Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  Amy said nothing.

  “Then of course it was ours, it just fastened on us! We had to shut it in a back room and there it howled while we waited for the animal control people to make an appearance. You can imagine. You know these people. But Charles fed it faithfully, didn’t you, Charles?”

  “All but the one day.”

  “Shame on you, dear. Whatever day?”

  “When we were off having Hari Raya. . . .” Barnes scratched his yellow arm.

  “Guess what I found today!” Amy got up unsteadily. “In the house. In the amah’s pantry. Look at this.” She grabbed the box and tipped the snakeskin out onto the table, making loops on the glass. When she stepped back, Barnes gave a weak shout and jumped up, knocking over his chair and beer bottle.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, Charles.” Eleanor leaned forward to sop up the beer with napkins and scrutinize the skin. “I’d be willing to bet that’s a cobra!” Barnes was over against the flagstone wall. “Charles is phobic,” Eleanor said wearily. “She said, dear, that it went behind the water heater. By now it’s off hunting, like Kaa. After rodents, not us. Quite gone.”

  “I’m just—I’m going out for just a moment to see—we have a dog here,” Amy said, putting up her hands to keep them in their seats.

  “Whatever is the matter? Where are you off to?” It was Carruthers, pushing aside the palm leaves and coming out with her. “Look here, a cobra doesn’t swallow a dog.”

  “Do keep that bee from launching an attack!” cried Eleanor’s voice from inside. “One of those pesky great bees has been assaulting poor Amy over the washing!”

  “Over my dead body!” Barnes had recovered himself and came blinking out into the sun swinging his wife’s big embroidered purse by the straps.

  Amy grabbed for the purse, in slow motion because of the beer. “Don’t! You can’t swat it!”

  But Barnes held on. “Oh no no. There’s no need! No, my dear, this is what you do. The clothesline, is it?”

  The clothesline was in the same place in all the yards. He got away from Amy while Carruthers trotted backward blocking her path and waving his arms. “Amy! Now then! A cobra won’t go after a dog! Not to worry.” But the dog was gone.

  All day the bee had its routine, leaving its perch and returning. Over and over all day long it left and returned on some errand, until the sun went down. Then it went somewhere secret. It slept.

  “I have the culprit in view,” came Barnes’s voice. “He’s not an insect, he’s a V-2!”

  Amy shook Carruthers off her arm. Barnes had Eleanor’s purse hairspray straight out in front of him in both hands. “Try this in the propeller!” The bee was visible in the jet of spray. It wobbled on the clothespin, shivering its wings one at a time, and dropped to the ground where it began to crawl past the bird with no eyes, which Amy had failed to wrap up and throw away. It crawled over the mess of fallen orchids, laboring now, and over the network of roots leading under the bush.

  “Oh, God!” Before Amy’s eyes everything went dark gold, like gasoline. She slapped the spray can out of Barnes’s hands, straight up in the air, and shoved him in the chest. He staggered backward against the garbage cans, which clattered over and spilled with him between them, at the same time as Amy dropped to all fours so that she could spread the branches, so clamped to the ground they were half roots already. She couldn’t see anything under the bush, but she could hear a metallic resounding from the trash cans. Then streams of words from all sides. “I’m afraid,” Carruthers’s voice kept saying, “I’m afraid that she was rather fond of it,” while Eleanor Barnes was murmuring in a stricken way, pulling her husband up by the hands.

  Carruthers insisted on stroking Amy’s back and speaking very slowly to her. What was the dog’s name? And what breed of dog?

  “Why did you have to do that?” She stayed down on the ground while a voice came out of her, flat and mean. “Why would you hurt a bee? I bet you think you’re a good person. I bet you don’t know what the Prophet said. He said the man who tied up his cat and starved it would be thrown into hell.” After she said that she had a return of dead sobriety and opened her eyes. Maybe they would not be there.

  But there they were. There was an open-endedness to the scene, as if they might be in the process of rehearsing it. There was Barnes blindly cleaning his glasses. There was Eleanor wordlessly holding him by the arm, both of them looking shocked and old. Of course. And herself, below them, in the dirt with anthills and shreds of ancient plastic.

  Eleanor’s blouse was untucked, her nose was purple under melting powder. Her face had puffed up so that she resembled those bedraggled women who sat in the dirt outside refugee tents.

  “I’m sorry,” Amy said. “I’m awful. I’m awful.”

  “You aren’t yourself,” Eleanor got out finally. “I must say.”

  “Ready?” Carruthers said, and he hoisted Amy to her feet with so much momentum it almost threw her into his arms, but she pulled free. She bowed her head and held out her hand to Barnes, who took it weakly and smiled at her. Of course it would happen that way. He would smile at her.

  “Don’t forgive me,” she said.

  “We’ll be off, and you have a rest,” Eleanor said, getting back some of her authority. “Heat will combine with alcohol, you know, or . . .” She looked Amy up and down.

  “I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you think,” Amy said. “Don’t touch me,” she said to Carruthers, lifting his hand off her arm. “I’m unclean.” She laughed a short burst and then another, on the way to the front door. Hurriedly the three guests bent, the Barneses propping each other, and put on their shoes.

  It had been Eleanor Barnes. The voice in a kitchen in the lorong, at a meeting of the Koran study group.

  “Oh, I think in her twenties. Poor man, she just made off with him. A silly little thing. A little floor nurse, I think she was. But look at her, of course.” “Do you think they are married?” “Heaven knows, my dear. And there were children. And the wife was so involved here years ago, I’m told. Quite his equal.” Then there was silence, the silence of someone pointing, because Amy had gone in through the kitchen ahead of them, it was the amah’s day off and she went into the amah’s bathroom.

  A silly little thing. Of course in that bathroom there was no toilet. But now she was in there. There was a pit, quite clean, and a little hose. She kept thinking of turning the hose on herself, drenching herself from head to foot.

  A silly little thing.

  She, who in another country had wrapped a brown leg severed at the knee in her shirt, and carried it under her arm, pressed against her and dripping down her ribs like a bloodied infant. She and her partner were in their underpants; they had taken off their jeans to make a kind of hammock. With him she was carrying the one-legged boy, shocky and grinning, who kept sighing, “Gracias, gracias.”

  A silly little thing. She, who had, at home in her own city, shriveled a boy the same age as that one to a skeleton by uttering in savage joy, as she stood with his father in a crowded place, the ordinary syllable, “Yes.”

  Later that day she had a different reaction to it. She warmed to the idea. A silly little thing. The comfort of being that.

  But at the time she stayed in the amah’s bathroom for a while, and when she opened the door she thought about going home, but went around to the front of the house instead and came in again, and sat down to tea as if she had merely been out finding something forgotten in the car, though she had no car, she had come on foot, and in an hour she would walk back, in the loud afternoon shrilling of that insect, whatever it was, that drowned out thought.

  She could hear a mosquito under the net with her. It was late, the plush navy darkness. She was awake because the ceiling fan and the radio had suddenly come on.

  She sat up and yanked the net aside with her feet: John had not come back. And the telephone had not rung. No call from his family. Nothing about his son. But Skylab had fallen. Of course it had; it had fallen in the afternoon
, even before they were sitting with their beer arguing about it.

  It had not landed on anyone.

  Several BBC reporters were doing a sort of reprise of the day, hour by hour as Skylab lumbered down the sky, now over this city, now over that. What was it the voices reminded her of? As they had been predicting with more and more certainty all along, Skylab had come down far from any human settlement, in Australia. It had done no harm.

  But something was wrong. Something had filled Amy with an awful, stifling regret while she slept.

  “. . . the way we expected it to. And that’s a relief to a lot of people in that part of the world who have a crick in their neck. But there’s work to be done to set the public’s mind at rest, and I think, don’t you? that NASA would be the first to agree it’s their job to do it.”

  Charge nurses sometimes had that reined-in satisfaction when everything was going to pieces. The nuns—that was it—the nuns had had it when they rounded everyone up for an assembly after a girl had been expelled. That insistence on the hidden order that included whatever had taken place, but still required them to search their consciences, each one, to see if the punishment that had fallen on that other girl was really meant for her.

  Amy got up and stood under the wobbling fan. It was too dark to see in the room. She didn’t want to step on anything alive. Did the ants labor up and down the bathroom wall all night? Why did they climb the leg of the bed in the morning, when you had left? What kept them from coming while you were there, following the scent of lips, eyeballs, sticky membranes? Why didn’t they eat you alive?

  Often the thing the expelled girl had done was something Amy herself commonly did, though in the end she was trying to hold herself back, she had to, because of a disturbing suspicion that she had a vocation. A vocation. Acts to perform that were brave, wild, wildly brave, heroic.

  But if you were protected, if you went under an umbrella of protection, then not heroic. Was it a blessing to be protected, to be skipped?

  The tile was cool to her feet as she crossed from room to room and stepped out into the dark. The porch light had burned out but she could see the great slow-winged moths at the windows, and then a bat. In the grass by the path something stirred, but there was no moon to show it. Gradually the white frangipani blossoms melted forward out of the dark as she breathed their scent.

  Mother!

  Mother, if you are out there I’m asking you to leave everything alone. Don’t save me. Don’t let someone else get my punishment. I’m asking you.

  After a while she could hear John. He was coming on foot; she could hear his step on the gravel, with the hitch from the sprained ankle. All she could see was his white shirt wavering toward the gate.

  Let the snake be. She squeezed her eyes shut. Let whatever happens happen. But not to him. Don’t let him die. Or his son. His child! Don’t let his son die. I’m asking you.

  She sank down and sat against the wall of the house, making the face of crying but not crying, just passing her hand over the ground at the edge of the flagstones, digging with her nails. She rubbed the dirt between her fingers, and on her leg.

  Pure earth. Pure earth.

  Outside the lorong, which had no streetlights, she knew the dark lost its surrounding softness, its hugeness, and let itself be broken up and moved back like the dark in any city. Here, in the fuller dark, John’s white shirt swelled like cloth in water as he unfastened the gate. In a disconnected piece of her life she had climbed the steep streets of a coastal town after a tidal wave. She remembered being shown the jellyfish swirling along the esplanade or left glued to walls, as she walked at night exalted and calm from digging out a family alive and being kissed and blessed by them, after days of lifting and hauling and counting the dead.

  astride

  There was an incident, the summer I worked in the Pentagon. My supervisor vanished.

  That summer I didn’t know any better than to take the job offered me. I knew nothing. My father worked in the Commerce Department and raised a few Angus in Virginia, in that wide grass circle, not then covered with suburbs, that poured civil servants and in summer their college-age children into the offices of the government. I remember the commute. In the morning you would pass combines and dairy herds and girls up early schooling horses in the wet grass. I was newly appreciative of the green beauty of my state, the Old Dominion, because I had come back to it after being away at college for the first time.

  I took a typing test and not long afterward I walked up the steps of the Pentagon. I did that. I have no excuse.

  One morning toward the end of that summer my supervisor’s door was standing wide open when I arrived, and all that was left of him was the straight-backed wooden chair he had brought from home. He never came back. He had a high security clearance, though that was downplayed because the official reason given for his disappearance was thwarted passion.

  This was early in the sixties, in the days before anyone came to levitate the Pentagon. Certainly no one had attacked it. Its enchantment was internal and impervious. Whatever else has changed since then, I know the vast building must still be filled, despite the throngs inside it, with the same cathedral air, of hushed, guarded, exquisite knowledge. No photograph really shows it as the massive thing it is, a stone wheel covered with portholes, an inhabited wheel, spun down into Virginia swampland and fallen on its side, to be cordoned and protected forever.

  It was a city, with sloping ramp-avenues leading to a vast city square of shops and restaurants, the Concourse. The Concourse had the feeling of a great hotel as well as that of a department store. Dignitaries were led along it, parades marched through it, shoppers crowded the aisles of pottery and books. Other countries may give their generals villas, but surely they are outdone by this bazaar of flowers and souvenirs and cosmetics, of pastries, crystal, and the scented wood of carvings, available to everyone, right in the heart of the fort.

  In the seventeen miles of corridor, which radiated in spokes and revolved in concentric rings, pedestrians flowed aside for motorized carts carrying men with brooms and buckets, or sometimes tanned young lieutenants in summer uniform, calmly steering little vehicles among the civilians on foot. Little boys saluted them. There were crowds of children there, headdresses, saris floating. Regular tours came through from schools and embassies.

  It was never clear which individuals were not important. Always disputable. A janitor could be going through the wastebaskets on the orders of a foreign government.

  Underneath the building was an enormous depot with the green and white buses of Washington and the red buses of Virginia, and even Greyhounds, pulling up to dozens of stations and surging away with echoes and grinding of gears. In the late afternoon I descended a numbered stairway to get the bus to Commerce where I would meet my father, whose day was longer than mine. Hundreds waited with me on hot platforms with puddles steaming where the air-conditioning dripped. In the gloom you looked through open hangars to the white air of Virginia. The buses shimmered one last time as their backs crossed into the shade. Blue exhaust, islands of pink gum on the concrete, at every station people just down from the Concourse with their bags and packages. Anything could have been carried into or out of DOD, as we called it, the Department of Defense.

  What really happened to my boss, Mr. Orlenko, was that he was accused of a security violation. All of us knew we stood to lose our clearances, even our jobs, if we failed to take every precaution with classified material. But we knew, too, how unlikely it was that our little errors would hurt us, we knew we were innocent.

  From the secretaries—“Mr. Orlenko, what a pain!”—we knew he had a wife still in shock from the DP camp after years in this country. He was Ukrainian. He hated the Soviet Union with a devotion of hatred. At the mention of Khrushchev his heavy-lidded eyes would grow sinister. From his window he would scout the wide parking lots as if he could see the hammer and sickle creeping in a liquid Disney shadow across them. He hated the president, whose inauguration w
as still fresh in everybody’s mind, mine in particular because of the raising of a poet to the dais, white-haired Frost, pure as his name—nobody then knew of meanness in a poet—the poet I had studied all the spring before, in my freshman year.

  I was a clerk-typist. Somebody read through records and newspapers every day looking for certain references, then gave the marked passages to the typists to type into lists for Mr. Orlenko, who was able to enter each item into lists of his own.

  Mr. Orlenko was an analyst. Subjects he analyzed were apt to be already classified and to move up to a higher classification because they had been worked on by him. His desk was a haystack of legal pads and folders stamped “Secret,” and like all the offices his had its safe, that is, a filing cabinet—in his case two of them—with a combination lock and a steel rod dropped through the drawer handles and padlocked.

  The theme of our summer was National Security.

  The theme covered everything from the aims of the Soviet Union to our own missteps and oversights. At that time, one-use carbon ribbons preserved everything we typed in a readable form; although the letters jumped and skittered unevenly along the tape, a spy could unfurl the ribbon and read your whole document. Of course the college students with summer jobs were the poorest at remembering to take out their ribbons and lock them up at the end of the day.

  Considering that we were there not to help them but to spring into jobs above their heads at a later stage, the real-life secretaries were lenient about our carelessness and indeed about everything, including the job of proofreading what we typed. “You passed the typing, hm?” Typing was the major part of the test we had taken to rule out nepotism in our placement.

  That summer no matter what we actually did at our desks we were called interns, and heard lectures in one of the small, dark, deep-chaired auditoriums to be found in the building, like chapels, though there were actual chapels as well, filled in wartime, we heard, with praying employees. At any rate men spoke to us in a comfortable chamber, gray-blue, soundproofed because some of the movies shown there were about ordnance, or materiel. We all liked the word materiel, and liked to throw it into conversations. “But did you have any materiel on you?” The movies were presented as entertainment, as none of the interns that summer was an engineering student who might go into materiel. We were an unpromising group; most were English majors, displaying volumes of poetry or existential novels on our desks. The girls typed, the boys shadowed a deputy assistant for the summer. No history majors; only one in political science. The light went down and a blue glow stole out from a recess above the paneling. A silver cone crossed the screen to the music from Exodus.