by Susan Choi
Outside it had started to rain. The rain came down in ropes; all the colors seemed drained out of things, and the wind lashed the trees. Jenny went to the door and gazed out, her back to them, and the force of the rain misted her through the screen. Through her whole conversation with Frazer she had been so concerned for her letter, and how he would react, she had not lingered over his saying he’d brought them a gun. They had been talking about guns from the start, and she had always realized guns might one day appear. But the idea of guns and the actual presence of one weren’t at all the same thing. Behind her, even the hardened threesome who sawed off their own shotguns were silenced by the gun’s magnetism. Now that Juan had put on the holster she couldn’t imagine him taking it off; and then she knew that he couldn’t, either. From this minute he would constantly wear it, as if before he’d been naked.
The rainstorm had not slackened at all, and the rich wholesome smell of wet earth, such a strange counterpoint to the gun, billowed into the kitchen. Yvonne suddenly said, “I can’t stand it, I’ve just got to feel it!” She leaped up from the table, squeezed past Jenny and ran out the door. Then Pauline moved away from the gun’s circle also. Jenny thought she would follow Yvonne, but Pauline came to stand in the back door as well, and silently they both watched Yvonne run shrieking over the grass. She turned to see Pauline’s face, and Pauline looked back at her—not communicatively or blankly, not coldly or warmly, only looked at her briefly, and then looked back outside. Pauline did not seem to feel the same dread that she did. After all, Pauline had been as insistent on being rearmed as her comrades. The rain’s wind blew Pauline’s hair slightly off of her temples; then Yvonne splashed back onto the step and they wordlessly stepped back to let her inside. “It’s cold,” Yvonne gasped.
Only Juan’s concentration had not left the gun for an instant. He didn’t look up at Yvonne in her plastered-down T-shirt, with her breasts in clear view. “One gun,” he said again sourly. “What the fuck do you do with one gun? Oh, anything you want. You just have to get in and out fast. If you’re cornered you’re dead, because none of your comrades are armed. But haven’t you heard about guys robbing banks with one gun? Sometimes even no gun. They just make a gun shape with their hand in their pocket, and all the dumb people believe it. One gun. Hey,” he said loudly to Pauline and Jenny. Yvonne had left the room to change clothes, and Juan had realized he was speaking to no one. “You can hijack a plane with one gun. A plane’s the one place where one gun is as good as a hundred. Hijack the plane, go to Cuba. Some comrades I knew did that once.”
“Who?” Pauline said, finally.
“Before your time, Princess. A guy that I knew who lived on the East Coast helped these other two guys leave the country. I think they’d blown up a Dow Chemical plant. My friend heard that hijackings to Havana were happening all the time on flights from New York to Miami, but the hijackings were never reported. The airlines didn’t want to show how goddamn easy it is. The government didn’t want to show how many people are wanting to go to Cuba all the time. The papers are all in on it. My friend went to the library and sure enough, there were all these little wire service reports of successful hijackings on the very back pages of newspapers, and on the front page are the stories about the one or two hijackers who failed, usually because they’re so dumb they don’t even have a weapon. And not only that, but he learns the airlines tell pilots to do what the hijacker wants, because they’re afraid of having passengers die. So everybody’s trying to play down that you can basically go to Cuba, no problem, if you pull out a gun.” The reminiscence had vastly improved Juan’s humor. “I hadn’t thought about that in a while.”
“Did they make it?” Pauline asked.
“Who?”
“The guys. The Dow Chemical guys.”
“Fuck, of course they made it. My friend drove them to the airport and then he went home and listened to Liberation News Service and sure enough, late that night he hears flight whatever’s ‘diverted’ to Havana. Read off the wire. It sure wasn’t in the New York Times the next day. I didn’t believe him at first, but I redid his research and it’s all true. Between ten and twenty hijackings a year to Havana, and you never hear one word about it.”
“When was this?” Jenny asked.
“Four, five years ago. It’s less now, but I bet you it hasn’t changed that much. There’s no foolproof way to stop people. What are they going to do, make everybody unpack their suitcase before they get on? Go through everybody’s shaving bag? They can only hope less people think of it.”
“You know a lot about it,” she said.
“At the time I thought, if I ever had comrades who needed my help in that way, I ought to be ready to help them. I never thought I’d be one of them.”
“We could never hijack an airplane,” Pauline said, staring out at the rain.
“Why not, Princess? What’s a better long-term plan?”
“I don’t know,” Pauline said. “Isn’t it your job to figure that out?”
Before Jenny had even registered what had been said, Juan snatched the gun off the table and aimed at Pauline. “What’s with your fucking mouth, Pauline?”
“Stop it,” Jenny murmured. The hair on her neck had sprung up.
“It’s not loaded. He just finished cleaning it,” Pauline said, but they still didn’t move.
“What are you doing?” Yvonne said, coming in.
“Hijacking a plane. You know. ‘Nobody fucking move. This is a hijacking.’”
Yvonne seemed to think it was funny. “‘Maybe you should have a cocktail, sir,’” she said. ‘“Bag of peanuts? Would you like a cigarette? Pinch my ass, Mr. Hijacker.’ I’m the stewardess, get it?”
With his free hand Juan yanked the kitchen chairs out to face forward, like rows. “All right, Princess,” he said. “You be the hero passenger. You look mild-mannered and square but it turns out you’re some kind of Green Beret. Try to subdue me.”
“No thanks,” Pauline said.
“Okay, maybe you’re the screaming bitch who’s so scared she can’t keep her mouth shut. ‘Oh, no! What will we do?’” Juan pulled a long face.
Pauline kept silent, staring at the gun pointed at her.
“Maybe you’re the hero passenger,” Juan realized, turning the weapon on Jenny. Loaded or not, the gun pointed at her made her armpits turn damp. The temperature had dropped with the rain, and the wind that touched her felt like fall. Her skin goosepimpled all at once, as if obeying a command.
“Maybe I’m the pilot,” she said. “Stop pointing your gun, sir. I’ll take you to Havana.”
“How do I know you won’t try to overpower me, and turn me in to the pigs?”
“It’s not worth it. We’d rather go along with you than risk anyone getting hurt.”
Juan let his arm drop and threw the gun on the table with a loud clatter, and Jenny felt release flooding through her, as if tranquilizers had entered her blood. “Don’t rule it out,” Juan told Pauline. “Running and hiding forever just isn’t my style.”
FOR THE REST of the day the rain continued, though it ebbed to a drizzle. No one so much as mentioned doing combat training. Juan kept leaping through doorways quick-drawing the gun from its holster. Then it was dusk, and Pauline and Yvonne began dinner. The house had never seemed so small. Since the night Pauline had brought her the soup Jenny had sometimes felt the strange hyper-alertness that follows a moment of intimacy, as if their conversation had been left incomplete, the point felt but avoided. Pauline had rebuffed her question but then she’d brought up the clippings; that had seemed like an invitation, as if the subject weren’t closed after all. When Juan had sneeringly pointed the gun at Pauline, and then her, though she’d known it was just a new form of his usual strutting, for an instant she thought she had felt the three fugitives’ tightly knit union fall slack. For an instant Pauline was cast out completely, and even Yvonne had looked inconsequential, and each of them seemed solitary, the way Jenny felt that she constantly was. She�
��d wondered if the gun, the very thing that joined them as comrades-in-arms, was actually working on them in an opposite way. And again she had glanced at Pauline’s face for some fleeting message. Pauline had been flushed, with anger or fear or embarrassment or all of those things. But if she’d felt brief alliance with Jenny, from both finding themselves at the weapon’s wrong end, she had never let on.
The rain finally stopped while they were eating. They ate in silence, the four of them hunched at the table, Juan still wearing the holster and gun. She wanted to rip it off him. After dinner Juan announced they would work on their book. Juan and Yvonne and Pauline went into the front room with their unfinished beers and pulled the door shut behind them. She went upstairs and sat down with her journal, but she couldn’t write in it; she uncapped her pen and just sat there, tensed over the page. The air in the house felt close, sickly. The moment of refreshment the rainstorm had brought was long gone. She heard the big maple dripping. And then she heard them; she felt unsurprised, though her stomach turned cold. They had been shut in the front room for barely half an hour. The shape of the dispute ascended and ascended, rising and falling in smaller waves up toward a peak; she couldn’t make out the words. She recapped her pen, lay the pen in her journal, closed the covers around it, and walked to her door. The argumentative peak had snagged clouds and brewed thunder; she heard the lightning-bolt crash of a large piece of furniture thrown or, she realized, a body. Someone screamed. She yanked open her door in time to see Pauline rush past the foot of the stairs with the bright print of a hand on her face. “I don’t care, I don’t care!” Pauline screamed, running into the kitchen and out the back door. Yvonne hovered in the front room; Juan blocked Jenny’s way at the foot of the stairs. “Stay out of this, Jenny,” he said.
“Don’t you touch me!” she yelled, shoving past him.
She couldn’t make out Pauline in the dark, but she heard the barn doors creaking open with effort, and then the barn light, its bare lightbulb, came on. She found Pauline sitting on one of the moldering haystacks, loudly sobbing, her thin hands hanging between bony knees. When she saw Jenny she shot to her feet.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “Leave me alone!”
“What happened? Why did he hit you?”
“I know it’s a trap, I’m not talking to you. Like that time in ego reconstruction? ‘Tell us what you really think of Juan’s leadership. We really want your honest opinion.’ And then I gave it, and everybody said that I was insubordinating. Well, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
“No,” she said. “That’s not me. Pauline.” She heard her blood sounding loud in her ears. Pauline looked feral and unrecognizing, as if her words were instinctive defenses, claws bared, haunches tensed at a threat. Jenny remembered a trip she and William had taken—they had driven miles and miles up Highway 1, past Mendocino, all the way to the place where the highway cut in from the coast, the one place in the state where it did this, because the coastal range there was impassable. The Lost Coast, only reached by a harrowing, steep, wet dirt road with a sign at the mouth that said CLOSED. ROAD IS OUT. GO NO FARTHER. They’d seen the ocean yawn open beneath them as they came through the pass and inched down, gravel showering under their tires. They’d seen a gray whale burst out of the surf like a missile, just yards off the beach. The last bend of a long mountain river, pulling a delta of mountainous rubble and downed giant trees and fine brown sand on its way out to sea. They had hiked up to shelves of wild meadow, hearing only the harsh cannonade of the ocean and the barking sea lions, seeing the dark shapes of the whales below on their epic migration; and when they’d returned to their camp, between themselves and their tent had been a small golden bobcat. Seated compact on its haunches, its tail curled around, its ears sharp and upright, its spectacular eyes trained on them. “It’s so beautiful,” William whispered, advancing. “No,” she’d said, stopping him. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Pauline,” she said, trembling. “Pauline.”
“Why do I have to choose?” Pauline screamed at her. “Don’t make me choose!”
“Hey, baby sister, hey, come on,” Juan was saying, behind them.
“Leave her alone,” Jenny said, but Juan strode in and took hold of Pauline and she scrabbled at him frantically, not to escape but to keep him.
Yvonne had come in as well. “Oh, Polly,” she said.
“Don’t make me choose,” Pauline sobbed.
“Of course not. Choose what? What the fuck did you say to her, Jenny?”
“Nothing,” Jenny said. She could not make her mouth utter anything else. She could only watch dumbly as the three of them, fused to each other, as if tied together to run a strange race, hobbled out of the barn.
“WHAT I REALLY ought to do is build a block first and then mount the gun to it,” Juan said the next evening at dinner. “You and Y both learned to shoot on shotguns, and a handgun’s a whole different creature.” He explained to Pauline patiently, “You’re small, but you can brace yourself against a shotgun so the kick doesn’t throw you, remember? With this gun it’s more like,” and Juan mimed shooting the gun with his arm extended, and his hand flying back from the force. “It’s going to be hard for you to have the accuracy you’ve achieved with the shotgun. You’re going to get frustrated.”
“I could hold it with both hands,” Pauline said, reaching out toward the gun. Juan barred her from it and Jenny saw her face spark with annoyance.
“That’s fine on the shooting range,” Juan said, “but not on the fly.”
At last, Juan relented; they could shoot without the block for a few rounds and see how it went. Jenny followed them into the barn and stood in the barn door, watching. Was it an act, Pauline’s seeming eagerness to handle the gun? Was it apology, for whatever she had done to incur Juan’s wrath the previous night? Before leaving the house Pauline had briefly disappeared into the bathroom while Juan dug in the trash for their empty soup cans. Now the cans filled the barn with a strong stench of old coffee grounds, sour wine and wet cigarette butts. “Joining us?” Juan said to Jenny genially. “You must be a good shot. Oriental people always have exceptional aim. They’re inherently good marksmen, they’re good at precision sports like pool and golf, they’re good archers—”
“I’ve never touched a gun in my life,” she said coldly.
“Oh, I don’t believe that,” Juan said. One by one, Juan balanced the cans on the spine of a sawhorse. “Just say the word if you want to take a shot at it. Get it? Take a shot at it?” Yvonne, always his best audience, dissolved, giggling.
But when Yvonne got the gun she became serious, even grim. Her chin crinkled and her lower lip jutted out slightly, while the rest of her body seemed fused to itself and the floor. The mass of muscle above her kneecaps tensed and shifted. Yvonne punctured the back wall of the barn several times and then, with her very last shot, a can flew in the air with a pang. The rest of the cans tumbled onto the floor from the movement.
“Good!” Juan yelled. Yvonne grinned.
When Pauline’s turn came she brought a wad of toilet paper out of her pocket and began twisting it into small balls. Juan went into paroxysms.
“What are you doing?” he said. “What’s the Kleenex for?”
“Earplugs.”
“Oh my God—wake me up, Yvonne. Earplugs.”
“You know that my ears are fucked up! I still hear that ringing sometimes—”
“‘The pigs are at the door!’” Juan enacted. “‘Okay, I’ll just put in my earplugs.’”
Pauline threw the balls of tissue angrily onto the floor and wrapped her small hands around the gun’s grip. Her stance seemed overdone; her feet were planted very wide. Her narrow shoulders shrugged up toward her ears.
“Wait,” said Juan seriously, stepping up behind her. “Get your shoulders down. You’ve got to compensate for the weak one. Push your arms good and firm in their sockets.”
Pauline wasn’t disastrous, but she was badly thrown by the recoil, and only sheer stu
bbornness seemed to keep her arms stiffly extended. From her first shot they trembled with effort. Unexpectedly she tried shooting one-handed and her shot flew to the ceiling; there would have been an eruption of terrified doves if the doves hadn’t all fled already. “Whoa!” Juan said, hitting the floor. “Holy Jesus! Hand over that thing!”
Jenny finally left them and went back to the house; from her bed she could hear the POP, POP of the gun; in the end she must have fallen asleep to it. The next morning she found them all in the kitchen, writing little notes back and forth to Pauline on a notepad. “She’s deaf?” Jenny said, looking at her in horror. Pauline looked back and frowned. She took the pen and wrote, You have to write, Jenny.
“Oh, my God,” Jenny said.
“It’ll pass,” Juan said, shrugging. “She has sensitive ears. It happened before, and it passed.” Pauline was watching him with impatience; he looked at her and she pointed sternly at the notepad. “Oh, I’m sorry, Princess,” Juan laughed. He took the sheet and wrote, Talking about what a sensitive Princess you are. Pauline whacked him, but she was smiling; if she was frightened by her sudden deafness—and Jenny was sure she saw, at the back of the green-flecked eyes, fear—her fear was outweighed by her obvious pleasure in being pampered by her comrades. For the rest of that day Juan and Yvonne and Pauline passed little notes back and forth, giggling and hitting each other, or reading and tearing to shreds with a show of annoyance. Jenny could almost have thought they had deafened Pauline deliberately, so that they could play a conspicuous game of shared secrets that, whether by design or not, did not include her. By dinner that night Pauline’s hearing had begun to return, and then this was a new game: Juan and Yvonne would say things to each other in Pauline’s presence but in normal tones, and Pauline would yell, “What?” Or, alternatively, every minor announcement was bellowed: “I WANT MACARONI FOR DINNER!”