Vida (11 page)

“Would you like a fire? Matter of fact, that’s all we got to heat this cabin—the fireplace and a wood stove”

“I’m cold and tired. I had to hang around Boston for hours till she could meet me … I could use a bath. Is there hot water, or is that disconnected?”

“I turned it on. Look around, it’s a pretty cabin. We’re smack on the lake. A sandy beach at our door. I even went swimming this morning.”

“Swimming?” she shuddered. “Did you cut a hole in the ice?”

“Water was warmer than the air. I like to get exercise.”

“Where’s the john?” At last she would be alone, relax.

He pointed the way. “Want some fresh coffee when you hop out?”

She didn’t. She wanted to sleep; but she had better wake up, battle her fatigue and figure out who this kid was before she rested. It was indulgence to bathe first, but she could not find the strength to deal with him until she had somewhat collected herself. With real satisfaction she locked herself in the bathroom, stripped and ran the water good and hot.

She took a long soak, washing herself slowly, trying to blot anxiety from her mind for this interval. She needed sleep, she needed rest, she needed quiet and safety. Her back ached from too many nights on couches. The last time she had stayed someplace was a week with Saul and Dee Dee in Cincinnati, where she and Bill (who was on his way back to L.A.) had run a workshop on how to do pirate TV actions for the live fugitives in the area. That was the last time she had unpacked, relaxed and done some political work. She felt crazed with traveling, bumping warily against strangers, weaving a veil of lies and dancing within, moving, constantly moving.

Green eyes—that clear hard green. Suddenly she knew him. She sighed profoundly and slid into the water with a shiver of relief. Joel his name was, Joel White. He was a kid who hadn’t made C.O. and had deserted when he was nineteen and been a fugitive since. He’d hung around with Jimmy. Joel wasn’t really in the Network but one of that much larger group who loosely related to it. Jimmy and he had traveled together before Jimmy settled at Hardscrabble Hill with Kevin and her. Joel was okay, then; he had been under a long time, and he was safe. Only what connection might he have with Kevin? She had to feel that out.

When the water had lost its warmth, she got out of the tub reluctantly and cleaned it, dried herself. She did not want to put on the same dirty clothes. No, a clean pair of cords and her funky moss green velour top. A squirt of Laura’s Femme cologne from the medicine cabinet pricked up her spirits.

Coming out, she scanned the house, a log cabin but hardly Lincolnesque. The floor was pine in the bedrooms and slate of various subdued colors in the kitchen and huge living room, while heavier slabs of the same stone faced the fireplace. Two walls of the living room were glass, the third wood paneling, and the fourth was open to the sizable kitchen. The furniture was rattan. A settee heaped with plush cushions faced the fire he had built. At one end of the settee he was waiting, one leg crossed over the other. On the coffee table he had placed a tray with the hot coffee in a heavy blue ceramic pitcher, cream in a jug, a sugar bowl and two mugs and spoons. Beside that apparatus stood a bottle ofJohnnie Walker red and a couple of glasses with ice in them. “Dug that up too. I figured you might go for it. I sure do”

Wavering, she wanted to take the chair, well away from him to inspect him better, but that would represent obvious avoidance after the way he had set things up. She settled for curling at the other end of the none-too-wide settee with her legs brought up between them. “I’ll have a little, Joel.”

“Didn’t think you knew me!” He grinned. “I recognized you immediately. Vida Asch.”

He seemed to enjoy saying her name, while she experienced an automatic spurt of cold along her arteries. In contrast, he had been flattered when she called him by name—not frightened or at least startled as she had expected. That had not given her the commanding edge she had anticipated, but rather had eliminated some small advantage she had not been aware of. “I’m not sure we should be finishing her Scotch”

“I don’t think she’s a heavy drinker. The bottles had cobwebs running between them.”

“We scared you when we drove up.”

He ignored that probe. “I’m not a big Scotch drinker. Like sour mash better.”

“So do I.”

“Yeah, I always think of New Yorkers drinking Scotch”

“I was born in Cleveland, and I finished growing up in Chicago. Where are you from?” She wanted to place that voice.

“Born in New Jersey. Family moved to North Carolina. Then at fifteen, to Sacramento.”

“Such a cosmopolitan upbringing!”

“We both know there’s nothing cosmopolitan about Passaic, Roanoke Falls and Sacramento.” He raised his eyebrows at her, over his glass. His hair was black and thickly wavy and his complexion ruddy through the remains of what had been a dark tan. He looked contagiously healthy. He was not slight, as he had seemed at first in his boyish faltering approach, but solidly built, muscular, although his features were delicately made: a small slightly puckered arrogant mouth, beautiful ivory teeth, a well modeled flaring nose, arched brows, a perfect lightly cleft chin. His manner of speaking was emphatic, almost flirtatious. Oh, he’s gay, she realized, of course. That was the nice tea tray with the coffee, the cups, the Scotch, the air of elegance as he sat there in worn denims with a soiled bandage on his left hand. Probably he had been lovers with Jimmy. She should have guessed that earlier. She relaxed against the back of the settee, letting her spine sag. Nothing to worry about, then.

“So we’re both from the provinces,” he said.

“Exactly” She nodded. “I remember seeing New York for the first time, wanting it, wanting it the way you want somebody gorgeous you see at a party, some guy you see dancing.”

He smiled very slightly and knelt to put another log on the fire. “We danced together at Wichita.”

“You and I?”

“Oh. You don’t remember. Why should you?” He was pouting, drawn up aloof on the couch again. He rattled the ice cubes in his glass and poured in more Scotch.

What vanity! What a perfectly self-centered kittenish puffball! Ugh— and she would have to get along with him for however long she stayed here. Then she remembered he was a fugitive too. He was not sheltering her. She was not forced to get on with him any more desperately than he must get on with her. It was equal! How delightful: she was free to dislike him if she wanted to. They could divide up the house and ignore one another. They were of no use to each other whatsoever. How marvelous and unusual it was. She didn’t have to please him, she didn’t have to take care not to step on his prejudices, she didn’t need to extract help or money or transportation or information or message delivery or mail drop or anything at all out of him. They could fight. They could scream. They could take out their ill temper on each other because neither had any power. The only people with whom she ever let out feelings were her real family when she saw them, and sometimes, as with Leigh, she had to be cautious even there. The Network was artificial family. You could let out feelings, yes, but you were stuck with each other till death or disaster parted you. When a divorce occurred, as it had with Kevin, the result was possibly lethal.

He was glancing at her with that pout. She asked, “There are no houses near this one?”

“She’s got neighbors to both sides—you’ll see when you walk around— but they’re boarded up for the winter.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to ask each other questions like that? Never mind. What day is this?”

“Tuesday night.”

“Since last Friday … I think she has a boyfriend at her house in Newton and that’s why she toted us out here. We had to turn on the water and open up the house, and all the time she was in an awful hurry to rush back.”

She finished her drink and let the coffee stand. “I’m going to bed … Where have you been sleeping?” She added quickly, “I don’t care which bedroom I take.”

“I’ve been sleeping in my bag in front of the stove” He pointed to the wood-burning stove between the living room and the kitchen. “It gets pretty damn cold.”

“I’ll put on a lot of covers”

The bed was double and covered with an Appalachian quilt. She checked that the window opened and that she could pry herself out through it if she had to. Undressing swiftly, she launched herself into the iron-cold sheets. Immediately her teeth began to chatter as she curled into a ball. He was right: the room was appallingly cold. Her body felt as if the warmth were seeping from it. Weary as she was the cold kept her awake, but she would not go in there with him. She did not want his company. She stayed in the double bed on the Great Greenland Ice Shelf and froze.

As sun warmed the house in the morning, she slept late. She was exhausted through and through, and what was there to get up for? She recognized that she was close to an emotional bottom and must coddle herself. It happened from time to time; it happened. She did not want to get up and face the day, him, her life, anything. Leigh with his new all-too-serious affair. Surveillance on Natalie. What the hell was the Network doing with itself? Marking time. Generating rhetoric like an antiquated wind machine in the desert. She had been in the forefront of a movement that had blown away. Her days were spent in simple survival. It was fine for Larkin; he lived on victories in Angola and Afghanistan. It was fine for Kiley; she lived on abstractions. How did Eva manage? Gently, Eva and Alice and she had kept one another intact, but survival was not enough. Their little actions felt paltry to her. She could not live on distant struggles.

Finally she realized she was smelling coffee and eggs, and she promised herself another hot bath. In L.A. Eva and Alice and she had a tiny gas heater. In a day it was possible to generate enough hot water morning and night for one bath or one shower or one dishwashing or one clothes washing in the sink. Therefore, at most she could bathe every two days. Traveling, she had often had to go longer. Her skin crawled. Leigh had once told her she kept her pussy so clean a crab couldn’t find it on a dark night; certainly she was used to being called fastidious. Hot water was her favorite luxury.

In the kitchen, the wood stove was stoked up. Joel had made coffee and juice. He was sitting at the table mending his spare pants, where a seam had opened in the crotch. A real domestic type.

“Would you like me to scramble you some eggs?” he offered.

“Oh, I can do it.” Better than he, she suspected, for from the evidence of the pan he cooked eggs on too high a flame.

Breakfast was a nice quiet meal, but he seemed disturbed by the silence and finally began to make conversation as she sipped her coffee.

“Worst thing for me is no TV. No radio, even. No papers. You can’t find out what’s happening.”

Her first impulse was to mock him: poor child, baby-sat by television. But then she realized that she was deprived of any news about Kevin. “That’s not good” she said more agreeable than she had intended. “It makes me nervous too.”

”Not that there’d be a thing about me” he added defensively. “But I mind feeling cut off. That’s an occupational hazard anyhow, feeling out of it.” He got up to feed the stove. “We need more wood. It’s been keeping itself chilly”“

“You can say that again.”

“Oh, you were cold last night.” He grinned.

“Where do we get the wood?”

“In the woods. It grows there.” He was enjoying himself now, playing man of nature. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll get to work chopping”

“Look, I know how to use an ax. If you don’t, you can leave it to me,” she said firmly. Don’t tell me even this one is going to try to play macho! “I lived on a farm where we had nothing to keep us from freezing to death but three wood stoves.”

“Then we’ll both chop,” he said very gently, reproving her for her vehemence. “The tools are in the shed. That was Hardscrabble Hill, wasn’t it?”

She stared at him with the fear back.

“Look, I used to live not far from there. I worked on their cars. Couple of winters ago I stayed there for a while. Tequila and Marti talked about you”

Enough branches in the woods had broken, enough trees had toppled in the storms of the summer and the winter and probably the winter before and the winter before that, so that they could chop downed timber. They worked for two hours and then hauled the wood back. How long had it been since she’d done that much labor? He was a good worker, and in the woods she liked him better, although she guessed he was no more bred to such labor than she was. Probably he’d picked it up the way she had, holing up some winter on an isolated farm … “Do you know Kevin?” she asked suddenly.

His face closed a little. “I know him … Not well. Your old man, wasn’t he?”

“Not in a long, long time. He got busted, you know?”

“No! When?”

Of course. He’d been here since Friday night. “I heard it Saturday”

“You must be real upset?” He looked over his shoulder at her as he carried his pile of logs.

The small of her back hurt dully and then sharply. She could feel another pulled muscle in her left shoulder. She could hardly walk upright. For too long she had not used her muscles, not since she had dug the garden in Los Angeles. He was still waiting for an answer, the logs on the pile and his arms hanging loose at his sides.