Mercy (42 page)

get colder anyw ay because the w et’s up against you, wrapped

around you and it don’t breathe, it stays heavy, intractable, on

you; and so rain is very hard and when it rains you get sad in a

frightened w ay and you feel a loneliness and a desolation that is

very big. This is always so once you been out there long

enough. I f yo u ’re inside it don’t matter— you still get cold and

lonely; afraid; sad. So when the boy came to stay with me in

the rain I took him to m y heart. I made him m y friend in my

heart. I pledged friendship, a whisper o f intention. I made a

promise. I didn’t say nothing; it was a minute o f honor and

affection. About four in the morning we found a cafe. It’s a

long w ay to dawn when you’re cold and tired. We scraped up

money for coffee, pulled change out o f our pockets, a rush o f

silver and slugs, and we pooled it on the table which is like

running blood together because nothing was held back and so

we were like blood brothers and when m y blood brother

disappeared I went looking for him, I went to the address

where he lived, a cold, awful place, I asked his terrible mother

where he was, I asked, I waited for an answer, I demanded an

answer, I went to the local precinct, I made them tell me,

where he was, how to find him, how much money it took to

spring him, I went to get him, he was far away, hidden away

like Rapunzel or something, a long bus ride followed by

another long bus ride, he was in a real prison, not some funky

little jail, not some county piss hole, a great gray concrete

prison in the middle o f nowhere so they can find you if you

run, nail you, and I took all m y money, m y blood, m y life for

today and tom orrow a n d : he next day and for as long as there

was, as far ahead as I can count, and I gave it like a donor for his

life so he could be free, so the piglets couldn’t put him in a

cage, couldn’t keep him there; so he could be what he was, this

very great thing, a free man, a poor boy who had become a

revolutionary man; he was pure— courage and action, a wild

boy, so wild no one had ever got near him before, I wish I was

so brave as him; he was manic, dizzying, m oving every

second, a frenzy, frenetic and intense with a mask o f joviality,

loud stories, vulgar jokes; and then, with me, quiet, shy, so

shy. I met him when he had just come back from driving an

illegal car two times in the last month into Eastern Europe,

crossing the borders illegally into Stalinist Eastern bloc

countries— I never understood exactly which side he was

on— he said both— he said he took illegal things in and illegal

people out— borders didn’t stop him, armies didn’t stop him, I

crossed borders with him later, he could cross any border; he

wore a red star he said the Soviets had given him, a star o f

honor from the government that only some party insiders ever

got, and then he fucked them over by delivering anarchy in his

forays in and out o f their fortressed imperial possessions. He

had a Russian nickname, his
nom de guerre
, and since his life was

subversion, an assault on society, war against all shit and all

authority, his
nom de guerre
was his name, the only name

anyone knew he had; no one could trace him to his fam ily, his

origins, where he slept: a son paying rent. Except me. In fact

the cops arrested him for not paying traffic tickets, thousands

o f dollars, under the conventional birth name; he ended in the

real prison resisting arrest. Even in jail he was still safely

underground, the
nom de guerre
unconnected to him, the body

in custody. When I married him I got his real name planted on

me by law and I knew his secrets, this one and then others,

slow ly all o f them, the revolutionary ones and the ones that

went with being a boy o f his time, his class, his parents, a boy

raised to conform, a boy given a dull, stupid name so he would

be dull and stupid, a boy named to become a man who would

live to collect a pension. I was M rs. him, the female one o f him

by law, a legal incarnation o f what he fucking hated, an actual

legal entity, because there is no Mrs.
nom de guerre
and no girl’s

name ever mattered on the streets or underground, not her

own real name anyway, only if she was some fox to him, a

legendary fox. I was one: yeah, a great one. I had m y time. But

it was nasty to become Mrs. his Christian names and his

daddy’s last name, the w ay they say M rs. Edw ard Jam es Fred

Smith, as if she’s not Sally or Jane; the wedding was m y

baptism, m y naming, Mrs. what he hates, the one who needs

furniture and money, the one you come home to which means

you got to be somewhere, a rule, a law, Mrs. the law, the one

who says get the mud o ff your shoes because it’s dirtying the

floor, the one who just cleaned the fucking floor after all. I

never thought about mud in my whole fucking life but when

you clean the floor you want to be showed respect. I lived with

him before we got married; we were great street fighters; we

were great. N o one could follow the chaos we made, the

disruptions, the lightning-fast transgressions o f law; passports, borders, taking people or things here or there; street actions, explosions, provocations, property destruction, sand

in gas tanks, hiding deserters from Vietnam, the occasional

deal. We had a politics o f making well-defined chaos,

strategically brilliant chaos; then we made love. We did the

love because we had run our blood together; it was fraternal

love but between us, a carnal expression o f brotherhood in the

revolutionary sense, a long, fraternal embrace for hours or

days, in hiding, in the hours after when we wanted to

disappear, be gone from the world o f public accountability;

and he whispered Andrea, he whispered it urgently, he was

urgent and frantic, an intense embrace. He taught me to cook;

in rented rooms all over Europe he taught me to cook; a bed, a

hot plate, he taught me to make soup and macaroni and

sausages and cabbage; and I thought it meant he was specially

taking care o f me, he was m y friend, he loved me, w e’d make

love and he’d cook. H e’d learned in the N avy, mass meals

enhanced by his private sense o f humor and freedom, the jokes

he would tell in the private anarchy o f the relatively private

kitchen, more personal freedom than anywhere else, doing

anything else. He got thrown out; they tried to order him

around, especially one vicious officer, he didn’t take shit from

officers, he poured a bowl o f hot soup over the officer’s head,

he was in the brig, you get treated bad and you toughen up

or break and his rebellion took on aspects o f deadly force, he

lost his boyish charm although he always liked to play but

inside it was a life-or-death hate o f authority, he made it look