by Susan Choi
She wondered if Pauline, in those in-between days when she had no longer been simply a captive, but was not yet a comrade, had felt the way she was starting to feel: neither satisfactorily with the group nor completely outside it. They had all laughingly offered her the notepad and pencil while Pauline was deaf, they’d done nothing outright to exclude her—but she’d had nothing she wanted to say to all three of them, and that was the heart of the game, that the three were as one. The next day Pauline was back to normal and they decided to work on their book. Now Jenny eavesdropped on purpose, but she learned nothing about why they’d fought. She did learn at least one of the reasons the project was taking so long. They couldn’t seem to make the first statement without delineating the premises on which it was founded; and every premise required its own proof beyond all possible doubt. “U.S. imperial incursions into peaceful Vietnam,” Yvonne began. “Wait a minute,” Juan said. “We can’t forget that the French were in Vietnam first.” “So we can’t say it was peaceful?” “It’s not that, it’s the way the world’s powers collude with each other to exploit the brown peoples. The way we colluded with France.” “We colluded with France?” Pauline said. And it went on like that, endlessly. The foundation of their worldview sank swiftly into the past: condemnation of the war required dissection of the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy, which demanded criticism of the imperially minded rearrangement of national borders in the wake of the Second World War, which led to a long meditation on the rise of the nation-state. Gone were the days when they’d been happy to make incendiary, irresponsible statements with no basis in fact; and the further they beat back the brush of the past the less effort they gave to the present.
That afternoon they were still working when she heard a car laboring up the hill. Jenny went down to the kitchen, and the three of them emerged from the front room. Juan said, “What the fuck is Frazer doing back here already? He said he’d give us another two weeks.” She looked out the window and saw, instead of Frazer’s battered brown coupe, a blue four-door come around the last turn of the drive.
“It’s not Frazer,” she heard herself say, “unless he bought a new car.” But she knew, although she could only see the barest hint of the person inside the sedan, that it was someone unknown.
“Upstairs,” Juan said to Pauline.
A solid, blond, red-faced white man, perhaps in his mid-forties, was coming toward the back door. He had an off-duty look to him. Pauline’s last pounding step had sounded at the top of the stairs and now Jenny and Juan and Yvonne were all locked there like statues. The man seemed to know the house; a stranger would have tried the front door, not knowing it barely got used. He passed from view through the window and reappeared right away in the door. “Afternoon,” he said cheerfully. “Sorry to barge in on you folks.” They didn’t manage to utter a word of response. The man opened the screen tentatively. “I’m Bob, the owner. Where’s—Dierdre? I’m lousy with names. For a second I thought you were her,” he added, to Yvonne.
None of them knew if Yvonne should be Dierdre or not. “Bob,” Juan repeated. Jenny felt her skin crawl. She knew it was only her paranoia that made this man look like a cop, but what must they look like to him? Juan had a dully fixed look to his face, like a reptile eyeing a fly. The man said, “Are you Dierdre’s husband?” and shook Juan’s stiff hand, and then Jenny understood suddenly, and Yvonne must have, also.
“I’m Dierdre’s sister,” Yvonne announced boldly. “And this is my husband, George. And this is our friend Judy.”
“You all having a good holiday? Wife and I both grew up in these parts. We wish we could get back here more. I thought Dierdre was meaning to be with her kids here all summer.”
“She did, but she just took them down to our mother’s for a couple of days,” Yvonne said. “Our mother lives in Pennsylvania,” she added, warming to the exercise. “In Philadelphia.”
Jenny felt a bead of sweat leave her armpit and draw a wet path down her side. The man had shaken her hand very briefly and turned his gaze back to Yvonne. Juan was still staring hard at the man but the man only glanced toward Juan courteously. “Excuse me,” Jenny murmured, and slipped from the kitchen. The front room was a riot of ashtrays and unwashed wine glasses and empty potato-chip bags and heaps of newspaper and inexplicable detritus like Juan’s flower-pot barbell; they had been living here with no thought for whomever the house was owned by, as if the house would vanish into the ground the instant they moved out. Now she saw the accumulated damage of months, the blackish-purple splash of spilled wine on the couch, the ashes and dirt that had darkened the carpet, the beer bottles kicked in the corners, and this was not even the barn, with the block-mounted gun and the silhouette shot full of holes, or the pasture, where the grass was stamped flat in an oval-shaped course. Juan had taped a list to the wall hugely titled CODE OF WAR and she ripped this down and was crumpling it into a ball when the others came out of the kitchen. Bob stopped in the doorway and she saw him take in the room very quickly before turning away. “Because the number Dierdre gave me doesn’t work,” he was saying. “I might have took it down wrong. You don’t have it?”
“No,” Yvonne said. “She just moved.”
“It’s nothing important. I just like to have a number for my tenants.” Bob cleared his throat. When he’d turned away from the front room Juan and Yvonne had been just on his heels, and now the three of them were crowded in the little vestibule between front room and kitchen, at the foot of the stairs. Jenny hovered behind them. Bob’s back was encased in a thin brown windbreaker and she wanted to plant both her hands on this jacket and catapult him from the house. Juan was still staring at Bob as if he were a steak to be carved up and eaten and she understood, suddenly, the great impulse that he was restraining; Juan could murder this man. He could actually kill him. “Do you want us to give Dierdre a message?” Yvonne asked, steering Bob toward the kitchen. But Bob resisted; he looked up the stairs.
“Anything I should know?” he asked. “Roof leaking? Plumbing all right?”
“Fine,” Yvonne said, rather sharply.
He finally followed her back to the kitchen. “I hate to intrude on a person’s vacation. Just tell her to make sure, when she mails me the key, to include an address. I’ll need it to refund her deposit. I somehow never got it from her.”
“She’s been so absentminded. She moved . . .”
At last he was standing outside, with the three of them crowding the door like a barricade. Jenny tried to remember that most people trust. He would take what he’d seen as the basis for standard regret, might not refund all the deposit. It’s people like us, she thought, who mistrust everyone. She had spent years of her life trying to instill mistrust in the average person. Your leaders are misleading you, she might say, and misspending your taxes, and killing your children—not just strange foreign children, but yours. Very few people listened. Now she relied on that stubborn, instinctual trust. Yet this man lingered on the grass. “That your car?” he asked, indicating the Bug.
“Yes,” Yvonne said.
“You might need a new muffler.” He bent to look, hands on his knees. “Say,” he said, straightening again. “Say, would it bother you all if I took a short walk through the fields? It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. I come by to check on the plumbing and errands like that, but I never just amble around.” He must have seen something in all their faces; he blanched suddenly. “On the other hand, I don’t have time,” he amended. “You all didn’t rent out this place to get bothered by me.”
“It’s all right,” Yvonne said. Jenny saw Juan take a pinch of her flesh and squeeze, hard. Yvonne slapped him away. “Go ahead. It’s your home, after all.”
“No—no. That’s okay. The wife’s waiting in town, anyway.” He zipped his jacket and nervously took out his keys. Suspicion or some even more dreadful feeling seemed to tug at his sleeve, but he pulled himself free. “You kids have a nice summer,” he said, getting into his car.
P
AULINE rushed downstairs covered with dust. “I was under your bed,” she told Jenny. “He’s gone, right? He’s gone?”
“For the moment,” Juan said.
Juan seemed strangely clarified and calmed; in the face of an actual crisis his disproportionate swagger, his hair-trigger temper, his preening self-importance were gone. Under Juan’s direction they tied blankets and clothing and food into four equal bundles, and buried them in the woods in a pile of rocks they’d once used during combat training. “I never thought I would say this,” Juan said, “but if pigs come here, run. Run like fucking antelope, to this spot, grab provisions, then melt away into the woods.” Two BB rifles, and one handgun; that was no arsenal, thanks to Frazer, and it left them no choice but to run. “We’ll survive,” Juan told them as they retraced their steps, and in spite of the fear that she obviously felt, Jenny thought that Pauline almost floated with joy. Juan had finally said it was all right to try to survive.
Back in the house the three of them quickly sorted their actual writings from the litter of writing equipment, and now it seemed fortunate that these comprised just a few messy sheets and a half-blank cassette. The writings were compressed into a pocket-size package, and wrapped and rewrapped in a plastic trash bag. They returned to the woods and Juan buried the package as well.
Then they all agreed that Jenny should drive into town and call Frazer immediately. “Ol’ Bob-O,” Juan said. “He might not have suspected a thing. Nine out of ten that he didn’t: We’re fine. One out of ten and we’re dead. I’m coming with you,” he told Jenny. “Let’s go to the big town, with stores. And don’t argue with me.”
THEY LEFT Pauline and Yvonne, terrified, with the one gun and the last of the wine. “I know you’ve been mad,” Juan remarked casually as they drove off, as if they went driving all of the time. Being in a car, undisguised, in broad daylight, for the first time since becoming a nationally sought fugitive, now didn’t seem to perturb him at all. “I know you’re mad about stuff with Pauline, and I’m glad we’ve got some time alone to talk. I’ve been wanting to talk with you. Damn,” he added, looking out the window. “This is beautiful land, you know that? You can look at land like this and almost forget what a sick, fucked-up country this is. Anyway, understand: for Yvonne and for me, Pauline’s truly our sister. Know it, all right? She’s our family. And we fight. And all families fight. And I know that you know how that is.”
“I do,” she said, mostly to make him shut up.
The drive to Monticello hadn’t changed, but now every shifting inch jarred her, the way shifting light jars someone with a migraine. Juan kept talking, his face pointing into the wind, the late afternoon sun flashing morse code off his glasses, his words, an endless stream of them, snatched by the wind. Something about his mother . . . his mother would have loved all these hills. His mother had spent all her life on the flat fields of Illinois, so that any kind of wrinkle in the land used to get her excited. There was this one field they used to drive past when he was a kid where, who knew how, a huge tree had grown up in this dent in the field, so that even if the farmer had gone to the trouble of pulling the tree out, the dent still would have been there. Tripping up plows, etc. So the tree had been permitted to stay, and it made an oasis in the unchanging field, this deep bowl of greenery. This thrilled his mother. “Oh, there’s my tree!” she would say. Did Jenny know that of all of their twenty-four parents, his mother had been the only one to have said she was proud of them? A reporter from the Chicago Tribune tracked her down, and she said she didn’t really understand their methods, but she understood their beliefs, and she was proud of them. “That’s what she said. She grew up poor. Yeah, my mother was poor,” Juan said, suddenly abstracted.
She called Frazer from a telephone booth at the end of Monticello’s Main Street. “I’ll call back,” he said. “At the usual place?”
Craning around to look back at the car, she realized she couldn’t see Juan. Sunlight blazed at her off the windshield; was Juan waiting quietly there, sheltered by the reflection? She felt sure that he wasn’t. “There’s no time,” she told Frazer. “I’m just calling to say visit early. Like maybe tonight. Okay? Bye.”
“Wait, wait, wait. I’ll buy milk. It’ll take me five minutes.”
“I can’t wait, just come up! We’ll talk then.”
“What the hell—has somebody got sick?” Now a note of alarm shook his voice. He’d never felt this, she realized: nearing danger, its sights fixed on him. Frazer’s desire to play savior was real, but it was fueled by his flawless good luck. He’d always been so uncommonly lucky, he’d never had to be selfishly prudent. He’d never had to choose between self-sacrificing battle and ignominious but self-preserving retreat. He was ardently loyal but she’d always been nagged by the fear he was also untrustworthy; he never expected a problem, and so perhaps wasn’t built to withstand one. Perhaps, when the problem arrived, he would run for his life. It wouldn’t make him any worse than she was; his tone of alarm made her fear for herself, and so she said the one thing that she knew would snare him, and not scare him away. “They haven’t written a word.”
“Motherfucker! Okay. I’ll try to be there tonight.”
Leaving the phone booth she saw Juan coming back toward the car. He had a pleased smile on his face, as if Main Street offered a rich tapestry to consider. At least it was near five o’clock; the few stores here that weren’t out of business would soon be closed for the night. The sidewalks were deserted. There was the store that sold fishing supplies, the Singer store for sewing materials, the Maytag repair outlet, the five-and-dime with a wilting Fourth of July display still in its window. They had entirely missed the Fourth of July, she realized—how many weeks ago had it been? Seven? Eight? “I don’t even want to know what you were doing,” she told Juan. “I called Frazer. Let’s get out of here.”
“We just got here! Come on. Ten minutes. And give me some of our money.”
“What for?”
“Things. Didn’t I say not to argue with me?”
“Ten minutes,” she said finally.
“And the money, Jenny.” She gave him a twenty and he said, wheedlingly, “Could I have some more, Jenny? Please?” Whistling, with Frazer’s money in his hands, Juan strode off down the sidewalk.
She checked the parking rules sign at the curb and then turned off the engine and pulled the keys from the ignition, absently crushing them in her hands. After a while a sweaty metallic smell told her what she was doing and she dropped the keys onto her lap. Little hands! William had often said that. Little hands but big deeds. She had been very good at wiring explosives. Deft, and unafraid. She’d learned from him quickly and hadn’t needed him to check on her work. Somehow she had not had a splinter of doubt when she put them together. She remembered, coming home from Japan, the way her long absence from English had stripped every English cliche of its comforting chime. Suddenly there were the tepid and fraudulent words: Do unto others, and, If at first you don’t succeed, and, Might does not make right. It had struck her, coming home to a country in which she felt foreign, that they were lessons taught in the same way that vaccines were punched into your arm on that bad day in grade school, lined up in the gym in your ankle socks with the sleeve of your Peter Pan blouse harshly shoved to your armpit. Lessons punched in when you’re young so that when you grow up, you won’t really believe them. Might does not make right: a stunning truth, robbed of its force by a numbing cliché. The mind might believe, but the body has trouble. Power has the power to seem natural, and to live in your gut like an ulcer: your secret certainty of your defeat, finally, at its hands. And yet Power was only people, war makers, money-possessors, with elaborate tools to use. This had been the belief that impelled her, when she learned to build bombs. Feeling as she thought the Christian Reformers might have felt when they seized the Good Book for themselves. Except bombs weren’t inherently good but inherently evil; she and William had set out with their bombs to expose the real evil of government violence, n
ot to recommend violence to everyone else. Then the ground started tilting beneath them, or perhaps it was they who had tilted the ground; perhaps they had been wrong to fight Power on its terms, instead of rejecting its terms utterly. Little hands. Something about this memory made her cringe now. Juan emerged from the five-and-dime with a bulging sack under his arm, and entered a store called Margot’s Modern Fashions. She lit a cigarette and smoked it furiously until her head wobbled from the smoke and the heat. She’d smoked two more before Juan came out again. “What size are you?” he asked, coming up to her window. “Dress size, not jeans size.”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know. It’s a number. For example, Yvonne is a ten. You’re smaller than that.”
“Four or six, maybe. Why?”
“Four’s what I think. You and Pauline are about the same size.”
In a much shorter time he’d returned from the store again, now with two bags. She started the engine and was squealing away from the curb before he’d fully shut his door.
“Hold on! Take this turn,” Juan said.
“Why?”
“I want to look around! Come on, Jenny.”
Off Main Street were cracking sidewalks, uplifted by the roots of old trees, and Monticello’s surprisingly pretty old houses, dignified and decrepit, set at the backs of deep lawns. The street was quiet, except for the voices of children coming from the backyards. She slowed down and they took in one block, then another. Farther from Main Street the houses were smaller and in worse repair, but the yards were more lush. “What did you buy?” she asked him.
“You’ll see when we’re back at the ranch.”
“You didn’t spend all the money, did you?”
“Don’t worry about Frazer’s money. We won’t need his money much longer.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that it’s time for a change. It means we forgot who we were, but we’re starting to remember again. It means we won’t be no exotic zoo show anymore.”