Angela Sloan (22 page)

“You're a pig,” I said.

“What?”

“You're a G-man, a shoe. I know it. You work for the FBI!”

She pulled aside some lank, dark hair, revealing a shallow crease down the middle of her white forehead.

“What makes you think that?” Wilhelmina said.

“All this patter about my oppressing a brown sister. You've taken it straight from the handbook! I know a Hoover when I see one.”

An idea crept over her face. “I think
you
are the pig,” she said.

“That's right. Stolen Tuna Squad.” I spat on the ground.

“You may be a narco pig! Are you waiting for us to cross the state line? Is that it? Well, we won't.”

“I'm not a narco pig.”

“If so, you can prove it by smoking some gage.” She patted the bedding around her, looking.

“That wouldn't prove anything,” I said. “A person can smoke some gage and still be a pig.”

We stared at each other awhile, and then I stepped up into the van. The air was foul inside, but I slid the door shut behind me. Wilhelmina sniffed and rubbed sleep from her eyes. She didn't look so militant now. She looked like a woman who'd fallen asleep on the bus and missed her stop.

“I am not a pig,” I said. “I am hiding from the pigs.”

“Why are you hiding from the pigs?”

“Ding and I belong to an independent Maoist cell,” I said. “We are moving like fish in the sea. Do you know what I'm saying, sister?”

It will sound grandiose, but I felt like Leopold Stokowski when I saw the color come up in her neck. I had made that happen. She must have been physically salivating, because I heard her slurp.

I fed her some details. Ding and I were just off a two-week campaign of domestic sabotage. We had poured red paint into public mailboxes all over Baltimore. “We also injected glue in stamp machines,” I said. “But now the Postal Inspection Service is on our tail. Don't speak of this with Ding.”

“Why not?”

“For security reasons, we never mention the action out loud. Or if we must, we refer to the action by the code word of
It.
”

“It?”

“Right. That's the code word for the action.”

“
It,
” she said.

“Don't keep saying it, sister.”

We went on like this until I felt pretty sure I had her on the hook. All my answers were ready. Yes, I had rioted plenty, before I quit high school to go underground. My political awakening happened on a field trip to D.C., when I heard a boy in a brown corduroy suit read a speech about
Cambodia. His motorcycle helmet had a scuff on it from a Chicago policeman's billy club. Ding's criticism of me the night before was genuine; we made it a practice to criticize each other just as often as we had the chance.

Wilhelmina wanted to know whether Ding and I were “lesbians.”

“Certainly not,” I said, once I understood her meaning. “That kind of thing doesn't serve the revolution very much.”

“Is Lucy your real name?”

“No.”

“What
is
your real name?”

This was one detail I didn't have ready. It seems simple enough, but in fact it is not so easy to come up with a real-sounding name when someone is staring at you waiting. Finally I said, “I don't have a real name.”

“Everybody has a name,” Wilhelmina said.

“Not if you stole your own birth certificate from the courthouse and set it on fire.”

As I heard myself say this, I became depressed. Too much, too far! I had blown the pitch.

Wilhelmina let her jaw hang until she had to drag her sleeve across her mouth, removing the drool. “I've got to get some food,” she said. She slid the van door open and trotted off.

W
ilhelmina eyed me fervidly across the campfire while spooning down her breakfast. Then she led me to the cottage and into the off-limits room. Dirk reclined on a mattress on the floor.

“Lucy says that she and Ding did some postal actions in Baltimore,” Wilhelmina informed him.

They had me describe the actions again. “This is all new to me,” Dirk said. “Are you with the Baltimore People's Front?”

“No. We are an independent cell.”

“Most of the Baltimore militants report to the People's Front.”

“Not us. We worked out of a hotel on St. Paul called the Fletcher.”

“I know the place. It's near the Peabody Institute.”

“Correct.”

“You probably know the brothers in the Eager Street Collective, then.”

“I'm not familiar with any collective on Eager Street.”

“There's some greasers living with a lady named Mother Swink on Pratt. Bunch of tire cutters.”

“I don't know any Mother Swink.”

“What about the Midwives of Violence, at the University of Maryland? You must have heard of them,” Dirk said.

“Nope.”

“Have you heard of the University of Maryland?”

“Don't talk down to her,” Wilhelmina said.

“I wasn't talking down to her. I'm trying to ascertain her place in the movement.”

“You don't know every single militant in Baltimore,” Wilhelmina said.

“There's some Ho-ists at Towson State.” He swiveled his small eyes. “Who are you friends with?”

“You don't know much about security,” I said to Dirk. “You've just described the order of battle for half of Baltimore County. If I were a pig, you'd have compromised all of them.”

“Dirk, you pinhead!” Wilhelmina said.

“I don't trust her.”

“I do,” Wilhelmina said. “Your work pouring paint in mail slots was laudable,” she said to me. “I dig that. But revolutionaries have to organize. I wonder if you're ready to take the next step.”

“What step?”

“Would you fight a pig in the street?”

“Fighting pigs is no big deal. I haven't used a toothbrush in several days, so my breath could probably knock a pig over.”

“Some of us are ready to get beat up or even die for the revolution,” Wilhelmina said. “What do you think about that?”

“I'm in no hurry to die,” I said.

Dirk gave a laugh—not even a laugh, really, but a dry blast of air from his nose. For him, apparently, dying was just a normal day at the office.

“I don't mind mixing it up,” I said. I lifted my hair to show them the mark where I had run into the shovel on the front-end loader. I told them a night watchman had done it to me outside a Bank of America depository. “Ding took him out with a pipe,” I said. “Then she dragged me up the alley to a candy shop.”

Dirk gazed at the scabbed-over gash on my forehead with a simple, greedy awe. Both of them did. They were made stupid by it.

“I'm telling her about the action,” Wilhelmina said to Dirk.

“If you tell her, she's got to become involved,” Dirk said.

“Are you in?” she asked me.

“In what?” I said.

“In the action.”

“I don't know what the action is.”

“We can't tell you what the action is until you promise you're in.”

“I'm going to have a problem with that,” I said.

“I know you're not afraid,” Wilhelmina said. “Do you hate the world as it is?”

“Sure I do.”

“Then let's make war.”

“I'm getting everyone in the van right now,” Dirk said. “Bring the box.” He left.

Wilhelmina gathered a few tools from the floor—a hand drill, some pliers—and set them in an Army surplus footlocker. I saw packs of flashlight batteries in there, too, along with some bundles wrapped in newspaper. Wilhelmina shut the lid and snapped a padlock.

“Grab an end, sister.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the van.”

The footlocker was heavy, and when I stumbled once, Wilhelmina stopped and laid a hand on her chest. “Don't drop it,” she said.

The rear doors of the van stood open. We set the locker in back, behind the daybed, and covered it with some dirty canvas and a green pillowcase.

“What's that?” Renee said from on top of the bed.

“Supplies,” Wilhelmina said. She climbed up to join Renee.

The engine cranked and caught. I walked around to the open sliding door. Eeyore was already at the wheel, with Dirk in the front passenger seat.

“Come on, sister!” Wilhelmina called.

“I haven't had breakfast yet,” I said.

“I saved you some Spam,” Renee said.

“Where is Ding?”

But there she was right in front of me, alone on the fan-backed wicker garden chair. “If I come, you come,” Ding said.

I got in.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Washington, D.C.!” Renee said.

W
e exited North Carolina by the Blue Ridge Parkway, which runs along the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Betty asked for gum, but there is no place to get gum on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

“The park pigs police the parkway,” Dirk said.

“I haven't seen any pigs,” Renee said.

There wasn't much of anything to see—no billboards allowed on the parkway, and no Stuckey's restaurants. It was a national park in the form of a well-maintained highway. Aside from the pavement itself, the only evidence of mankind's dominion was the occasional brown speed limit sign.

Betty looked like she might cry or kill someone. I advised her to try to sleep.

The morning was long, tense, and dull. Wilhelmina explained to Renee that the park pigs were some of the basest pigs in the government, because it was their job to underestimate the size of the movement. “When a million kids stormed the Pentagon, the Park Service said there were only a hundred thousand of us.”

Dirk explained to Eeyore why monogamy must be smashed. “After the revolution there will be no private property.”

Betty's garden chair had one bad leg, which eventually broke off. Down she went. Wilhelmina laughed—not a pretty sound. Betty got to her feet and, very practically I thought, smashed the chair against the steel floor until the other three legs were also broken off. She then had the benefit of the comfortable wicker seat and the large, fan-shaped backrest while stretching her legs out in front of her, crossed at the ankles.

I got by with a dirty red pillow, fringed in gold at the seams.

Dirk proposed we all take our clothes off and entwine our bodies on the floor of the van.

“No,” said Wilhelmina, Betty, Renee, Eeyore, and I.

His next idea was that we get off the Blue Ridge Parkway and find some gum for Ding.

“All right,” Eeyore said.

We left the parkway and stopped at a Gulf station. Dirk seemed to know the attendant. They hugged and shared an elaborate handshake. When we were in the van and moving again, Dirk passed around a sack of green, apple-flavored bubble gum. Mine had a little stamp inside the wrapper, like an S&H green stamp, only smaller. We all had these stamps, except for Eeyore, who was driving.

“What are these little stamps?” Renee said.

“Lay it on your tongue. Like this,” Dirk said.

She did it, and so did Wilhelmina. Now they watched Betty and me.

“It builds cadre spirit,” Wilhelmina said.

“And proves you're not a pig,” Dirk said.

I put the little stamp on my tongue as Dirk and Wilhelmina watched. Betty did the same.

Renee described an experience she'd had while camping with the youth group from her church. A bunch of them were holding plastic forks over the fire, causing the tines to curl. Then she put a Styrofoam cup on a stick, and a drop of molten Styrofoam landed on her fingertip. She showed us the scarred cuticle.

“Still, you have a handsome set of paws,” Wilhelmina said.

All of us examined Renee's hands. The fingers were long, though not too long, and the skin had a wholesome, healthy, elastic appearance. The bluish veins branched and cornered like U.S. routes on a map.

“My old paws are awfully scaly,” Wilhelmina said.

“Mm, yes,” Renee said. She examined them clumsily, front and back.

“Maybe you can put some lotion on those hands,” Betty said.

We took turns scrutinizing Betty's hands. They were as hard as wooden spoons.

Eeyore had the handsomest set of hands aboard. The same quality that was so unappealing in his feet, namely their expressiveness, was a virtue in his hands. He didn't carry much meat on his bones, but Eeyore's skeleton was substantial. He had big knuckles, too.

“Eeyore's hands make me sad,” Renee said. She began to cry.

Dirk's hands were like possum hands. Pink, with wrinkled knuckles and pale, horny nails. His hands seemed made for reaching and scratching
up under
things, like up under dashboards, sofas, or pant legs.

“Don't cry,” Eeyore said.

I was well aware that I had ingested some kind of narcotic substance with that paper stamp. I'd considered it necessary to establish good faith with these dangerous hooligans. I waited for my mind to be blown. Yet nothing much happened to me.

Renee was up front in the passenger seat holding hands with Eeyore, who still drove. Dirk had taken his clothes off and was loping in an ape-like posture in the back of the van while Wilhelmina twitched on the daybed.

I began to suspect that I had some kind of natural resistance to whatever was in the stamp.

Betty sat quietly. On the floor next to her was an animal about the size of a large tomcat. Its body and tail were covered with leathery gray scales.
A pangolin.
I hadn't seen one of those in a long time.

I asked Betty, “How do you feel?”

“I feel
different,
” she said.

“I don't.”

“Everything feel so soft.”

“How did that pangolin get in here?”

“I don't know what a pangolin is.”