Revolution Number 9 (37 page)

“You’re not what I would have thought,” she said.

“No?”

“You’re much … tougher. Much more competent. You remind me a bit of someone.”

“Who?”

“Guy named Gus. No one you’d know.”

“Who is he?”

“Nobody important.” She yawned and stretched. A crow swooped across their path, landed in a cornfield. “My God,” she said, “I’m going to be free. Really free.” There was a pause. “Aren’t you tempted?”

“By Cuba?”

“You make it sound like the ninth circle of hell.”

“It’s not the place of my dreams, that’s all.”

“What’s the place of your dreams?”

“You’ll see.”

“This pond place? How romantic.” There was another pause. Then: “Are you married?”

He nodded.

She laughed. It began as the barking laugh but grew wilder, almost out of control. “God, how stupid I’ve been,” she said. “That should have been my first question. Of course you’d be married. You’re … invested. Invested in all this shit.” She gestured at the blue-green space outside. “I suppose you’ve got children too.”

“Just Malcolm,” he said, in case she had forgotten her own investment.

Rebecca whirled and struck at his face, much too quickly for him to do anything about it. The car swerved into the next lane. He swung it back, steadied it, and only then felt a sharp pain, from just under his right eye down to the chin. He checked the mirror, saw three red tracks on his cheek where she had raked him.

His right hand came off the wheel, rounding into a fist. But
that was silly. He couldn’t bring himself to hit a woman, and no amount of living in late twentieth-century America could change that. He didn’t say a word. He just drove.

For a minute or two he felt her gaze, and then he did not. After a while he glanced at her, saw she had fallen asleep, sitting up straight. Later her head fell to one side, and not long after that she came sloping his way and settled with her head in his lap. Looking down into the wild darkness of her hair, he saw gray ones, more than a few, scattered here and there.

Charlie drove, across the Mississippi and into the night. She groaned, once or twice.

· · ·

He pulled into a truck stop after midnight. The sky over Chicago glowed pink and orange in the distance. He slid out from behind the wheel, lowering her head to the seat. She didn’t wake up.

Charlie went in, sat down, ordered coffee. A tabloid paper was open on the table. While he drank, his eyes scanned an article about an armored car heist: robbery at the Oakland docks, seven dead, $860,000 missing. He looked a little more closely when he saw that some previously unknown radical group was suspected of the crime, more closely still when he saw that one of them was named Gus. There was a picture of Gus. He was fair, with a broad face and intelligent eyes. A waitress from a place called Paco’s Sports Bar and Restaurant in Hayward was being sought for questioning. Paco was quoted, expressing bewilderment.

Charlie walked outside. He half expected the car would be gone. But it was still there, and she was still asleep. He went around to the trunk and unlocked it. There were three canvas sacks inside, one bearing a large red-brown stain. He opened one of the others, reached in, and pulled out a wad of bills wrapped in a yellow paper band that read “50 ¥ $100.” There were lots of identical bundles in the canvas sack. He replaced them and closed the trunk.

She was still asleep. Charlie pushed her aside, squeezed in, started the car. She stretched out, her head moving toward his
lap. He put his hand on her shoulder and kept her where she was. She groaned and went still.

Charlie pulled out of the truck stop and onto the highway, heading east, distancing them from Oakland with every rotation of the wheels. He realized after a little while that he was driving the getaway car. She’d done it to him again. “God damn it,” he said aloud. She groaned.

· · ·

She awoke just after dawn. They were in a paved world under a brown sky. “Where are we?” she said.

“Toledo.”

“I’ll drive.”

“I’m okay.”

She rubbed her eyes, stretched. He was conscious of her gaze again. Then she leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“Last night. Or whenever it was. I’ve lost track of time.”

“What about last night?”

“Clawing you. It doesn’t seem to have made much of an impression. Maybe because you spend your time with lobsters.” He felt her fingers lightly tracing the marks they’d made. Soft and gentle: but the salt from her skin stung him all the same. An ambulance howled by on their left.

“I don’t remember telling you what I did for a living.”

Silence. “It must have been Daddy.”

I don’t remember telling him, either
, Charlie thought. He tried to remember whom he had told.

They stopped at a gas station outside Ashtabula. Rebecca opened her door, looked around at the wasted landscape, said: “I feel so alive.” But she had trouble getting out of the car and stumbled to the ground after two steps. Charlie helped her up, carried her into the women’s room. She seemed light, much lighter than twenty-two years before; the only other possibility was that he had grown stronger.

“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just my knee.” But she didn’t resist.

The women’s room had a sink, a toilet, a greasy mirror,
grimy walls. As Charlie crossed the threshold with Rebecca in his arms, he glimpsed their reflection: a man and a woman, exhausted and worried, in dirty clothes, like a misanthrope’s comment on honeymoons. Charlie sat Rebecca on the sink, then closed the door and locked it.

“Let’s see that knee,” he said.

“It’s nothing.” But she let him undo her jeans and pull them down.

It wasn’t her knee. The problem was higher up, on the front of her thigh. She’d wrapped it with bandages and taped a wide clear plastic strip over them. The bandages were saturated with red, and the plastic strip bulged with it. Charlie tore away the tape. Blood splashed on the floor, ran down her leg. He unwrapped the bandages, slow and careful. He thought again of her sitting beside his bed in the infirmary, long ago; then he had been wearing the bandages. Charlie examined her leg. There was a small round tear in the flesh; blood seeped out.

“That might have to come out,” Charlie said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The bullet that’s in there.”

There was a knock at the door. “All gassed up, you two,” said the attendant, not quite concealing his amusement.

Footsteps moved softly away. Charlie washed his hands, pulled strips of coarse paper towel from the dispenser and dampened them, then pressed them on the wound to stop the bleeding.

She cried out. From outside the door came a snicker.

When Charlie lifted the wad of paper towels, blood still seeped out. “We have to find a doctor.”

“No doctors.”

Charlie dampened more paper towels, covered the wound, wrapped his belt around the covering. He picked up the bandages and the tape and flushed them down the toilet, washed off the plastic and threw it in the trash, wiped up the blood with paper towels, flushed them away too.

“You’re good at this,” she said, tilting her head as though to see him from a new perspective. “You’re not what I would have thought.”

He helped her pull up her jeans.

“I can walk,” she said.

They went out together. Rebecca was limping badly, but she walked. Charlie paid the grinning attendant. They got in the car and drove off. Rebecca was silent for a minute or two. “The honeymooners,” she said. Then she began to laugh. It went on and on. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, ran down her face. It was abandoned, hilarious laughter, but not contagious enough to infect Charlie.

He found a drugstore and bought what he thought he needed. He got off the interstate and followed an old highway until he came to a motel. It had a broken sign, dirty windows, no customers.

“Check-in’s not till four,” said the man behind the desk.

“We’re not staying the night,” Charlie told him.

This man had been around longer than the gas station attendant. He wasn’t amused, or even interested. “Twenty bucks,” he said, sticking a fresh toothpick in his mouth and handing Charlie a key. He didn’t ask him to sign anything.

The room was at the far end. Charlie parked in front of it. “The locals think we’re sex maniacs,” he said.

“Is that so bad?” She limped in.

Charlie had expected the room to smell of Lysol, but it smelled of other things instead. There were ants in the sink, mouse turds on the floor, cigarette burns on the bedspread.

“I suppose you’re faithful to this wife of yours,” Rebecca said.

I haven’t been tested
, Charlie thought. He said: “Let’s see what we can do about your leg.”

He spread towels on the bed, had her lie down. He cleaned the area around the wound with sterile pads and hydrogen peroxide, then dripped some hydrogen peroxide into the round tear. She hissed. He rolled one of the pads into a taut cylinder and stuck it inside, gently as he could. She hissed again. He withdrew the pad, now bloody, and for a moment could see deep into the wound, all the way down to a stubby chunk of metal. He took a long pair of tweezers from its package, dipped it in the hydrogen peroxide, and said: “This is going to hurt like hell.”

“Do it.”

He did. She didn’t make a sound.

· · ·

Charlie drove. Rebecca slept in the backseat. They crossed the state line into New York, got on the Thruway. Night closed around them. Charlie’s body was tired, his mind wide awake. He found himself picturing the two round holes in Andrew Malik’s chest. Then he began remembering their conversation. He remembered telling Malik what he did for a living. And he remembered Malik’s barking laugh after he had said: “What other bomb is there?” And:
It doesn’t matter anyway
. She had said that. He began pushing pieces around in his mind, and was still pushing them around when he turned onto the Mass. Pike, and not long after, as he approached the exit that led up into the hills to Morgan College.

“Rebecca?” he said. There was no answer, no need to mention the detour.

He took the exit.

Charlie drove up into the hills and down into the valley, as he had driven with his mother and Ollie; with Svenson and Mr. G. The town was dark, the campus a darker shape inside it. He checked his watch: 4:05.

Charlie parked near the central quad. He rolled down his window. The air was warm, the night quiet. He heard a few notes of music in the distance; then a breeze rose and swept the music away. Rebecca stirred in the back.

“Blake? Are we there?”

He turned to her. She sat up, looked around. “Where are we?”

He didn’t answer. A few moments passed. Then she stiffened.

“I want to show you something,” he said.

“We don’t have time for nostalgia.”

“It won’t take long.”

“Or is it some kind of therapy?”

“No,” he said, but maybe it was.

“Because I told you—I don’t have a guilt button.”

“There’s nothing to feel guilty about. It was an accident, right?”

“Right.”

They got out of the car, walked onto the quad. It was lit here and there with dim orange lights. Rebecca was still limping, but not as badly. They crossed the grass, stepped onto the crushed-brick path. The crunching under his feet suddenly opened Charlie’s mind, releasing clear memories. He remembered that night: remembered Malik and Rebecca talking to her father on the phone; remembered that when he returned from planting the bomb, they had been out and had come back with grass stains on their knees; and most of all he remembered their tension, rising and rising, even after four-thirty passed, and their refusal to accept that the bomb was a dud.

Rebecca took a deep breath. “It’s a pretty place,” she said.

“Quiet,” Charlie said.

Someone was coming toward them. Rebecca took Charlie’s hand, squeezed it hard. The figure came closer, a male figure, talking to himself. “Isotopes, isotopes, isotopes,” he was saying. As he went by, Charlie recognized him: Stuart Levine, Jr. He didn’t appear to see them at all.

The chapel loomed on their right. Rebecca didn’t glance at it. They stopped in front of the Ecostudies Center.

The boy’s face was tilted toward the crowd. It looked absolutely unmarred, the face of a healthy eleven- or twelve-year-old who happened to be sleeping in the middle of a wild scene. But he wasn’t moving at all
.

“Well, well, well,” Rebecca said, looking at the ecostudies sign. “Success.”

“Success?”

“At least we got rid of the ROTC.”

“They’ve got a new building near the gym. Bigger and better.”

He led her around to the back, knelt in front of the hatch, drew the bolts, swung it open. “Inside,” he said.

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

Rebecca crawled in. Charlie went in after her. He felt in his pocket, found matches, the matches from the Catamount Bar and Grille. He lit one, crawled past her, across the earthen floor, first damp, then dry, past the gardening tools, all the way
to the three cement blocks. The match went out. Her hand found his ankle, grasped it, dug in. He lit another match. She let go.

He turned, handed her the burning match. He twisted around, pushed the blocks aside. The match went out.

He lit another, felt for Rebecca’s hand, took it, pulled her forward. “Dig,” he said.

They lay on their stomachs, side by side, heads almost touching, the match burning in Charlie’s fingers. She looked at him, the anger line a deep shadow between her eyes. “Why?” she said.

“Dig.”

She dug her hands into the earth. Already dug once, it offered little resistance. Her finger hooked a strap. She pulled out Malik’s khaki knapsack.

“Look inside.”

She looked. “What is it?”

The match went out.

“The bomb I made,” he said. They were in a tiny black universe where his voice was everything. He lit another match, then drew the insulated wires out of the knapsack. “It didn’t explode—it couldn’t explode—because I’d taped this wire, right here.” He held it in front of her eyes.

She barely glanced at it. “So?”