American Woman (39 page)

All this time, she thinks later, perhaps they actually courted the fatal encounter: at Dolly's, and in the rainstorm with the truck and the troopers, and at the auto junkyard, at the bar. They could only be careful so long before taking some idiot risk. They drove at night and then went into bars. They changed their disguises but kept the same car. They behaved as if they meant to be prudent but in truth there was some awful impulse to endanger themselves. They feared capture completely, and at the same time they longed to be caught through no fault of their own. Perhaps it wasn't paradoxical at all: they just wanted a verdict. They knew they were failing to fully face up to their crime. They tried; but all their feelings were too full of self-regard. They were afraid for themselves, horrified at themselves. Of course their bids for innocence were concerned with themselves. Their feelings piled up like strata; at the outermost, fear and remorse; beneath this, the sinful suspicion that perhaps they were less culpable. Perhaps they were victims of Juan and Yvonne. Thinking this made them ashamed. Of just Juan, then; Yvonne was a victim as well. Perhaps they were all, even Juan, victims of bad circumstances: they were all four of them victims of Frazer. But in a larger, “truer” sense, Frazer along with the four of them was a victim of unjust government. Frazer only had wanted to help them, and why had they needed help? Government persecution. They took it to a higher, a deeper, a broader level again. Frazer, they mused, framed salvation in terms of more money, and then they did as well. In the end, it was capitalism that caused all these problems. Their lives had been compromised from the start by a legacy of imperial violence they could either have condoned through inaction, thus enabling violence itself, or resisted, thus consigning themselves to a marginal place with regard to the sullied mainstream. This marginality, morally right as it was, had bred moral wrong. But why should they be marginal? It was their duty, now more than ever, to devote themselves to revolution. But who were they to lead the good fight, compromised as they were? (Though not quite . . . they had not pulled the trigger.)

At the hot core, beneath all these strata, was a feeling they didn't yet know how to name. They might never name it while they were together. So long as each remained within view of the other a reality pertained between them, and the core feeling didn't intrude. It was amazing, Jenny thought, how a death could remain so abstract, but it was also not surprising at all. She had first known Pauline in the shadow of nine unjust deaths, but Pauline had never known those deaths truly. She couldn't bear to. And this death, number ten, they would also not bear. Mr. Morton: an honorific and a pallid last name. They came to feel they knew him well, but some day they would have to admit that they only did so in the service of their own punishment and redemption. It would take a long time for Mr. Morton to make himself heard above that.

And so they might have longed to be caught through no fault of their own, but at the same time they hoped to be spared, as a sign from the gods. (Surrender wasn't an option. Radicalism, Jenny thought sometimes, was like Catholicism, with its extreme self-referentiality, its strict liturgy, its all-explaining view of the world, its absolute Satan, and its deadly sins, of which surrender was one—the very worst, arguably.) It wouldn't just mean they were lucky—or rather, luck wasn't without deeper meaning. She knew that sheer, dumb luck shouldn't have been of the slightest significance. It wasn't embraced by a reasoned and just worldview. It failed to jibe with all humans created equal. It had no place in a liberation movement nor in a radical's ethical code, yet anyone who had committed the magical act of “going underground,” of dropping into a rabbits' warren of the imagination where reinvention of the self was possible, believed in it. Anyone who had ever acted on the premise that she could escape the clutches of an unjust law indefinitely was likely to be a subscriber to the doctrine of luck just as much as the doctrine of racial equality. Outlaws live on luck, and they were outlaws as well as soldiers. In the end the verdict seemed very clear; they made it to the other side not merely unscathed but anointed by one enemy after another, who had looked them in the eye and not seen them, and so added more force to their state of enchantment.

They might have driven for almost two weeks; later on, Jenny couldn't remember how long the trip was. It wasn't possible to judge by dividing the most efficient route by the most comfortable number of hours to drive every day. They hadn't taken the efficient route, or driven the comfortable hours. They hadn't even maintained one direction; they would wend north, then south, pursuing and fleeing vague instincts of where they felt safe, where they felt vulnerable. If she had to put a shape on the journey, she would say that in the end they'd been struggling west all along. But no journey can fit in the mind as it happens through distance and time. There's no way to record it as you might the repetitions of your heart with a vibration-sensitive needlelike pen on a very long roll of paper. Looking back it does not unscroll smoothly. Moments stood out because something had happened, others because nothing had happened but sublime coexistence between the whipped hair of the woman beside her, and the glimpse of her own eyes in the rear view staring back like a critical stranger's. The lurid sunset, the wind suddenly cold though the day had been hot. An emblematic moment, neither resolved nor contented nor perhaps even hers. Perhaps the persnickety car, bought from a little old lady who kept it garaged since 1961—perhaps this car has carried them across an invisible border into somebody's movie. That would be why the wind and the hair and the critical eyes seem so strangely familiar. Other moments stood out for no reason, they were neither eventful nor emblematic, they were as randomly snatched as the insects that stuck to the grill.

As they crossed the Great Plains Pauline told her, “I can't believe all this space. It's so huge. God, I've never seen anything like this.” Propping her head on the window frame, gazing; but Jenny knew Pauline had been here before. She'd been one of those girls in a calico dress, lace-up shoes, sun-strain pinching her eyes, thin long hair always tangled and wild and not in proper braids. One day, the Crow Indians come along and attack her parents' farmstead, scalp her parents, burn the house to the ground, abduct her thrown over their shoulders, her lace-up boots kicking. And the next thing you know, she's tearing around on a horse, wearing paint, giving the Crows who've adopted her hell . . . Jenny could see it in Pauline's deep eyes, if not in her time-refined features. She might have grown up rich, but where had that money come from? From people who'd gotten here first, that was all, when this land was lawless and even more vast. People who'd stuck it out. Killed enough, grabbed enough. Never looked back.

The farther west they got, the more they traveled by day. They had long ago spent Jenny's money; now they sowed the stolen bills, one at a time, at great intervals. Each one they spent was a great burden lifted; they grew lighter and lighter. They weren't in a particular hurry; they zigged north, zagged south. In a motel in Winnemucca, Nevada, Pauline said, “I meant it that day in the rainstorm. If they caught me, I'd never tell them about you. But you, you didn't have to stay with me. I'd understand if you told about me.” “But I won't,” Jenny said. “I know that,” Pauline said. “That's the way that you are. I know that.” Before leaving Nevada they paused again in a town called Stateline, just short of the mountains. “We could try Oregon,” Jenny said. They had also said, “We could try somewhere inland; a small town,” but as they talked about where to touch down, about what would be safest, they sailed closer and closer each minute, so that when the flat green and yellow land of the Valley—with its sprinklers and its rows swinging by in great arcs, and its dusty, tired workers lagging home in the late afternoon down the dusty, tired roads—so that when all this began to thin out, and fall into deep golden folds, and when the road began rising again, for the last time, for its last hurdle, into the coast range, they were thrumming with anticipation, and when they first saw the water, the blue gleam of San Pablo Bay, they shouted. It seemed their decision had been made, long before. There was no question but that they'd go home.

S
ANDY, POOR
S
ANDY
, only recently back from her frightened selfexile to live with her sister in Tucson, opened the door to the place in North Berkeley she shared with Tom Milner and found Jenny there on her porch. Jenny, her shoulder-length hair in a small ponytail and her bangs smoothly combed to her eyebrows. Jenny was wearing a churchgoing white cotton blouse, slightly large, and a pleated blue skirt, also large, looking very much like a teenager from neighboring Virgen de Guadaloupe High School. She even had a Bible in the crook of one arm. She asked, “Have you heard the Good News?” It took Sandy a moment to know who she was.

“Oh, no,” Sandy said. “Oh, don't tell me, oh
no
, oh my
God
!”

They'd gotten their first Bible from a motel room somewhere in Nebraska; they'd just driven off in the morning when Pauline produced it from under her shirt. “I can't believe you did that,” Jenny said. “Motels
always
report stolen Bibles. Now we're transporting it over state lines.” When she'd seen Pauline's face she said, “Oh, I'm just joking with you.”

“Don't
do
that.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't
do
that!”

Jenny had taken the next Bible herself and by now they had ten piled up in the car. It marked where they'd been in some way, by subtraction, but it also made good camouflage. “Who can prove that we're not Gideons?” Pauline said. “No one knows what the Gideons look like.”

Now Pauline had stepped onto the porch, in her flowered sundress and flat sandals and straw-colored hair, with her Bible as well. Sandy yanked them inside and Pauline said, “Hi! You and I met, maybe you don't remember—”

“I remember you,” Sandy said coldly.

T
OM
M
ILNER
didn't paint houses full time anymore. He'd tried a succession of other jobs that accommodated his need for freedom and, to a lesser extent, his creativity, and was currently working as a tour manager for a band. But he still pitched in sometimes on large jobs, and the crew, though it had evolved and evolved again over the past two and a half years, taking on and shedding participants, growing and shrinking, had retained the same core: Mike Sorsa, and the truck on which Jenny had once lettered
MIKE AND BROS
.
HOUSEPAINTING
on each of the doors. The brothers then had been Mike and Tom Milner and William. It made Jenny feel a weird forsaken joy, to learn that the dilapidated huge-fendered truck with its ding-covered body and cheerful orange sign still went rattling across the Bay Bridge, sprinkling fine motes of rust, cans of turquoise and fuchsia and cream-colored paint hopping wildly around in the back. Forsaken that she and William had been snatched from their lives while that truck trundled on, and yet joyful for the same reason, as if she were a refugee coming back home and someone told her, “Your people are here!” The truck, with its trail of fresh oil left behind on the pavement. Against all odds it still carried its freight of paint cans and young men, and the young men were still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, lying flat in the bed to light cigarettes under the wind. They were still plying their small craft on the surface of the imperfect world to fund plans carried out in its depths. Tom had just done a job on a three-story building in a mostly Mexican neighborhood owned by a man Tom diagnosed as a very nice cheapskate who disliked the work of land-lording. The third floor of the building was empty, and Mr. Minski, the landlord, had asked all the painters to pass on the word to nice friends. A few days after Jenny and Pauline arrived Tom rented the place on behalf of his “sister, and a girlfriend of hers, who were moving out from the East Coast,” and after a reasonable interval Jenny and Pauline moved in, Pauline wearing a vast floppy hat and sunglasses. Tom explained she was extremely sensitive to the sun.

They loved that apartment right away, for its hideous brand-new shag carpet upon which they could leap without sound, for its blazing linoleum kitchen—for all its internal brand-newness and cheapness, which made them feel no one had lived there before, but equally for the true oldness that lay just beneath. They were so glad to be back in a city, which they had agreed was not merely what suited their temperaments, but what suited a fugitive most: to be paradoxically sheltered by the nearness of people, and alone without feeling so lonely. The building rode a crest of San Francisco's ceaseless waves, and although in the front it had a stack of bay windows, one per apartment, it really faced back; in back there were old wooden stairs that went up the outside and each landing was as large as a porch. From theirs, at the top, where no one ever passed them, they looked onto the rising and falling rooftops, by day white and dense as a hill town in Spain, by night rolling away like a blanket of stars; or they'd watch the fog come, flat and eerie and luminous gray from the lights it had muffled. A Dutch door led from there to the kitchen, so that with the top half of this door always open they could spend all their waking hours here and yet never feel cramped. The front room they neglected; the blinds on the bay window were always pulled down. The bedroom was plain, the light from its one window shadowed by the nearness of the neighboring house. Because of that nearness they also kept the shades drawn in here. Brand-new royal blue shag carpeting, which Mr. Minski had laid just before they'd moved in, lined the floor perfectly and even extended beneath the closet door to line the floor of the closet. In the closet were Jenny's accordion file, and under the carpet the rest of the bills from the grocery store. Outside, two cot-size mattresses bought from the thrift store and laid directly on the floor with their clothes neatly folded beside them; when they moved in they didn't have hangers, and then the transformation of the closet into a vault made them not want to use it for anything else. But after all these transient years Jenny oddly enjoyed, in the context of rootedness, the compactness of her personal effects, the square heap on the royal-blue shag of her folded-up jeans and T-shirts, her paired socks, her sneakers, her hat. She was glad there was no ancient maple outside sighing at the slightest touch of wind; that there were no worn, creaking floorboards or tumbling mice. Even the rain, when it fell, sounded different. No trace of life as it had been. There already seemed to be so many intervening eras, so many layers of sediment. Their journey across the country, not one stratum but many, Indiana and Missouri, Wyoming and Nevada, and all the fine striations in between. Their first spooked and euphoric nights here. First contact with Sandy and Tom. Though at night, when the usual dimness of the room—they didn't mind it; it was cool and cavelike—was transformed into darkness, for Jenny their farmhouse life sometimes rose up. She would startle awake in the night thinking she was still there, and the inarticulate melancholy of that time, her own loneliness at a depth she hadn't known how to sound, would yawn in her again. When she heard Pauline's breathing she would not understand who it was. Then the clock they had bought and that sat on the carpet nearby would tick tick very softly and she would remember, and flood with relief.