American Woman (35 page)

She must have heard the shouting well before she recognized it had to do with her. If recognition ever came: She remembered terrible slowness and panic, like rising through water, at the end of her breath, toward the faraway surface. She looked out the window again and saw in front of the store Juan grappling with a man in a uniform, and Yvonne struggling to free herself from a second man, not uniformed. Juan, they later explained, had seen an ammunition bandolier in the hunting department he'd felt they should have, but had worried that purchasing it would raise eyebrows. He'd put the bandolier up his sleeve, but someone must have seen. Juan was shouting Pauline's name—not her real name, but her code name of that time, and then she understood that he had been shouting and shouting it. She threw herself bodily toward the blanket of guns, so that she badly scraped her knee on the floor of the van, and then, in a much less awkward movement that she remembered as a single arc, she swung her gun out the driver's-side window and sprayed a round in the direction of the store, not remembering to aim, extensively perforating
SURFING-JOGGING-BIKING-HIKING-HUNTING-FISHING-CAMPING-SKIING . . . SKATEBOARDS
. The uniformed man and the nonuniformed man shrieked, threw their hands up, belatedly threw themselves down. Pauline realized, perhaps from this display, that the uniformed man was not a cop but a security guard. This information emboldened her and she fired again, but the effort of the first time had already exhausted her shoulder; the gun kicked her painfully and its bullets flew wide, she could not have said where. Juan and Yvonne were running toward her and she felt overjoyed; perhaps she was merely relieved they were coming back to her, but against the landscape of her feelings at that time relief had the stature of ecstasy. This was when they lost Juan's handgun, seized by the security guard in the course of the struggle. The gun had been bought several years earlier, in Juan's actual name. Juan tore the door open and Pauline flew backwards, slid on her rump through the back of the van and almost hit the rear doors, as they sped from the lot.

“What took you so long!” Juan was screaming. “What took you so long!”

At an intersection a few blocks away they leaped from the van with their weapons, leaving the van running in the middle of the street, and commandeered a sedan from a terrified man at the stoplight. This was where they lost the parking ticket, which noted the address of the house at which the van had been parked—the address of their safe house. The ticket was forgotten on the dashboard. A few blocks farther and they left the sedan the same way, commandeered a second car from an equally terrified person Pauline couldn't even recall as a man or a woman. Procedure dictated that, if jammed up, they lie low and not try to return to the safe house for fear they might lead someone there. They didn't realize that they already had. Already, the handgun was on its way to the LAPD and very quickly its ownership would be traced and the city would realize that the cadre was there, and not in San Francisco. And the van that they'd left in the road was being combed through by cops, and the ticket uncrumpled.

They swiped a third car, left its owner in the shade of an overpass. By now they were a long way from where they had started. They got another newspaper, scanned its car ads, bought within the hour and with two hundred fifty dollars cash another old van from a genial teenager. Now several hours had passed since the sporting-goods store. They drove in their new old van farther and farther, looking for a safe-seeming motel, and it was the experience of sitting in this van, so much like the other one, that reminded Juan of the ticket. “Fuck,” he said. “Where's that ticket?”

“You threw it away,” Yvonne said, and in all the confusion she might have believed this. Pauline hadn't seen the transaction, had never even seen the ticket, having stayed inside the house that morning until the van was all ready to go. She didn't yet understand the debate.

“You told me not to,” Juan said. “I put it up on the dashboard.”

“You did not,” Yvonne said. “I don't think so.”

“Even if I did, it wouldn't have the address on it, would it? Do the pigs put addresses on tickets?”

“Maybe we should go back to the house.”

“Absolute no, the Code says—”

It was too late by then, anyway.

The sun sank, spread the shadows of the billboards and the buildings and the telephone poles and their van across miles of pavement, diffused through the particled air and turned everything orange. They chose a motel near the roar of the freeway. Inside they turned on the TV, and there, on TV, saw their safe house: encircled by barricades, flashing police cars, helmeted armed policemen, crawling snipers, a mob of reporters with hair whipped upright by the wind from the low helicopters. The broadcast was live. Outside their windows, the sun set. Over their safe house, the sun set, and klieg lights came on to illumine the scene for the cameras. How could she describe what they'd felt? Gasping and weeping in that room, pillows held to their faces? They couldn't make telltale noise. Through the thin walls to their right, they were sure, they heard their comrades' deaths doubled by the next room's TV. Pauline locked herself in the bathroom and vomited so violently that she brought up blood. There wasn't anything else in her stomach.

Late that night they agreed to make Juan their new leader. There hadn't been dispute, or even thoughts of dispute. Pauline had only been grateful, to Juan for sifting ashes of disaster in search of some relic of how life had been. To Yvonne, for having banged on the door of the bathroom until Pauline let her in, and let her hold her in her arms. Beneath their stunned grief a purpose had begun to take form, and though it was only to preserve themselves and each other, it had a hardness to it against which all their previous purposes, so multiple and complicated and subject to argument, crumbled. At last they tried to sleep, on the sour-smelling mattress that filled up their room like a huge slice of moldering bread. Curled on her side with eyes open, Pauline saw the imperfect darkness, dyed pink by the light leaking in through the drapes. Eyes closed, she saw fire, and death. Behind her in the bed there was movement. With underwater slowness, Yvonne and Juan tried to make love. Then Yvonne reached an arm out, across the wide bed. “Sister,” she whispered. “You can make love with us if you want to.” They were solemnly bound—by having survived, by being pursued, and by something that might be called blood. They were a family now.

It was a feeling that sustained them through days of crisis—or perhaps crisis had sustained the feeling. The night they'd arrived at the farmhouse with Carol, before Jenny was there, they had done their security tour of the house, and then they'd carried the second twin bed from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs, which had a double. Pauline had been relieved that it went without saying that they'd all share a room, because by now weeks had passed, an eon, since that night. There had been so many different disruptions, first having to sleep in a car, and then vagabond life in a park, then their tense time with Sandy and Tom. Separate trips crossing the country, to Frazer and Carol's Manhattan apartment. And Pauline supposed it was all disruption, except for that long night when grief married them—yet that night was the island. She'd found solace there that now seemed to be lying in wait, and they all only needed the chance to reach for it again.

It lasted a little while longer, but it was already ebbing. That first night at the farm their anxiety and anticipation had left them exhausted, and Juan and Yvonne fell asleep on the high double bed before Frazer arrived. Pauline had been left in the lumpy twin bed, wide awake, feeling suddenly hollow. A few times in those first early days, especially while they were writing the eulogy tape, it had happened again. Never promised or planned; but once they were all in the bedroom alone, Juan might hug her a long time, then slowly undress her. Or Yvonne would smile sleepily up from the covers and say, “Help us warm up this bed.” She'd done things she'd never done in her life, never known you could do. With Yvonne, while Juan watched them or held them, or with Juan inside her while she hungrily sucked Yvonne's breast. Something in her, whether it had been born during her captivity, or had resided in her all along, seemed to have been waiting for this, for the mute urgent pleasure that wasn't part of any story she knew, and by day left no traces. And then day extended to night, and the chapter was over. No one ever spoke about it. Juan and Yvonne were as always, conjoined, although no longer cruel to her. Their triumvirate, having begun from the blackest hostilities and passed all the way to the opposite thing, was now just an everyday union with quarrels, and an every night sleeping arrangement of three persons, one room, and two beds. Some nights Pauline woke in her bed and heard them trying to make love, without making noise.

Jenny had arrived in the midst of these embers—absurdly built up beforehand, she now learned, because Frazer told grandiose tales about her. And threatening, with her history of exploits that Juan found impressive. And so self-sufficient, with her faraway world that she wrote to, and her lover in prison, her journal. She'd drive off in the loud little car, her neat cap of black hair flying back, her huge sunglasses on—she was always departing. You sensed any time she might just leave for good, an idea Pauline hated, and brooded upon. There was, Pauline supposed, a submerged recognition: once Pauline had had her own car, and she'd driven around with her long clean hair flying behind and her sunglasses on. But mostly she tried not to think of the past. Mostly she thought of how Jenny had altered the present. Pauline's island existence with Juan and Yvonne had become sharply lonely for her. At first Jenny just made it worse, but soon Pauline realized, with confusion and uncertain pleasure, that Jenny liked her, perhaps even preferred her. And when Jenny resisted their robbery plan, Pauline suddenly saw how a very small lie could be good for them all, in the end. Juan would be happy, which would make Yvonne happy, and they'd both be surprised and impressed with Pauline. And once the robbery proved the resounding success Juan had said it would be, even Jenny would see it was better to stay with the cadre, than be cast out alone.

I
N
I
NDIANA
the thick Eastern carpet of cities and roadways and towns had at last grown threadbare. The shorn rows of harvested corn turned past them like great spokes. After the sun set they drove through profound country darkness for hours, afraid they'd be driving all night, when they finally found a motel, spied its lone neon twinkle far off like a bead lost from some cosmic necklace.

The next day at dawn that distinction was lost. Jenny eased their door open a crack and saw they were camped at a handful of weatherworn boxes the same shade as the gray country road, the gray dirt and the lightless gray sky. In the lot there was one other car that was still misted over with night condensation. Outside the office the neon sign buzzed. She slipped out and loaded the file and duffel back into the trunk, finally started the car after giving herself courage with the thought that in the dreary Indiana dawn it would sound no more foreign than rainfall or crows. A few minutes later, when the car was warmed up, Pauline cracked the door and through the mist-streaked windshield Jenny nodded to her. Pauline pulled the door shut and with rapid steps came to the car and got in and they drove away swiftly, two temperate travelers resuming their journey at dawn.

They were driving a desolate stretch in Missouri in a blinding rainstorm when the car died on them. They'd pulled onto the shoulder to study their atlas, afraid they were lost, and then the engine wouldn't restart. “Okay,” Pauline said, lighting a cigarette with a trembling hand. “Okay, let's just think. Try to think.” She cracked her window to let the smoke out and a slice of hard rain shot sideways through the crack and got them both instantly wet, and snuffed the cigarette out. Pauline quickly rolled up the window again. They turned on the hazards, afraid they'd be hit from behind; and then saw no one for half an hour, in either direction, until a huge truck went rumbling past, smacking their car with a wall of water. Water was standing on the road now, perhaps as much as a foot deep, and they both screamed when the truck's force struck them; they felt that all that mattered was the integrity of their car, that it remain watertight and protective. Pauline's newly yellow hair stuck like paint to her cheek. “We're going to be okay,” she said. “Aren't we?” “Yes,” Jenny kept repeating. The bright red taillights of the truck, the only parts of it they'd clearly seen, had continued away, but had not disappeared. Jenny squinted through the swift ropes of water; tried the ignition again; tried the wipers. The lights seemed to be frozen just short of the point at which they should have vanished. She couldn't judge motion or distance; perhaps the truck had slowed down to a crawl, so that its receding was strangely prolonged. Now Pauline saw what she saw, and they both grew silent, their silence outlined by the deafening noise of the rain. The lights winked at them, like twin planets above the horizon. And then from out of the deluge a lone figure came toward them, one arm up to shield his face. “Oh my God,” Pauline said.

Jenny met the truck driver halfway and stood shouting with him, immediately as wet as if she'd been submerged. She felt her T-shirt sucking against her flesh, knew her bra and breasts clearly showed through it. Her blue jeans were so heavy with water they were pulling themselves off her hips. None of this seemed to matter at all. Her identity, Pauline's, the consequences if they were discovered; these had seemed to be crises, but the elements swept them away. She felt simplified. They were alive, after all! She shouted to the man that she thought it was the battery, he gestured for her to follow him to his truck. He would back up, and give her a jump. But when they came near the truck they stopped short, while the rain lashed their bodies. Everything seemed illusory—the taillights remaining when they should have vanished, the man's figure resolving from out of the rain, and now the truck tilting sharply sideways, because the nine wheels on its passenger side were sunk axle-deep in the mud. The driver's-side door of the cab opened and a woman leaned out, waving frantically. “It's tipping!” she cried. She came out on the cab's booster step and jumped up and down, as if this could counter the tilt, and Jenny saw she was massively pregnant. The rain had made the driver misjudge the width of the shoulder, and though the driver's-side wheels were parked on it, the other side's had been parked on the dirt that sloped down from the grade of the road. The weight of the truck had made the wheels sink in, and now this tilt and the tilt of the slope added up were enough to tip the giant truck over.