4.

The night before Frazer’s arrival they packed up the writing box and hid it under Juan and Yvonne’s bed. They had obviously learned not to leave the evidence, or lack of evidence, of their progress lying out in plain view. When Frazer arrived the next day they held council with him underneath the big maple. Jenny watched from high up on the hill, pretending to be reading. The conference looked friendly and calm. It ended with everyone rising and the two girls and Juan sauntering toward the house. She began to walk down and when Frazer saw her he walked up to meet her. His expression, while not overtly angry, was sardonic. One corner of his mouth was pinched upward.

“So,” he said, reaching her. “They’ve done nothing.”

“They’re doing something, Rob. They finally seem committed to it. They talk about how great it’ll be, to have the chance to explain how they feel.”

“Do they talk about how great it’ll be, to have the chance to make back all my money?” As soon as he said this he seemed to regret it. “Juan tells me they’ve been putting the whole thing on tape. He won’t let me hear the tapes, or even look at them. He says he doesn’t want confusing input until they’re all finished. Is this a crock of bullshit?”

“They are taping. I’ve heard them.”

“Then what are they saying? Give me something to go on, Jenny. I just want some goddamn reassurance.”

She hesitated. “I don’t hear individual words. They always keep the door closed. They can’t write with me eavesdropping on them.”

Frazer glared, disappointed. Then he laughed. “You’re so generous, sweetheart. Maybe we’re two of a kind. I brought them the gun that they wanted. I kept up my end of the bargain.” Below them the back door swung open and Yvonne leaned out.

“What do you want?” Yvonne yelled. “Tuna fish sandwich, or cheese?”

When they had shouted back and forth about lunch and the door slammed shut again she said, “Just one?”

“Don’t tell me they’ve turned you into a gun lover.”

“No. I’m just afraid they were expecting something more.”

“I’m afraid I was expecting something more.”

She couldn’t say anything to this. She watched him as he cast a hard gaze at the opposite hills, the vein at his temple jumping, the smooth dome of his head bright with sweat. Frazer’s strange, prominent skull featured a shelf of bone just above the eyebrows that could make him resemble Neanderthal man or a glowering genius, depending on his general expression. She couldn’t decide which he favored right now; his jaw was jutted forward, restlessly working, another tic that betrayed deep anxiety. She could feel her own pulse speeding; she’d been hoping for something like the right moment, but she’d known beforehand that a moment like that wouldn’t come. The book she was holding was only a ruse, to conceal her letter. She had written to William all over again, though she’d been no more free than before to explain where she was. And now she’d had to explain what he would feel as long silence, as well. At least she’d had a stroke of brilliance and borrowed the typewriter from them, to type it. She wouldn’t have to ask Frazer to rewrite her love letter. That was one humiliation she still could avoid.

As if he somehow sensed the drift of her thoughts, her effort to find the small upside, Frazer said, “At least it’s a beautiful place.” He sighed, looking off at the warm, buzzing hills.

“Rob,” she said. “I have something to tell you. And a favor to ask.”

TEN MINUTES LATER she was standing in the kitchen with Juan and Yvonne and Pauline, as Frazer’s car roared down the hill. “Doesn’t he want his sandwich?” Yvonne asked.

“No,” she said.

“Good. Fuck him,” said Juan. “I’ll eat his goddamn fucking sandwich, fucking dishonest fuck.”

She chewed her own sandwich without appetite. Frazer had blown up when she told him what happened with Dana. In the days since that phone call she’d felt more and more certain that Sandy had given up Dana’s name to throw the cops off the trail; not knowing that Jenny had mailed Dana the tape, she would have thought Dana still was the cleanest of all of their friends. Sandy never would have named Frazer no matter how scared she was; she’d introduced Juan and Yvonne and Pauline to Frazer herself. But Frazer just said, “I still can’t believe you sent out their damn tape! If they’d just had the patience to wait, that could have been chapter one of the book. That could have been our exclusive, I could have called up that editor weeks ago . . .”

Handing him the letter at this moment was even worse than she’d thought it would be, but there were no moments left. “You know people everywhere,” she was saying. “If you mailed it to someone in Mexico, maybe, and they mailed it on—”

Frazer was turning it over and over in his hands, as if trying to see into it. “Thick,” he murmured. “Didn’t Dana recopy these for you?”

“I typed it.”

“Oh, wonderful. Can I guess whose typewriter you used?” He closed his eyes and stood still a long moment, as if hearing something that she couldn’t hear. She could see his jaw working, his pulse hammering in his neck. “I’ll do my best,” he said finally. “But it’s not really the first of my worries.”

Her face burned. “I didn’t ask to be the first of your worries. If I had my way I wouldn’t have asked you to do this at all.”

“I know you wouldn’t.” Frazer got in his car, slammed the door hard and started the engine, but his window was down and she came to it and looked at the letter, which he’d tossed on the passenger seat. “I’ll take care of it, Jenny!” he said.

The car’s vibrations shifted the letter, and a wind had risen that seemed the forerunner of rain. “It’ll fly out the window,” she said.

Frazer opened the glove compartment, threw the letter inside with his jumble of maps, and slammed it shut again, hard. “How’s that?” he yelled.

“One fucking gun,” Juan was saying. “‘That’s not exactly what we agreed on.’ ‘Well, it looks like we’re all just a little behind.’” Juan minced and sneered when he did Frazer’s line. Then he said, “Clear the table. Let’s take a look at this thing.”

The gun was a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver, with its own cop-style holster; Juan explained all this as he cleaned it, and buffed its outside with a T-shirt, and lay it down, darkly gleaming, on the table. He was already wearing the holster. Alone at the center of all their attention, the gun seemed to have an aura of intelligence, as if its coiled stillness was deliberate, and its potential lunges also matters that it would decide. It didn’t seem at all related to the BB guns, with their faux wood grain and their slender black snouts and the gentle pew pew sound they made. Compared to this the BB guns were like fireplace tools. This gun stared back, through tiny, bright, metallic eyes.

Outside it had started to rain. The rain came down in ropes; all the colors seemed drained out of things, and the wind lashed the trees. Jenny went to the door and gazed out, her back to them, and the force of the rain misted her through the screen. Through her whole conversation with Frazer she had been so concerned for her letter, and how he would react, she had not lingered over his saying he’d brought them a gun. They had been talking about guns from the start, and she had always realized guns might one day appear. But the idea of guns and the actual presence of one weren’t at all the same thing. Behind her, even the hardened threesome who sawed off their own shotguns were silenced by the gun’s magnetism. Now that Juan had put on the holster she couldn’t imagine him taking it off; and then she knew that he couldn’t, either. From this minute he would constantly wear it, as if before he’d been naked.

The rainstorm had not slackened at all, and the rich wholesome smell of wet earth, such a strange counterpoint to the gun, billowed into the kitchen. Yvonne suddenly said, “I can’t stand it, I’ve just got to feel it!” She leaped up from the table, squeezed past Jenny and ran out the door. Then Pauline moved away from the gun’s circle also. Jenny thought she would follow Yvonne, but Pauline came to stand in the back door as well, and silently they both watched Yvonne run shrieking over the grass. She turned to see Pauline’s face, and Pauline looked back at her—not communicatively or blankly, not coldly or warmly, only looked at her briefly, and then looked back outside. Pauline did not seem to feel the same dread that she did. After all, Pauline had been as insistent on being rearmed as her comrades. The rain’s wind blew Pauline’s hair slightly off of her temples; then Yvonne splashed back onto the step and they wordlessly stepped back to let her inside. “It’s cold,” Yvonne gasped.

Only Juan’s concentration had not left the gun for an instant. He didn’t look up at Yvonne in her plastered-down T-shirt, with her breasts in clear view. “One gun,” he said again sourly. “What the fuck do you do with one gun? Oh, anything you want. You just have to get in and out fast. If you’re cornered you’re dead, because none of your comrades are armed. But haven’t you heard about guys robbing banks with one gun? Sometimes even no gun. They just make a gun shape with their hand in their pocket, and all the dumb people believe it. One gun. Hey,” he said loudly to Pauline and Jenny. Yvonne had left the room to change clothes, and Juan had realized he was speaking to no one. “You can hijack a plane with one gun. A plane’s the one place where one gun is as good as a hundred. Hijack the plane, go to Cuba. Some comrades I knew did that once.”

“Who?” Pauline said, finally.

“Before your time, Princess. A guy that I knew who lived on the East Coast helped these other two guys leave the country. I think they’d blown up a Dow Chemical plant. My friend heard that hijackings to Havana were happening all the time on flights from New York to Miami, but the hijackings were never reported. The airlines didn’t want to show how goddamn easy it is. The government didn’t want to show how many people are wanting to go to Cuba all the time. The papers are all in on it. My friend went to the library and sure enough, there were all these little wire service reports of successful hijackings on the very back pages of newspapers, and on the front page are the stories about the one or two hijackers who failed, usually because they’re so dumb they don’t even have a weapon. And not only that, but he learns the airlines tell pilots to do what the hijacker wants, because they’re afraid of having passengers die. So everybody’s trying to play down that you can basically go to Cuba, no problem, if you pull out a gun.” The reminiscence had vastly improved Juan’s humor. “I hadn’t thought about that in a while.”

“Did they make it?” Pauline asked.

“Who?”

“The guys. The Dow Chemical guys.”

“Fuck, of course they made it. My friend drove them to the airport and then he went home and listened to Liberation News Service and sure enough, late that night he hears flight whatever’s ‘diverted’ to Havana. Read off the wire. It sure wasn’t in the New York Times the next day. I didn’t believe him at first, but I redid his research and it’s all true. Between ten and twenty hijackings a year to Havana, and you never hear one word about it.”

“When was this?” Jenny asked.

“Four, five years ago. It’s less now, but I bet you it hasn’t changed that much. There’s no foolproof way to stop people. What are they going to do, make everybody unpack their suitcase before they get on? Go through everybody’s shaving bag? They can only hope less people think of it.”

“You know a lot about it,” she said.

“At the time I thought, if I ever had comrades who needed my help in that way, I ought to be ready to help them. I never thought I’d be one of them.”

“We could never hijack an airplane,” Pauline said, staring out at the rain.

“Why not, Princess? What’s a better long-term plan?”

“I don’t know,” Pauline said. “Isn’t it your job to figure that out?”

Before Jenny had even registered what had been said, Juan snatched the gun off the table and aimed at Pauline. “What’s with your fucking mouth, Pauline?”

“Stop it,” Jenny murmured. The hair on her neck had sprung up.

“It’s not loaded. He just finished cleaning it,” Pauline said, but they still didn’t move.

“What are you doing?” Yvonne said, coming in.

“Hijacking a plane. You know. ‘Nobody fucking move. This is a hijacking.’”

Yvonne seemed to think it was funny. “‘Maybe you should have a cocktail, sir,’” she said. ‘“Bag of peanuts? Would you like a cigarette? Pinch my ass, Mr. Hijacker.’ I’m the stewardess, get it?”

With his free hand Juan yanked the kitchen chairs out to face forward, like rows. “All right, Princess,” he said. “You be the hero passenger. You look mild-mannered and square but it turns out you’re some kind of Green Beret. Try to subdue me.”

“No thanks,” Pauline said.

“Okay, maybe you’re the screaming bitch who’s so scared she can’t keep her mouth shut. ‘Oh, no! What will we do?’” Juan pulled a long face.

Pauline kept silent, staring at the gun pointed at her.

“Maybe you’re the hero passenger,” Juan realized, turning the weapon on Jenny. Loaded or not, the gun pointed at her made her armpits turn damp. The temperature had dropped with the rain, and the wind that touched her felt like fall. Her skin goosepimpled all at once, as if obeying a command.

“Maybe I’m the pilot,” she said. “Stop pointing your gun, sir. I’ll take you to Havana.”

“How do I know you won’t try to overpower me, and turn me in to the pigs?”

“It’s not worth it. We’d rather go along with you than risk anyone getting hurt.”

Juan let his arm drop and threw the gun on the table with a loud clatter, and Jenny felt release flooding through her, as if tranquilizers had entered her blood. “Don’t rule it out,” Juan told Pauline. “Running and hiding forever just isn’t my style.”

FOR THE REST of the day the rain continued, though it ebbed to a drizzle. No one so much as mentioned doing combat training. Juan kept leaping through doorways quick-drawing the gun from its holster. Then it was dusk, and Pauline and Yvonne began dinner. The house had never seemed so small. Since the night Pauline had brought her the soup Jenny had sometimes felt the strange hyper-alertness that follows a moment of intimacy, as if their conversation had been left incomplete, the point felt but avoided. Pauline had rebuffed her question but then she’d brought up the clippings; that had seemed like an invitation, as if the subject weren’t closed after all. When Juan had sneeringly pointed the gun at Pauline, and then her, though she’d known it was just a new form of his usual strutting, for an instant she thought she had felt the three fugitives’ tightly knit union fall slack. For an instant Pauline was cast out completely, and even Yvonne had looked inconsequential, and each of them seemed solitary, the way Jenny felt that she constantly was. She’d wondered if the gun, the very thing that joined them as comrades-in-arms, was actually working on them in an opposite way. And again she had glanced at Pauline’s face for some fleeting message. Pauline had been flushed, with anger or fear or embarrassment or all of those things. But if she’d felt brief alliance with Jenny, from both finding themselves at the weapon’s wrong end, she had never let on.

The rain finally stopped while they were eating. They ate in silence, the four of them hunched at the table, Juan still wearing the holster and gun. She wanted to rip it off him. After dinner Juan announced they would work on their book. Juan and Yvonne and Pauline went into the front room with their unfinished beers and pulled the door shut behind them. She went upstairs and sat down with her journal, but she couldn’t write in it; she uncapped her pen and just sat there, tensed over the page. The air in the house felt close, sickly. The moment of refreshment the rainstorm had brought was long gone. She heard the big maple dripping. And then she heard them; she felt unsurprised, though her stomach turned cold. They had been shut in the front room for barely half an hour. The shape of the dispute ascended and ascended, rising and falling in smaller waves up toward a peak; she couldn’t make out the words. She recapped her pen, lay the pen in her journal, closed the covers around it, and walked to her door. The argumentative peak had snagged clouds and brewed thunder; she heard the lightning-bolt crash of a large piece of furniture thrown or, she realized, a body. Someone screamed. She yanked open her door in time to see Pauline rush past the foot of the stairs with the bright print of a hand on her face. “I don’t care, I don’t care!” Pauline screamed, running into the kitchen and out the back door. Yvonne hovered in the front room; Juan blocked Jenny’s way at the foot of the stairs. “Stay out of this, Jenny,” he said.

“Don’t you touch me!” she yelled, shoving past him.

She couldn’t make out Pauline in the dark, but she heard the barn doors creaking open with effort, and then the barn light, its bare lightbulb, came on. She found Pauline sitting on one of the moldering haystacks, loudly sobbing, her thin hands hanging between bony knees. When she saw Jenny she shot to her feet.

“Leave me alone,” she said. “Leave me alone!”

“What happened? Why did he hit you?”

“I know it’s a trap, I’m not talking to you. Like that time in ego reconstruction? ‘Tell us what you really think of Juan’s leadership. We really want your honest opinion.’ And then I gave it, and everybody said that I was insubordinating. Well, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

“No,” she said. “That’s not me. Pauline.” She heard her blood sounding loud in her ears. Pauline looked feral and unrecognizing, as if her words were instinctive defenses, claws bared, haunches tensed at a threat. Jenny remembered a trip she and William had taken—they had driven miles and miles up Highway 1, past Mendocino, all the way to the place where the highway cut in from the coast, the one place in the state where it did this, because the coastal range there was impassable. The Lost Coast, only reached by a harrowing, steep, wet dirt road with a sign at the mouth that said CLOSED. ROAD IS OUT. GO NO FARTHER. They’d seen the ocean yawn open beneath them as they came through the pass and inched down, gravel showering under their tires. They’d seen a gray whale burst out of the surf like a missile, just yards off the beach. The last bend of a long mountain river, pulling a delta of mountainous rubble and downed giant trees and fine brown sand on its way out to sea. They had hiked up to shelves of wild meadow, hearing only the harsh cannonade of the ocean and the barking sea lions, seeing the dark shapes of the whales below on their epic migration; and when they’d returned to their camp, between themselves and their tent had been a small golden bobcat. Seated compact on its haunches, its tail curled around, its ears sharp and upright, its spectacular eyes trained on them. “It’s so beautiful,” William whispered, advancing. “No,” she’d said, stopping him. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Pauline,” she said, trembling. “Pauline.”

“Why do I have to choose?” Pauline screamed at her. “Don’t make me choose!”

“Hey, baby sister, hey, come on,” Juan was saying, behind them.

“Leave her alone,” Jenny said, but Juan strode in and took hold of Pauline and she scrabbled at him frantically, not to escape but to keep him.

Yvonne had come in as well. “Oh, Polly,” she said.

“Don’t make me choose,” Pauline sobbed.

“Of course not. Choose what? What the fuck did you say to her, Jenny?”

“Nothing,” Jenny said. She could not make her mouth utter anything else. She could only watch dumbly as the three of them, fused to each other, as if tied together to run a strange race, hobbled out of the barn.

“WHAT I REALLY ought to do is build a block first and then mount the gun to it,” Juan said the next evening at dinner. “You and Y both learned to shoot on shotguns, and a handgun’s a whole different creature.” He explained to Pauline patiently, “You’re small, but you can brace yourself against a shotgun so the kick doesn’t throw you, remember? With this gun it’s more like,” and Juan mimed shooting the gun with his arm extended, and his hand flying back from the force. “It’s going to be hard for you to have the accuracy you’ve achieved with the shotgun. You’re going to get frustrated.”

“I could hold it with both hands,” Pauline said, reaching out toward the gun. Juan barred her from it and Jenny saw her face spark with annoyance.

“That’s fine on the shooting range,” Juan said, “but not on the fly.”

At last, Juan relented; they could shoot without the block for a few rounds and see how it went. Jenny followed them into the barn and stood in the barn door, watching. Was it an act, Pauline’s seeming eagerness to handle the gun? Was it apology, for whatever she had done to incur Juan’s wrath the previous night? Before leaving the house Pauline had briefly disappeared into the bathroom while Juan dug in the trash for their empty soup cans. Now the cans filled the barn with a strong stench of old coffee grounds, sour wine and wet cigarette butts. “Joining us?” Juan said to Jenny genially. “You must be a good shot. Oriental people always have exceptional aim. They’re inherently good marksmen, they’re good at precision sports like pool and golf, they’re good archers—”

“I’ve never touched a gun in my life,” she said coldly.

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” Juan said. One by one, Juan balanced the cans on the spine of a sawhorse. “Just say the word if you want to take a shot at it. Get it? Take a shot at it?” Yvonne, always his best audience, dissolved, giggling.

But when Yvonne got the gun she became serious, even grim. Her chin crinkled and her lower lip jutted out slightly, while the rest of her body seemed fused to itself and the floor. The mass of muscle above her kneecaps tensed and shifted. Yvonne punctured the back wall of the barn several times and then, with her very last shot, a can flew in the air with a pang. The rest of the cans tumbled onto the floor from the movement.

“Good!” Juan yelled. Yvonne grinned.

When Pauline’s turn came she brought a wad of toilet paper out of her pocket and began twisting it into small balls. Juan went into paroxysms.

“What are you doing?” he said. “What’s the Kleenex for?”

“Earplugs.”

“Oh my God—wake me up, Yvonne. Earplugs.”

“You know that my ears are fucked up! I still hear that ringing sometimes—”

“‘The pigs are at the door!’” Juan enacted. “‘Okay, I’ll just put in my earplugs.’”

Pauline threw the balls of tissue angrily onto the floor and wrapped her small hands around the gun’s grip. Her stance seemed overdone; her feet were planted very wide. Her narrow shoulders shrugged up toward her ears.

“Wait,” said Juan seriously, stepping up behind her. “Get your shoulders down. You’ve got to compensate for the weak one. Push your arms good and firm in their sockets.”

Pauline wasn’t disastrous, but she was badly thrown by the recoil, and only sheer stubbornness seemed to keep her arms stiffly extended. From her first shot they trembled with effort. Unexpectedly she tried shooting one-handed and her shot flew to the ceiling; there would have been an eruption of terrified doves if the doves hadn’t all fled already. “Whoa!” Juan said, hitting the floor. “Holy Jesus! Hand over that thing!”

Jenny finally left them and went back to the house; from her bed she could hear the POP, POP of the gun; in the end she must have fallen asleep to it. The next morning she found them all in the kitchen, writing little notes back and forth to Pauline on a notepad. “She’s deaf?” Jenny said, looking at her in horror. Pauline looked back and frowned. She took the pen and wrote, You have to write, Jenny.

“Oh, my God,” Jenny said.

“It’ll pass,” Juan said, shrugging. “She has sensitive ears. It happened before, and it passed.” Pauline was watching him with impatience; he looked at her and she pointed sternly at the notepad. “Oh, I’m sorry, Princess,” Juan laughed. He took the sheet and wrote, Talking about what a sensitive Princess you are. Pauline whacked him, but she was smiling; if she was frightened by her sudden deafness—and Jenny was sure she saw, at the back of the green-flecked eyes, fear—her fear was outweighed by her obvious pleasure in being pampered by her comrades. For the rest of that day Juan and Yvonne and Pauline passed little notes back and forth, giggling and hitting each other, or reading and tearing to shreds with a show of annoyance. Jenny could almost have thought they had deafened Pauline deliberately, so that they could play a conspicuous game of shared secrets that, whether by design or not, did not include her. By dinner that night Pauline’s hearing had begun to return, and then this was a new game: Juan and Yvonne would say things to each other in Pauline’s presence but in normal tones, and Pauline would yell, “What?” Or, alternatively, every minor announcement was bellowed: “I WANT MACARONI FOR DINNER!”

She wondered if Pauline, in those in-between days when she had no longer been simply a captive, but was not yet a comrade, had felt the way she was starting to feel: neither satisfactorily with the group nor completely outside it. They had all laughingly offered her the notepad and pencil while Pauline was deaf, they’d done nothing outright to exclude her—but she’d had nothing she wanted to say to all three of them, and that was the heart of the game, that the three were as one. The next day Pauline was back to normal and they decided to work on their book. Now Jenny eavesdropped on purpose, but she learned nothing about why they’d fought. She did learn at least one of the reasons the project was taking so long. They couldn’t seem to make the first statement without delineating the premises on which it was founded; and every premise required its own proof beyond all possible doubt. “U.S. imperial incursions into peaceful Vietnam,” Yvonne began. “Wait a minute,” Juan said. “We can’t forget that the French were in Vietnam first.” “So we can’t say it was peaceful?” “It’s not that, it’s the way the world’s powers collude with each other to exploit the brown peoples. The way we colluded with France.” “We colluded with France?” Pauline said. And it went on like that, endlessly. The foundation of their worldview sank swiftly into the past: condemnation of the war required dissection of the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy, which demanded criticism of the imperially minded rearrangement of national borders in the wake of the Second World War, which led to a long meditation on the rise of the nation-state. Gone were the days when they’d been happy to make incendiary, irresponsible statements with no basis in fact; and the further they beat back the brush of the past the less effort they gave to the present.

That afternoon they were still working when she heard a car laboring up the hill. Jenny went down to the kitchen, and the three of them emerged from the front room. Juan said, “What the fuck is Frazer doing back here already? He said he’d give us another two weeks.” She looked out the window and saw, instead of Frazer’s battered brown coupe, a blue four-door come around the last turn of the drive.

“It’s not Frazer,” she heard herself say, “unless he bought a new car.” But she knew, although she could only see the barest hint of the person inside the sedan, that it was someone unknown.

“Upstairs,” Juan said to Pauline.

A solid, blond, red-faced white man, perhaps in his mid-forties, was coming toward the back door. He had an off-duty look to him. Pauline’s last pounding step had sounded at the top of the stairs and now Jenny and Juan and Yvonne were all locked there like statues. The man seemed to know the house; a stranger would have tried the front door, not knowing it barely got used. He passed from view through the window and reappeared right away in the door. “Afternoon,” he said cheerfully. “Sorry to barge in on you folks.” They didn’t manage to utter a word of response. The man opened the screen tentatively. “I’m Bob, the owner. Where’s—Dierdre? I’m lousy with names. For a second I thought you were her,” he added, to Yvonne.

None of them knew if Yvonne should be Dierdre or not. “Bob,” Juan repeated. Jenny felt her skin crawl. She knew it was only her paranoia that made this man look like a cop, but what must they look like to him? Juan had a dully fixed look to his face, like a reptile eyeing a fly. The man said, “Are you Dierdre’s husband?” and shook Juan’s stiff hand, and then Jenny understood suddenly, and Yvonne must have, also.

“I’m Dierdre’s sister,” Yvonne announced boldly. “And this is my husband, George. And this is our friend Judy.”

“You all having a good holiday? Wife and I both grew up in these parts. We wish we could get back here more. I thought Dierdre was meaning to be with her kids here all summer.”

“She did, but she just took them down to our mother’s for a couple of days,” Yvonne said. “Our mother lives in Pennsylvania,” she added, warming to the exercise. “In Philadelphia.”

Jenny felt a bead of sweat leave her armpit and draw a wet path down her side. The man had shaken her hand very briefly and turned his gaze back to Yvonne. Juan was still staring hard at the man but the man only glanced toward Juan courteously. “Excuse me,” Jenny murmured, and slipped from the kitchen. The front room was a riot of ashtrays and unwashed wine glasses and empty potato-chip bags and heaps of newspaper and inexplicable detritus like Juan’s flower-pot barbell; they had been living here with no thought for whomever the house was owned by, as if the house would vanish into the ground the instant they moved out. Now she saw the accumulated damage of months, the blackish-purple splash of spilled wine on the couch, the ashes and dirt that had darkened the carpet, the beer bottles kicked in the corners, and this was not even the barn, with the block-mounted gun and the silhouette shot full of holes, or the pasture, where the grass was stamped flat in an oval-shaped course. Juan had taped a list to the wall hugely titled CODE OF WAR and she ripped this down and was crumpling it into a ball when the others came out of the kitchen. Bob stopped in the doorway and she saw him take in the room very quickly before turning away. “Because the number Dierdre gave me doesn’t work,” he was saying. “I might have took it down wrong. You don’t have it?”

“No,” Yvonne said. “She just moved.”

“It’s nothing important. I just like to have a number for my tenants.” Bob cleared his throat. When he’d turned away from the front room Juan and Yvonne had been just on his heels, and now the three of them were crowded in the little vestibule between front room and kitchen, at the foot of the stairs. Jenny hovered behind them. Bob’s back was encased in a thin brown windbreaker and she wanted to plant both her hands on this jacket and catapult him from the house. Juan was still staring at Bob as if he were a steak to be carved up and eaten and she understood, suddenly, the great impulse that he was restraining; Juan could murder this man. He could actually kill him. “Do you want us to give Dierdre a message?” Yvonne asked, steering Bob toward the kitchen. But Bob resisted; he looked up the stairs.

“Anything I should know?” he asked. “Roof leaking? Plumbing all right?”

“Fine,” Yvonne said, rather sharply.

He finally followed her back to the kitchen. “I hate to intrude on a person’s vacation. Just tell her to make sure, when she mails me the key, to include an address. I’ll need it to refund her deposit. I somehow never got it from her.”

“She’s been so absentminded. She moved . . .”

At last he was standing outside, with the three of them crowding the door like a barricade. Jenny tried to remember that most people trust. He would take what he’d seen as the basis for standard regret, might not refund all the deposit. It’s people like us, she thought, who mistrust everyone. She had spent years of her life trying to instill mistrust in the average person. Your leaders are misleading you, she might say, and misspending your taxes, and killing your children—not just strange foreign children, but yours. Very few people listened. Now she relied on that stubborn, instinctual trust. Yet this man lingered on the grass. “That your car?” he asked, indicating the Bug.

“Yes,” Yvonne said.

“You might need a new muffler.” He bent to look, hands on his knees. “Say,” he said, straightening again. “Say, would it bother you all if I took a short walk through the fields? It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. I come by to check on the plumbing and errands like that, but I never just amble around.” He must have seen something in all their faces; he blanched suddenly. “On the other hand, I don’t have time,” he amended. “You all didn’t rent out this place to get bothered by me.”

“It’s all right,” Yvonne said. Jenny saw Juan take a pinch of her flesh and squeeze, hard. Yvonne slapped him away. “Go ahead. It’s your home, after all.”

“No—no. That’s okay. The wife’s waiting in town, anyway.” He zipped his jacket and nervously took out his keys. Suspicion or some even more dreadful feeling seemed to tug at his sleeve, but he pulled himself free. “You kids have a nice summer,” he said, getting into his car.

PAULINE rushed downstairs covered with dust. “I was under your bed,” she told Jenny. “He’s gone, right? He’s gone?”

“For the moment,” Juan said.

Juan seemed strangely clarified and calmed; in the face of an actual crisis his disproportionate swagger, his hair-trigger temper, his preening self-importance were gone. Under Juan’s direction they tied blankets and clothing and food into four equal bundles, and buried them in the woods in a pile of rocks they’d once used during combat training. “I never thought I would say this,” Juan said, “but if pigs come here, run. Run like fucking antelope, to this spot, grab provisions, then melt away into the woods.” Two BB rifles, and one handgun; that was no arsenal, thanks to Frazer, and it left them no choice but to run. “We’ll survive,” Juan told them as they retraced their steps, and in spite of the fear that she obviously felt, Jenny thought that Pauline almost floated with joy. Juan had finally said it was all right to try to survive.

Back in the house the three of them quickly sorted their actual writings from the litter of writing equipment, and now it seemed fortunate that these comprised just a few messy sheets and a half-blank cassette. The writings were compressed into a pocket-size package, and wrapped and rewrapped in a plastic trash bag. They returned to the woods and Juan buried the package as well.

Then they all agreed that Jenny should drive into town and call Frazer immediately. “Ol’ Bob-O,” Juan said. “He might not have suspected a thing. Nine out of ten that he didn’t: We’re fine. One out of ten and we’re dead. I’m coming with you,” he told Jenny. “Let’s go to the big town, with stores. And don’t argue with me.”

THEY LEFT Pauline and Yvonne, terrified, with the one gun and the last of the wine. “I know you’ve been mad,” Juan remarked casually as they drove off, as if they went driving all of the time. Being in a car, undisguised, in broad daylight, for the first time since becoming a nationally sought fugitive, now didn’t seem to perturb him at all. “I know you’re mad about stuff with Pauline, and I’m glad we’ve got some time alone to talk. I’ve been wanting to talk with you. Damn,” he added, looking out the window. “This is beautiful land, you know that? You can look at land like this and almost forget what a sick, fucked-up country this is. Anyway, understand: for Yvonne and for me, Pauline’s truly our sister. Know it, all right? She’s our family. And we fight. And all families fight. And I know that you know how that is.”

“I do,” she said, mostly to make him shut up.

The drive to Monticello hadn’t changed, but now every shifting inch jarred her, the way shifting light jars someone with a migraine. Juan kept talking, his face pointing into the wind, the late afternoon sun flashing morse code off his glasses, his words, an endless stream of them, snatched by the wind. Something about his mother . . . his mother would have loved all these hills. His mother had spent all her life on the flat fields of Illinois, so that any kind of wrinkle in the land used to get her excited. There was this one field they used to drive past when he was a kid where, who knew how, a huge tree had grown up in this dent in the field, so that even if the farmer had gone to the trouble of pulling the tree out, the dent still would have been there. Tripping up plows, etc. So the tree had been permitted to stay, and it made an oasis in the unchanging field, this deep bowl of greenery. This thrilled his mother. “Oh, there’s my tree!” she would say. Did Jenny know that of all of their twenty-four parents, his mother had been the only one to have said she was proud of them? A reporter from the Chicago Tribune tracked her down, and she said she didn’t really understand their methods, but she understood their beliefs, and she was proud of them. “That’s what she said. She grew up poor. Yeah, my mother was poor,” Juan said, suddenly abstracted.

She called Frazer from a telephone booth at the end of Monticello’s Main Street. “I’ll call back,” he said. “At the usual place?”

Craning around to look back at the car, she realized she couldn’t see Juan. Sunlight blazed at her off the windshield; was Juan waiting quietly there, sheltered by the reflection? She felt sure that he wasn’t. “There’s no time,” she told Frazer. “I’m just calling to say visit early. Like maybe tonight. Okay? Bye.”

“Wait, wait, wait. I’ll buy milk. It’ll take me five minutes.”

“I can’t wait, just come up! We’ll talk then.”

“What the hell—has somebody got sick?” Now a note of alarm shook his voice. He’d never felt this, she realized: nearing danger, its sights fixed on him. Frazer’s desire to play savior was real, but it was fueled by his flawless good luck. He’d always been so uncommonly lucky, he’d never had to be selfishly prudent. He’d never had to choose between self-sacrificing battle and ignominious but self-preserving retreat. He was ardently loyal but she’d always been nagged by the fear he was also untrustworthy; he never expected a problem, and so perhaps wasn’t built to withstand one. Perhaps, when the problem arrived, he would run for his life. It wouldn’t make him any worse than she was; his tone of alarm made her fear for herself, and so she said the one thing that she knew would snare him, and not scare him away. “They haven’t written a word.”

“Motherfucker! Okay. I’ll try to be there tonight.”

Leaving the phone booth she saw Juan coming back toward the car. He had a pleased smile on his face, as if Main Street offered a rich tapestry to consider. At least it was near five o’clock; the few stores here that weren’t out of business would soon be closed for the night. The sidewalks were deserted. There was the store that sold fishing supplies, the Singer store for sewing materials, the Maytag repair outlet, the five-and-dime with a wilting Fourth of July display still in its window. They had entirely missed the Fourth of July, she realized—how many weeks ago had it been? Seven? Eight? “I don’t even want to know what you were doing,” she told Juan. “I called Frazer. Let’s get out of here.”

“We just got here! Come on. Ten minutes. And give me some of our money.”

“What for?”

“Things. Didn’t I say not to argue with me?”

“Ten minutes,” she said finally.

“And the money, Jenny.” She gave him a twenty and he said, wheedlingly, “Could I have some more, Jenny? Please?” Whistling, with Frazer’s money in his hands, Juan strode off down the sidewalk.

She checked the parking rules sign at the curb and then turned off the engine and pulled the keys from the ignition, absently crushing them in her hands. After a while a sweaty metallic smell told her what she was doing and she dropped the keys onto her lap. Little hands! William had often said that. Little hands but big deeds. She had been very good at wiring explosives. Deft, and unafraid. She’d learned from him quickly and hadn’t needed him to check on her work. Somehow she had not had a splinter of doubt when she put them together. She remembered, coming home from Japan, the way her long absence from English had stripped every English cliche of its comforting chime. Suddenly there were the tepid and fraudulent words: Do unto others, and, If at first you don’t succeed, and, Might does not make right. It had struck her, coming home to a country in which she felt foreign, that they were lessons taught in the same way that vaccines were punched into your arm on that bad day in grade school, lined up in the gym in your ankle socks with the sleeve of your Peter Pan blouse harshly shoved to your armpit. Lessons punched in when you’re young so that when you grow up, you won’t really believe them. Might does not make right: a stunning truth, robbed of its force by a numbing cliché. The mind might believe, but the body has trouble. Power has the power to seem natural, and to live in your gut like an ulcer: your secret certainty of your defeat, finally, at its hands. And yet Power was only people, war makers, money-possessors, with elaborate tools to use. This had been the belief that impelled her, when she learned to build bombs. Feeling as she thought the Christian Reformers might have felt when they seized the Good Book for themselves. Except bombs weren’t inherently good but inherently evil; she and William had set out with their bombs to expose the real evil of government violence, not to recommend violence to everyone else. Then the ground started tilting beneath them, or perhaps it was they who had tilted the ground; perhaps they had been wrong to fight Power on its terms, instead of rejecting its terms utterly. Little hands. Something about this memory made her cringe now. Juan emerged from the five-and-dime with a bulging sack under his arm, and entered a store called Margot’s Modern Fashions. She lit a cigarette and smoked it furiously until her head wobbled from the smoke and the heat. She’d smoked two more before Juan came out again. “What size are you?” he asked, coming up to her window. “Dress size, not jeans size.”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know. It’s a number. For example, Yvonne is a ten. You’re smaller than that.”

“Four or six, maybe. Why?”

“Four’s what I think. You and Pauline are about the same size.”

In a much shorter time he’d returned from the store again, now with two bags. She started the engine and was squealing away from the curb before he’d fully shut his door.

“Hold on! Take this turn,” Juan said.

“Why?”

“I want to look around! Come on, Jenny.”

Off Main Street were cracking sidewalks, uplifted by the roots of old trees, and Monticello’s surprisingly pretty old houses, dignified and decrepit, set at the backs of deep lawns. The street was quiet, except for the voices of children coming from the backyards. She slowed down and they took in one block, then another. Farther from Main Street the houses were smaller and in worse repair, but the yards were more lush. “What did you buy?” she asked him.

“You’ll see when we’re back at the ranch.”

“You didn’t spend all the money, did you?”

“Don’t worry about Frazer’s money. We won’t need his money much longer.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that it’s time for a change. It means we forgot who we were, but we’re starting to remember again. It means we won’t be no exotic zoo show anymore.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said irritably. They had entered a part of town where the unrestrained plant life had defeated the buildings completely. Small shotgun cottages hid in the trees, and the drone of insects was almost as loud as the drone of the Bug. The scene was pleasantly swamp like, as if they were puttering along in a boat. Then she saw, loping through the pattern of sunlight and shade, a familiar figure with a great crown of hair.

“Oh God,” she said.

“What?”

“That kid. I met him once.” She covered the side of her face with her hand.

“You know him?”

“I don’t know him.” She was trying to subtly speed up, but the car’s solitary presence on the street had caught Thomas’s attention already. “Hey,” he said, coming toward them. “Not-from-Nam. Alice.”

She slowed down, then stopped. “Hi,” she said. She felt her heart in her throat. She wished she could signal to him to move on from them. She saw the comb in his pocket, but he didn’t reach for it. He looked older somehow, and then she realized that his face had very slightly hardened against her, developed a shell of defense it had not had before. She’d never come back to see him.

“How you doin’?” he said, with emphasized casualness.

“Okay,” she began. “My job . . .”

“Hey, that’s all right. This must be your boyfriend. Good thing I didn’t make my move, right? Hey, man.” With his hairdo-maintaining grace Thomas leaned into the car across Jenny, extending his hand. “How you doin’?”

“I’m good,” said Juan, taking the hand. She braced herself for the brusque dismissal, but instead Juan said, “What’s your name, brother? I’m George. Sounds like you know her.”

“I know Alice. I’m Thomas,” he said.

“What you doin’?” said Juan.

“Just walking.”

“Get in.”

“George,” she said.

“Get in,” Juan repeated. “Ride with us.”

Once they were moving again she began to wonder if Juan longed to be recognized. She barely saw where they went, while Juan twisted around toward the backseat congenially. He was saying things like, “You think all white folks look the same? Bet you’ve seen me before. Or a million dudes like me.” Thomas laughed. “Where you live, man?” Juan asked him.

“Just there,” Thomas said. “Where you got me.”

“What you got planned for later?”

“It’s my day off,” Thomas said. “Ain’t nothing to do in this town. Almost rather be working.”

“Not for the Man. You should work for the People. Your People.”

“My people ain’t owning a grocery store,” Thomas joked.

“Naw, that ain’t what I mean,” Juan insisted.

She’d circled back to the block where they’d started. “Where’s your house, Thomas?” she asked, and her voice seemed too high. Juan interrupted.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Juan said. “My name ain’t George. And Alice here ain’t my old lady. So you still got a chance.” He and Thomas both laughed. “But she’s my sister-in-arms,” Juan went on. “She’s been helping me out.”

“I had a feeling she was helping out someone,” said Thomas. His fresh spark, his openness, had returned. “She was doing some extensive grocery shopping.”

“That’s right. You want to help me out too, for a minute?”

“George!” she said.

“Sure,” said Thomas. “Of course I’ll help you.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” she said. “Let him go!”

“It’s cool, Alice,” Thomas said, very kindly, and the simplicity of the gesture, of his using what he thought was her real, perfect name, almost made her start crying.

“Let him go,” she told Juan.

“In a minute,” Juan said.

They drove back to Main Street, and took in its full length again. Thomas wanted a Coke, and they stopped in front of a dingy luncheonette and waited while he went in. Nearby were the stone slabs and grim pillars of a bank, faceless as a tomb, and though built to be imposing, somehow almost unnoticeable. It was past five now; the bank had been closed for more than two hours. When Thomas came back Juan said, “Is that the only bank in town?”

“Think so,” Thomas said, unwrapping his straw.

“Black people bank there, or just white people?”

“I really couldn’t say.” Thomas took a slurp of his Coke and then raised his eyebrows. “Uh-oh. This sounds serious.”

“I’m just wondering. There’s no other bank around here? Maybe out where your grocery store is?”

“Mr. Morton makes his deposit up here. I don’t know why he would if we had one down there.”

“Mr. Morton’s the boss?”

“He’s the Man,” Thomas teased. “Naw, he’s a nice man.”

“It would be better to work for a black man.”

“It would be better to not work at all.”

The conversation was in its final stretch, and as their banter continued she drove determinedly back to Thomas’s street and heard no objections. But when they reached Thomas’s house Juan got out. “I’ll walk him up,” he said.

“I hope I’ll be seeing you, Alice,” said Thomas. “Don’t forget how you said we would hang out again.”

They loped away over the grass, Juan unconsciously mimicking Thomas’s gait. Juan had only been making dumb, eager small talk, asking Thomas his age, if he still went to school, if he had any brothers or sisters, but her stomach was still clenched with dread. She could see them, although indistinctly, on the shadowed and shrub-obscured porch.

It was many more minutes before Juan came jogging back over the grass. He was flushed and excited. “Man!” he said. “That’s a smart fucking kid.”

She shoved the Bug into gear. “Don’t act so amazed that a black kid is smart.”

“Oh, bullshit. I’m amazed if a white kid is smart.”

She was finally free to drive back to the farm. The sun was just setting when they reached the base of the hill the house sat on, and started to climb. The gold sunset light stretched the car’s shadow over the grass, so that from a distance an observer might have seen on the bright face of the hillside a long black mark, moving slowly upward. Juan had been rambling and musing the whole way: “There’s a reason we’re different from trees,” he observed. “Trees stay stuck in one place their whole lives, but a man’s got to move or his brain starts to rot.” When they got to the top Yvonne and Pauline came running out the back door with relief at the sight of them. “Sometimes, when you’re not sure which way you should go, you just float with the current,” Juan said. “Then you see. Then you see.”

JUAN’S equanimity was still intact the next day, though his comrades could not seem to share it. Yvonne and Pauline were up and down from the kitchen table all morning, lighting second cigarettes while their firsts were still burning, peering through the curtains, slamming out the back door to gaze down the long hill from behind the fat trunk of the maple. Nine A.M. gave way to ten, then eleven, then noon. Jenny stayed in her chair with an effort, pretending to read. Juan sat across from her, feet up, contentedly paging through Blood in My Eye. “You did say it was urgent?” he asked, his voice not sounding urgent at all.

She studied him for a beat before answering. “I said you still hadn’t written a word of the book.”

To her surprise Juan guffawed. “Right on, Sister! That’ll get him up here on the double.”

It was past one when they heard a car’s engine and saw Frazer’s familiar brown coupe struggling up the long hill. The coupe parked and Frazer seemed to hesitate a long moment, twisted around toward his backseat, before he swung out and came toward them. Jenny realized Juan was wearing the gun, in its holster. “What are you doing?” she said, but then Frazer had reached them. He greeted Juan with a strained smile, ignoring the gun. “So that old devil writers blocks bothering you,” Frazer said. “It’s not easy for me to write, either—”

“Really? And you don’t even have pigs named Bob dropping in.”

This caught Frazer up short. “Pigs named Bob?”

“Pigs named Bob,” Juan repeated. “That puts a damper on writing for sure. It’s called a security breach. A bad one. The kind of breach you assured us we’d never have while we were here.”

“Bob’s the landlord,” Frazer realized. “For fuck’s sake, you knew there was a landlord. I told you that ages ago. He didn’t see Pauline, did he? You acted natural, right?”

“Don’t act like it’s our fault! I don’t remember anything about Bob the Landlord dropping in on us while we were here. You need to move us right now. To a better location.”

“Move you? I don’t have the money to move you. I paid for this place in advance, and it didn’t come cheap. You have to finish that book—oh, Jesus. Hang on for a second—hang on—” Frazer went back to his car. Until now Juan had seemed to be toying with Frazer, as if he enjoyed Frazer’s trying to make light of Bob’s visit. Soon would come Frazer’s acknowledgment that he’d been wrong after all, and after this would begin his exhaustive attempts to appease them. The balance of power would be all the while shifting toward Juan . . . Frazer had opened his rear passenger door, and suddenly they were seeing him help someone upright and out of the car. “You okay, Alan?” said Frazer. The person named Alan was a spindly young man: big Adam’s apple, long legs and long arms, timid-looking, in running shorts and a T-shirt and jacket. He was blindfolded. Somehow that fact seemed no stranger, no more astonishing or terrifying, than anything else about him. Frazer eased off the blindfold, and Alan blinked and rubbed at his temples. Then he saw them; his eyes widened slightly when he caught sight of Pauline.

“Wow,” he said. “You weren’t kidding.”

Pauline reddened; suddenly she turned and ran into the house. They heard her footfalls on the stairs, Jenny’s upstairs bedroom door slamming shut, as if by hiding herself Pauline could erase the moment the young man had recognized her, or perhaps erase the young man himself. “Oh my God,” Jenny realized. “Jesus, Rob, I didn’t tell you to do this! I just told you to come right away, I didn’t say to do this.”

“Who the fuck is this guy?” Juan screamed at them.

Frazer still had Alan by the arm, as if to keep him from running away. “This is Alan,” Frazer said, putting too much emphasis on the name, as if speaking to children. It was clear this introduction wasn’t going the way he’d intended. “Alan’s a very close friend. He’s your ghostwriter, Juan.” In response to Juan’s stunned, pop-eyed silence Frazer added—gently, firmly, finding his footing again—“Isn’t that great? Alan was one of my boys when I coached at that college I got fired from. He’s a brilliant writer—he’s been my assistant on the last two sports-activist books that I wrote. And he’s a runner. Just like you, Juan. He’s a miracle worker. He’s discreet, he’s smart, I’m paying him out of my pocket. We need to get this thing going. That editor I told you about is getting very impatient.”

Alan had withstood his introduction like a person about to be tossed in a pit. He was cringing away from them stiffly, his eyes on the ground. “Rob, you should have told me you were thinking of this,” Jenny said to Frazer. “You said you’d never bring outsiders here.”

“Told you when? You hung up on me, Jenny, remember?”

Juan had found his voice again. “We asked you here to discuss our security, and you’ve brought us a ghostwriter?”

“Juan, before you asked me here, as you say, I asked you here, for the purpose of writing a book. We’ll also discuss your security worries—” Juan unholstered the gun suddenly and aimed it at Frazer, undoing the safety. “Jesus!” said Frazer. “Don’t do that. That’s no fucking joke.”

“I agree. It’s no joke, it’s a serious, valuable item. We owned a number of these items not so long ago. A handgun. A number of rifles. Some customized by us, which takes effort.”

“That’s a separate issue. If I don’t have the rest of your weapons today, it might have something to do with the fact that I was ordered to come up here early.”

“Don’t interrupt me, man. I’ve got the loaded gun! You should just shut the fuck up and let me continue.” Juan waited a moment for compliance; Frazer stared at him, silent. “Think back to a few months ago. You offered us safety, in exchange for a cut of our story. You made us put down our guns to travel, but that was just temporary, that was just so we’d be more secure.”

“The only thing I care about is your security, Juan.”

“Then why won’t you arm us? Why the fuck are you stalling? Armed revolutionaries, that’s what we are. That’s the point of your stupid-ass book.”

“My stupid-ass book?”

“Yeah, your stupid-ass book! It’s just your way of grabbing our action. Books are for phonies like you who use words when they ought to do something.”

“I’ll just wait in the car,” Alan said.

“Don’t you move,” Juan said. The gun was pointed again, now at Alan. Alan froze in his tracks.

She saw Frazer blanch. She could almost see his calculations: sedate, or confront? Sedate, she was thinking, sedate . . . “That’s it,” Frazer said. “When you can stop acting like a prick you just give me a call. Come on, Alan. What are you going to do, shoot him?”

“Shut up, Rob!” she yelled furiously, but Juan had already pounced; he grabbed Alan around the neck and stuffed the nose of the gun into the soft space just under his chin.

“Ah, agh,” Alan gurgled in terror.

Now Frazer was visibly frightened; and it served him right, strutting in and out of the house, on and off the hillside, never knowing what it was to live here, waiting for his payday; she thought of something else. She walked quickly to Frazer’s car and Juan said, without moving at all, “What’re you doing, Jen?”

“Just checking something.”

“All right.”

“Juan . . .” Frazer said.

But Juan was saying to Alan, “Do you know what’ll happen if you ever tell pigs where we are? That you saw us at all?”

“I won’t tell,” Alan gasped.

“I will find you, and kill you,” Juan said. “I don’t have reservations about rich boys like you.”

“He’s not rich!” Frazer said. “Alan made it through school on a track scholarship!” Jenny leaned in the passenger window of Frazer’s brown coupe and flipped open the glove compartment. Her letter to William was still there. She pulled it out and stared at it. “For fuck’s sake,” Frazer said, the weight of the last straw dropped on him. “It slipped my goddamn mind, all right? Why’d you make me shove the thing in the glove compartment?”

Juan flung Alan away from him and Alan went tumbling at Frazer’s car so that Jenny had to leap from his path. Alan dove into the car and flattened himself on the backseat, as he must have been flattened when Frazer had driven the car up the hill. Juan was no longer paying any attention to him; now he had the gun trained on Frazer again. “Give us money,” Juan said.

“Money? How much more do you want?”

Yvonne searched Frazer’s pockets and pulled out his wallet. “Ten dollars,” she told Juan.

“You asshole,” Juan said. “Come back with our guns and our new place to live and our money, and you’ll get your dumb book.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Frazer said as he rushed to the car. From the relative safety of the driver’s seat he called out, “Jenny, give me the letter.”

The envelope was warm, dry, her careful printing of the prison address somehow pitiful to her; she couldn’t bear to hand it back to him now. My darling, it bluffed, it bullshitted, you haven’t had an answer from me in so long, but there’s not any reason. I love you, so much. She felt her eyes flooding with tears. “No,” she said, but he might not have heard her. The gun went off: POP! Juan had fired a shot into the air. Frazer stomped on the gas, sending chunks of turf flying.

“And put his blindfold back on!” Juan yelled after them.

JENNY DIDN’T know how long she lay upstairs in bed, curled tightly around herself under the sheets, oblivious to the heat. The unopened envelope lay on the nightstand. From downstairs she heard their voices rising and falling, water running and being turned off. She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed to fall asleep, but her body seemed to wind itself more and more tensely away from repose; she couldn’t even feel that her head lay heavily on the pillow. It seemed to ride just a hair’s width above, and her neck ached from bearing the weight. Bands encircled her ribs: fear, she knew. Although she had never told William where she was, what she was doing, the unsent letter made her feel a new danger, as if she had set off on foot into mountains without telling a soul, and now knew she was lost. No one would realize they had to come looking for her.

She heard a car start. She had also heard footsteps, the back door, voices loudly debating together, but all of that she had ignored. She got to the window in time to see the Bug driving away.

Downstairs she found Pauline watching out the front window, clutching the transistor to her chest. It was hissing with static. “I’m too recognizable,” Pauline said. “They wouldn’t let me go with them.” She wiggled the transistor’s antennae, touched the dial, then hugged it tightly to her chest again, no more tuned in than before.

“Where are they going?”

“Into town. To survey the terrain.”

“Why? What for?”

Pauline shook her head; she knew, but was not going to say. “He’ll tell you,” she said.

Juan had hidden his purchases when they got back from Monticello, but now she saw what they were; in the bathroom and in their bedroom, boxes of L’Oréal hair dye, combs and brushes and scissors, eyeliners and lipsticks and powder, lengths of Ace bandage, reading glasses for both men and women, pillow forms that must have been from the sewing-supplies store, had emerged from their place of concealment and been strewn everywhere on the floor. There were two dresses lying empty and twisted across the rumpled double bed. Both were conservative, even prissy, with cap sleeves and darts. One was pink and one yellow. Both were size four. Pauline watched as Jenny riffled the bedroom, but said nothing to stop her. The bedroom was ripe with the smell of sweat, and dust. And sex. Dirty clothes, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles, plates crusted with food, cups lined with a skin of dried wine, were so thick on the floor she had to push things aside with her feet to take steps. She left the bedroom and went into the bathroom; in the bathroom was a blizzard of hair. When she returned to the front room Pauline said, blurting it out, “They’ll be all right, won’t they?”

“I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know what they’re doing.”

“Don’t be angry, Jenny. Juan’s in command. He has to tell you himself what he’s doing. Don’t leave!” Pauline cried.

“But you won’t tell me what’s going on!”

“You can still stay. Don’t leave me alone. Find some music.” Pauline thrust the radio at her. “Do the crossword with me. I found an empty one. I’ve been saving it.”

Juan and Yvonne were gone for almost two hours. When she and Pauline heard the Bug on the hill again they both leaped up; Jenny rushed out the back door and stopped short in her tracks. Yvonne was made up and coiffed, legs shaved, in a powder blue dress, but it was Juan’s transformation that stunned her. Juan’s guerrilla beard was gone, exposing round cheeks and a cleft in his chin. And his hair was cut off—it fell neatly above his ears, and the ears, exposed, stood out alertly. His shirt was tucked in, trousers belted. He looked like a midwestern college kid studying crop yield. She might not have recognized him had they passed in the street.

“Not bad, huh?” Juan said, walking past her. “We clean up pretty well.”

Yvonne was stepping out of a pair of sandals. “Those are awful,” she said, walking barefoot the rest of the way to the door.

“Where have you been?”

“Town,” Juan said shortly. “Hey, Princess. Don’t look so freaked out.” Pauline threw her arms around him; Yvonne came and smiled gaily and Pauline rushed to hug her as well.

“Give me the keys,” Jenny said to Juan quietly.

“Later,” Juan said. When he saw her face he said, “Come on. We just went for a nice country drive.”

Behind her, Yvonne was still hugging Pauline. “I wish you could have seen the sights with us, Sister. I brought you a treat.” It was a copy of Newsweek, with Pauline on the cover. Beneath her face the word WANTED had been crossed out and replaced with MISSING. “Isn’t that wild?” Yvonne squealed, as Pauline held it and stared.

THAT NIGHT after dinner Juan called a council. “The reward offered for us is more than he’d get for a book, I would bet you,” Juan said. “And he wouldn’t have to split it up. He could keep the whole thing.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Jenny said, at the same time as Yvonne said, “He’d get busted for harboring,” though this hadn’t been what Jenny meant.

“Bullshit,” Juan said. “Harboring’s hard to prove, and he’s smart. He’d make a nice deal for himself. It ought to be tempting for him.” All through dinner the little radio had been tuned to the A.M. news station to the extent it could be tuned to anything, and in the silence after Juan finished speaking its whining and hissing seemed to scrape on the bones of Jenny’s skull. “Anyway, let’s start this fucking council,” Juan said. Jenny rubbed her thumbs over her eyebrows and snapped off the radio irritably. Looking up she felt everyone’s gaze on her.

“Sorry,” she said. “It was bugging me.”

After a moment Juan said, “You see, we’re starting our council.”

“I heard you.”

“You need to leave,” Juan clarified.

Between hearing his words and understanding them she experienced a very slight delay. “Right,” she said, standing up stupidly.

She slept badly that night. The next morning she was still tangled up in her sheets, trying to block out the light, when Pauline came and lightly knocked on her door. Pauline looked oddly happy. “Come down,” she said, smiling.

Downstairs Juan looked as if he hadn’t slept either. His eyes were bright with manic calculation. He was unfolding a wad of notepaper. “Jenny,” he said. “There’s coffee. You want coffee? So, you know, we had to hold council, we had to vote, but it turned out good for you, we all voted for you. I know you hated us making you leave.” Gripping both ends of the notepaper he scrubbed the sheets against the door frame to flatten them.

“I didn’t hate it,” she said. “I just want the car keys.”

“But in our situation, it’s not that we would ever have secrets from you so much as we feel responsible to you,” Juan went on, ignoring her interruption. “We couldn’t lay our plans on you until they were formed, and I had it all firm in my mind how and why things would go. Now I do, and I can answer your questions and deal with your objections, because I know that you’ll have them. Day after tomorrow is Sunday, and we’re going to hit that kid Thomas’s store. Not with him, don’t bugeye like that. He doesn’t have any idea, it won’t touch him at all. His boss makes the deposit into the drop safe at the bank on Main Street. He does it alone, and he’s a very small guy—Y and I checked him out yesterday. We’ll approach, boss’ll hand it right over, and then we’ll be able to get out of here.”

It took her a moment to find her voice. “No!” she said.

“Just listen before you say no.”

“No! This is your wonderful plan? Are you out of your mind?”

“I know it’s not the kind of thing you like to do,” Juan went on, seeming unsurprised by her objections. “You like to blow things up that belong to someone who can always replace them, like the federal government. You like to do things that make you feel morally superior but don’t make any difference, except getting your lover’s ass thrown in prison.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“I’m just saying, Jenny, that you have to leave the moral high ground sometimes. Our high purpose now is survival. We don’t have the good options. And we don’t have your stash of cash, either.”

She felt herself color; at the edge of her vision she saw Pauline’s eyes widen slightly. She wondered if Pauline was surprised at the invasion of her privacy, or if she’d been part of it too, and was merely surprised Juan had told.

“Your two hundred thirty-two dollars and, uh, what.” Juan consulted his sheets of paper. “Some small change. Don’t be mad at us, Jenny. We went through your shit. It was ages ago. We just needed to know who you were.”

“Fuck you, Juan!”

“Jenny.” Juan stretched and looked at her perplexedly. “We made this plan with room in it for you. We want to make it up to you, that you’ll never get your cut from the book. I know that’s why you’re here. I don’t hold it against you—you’ve got to survive just like we do. The three of us agreed last night to give you a full fourth of the take, though we’re doing all of the planning. It won’t be the big bucks a book might have made, but it’ll carry us all for a while.”

Pauline, like Yvonne, was watching her with less suspense than confidence; they actually seemed to expect she’d relent, and not just relent, but become infected by their enthusiasm, which they’d caught from Juan—or perhaps the idea, like everything that they did, was a product of bad alchemy, a miniature collective insanity none of them could have sustained on their own. “No,” she said. “No, I will not commit stupid armed robbery, Juan.” When she looked at Pauline and Yvonne, they seemed truly surprised.

“Then you go,” Juan said, suddenly brusque.

“Oh, Juan,” Yvonne said. “That’s so harsh.”

“If she does the thing with us she stays, if she doesn’t, she goes! You think we should keep her around as a witness?”

“I’ll go gladly,” she heard herself say. “I’ll go now.”

Juan only hesitated a moment, and then threw the keys at her. She raised a hand and felt them smack into her palm. Juan’s and Yvonne’s and Pauline’s six-eyed gaze, suddenly strangely opaque, tracked her out of the room, and then she was striding past the foot of the stairs and through the kitchen with its warm pot of coffee and out the back door. Juan had thrown her the keys in a fit of his idiot temper, and even now he’d be realizing what he had done. He’d come storming out, red-faced and thwarted. She only needed to drive into town and call Frazer. This was his problem, now. She was aware of feeling more than a little bit pleased that everything was backfiring for him. Crossing the grass toward the car she heard the back door open and shut, a strangely leisurely sound. She dropped into the Bug’s driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. There was nothing, not even a cough. She gave the gas a few pumps; still nothing. All three of them had filed out the back door and now they stood at wide intervals, watching: Pauline on the back step, Yvonne several paces closer, eyeing Jenny with stern disapproval, but still a fair distance away; Yvonne seemed to sense that this moment was a crisis in Juan’s leadership he desired to resolve on his own. Juan had come up to the driver’s side window; he stood there observing as she turned the key and stamped furiously on the gas a last time. “Excuse me,” she said to him coldly.

He stepped aside with what was almost great politeness, and she shoved the door open and got out again. At the back of the Bug she yanked open the deck lid and stared at the engine. Juan came and studied it also. One of the spark plug wires was missing. “I only took it on the long, long-shot chance you’d say no to our plan,” Juan remarked thoughtfully. “You can hot-wire a car, can’t you, Jenny? Of course you can. You can do everything. I couldn’t let you try jamming the works, once we’d let you in on it. But I really didn’t think you’d say no. I’m surprised and I’ll even admit that I’m kind of upset. It’s not just that my plan’ll work best with four people. We can do it with three: it’s less elegant, sure, but we’ll do it. I’m upset that you seem to have more sympathy for a store-owning pig than for the people we’re trying to help. The People! Your People, Third World People—”

“When can I actually leave?” she interrupted impatiently. Juan’s encouraging, comradely aura snapped off like a lamp.

“When you can’t interfere with our plan.”

“And when’s that?”

“When I say! I guess we’ll finish the job and take off, and you’ll walk into town. Find a bus stop or something.”

“I could walk to town now.”

“But I’d stop you,” Juan said. His tone was so simple it took her a moment to realize he was threatening her. He was wearing the gun in its holster. It was so much a part of him now that she sometimes forgot it was there. Her eyes fell to it and Juan smiled, seeing what she was seeing, and knowing what she had realized. “Just sleep on it, Jen,” he suggested.

“I don’t need to,” she murmured.

“Who knows? Maybe you do. Because this—” and he gestured, at the shimmering maple above them, at the steep hill beyond, at the barn, and the woods, and the shriveled-up patch of the pond, and the summer, she realized. “This is over,” he said.

SHE WAS SITTING on the floor of her room going through William’s letters when she heard the Bug’s engine start up. She went to the window in time to see Juan and Yvonne drive away, both in sunglasses, smoking, their windows rolled down, Juan’s left elbow protruding, Yvonne’s right, as if they and the car comprised one entity that had always been self-sufficient.

She went back to the letters but couldn’t stand to look at them. She had meant to find a way to compress them, but going page by page through the thick bundle she couldn’t find anything to cull but the occasional white envelope with her old alias and old post office box printed on it in Dana’s neat hand, and even these she could not throw away. Most of them she’d discarded long ago, and the few that remained seemed like rare artifacts and their absence would not have diminished the bulk anyway. She removed them, replaced them, retied the bundle and stared at the wall. She heard Pauline coming upstairs.

“Packing,” Pauline said when she reached the doorway. She said it as if she’d found Jenny slaughtering a chicken, or performing some other blood-curdling and difficult task.

“Just thinking about it. Don’t worry, I’ll pack soon enough.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” She didn’t feel like arguing. She wound the leftover tail of twine around and around the letters. She’d been trying to imagine herself on a bus, her duffel on the rack above her, the accordion file on her lap, but she could only see it from the outside, like a scene from a movie. Her head dark and vague through the grit-coated window.

Pauline didn’t move from the doorway. The cigarette that she held stayed unlit. She seemed irresolute, as if she might turn on her heel and leave. “You’re making a mistake,” she said finally.

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“You don’t have anywhere to go. It’s like Juan said: You’re just making a self-righteous stand. What are you going to do? Who can you turn to? You’ve decided robbery is wrong on principle, but it won’t hurt that man, and it’ll help all of us. It’s not his money, anyway. All his business comes from the black people of that neighborhood who don’t have any other store to shop in. They can’t get loans to start their own stores because the banks are so racist. So stealing from him isn’t stealing. He profits from racism.”

Jenny wondered how it was that Juan, whose analysis this obviously was, managed to take very plausible statements and make them sound trite. “I think that’s probably true,” she allowed. “It doesn’t mean I’ll add armed robbery to my rap sheet.”

“Why was it justifiable for you to blow up a building the government owned? That’s against the law, too. That’s destruction of property.”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

“That was to try to end a war. These things aren’t all on the same scale, Pauline. The lives of millions of Vietnamese, and thousands of young American men, aren’t quite the same as the wellbeing of a bunch of lunatics.”

“And that’s what we are?”

“I don’t know,” she said after a minute.

“Because if that’s what we are, that’s what you are! You think you’re a saint. Maybe you’re just a little too proud of yourself.” Jenny had heard this one, too; she could not remember quite where or when. But she didn’t have the chance to say so; Pauline had slammed her door hard and gone back downstairs.

SHE KNEW it had been an unthinking insult, seized upon and fired off randomly, but for the rest of the morning Pauline’s saying that she might be a little too proud nettled her. Her father had always been maddened by what he called her moral absolutism. And once when she’d criticized Frazer’s self-promotion in the guise of political action, he’d dismantled her in return. “At least I’m not deluded about my desires,” he’d said. “At least I know that I’m selfless and selfish. We all are, sweetheart. We’re just human.” One of the first things she’d loved about William was his tireless perfectionism; he never chose a target for an action without researching exhaustively first, without being able to demolish its potential defenders with chapter and verse, without knowing its board of directors or slate of officials, its funding, the whole range of its acts, bad and good, in the world—but had this rigor been vanity, too? If so, she’d been equally vain. She’d never wanted some ill-defined public glory, like Frazer. Even in their intimate circle of comrades she’d been relieved to let William take most of the credit. Yet she knew, in a way that now made her feel oddly abashed, that she’d longed to be morally perfect. That was either self-denying, or vain, or perhaps it was both.

She still felt sure that none of this touched on armed robbery. Armed robbery simply was wrong, and saying so wasn’t endorsing the capitalist system, no matter what Juan might insist. For one thing, it did nothing to alter that system. For another—but Juan wasn’t interested in arguments. “This ain’t theory, this is practice,” he said, brushing past her. He and Yvonne had overshot the Bug’s usual spot when they came back from wherever they’d gone, and instead parked in back of the barn. By the time she was climbing toward them they were on their way down and the spark plug wire, she knew, had been plucked from the engine again and concealed somewhere. That afternoon Juan and Yvonne and Pauline went into the barn to rehearse. As soon as the barn doors swung shut she began on the house: she searched underneath the back steps, in the toilet tank, under the mattresses of their ripe, rumpled beds. When she lifted up Pauline’s mattress she saw the patch that she’d made on the underside, eons ago. She ripped the lid off the coffee can and dug through the grounds. When she heard target practice and knew they couldn’t hear her she walked up to the Bug and examined its engine again. She felt along the insides of the fenders and wheel wells and door panels, but she was more and more sure the wire was simply on Juan. Like the gun, it now went with him everywhere.

She thought of Frazer, probably stretched on his couch in New York, his glare drilling holes in the unringing phone. He hoped to be called and apologized to; he expected to always be needed. She willed him to realize that he was expendable—to grit his teeth, rehearse a smile of defeat, and drive back up the hill. But he was also too proud; too proud to imagine his fugitives could hatch a scheme of their own, not in spite of his help but because of it. This was a great part of their happy activity, she knew: the rediscovered pleasure of calling the shots. Of course they were too proud to have stayed Frazer’s wards forever. She’d felt the same way when she’d left Dick and Helen: disgusted with them and afraid Frazer might compromise her, but beyond all that, fed up with being dependent. She’d hated being dependent, and Juan and Yvonne and Pauline hated it just as much. If their plan was to remake the world, then they had to be able to remake themselves. She understood that very well; at least that was one thing she could still sympathize with.

That night at dinner they were loudly optimistic. Juan said, “It’s so obvious to me we could rebuild our cadre right here. The one mistake I’ve made is I took so long realizing that. Take that kid, Thomas. That kid’s never heard of Black Power, he’s like a powder keg ready to blow.”

“You’d better leave him alone,” Jenny said.

“I’ve gotten to like rural life,” Juan continued, ignoring her. “I can imagine a headquarters here.”

“‘For Rent, Fishing Camp, on the Delaware River,’” Yvonne read, as they ate. “Fishing Camp—that’s right on. We could catch our own food.” Then she looked up at Jenny. “What about you, Sister? Wouldn’t you like that? You love being in nature so much.”

Only Pauline said nothing, and kept her eyes trained on her plate. After dinner Jenny sat in her room at the window, reexamining the things she’d lined up on her sill over the course of the summer. Things she’d found on her walks and felt compelled to slip into a pocket, which had always looked diminished when she found them again, slightly crushed, or dusted over with lint. The spiny rind of a chestnut; a smooth white bracket mold, like a tongue of spilled cream. The one thing that hadn’t been damaged in transit was a robin’s-egg shell that she’d cupped in her palm all the way down the hill. Someone, between dinner and her mounting the stairs to go to bed, had hung one of the size-four dresses, the pink one, on her doorknob. Compared to the blue of the egg the pink shade was a vile one, tainted with orange. The effort, whoever had made it, to tempt her with the dress, then the whole costume drama-in-progress, with its earnest makeup and its script and the greatness of its imagined results, almost made her laugh, it was all so absurd. Then she thought she might cry. Downstairs was shrill laughter and footsteps; they must be getting drunk. Their bedroom door slammed but then she heard someone mounting the stairs. Pauline appeared in the doorway. “You’re still awake,” Pauline said.

“So are you. I thought you’d gone to bed.”

“They did. I wanted to talk to you.”

Pauline looked much more resolute now. Jenny thought of Pauline’s shooting stance, the wide legs, shoulders shrugged to her ears. “Pauline, my mind is made up.”

“There was just something I thought of I wanted to tell you. Our old leader—before our comrades died our old leader once said when you’re weak, you have to fight to get strong. But you can help yourself out by removing temptation. Like the temptation to go back to a life that’s complacent and selfish. I had that temptation. My comrades needed money to keep doing actions, and I needed to remove the temptation. So I robbed a bank with them.”

After a moment Jenny said, “You shouldn’t tell me about crimes you’ve committed.”

“But there’s more. There’s something else that I wanted to say: It helps us help them. Help the People. Because without it we just can’t continue. Of course it isn’t an ideal situation. Money is evil, there’s no good way to get it. But it’s a necessary evil, until the revolution changes everything. Until then, we need money. There’s no good way to get it, and there’s no bad way to get it. You just have to get it, that’s all.”

“That sounds like something Juan would say.”

“Why can’t I make you understand?”

“It’s not your job to.”

“Yes it is. Yes it is.” Pauline sat on the floor suddenly, leaning onto the door frame.

When Jenny had come upstairs the room had been cool; now the chill night air was making her shiver. Pauline was biting her thumbnail, intense, but turned inward again. Jenny got up and closed the window, and realized it was the first time she’d closed it since they had arrived. She knew that she’d never imagined the four of them still in this place, as the leaves on the maples turned red, and the larches turned yellow, and magnificent weather refilled the small pond and then gave it a clear skin of ice. They were always supposed to be gone by the end of the summer. Autumn was coming, and none of them even owned socks. They had turned all their socks into wrist weights.

She lit a cigarette and held it out silently to Pauline, and Pauline took it and inhaled hungrily, without comment, and in that instance the undeniable nonaloneness of the past several months overwhelmed her. Of course she would only taste it when it came to an end.

“I’ll stop bothering you,” Pauline said, and she went back downstairs.

THE NEXT DAY she’d finally packed all her things—her blue jeans and T-shirts and the old leather jacket for when it got cold, her underpants and her modest collection of paperback books, the tools she’d accumulated that were too valuable to give up, like the big crescent wrench and the drill from Wildmoor that an ancient worker had abandoned; and the notebooks of her journal of more than two years, and her letters from William—when she realized her duffel and accordion file were too much to carry. She hefted one and then tried for the other and almost fell over. It would have been different if the duffel was something else, like a backpack, or if the file had a handle. She finally got the duffel hung over one shoulder, and took a tentative step. Once she got used to this she could try the accordion file under an arm. Juan came jogging up the stairs and eyed her coldly from her doorway. So far today he had been treating her not with goading argumentation or comradely persuasion or ostentatious indifference, but a sort of hostile minimality: she had spurned his great offer, and now he was finished with her. “We’d like to rehearse, and we’d rather not go to the barn just so you can kick back in the house.”

“Then I’ll leave.”

“And put the bag down. You’re not free to go yet.”

“I’m just seeing how well I can carry it.”

“Bullshit. Put it down.”

“I’m not trying to sneak off, Juan,” she snapped.

“Put it down.”

She let the duffel bag fall to the floor; its impact shook the room. “You’re a prick,” she said, shouldering past him to get out the door. She felt her eyes welling up suddenly.

Outside was a late summer day, clear and warm but alive with cool breezes. The sky seemed huge for the mammoth clouds traveling through it. She walked the steepest and fastest way up to the woods but once in the dense mix of boulders and trunks she was forced to slow down. She picked her way through obstacles. She was near the split-boulder reconnaissance point that Pauline had picked out long ago, or at least thought she was. Now she couldn’t locate it. She kept moving, not climbing or descending but just steadily crossing the flank of the hill. Then she reemerged in the open, in the uppermost pasture. From here the house looked like a toy left behind in the grass. The hillside was ragged with milkweed and goldenrod and other hardy things she didn’t know the names of, the kinds of things that drift and root everywhere and don’t need a particular place. She thought of her father, always trying to teach her to build chairs from scrap wood or grow food from seeds. Maybe that had been his way of describing internment to her. He’d always brushed off her questions about it, but maybe he’d been telling her things all her life. This is how you make a horse stable into a home, and a burlap sack into a bed. This is how you pack one little bag, though you’re going so far for so long . . . She thought of her duffel and accordion file, waiting for her like a pair of old dogs. They seemed like so little and they still were too much. She hadn’t learned very well. And her eyes, spilling tears that she chose to ignore, also burned from how badly she’d slept. She hadn’t learned that, either. Her father had expected her to sleep well anywhere and under all circumstances. On the ground, in the back of the car. Across chairs in the bus station waiting room.

She closed her eyes and lay carefully back in the bug-teeming grass. After a while she had finally stopped crying. She knew the sun alternated with clouds from the shifting of warmth on her face. Some time later she heard the back door slam, the noise carried to her on the wind. When she sat up she saw the tiny figures of Juan and Yvonne moving over the grass. Halfway to the barn they paused for a moment, then parted. Yvonne dropped to the ground and began doing sit-ups. Lately she did them by the hundreds, bobbing and gasping with calm fixity, like a yogi. Yvonne had decided that they were too decadent with their meals, and begun halving hers; now she even tore her sticks of gum in half. Juan went on to the barn. A few moments later Jenny heard the POP, POP of the gun.

The next time she opened her eyes she must have been responding to the strange length of time that her face had been covered by shadow. Pauline stood over her. She sat up on her elbows and Pauline said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“That’s okay.”

Pauline just stood there, not saying anything else. “Want a cigarette?” Jenny asked, to break the silence. Pauline accepted, sat down, leaned forward to take a light, began to smoke, without speaking.

There was a hawk turning slowly above them; Jenny watched it, feeling the way she might have on a boat, watching the horizon to keep from throwing up as the boat pitched and rolled. Clinging to belief in the tranquil apartness of that faraway point, from the tumult she found herself in. When Pauline finished her cigarette she ground it out at great length on the bottom of her sneaker. Pauline’s old beet-colored dye job had grown out so much that an inch of brown showed at her scalp, strange and vulnerable-looking, like the fur of some blind newborn mammal. Then the wind picked her hair up and the pale brown roots were obscured. Pauline dug in her pockets and brought out her own cigarettes and a book of the matches that Jenny had brought back to the house when they’d first gotten here, from a gas station outside Ferndale. She had swiped a whole big box of the individual cardboard books of matches from the gas station’s office while the attendant was under a car, because they went through their matches so quickly. They’d needed them to light the stove, and cigarettes, and since they were always lighting cigarettes outside, and there was often wind, they always used up many matches on just one cigarette; except for Juan, who had a trick for lighting a match with one hand, without tearing it out of the book. He’d bend the match backwards and then by some swift movement of his thumb make it ignite with particular violence. She’d once seen Pauline alone in the kitchen trying to duplicate Juan’s trick with match after match until a whole book was splayed like a badly bent fork and the sulfur heads were all crumbled and Pauline’s thumb, she imagined, was sore. Pauline didn’t try to do the trick now; her hands were suddenly trembling as she handed Jenny a reciprocal cigarette and tore a match from the book to try to light them both. But she couldn’t; Jenny took the matches from her. “Pauline,” she said. “What is it?” The breeze had gained strength, and on it she thought she heard the POP, POP of the gun again, just for an instant.

“Please do this thing with us,” Pauline said. “Do you remember the other night when I told you about what I did to remove the temptation? That was only to make sure I couldn’t go back. It didn’t let me go forward. It didn’t prove to them I can be good, and not just a beginner.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s my job to persuade you to stay. To recruit you. You didn’t think we’d be an army of three forever?” Pauline paused, watching her searchingly. “It’s the first thing I’ve been given to do on my own. I don’t get any help. And they know I won’t let myself fail.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they know I won’t let myself fail. He could probably kill me.” Pauline was flushed, oddly triumphant from the terrible confession. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. You know I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. But you won’t ever tell them.”

“No,” she said. She was suddenly sweating, she realized. Profusely. She thought of the bright red handprint, Pauline screaming at her in the barn. She saw the hawk drop like a meteor into the grass. For a moment the hillside looked just as it had. Then the hawk rose again, without anything.

“He only wants you to drive the switch car,” Pauline added.

Jenny was still staring at the blank patch of grass where the hawk had dropped down. What did it mean when people said, “I’ve decided . . . ?” Did anyone ever truly decide? A brand-new white purse set in place, her quick footsteps away; that had been a decision. And yet she couldn’t recall when and where she’d decided to do that. “I drive the switch car, and Juan leaves you alone.” It came out as a statement, though it was meant as a question. Her own voice sounded distant to her. “And then what?” she belatedly asked, but Pauline had stood up.

“He’s in the barn. He’ll want to know we can go with Plan A.”

Jenny followed Pauline down the hill. Pauline moved hastily, almost eagerly. In the barn Juan was taking a break to reload. He was handling the gun with grave earnestness; seeing him like that, imitating the pure absorption of a child as his minion approached him, made her feel hatred for him like a rash of small spines bursting out of her skin. He looked up at Pauline without anything in his face but the fact that she’d roused him from deep meditation. “Jenny does want in,” Pauline announced. “I’ve been talking to her about it.”

Juan looked startled; he must have assumed and perhaps even hoped Pauline wouldn’t succeed. But then he remembered to safeguard his pride; he turned to Jenny magnanimously. “It’s a good thing I don’t take back my offers,” he said. “You’re gonna have to catch up. We’ll rehearse before dinner.”

She stalked out of the barn tasting bile in her throat. When Pauline emerged a few moments after she pulled her aside, as Juan’s shooting resumed.

“When this is over, you have to leave them.” She wished there were proof of the moment, a receipt or a bell, to mark Pauline’s decision.

Pauline seemed to hesitate slightly. “Okay,” she finally said.

“HI, MR. MORTON,” Yvonne called.

Then she would hurry to him, in a powder-blue dress from Margot’s Modern Fashions, a light coat from the same on her arm. “Hi! Don’t you remember me? Sandra. I’m back home for a visit.” She would put her coat arm partway around him, take his arm with her free hand.

He would say, “Sandra?” his small, creased eyes blinking at her. He would feel the hard thing in his back.

Yvonne urges him gently. “Keep walking. Sandra Smith, remember? From check-out. Now I’m engaged.”

“I don’t remember . . .” he says, in a strangled voice. Fear, not resistance.

“It’s a gun,” Yvonne says. “I won’t use it if you’ll just walk with me. Let’s turn here, okay?”

They leave Main Street, the bank still a half block beyond them, and turn down a side street that leads to a rear parking lot. The side street is blank, no windows, just some side doors to businesses closed on Sundays. Juan is there. “This is my fiancé,” Yvonne says. “Why don’t you give him the bag.”

Juan holds out his hand, warmly smiles. In rehearsal this takes barely a minute. A car pulls itself free of the cars in the lot and comes toward them, Pauline at the wheel. A few miles away, in a second car, Jenny is waiting.

“Good!” Juan said. “Now we’re driving, we’re calm . . .”

Past four in the morning Yvonne and Juan drove to Ferndale and hot-wired a nondescript four-door sedan. The two cars came rumbling back up the hill before dawn. Pauline sat in the driver’s seat of the sedan and gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles turned blue. “Drive up to the barn and come back and don’t turn off the engine,” Juan said. The car rolled away, picked up speed. “California girl,” Juan observed of her. “She said she wasn’t sure she could still drive. Like she’d ever forget.”

At ten o’clock Jenny was sitting in the Bug at an overgrown fishing access to a river so dry that she only saw piles of rocks, round and pale, and then sometimes a glint of reflection from deep between them when the sun left the clouds. Through the trees she could see the boat launch, a cracked, crumbling ramp of concrete. She was wearing her own jeans and T-shirt and sneakers; she’d refused to put on the pink dress. It was a grim day, intermittently raining: all the better for Sunday on Main Street. “Hi, Mr. Morton,” Yvonne calls. It had occurred to them, belatedly, that Mr. Morton did not seem to have white employees. Did this mean he had never had white employees? She hurries to him, in the dress, with the coat, puts her coat arm partway around him.

Jenny thought of the white purse, the green dress. On that years-ago day that is somehow more real than this one, she looks like a girl who has just been to church, in a dainty green dress with white piping, white shoes, clean white gloves, the white purse to match. In the middle of the bright business day, waiting calmly at the elevator bank in the lobby, later going back out the same way she went in. Perhaps the guard senses a ripple, in a distant recess of his mind; she does not have the purse anymore but the lobby is crowded, twenty people pass by every minute, he doesn’t know what he has noticed and may not even know that he’s noticed at all. She takes the bus home as if sleepwalking, as if levitated, or drugged. Seeing nothing. Trying to shake herself free of the trance, for the sake of safety, but she can’t. Floating into Tom Milner’s apartment, where they’ve arranged to regroup and observe, she finds not just William and Tom but Mike Sorsa, and Tom’s practically brand-new girlfriend—she’s still really a date—Lorraine, gathered there, waiting for her. One look at her face and William knows she’s done it right; and of course the bag is gone. Before anyone can say anything, while they’re still staring, stunned, she and William walk straight to each other and lock mouths desperately, and the tension, though it doesn’t break, quavers briefly with keyed-up laughter and admonitions: “Aw, come on. Save the pornography.”

Tom Milner’s brand-new girlfriend—he won’t meet shy, loyal, nervous, impassioned Sandy until more than a year from this time—reveals she has made them a party: vegetarian chili heating up on the stove, a bowl of salad in the fridge, she’s instructing various of them to get out paper plates, forks, napkins, she leads them onto the roof, the reason they’re using Tom’s—it has a view of the building—and there are lawn chairs set up here, as if it’s a day at the beach, and a cooler of beer. It’s only now that she registers how disturbed—not just disturbed, angry—she is that this girl, Lorraine, is here. William wraps his arms around her from behind and she shrugs him off; she can’t scold Tom, or even reveal her irritation, and so she’s left with being angry at William. “What?” he whispers, with the hint of a warning: don’t ruin our night.

“Nothing,” she says. “But I’m nervous.”

“I love you,” he says. Waiting sternly until she meets his eyes.

She hates this pro forma exercise; what she really means, what she really feels, needs, craves, is hardly expressed by these words. These words seem like a fence to her, a little white line of pickets to keep things at bay. A formula to ward off other words, real words, words tightly bound to their meanings. But for William the utterance is like a dangerous thing he was taught to avoid. He says it with jaw jutted, with something like anger—I will possess this fatal weapon and use it!—and, finally, with the need for her to acknowledge the significance of his having chosen her.

“I love you,” she says.

And then all of them are eating the chili and drinking the beer, conversing at first uneasily, then with greater fluidity as the sun, and the beer, go down. They gorge themselves, lean back, open fresh beers. Mike Sorsa fills his little silver pipe and passes it around and they get high. It’s a mild, fragrant night; she watches the green lights from the port come on, the lighthouse beating its tempo on Alcatraz Island. It almost feels like any summer night’s roof party. It won’t be fully dark until nine; then Lorraine, somewhat self-importantly, takes the leftover chili downstairs—it was good chili; they’ve all praised her, grinned over it, dunked bread into the pot and licked it off their fingers in stoned primitiveness when they got sick of using their plates—and comes back up with candles and the transistor radio. Jenny is annoyed again by Lorraine’s manner—it is proprietary, braggartly, as if Lorraine is the center of events and not what Jenny feels she is, a dangerous interloper. Lorraine’s easy femininity also seems boastful. Jenny decides she hates these girls who flaunt their casual associations with the marginal while at the same time oddly emphasizing their traditionalness—these girls who always end up acting as caretakers, the ones who stroke the foreheads of the boys overcome by LSD, who gladly whip up omelettes for twenty at four in the morning, who are always to be found, the next day, gliding easily among the prone, pungent bodies on the living room floor, collecting the glasses and plates and wiping up the spills. She is thinking she hates them; though she is more likely to be a caretaker herself than a prone body on the living room floor. All the same she is more and more, perhaps because of the grass, not just irked but frightened by the ramifications of Lorraine’s inclusion in their circle. And also, perhaps because of the grass, she is less able than ever to summon the strength to do something about it. What could she do?

It is the kind of thing, she thinks, that will lead to disaster someday.

But hours are passing, have passed. William has gone downstairs also, and returned swinging a full bottle of whiskey by its neck. Nice whiskey. “I think this qualifies as a special occasion,” he says, smiling at her.

At half-past midnight she shudders suddenly, as if chilled. She’s thoroughly lost track of time. “Shh!” she exclaims, and everyone stares at her. Lorraine looks at her with exaggerated concern, her eyebrows raised questioningly, as if Jenny were an inarticulate child.

“I just worry we’re loud,” she says, embarrassed. She gestures around, at the indigo night, the palms swaying along the avenue, the lights from the strip, two blocks away, where the deli and grocery are. All is murmurous, as are they, she realizes. They’re not loud, they’re not even the only ones up on a roof, drinking beer, getting high. It’s the season of roof parties.

“You just worry,” William teases, wrapping himself around her back like a chair. She leans into him, closes her eyes. She can feel his cock hardening against the base of her spine. He feels her feeling him and squeezes humorously; it’s a joke of theirs, his uncontrollable hunger for her body. A fantastic joke she can’t imagine tiring of. A sated drunkenness has overtaken them all. Tom Milner and Lorraine, around the corner of the hutlike structure that houses the entrance to the stairwell, are intensely necking and stroking each other; she can feel the heat washing off them, but with William against her, she doesn’t care anymore. Sorsa, the quiet loner, is crouched near the roof’s edge, cigarette pinched between his fingers, meditative and unmoved, it seems, by the pulse of sex behind him. She feels William work his hand beneath her shirt, under her waistband. When he fingers her she is already so wet he’s sucked in by her flesh. She twitches, gives a jerk, as if her nerves are malfunctioning, and pushes against him anxiously; she hears his ragged breath. He sometimes comes, with sudden and great force, while touching her this way. Not touching himself at all. Then she hears Sorsa say, as if to himself, “One.”

She looks up, feels Tom Milner and Lorraine break apart. William’s hand, as if caught, slips from her. A long beat, in which nothing happens. Her throat closes.

Then, across the expanse of cottages, palms, streets crisscrossing, the quiet night in this low-slung, waterside settlement, traffic hardly audible, lights of the port glowing green, lighthouse at Alcatraz pulsing, the toy city of San Francisco not really visible behind the string of the Bay Bridge, downtown Oakland rising like an accident near the water’s edge, as if, midway through its construction, someone had realized San Francisco lay just across the water, and so cancelled the project, the X____ tower, only twenty-two stories, rectangular and graceless, burps a ball of black smoke and orange flame; from the distance the noise is as quick and mundane as, perhaps, a dump truck letting go of its load. Boom. That’s all. Then a streamer of black smoke is angling away, with the wind. She feels as if she’s going to faint, is fainting, she’s tumbling backward, then realizes this is because William, whom she’d been leaning on, has leaped to his feet with a whoop. “Shh!” she says—but they’re all whooping, clutching their chests, pointing, reeling, amazed.

While she’s started to shake, violently. Not because she did not know, before, the real scope of the thing she would do. She made sure to know, or she wouldn’t have let herself do it. But nothing, no amount of mental preparation, has been equal to what it looks like. William sees her quaking, her teeth chattering, as if it’s the middle of winter, and kneels quickly before her, grabs her hands, her little hands, squeezes them, as if she is a child. “Think of that being dropped onto people,” he hisses. “Balls of fire dropped down onto children. Little children who look just like you.”

“I know what I did,” she says angrily, snapping out of her trance. “And I know why—you don’t have to coach me.”

AT ELEVEN they were suddenly upon her. Yvonne’s blue dress was spattered with black blood and gore—Jenny saw her and screamed. “Shut up!” Juan yelled. Yvonne couldn’t speak; her hand, her gun hand, was soaked in blood as if she had plunged the hand into a wound. Juan was bundling her into the Bug like a sack of potatoes. Pauline drove the other car across the empty oncoming lane and the shoulder and bumped down into the high grass in the ditch; the rear bumper sank out of sight. “What happened?” Jenny screamed at them. Pauline came running back across the road to the Bug, her hair flying behind her. Yvonne leaned out the door on her side and threw up and Juan pulled her back in, roughly, but with a palm on the top of her head to keep her from hitting it on the door frame. The way cops always do, Jenny thought. “What happened?” she screamed again.

“Just drive!” Juan said. But she was already driving.

She didn’t remember the drive back; not in sequence, or as a sustained length of time. All the miles she’d driven up and down these roads now seemed to have been an accumulation leading up to this drive; she did not see what she did, didn’t tell her hands to guide the wheel as they guided it. She held the memory of this drive in every cell of her body, and later it would seem that even those things that were happening now had already been part of the great mass of detail she knew. Yvonne sobbing hugely. Juan talking and talking, like a thread being pulled from his mouth, no island of silence or emphasis. Clean house pack call Frazer need to cars need to get another car maybe after nightfall go back for that car maybe no one but that one man saw have to travel they’ll think it was local not the kind of thing state police local one-off thing . . .

Pauline was silent. She sat beside Jenny, her profile motionless, like a ship’s figurehead. Homing in on invisible landmass. Seeing past the horizon—

They roared and bounced wildly up the dirt track to the house; now that they were on the property Jenny was standing furiously on the gas pedal until they were doing seventy, eighty; they almost shot up in the air when they came to the level. And they almost hit the maple; her eyes were trained on the rear view, on the length of the road you could see when you’d climbed from the valley. Not another car on it.

“Put it into the barn,” Juan said, pulling Yvonne, limp and blood-spattered and vomit-stained, out of the car. He flipped her over to face the house and swung her arm around his shoulders. “Walk,” he growled. “Come on, baby. Walk.”

Pauline finally turned to her. “He’s dead,” she burst out.

“Get my duffel and file. Run!” Pauline heard an order; she ran; she ran across the lawn ahead of Juan and Yvonne as if to hold the door for them, then slipped through; the door slammed shut behind her. A beat later Juan was there with Yvonne. Jenny watched him struggle to reopen the door, then hold it with one outstretched leg while he handled Yvonne. She seemed to have fainted, but then she looked up at him, as if she’d just seen him. Her face collapsed, and he pulled her into his arms.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay. He’s all right. That person was there to help him. Now they’ve gone to the hospital.”

“I love you,” moaned Yvonne.

“I love you. I love you.” Juan hitched her arm over his shoulder again. They went in. Jenny started to cry; she tipped her forehead on the wheel and sobbed. The engine was still running. Her body shook as if someone were standing behind her and shaking it. She heard noise at the back door, and her head, like an object obeying physical laws, rolled to one side; she opened her eyes. Through her tears came a melting and wavering form, struggling, pulling something. Her duffel and file. Pauline had the file gripped to her chest and was tugging the enormous duffel through the grass; she dumped them next to the car as if they were an obstacle race she’d completed. “They’re in the bathroom,” Pauline gasped. “Cleaning. Juan says put the car in the barn and hurry!” Jenny swung out of the car and opened its back doors. She kicked the red gun onto the grass. The deposit bag was still sitting on the floorboards; she opened it, pulled out some money, and threw the bag on the grass also, then grabbed for her duffel and file.

“Get in!” she said to Pauline.

“What?”

“Get in! We have to go, now!” She could see Pauline finally flooding from panic, as if the news she’d delivered herself had just registered with her. He’s dead. Pauline blindly turned toward the doomed house and Jenny seized her and manhandled her into the car, the way Juan had manhandled Yvonne, but with even less care. Pauline’s brittle frame gave her a shock, as if she’d taken a gloved hand and felt only bones. Pauline twisted and recoiled and fell roughly on the front seat.

“Oh, no,” she was sobbing. “Oh, no, no, we can’t, no, we can’t . . .”

Jenny stamped on the pedal and the Bug squealed in a half-circle and roared down the hill. Inside, above the sound of running water, the noise might have reached Juan, but if he came running out with his sleeves rolled up, hands white with lather, Yvonne’s tears a damp patch on his shirt pocket, she didn’t look back to see him.

They were down the drive, onto the road, before Pauline had voiced her whole protest. “We can’t leave them!” she screamed.

“Leave them!” Jenny said.

But after they’d been driving long enough, turning, turning, turning, changing roads as often as there were roads to change to, Pauline’s sobs winding down to just harsh hopeless scrapes in her throat, the pinhole that had been Jenny’s vision dilated: grew huge. She slowed down. The faint yellow stripe of their road stretched away endlessly.

“You lied,” she said. “Juan never threatened you. He didn’t make you recruit me. You just did it to please them.”

Pauline’s wet face was blotched a raw color. “And it did please them, didn’t you see?” she choked forth raggedly. “They were so pleased with me . . .”

When night fell Jenny found a truck stop and called Frazer, for the last time, from a pay phone. “They’re all done with their book. Come right now.”

“Oh, fantastic!” said Frazer, surprised. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry we fought. See you soon.”

“See you soon,” she echoed.

She hung up and ran back to the Bug. Pauline was curled in the back with the duffel. The night had turned cold. Jenny sat up for hours, a knot, holding herself to keep warm, waiting for understanding, but her mind had been bombed; it was only a crater. She closed her eyes against the harsh yellow lights of the lot. The rumbling of the idling trucks around her gave off something like animal comfort. Behind her, a tight ball, Pauline slept. There were many ways, she thought, to disappear. She thought of Juan’s mother, and her beloved dent-with-tree in the field. There would be an oasis.