Authors: James Whorton
“Look, it's right there.”
“Don't see it.”
The pangolin stood, lifting its front legs off the floor. It was difficult to tell for sure in which direction it was looking. Its eyes were positioned on the sides of its head, like a horse's eyes. There was a nonspecific vigilance about the creature: the wariness of the grazer. The eater of insects.
“When I was a small girl,” I said, “some boys brought a live pangolin to the house for us to eat. Judith gave them some money for it, but then she wouldn't cook it. She said we must never eat a pangolin. Judith was a Congolese lady. She put the dogs in the shed, and then she put the pangolin on the ground. It stood up and walked into the bush.”
Betty wasn't listening. She was singing in her high, quavering Chinese singing voice.
Dirk was urging all of us to take all our clothes off and criticize Wilhelmina. I don't know what road we were on. We rolled through towns. Renee had a hand on the top button of her shirt, but she was not quite fully persuaded yet. Eeyore kept an eye on her over his shoulder as he drove. I noticed lots of flags out. I didn't think anything of it. I had forgotten what day it was.
“Go ahead and criticize me,” Wilhelmina said. “Pelt me with doctrine.”
From outside the van there came a noise like artillery.
Behind us in the road, six or seven ranks of girls in white tights and spangled blue leotards were marching in close formation. They carried bright rifles. They all wore snowy eye makeup, too.
Wilhelmina began to scream.
A line of cymbals flashed in the sun, and a band blasted out the “Marines' Hymn.” It's a stirring tune, even if, like me, you're not sure what the halls of Montezuma are. The girls pitched their rifles over their heads, and the rifles hung spinning until the girls snatched them down.
“I do believe we are inside of a Fourth of July parade,” Dirk said.
Wilhelmina squealed and wriggled, and the rest of us kept falling over whenever Eeyore tapped the brakes to keep from hitting some men who were driving little red cars. The men had fezzes on their heads. The sidewalks were bunched with people. In some cases, the small people straddled the necks of the large ones.
A couple of horses came alongside the van with policemen on their backs. Dirk began to look for his clothes.
“You threw your clothes out the window,” Eeyore said.
Dirk pulled at Wilhelmina's shirt. She slapped his hands away.
Renee waved her lithe arms from the window, and some of the people waved back at her.
I was holding the pangolin in my lap through all of this, hidden underneath my hands. It had a way of rolling its body into a ball.
Eeyore got us out of the parade and found a place to park. In the back of the van he went from person to person, settling people down. Wilhelmina
clenched her eyes, then woke up ready to lead the study group. “Let's all clean our buckets out!” she said.
Dirk was first. “Sometimes I can't concentrate because of my horniness,” he said.
“Before I was in love with Eeyore,” Renee said, “I was in love with someone else.”
“I feel guilty for not going to Vietnam,” Eeyore said.
Betty spoke some language while rolling her eyes, and then she punched her thigh.
“What is it?”
“I am speak Chinese with American accent,” she said. She laughed and laughed.
“I once had a friendly uncle,” Wilhelmina said.
“That's nice,” Renee said.
“No, it isn't.”
This went on for an hour or more. A lot of buckets got emptied in the van.
“Go on and clean your bucket with us, Lucy,” Wilhelmina said.
“My bucket is already clean.”
“If so, you are a marvel.”
“Let's have a corn dog,” I said.
We got out of the van and walked to where the corn dog stand was. The parade was long over, and I don't know why the stand was still open. The man was dipping corn dogs to order. They came hissing from the grease. “Corn dog is good!” Betty said. She paid for everyone.
While the others were distracted, I slipped off behind a pile of tires and set the pangolin on the ground. It unballed itself and climbed into a trash can. Perhaps the kind of food it liked was there.
The others were waiting for me in the van. I got in and we left.
It was evening when we crossed the Potomac. Traffic was slow, and Eeyore got lost. He had gotten us there alive, though. We climbed out into a thick flock of longhairs at Dupont Circle. It was raining. Dirk had on some overalls of Wilhelmina's; I saw his naked gray heels flash, and he disappeared into the crowd. Wilhelmina sank into a heap. Eeyore clung
to Renee, and she petted him constantly. I heard her say into his ear, “I would never do that.”
Eeyore paid some quarters so we could go under a tarp and see a thing called “The Dave Wilson Millipede Circus.” In fact Dave Wilson's millipedes didn't do much but crawl over some miniature playground equipment while Dave Wilson blew songs on a harmonica. When one of the millipedes fell an inch it would coil up and be still awhile.
“It's a traveling millipede circus,” Dave Wilson explained to Renee. “When I get enough quarters, I'm going to Kentucky.”
“Anywhere sounds better than here,” Eeyore said.
I lost Betty and then I found her again under a tree, eating peanuts from a bag.
We watched fireworks, and then we fell asleep.
Before dawn, someone waked Betty and me up and asked us if we wanted a bath. Of course we did. Ten or a dozen of us got into Dirk's van. Dirk and Wilhelmina were there. Eeyore and Renee had left, I guess. Maybe they went with Dave Wilson to Kentucky. I never did see them again.
The van stopped near the Capitol, and we walked west along the lit-up Mall. There'd been an awfully big party there the day before. The grass was chewed up and littered with trash. A few stragglers lay under blankets, or under each other. The Smithsonian Castle shone black with glitter points. We sauntered, soaking wet, some of us pausing to howl or scratch. It had rained all night, and it was raining now.
Betty touched my arm. “Where are we?”
I told her where we were.
“Something strange has happened,” she said. “No more apple-flavor gum.”
The two of us found a bench. Ahead of us, at the Reflecting Pool, the men and women we'd come here with were stripping off their clothes. Their figures were small and pale, the voices mild and faraway-sounding. So this was where we were to bathe. A tall fellow waded in circles in the fountain, gathering pennies into a sock.
“D.C. has a big Chinatown,” Betty said. “I think I will go there.”
“What about Wang? You said that he could find you in any Chinatown.”
“I know how to deal with those people. I don't want to stay with these hippies anymore.”
We sat awhile.
The sky over the Capitol turned pink. On the sidewalk I noticed some wormsâ
many
worms. Hundreds of them. The big ones were long and doughy, the small ones little more than pencil strokes. They were everywhere. At a puddle in the sidewalk a huge clot of them had massed up like a pound of fresh hamburger, striving together.
I asked Betty, “Do you see these worms?”
She got down on her haunches like a baseball catcher and cupped a worm in her hands. Her hands were pale inside. The worm flipped as though trying to right itself.
“I do see worms,” Betty said.
We were studying the flipping worm when we heard screams. I wasn't too alarmed, by now. It was only some Girl Scouts, up early and hysterical. Three of them shared two umbrellas, hopping on the sidewalk, squealing and laughing, splashing in their saddle shoes. They saw the worms, too. It was an ordinary, real, post-rain earthworm rising.
Betty laid her worm on the grass. “Goodbye worm,” she said.
It was at this point that I advised Betty of the truth, that I had held certain things back from her regarding my identity and associations, etc. I did not tell her what my associations were. There was simply a desire to clear the air. “I have lied to you a good deal,” I said.
“I know that already.”
In spite of trying not to, I began to cry. “I oppose your ideology,” I said, “but I wish your Chinese people well.” I told her how to get to Chinatown.
“Goodbye,” she said, and she walked off the way I had told her to go, back up the Mall and past the Museum of Natural History. Beyond that she would go north until she came to H Street, where she would turn right and just keep going until she found herself surrounded by signs with Chinese writing on them. That was the last I saw of Betty.
T
he sixth of July was a Thursday. The streets had been washed, and the sky was mostly empty. In the van Wilhelmina read aloud to us about the night the Bolsheviks killed Czar Nicholas and his heirs in a basement, bunching them up as though for a family portrait, then cutting them down with guns and bayonets.
We all had new clothes on, or new old clothes, from the Salvation Army store. Wilhelmina had chosen a tailored skirt and jacket made of coarse, knobbly orange and magenta stuff. She'd found some pumps that nearly went with the suit, and up top she had on a cloche hat that covered her ears. Her calves were nicked and bloody from a public restroom shaving.
Dirk was in dark blue business attire. The suit had an off smell but looked all right.
I had on cowboy boots and a blue DuPont raincoat.
The bomb was in pieces in our clothes. Our plan was to enter the Department of the Interior building one at a time. Each of us would take the elevator to a different floor, then we'd meet in a back stairwell. Dirk would leave the assembled bomb in a men's-room stall near the offices of the National Park Service.
In the van Wilhelmina stopped reading and closed her book. The czar had gone quickly, but some of the family had lingered through long stabbings. Wilhelmina's cheeks were wet. Dirk asked her why she was crying.
“Because I'm so happy,” she said.
I hoped to see her in handcuffs soon. We were to enter the building separately, five minutes apart, and I'd agreed to go in first. Once I got upstairs, all I had to do was knock on any door and ask a secretary to telephone the guard in the lobby. Wilhelmina and Dirk could be
safely picked off as they entered. I would try to slip away; and if I couldn't, so be it.
The United States Interior Department faces C Street and occupies a whole block. Dirk drove all the way around the building once, looking for a parking space. “I can't walk far with this flashlight taped on my leg,” he said.
Wilhelmina was breathing loudly through her mouth.
“This may be our last day to walk on the street,” Dirk said. His voice reached a high note. “If we're caught, they'll put us away forever.”
“We don't matter,” Wilhelmina said.
“Maybe we should be doing something more important than this,” Dirk said. “The Park Service is an
extremity.
We should go for the groin.”
“Too late,” Wilhelmina said. “We're here. We're doing this.”
Dirk jerked the wheel. He turned onto Virginia Avenue.
“Turn around,” I said. “Wilhelmina's right.”
“Let me think!” he said.
Wilhelmina stared at him.
We passed Howard Johnson's and the Watergate. I could almost see the roof of Mrs. Edel's house on I Street.
We drove along Water Street under the elevated freeway into Georgetown. There was the Francis Scott Key Bridge with its arches and the Popsicle-shaped caves above them. When Water Street came to an end, Dirk turned the van around. Soon we were crossing the river.
“Where are you taking us?” Wilhelmina said.
“To the place we've always wanted to go,” Dirk said.
He took a book from under his seat and handed it to her. The jacket was gray and black with orange lettering, and I knew the book immediately. It happened to be a book I had read.
I
am talking about a book called
The Craft of Intelligence
that was written by Allen Dulles after he was sacked by President Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs. According to Miss Evans it is the book that is checked out of the Farm library more than any other. It is not the sort of book a person living an Agency cover can keep in his living room, even though there's nothing classified in it.
Wilhelmina opened it to the place that was marked: an aerial photograph of the Headquarters building in Langley. She spoke some profanities.
“We'll come in this way,” Dirk said, tracing a line up her sleeve toward the picture.
“They're not going to let us walk in the front door of the CIA,” Wilhelmina said.
“They
will,
” he said. “We only have to get onto the grounds. Once you're on the grounds, you
can
walk in the front door. It's open.”
“How do you know that?”
“I read it in
Ramparts.
”
“It doesn't seem prudent,” Wilhelmina said.
“Was Che prudent?”
“Che's dead.”
“You're thirty-two,” Dirk said. “How long do you want to live?”
With her small, square teeth Wilhelmina chewed her lips.
We rode the George Washington Parkway west of town through Fairfax County. Dirk pulled the van off at a wide spot. “Come into the woods with me,” he said. We followed him. The damp ground was slick under hard soles. He brought some balls of leaves out of his black shoulder bag. They were baseball-sized. He gave one to each of us. “I got these from a Vietnamese sister yesterday,” he said. “Open them.”
Inside each ball was a lump of plain rice.
“This is how our brothers in the Viet Cong eat,” Dirk said. “Let's eat now while we think about three million brown people who have died.”
“I'm not eating this rice out of a leaf,” I said.