Waking the Dead (34 page)

“I wouldn’t be going through all this if I didn’t think I could make a difference,” I said. “It’s just that time’s so short and there’s so much ground to cover. I guess sometimes I act a little like an ass.” I smiled and he smiled back and as I slipped out of the car I thought to myself: That ought to hold him for a while.

“I’
VE GOT SOMETHING
I’ve been meaning to tell you,” said Kathy Courtney. “It’s just something strange but I think you ought to know.”

We were in her car heading toward Rush Street, where we were going to have dinner with the reporters. She drove a tan Peugeot rigged up with a German sound system and I had a box of her cassettes on my lap, going through them, looking for something to play. She had odd musical tastes: Anne Murray, Captain and Tennille, Helen Reddy. Music to relax you, whereas I had a weakness for music that dripped a little acid on your wounds.

“Go right ahead,” I said. I noticed the flirtatious lilt in my voice, puzzled over it, forgave myself.

“I knew Sarah Williams. I went to school with her.”

“School?” I said, automatically, as quickly as you’d throw your hands in front of your face if you felt someone was going to slug you.

“Yes. In Baltimore. Goucher College. I was taking political science courses. I didn’t really know that many people. Everyone else was studying medieval history or poetry. But everyone knew Sarah.”

You don’t really have to listen to this, I told myself. We were stopped at a red light. The car next to us was filled with dark teenagers. The interior was wreathed in smoke; they were passing a joint around; I could see the glow of the radio dial.

“I don’t even know if I should be saying any of this,” said Kathy, her voice small and gloomy.

“It’s fine,” I said. I waited a moment, let her relax. And then: “Does Jerry Carmichael know this?”

“Jerry? No. Why?”

“You used to work for him, that’s why. Who else knows?”

“I don’t know who does.”

I could feel my questions squeezing her. As a county prosecutor it was my best skill. Once I had been interrogating a cement contractor we were trying to turn and the guy had been insisting on his innocence for six days. Finally, I began really pouring it on and he got so rattled that when he started to rub his eye he poked his finger right through his glasses. With a lap full of lens he came over and we used him as a key witness in exchange for immunity on just three of the eight counts against him.

“Well, you’ve obviously told someone,” I said. “You’re in the information business. It’s just a matter of remembering, Kathy.”

“I’m sure I told a lot of people. After.”

“After what, Kathy?”

“After she was killed.” She looked over at me with frightened, wounded eyes and the appetite for the interrogation just left me. I covered my eyes, but that was no good: there was something waiting for me in the darkness.

“Tell me about her,” I said.

“I don’t know what you want,” said Kathy. A patch of light from the headlights of a turning car went over one eye, down her full cheek.

“Just talk to me about her,” I said, my voice slipping away from me.

“She was very funny. I mean in school.” Kathy lapsed into silence. “I don’t know what you want to hear.”

“Anything,” I said.

“She was a riot. All over the place. Making trouble. She always wore a trench coat and sunglasses and when someone said she was a spy Sarah said she really
was
a spy. You know. College.”

“College,” I said.

“And then she got involved with those poor … I don’t know, kind of scary women down near the waterfront. That shelter she helped start. After that, no one saw much of her. I don’t know how she passed her classes.”

“She was a fast learner,” I said. “She did everything fast. And totally. She went through everything as if it didn’t count unless you did it to its furthest extreme.”

“I think you’re right about that,” said Kathy cautiously, as if suspecting I might be trying to lure her into dangerous territory.

“And then she got caught on the wrong side of history,” I said, and at that moment I don’t think I was altogether aware of whom I was talking to. It was just between me and the darkness in that car.

“When I heard, I just couldn’t believe it,” said Kathy. “To me she always seemed like such a lucky person.”

“Were you pretty good friends with her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think she knew who I was. I was a wallflower, a typical Catholic schoolgirl with my wool socks and hideous complexion. We were in different worlds.”

And then I couldn’t say another word. I was remembering getting the news, remembering the long flight to Minneapolis on Northwest Orient and the stewardesses strapped into the very last seats gossiping back and forth, laughing, sharing some private sketch, some piece of hilarity, and me thinking Sarah will never laugh nor hear the laughter of others, all of this is going on without her. I was remembering the following spring without her, the little clay pot of paper-whites coming into bloom in the bedroom window and the thin line of sweet aroma they pumped out, like a note on an organ left on forever. And I was remembering the phone calls and the letters and the dry desperate interviews with the scattered left-wing magazines that still gave a shit about what had happened to Sarah. And I was remembering the calls from Father Mileski that I avoided, and the trip to D.C. to talk to Agent Donahue, a sallow, softening cop in his forties with two pictures in his little office—one of J. Edgar Hoover and the other a child’s drawing of a blue smiling face with the inscription “My Daddy is the Smurfiest. Love, Sean.” (I looked at the FBI files, the eight-by-ten black and white photographs were glossy and oddly old-fashioned, as if this were something that had happened a long time ago. The white Volvo was broken in half; it rested in a meringue of firemen’s foam. Arrows had been drawn on with grease pencil, indicating where the bomb had been placed, where the impact had been absorbed. There were pictures of the bodies, but I couldn’t very well look at those.)

I was remembering everything. I was remembering much too much: I was a man unconscious in the hull of his boat heading toward the Angel Falls. I was remembering now the walk home from Carmichael’s apartment and how close she was to me in that storm and then her call as soon as I was home. I was at the cusp of something and I didn’t know if it was madness or enlightenment, collapse or transcendence—and it didn’t seem to matter which it was. It must have felt like fever when people first began to believe that the earth was not flat, did not end, but curved endlessly around and around upon itself. You could stare at the ocean for a lifetime and see the hard edge at its terminal point and then one day that edge is gone and in its place is a curve—sudden, inexplicable proof of infinity. Perhaps we would one day see death that way, too. Perhaps I was already seeing it. Maybe the dead wait for us to need them before waking—or maybe it is not them at all, but we who do the waking, peeling away the scales of our tragic view of life and death and stepping into a vision at once ecstatic and terrible. Without a total and final death, then consequence becomes infinite. What if an unkind word, a moment’s dishonesty, the twisting of a child’s arm lasts not just for that moment, not even just for your entire lifetime, but extends itself clear across the arc of time?

We were parked across from the restaurant. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting in silence, but Kathy just sat with me, breathing as I breathed.

Finally, she said, “We’re here.”

I nodded. “You go in,” I said. “I’m just going to sit and get focused again.”

The way I’d put it set her at ease. She quickly checked herself in the rearview mirror, patted her hair, tugged at the ruffled collar of her blouse. “OK,” she said, and opened the door. With the engine off, a thin skin of ice was already forming on the windshield. She got out carefully; there was ice on the pavement. She looked in at me for a moment and closed the door as quietly as possible, like a mother letting herself out of the bedroom of a difficult child, praying the brat won’t awaken.

T
HE NAME OF
the restaurant was Alan’s Rib. These adorable restaurant names seemed to have reached epidemic proportions. It was full of chrome and mirrors and gray carpeting. I looked around for Kathy and couldn’t see her. There was a smell of burned fat in the air, quiet jazz from the speakers. Then I saw her, standing at our table, waving toward me. Earth to Fielding. I walked leadenly toward her, smiling in what I hoped was a reassuring manner.

Kathy was with a stout woman with a birthmark on her face. Her name was Sandra McDuffy and she had a Sunday morning public affairs show called “Chicagoland Now” on WGN. My other pal for the night was a guy named George Broderick, from the
Sun-Times
. George was in his late twenties, with a blow-dry haircut and a sack of oats under his vest.

Kathy was nervous and seemed overanxious to please. “I hope everyone’s hungry!” she said, as if she’d been long at the stove preparing a meal for our pleasure. As I settled in, it struck me that her tone was all wrong: she was acting as if she needed to make a sale, whereas my instinct said we ought to treat them as if we were doing them a favor.

We ordered drinks. Broderick raised an eyebrow when I asked for a club soda. We chatted back and forth for a while and I did just fine on automatic pilot. I’d been at this business only for a short time but it seemed suddenly, crushingly, that I’d been going through this bullshit all my life.

I could almost feel it happening, like a tremor in the earth—the evening began to turn.

“Is Congressman Carmichael participating in your campaign?” George Broderick asked me. He’d taken a drink of his stinger without removing the swizzle stick and the little red tip had left an indentation on his cheek.

“Let’s put it like this,” Kathy said, heading me off. “Jerry’s still pretty exhausted. Naturally, he doesn’t want the seat falling to the Republicans, but family considerations are going to have to come first.”

“Jerry’s a hell of a campaigner,” Broderick said.

“Oh, he loves it,” said Kathy. “He just comes to life.”

Sandra McDuffy fished her maraschino cherry out of her Rob Roy. She placed it on the napkin and when she saw I was staring at her she smiled. “Do you remember me, Fielding?” she asked.

I didn’t. Not yet. But the question and the tone of her voice tripped a lever in me. “I can’t … ah, can’t quite place you.”

“You see her on TV all the time,” said Kathy, trying to cover for me.

“Oh no, no, I don’t mean that,” said Sandra McDuffy. “Fielding and I met a few years ago, just when I was starting out in the news business. But you don’t remember?” She stopped and held her face up, as if posing for a snapshot.

“Not really,” I said. There was a loud burst of laughter from another table; I fought the impulse to turn in my chair and see who was so fucking happy.

“Minneapolis,” Sandra said. She saw the confusion in my face and was crestfallen. “Oh, I’m sorry. It was a terrible moment. I suppose you don’t remember. Silly of me.”

“Minneapolis,” I said.

She explained to the others: “It was my first job. I was like Mary Tyler Moore working for the little news department at WJM. Only I didn’t have a Lou Grant as my boss. The guy I worked for was a total nightmare. I mean, the worst. And because I was a
woman
he had me on the miscarriage-at-the-zoo beat. Ugh. The worst! But then this incredible thing happened. One of the biggest stories of the year broke and this reporter named Doug Swenson, whom my boss absolutely
doted
on—I mean to the point of total ridiculousness—got an attack of phlebitis and before I knew it, I was on the story. It was such an amazing stroke of luck.”

“What was the story?” George Broderick asked. Professional courtesy.

“Well, maybe Fielding better tell you. He was a
participant
.”

Like spectators in a very slow tennis match, the eyes of my table-mates shifted toward me. I took a sip of my club soda and with a little imagination it tasted like gin.

“The woman I was living with was in a car. The car was attacked.”

“Oh, come on,” said McDuffy. “As if that was all there was to it.” She was sitting to my left. I could smell her perfume; her eyes flashed with that weird skittering light people have who are thinking ten minutes ahead of you. She took the story away from me as if it were a flag and now
she
was going to lead the parade.

“They were a bunch of Chileans,” she said. “And they were all mixed up with these liberation-type priests.They were sneaking out of Chile and coming here. Just the story of these poor people from the mountains of South America waking up one morning and finding themselves in St. Paul in the winter is worth time on any newscast. But it was even more than that. It was like a spy-versus-spy thing. You’ve got the left-wing Chileans over here and the American priests giving them sanctuary. And then you’ve got the right-wing Chileans hunting them down. And then you’ve got a girl like Fielding’s old friend getting herself caught in the middle. I must say, my heart goes out to them. Gutsy types, really gutsy.”

“Save us from the
past
,” said Kathy, rolling her eyes, throwing it away.

“You know why you didn’t remember me?” Sandra said, poking me again. “Because I’ve lost a lot of weight since then.”

“You look great, by the way,” said Kathy. “What are you on? Scarsdale?”

“No. Nothing like that. Just eating less. And drinking bottled water.”

“But I do remember you,” I said, in a just audible voice. “I remember your eyes and
the
sound of your voice and the way you pushed the microphone into my face.”

“Women aren’t supposed to be aggressive,” Sandra said to Kathy.

“Were you involved with the Chileans, too?” Broderick asked me.

“This is such old news,” said Kathy. “Fielding really had nothing to do with it.”

“But you must have known them,” persisted Broderick. “What were they? People from the old Allende days?”

“Yes, they were. I did know them.”

Sandra McDuffy looked questioningly at Kathy, who shrugged, as if to say this was the first she’d heard of any of this.