Amerika (11 page)

He looked like a politician.

Amanda wanted to cry.

Chapter 5

Amanda awoke early
from a brief and troubled sleep. She looked over at Peter sleeping peacefully, his tranquil face 'illuminated by the Sight of their digital clock on the nightstand.

The ride back from Omaha had been a nightmare. Her mind returned to the conversation they had in the car. Peter had started out incredibly happy, intoxicated by the ovation and all the attention, seemingly unaware of her concerns. Halfway back to Milford she found that she could contain her anger no longer.

“You knew,” she said evenly.

“Not really. I’d been told there was a possibility. I didn’t want to raise false hopes.”

“You didn’t trust me. The rest of us are involved, you know.” Her anger bit into the tension between them. “What if we don’t want to move to Chicago—or Kansas City—or wherever it would be? What if we don’t like the idea of collaborating with the Soviets?”

Peter didn’t answer. She watched him stiffen, seething silently for a moment, before he could trust himself to answer. Finally he said, “You think I’m a collaborator.”

“I—no—I don’t know. I know I don’t want you to be. It just gets confusing. Trying to hold on to values you believe in—not being sure what the difference is. Am I collaborating just because I go along with things and try to survive?”

“There’s no choice,” he said coldly.

“Isn’t there? Maybe there are little things. You know the other morning, a child was in the yard—foraging, like an animal. Cold and hungry. Her mother grabbed her away when I offered her something; she grabbed her away because of who I was. She realized I was the wife of the county administrator, and that made me a threat—an enemy.”

Peter sighed. “That’s nonsense. They just know there’s a regulation against loitering in town.” He looked at Amanda. “They get government relief.” Amanda wasn’t listening. “Do you know, I have never even been out there. I don’t even know what it’s like out there.”

“There’s a limit to what anyone can do. They’re a mixture of people—some college professors, some criminals. It’s hard to deal with them as a group. That’s why there’s the blanket policy of as little fraternization as possible. They have their own council to solve their own problems internally.”

“You make it sound so neat, so logical.”

“It is logical,” he said, watching Amanda’s face tighten. “That doesn’t mean it’s ideal.” He reached out to her, resting his right hand on her knee. “Am, I think there are a lot of things I can do something about as governor-general. There’s no place to hide. Things change; whether you want them to or not. All you can do is to see if you can influence the change, make it something better. I think I have a better chance of doing that if I’m in a position of power.” He smiled, a kind of sad, small smile. “Somebody has to be governor-general. Maybe if that somebody is me, I can figure out a way to keep our little town pretty.”

Now, lying in bed next to the man she had built a life with, she thought of Devin and what would have been if, so many years ago, she had felt and known all that was pressing on her heart tonight.

She’d known Devin Milford all her life. He and Peter had been inseparable from the first grade on. Although they’d always been friendly to her, there came a time, when she was fourteen or so—a gangly tomboy with budding breasts that she tried to ignore—when they admitted her to their world. When kids started dating, she quite naturally paired off with Peter. He was popular,'a star athlete, a leader. Devin, even then, was different. He and Peter had been co-captains of the Milford Wildcats football team their senior year. But Devin kept to himself much more than Peter did. Even though others looked to him for leadership, he remained somehow aloof. He read a lot more than anyone else and had ideas that seemed strange to seniors in high school. Amanda was drawn to Devin, but there was something unsettling about him. He was always finding something wrong, something to attack. Amanda had never been critical; she liked t
hin
gs the way they were. She never felt uneasy at the thought of living in Milford, where she’d been born and had grown up, for the rest of her life.

Devin had been attractive, of course, lean and hard, with those dark, watchful eyes and that wide, sexy mouth. A lot of the girls were afraid of him. He had a worldly swagger to him, as though he’d formed opinions of things no one else even knew about, and that was unsettling to “nice” girls like Amanda, still a virgin when she started college after two years of going steady with Peter.

They’d all gone to the University of Nebraska. Amanda pledged Chi Omega and proudly wore Peter’s Kappa Sig pin; Devin, typically, rejected the fraternity system and took an apartment off campus. Amanda and Peter went to one party there but left early when some of Devin’s long-haired and bell-bottomed friends started smoking marijuana. Even then, Amanda realized that Devin represented a world not beyond her ken, but beyond her nerve—a world of Charlie Parker albums, vodka punch, rude but vivid talk. She was attracted by Devin’s moody isolation, his vast self-sufficiency, but they’d drifted apart in college, with different interests and different circles.

Then, the summer after her freshman year, Peter had gone off to work in the oil fields. Boys who worked double shifts were saving as much as four hundred dollars a week. Amanda had been home that summer, working in her father’s hardware store, and Devin had been home, too, shingling the bams at his father’s farm.

They talked at the Fourth of July parade and she invited him to drop by her house. He did, and the next Saturday he asked if she wanted to go fishing. There was a little lake about two miles west of the Milford farm where nobody went much, and they walked there and fished, not too seriously, and talked and joked. He told her he was thinking about enlisting in the marines, which made no sense to her at all, with so many people being killed in Vietnam. Devin said he was sick of all the controversy, from people who’d never even been there, and he thought he’d go see for himself.

They sat on the end of the little dock, watching the sunset, darkness settling around them. Neither of them said anything about leaving. They just kept talking and she began to feel like she’d never felt before. She was spellbound. He was so beautiful, serious one minute, funny the next, and she just wanted to go on looking at him and listening to him forever.

They sat until the moon shimmered over the calm lake. Finally he said, “I better get you back.”

She answered, “No—not yet, please.”

That night she gave him gladly what Peter had never asked for, but always thought would be his.

It went on like that for a week. They spent each night at the lake or in a bam near his house, making love and talking about everything but the future. She knew from the first that she and Devin had no future, that he was quicksilver, soon to dart away.

Then 'she got a letter from Peter saying he was coming home. She told Devin and he just nodded. That was their last night together.

Several things happened then, in quick succession. First, she told Peter that she’d “seen Devin” a few times. Bronzed and hardened by his months in the oil fields, Peter cursed and leaped into his car, roaring off in the direction of the Milford farm. She never knew what happened there; neither man ever talked about it. Within a week Devin made good on his plan to join up with the marines. At the end of the summer, Peter did the same thing.

Amanda was devastated. She imagined them both being killed. But they both came back safely and everything was as it had been before. Devin and Peter were friends again. Amanda resumed her relationship with Peter and her episode with Devin faded into unreality.

They didn’t see much of Devin, except at Christmas, and when he came back to be best man in their wedding. After that, Amanda was busy raising a family and she hardly thought of Devin at all.

But now, after the fight with Peter, the memories of Devin, and the news of his return, were almost more than Amanda could bear.

By midmorning Amanda had the house to herself; the kids off to school, Peter to work. She sat in her kitchen, a cup of untouched coffee before her, staring out of the frost-tinted kitchen window. The walls were closing in on her, the silence of the house suffocating. She grabbed her winter coat and walked out the door, a blast of winter chill hitting her immediately. She got into the station wagon and started to drive, with no particular destination in mind. She passed the Milford farm and, at a small rise, pulled to the side of the road, got out, and walked to the front of her car.

She looked down upon a sight that defied all memory and logic.

The exile camp had sprouted along a muddy creek, sprawling up the hillside. It resembled a shantytown, the likes of which had not been seen in America since the depths of the Great Depression—Hoovervilles, they called them then, but now there was no one so handy as a president to blame. Some two hundred men, women, and children lived in fifty-odd shacks, tents, lean-tos, and rusted-out vans and hatchbacks. The dwellings were crudely constructed from scraps of lumber, tarpaper, tin, canvas, even from huge cardboard boxes that still said Frigidaire or Kelvinator. Fires blazed in barrels, and the soggy ground was littered with old tires, rusty bedsprings, discarded furniture, and farm implements. Every imaginable variety of junk lay scattered about.

A
m
anda got back into her car and drove a quarter of a mile to a soggy, rutted road that led into the camp. She got out and looked around, not quite knowing how to proceed.

Children in ill-fitting, cast-off garments passed by as they played some sort of game, barely acknowledging the woman in clean, pretty clothes. From the adults, however, she received suspicious looks as she made her way toward a modem farmhouse, the only permanent structure amid the makeshift dwellings.

She made her way to the front door of the house, where she was met by a large, crude-featured woman. “It’s a little early for the tourist season.”

“Hello. I’m Amanda Bradford.”

“I know who you are. Can I help you?”

“I don’t know, really. I just—”

The Woman interrupted. “Never been out here and thought you’d like to see the way the scum—no, what is it you call us? . . . squatters—live.”

Amanda felt herself flush.

“What happened? Junior League run out of projects?” the woman snapped.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe I should have come sooner, but I didn’t, and I’m here now, so maybe you should take advantage of that instead of trying to make me feel miserable—which, incidentally, you are doing one helluva job at.”

The woman stared at her a moment, then smiled tightly. “Fair enough. I’m Esther. Welcome to America’s Russian-inspired real-life a
nim
al park.” She turned aside and, with a sweeping gesture, invited Amanda to follow.

For the next hour they hiked from tent to shanty to rusty school bus, as Amanda met the people of the exile camp. They seemed cold and hungry and unquestionably frightened. And yet, because Esther was her guide, they greeted her with civility. Some of them, clearly, had been well-to-do; she spotted a few tattered L. L. Bean sweaters and Brooks Brothers shirts amid the layers of rags and cast-off clothes.

In time, Esther took Amanda and several of the camp’s leaders to a nearby barn for a talk. Amanda recognized it—at one time the barn had been part of the old Milford farm. Now it was used as a meeting hall. The exile leaders were thoughtful, wary people who retained their dignity even in their distress. They sat in a circle, on milk cartons or stumps of wood, Esther skillfully taking charge of the conversation.

“I’d like to introduce Amanda Bradford. She wants to help but isn’t sure how. Right, Amanda?”

She nodded.

“Does anyone have any suggestions?”

“We need food,” a woman said.

“And clothing, particularly for the children.”

“And material to build decent houses with.”

“And help in building them,” another man said. “Wait a minute,” said Esther, “we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We sound like a bunch of beggers. What we need first, most of all, is respect. We need for the people in Milford to treat us as human beings, Americans, not trash.” Esther turned and stared straight at .Amanda. “So, what do you suggest?”

Justin slipped through the crowded high-school corridors during the class change. He watched the sea of passing faces, aware that many seemed uncomfortable with this sullen rebel prowling their closely watched corridors. Justin ignored them, scanning the faces until he found Jackie.

“Justin. What are you doing here?” She wore a plaid shirt and a crewneck sweater. In school, she looked like what she was: a sheltered teenage girl.

“Got to talk to you. C’mon.”

“I’ve got a class.”

“Come on.” He took her by the arm and led her into a quiet spot partially hidden under a stairwell.

“Jus? What’s going on?”

“I ... I had to see you.”

“You’re not in trouble, are you?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“I’m late for class. Besides, if the monitor catches us, I could be in real trouble.”

“I’m splitting,” he blurted out, and she knew at once that he meant from Milford, not just from the school.