American Woman (17 page)

“What happened? How did three warriors fly from Los Angeles? They knew vengeance would have to be theirs. How did they sleep on the ground in the shelter of trees, right under the FBI's nose, like a pack of wild dogs with no fear? They were not afraid to eat the garbage scraps of the citizen-pigs who waste food endlessly. They were not afraid to pull your pizza scraps right from the trash, pig, they know how to live like the man with no home, the poor man who's their brother. We were there on the bench in the park with the crust of your sandwich. Our clothes didn't smell so good and our manners weren't nice. Did you see us and turn a blind eye? We were there right in front of your face. And when our friends came to mourn us and swear vengeance for us, we were there too. We came forward and said, Do not cry.

“We understand that the Chief of Police of Los Angeles had some awe for the weapons we use. According to the
Los Angeles Times
, after slaughtering our comrades in a battle that was more than a hundred to one, almost a thousand pig bullets per warrior, the Chief picked a number of our warriors' shotgun shells out of the rubble because he admired their size. He had them made into gift lapel pins for his underlings. Did you desire a souvenir, pig? We've got something for you that's much better, but don't hold your breath. It'll come when you're least prepared for it.

“To our friends: Don't think we are cold. It was horrible watching our comrades get burned to their deaths. But we live for the struggle, and die for the struggle. We don't fear our deaths anymore.”

The tape seemed to go on forever. The words now seemed ancient to her, not elegy so much as things that should themselves be elegized, artifacts from the deep past. All over the country, at that instant, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, were listening to this. Did the three of them realize, themselves? They had never heard themselves as she had, driving down a country road with the radio blaring and paralyzed suddenly by their crazed, keening screed. It was possible that their own voices were an echo chamber around them, beyond which they grasped nothing. There was something so lonely about it, the three of them standing and sitting, and hearing themselves as they'd been just a few days before. And then, as if the storm's fireworks had ended, leaving only a slow, steady rain, Pauline's section began. Jenny thought she saw Pauline stiffen, though her face didn't change.

“A ____, that scarf never left your hair, did it? It was a gift from your father, and you loved him so much, though he scorned your beliefs. You never stopped hoping you'd reach understanding with him. And B ____. You had trouble at first with your rifle, but you just worked harder. You never complained. That's how you were all your life, so determined and quiet. C ____. You alwaysstood with your arms crossed and your blue eyes on fire, so mad when we weren't being serious! Then you would laugh too. Perfect friend in good times, perfect soldier. I know you fought hard . . .” Behind Pauline's staticky voice the kitchen was still. “And Evan,” Pauline said. Then she paused. When she resumed she was less audible. “I never had a brother, but when I met you I thought you were my brother. We both grew up like birds in gold cages. Always being admired. Afraid that if we escaped we would never survive. We had so much more to overcome than the rest of our comrades. Yet you changed, and you promised I'd change.” Listening to herself, Pauline seemed to grow more and more stiff; now the stiffness dissolved and she crumpled, and started to cry.

“I can't listen to this!” she said. She shoved her chair back and ran from the room. Yvonne dropped her pen and stood up.

“Don't,” Juan said. “Let her go.”

“What if you'd died and left me alone?”

“I'd expect you to save your tears. Do you fear death? I don't. My death will be righteous. Our comrades' deaths were righteous.”

“God, you're a fucker. Are you happy they're dead?”

“No, I'm not happy they're dead. You're a moron. What I'm saying is your tears are an insult to them.” Juan sounded as if he had tears of his own, but since he couldn't cry without contradicting himself, they seemed to be boiling off him through his pores. “Would you shut up?” he screeched at Yvonne. “I'm still trying to listen!”

At last the tape ended, and as Yvonne had predicted it was followed by a tumult of update: three still at large, field agents, new focus on Boulder. Jenny felt a wash of heat slide down her skin. “Oh my God,” she said, thinking of Dana. But Juan had seen Yvonne clearly at last, and Yvonne had fallen into his arms, and Pauline was still locked in the bathroom, and so no one responded.

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
the door of her bedroom flew open. Pauline cried, “Someone's coming!”

Jenny flew downstairs into the front room and in the dimness saw Juan pressed against the side wall, hopping into his blue jeans, and Yvonne rushing past toward the kitchen. “No lights,” Yvonne hissed. In the kitchen Pauline dropped to her knees beside Yvonne at the front-facing window, pressing her face near the sill. The window was open, and Jenny heard the sound more distinctly—a car engine, straining in its highest gear and seeming to stutter from very slight taps to the gas. It came slowly; there was no sign of lights. Juan sprinted out the back door and returned with a rake in one hand.

“We don't have anything,” he panted. “Not the first fucking means of defense—”

At last the shape of a car emerged out of the darkness, and felt its remaining way toward them. The car halted somewhere near the big maple and a silhouette emerged, its gait familiar, traveling swiftly. “It's Frazer,” Jenny said, still frightened in spite of herself. The back door opened and Frazer made a strangled noise, seeing their four dark shapes. “Ah—” he cried.

Juan flipped on the light. “What are you doing? Why the fuck were you trying to scare us?”

“I wasn't trying to scare you, I was trying not to wake you.”

In the harsh sudden light from the bulb they all stared at each other. “I thought,” Jenny said after a moment, “you were coming next weekend.”

“I felt like coming early. To see how it's going.” He glanced around at Juan and Yvonne and Pauline. “I have a surprise for you,” he told them. “It's out in the car. The backseat. You want to go bring it in?”

After a long moment the three of them filed out the back door. “Not you,” Frazer murmured to her. They heard car doors open, and Frazer pulled her upstairs.

Once in her bedroom he turned on her. “Are you crazy?” he said. “What's the matter with you? I've left you with them for
ten days
. You're supposed to be handling them!” All his edgy tics were going full throttle—pulsing eyelid, beads of sweat on the brow, one hand opening and closing as if it were squeezing a ball. He hadn't been driving without lights not to wake them, he'd been driving without lights not to be seen by his unknown pursuers.

“I am, Rob,” she began, annoyed by her instinct to mollify first, before showing her anger at him. Who was he, to be lecturing her? “It's not easy—”

“I guess not! I guess it's not easy helping them get their promise-of-apocalyptic-vengeance manifesto on the radio.”

“Is that why you're here?”

“I would have come the minute I heard but I'm trying to use some precaution, unlike the rest of you. Can I guess whose tape recorder they used? And whose
tapes
? Dana called this afternoon. She's extremely unhappy.”

“They tried to take the car and mail it themselves!”

“You're supposed to control them, Jen. You're supposed to keep these lunatics alive!”

“Until you have your book and your money?”

He seemed stung. “It's not just about money. Though I seem to remember you're in for a share of it, too.”

“I've got to survive.”

“So do
they
. That's my point.”

“Then why aren't you yelling at
them
.”

He stared helplessly at her a moment, as if about to say something else; then he yanked open her door and went back down the stairs. She could hear Juan and Yvonne and Pauline coming through the back door, dropping things on the table. She lingered at the top of the stairs, but he didn't come back. When she went down he was unpacking grocery bags into the fridge, with the three of them watching him mutely. The surprise was a feast: thick steaks, potatoes, a bucket of chocolate ice cream that was soft from its ride in the car, vegetables for a salad, a bottle of whiskey and two of red wine. “I know nobody's vegetarian, because you ate burgers at Sandy's,” Frazer was saying. “Pauline likes a plain burger, right? I bet that means plain steak, too. For the rest of us there's A-1 sauce”—with a flourish—“and a shitload of stuff for potatoes. The oven works, I made sure of all that when we rented this place. There's more in the trunk, but don't peek—save some stuff for tomorrow.”

“What's all this for?” Juan managed weakly.

Frazer laughed—a fake-sounding laugh, she thought angrily. “I've really confused things by coming up early. This weekend I was going to pick up your writing, remember? I jumped the gun a little—I'm sorry. I'll get a couple days less of your writing, but that's only fair. We'll still celebrate. That's what all this is for.”

All three of them seemed confounded—by Frazer's appearance, by the food, by the mention of writing. But at the word
celebrate
Yvonne seemed to home in; her gaze narrowed on Frazer as if he'd just said the one thing in the world that she found most distasteful. “I know that you're just being nice,” she told him, “but we're struggling for our brothers and sisters who've never had what we all got at birth, just for being born white. In terms of all that this is so self-indulgent.”

“It's not self-indulgent to celebrate when you have a good reason.”

“Well, we don't!” Yvonne said. “We can't
celebrate
while our comrades' ashes are still blowing into those shacks our black brothers and sisters in L.A. have to live in. Who'll never afford to eat steak in their whole fucking lives.”

“Sometimes you're too much of a saint,” Juan told her suddenly. “Don't be so proud of yourself.”

Yvonne stared at Juan, silenced.

“Look, my fault,” Frazer said. “I went overboard. Let's just not waste this stuff, okay? It won't happen again.”

Yvonne had flushed deeply; she seemed to be containing a huge conflagration just under her skin. Pauline was watching her with what Jenny felt she recognized now as anxiety, but if Yvonne's emotions were as obvious as weather, Pauline's were indoors and shuttered and draped. “I guess we'll see you in the morning,” Yvonne said, and turned on her heel and walked out. Pauline followed her quickly. The bedroom door slammed.

Juan hadn't moved since he'd admonished Yvonne; he was propped up against the door frame. He seemed on the verge of saying something in summation, but then he only said, “Good night, man.” He left the room and the bedroom door opened and slammed shut again.

Now she and Frazer were alone. For a moment she pretended to be absorbed in listening for noises of argument or reconciliation from the downstairs bedroom, but there was only silence. She felt Frazer watching her. “Jenny,” he said.

“I'm tired, too. I'll see you in the morning.” She started upstairs, and he snapped off the kitchen light and followed. “Rob,” she said warningly.

“Just to talk.”

On the stairs there wasn't even the faint sifting of moon- and starlight through the windows; she couldn't see him at all, but she could smell him, the always surprisingly sweet scent of his skin, strangely familiar though he had never been her lover, or rather, though he'd just been her lover that once. She knew how near he stood from his heat and his breath. “Then talk here,” she said, sitting down on a step.

“What if they come out?”

“We'll hear them.”

He hesitated, but not as long as she thought that he might, and not petulantly. Finally she felt him sit down on the step just below her. He found her hand and she let him hold it; he held it gently, as a friend might. He didn't clutch it or stroke it. “I'm sorry I yelled,” Frazer whispered.

“It's okay,” she said. She felt suddenly so comforted to be allied with someone, even if it was Frazer. After a moment she said, though she'd been afraid to, “They haven't started their book.”

“I figured. I'll get them in gear.”

“How?”

“Would you stop worrying? If you want to keep worrying I'll have to leave, or I'll solve all your problems.”

She laughed. “You're the same asshole, Rob.”

“And you're the same.” He stopped talking and reached for her.

“
No
,” she said, pressing him back.

For a moment she just heard his breathing. Then, “You can't blame me for trying,” he joked.

She found his head in the dark, kissed its crown quickly, and stood. “Good night, Rob,” she said, finding the banister.

“Good night, sweetheart.” And then he stood also, and made his way down.

T
HE NEXT DAY
was tall and dark blue and much cooler than the few days before it. She and Frazer dug a fire pit in back of the house and lined it with flat stones that they found up and down the hillside. Juan dragged dead branches out of the woods and threw them carelessly into a pile. Inside Pauline and Yvonne cut vegetables for a salad. They had tuned the radio to music and set it up in the window, so the music moved out on the breeze. But a pall still hung over the day, deepening by the hour. The three fugitives seemed to have repaired their rift of the night before by turning a blank, sullen face to Frazer. When they sat down to eat in the late afternoon Juan and Yvonne and Pauline only picked at their food. None of them spoke; she and Frazer were left talking to each other, like nervous hosts trying to keep a bad party afloat. She was growing angry with them—for shoring up their unity by snubbing Frazer, for behaving like children about the good meal, which she wanted to relish but now somehow could not—when Frazer finally shoved his plate aside, and everyone else set aside theirs as well, although they were crowded with uneaten food. “Did I say I had another surprise?” Frazer said with a show of great cheer. “And you guys, don't keep me waiting anymore! Why don't you bring out the pages you've got and let me take a look at them.” She caught Frazer's eye but he only smiled at her.