American Woman (13 page)

Coming back to the house she sometimes felt such pleasure in the progressive unfurling of the landscape, such a sense of poignant recognition as the battered old house rose again from the grass into view, that she would forget how unlike her it was to pretend this was hers. Forget her deepening shock, the first time she'd gone walking and realized the property went on for miles. The days grew longer, and if Dolly was ensconced with a tea visitor she could slip back in through the side door, and go up to the second-floor ballroom, where the gold light that bounced off the river poured in through the giant windows. She could move with her crisp shadow over the boards through the turning dust motes, as the air started losing its heat. She had bought painters' lights to offset the dramatic shadows of the late afternoon, but this also meant she could work late at night, after Dolly was sleeping. That was its own lonely pleasure, working at night when it grew really cold in the room, and the velvety darkness outside sometimes echoed with owls, and she knew that her bright yellow light could be seen miles away, from the river's far side.

And always the radio on, somehow underscoring her loneliness more than relieving it. She had plenty of distance from Dolly but still, late at night, she would turn down the radio low. In the vast nighttime hush she could play it quite softly and hear. The contrast of her life with the world outside sometimes felt too great on these nights. The radio was like a tiny porthole in her drifting balloon. One night in the middle of May her evening music broadcast was interrupted by the news that the cadre had finally been traced to a house in a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. They were surrounded by FBI agents and local police and SWAT teams. All twelve members, including Pauline, were presumed to be there. Calls for surrender had been answered by gunfire. “We take you live to Los Angeles,” the newscaster declared, and then a maelstrom erupted in the small radio such as she wouldn't have thought it could hold. A badly stammering reporter who could barely be heard. Such a roar of gunfire she thought it was war. Smoke, the reporter was saying, rising out of the house, a smoke bomb—no, orange flames could be seen. No, that's fire, he said. We're told that these are . . . the rules of engagement . . . they say that they'll call for surrender again. I'm up here on a neighboring roof. Oh, my God. That's a real, that's a very hot fire. Those deafening booms that you hear, we're told that's ammunition they had in the house, blowing up from the heat. Through the smoke a lone person was seen, crawling out the back door, and was quickly picked off by the SWAT team. Jenny had stopped in mid-stride with a big can of wood varnish hanging from her hand, her breath frozen inside her, the weight of the can almost pulling her over. It wasn't until it had ended—fifteen minutes? an hour?—that she found herself standing this way. Slowly, she set down the can, her right arm muscles wildly trembling. And then turned the radio off. Never imagining that in the twilight beyond what she'd heard, the three fugitives somehow spared death were driving north on 1-5, being bundled into an apartment. That on the opposite coast, in New York, Frazer's telephone was ringing, in the middle of the night.

Part Two

1.

T
hey had been driving for more than an hour on a succession of small rural roads, creeping along at just under the speed limit although it was near five o'clock in the morning. A waxing moon hung fuzzy and huge just above the horizon. The damp of the summer night strangely translated the moon's weak gold light through the air, so that though it was dark you could see a great deal—shadowy forms of dense woods, lone trees, smooth dark hills reaching to the horizon. She had been staring out the window a long time. “Rob,” she said. “When Pauline joined the cadre—are you sure it was truly her choice?”

“I had doubts too until I met them.” Frazer paused. When he spoke again his voice was so certain it almost sounded grim. “She's riding with them, for sure. You'll see what I mean.”

The stars were just starting to fade when they found it, a faint dirt track climbing a long grassy slope from the road. The car shuddered on the uneven ground. They were almost at the top before they saw the house, small and dark, with the dark woods behind it. From here you'd have warning long in advance of anybody heading toward you from the road. As if to prove this she saw Carol standing outside, waiting for them. Carol was wearing shorts and a large sweater and was hugging herself against the dawn cold. Frazer touched Jenny suddenly, seized her hand—he hadn't even tried to touch her when she'd shown up at his motel room door, when she'd sat in the doorway with him for hours, smoking, arguing, settling what she would do, what she wouldn't. His hands had stayed carefully far. Now he seized her hand just as their long ride alone was over; she no sooner felt it than he let go again and they'd come to a stop. Frazer rolled down his window and Carol ran over and said, “Pull around back where the other car is,” and turned to lead them to the rear of the house.

When they had parked he sat a beat without moving, and she thought he was going to speak. Then he simply got out of the car, and so she got out, too.

“Hi, Jen,” Carol said. “We were worried about you.” Belatedly they jerked forward and hugged. In the brief moment of the embrace she looked up and saw Frazer watching. He looked away quickly.

Carol detached herself and said to Frazer, “I need to get back to the city for work. I've been waiting all night for you guys. What the hell took so long?”

“Where are they?”

“Sleeping. Finally. After marching all over the house like crazies, doing ‘security checks' and complaining about every goddamn—”

“Carol,” Frazer said.

“I'll go in,” Jenny said, quickly pulling her things from the car.

The back door was a rickety screen in an old wooden frame; it whined as she eased it open. She heard a sound like small rubber balls tumbling: mice. Inside she set her things down and waited for her eyes to adjust. She was in a small kitchen: all the usual things plus a table and chairs, and several full-looking grocery bags on the table. She trailed her fingers on the wall, turned through a doorway to a small vestibule at the foot of a short flight of stairs. Through a second doorway was a room growing gray with the dawn. A few curtained windows, another door at the far side that was closed, the dark shape of a couch. She didn't know where the fugitives were, she realized. Whether they were upstairs, or downstairs, or behind the closed door. She heard the screen door squeak open and then Frazer was in the room with her. “Jen,” he whispered. She heard an engine cough, start. “Carol's tapped out and she wants to get back to the city. So I'm running her back, because we're leaving the other car here for you. You'll need money. Shit. This is—shit. I have forty. Okay? Next time I come I'll give you enough for a month. But write that down, so I don't forget. Jenny? Write down what I gave you and keep track so I know what I've spent. Get a notebook or something.”

“Okay,” she said. Her heart was banging, the way it had banged at the station in Rhinecliff when she had walked out and seen him and not known where she was, who she was, anything. The car, the car that she and Frazer had arrived in, was pulling around to the front of the house with Carol at the wheel. She followed Frazer to the door. Carol did not look over at them.

“I'll be back soon,” Frazer said. “I've been away from home for weeks dealing with this, so I have a whole lot to catch up on. But you can handle it until I get back. Keep cool,” he added, as he strode away quickly and climbed into the passenger seat. Frazer and Carol drove off without waving good-bye.

B
Y EIGHT
in the morning the heat was rising, along with the noises of insects. Deafening chirrs, rattles, buzzes; so many variations of drone from invisible sources, each a note she parsed out with her ear but the whole somehow unified also, in a rhythm like waves. She sat at the kitchen table, paralyzed, waiting for some sign or noise from somewhere. Finally she went outside and tried to find a place of repose there, in the overgrown grass, but the soft patches it promised from a few feet away were all equally prickly and crawling with bugs when she got to them. Even from a few yards off the house shrank drastically. It seemed to be capsizing in its ocean of grass. She stood looking up the hill to where the dark woods began and climbed up to the ridge, and down to where she knew the road lay, out of sight. She crossed her arms tightly over her breasts; she felt cold although it was hot. Nothing about the house and the long golden hillside it sat on didn't feel abandoned, as if it was all an old luckless homestead that the owners had fled. Up an S-shaped pair of ruts from the house was a barn and an almost dry pond. She waded slowly through the grass to the barn and pulled its heavy doors open, belatedly starting with fright, as if the three fugitives were inside. But it was only a flock of pigeons exploding above her, in the dim space of crisscrossing rafters; she watched them arc through the pale beams of light falling in through the roof. The barn was full of dark shapes, smelled of moldering hay. She backed out and latched the doors shut again.

The house was still eerily silent when she returned to it; nothing had changed except that there was more light, and more heat. She eased one of the kitchen windows open and right away the screen door began to slap in its frame from the breeze; she rushed to latch it, but she still didn't hear a roused cough or a footfall. In the front room motes of dust turned in the light coming in through the drapes. She carefully opened a window here, too. The door off the front room that had been closed before was still closed. A second door that stood ajar revealed the bathroom, an old toilet with a pull-chain, an old tub with a green copper streak where the faucet was leaking. Leaving the bathroom and going to the foot of the short flight of stairs she could see a patch of sunlight at the top: a door upstairs was open. She climbed up, creaking no matter how slowly she went, and at the top found the open door, the only door there was, leading into a little low-pitched attic room with a single low window. That was all; now she had seen every room in the house but the closed room downstairs. There wasn't even a cellar. The attic room was bare except for a single narrow bed against one wall, a frail-looking table, a lamp and a frail-looking chair. Along the opposite wall was a thick rectangle of dust on the floor. It was about the same size as the bed, as if it had been moved in one piece from beneath it, or rather, she realized, as if another bed had been moved from above it. She got down on her knees beside the bed and flipped up the threadbare coverlet it was made up with, to look underneath. There was a thick pad of dust down there, too. So they really were here. They had taken a bed from upstairs, and moved it downstairs, behind the closed door. Somehow this small confirmation that she wasn't alone was less reassuring than startling, like the footprint on the sand in
Robinson Crusoe
.

The exposed stretch of dust, the shadow of the bed they'd removed, stirred and began to disperse in gray clumps when she opened the single window to let in the breeze. The sun was high now, and the cramped room was hot. She'd begun pouring huge beads of sweat. She was tired, she realized. She hadn't slept in a day, not since she'd risen early to go to Poughkeepsie and come back to find Frazer at the train station, waiting for her.

She climbed onto the bed, which stank faintly of mildew. For a moment her loneliness swept her and she thought she would never descend into sleep. But she was so tired that the next time she opened her eyes it was dusk. Now the bare room was softened and blue, with cool air pulsing in through the window. Outside she could see the dark form of the barn, and closer, the texture of a huge maple fading with the last of the light. Even the insect symphony had grown smaller and simpler; single crickets creaking tentative up-notes, and something else, a soft whirr. The best time was dusk, she realized. The sharp baring light bled away but the night hadn't come. That was the fugitive's hour, when the darkening air felt like shelter, yet you still had your eyes.

Downstairs the front room was as shadowy as it had been when she'd first seen it that morning; the one door was still shut. She tiptoed into the bathroom and peed without turning the light on. She put her hand on the chain, then thought again and simply put down the lid. In the doorway from the front room to the kitchen were her duffel and accordion file; she'd forgotten about them. Frazer seemed to have brought her here, left her here, eons ago. Passing through the kitchen and pulling open the screen door she caught her breath and stood still. Someone was sitting on the step, a hunched form in a blanket facing away from her in the direction of the hill climbing up to the barn, and beyond, to the woods; and then the dark ridge giving way to the sky, strangely pale from the afterglow. After a long moment the form didn't turn to her so much as it twitched aside slightly, shifted in the most minimal, barely animate way while still giving her room to step out.

It was the man—Juan—as she'd sensed it would be, from the wideness of the hunched, shrouded back. But nothing else about him was familiar. The photos she'd seen in the papers had shown a grinning boy with curly hair and a blunt nose and round cheeks, a midwestern farm kid, robust; because the pictures only ever showed his head and shoulders she'd had to extrapolate the rest of the body, and she'd imagined him tallish and tapered. But he was small and compact, like a barrel with legs. And though the face was the part she had seen, in the flesh it was equally startling and strange. Beneath a globe of wild hair and a beard and a small pair of wire-rimmed glasses his face was dull, its lines muddied. His eyes were obscured in dark hollows but she could feel him staring at her from what seemed to be deep, inert shock, as if she were an apparition, a supernatural event thrust upon him that jammed all his modes of response. A crumpled pack of cigarettes lay in the grass by his feet. He seemed to have carried them outside and then let them fall from his fingers, forgetting about them. “Hi,” she said, because it was the only syllable that seemed appropriate for utterance by itself, and she couldn't imagine uttering more than one syllable now that the air felt so fragile and tense, with this motionless man staring at her. It was strange to hear her voice, smaller amid the noises of insects and leaves than she'd thought it would be.