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But Jean was a woman. A woman who had ideas. An
attractive
woman who had ideas, and this is why she had to be neutralized. Hoover chose her as his mission. While she was busy creating art, or raising money for Watts preschools, Hoover and his band of sweaty gnomes studied her phone calls, letters, meetings transcribed by some poor junkie who ducked jail time by offering Jean Seberg. And the feds, spittle at the corner of their lips, their suspenders strained, their lentil brains taxed, could bend the evidence into a single narrative, the only narrative they could understand: the blonde from Iowa liked dick, and lots of it. In particular, black dick.

T
HE BOY AT
the Edna supermarket Starbucks took a lot of pride in his product. He was talking to a woman in a leopard-skin top, thinner than most of the women I saw in Edna, thinner than me.

“This has two shots,” the boy said.

“Two shots?”

“You usually have one so I don't want to jolt you.”

“Oh, what the hell!” The woman slapped the counter and turned to me conspiratorially. “Jolt me!”

She was middle-aged and wouldn't know me.

“Odile Dahlquist, as I live and breathe. I heard you were back in town. I think it was Faye Eckhardt at yoga told me she spoke to Cindy Franck at the Golden Cup.”

The espresso machine squealed.

“You don't remember me,” she intuited. “Megan McKibbee. I
used
to be Megan Sondergaard.”

The name swam toward me: the smell of Obsession and overcooked peas, and something about a broken zipper. Whoever she was, she triggered unpleasant associations.

“You've been living in California, right? I always said you were meant for big things. You with that haircut, that cocktail hat with the birdcage veil.” I did have a hat. And a haircut. “So why
did
you come back?”

I was not about to mention Jean Seberg. I did not want to dangle my pearl before this particular sow. When she was handed her latte with a whipped cream dome she reared like a pony, pointed her phone, and snapped a picture of it.

I let the Starbucks boy sell me a muffin with my macchiato, and I ate it quickly, wiping my finger grease on a tiny cocktail napkin. I carried my macchiato to Swensen Park, named for the enterprising brothers, pig farmers, who came up with the idea of disemboweling the swine right here in Edna, carving them for good parts, grinding the rest for baseball franks and hosing the blood into a cistern so it could be siphoned for headcheese. The Swensens could not have guessed their eponymous park would be the roaming grounds for a Cinco de Mayo party, ranchera music blaring from the cars, the pickups dressed in bunting, the children from the band, relieved of their duties, wandering in groups of three or four with their instruments in one hand and ices in the other, babbling with the rush of accomplishment. Everything about this party—the refreshments, the clothes, the classic convertibles—had been planned for a much warmer day.

Our mayor was now in a striped serape and a sombrero, spread-armed like a prophet, blessing the subjects who approached him with a goose in the ribs or a jocular half nelson. I was in high school during the last strike, the big strike, when Charlie Burt was the union president, leading a very different parade of angry meat workers down Decatur and toward the gates of the abattoir from which they'd been locked out. The slaughterhouse employees were Anglo then, the grandsons of the Germans and Swedes who busted this sod a century ago: my dad and my uncle, Charlie Burt, almost everyone we knew. They never got back into the plant; my father works at the jail now, and comes home in the morning to sit still for an hour or two. The tendons of his hands were so often serrated, his fingers curve in a permanent cup-shaped craw.

My parents hold a lot of goodwill toward Charlie Burt. Everybody does. That's why he's been mayor so long. He spent his political capital smoothing Edna's transition. In my weekly phone calls from California I heard my father's voice ebb in bewilderment. Charlie Burt says don't blame the Mexicans, they're just workers same as us, except they get paid half as much. Charlie Burt says it's a good thing, brings business to town: the taqueria, the money-transfer agency, the furniture rental. My father would be looking out the window, watching the tree surgeons bobbing in their baskets.

I have to credit the mayor, with his biker clothes and horse teeth. Edna never turned into one of those news-making towns like our Iowa neighbors, busting landlords for housing immigrants, jailing Mexicans for traffic violations, threatening the schoolteachers who refused to turn over lists of Hispanic-surnamed children. Edna had soccer games and harmony dinners, and when the one priest in town refused to perform Spanish mass, Charlie Burt persuaded the Lutheran minister to donate church space to a Spanish-speaking circuit priest who rode into town once a week. Even the mild Lutherans put down their collective foot when Charlie Burt suggested hanging a crucifix at the altar.

Charlie spotted me and cuffed the top of my spine in his enormous scarred hand. “Look here, everybody,” he said. “This here is Odile, and she went off to California for a few years but now she's back. Odile, I bet you never thought we'd have a true-to-life Cinco de Mayo right here in Edna, did you?”

“I guess not.”

“A lot's changed here in Edna. A lot's changed. For the better! Let me buy you something. A corunda, Mexican wedding cookies.” He enunciated coo-roon-dah. “You can't get those in San Francisco, can you?”

“Actually—”

“You know what mistake they made out there? Putting everything in the dot-com bubble. Here in Edna we never had a bubble. That's why we're still thriving. We're going to be thriving, too. As long as people eat bacon we will be okay.”

His boosterism exhausted me. The hand on the neck felt good, though. It hit me how many weeks it had been since a man's fingers had been wrapped around my neck.

To be honest, I'd had a girlhood crush on Charlie Burt. Who didn't? Charlie talked slow but clever circles around management, Charlie faced down the cops, Charlie chatted on the phone with Bruce Springsteen. I've been tainted by San Francisco, though, where a guy as ungroomed as Charlie would be mistaken for an old roadie who would pin you to a barstool with his tedious tales about touring with the Dead.

Still I went out for coffee with Charlie Burt, for a drink at the Lion's Den. For dinner. Jean Seberg had instilled in me early the thirst to go out with a variety of men: young/old, cute/ugly, married or not. I wanted to be that girl in the Citroën pulling away from the curb.

I guess I am not the best person in the world to tell Jean's story. But what the fuck, nobody else is doing it. Her evaporation from the landscape depresses me; there are mornings I don't want to inhabit a world that fails to imagine Jean Seberg. Before I left San Francisco I had a long talk with a girl who made me believe, fleetingly, the city still could be young and hip: she was a collagist who procured police reports of rapes, scissored them up, and reassembled them as poetry. I thought she would be interested in Jean Seberg, and I rambled, the way my mother used to ramble to my friends about having once seen Patricia McBride dance (her fondest moment!), ignoring the polite, indifferent coughs. I heard myself tell the girl all about Hakim and his wife, about the Panthers, about J. Edgar Hoover's vow to neutralize her, and when I paused the girl said, “I hate it when people racialize everything. I just don't see people in terms of skin color.” Which made me want to go to bed. Forever.

But instead of honoring Jean's story, weaving the threads that resist any pattern, I ordered a floral dress and T-strapped sandals. I got a thrill when the UPS box arrived, and I ordered more: a book about the FBI, an espresso maker, garnet earrings. I dedicated a corner of my kitchen to flattened cartons. I picked a fight on Facebook with a Bay Area friend about how the anti–Prop 8 campaign went wrong. I saw in my newsfeed a group of women celebrating a birthday and I was haunted, throughout the day, by the certainty that, even if I had been in California, I wouldn't have been invited. I came to think of Edna as a deeply earned jail term.

“That's why I try not to get involved with the so-called social media,” Charlie Burt said, as we sat in a booth at Esquivel's. “Now, don't get me wrong: I tweet. But only in the name of the city of Edna.”

“You tweet?” I helped myself to the tomatillo salsa.

“Only as the city of Edna. I sing its praises. Of course, people know it's me behind the avatar, judging from the comments I get. Not all of them kind, mind you.”

“How could anyone not be kind to you?” I asked. I wasn't flattering. Charlie created a circle of calm around him, a fortress. I had been trying to be unkind for days to no avail.

“Oh, well, you'd be surprised.” He sliced his enchiladas with his knife. “Now, usually, what they have to say is not very original. But sometimes people can get very creative, particularly with anatomical improbabilities and commands of incestuous actions and some such and so forth. But, like I say, that's not the usual.”

“What's the usual?” I asked.

“Oh, you know. Nigger lover, spic lover, faggot lover, badabadonk, badabadink.” His do-rag had a
Finding Nemo
motif. Charlie's daughter was a pediatric nurse in Iowa City and every week she drove out to Edna to sponge down his countertops and bring him a box of old scrubs he could scavenge for kerchiefs. She was a blond, jolly girl, strong round arms; she friended me after we met and filled her page with pictures of her and her girlfriends hoisting martinis and affecting gang signs.

“Still?” I asked.

“Every day.”

“Every
da
y
?”

A boy of twelve appeared from the kitchen with a broom and long-handled dustpan. He started sweeping in brisk strokes, as if he were raking leaves.

“I'd say about every day. You would be amazed what people can say from the veil of anonymity. You would be amazed.”

Guillermo Esquivel, the owner, a man with a comically alarmed mien, brought a plate of flautas we hadn't ordered.

“Now look at that,” Charlie Burt said. “How much do I owe you, Guillermo?”

Guillermo wagged a finger at him.

“You are too good to us,” the mayor said. “Now this right here is the upside to being mayor.”

Charlie's daughter told me when the Mexicans began to appear—first by carload, to be housed in trailers off State Road 24, then by van and bus—Charlie did more than welcome them. “He totally went native.” She had a raucous laugh; she seemed to inherit all of Charlie's equanimity and was uncursed by his powers of reflection. “That's the reason my mom left,” she said. “Two years of a lockout? Hey, no problem. Black union janitors from Chicago sleeping on the living room floor? That's cool. But once he jacked the pickup on hydraulics she hauled outta there.”

I said to Charlie, “That's what fucked up Jean Seberg. Anonymity. The rumors about her getting pregnant by a Black Panther. She got so upset, her baby died a few hours after birth.”

“Oh, well, sure. But that was the FBI.” Charlie threw one arm across the back of the banquette and rubbed his belly with the other hand. “That was a sophisticated operation.” One thing I liked about Charlie was that I never had to explain to him about Jean Seberg. He knew all about her, as he knew about all the famous people from this part of Iowa—an astronaut, an opera singer, a gay novelist from the fifties. A mass murderer, too.

“The net result is the same, isn't it,” I said darkly.

“Neutralizing? Well, only if you allow it to be. Of course I don't attract the interest of the FBI. Not anymore. No, I just attract a bunch of cowards with too much time on their hands. Now that poor girl there, she never had a chance.”

The sweeping boy came to our booth and gestured impatiently at my feet. I lifted them and he swept beneath me, knocking my soles with his broom handle. The front window admitted the milky haze of the Iowa afternoon. The streets were damp and empty; hard to believe we once crowded them, shoulder to shoulder, meatpackers with their wives and kids, hollering for an end to the lockout.

“I wonder what happened to all those strikers,” I said.

Charlie stared where I was staring. “Oh, they're still around. They just all went indoors.”

A
FTER
I
HAD
Googled Barack Obama a couple times I started getting pop-up ads for chocolate singles. Every morning at the same time I craved a macchiato, went to the supermarket Starbucks, and ran into Megan McKibbee, who was now concerned that the Iowa Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage. “I'm
concerned
,” she said, photographing her beverage. “I am not a homophobe. But I do believe in freedom of religion.” The oftener I saw Megan the more I remembered her from high school, sitting in the front of English class, waving her hand, declaiming that Jane Austen was so
relatable
.

I drew deeply on my iced macchiato, trying to induce brain freeze.

Jean Seberg's baby, Nina Gary, was buried in Marshalltown, not far from the rest of the Seberg family (except for Nina's parents, both suicides, both laid to rest in Paris). The Riverside Cemetery was inclusive, but segregated: the Catholics lay across the footpath from the Lutherans, the Germans cordoned from the Swedes, with a small but special spot for the blacks; the veterans mingled in death as in life. It was a gorgeous old graveyard, shaded by sycamores. There was Jean's father, Ed the pharmacist; her mother Dorothy; her brother David, who celebrated his high school graduation gunning the dusty road to Edna and was killed when his car skidded and ignited a dry patch of grass; Jean's beloved grandmother, a frontierswoman with a creative streak, the only member of Jean's family who adored meeting the likes of Bobby Short and Burl Ives. The graveyard was tended but not manicured, bouquets here and there in various stages of desiccation, one freshly dug grave awaiting its coffin, the black Iowa clay piled alongside it. The tombstones straight or leaning. I considered buying a little bunch of forget-me-nots at the cemetery shop to place on Nina's grave, but what was the point, really? Who would see? Instead, I took a picture.