American Woman (28 page)

“I had a feeling she was helping out someone,” said Thomas. His fresh spark, his openness, had returned. “She was doing some extensive grocery shopping.”

“That's right. You want to help me out too, for a minute?”

“George!” she said.

“Sure,” said Thomas. “Of course I'll help you.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” she said. “Let him go!”

“It's cool, Alice,” Thomas said, very kindly, and the simplicity of the gesture, of his using what he thought was her real, perfect name, almost made her start crying.

“Let him go,” she told Juan.

“In a minute,” Juan said.

They drove back to Main Street, and took in its full length again. Thomas wanted a Coke, and they stopped in front of a dingy luncheonette and waited while he went in. Nearby were the stone slabs and grim pillars of a bank, faceless as a tomb, and though built to be imposing, somehow almost unnoticeable. It was past five now; the bank had been closed for more than two hours. When Thomas came back Juan said, “Is that the only bank in town?”

“Think so,” Thomas said, unwrapping his straw.

“Black people bank there, or just white people?”

“I really couldn't say.” Thomas took a slurp of his Coke and then raised his eyebrows. “Uh-oh. This sounds serious.”

“I'm just wondering. There's no other bank around here? Maybe out where your grocery store is?”

“Mr. Morton makes his deposit up here. I don't know why he would if we had one down there.”

“Mr. Morton's the boss?”

“He's the Man,” Thomas teased. “Naw, he's a nice man.”

“It would be better to work for a black man.”

“It would be
better
to not work at all.”

The conversation was in its final stretch, and as their banter continued she drove determinedly back to Thomas's street and heard no objections. But when they reached Thomas's house Juan got out. “I'll walk him up,” he said.

“I hope I'll be seeing you, Alice,” said Thomas. “Don't forget how you said we would hang out again.”

They loped away over the grass, Juan unconsciously mimicking Thomas's gait. Juan had only been making dumb, eager small talk, asking Thomas his age, if he still went to school, if he had any brothers or sisters, but her stomach was still clenched with dread. She could see them, although indistinctly, on the shadowed and shrub-obscured porch.

It was many more minutes before Juan came jogging back over the grass. He was flushed and excited. “Man!” he said. “That's a smart fucking kid.”

She shoved the Bug into gear. “Don't act so amazed that a black kid is smart.”

“Oh, bullshit. I'm amazed if a
white
kid is smart.”

She was finally free to drive back to the farm. The sun was just setting when they reached the base of the hill the house sat on, and started to climb. The gold sunset light stretched the car's shadow over the grass, so that from a distance an observer might have seen on the bright face of the hillside a long black mark, moving slowly upward. Juan had been rambling and musing the whole way: “There's a reason we're different from trees,” he observed. “Trees stay stuck in one place their whole lives, but a man's got to move or his brain starts to rot.” When they got to the top Yvonne and Pauline came running out the back door with relief at the sight of them. “Sometimes, when you're not sure which way you should go, you just float with the current,” Juan said. “Then you see. Then you see.”

J
UAN'S
equanimity was still intact the next day, though his comrades could not seem to share it. Yvonne and Pauline were up and down from the kitchen table all morning, lighting second cigarettes while their firsts were still burning, peering through the curtains, slamming out the back door to gaze down the long hill from behind the fat trunk of the maple. Nine
A.M.
gave way to ten, then eleven, then noon. Jenny stayed in her chair with an effort, pretending to read. Juan sat across from her, feet up, contentedly paging through
Blood in My Eye
. “You did say it was urgent?” he asked, his voice not sounding urgent at all.

She studied him for a beat before answering. “I said you still hadn't written a word of the book.”

To her surprise Juan guffawed. “Right on, Sister! That'll get him up here on the double.”

It was past one when they heard a car's engine and saw Frazer's familiar brown coupe struggling up the long hill. The coupe parked and Frazer seemed to hesitate a long moment, twisted around toward his backseat, before he swung out and came toward them. Jenny realized Juan was wearing the gun, in its holster. “What are you doing?” she said, but then Frazer had reached them. He greeted Juan with a strained smile, ignoring the gun. “So that old devil writers blocks bothering you,” Frazer said. “It's not easy for me to write, either—”

“Really? And you don't even have pigs named Bob dropping in.”

This caught Frazer up short. “Pigs named Bob?”

“Pigs named Bob,” Juan repeated. “That puts a damper on writing for sure. It's called a security breach. A bad one. The kind of breach you assured us we'd
never
have while we were here.”

“Bob's the landlord,” Frazer realized. “For fuck's sake, you knew there was a landlord. I told you that ages ago. He didn't see Pauline, did he? You acted natural, right?”

“Don't act like it's our fault! I don't remember anything about Bob the Landlord dropping in on us while we were here. You need to move us right now. To a better location.”

“Move you? I don't have the money to move you. I paid for this place in advance, and it didn't come cheap. You have to finish that book—oh, Jesus. Hang on for a second—hang on—” Frazer went back to his car. Until now Juan had seemed to be toying with Frazer, as if he enjoyed Frazer's trying to make light of Bob's visit. Soon would come Frazer's acknowledgment that he'd been wrong after all, and after this would begin his exhaustive attempts to appease them. The balance of power would be all the while shifting toward Juan . . . Frazer had opened his rear passenger door, and suddenly they were seeing him help someone upright and out of the car. “You okay, Alan?” said Frazer. The person named Alan was a spindly young man: big Adam's apple, long legs and long arms, timid-looking, in running shorts and a T-shirt and jacket. He was blindfolded. Somehow that fact seemed no stranger, no more astonishing or terrifying, than anything else about him. Frazer eased off the blindfold, and Alan blinked and rubbed at his temples. Then he saw them; his eyes widened slightly when he caught sight of Pauline.

“Wow,” he said. “You weren't kidding.”

Pauline reddened; suddenly she turned and ran into the house. They heard her footfalls on the stairs, Jenny's upstairs bedroom door slamming shut, as if by hiding herself Pauline could erase the moment the young man had recognized her, or perhaps erase the young man himself. “Oh my God,” Jenny realized. “Jesus, Rob, I didn't tell you to do this! I just told you to come right away, I didn't say to do
this
.”

“Who the fuck is this guy?” Juan screamed at them.

Frazer still had Alan by the arm, as if to keep him from running away. “This is Alan,” Frazer said, putting too much emphasis on the name, as if speaking to children. It was clear this introduction wasn't going the way he'd intended. “Alan's a very close friend. He's your ghostwriter, Juan.” In response to Juan's stunned, pop-eyed silence Frazer added—gently, firmly, finding his footing again—“Isn't that great? Alan was one of my boys when I coached at that college I got fired from. He's a brilliant writer—he's been my assistant on the last two sports-activist books that I wrote. And he's a runner. Just like you, Juan. He's a miracle worker. He's discreet, he's smart, I'm paying him out of my pocket. We need to get this thing going. That editor I told you about is getting very impatient.”

Alan had withstood his introduction like a person about to be tossed in a pit. He was cringing away from them stiffly, his eyes on the ground. “Rob, you should have told me you were thinking of this,” Jenny said to Frazer. “You said you'd never bring outsiders here.”

“Told you when? You hung up on me, Jenny, remember?”

Juan had found his voice again. “We asked you here to discuss our security, and you've brought us a
ghostwriter
?”

“Juan, before you asked me here, as you say, I asked you here, for the purpose of writing a book. We'll also discuss your security worries—” Juan unholstered the gun suddenly and aimed it at Frazer, undoing the safety. “Jesus!” said Frazer. “Don't do that. That's no fucking joke.”

“I agree. It's no joke, it's a serious, valuable item. We owned a number of these items not so long ago. A handgun. A number of rifles. Some customized by us, which takes effort.”

“That's a separate issue. If I don't have the rest of your weapons today, it might have something to do with the fact that I was ordered to come up here early.”

“Don't interrupt me, man. I've got the loaded gun! You should just shut the fuck up and let me continue.” Juan waited a moment for compliance; Frazer stared at him, silent. “Think back to a few months ago. You offered us safety, in exchange for a cut of our story. You made us put down our guns to travel, but that was just temporary, that was just so we'd
be more secure
.”

“The only thing I care about is your security, Juan.”

“Then why won't you arm us? Why the fuck are you stalling? Armed revolutionaries, that's what we
are
. That's the point of your stupid-ass book.”

“
My
stupid-ass book?”

“Yeah, your stupid-ass book! It's just your way of grabbing our action. Books are for phonies like you who use words when they ought to
do something
.”

“I'll just wait in the car,” Alan said.

“Don't you move,” Juan said. The gun was pointed again, now at Alan. Alan froze in his tracks.

She saw Frazer blanch. She could almost see his calculations: sedate, or confront?
Sedate
, she was thinking,
sedate
. . . “That's it,” Frazer said. “When you can stop acting like a prick you just give me a call. Come on, Alan. What are you going to do, shoot him?”

“Shut up, Rob!” she yelled furiously, but Juan had already pounced; he grabbed Alan around the neck and stuffed the nose of the gun into the soft space just under his chin.

“Ah, agh,” Alan gurgled in terror.

Now Frazer was visibly frightened; and it served him right, strutting in and out of the house, on and off the hillside, never knowing what it was to live here, waiting for his payday; she thought of something else. She walked quickly to Frazer's car and Juan said, without moving at all, “What're you doing, Jen?”

“Just checking something.”

“All right.”

“Juan . . .” Frazer said.

But Juan was saying to Alan, “Do you know what'll happen if you ever tell pigs where we are? That you saw us at all?”

“I won't tell,” Alan gasped.

“I will find you, and kill you,” Juan said. “I don't have reservations about rich boys like you.”

“He's not rich!” Frazer said. “Alan made it through school on a track scholarship!” Jenny leaned in the passenger window of Frazer's brown coupe and flipped open the glove compartment. Her letter to William was still there. She pulled it out and stared at it. “For fuck's sake,” Frazer said, the weight of the last straw dropped on him. “It slipped my goddamn mind, all right? Why'd you make me shove the thing in the glove compartment?”

Juan flung Alan away from him and Alan went tumbling at Frazer's car so that Jenny had to leap from his path. Alan dove into the car and flattened himself on the backseat, as he must have been flattened when Frazer had driven the car up the hill. Juan was no longer paying any attention to him; now he had the gun trained on Frazer again. “Give us money,” Juan said.

“Money? How much more do you want?”

Yvonne searched Frazer's pockets and pulled out his wallet. “Ten dollars,” she told Juan.

“You asshole,” Juan said. “Come back with our guns and our new place to live and our money, and you'll get your dumb book.”

“You're making a mistake,” Frazer said as he rushed to the car. From the relative safety of the driver's seat he called out, “Jenny, give me the letter.”

The envelope was warm, dry, her careful printing of the prison address somehow pitiful to her; she couldn't bear to hand it back to him now.
My darling
, it bluffed, it bullshitted,
you haven't had an answer from me in so long, but there's not any reason. I love you, so much
. She felt her eyes flooding with tears. “No,” she said, but he might not have heard her. The gun went off:
POP!
Juan had fired a shot into the air. Frazer stomped on the gas, sending chunks of turf flying.

“And put his blindfold back on!” Juan yelled after them.

J
ENNY DIDN'T
know how long she lay upstairs in bed, curled tightly around herself under the sheets, oblivious to the heat. The unopened envelope lay on the nightstand. From downstairs she heard their voices rising and falling, water running and being turned off. She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed to fall asleep, but her body seemed to wind itself more and more tensely away from repose; she couldn't even feel that her head lay heavily on the pillow. It seemed to ride just a hair's width above, and her neck ached from bearing the weight. Bands encircled her ribs: fear, she knew. Although she had never told William where she was, what she was doing, the unsent letter made her feel a new danger, as if she had set off on foot into mountains without telling a soul, and now knew she was lost. No one would realize they had to come looking for her.