American Woman (27 page)

“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.

P
AULINE
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.”

T
HEY 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.”