American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

  But the hook was in. I was curious. I called Cressida at the Times, and she answered on the first ring, hurriedly spitting out her name as if angry at its length.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Aidan, I don’t have time for—”

  “I need your help.”

  “Can’t it wait till dinner? We are still having dinner tonight, right?”

  “It’s about the bombing. I might be onto something.”

  “You?” she cried. “How could you be onto anything? What, did one of your readers confess?”

  “Come on, I’m serious. I’ll fill you in later. Right now I need you to do a background check on someone.”

  “What the hell has gotten into you? Does this have to do with Touché?”

  “Cressida . . .” She didn’t answer, which I took as a sign of intrigue (she was a reporter, after all). “Please,” I said.

  “Fine, give me the name.”

  This I wasn’t ready for. And I did something I still can’t quite believe.

  “It’s actually a few names. Easton St. Claire, Paige Roderick, and Kimball LeRoux.” I spelled them out.

  “Are these real? They look fake. Did you just—”

  “Come on, stop.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ll see what comes up.”

  “Thank you. How’s Malatesta at nine thirty?”

  “Do you promise you’ll explain this when I get there?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I’ll see you then, love.”

  The line went dead, but her last word hung in the air. As if it didn’t belong.

  PAIGE

  WE STOPPED FOR THE NIGHT AT A MOTEL JUST SHORT OF WILKES-BARRE, Pennsylvania. Keith stayed in the car while Lindsay and I paid cash for two rooms. She snores, Lindsay told the young man behind the desk, motioning at me for effect. He smiled faintly, nervously, then printed out the paperwork. Lindsay signed it using a false name. We were ready with a backstory—two tired girls driving to a friend’s wedding—but he never asked. How difficult it might have been. How easy it was. Details were everything, and Lindsay, I was learning, was a pro.

  The rooms were next to each other on the ground floor. We parked a few doors away, then slipped inside—Keith into one, Lindsay and I into the other. I turned on the TV while she took a shower, but when I saw American soldiers on CNN, I turned it off. The news never changed. Lindsay was still wrapped in a towel when someone knocked on the door. Three raps, then two, then one.

  It’s Keith, she said.

  Should I get it? I asked, glancing at her outfit, but Lindsay was already moving across the room. Her hair wet, her body glistening from moisturizer, she peered through the peephole, opened the door a crack, then turned and sauntered nonchalantly back to the bathroom. Keith stepped inside.

  Are you two okay sleeping together? he asked.

  Sure, I said.

  And you’re holding up well?

  So far.

  Good.

  When Lindsay reemerged, she was wearing a small T-shirt and striped underwear. Unhurriedly, she bent down and picked up the jeans she’d left strewn on the floor, then slipped them on and joined me on the bed.

  We should talk logistics, Keith said. There’s a house waiting for us in Vermont. I’m told it’s very private and set back from the road. It’ll be our base of operations for now. Paige, you’ll start building your new identity. Lindsay and I already have ours.

  They get them from death records and obituaries, Lindsay explained. Children who died in infancy. Once they’ve found a baby that’s suitable—someone who’s the same age, sex, and ethnicity as you—they send away for a copy of the birth certificate and the rest is easy—Social Security card, driver’s license, passport, you name it.

  I already knew all this, but said nothing. What I didn’t know was who they were.

  In any case, Keith said, we can keep using our real names in private. At least until the first Action.

  The word rolled off his tongue casually, but its effect was immediate. A chill shot through me. Lindsay pulled her hair back. And there we sat, still as stones, while the details of our fugitive lives were laid before us. Keith and I would work in and around the house, researching, planning, and—here Keith paused, searching, I suppose, for the perfect turn of phrase—assembling, he said. Lindsay would be our eyes and ears. Using her new alias, she’d get a job at a local store or restaurant and watch for anything suspicious. She’d even have her own car, gassed up and waiting in the driveway.

  Next came the rules, many of which I already lived by. No cell phones (except Keith’s, for emergencies), no e-mail, no unnecessary contact or budding friendships. It was about blending in. Becoming nobody. There would be code words and rendezvous points. Keith would teach us how to hide our tracks—roam the Web anonymously, wipe down a house, vary our routes and routines. Lindsay and I were completely clean, Keith said, and as far as he knew, he was, too. There’d been no one on his tail for quite some time. Still, from this moment on, we’d be living underground. Leaving our given lives for invented ones. Within a country but without it.

  Clearly, he had been saving this speech, because Lindsay was hearing it for the first time as well. Perhaps it was his way of saying we’d be on equal footing from now on. She may have had more experience with this kind of life, but when it came to what lay ahead, she knew what I knew, nothing more.

  But what about the past? Well, I didn’t have to wait long. Keith said his piece, hugged us both good-night, then retreated to his room. I’m sure he was exhausted—he’d driven for hours—but he was also aware of boundaries and bonds, and Lindsay and I needed to create our own.

  At first, we circled each other politely. In the bathroom, I washed my face and brushed my teeth. When I emerged, the TV was back on and Lindsay was flipping restlessly through the channels. I lay on top of the sheets and closed my eyes.

  I’ve always been able to stay quiet for long periods. My brother used to say it was because I was comfortable in my own skin. I suppose that’s true. Because it wasn’t shyness or nerves; I just never craved attention. Not until my freshman year at UNC did I realize how self-conscious my silences could make other people. The fleshy-cheeked girls from vast Southern families, the perpetually stoned boys in their cargo shorts and fraying ball caps. All they did was talk and talk, incessantly self-absorbed and completely unaware of it. When I didn’t add my voice to their booming chorus, I was labeled mysterious, a challenge, above it all. And so I gave in. I started dressing like everyone else. I drank at house parties, cheered at basketball games, even joined a sorority. Except nothing ever fit right. I could never quite get there—wherever there was. Instead, I existed on the outskirts, a girl once removed. Outwardly, I remained placid and unruffled. Inside, I clawed desperately at the air as I fell toward the dark and hollow center of conformity.

  I say this because Lindsay was starting to fidget. My silence was wearing on her. She dug into her bag and produced a pack of Parliaments. Mind if I smoke? she asked.

  Go ahead.

  She walked to the front of the room and opened the curtain partway. A streetlamp cast dull yellow light over the car-lined blacktop. Lindsay cracked the window and looked around for an ashtray, settling for a plastic water cup on the bedside table.

  Keith speaks really highly of you, she said.

  I sat up. He’s only met me once, I responded. But that’s nice to hear. I’ve heard a lot about him.

  Like what?

  Nothing that concrete, I guess. Just his reputation.

  This was the answer she was looking for, and she came over and settled down at the foot of the bed.

  Well, I’ll tell you if you want to know, she said. About me and Keith, I mean.

  Okay.

  And so she did. Armed with her cigarettes and her past, she told me their entire history. Or her version of it. Enough to let me know there had been a history. Me and Keith . . .

  They had met at the WTO protests in Seattl
e. Keith Sutter was an ELF organizer; Lindsay Hardt was a student activist at a local community college. In 1999, the Earth Liberation Front was the most radical environmental activist group in the country. They tinkered with explosives, but arson was their real calling card. Economic sabotage. Working in small cells with little central coordination, they burned down everything from SUV dealerships to freshly painted housing developments, but their most famous action was the 1998 torching of five buildings and four chairlifts in Vail, Colorado, in response to the resort’s impending expansion. The brazen and clandestine nature of the group gave them allure, and more than a little media attention. They even had a press office that released statements and conducted anonymous interviews. Keith Sutter was that press office. He was also heavily involved in the Actions themselves.

  The ELF was one of dozens of radical groups that descended upon the dreary streets of Seattle that November weekend—tens of thousands of angry bodies seeking a common outlet. Lindsay said it was bound to get violent, the law of large numbers, of mob mentality, of sneering chaos, coming to the fore. It was supposed to be an antiglobalization protest, but that was just a catchphrase for the many ills of a changing world, and the varied agendas of its fuming revolutionaries—anarchists and punks, communists and labor leaders, crusaders and criminals. And the issues they advocated read like a dossier of the downtrodden and left-behind: racism, poverty, prison abuse, nuclear disarmament; the evils of science, energy, religion, property, capitalism, imperialism, free trade; the raping of Africa, Tibet, the earth. This was the throng that amassed and then combusted in a smoke-filled cauldron of clubs and tear gas and rubber bullets. Black-clad anticonsumerists smashed Starbucks windows; nihilist skinheads looted department stores; and through three breathtaking nights, the world watched transfixed as the young crusaders shut down the trade meetings and battled with beleaguered cops for control of an American city.

  If it sounds like I’m adding personal commentary here, well, I am. Because I was one of those watching. From my sorority-house bedroom in Chapel Hill, I gazed at the images pulsing through my roommate’s TV and wondered what it all meant. I was a sophomore, majoring in Political Science, and fully enveloped in the puerile routines of college life—the safe majority, a world that made sense. In 1999, the country was fueled up and running strong. UNC’s job fairs were like high school proms, the fresh-faced dot-coms showing off their slender silhouettes while America’s corporate giants, the companies our fathers had entrusted their working lives to, sulked in the corner like wallflowers. Ours was a land of opportunity, of jobs and growth and freedom, and so the searing images from Seattle were completely incongruous. What was happening out there? All those people. That naked rage. As my so-called sisters flirted and fucked in the rooms down the hall, I stared at the screen and felt the first pangs of recognition, a kind of longing to be in a place that made less sense. Or more. That somewhere in this country of plenty, people (like Keith and Lindsay) were charging at lines of armed men, rocks against guns, dreams against grenades.

  Lindsay lit another cigarette and let her damp hair back down. She was a mesmeric wisp of a girl, pale and hipless, completely self-contained. Her face was flawless—the smooth skin, the button nose, high cheekbones, accentuated chin. And her eyes, freed for the first time from her ubiquitous aviators, were a raw and piercing blue. Everything about her was a bit raw, a bit piercing, as if a sculptor had spent years shaping her into his masterpiece, only to forget some final coat of polish.

  Picture it, she said, licking her lips. All these cops, rows and rows of them, suddenly raising their shields and marching in lockstep toward us. It had been a standoff until then. We’d been blocking the key intersections; they’d been protecting the convention center. And that was fine with us. I mean, what were we going to do? Throw rocks at a huge building? Unfortunately, they finally figured out the delegates couldn’t get to the meeting with all the roads cut off. Which is when they got serious.

  Were you part of a group? I asked.

  Lindsay offered me a drag. I took one.

  I was in the Black Bloc, she said. A bunch of us up from Eugene. We looked so scary, dressed head to toe in black, our faces covered with bandannas, but really we were a bunch of Goths and neo-hippies. We were nineteen and twenty. Half of us were only there to cut classes.

  I remember on TV, I said, that huge white banner hanging from a crane. The one with arrows pointing in opposite directions. WTO one way, DEMOCRACY the other.

  The Direct Action Network did that. They were older, more organized. We were . . . oh, God, we were just kids standing in the cold trying to find some food. That’s the real reason we smashed up those coffee shops: we were hungry. No one thought it would escalate. That the cops would start moving again. We were on the corner of Sixth and Union, and it was daylight, and overcast, and there were cameramen in the crowd and helicopters above us. We’d been out there since five a.m., and still there was this vitality to everything. We were all part of different groups, but it didn’t matter. When a uniformed force is amassed against you, it’s amazing how quickly defiance becomes a common cause. Earlier, we’d been chanting and singing, and a few of the protesters still had bullhorns. When the cops started toward us, I remember hearing this voice rising above all the noise, saying, Hold your ground, hold your ground. And the voice was so calm, so natural. I was close to the front, maybe the second or third row, and when the shields went up, we started throwing things. Rocks, batteries, anything hard. Not that it mattered, we couldn’t hurt them. It all just glanced off their protection. The cops kept coming. And still that voice: We’re Americans! We have rights! We have rights! Then they gassed us. We smelled it before we felt it, before the burning. I didn’t know what it was and kept my eyes uncovered too long. A few people tried to pick up the smoking canisters and throw them right back, the way you can with grenades if you’re quick enough. But none of us were quick enough. And anyway the cops were wearing helmets. They started moving faster, relentlessly forward, their sticks out, splitting us up, driving us back. By then I couldn’t see, could barely even open my eyes. The whole world was going dark, and I just looked at the ground and tried to follow other people’s feet, the direction they were running. And then the voice was saying, Don’t panic! It’s only tear gas! Cover your eyes and noses! I’d lost my friends, or anyway, I couldn’t see them, so I moved toward the voice. It was like the one thing that made sense.

  I was sitting up in the bed, perfectly still. All of this. She was such a frail girl.

  It was Keith, she continued. The voice of reason in all that madness. I ran right into him while people were getting clubbed everywhere around us. They go for the back of your legs, you know. It’s what they’re trained to do. So you just wilt right there in front of them, get kicked and crushed and trampled. They were coming after him specifically, but he had friends surrounding him, protecting him, and the cops couldn’t get close. When he saw me, he grabbed my waist and half-carried me through the crowd. He had dropped the bullhorn, but by then it didn’t matter. There was no chance for order anymore, not with the sirens and the screaming and the hovering helicopters.

  We regrouped in an alley a couple blocks north of the fighting. Someone made a call, and soon we were in a car, a half dozen of us piled on top of each other as Keith directed the driver through the wild streets. We ended up at a house on the edge of a boho neighborhood called Capitol Hill. It was like a temporary command station, with posters and protective gear everywhere. They had gas masks in the living room. People were shouting into cell phones, getting updates on the carnage a mile away. Everything was still blurry, but Keith was forcing my eyes open, squeezing drops into them. They stung so much. And my nose was running. And my skin. Have you ever been gassed?

  No, I said.

  Well, you’re lucky. It’s effective. Anyway, Keith and I were pretty much inseparable the rest of that week. And after. But that’s not the point of the story. . . .

  But that was the point
of the story. Or one of them. Lindsay was laying out her credentials as an extremist, and, in that shrewd way familiar only to women, laying out her ground rules as well. Keith was hers, or anyway, not mine. That this had all gone down more than a decade ago wasn’t important. She was in love with him. I’d realized that right away and accepted it as part of the arrangement. It wasn’t new love, of course. There was nothing overtly passionate or physical about it—not that I’d seen. No, they’d probably known each other on and off for years, had lived and slept together in any number of incarnations that were now a part of history. Episodes from other adventures.

  It all came down to this: I trusted Keith. And if he, in turn, trusted Lindsay, then I did, too. The man was that magnetic. The more he kept his distance, the more I wanted to know him. It’s an amazing thing to hear a person spoken of in such reverence, and then you meet him and he’s twice as impressive as you imagined. The business of extremism was, like all others, a business of people, and Keith was someone to go to war with. There was that past, sure—he’d managed to thrive as a leading radical for years without getting caught—but it was more than the résumé. He inspired loyalty. And faith. Now there’s a word I use with trepidation. Yet he brought it out in me. I felt secure around him, even then, especially then, in those first days, as I was being whisked off to help commit some treason yet unknown. He was incredibly careful and quietly confident, and it wasn’t hard to imagine it all might somehow work out. And to think I’d been handpicked over any number of capable and committed activists in dripping basements and seaside bungalows and everywhere else where people have come up against a wall in their lives and decided to smash through it.

  Lindsay and I said our good-nights, and I turned out the bedside lamp. Two weeks after I met Keith, that fateful night in Raleigh, I had read about the Pike County coal mine collapse in the Washington Post. It had happened in the dead of night, and although there’d been no deaths or injuries, the governor of Kentucky had immediately ordered OMSL inspectors to fan out across the state and reevaluate mining safety procedures. Tarver Coal was taken to task. Their track record was trotted out in the press, and the company’s financials were scrutinized and found lacking. Tarver was levied with fines as its stock plummeted and its CFO resigned. Against this hardship, they announced the closing of two of their least profitable mining operations. Throughout the ordeal, Tarver’s CEO had insisted the collapse was triggered by a small explosive device, but when investigators eventually verified his claim, it hardly mattered. The damage had been done.