Angela Sloan (21 page)

“There is only the one sofa,” Renee said. “This room is Dirk and Wilhelmina's”—she showed me a shut door—“but they don't like for others to go in.”

“I guess I'll flop outside,” I said.

“I wish I had a blanket to give you. I gave the towel to Ding.”

We said good night.

Out by what was left of the fire, Betty had spread her towel on the ground. She slept on her side, knees and arms pulled in close. I scrutinized her face in the moonlight. The eyebrows were lifted slightly. Perhaps in her dream she was raising a pair of sticks to her mouth with a bit of pungent food pinched between the tips.

I sat staring at her from Wilhelmina's pail. At one point I touched her arm to make sure she was breathing. She shuddered and gave a long sigh.

It drove me nuts to see her lying there asleep like that. In my mind I went through twenty different ways that I might put my complaint to her in simple, clear English.
You're unfair!
If only I could speak Chinese, so I could tell her how wrong she was in words that would pierce her heart.

And then I began to marvel at myself. Was I truly sitting here on this bucket under the stars, trying to figure out how to make a mean, wiry Chinese girl
apologize to me
? Look how torn up I am, I thought—like a child in school, all because of some things this nut job has said which have
hurt my feelings.
What? That was insane. Or was it?

When I saw what she had done, I jumped off my bucket. How had I failed to see it before? The cunning Chinese had handled me right into the same position that I had handled old Henry into: coming in early, staying up late, taking foolish risks, craving approval, and generally doing everything asked in the manner of a good-hearted pet. All for someone else's benefit, namely hers! There was a term for this kind of involvement. The Chinese had me
under discipline.

I did not walk, I ran across the yard. Ducking through a clump of trees, I breached an unusually sturdy spider's web. The threads pulled and snapped. I spun, slapping at my face, neck, and hair.

Break something else,
I told myself.

I found the pair of ruts that would lead me through the hemlocks to the road. I thought I would run all the way into town. But my head was hurting again. Then I remembered the van. It would be like an Eeyore to leave the key in it.

I went back. Yes, the key was there.

I
sat behind the wheel a moment trying to picture the way Eeyore had brought us from town. We had passed a furniture dump. That would be on my other side now, going back.

My mind went off into another place, and I sat wondering emptily.

Voices and running footsteps brought me back. I ducked to the floor as the van door slid open behind me.

There was a violent tussle in the back of the van. It seemed one person was shoving another into the van and beating him or her. I recognized Dirk's pipey voicings, though I couldn't tell which end of the beating he was on. The other voice was Wilhelmina's. They were not fighting, however. They threw their bodies against the greasy daybed at the back of the van.

Long minutes of this went by. When it was over there was a period of quiet before they spoke.

DIRK:
That Renee is sweet as pie.

WILHELMINA:
Mm-hm.

DIRK:
I would like to lick her up one side and down the other.
WILHELMINA:
Kitten.

DIRK:
Not for my sake, but only for hers and that bourgeois boyfriend's. I want to smash monogamy at their house. Hand me that thing.

WILHELMINA:
Here you go.

A match flared. There was silence, then the dark smell of cannabis smoke.

WILHELMINA:
No, thanks. I don't want any of that right now.

DIRK:
It'll make you less uptight.

WILHELMINA:
Don't police me, Dirk.

DIRK:
Do you see any potential in the blond kid?

WILHELMINA:
I don't know. She must come from money. She has that
do-what-I-say
way about her.

DIRK:
Like you do.

WILHELMINA:
I can't help it.

DIRK:
If she's a runaway, she'll hate her parents.

WILHELMINA:
But does she hate them creatively? Or is she merely pissed off because Father won't buy her a pony? If she only hates Father because Father won't buy her a pony, then she is no use to us yet. She will have to be de-educated, then radicalized.

DIRK:
Recruitable?

WILHELMINA:
She's still too fat. Let her go hungry awhile, and then we can begin to vandalize her worldview.

DIRK:
What about the Chinese?

WILHELMINA:
I don't know. Maybe.

DIRK:
I want to blow up America.

WILHELMINA:
Hey, good idea.

DIRK:
The stuff gets more volatile the longer it sits.

WILHELMINA:
I know.

DIRK:
Hit me.

Three blows followed. Dirk moaned.

WILHELMINA:
I want you to sleep somewhere else tonight, kitten.

DIRK:
Why?

WILHELMINA:
Your fingernails are bothering me.

DIRK:
You are a real white girl, you know it?

WILHELMINA:
Oink. Hit me back before you go.

DIRK:
I don't want to hit you right now. I feel mellow.

WILHELMINA:
Mellow?

There was silence, then a blow, and the van door slid open and shut.

W
ilhelmina moaned by herself on the floor of the van, and then she stopped moaning. Her nose whistled, though she kept sniffing and, from the sound of it, batting at her nose.

She began to talk again, just above a whisper. “I did it with Dirk, but I didn't let him
sleep
with me,” she said. “I don't want
you
to sleep with me. I'll only sleep in groups of three or alone.”

I almost answered her!
I don't want to sleep with you, either,
I almost said. But something stopped me. Wilhelmina thought she was alone. She was talking to herself, or else to a person who wasn't here.

“Sleeping in pairs is sad and bourgeois,” she murmured. “If I don't get up right now, I'm going to pee on myself.” She slid the door open, and I heard her scuff off.

Quietly I wormed between the seats and slipped out the door that Wilhelmina had left open. I crouched by the front of the van. There she was, not too many steps away, urinating in a square of moonlight. She held her head in both hands. When she was finished she rose a little, wagged her hips, and jogged back into the van.

I would have paid a thousand dollars for a shower right then. Instead I found some dry pine needles and rubbed them all over my arms and clothes. Then I sprinted for the road.

The stuff gets more volatile.
What stuff? It did make me pause. What did they want to recruit me for?

It took me a good thirty minutes just to get down the rutted half mile between the hemlocks to where the main road was. I kept having to stop and convince myself that Dirk and Wilhelmina were only a couple of high-talking jackass hippie kids. None of their talk had meaning, because it was mainly designed to impress themselves. I'd go a little further, then I'd find myself imagining Betty in some county jail, trying to figure out what to do with a pan of cool oatmeal. Would
she recognize it as food? I'd stop and spend some minutes reminding myself how sneaky and hateful Betty was. Bug out, I told myself.
No es mi problema.

The sneakers she had stolen for me were a pretty good fit. I wished she had stolen some socks to go under them.

I wondered what would ever come of me. How long would this bugout last? When would I see Ray? Would I ever go to college? The thought came to me that I might never see Ray again, and I put it out of my head. A more precise way to describe it is that I put the thought in a box and closed the lid. I put the box on a shelf.

I tripped on a root and wished I were in bed somewhere asleep. I got to my feet and reached the road. The walk to town would take me till daylight. I told myself, The first car that comes by, I am going to put out my thumb, and if the car doesn't slow down I will jump out in the road and wave my arms so that it
has
to slow down.

I waited a long time. A gray possum wandered into the moonlight and fumbled around on the pavement in its I'm-a-possum-please-run-over-me way.

No car came. I took the box down from its shelf and unpacked it along with some others that were there. Ray. My mother and father. Celeste and her baby named Angela. I looked closely at what was there, and I noticed what was missing. There were many things I didn't know because I had never asked Ray. Other things I wondered about that no one could ever tell me. What if my life had been different? It is the idlest question ever posed. My life was what it was.

A set of headlights approached. A pickup slowed and bent its course to spare the possum's life. I went back to the campfire and shook Betty awake.

“G
ive me a cigarette,” I said.

Betty sat up and rubbed her eyes. She blinked at me awhile. Then she produced a crooked half pack of Raleighs from one of her secret pockets and shook two out. She lit a match in her backward Chinese manner, swiping the book against the match head.

“Tell me how to do this,” I said.

“You have never tried smoke a cigarette before?”

“I've seen it done a half a million times.”

Frowning, she set the two cigarettes in her mouth and lit them both. She showed me how to take some shallow puffs to draw the smoke into my mouth. I did it awhile.

“Good enough,” she said. “Now you can smoke.”

The smoke made my teeth feel as though I had dried them with a paper towel. “We've got to talk,” I said.

“I am here,” Betty said.

I paused to collect my thoughts and arrange them. Serious lies needed telling, and for once I meant to get my lies straight ahead of time.

“First some old business,” I said. “I want to offer my sincerest apology for sometimes taking a domineering tone with you. Do you know what I mean by domineering?”

“Yep.”

“All right. And do you accept my apology?”

“I accept it.”

“That is settled, then. Now I want you to tell me what your intentions are, regarding this country.”

“Don't know what you are talking about,” Betty said.

“Well, you're a Communist, correct? And you're against the U.S. So what are you going to
do
about it?”

“I would like to take a bath.”

“Suppose you had the chance to strike a body blow at capitalism. For example, what if someone said to you, ‘Let's go plug all the toilets at the courthouse'? Vital records are generally in the basement, so any flooding would cause a degree of mayhem.”

“I don't want to cause mayhem now.”

I studied her awhile. A pine cone she'd kicked onto the coals was crackling like an old record, and Betty was finishing her cigarette all the way. She always smoked them right down to the filter eventually, though it might take her a couple of sessions.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“We are friends,” I said. “Aren't we?”

“You are strange.”

“I am going to give you some information that you must hold very closely. By this I mean you must not tell it to anyone, and if you do, I will deny that I said it. Understand?”

“What is it?”

“I've discovered that Dirk and Wilhelmina are political informers,” I said. “They pretend to like revolution, but if they learn that you're from Red China they will surely report you to Nixon's Secret Service.”

“I thought U.S. does not have political informers.”

“Oh, we have them. Ours are very treacherous. Don't be surprised if one of those hippies asks you to help plan a riot soon, or place a rock on some railroad tracks, or hand out flyers. It will be a trick, you see. When they suspect someone is a Communist, they are allowed to use special methods.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“No. Do you believe me?”

“If those hippies work for Nixon, I feel bad for that man.”

She lay down on her towel and closed her eyes.

I
n the morning, when Renee pushed aside the front door shower curtain of the red cottage, her ears were pink, and her eyes were puffy. She wettened her hands on some dew to wash her face. Then she knelt with a pan at the fire, searing cubes of stolen Spam while Eeyore and Dirk sat watching her like patient male coyotes.

“Where is Wilhelmina?” I said.

“She likes to sleep in the van,” Renee informed me sweetly.

I walked off toward the woods, as though to use the facilities.

The trick I had in mind was an old one: provoke Dirk and Wilhelmina to some mild illegal action, tip off the authorities, and get out of the way. If I could recruit Wilhelmina, Dirk would follow. Wilhelmina was a hard target, however. Where was her vulnerability? It wasn't money: her family had that, yet she lived in a shack. And it wasn't Dirk. They were intimate, but she disliked him.

I'd been chewing on the problem for a while when a better question came to me. What would
Marilyn
do in my position? I did know her work, after all. I ought to have learned something from her. How would she crack a nut like Wilhelmina? The answer: solid brass.

I went around to the van and slid the door all the way open. Wilhelmina sat up on the daybed.