by April Smith
“The whole superstructure of this country is collapsing,” he says, charging upstairs. “There’s downward pressure on everything.”
“Including me,” she replies, exasperated, as they pass.
I take the kitten in my lap and watch from a child’s point of view as the arguing parents thunder by. Stone’s boots raise dust on the runner tacked along the treads—which I remember checking out, piece by piece, for false compartments beneath the stair. That was before the discovery of the arms cache—before I knew that Daddy stole the bunnies that were rescued from starvation at the dump, in order to feed the rattlesnakes that were guarding Daddy’s guns.
“It’s everywhere,” Stone is lecturing. “Even for people who are medium well-off. Nobody can make it anymore.”
“Could the apocalypse wait until Saturday? I’ll drive you wherever you want to go after the market.”
“You?” He laughs as they disappear inside the bedroom.
“Oh, stop being silly,” clucks Megan, but a few minutes later she is heading back downstairs with a purpose.
I find her in the dining room, digging through the sideboard until she has what she is looking for—two bankbooks I have already examined. Neither shows a balance of more than fifteen hundred dollars.
“Phew!” She uses them to fan herself dramatically. “Last time he was in a mood like this, he took out three hundred dollars with no memory of what happened to it.”
“He doesn’t remember? Really?”
She slips the bankbooks in her pocket.
“We have ‘happy Julius days,’ ‘depressed Julius days,’ and ‘just plain crazy.’”
“How can you stand it? I thought when you left for Lillian’s funeral, you might not come back.”
“We fight, but that’s the way it is. We’ve been together a long time, Darcy.”
“That’s what women say whose husbands beat them up.”
Mistake!
Megan’s eyes narrow, defending her man.
“Julius has never laid a hand on me. Or any woman.”
Stuttering, I say, “I didn’t mean to say Allfather was like that.”
“It has gotten worse.” She considers me with an insinuating stare. “Actually, a lot worse since you arrived.”
Sticking an agent under his nose, as we might have learned from the Steve Crawford tragedy, only succeeds in aggravating the paranoia of a person like Dick Stone. His behavior has become irrational, and Megan is close to stating the truth: Once again, the FBI is responsible for letting the genie out of the bottle.
“I used to be able to talk him down. But what he did to Slammer…” Her voice breaks. “He was gone. He couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t physically stop him.”
We hear Stone stomping around upstairs.
“Where is he going?”
“To see his friend Toby,” she replies fretfully. “All of a sudden he’s got to see Toby, the most important thing in the world. The single day I have to go to Portland, and it’s a long drive in the opposite direction.”
“Why don’t I go along and keep an eye on him, Megan?”
Her eyes rise to the old beamed ceiling and her lips pinch.
“I wish I could get him to stay on his meds, but he refuses. Stubborn man.”
She looks at her watch.
“What time do you have to be in Portland?” I ask helpfully.
Megan hesitates. It is clear she’ll never make it to the market to sell her hazelnut brittle unless somebody volunteers to babysit Stone.
“Go with him,” she says, “but if he’s still like this, promise me you will not let him drive.”
Clouds of fog lie in the valleys, and the hills are saturated black. It stays that way, everlasting twilight. Nothing moves beside the houses and fences that blur the edge of our vision except the suddenly peaceful bandit, who seems to be flying past at eighty miles an hour, as if without benefit of a vehicle, like one of those maharishis known to levitate cross-legged over the mountains of India.
No way was he going to let me drive. He is the center. He is on the flight deck. He checks the green dials pulsing at the changes in the atmosphere—changes I imagine that he needs to know. Green dial faces are loyal. Amber ones are false. The amber ones do not worry him because he knows the truck is secure. As we crossed the misty yard, he called to me to make sure the engine hoses were clamped tight and there were no explosives hidden under the seat.
Now he is just steering the truck, maybe wondering what in hell made him so touchy when, in fact, he has everything! They tried disinformation, but he knew the game. They sent a provocateur, whom he skillfully disabled. His euphoria is rising. He feels like Jesus Christ—in a good way.
“Careful,” I say for the second or third time. “Who is this guy Toby Himes? I saw him at the festival.”
“Old pal of mine. He’s selling a boat. Check it out.” He pats his stomach. “Lost four more pounds.”
“Good for you.”
Then Dick Stone decides to drive for a while in the opposite lane.
“Let’s get there alive, if you don’t mind.”
He laughs until he can’t stop laughing, swerving back across the road.
No soldier at a reckless gallop, no jet pilot screaming upside down, no Navy Seal in dead of night, mad junkie, murdering, thrill-seeking sadistic monster; no hero under fire or Purple Heart, adrenaline-locked-eighteen-year-old-joyful-virgin-fucker; no one-eyed god, no God-drunk raven razoring the most primitive chartreuse skies of perpetual black rain was ever as purely out-of-body high as Dick Stone is now.
And he is like this recently, a lot.
The two-lane blacktop rounds a curve and we are afforded an inspirational view of mountains meeting mountains, whispering to the horizon beyond the wide green water of the Columbia River. There are a preposterous number of waterfalls in the mountains along this road, and we are passing yet another, a needle-thin cascade that falls maybe two hundred feet, raising clouds of mist that blanket stands of wildflowers—white anemones, Dick Stone has said.
“Beautiful.”
“That’s the spirit of Bob Marley, right there.”
“Bob Marley? Are you a fan of reggae music?” I ask just to say something.
“Major fan. He had it right about Babylon nation.”
“What is Babylon nation? When Slammer was going on about it, I figured he was just stoned.”
“Babylon is the Vampire. The inability of the white race to live in the natural world without destroying it. Babylon System is America, the whore of nations, gorged on luxury and fornication—but remember, that’s before Armageddon.”
“Gotcha.”
“See these waterfalls? A gargantuan river of melted ice comes raging down from Canada, fifty miles an hour, a thousand feet deep, gouging through those cliffs.” Stone is in a kind of rapture. “You want to talk cataclysmic?”
“All because of the white man.”
He disregards my wit. “It’s coming.”
“What is?”
“The Big One.”
“Another cataclysm?”
“Of major proportion.”
“What is the Big One, Julius?”
“The end of arrogance and superiority.”
“That could mean the Yankees. Come on, give me something to work with.”
“Funny girl.”
“What’s going on, Julius? Are we—the people at the farm—are we involved in something a lot more violent than I think?”
He smiles slyly. “I wouldn’t want to freak you out.”
“I can guess.”
“What?”
“You’re going to blow something up with a blood bomb.”
Somehow, this flatters him. He settles back in the seat. “A long time ago, before I switched careers to filbert farming, I firebombed a power tower.”
“Really? Cool! Where was this?”
“Ski resort.”
“Why? You didn’t like waiting on the lift?”
Stone chuckles.
Today he is allowing me to tease him. It’s like scratching a pit bull behind the ears.
“The neat part was that all we had to bring the thing down were a couple buckets of fuel, a kitchen timer, and an igniter they use for model rockets. You should have seen that thing keel over—power lines, trees, man, that was a tangle—tipping, tipping…tipping… into twelve feet of pure virgin snow.”
“Because?”
“Somebody was pissed off about endangered cats. I can’t remember what kind.”
Caution. No, it’s okay. Darcy, the activist, would know.
“Were they lynx?”
He looks pleased. “That’s right.”
Ecoterrorism. Vail, Colorado. A wave of unsolved fire bombings the Bureau has been chasing since the early nineties.
“That was impressive. Nobody ever took credit.”
He slaps my thigh in a friendly way. “Now you know.”
I can get anything I want from him now. What a feeling! It’s exciting. Tremendous! This is the good thing about penetrating without an informant: Nobody can snitch off you; nobody can compromise you. If we had tried to flip Megan, I’d never be where I am at this moment, confident and relaxed, riding up front with Stone. It’s as if you’ve stepped through the danger and you’re actually being sheltered by the source. The real source, which is Stone’s mind, a mandala of private symbols and pulsing hurts, in which the figure of Darcy DeGuzman has come to stand as a trusted ally. I see why guys like Angelo are addicted. It’s the greatest high in the world, to carry the shield you swore upon, to be representing the good people of this country, and the innocent, to be their emissary, to have the ability to talk with somebody who actually wants to harm you—talking to that person’s heart.
“This was in your badass revolutionary days.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Who said they’re over?”
I can barely control the eagerness. Everything seems so close. So possible.
“Does Toby have something to do with all this? You seem hell-bent on seeing him today.”
“He found the kind of boat I need.”
“For the Big One? Tell me.”
Now he is teasing. “Mmm, I’m not sure you’re ready to know.”
“Why not?”
Another trial of fire and ice?
“You promised to do something for me.”
“Off Herbert Laumann? I said I’d do it and I will.”
He assents in a fatherly way. That’s all for now.
“Be at peace and know that everything is unfolding as it should.”
“Swell. I’m in nirvana. When is lunch?”
When do we get approval from FBIHQ for the hit? What will it take to get the accountants off the dime? Because that’s the way it always is—the criminal side of the house versus the bean counters, leaving undercovers stranded on a seductively beautiful road like this one, guessing which fork leads to paradise, and which one to perdition.
We are edging along the Lewis and Clark Trail. In pictures you always see the explorers pointing, and with good reason. Imagine if you had discovered this plentitude of lumber and the riches of the salmon run. Not anymore, as Dick Stone vehemently points out, since a chain of hydroelectric dams has displaced the chinook’s ancient pathways to the sea.
“Look at those monstrosities, totally fucked the river. They are everything that’s wrong with big business and the U.S. government.”
“Without ’em, we wouldn’t have electric lights.”
“Fascist pigs,” Stone growls. “Monuments to ego.”
I stare at the dams going by—colossal concrete bunkers crested by powerhouse electric grids—remembering the surveillance photo of Megan, aka Laurel, confronting Congressman Abbott somewhere along this river, and that Dick Stone would have been there, too, but there is no credible way to bring it up. Below the spillways, where tons of water empty downstream from the dams, colorful windsurfers flick about the anthracite surface of the water, scraps in the bottom of a chasm.
“What did you do before you blew up that tower?”
“I was in the FBI.”
I just about eject through the roof of the truck.
“And I was in the CIA,” I say calmly.
“Don’t believe me.”
“You’re just playing.” Pause. “Am I right?”
At that moment, two sheriff’s cars pass at normal speed. What is this? A signal?
This can’t be happening. He can’t be telling me this now.
Dick Stone replies amiably, “What’d you think? Can you see me wearing a suit, in the FBI?”
“Suits with guns?”
He laughs. “Guys in suits, with no sex life, who fight alien life-forms.”
“Yeah.” I grin. “That’s you.”
But Stone is deliberating something. “Do you remember the Weather Underground?”
“That was a little before my time, but yeah, they were anarchists who were against the Vietnam War.”
“‘Bring the war home,’” Stone says grimly. “That was the slogan.”
“They set off bombs, right?”
“Three of them blew themselves up trying to build a bomb in a town house in Greenwich Village.”
“I vaguely remember.”
Memorized the files.
“What about the Weather Underground?” I prompt. “Were you part of it?”
“Me?” He dismisses the thought. “Hoover’s gangsters really fucked those people. Destroyed their lives. Hard times comin’, no matter which side you were on,” he says. “Sad. Really sad.”
The truck window is down and a river wind is washing Dick Stone’s commanding profile clean, blowing his long blond hair back over the built muscles of his neck, so a tuft of white in the honey-colored sideburns is revealed. In the deep lines of the forehead, and the clenched brows trying to grip whatever vision keeps eluding him at the far side of the journey, I see a middle-aged man asking if his life has been a fake.
Then he attempts to discard it, the past thirty years of it, with a rapid shake of the head, but a long silence follows as the road climbs the dark pine highlands, and we exit, loop up and back toward a spectacular gleaming bridge that leads to the Washington side of the river, as if leaving one fairy-tale kingdom of spells and lies for another.
From the bridge, a hundred feet above the Columbia River, the vault of space the water carved is enormous, enough to contain the talk of all this history and more; it’s as if you could lift off the railing and lie in the hammock of the wind, out of time, like the hawks.
But as we cross the bridge, I feel the threads of my connection to the Bureau tug and unravel. Dick Stone’s aborted confession hints at more than what management has been telling me. I know this because of the transparency of the way we are together in the car. I know because he’s dropped the craziness he cultivates with Megan, as if he’s aching to find someone with whom he can come clean. For the moment, Dick Stone trusts me enough to take a brief ride on the violent currents of the past—entwined and gone, and constantly renewed, like the twisted air.
“What the fuck is that?”
We have crossed into the state of Washington, passing sunny fields of yellow mustard. Ahead we can see flashing lights and backed-up vehicles surrounding a traffic accident. I spot unmarked vans and the same cars from the sheriff’s department that passed us an hour ago, and wonder if it’s a trap.
Stone’s paranoia is infectious. Have the orders come through from Washington? Is a SWAT team waiting to rush the car?
Not now. Not yet.
“Let’s avoid this, go left,” I vamp, and we turn sharply, ending up on a long private drive that leads to a contemporary lodge of huge logs and flower-covered walkways, something out of a Swedish Western. We double back, avoiding the accident by a couple of miles, and take the first fork east.
Not to perdition, or to paradise.
To a river town called Stevenson.
Where Dick Stone’s pal Toby Himes wants to sell a boat.
Thirty-two
We enter the town by crossing an old railroad bridge, which runs into a nostalgic street of local businesses—your time-honored pharmacy and coffee shop, picture gallery and independent bookstore—and stop for gas across the street from the Dough Folk bakery.
Dick Stone sends me inside to get crullers. “Best in the world,” he says.
I wait while a pair of elderly sisters, both wearing overcoats and high socks in the summer heat, order biscuits and gravy to go. Across the street, Dick Stone is putting gas into the white truck. Engaged in this most American moment, he seems to be an ordinary, slightly grizzled outdoorsman who takes his freedoms for granted.
The sun is shining and someone has driven by towing six canoes.
The white truck pulls to the curb and waits.
A hot breeze scented with cinnamon-sugar follows me as I hurry out the screen door of the bakery. Clutching a box of fresh fried crullers, I walk around the truck and slide into the front seat.
“Aren’t these great?” Stone wolfs one.
He smiles with pleasure at the old-fashioned taste of crisp dough and powdered sugar. We pass an inlet where a kayaker drifts in ripples of blue. Mountain buttercups are blooming in the new grass all along the road to Toby Himes’s house—an orderly house in a spick-and-span town.
Northwest tidy, you might say, like the ubiquitous trimmed mustaches and khaki shorts: a clapboard cottage painted buttermilk with pumpkin trim, a concrete slab for a porch where a golden chow sleeps beside a pot of geraniums. There are two cobalt blue metal chairs, the Dodge pickup in the driveway, along with a small powerboat on a trailer hitch, and a muddy ten-speed bike, unsecured, near a vegetable patch.
Toby Himes opens the door and the men embrace, Toby patting Stone on the back with thin, nervous fingers and calling him “Doctor.” He seems to match the clean and fluffy dog, and the neat yard. He is even more tailored than at the midsummer festival: a tall black man with glasses, white hair, and a neat white goatee, wearing a pressed shirt, slacks, and moccasins.
Not your image of a wacked-out Vietnam vet.
Toby Himes, who has an engineering job with the town of Stevenson, is still the only person of color I have seen. He must be Dick Stone’s age, but he is willowy and thin, whereas Stone has bulked out. The courtly manners and soft accent feel like the Old South, but in these austere bachelor chambers, there is no trace of a likewise genteel woman. One room is entirely bare except for free weights and Chinese drawings depicting the poses of kung fu.