“Sounds like the American dream.”
“Hey, it’s a free country. Really is. I learned that the hard way. Testing the system—starting at rock bottom and taking it to the limits. Which is more than most people ever do. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty that’s rotten in the system, hut what’s better? The Ayatollah? The Chinese? So I’m here for the long haul, trying to get through each day, paying my mortgage. I know what I do every day isn’t feeding starving orphans, it isn’t heart surgery, but I try to get some quality through when I can, okay? It’s no better or worse than anyone else’s gig, right? Which is what I want now. To be like anyone else. Blend in, concentrate on Terry, learn to be self-centered. Drive a car with leather seats, sit in the Jacuzzi at night, listen to compact discs, and get philosophical. Just get through each day.”
He pointed a finger at me. “I paid more dues longer than anyone else I know, so forget your guilt.”
I said, “Your guilt isn’t my concern, Other people paid dues too. The ultimate dues. Norm and Melba Green, the rest of the gang at Bear Lodge. I’m sure any of them would be happy to trade places with you.”
He closed his eyes, rubbed his eyelids, “Oh, boy, everything comes back like a wheel, doesn’t it.”
I said, “You were part of the group, weren’t you? What made you decide not to show up the day of the big blast?”
“Decide.”Eye twitch. “Who decided? It was an accident—twist of fate. If I read it in a script, I’d call it hokey.”
“How’d you escape?”
“I was babysitting. Taking the kid to the doctor.”
“Which kid?”
“Malcolm Isaac. He was sick.”
“Why didn’t his parents take him?”
“Because they were sick too. All of them were. Puking their guts out. Some kind of intestinal thing—diarrhea, fever. Something they ate—bad meat. I’d just come up the day before. There were two groups, you see. Two cadres. I was part of the second, brought communications from the second to the first. We were all supposed to get together in a week or so. I was a vegetarian back then. Didn’t eat the meat. That saved me. Me and the other kid.”
“Rodriguez and Santana’s son? Fidel?”
“Fidelito,” he said. “He was just a baby, too young for meat, on formula because Teresa couldn’t nurse. So he was healthy too. Crawling around the warehouse, fat and happy. But Malcolm Isaac had it bad. Really high fever, diarrhea, crying in pain. Melba was worried about dehydration, wanted him to see a doctor, but she and Norm were too sick to take him themselves, So they asked me, and I did, Public health clinic in Twin Falls. Me and him and a bunch of loggers and Indians in the waiting room. They had a country-western station on and he was wailing over it, in pain. That didn’t impress the nurses. They turned up the volume, made us wait. Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. Funny the things you remember, huh? I was holding him, wiping his forehead with alcohol pads, when I heard it—beep beep news bulletin breaking into the country music.”
His own brow had broken out in sweat. He wiped it with the back of his sleeve. “Big explosion at a warehouse in Bear Lodge. No one else in the waiting room was even listening—they could care less. But to me it was like everything was caving in, like a big hole in the earth—everything just being vacuumed into it. Then the FBI guy comes on and starts talking about some bomb factory, lying through his government-issue teeth, and I knew someone had shafted them. Knew I had to run.”
“There was no bomb factory?”
He gave me a disgusted look. “Right. Lard and sugar and horse manure and sawdust—we were making a produce nuke, right? If it was that easy, half the farms in America would’ve blown up before Ronnie Ray-gun screwed them over.”
“Half the farms in America don’t have igniting devices.”
“Neither did we. The FBI stooge either made that up or planted it. The supplies we’d stockpiled were for growing, not destroying. Seeds, fertilizer. Organic fertilizer. The sawdust was for compost. The lard was for cooking and making tortillas—Teresa loved to make tortillas. The plan was to stockpile enough stuff to put together a decent-sized collective farm, big enough to be viable. A new Walden. We were gonna move in on government land that was going to waste just a few miles south—land that was ripped off from the Indians in the first place. The plan was to squat on it, liberate it, homestead it, plow, sow, then invite the Indians to join us in the establishment of a new collective state. We knew it wouldn’t last—Tricky Dicky’s Nazis would move in and overrun us. All we wanted was to last long enough to create something viable—for the press. The publicity would put us in a good light—the government destroying crops. What’s more all-American than farming, right? So we’d be the good guys. Black and white and brown and red working together. The establishment would be seen as putting out all the negative energy. Too threatening, so they destroyed it.”
“Who’s they?”
“The government. Or some free-lance running dogs, working for the government. Someone had to have poisoned the meat, planted charges, waited until all of us were in that warehouse, puking, weakened, then blew it to kingdom-come. Some sort of remote-control detonator. Death knell for the dream.”
“Collective farming,” I said. “It’s not exactly what comes to mind when you think of the Weathermen, FALN, the Black Army. People like Mark Grossman and Skitch Dupree.”
“That’s ’cause you’ve been programmed to think that way. Everyone in that warehouse—everyone in New Walden—was a fugitive from violence. We were sick of violence, sick of the way things had turned. Tonio and Teresa had just quit FALN. Skitch had taken a lot of crap for renouncing violence—even got shot at by Black Revo Army dudes because he changed his tune. Norm and Melba were the architects of the plan. They’d turned their heads totally away from violence.” He shook his head. “Bomb factory. Do you think Norm and Melba and Tonio and Teresa would have brought their kids into some bomb factory?”
People had brought their babies to Jim Jones. Sacrificed countless other innocents to other Molochs. I didn’t say anything.
He said, “I sat in that clinic waiting room, and I knew everything was over. I wanted to run. But Malcolm was hot as a skillet, needed to see the doctor, so I sat and waited and hoped no one could see I was ready to burst out of my skin. Finally we got seen by a nurse, after all that time. She gave me medicine, told me he’d probably be okay once the fever broke, to give him lots of fluids, come back in a couple of days. I left, walked around the corner, carrying him, kept walking until I found a car with the keys left in the ignition. Got in, laid him across the front seat, started it up, drove all the way through Nevada, into California. Stopped to buy apple juice and diapers, driving while holding a bottle to his lips. Hundreds of miles of nightmares, roads with no one else on them, him screaming for his mama, me constantly thinking someone was gonna get on my tail, gun us down. Made it all the way to L.A. before dawn.”
“To Venice,” I said.
He nodded. “Like I said, they’d never gotten along, she and Norm, but where else could I take him? I left him on the doorstep and split.”
I opened his book, turned to the Berkeley picture, and showed it to him. “The other people—they were the second cadre?”
Another nod. “They were a hundred miles up the Snake River, negotiating for building materials. The plan was to build log cabins. They had bought the stuff from a logging contractor but got delayed trying to find some way to haul it down—Teamsters gave ’em grief, didn’t want to deal with a bunch of goddam hippies.”
“What’d they do after the explosion?”
“Disappeared. Mostly up to Canada.”
He took the book. Gazed at it. Closed his eyes.
I said, “What happened to them?”
He opened his eyes and sighed. “These two”—he jabbed a finger—“Harry and Debbie Delage. They stayed up there—they were French Canadian. I think they’re teachers in Montreal but I’m not sure, haven’t had contact with them. With any of
them.”
The finger drifted. “Ed Maher and Julie Bendix went to Morocco, moved around, and then came back, got married, had a bunch of kids. I heard she died of breast cancer a couple of years ago. He’s probably back east—his family had money.... Lyle Stokes got involved in this New Age crap—crystals and past lives. He’s making a fortune.... Sandy Porter I don’t know.... Gordy Latch married that fascist’s daughter and became a scumbag politician.... Jack Parducci’s a lawyer in Pittsburgh, joined the GOP.”
He stared at the picture a while longer, closed the book, and gave it back. “Fuck nostalgia.”
I said, “Who determined which cadre someone went into?”
“It wasn’t anything formal, just kind of natural selection. The first cadre were the leaders—thinkers, theorists.”
I said, “The second cadre fared a hell of a lot better than the first.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Nothing you haven’t wondered about yourself for seventeen years.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “I don’t wonder about anything. Wonderings a dead-end street.”
I said, “Why’d you choose Bear Lodge?”
“Randy Latch owned the property—her father had left it to her.”
“She was Mountain Properties?”
“Behind a bunch of dummy corporations—trust fund stuff, tax shelters. Her old man set it up for her. That’s why we pretended to lease it, so it would look businesslike, no one would dig into it.”
“With those connections,” I said, “didn’t Latch aspire to first-cadre status?”
“He might have, but that wasn’t a serious possibility. He was lots of noise, no substance. Not well respected. One of the reasons they kept him around was her money. After Bear Lodge, the two of them dropped out, reappeared as Jack and Mrs. Armstrong. Still lots of noise, no substance. The American public eats that up, right? No surprise he ended up doing what he’s doing.”
“Tell me about Wannsee Two.”
He sat up straight. “Where the hell didthat come from?”
“Ike Novato left some notes indicating he was researching it. He wrote it right above your name. He wondered about it.”
Crevolin gave a sick look. “That’s what he wanted to talk to me about? Hell that would have been easy.”
“Easy in what way?”
“Easy to answer. I could have told him the truth: Wannsee Two is government-issue drivel. Tricky Dicky Evil Empire Cointelpro disinformation tailor-made for John Q. Gullible. The government wanted to discredit us, so they planted bogus news items in the establishment press about us getting together with the neo-Nazi fringe—the old crapola about extremists on both ends being equivalent, Hitler and Stalin. Tarring us with the same brush as the KKK in order to isolate us, make us look bad. But in the end I guess it was just easier to blow us up—notice how you don’t hear about Wannsee Two anymore. And there are plenty of right-wing racist assholes running around.”
He shook his head, rubbed his temples. “Wannsee Two. I could have handled that in two minutes. I thought he wanted to get into personal stuff—his parents, raking up old memories.”
“Could Sophie Gruenberg have been interested in Wannsee Two?”
“Doubt it. That old lady was too sophisticated to be taken in by that kind of crap.”
“You knew her well?”
His headshake was vehement. “I only met her once. With Norm. But he talked about her. Said she was a revolutionary of the old stripe—well-read, intellectual. Even though he didn’t get along with her, he respected her intellect.”
“You only met her once?”
He was silent.
I caught his eye.
He said, “Twice. When I returned to L.A.—doing my little network page gig—I checked in with her. To see how things were going.”
“With Ike?”
“With the world.” He twisted his lip between thumb and forefinger.
I said, “Did you really just leave him on the step?”
“You bet I did. It was all I could do to hide and wait until she took him in. Going there in the first place was a risk. I was totally freaked-out, wanted to get the hell out of town before the men in the gray suits came calling. I figured eventually someone would figure out I hadn’t been blown up and try to finish the job.”
He laughed. “No one bothered. All these years.”
I said, “You mentioned the Feds’ running dogs. Any suspects?”
“Sure,” he said. “There were these weird trapper types skulking around in the forest. Mountain men—long hair, beards, homemade buckskins, eating grubs and whatever. Living off the land, like Redford in Jeremiah Johnson. We kind of did a mutual ignoring thing with them, but later, when I had time to think, I started to wonder. Because using them would have been a perfect government setup. We were naïve—we trusted anyone who looked counterculture. Crew-cut types sneaking around would have gotten us immediately paranoid, but those hairy fuckers we ignored. They’d been there before we got there, didn’t seem to have any real interest in us. Also, we respected the way they were doing their own thing. Thought of them as hippies with guns and Bowie knives. Macho freaks. We were jazzed by the whole live-off-the-land bit—that’s what we were aiming for. So it would have been easy for one of them to sneak in, plant the bombs, and sneak out. They were probably G-men or agents provocateurs —probably pushing paper in Toledo today. Which is punishment enough, right?”
The bitterness in his voice put the lie to his last statement.
I said, “Did you discuss any of these suspicions with Sophie Gruenberg the time you dropped by?”
“Didn’t have to. Moment she closed the door she sat me down and started lecturing to me about how the explosion had been a government plot; Norm and Melba and the others were martyrs. No tears—she was very tough. Just anger. This hot rage that made it seem as if she was vibrating.” He smiled. “She was a tough old lady. I could see her running a guillotine back in Bastille days.”
“Where’d she send Ike to be raised?”
“What makes you think she sent him anywhere?”
“He’d just moved to L.A. a few months before his death, told people he’d been living back east. That makes sense. Someone as suspicious as Sophie might be nervous keeping the son of martyrs around in plain view.”
“I don’t know the details,” he said. “When I asked about him, she said she’d sent him away to relatives. Said government people had come snooping around pretty soon after the blast, asking questions of the neighbors. She called them goddam cossacks. Said if they found out she had him with her, they’d kidnap him or something, claim she was unfit and take him away. She said he needed to be in a safe place for a while. I took that to mean temporary, she was planning to bring him back, but I guess she could have kept him away the whole time.”
“Any idea where these relatives lived?”
“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. I kind of assumed it was Philadelphia because Norm was born there—the family used to live there.”
“You only dropped in on her once?”
“That’s it. She was part of what I’d put behind me. So was Malcolm Isaac. That’s why I didn’t see him—it wasn’t just apathy. What would have been the point?”
His tension had lifted him out of his chair, and his skin had turned waxy. His eyes kept moving, up and down, side to side, back at the cartoon characters. Everywhere but at me.
I said, “I understand.”
“Do you? To understand you’ve got to know what it’s like to be a hunted animal—mainlining adrenaline, looking over your shoulder, hearing things, seeing things. Peeing your pants, afraid to move, afraid not to move. Convinced every tree is a storm trooper, not knowing what’s real and what’s not, when that bullet’s gonna come flying by, or the blade or the time bomb turning you into instant smog. By the time I dropped in on her, I’d finally managed to pull myself out of that insanity. Working at my page gig, renting a little bachelor apartment, going to the
supermarket, the Laundromat, the filling station. Eating Swanson TV dinners and hot dogs—no more macrobiotics, I was ready for some nitrite-cramming, like a real American. Doing regular-person stuff, so happy and grateful to be alive. I mean, I couldn’t believe they weren’t coming after me—couldn’t believe they were letting me live and work and eat hot dogs and do my thing and no one was trying to blow me up.
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