The Company You Keep (52 page)

Now I clenched shut my eyes, my heart exploding. In the muffling fog the dogs’ barking was everywhere, all around me. Would they stand at bay, showing me teeth, or would they bite? I had always, deep down, been terrified of dogs. Like a baby, I hid my head under my hands and waited.

Until, my panic subsiding, I realized the barking was moving west.

The dogs had caught my scent on the northern trail and were pulling their handlers up that way.

Quickly now I stood and bushwhacked south until stumbling out onto the eastern trail.

And then I began to sprint again.

There was no preparation now. There was no stretching, or bending, or slowly building up speed. They were going to catch me. The only question was when. And so I stretched my legs out as far as I could for every step, putting the fullness of my body strength into my speed, jumping from perch to perch along the trail, soaring over anything I could so as not to have to risk landing.

Everything I was doing now was buying Mimi not even hours, but minutes. Capture was imminent; the only question was when. But how long could I keep running? You can, I knew, run only so far on physical
strength. After a time, you start burning mental energy: determination, intention, willpower, fear, ideas. All these can power you beyond your physical strength, but as you use them, you impoverish yourself. Using mind’s resources for physical strength makes mind very vulnerable, and for the first time I felt, again, the distant noise of fear.

I’d expected the rising sun to burn off the mist, but in fact as I ran, the fog deepened, fading the colors of the trees, hanging in shreds from the sky and snatches along the trail, dropping big wet drops of water. Like an acoustic wall, it seemed to bounce the sounds of my steps toward me, deadening any awareness of anything but the immediate. I kept moving through it, though, splashing through puddles and sometimes having actually to walk through slippery spots on the trail. At ten o’clock I stopped to drink from a little stream. That was when I realized that I had left without my backpack, and that in the backpack were the compass and map. And at the thought, the forest—the wet, dripping forest—rose around me like a sea, vast, undulating, impenetrable, with all the threat that the dope had been, since I had left, keeping at bay. Then a dog barked, not far, but also to the north.

What was left now was the time it would take the dogs to follow my scent up the trail to the north, then down through my bushwhack.

I pulled Mimi’s shirt off and flung it into the woods. Eyes to the ground, breath pulling in through my throat, I set the fastest pace I could and flew along the trail.

In fifteen minutes or so I was at my vital capacity. Now, however, I’d run past most of my physical pains and could move more easily. I stretched out my gait to take as much as I could of the impact in my buttocks, setting my stomach muscles to absorb, also, the vectors of my weight from the hinge of my legs. I kept this up for perhaps forty-five minutes until the first dog reached me.

I had heard it barking behind me for about ten minutes. When it actually reached me, however, it changed to a low throaty growl and came after my feet, going in at my heels with its growl, then barking again. It was a German shepherd but not, evidently, trained to attack, because it never jumped me, just worried my feet. I kept running, and in time the dog began simply running keeping up with me, occasionally barking.

The second dog, when it arrived, was much more aggressive, making an immediate jump, jaws snapping at my hand. I felt a tooth tearing my palm, but I pulled away and put on a burst of speed. It jumped once or twice more, then joined the other dog in following at an easy lope, barking as it came.

By now my lungs were burning, I felt my head hunching between my shoulders, felt my shoulders working into my speed the way I hadn’t run since a child in a game of tag. But that made sense, didn’t it? That’s all it boiled down to—a lifelong game of tag, keep running till they won’t let you anymore, only, in this game, you don’t really get a chance to be “It.”

I don’t know what made the dog lunge. Perhaps it was that little dip in my courage. One minute I was running, the next minute the dog’s body was flipping over my shoulder, teeth hanging on in my neck.

I hugged it, instinctively, to release the weight from my neck, then fell and rolled over it and over it. When I stopped I had my elbow under its throat, pressing up against its quivering body. Without its teeth, the beast was helpless, and its eyes bulged big and white from the short fur of its bony cheeks. The sight made an enormous rage come across me, a child’s rage, so pure that it seemed good. And I was that, wasn’t I? I was a raging child, raging against those who had lost me, those who had promised me, those who had told me lies, those who had never told me that all I loved was to go away. My hand was in the dog’s throat, grabbing the massive muscles in my fingers, all the while twisting the dog’s big neck backward. Now it whimpered, and the other dog bit me, hard, in the thigh. Still I pushed and pushed, until I felt the dog begin to grow limp beneath me.

And then I let go and rolled over, too exhausted to move, thinking, Fuck it, killing this dog isn’t going to save Mimi.

The dog I’d attacked fumbled to its feet, looked at me, then lay down next to me, panting. The one who’d bit my calf stood still for a time, baring his teeth and growling. Then it too lay down.

And that, Isabel, is how the FBI found me, some twenty-five years after they first started looking. A middle-aged man lying bleeding on a trail in northern Michigan, attended by two exhausted dogs.

I was in Ypsilanti, Michigan, driving home to Little J and Rebeccah, when I heard the news on the radio. That Vincent had shot the guard. Senselessly, stupidly—after the robbery was already a success.

The guard was dead.

First a long movement of horror went through me, so horrible that I did not care about my safety, and I simply stopped the car and stared at nothing. Dead. Dead. The horror went through me, again and again, a peppery burning in my groin and armpits, a shudder through the muscles of my stomach. I don’t know how long it was until I came to myself, my hands holding the steering wheel, and realized that I was in a car, the getaway car.

Getaway. There was no getting away from this, ever. And I think I may really have just waited there to be caught, or given myself in—I just no longer cared.

It was only after minutes and minutes had passed that I remembered that I had to care, and why.

Rebeccah.

Oh, Rebeccah, the very weave of the world went out of any recognizable shape.

I knew the consequences. I knew them clearly, and right away. I was an accessory to murder. My daughter was going to be raised by Johnny Osborne. And if I wanted her to have a normal life, I could never surface
again. She could never know who her mother was, and never know who her father was, and I could never come back again. There was no emotion in this. I had known it could happen, and I knew what I had to do. The car I had was a rental from out of state, taken on a credit card stolen by someone Vincent knew. I drove it upstate to East Lansing and left it behind a small, closed mall. Then I took a bus to Traverse City.

I had made someone die. Why would I be afraid of doing, myself, what I had made another do? Wasn’t that what we had fought for so long, to bring the real experience of the real war, the terror we were raining down on North Vietnam, home to our towns and cities? Didn’t we always say that we had to be prepared to experience the horror of the war we were prosecuting abroad? Then, it was theater: the explosions that hurt no one, the violence that left no dead. Now, it was real, really really real, and I found myself calm.

The bus let me off at ten o’clock at night, outside a closed gas station in Grawn, Michigan. That was all there was to the town: a gas station, a bar across the street, dim lights through a dirty window the only sign it was even open for the two, three cars parked outside. A streetlight buzzed to an audience of circling moths.

It was as if I had always known what I was going to do. Without a thought I made my way across the road and into the woods, following a dirt road that took me up, and up, and finally to a gate opening to what had been, in the fifties, a Girl Scout camp.

I made my way through the deserted camp, drawn by sentimentality, to the little lean-to I had stayed in when last I was a camper, years before. Nothing in it felt familiar, though: just a lean-to in the woods, falling apart. An instinct made me go to the corner. The same instinct made me curl into a ball.

As if I had always known how to do this. As if genetically programmed in me was the fact that one day, I would have to die, and this was how I would do it.

Four days alone in the woods. With the clothes I wore and no food. Four nights huddling in the little lean-to, four days wandering the camp where I had been a girl; the empty dining room, the counselors’ cabins,
the offices. Four nights of lying dry-eyed, staring at nothing. Four days of living on water that I had collected from the swimming pond, growing lighter and lighter, every day, with hunger.

On the fifth morning I woke at four, as if I had an appointment. The woods were still dark, the trees were clinging to the escaping night. I crossed the camp to its western border, then felt my way along the lake’s edge to the north. Here the state trail passed, heading straight west to Point Betsie, and by the first light of the sky I began to follow it.

It was as if I always knew what I would do. I had taken a life, now I would give a life. I would walk into the woods, the dear woods that had been the one constant in my life, the woods next to Point Betsie where my father died. I would find a place to lie, and with my pocketknife I would open my veins and let my life drain into the ground, peacefully, comfortably. Slowly, feeling my way through the woods, just before dawn, like a fairy tale, it felt to me that it had always been meant to happen. The mist rising from the forest floor. The absolute hush before dawn. The summer air as fresh as if it were the first day of all time. First my father, then my brother, then my mother. Jason. And that dear, dear girl. It was as if it had always been meant to be this way: that I would be stripped down of all that was familiar to me, all that meant anything, until nothing was left but a girl, dizzy with hunger, walking into the fairy-tale woods.

Dimly, confused, I realized that I had, in the singularity of my hunger, actually come to think of myself as a little girl. Rebeccah, Rebeccah, Rebeccah. She was a gift for someone else, someone who deserved a gift, not for me, not for me. Now, it would be with my death that I would guarantee her life.

Rebeccah. I crouched now, on the path, and put my palm to the ground to stop from falling. Rebeccah. What I would do now, I thought, was lie down on the ground, on the path, with Rebeccah, and never get up again.

Perhaps I would have. I think I would have. But as I, weak and lightheaded, lowered myself to the ground, that morning, I experienced a potent hallucination.

I saw the sun come up over the trees, the weak sun of morning, and with sudden, absolute certainty, I knew that at that very second, my
baby was seeing it too. In a very literal way, I knew she was lying on her back in her new home, at Johnny’s house, and that she was next to a window, and that her arms and legs were moving in their uterine weightlessness and her eyes, her eyes that couldn’t yet focus, were filling with light that she couldn’t understand.

Watching the sun approach me through the woods, I knew that I had got it wrong. The boundless love that washed through me, through and through me, it was the only thing I had to offer my daughter. By its very existence, how could it not fill that child with confidence and possibility, with luck and with happiness? That my inability to imagine a circumstance in which she might need me did not mean that such a time would never arise. And I knew that nothing mattered, nothing mattered, but that I live out that love for her.

And then the sun crept across the sky and touched me, and when it touched me, like a little girl in a fairy tale, without thinking, I got up and began to walk, guided by a good witch through a magical forest, to the coast.

I didn’t have to think about what I’d do. I would walk to Point Betsie, and wait for night. At night I would go down to the Yacht Club and roll one of the little training dinghies into the water. I’d rig it, and then I’d steal a compass, and then I’d set off west across Lake Michigan to the Wisconsin shore. If I made it alive, I’d find a bar, find a man, find a way to hide for a week, two weeks. Then I’d go up to Milwaukee. Donal James had IDs I could use, I knew that; he’d always had an excess of IDs. And he could get me the name of the contact we had, in what seemed another life, with the Brotherhood. My last contact with anyone I’d ever known in my life would be Donal James. And then I would disappear even to him.

It was a death, but a different kind of death. Everything about Mimi Lurie would die. But that love, that love that inhabited the very light of the spring sun, that light that held, and carried, my baby, that I would keep alive.

In case one day, one day I could show it to Rebeccah.

•  •  •

Twenty-two years later I came out of the trail in the morning at the town of Oscoda, the east coast of Michigan, nearly twenty-four hours after I left your father at the Linder cabin. I made my way to the marina and stepped into the office. When I came out it was with a key, and this I carried directly down the dock to a twenty-nine-foot Pearson, the
Evelyn I
, kept here by a couple who worked for McLeod. The key opened the passageway, and when I came back out of the cabin, it was in yellow slickers to protect me from the wet fog. On diesel, I pulled the boat out of its slip and quietly moved out without lights.