by Dick Cluster
“Who does?” Dee put her fingers back to work on the streetlight pole again. “I can tell you this about Foster. When we got here to the city, he stayed with me for a while, not long. During that time he talked to a civilian lawyer here who did a lot of military work. The lawyer said he had some procedural, due-process grounds in his favor but he’d have to turn himself in, at whatever base he walked off of, and have a lawyer there, and hope for the best. Foster and I parted ways, but I did get a postcard from Germany, eventually. It said, ‘Dishonorable, but free at last.’ That’s Foster. As far as I know Jay didn’t have anything to do with him, or vice versa, except during that short time we all spent driving out. I think you’re on a wild-goose chase here, I really do.”
“Since I’m here, though, would you mind telling me what you can remember about Jay, or Jay and Foster, during that short time? At least the flavor of it.”
“The flavor, the odd detail, even if there’s none of the dangerous secrets promised in that note?”
“Please,” Alex said. “It might help. You never know.”
“Well, in that case you don’t need me in person, and you don’t need to take me out for a drink. If we can find a copy shop open at this hour, I’m willing to lend you my true confessions from that time.”
Dee Sturdevant looked once at Alex, sideways, then turned and started marching back the way the two of them had come. When Alex caught up he said, “You kept a diary, you mean?”
“Religiously. As if somebody were going to write my biography someday, or publish my journals. You know, like Anais Nin’s. I suppose everybody hopes their journals might be considered a masterpiece in another era. I confess I had that on my mind.”
“Really?” Alex said. Meredith had once said that many women tended their journals as devotedly as if they were striving for masterpieces. It was the as if that interested Meredith. “Did you ever try?”
“What? To get them published? No. I do accuse my boyfriend of stealing from them, for his stories. He says material is where you find it. Listen, I hope Jay appreciates this. No, I don’t care whether he appreciates it or not. I hope you’re convinced I’m doing anything for this woman that I can.”
14. Love and Rain
The plant in the window turned out to be a small tree, a miniature complete with branches and bark. Dee Sturdevant departed waving a spiral notebook, the five-by-eight kind, tan cardboard cover faded almost to white. She left Alex with her boyfriend, Roger, who was white, bearish, gray-bearded and gray-haired. Roger’s eyes swam through thick lenses while the rest of his face smiled in a hearty way. He poured Alex a glass of red wine from a local vineyard he liked, which Alex sipped while he called airlines in search of a seat on a red-eye flight. Then they chatted about auto engines and auto bodies, the strengths of Japanese production methods and the weaknesses of Japanese recycled steel. “Have you read all these diaries?” Alex asked finally. If he stole from them, he ought to be able to see them with a critic’s eye.
“A lot of them. They’re kind of helter-skelter, like cooking and housecleaning and yoga and a lot of things Dee can get into for short bursts and then forget about till the next time they strike her a certain way. She’s steady about her work, and she’s steady about Sierra— that’s her daughter. She’s delightfully erratic about a lot of other things. Delightful to me, anyway. I cook and clean regularly, and I always drink coffee out of the same cup and put it on the same corner of my desk.”
An hour later Alex sat in a crowded, littered departure gate area, one of the day’s last cohort of passengers, with a sheaf of photocopied pages in his lap. At the last minute Dee had also laid a photograph on him, a glossy black-and-white snapshot. Taken, she said, “by somebody or other with Barbarella’s camera, because Barbarella brought a camera when she ran away from home.” The shot was not quite in focus, or maybe the photographer hadn’t managed to hold the camera still. The quartet was posed: female, male, female, male from left to right, arms around one another’s shoulders or waists. Alex recognized the two in the middle. Jay and Dee, the ones with the one-syllable names.
Jay Harrison regarded the camera with a glare, though Alex had the feeling the glare was mostly to keep Jay from cracking up. His hair hung to his shoulders, straight without much body, secured by a headband, of course. The hair seemed lighter, closer to a dirty blond than today. The build was much thinner, almost delicate. He wore a blue-jean jacket, tattered, open in the front. What did his pose add up to? Youth, insouciance, determination, a certain air of persecution and paranoia too. From his own back pages Alex remembered all of that very well.
Next to him, Dee squinted more than smiled. Her pale hair hung down behind her shoulders, and she wore a denim vest that looked to be cut from a jacket, without any emblems but otherwise like the vests bikers used to wear. Alex imagined her expression meant she didn’t like posed pictures, didn’t particularly want to be frozen this way. She seemed supple and willowy, more given to movement than the woman who’d lent him this photo and these pages out of her past.
Foster was the same height as Dee and twice as wide. He had on a black motorcycle jacket. His head was shaved and his beard bushy. On his round face he wore a broad smile that might have come naturally from how solid he seemed. Or it might have meant something in that moment, happiness or confidence. Or it might have been designed to conceal something else. He was the second most photogenic of the bunch.
First prize went to the one on the other end, with Jay’s arm around her shoulders, somebody who might have called herself Barbarella after all. She wore cut-off jeans that hugged her hips, and a work shirt, tied above her waist beneath the curves of breasts that were full and unconfined. Her smile was young and broad, expectant. Her dark hair, which fell to just above her shoulders, seemed thick and shiny and full of energy. Underneath the photo somebody, presumably she, had written in rounded blue ballpoint script For Dee, elder sister, trip and a half, with a ton of thanks, love to F.— B.
Alex turned the photo over, as if it could tell him something more. The back was blank. He riffled through the diary pages, muddy black photocopies on overly white paper, scratchy script, two-page spreads with the wire spiral showing dark and blurry in between. This was what Dee had given him. She hadn’t said whether or not it was all she’d written during that particular journey, and he hadn’t asked. When he was sandwiched in the center section of the jumbo jet, he began to read.
May 5
I’m sitting at a kitchen table in a house in a neighborhood whose name I don’t know. Across the table a woman named Ginny is feeding her baby in the high chair. She’s Foster’s sister-in-law, younger than me. She said no, she wouldn’t be offended if I sat here and wrote privately to myself. She’s very polite, but not friendly. I’m trying not to take it personally, or even racially. Fact is, I don’t think she’s been too happy with Foster, I think him living here has been weirding her out somehow. But she’s not too sure about seeing him leave with me. I am. I hope I’m not wrong. Let me back up a day.
Yesterday just past sunset I was leaning against the fence of the Washington Redskins’ spare practice field a few blocks from here. I was thinking how astounding that name is. As if the Nazis, having taken everything from the Jews, decided to call their capital city’s soccer team the Berlin Kikes. The Washington Redskins, Nixon’s team. The farthest thing from my mind, I would have said, was looking for a man.
It was drizzling, getting dark, wet, and cold. I had my back against the chain-link fence, trying to tuck my head into my sweater like a duck, sniffing tear gas and wet wool. I was feeling old— admit it, feeling thirty, as in “Don’t trust anybody past.” Too old to look forward to spending the night in there, even with a thousand others, all stashed in this holding pen because the regular jails were full.
They had posted National Guard around the fence with rifles and bayonets, but with a lot of space in between. The ones I talked to had been friendly, or at least neutral enough. People who lived in the neighb
orhood— it’s all black— had been tossing food in to us over the fence. So there in the dusk, something landed in front of me, splat in the mud. I thought it was a can of like spaghetti or peaches, and I could find somebody with some kind of opener and we could share them around. But no. Wire cutters. Somebody had tossed a pair of wire cutters over the fence.
I picked up the cutters, held them in my hand. I told myself even if these weekend soldiers spotted me they wouldn’t shoot a blond thirty-year-old ex-schoolteacher for blocking traffic and then sneaking away from a football field. I knew I might be wrong, but when it got good and dark, I cut a hole to wriggle through and then slithered about fifteen feet along the ground, my heart hammering like a demented drum solo inside my chest. I waited for somebody to call out, in I didn’t know what language, “Halt!” When they didn’t, I walked up the rest of the hill like a citizen, my head high. My knees shook, I was shivering. I got ready to circle the field and head over toward the highway they brought us in on. Then I heard a low voice, quiet, with a hint of gravel. I dropped into a crouch like a hunted animal, suddenly smarter than I was brave. The voice said, “I thought somebody could get some use out of my brother’s old pair of shears.”
We ended up spending the night on a mattress in their basement, Ginny and J.T.’s basement, where Foster’s been sleeping, J.T. is his brother, younger brother it turns out. I was high off escape and daring, and Ginny and J.T.’s whiskey. Foster is a talker, funny and serious, with an accepting manner and nice hands. Is that really all I know about him? How many teenage girls have I told this to: Sex is a trip, but don’t travel without a map. Otherwise you’re pregnant too soon, and he’s drafted or in the joint or on the street without a job. None of this applies to us grown-ups. Do as I say, not as I do.
Facts about Foster, grown-uplike: He’s just back in this country after a few years in France. He worked in auto-body shops, says he met his first Africans there. He also played flute in the Paris Metro and drew sidewalk portraits above ground. Like I said, good with his hands. He’s been rebuilding J.T.’s old delivery van— J.T. has a printing business— to sell as a camper, score some bucks. Really he’d like to use it, not sell it. I need to get back to California. I said, “I’ve got travel money, once I reconnect with my friends. You’ve got wheels.”
May 7
In a bar, past midnight, Philadelphia. I’d be hassled here, unmercifully, except I’ve got a pretend date. His name is Jay. Foster and I have a traveling companion now.
Out of the frying pan into the fire. Forty-five minutes from the Nation’s Capital, it was Pig City once again. Maryland state troopers this time. All our shit spread on the highway shoulder. I felt naked, cop pawing through my purse. Leers at my pills, then looks at me like wherever Foster’s been he has a God-given right to go too. I hated that I had to stand and take it the way I knew I had to do. I had to do it because when the siren sounded Foster said, “Listen baby I got to tell you something. My name is Pierre Landreau, I’m French, I don’t speak much English, I know you can make up the rest.” So I did. I did the talking, I made up what I had to make up. He really does have a French passport, complete with photo, that helped. The police let us go with a “warning,” as if we’d committed some crime. “Tell him to get his piece of trash out of here,” the shorter one said— meaning the van, meaning me.
Then Foster drove but wouldn’t talk. He moped, leaving me to guess what he hadn’t told me, what was coming next. Damn it, I thought. No more humiliating for you than for me, making like a turtle ain’t gonna help. Between the secrets and the self-pity, I rode along with serious second thoughts. Nice while it lasted, nobody with whom I ought to fall in love. Let me out at the next bus station, you go your way and I go mine. But you don’t cross these lines without work, I argued with myself. Dee, you ought to know that by now.
All of sudden he said, “Hey, Dee, how about we pick up that hippie?” I didn’t know what hippie, because the guy was already behind us. I still don’t know how Foster saw him out of his averted eyes.
We took the next exit and we discussed and agreed. We didn’t talk about what happened, but Foster explained why the false papers. He apologized for not warning me. He’s a deserter, that’s all. I said that made him a patriot in my book. Not to wage this war is patriotism, is an attempt to salvage this country’s soul. But I asked were we carrying anything I should know about, like any guns or dope. Just a few grams of nice Turkish hash, he said, for personal consumption, buried deep inside his flute. We picked up the so-called hippie, who turns out to be rather overeducated, Harvard no less. Now we’re in Philadelphia, where Foster is off looking for an army buddy, then we’ll head west. I’m willing to give it another try. I do like him, what can I say?
May 8— Indiana— morning— drove all night
We’re making miles, but not so happily. In Philadelphia, Foster came back very bummed. He couldn’t find the buddy because the buddy got shipped to the war and died. It really threw him. In my experience, too much experience, it always does. Foster goes very fast from opening up to closing down, from high to low. Not like me and those Sturdevants I’m always trying to get away from. We go marching on like the postman, neither snow nor sleet. I tried to talk to him but he didn’t want me around. He drove, Jay sat up there next to him. I went to sleep.
I woke crossing the Alleghenies someplace, fog in the road. Foster was asking Jay what about him and the army, how did Jay deal? I-Y, Jay said, unfit for service except in time of national emergency. At his physical he kept asking what was the reason for the war. He pissed on the guy taking urine samples, had “Fuck the Army” written in lipstick on his back. Plus all this was backed up by a letter from some shrink. Since then he’s been working against the war, “so nobody will have to go.” He went into some detail about all of this. Also a patriot, to me, if not especially brave.
“You answered my question,” Foster finally said, “so shut the fuck up.”
After a while, Foster started talking. Told how he agitated, too, in Germany, after he was in. With his buddy from Philadelphia, the buddy’s name was Turk. Why should the black man participate in the white man’s war against the yellow, he handed out leaflets like that, off base at the soldier bars. So the brass cut them both orders to Vietnam. They discussed what to do. Foster walked. Turk didn’t, because he felt that would only dig him deeper in the shit.
Jay said he was sorry, or something like that. Asked did Foster feel responsible for what happened to his friend. Foster told Jay to shut up again. He wants to put miles between us and that ghost in Philadelphia now.
I learned how Foster got in the army, too, though he didn’t tell that to Jay. Spray-painting. Like “Alice’s Restaurant,” getting out by a littering rap, only not funny, the other way around. He got busted one night for spray-painting black power slogans, and the judge in Baltimore took a dislike to him. Gave him a choice between jail for malicious destruction, or joining up. Foster says in the end it came down to his father. Your country is still your country, his father said, and no son that had taken music lessons was going to be a jailbird, and you got enough going against you without a record, so serve your time in uniform and then finish school. Foster suspects the old man probably changed his mind later. He died while Foster was still in France.
May 11— The Black Hills
I’m cold, the cold woke me up, it’s six A.M. This close to North Dakota I start to feel winter, no matter what season it is. So I’m going to write about the day before yesterday when it was sunny and warm. When I knew things were good again for sure— for now.
We were on I-80 where it follows the old wagon route along the Platte. Foster and Jay both wanted to put their feet in the river, I think it was all out of Wild West movies to them. They do have some things in common. They both know about printing, for instance, and false ID. That gives them something to talk shop about.
We bushwhacked through brush and dry channels, Foster swinging his flute like a machete in its case. We got
to the river, running fast but shallow, sun-dappled, air hot and still. We broke out the hash and then we took off our clothes and floated downstream in the sun. I felt like the current was washing me free of bad choices, or no choices. I hoped it was doing that for Foster, too. We came to an island and I grabbed his hand and we kicked ourselves to the shore. Now I write this down in the cold morning and get goose bumps— part from remembered pleasure, part from shock about how dangerous that scene could have been. Do we think we carry some special charm that says we can get naked and screw wherever we want, on anybody’s turf? But so far we’re charmed. Foster, will this end? I know it will end, that’s what makes it work. When, though? When we run out of road?
We walked back up the river hand in hand. Jay’s stuff was gone when we got to the place we’d left our clothes. I had my T-shirt over my head when I heard rustling. When I could see again, Foster was doing up his belt grimly like a cowboy cinching down a saddle before going out to do some disagreeable chore. Nobody was in sight. Then these two bedraggled white teenagers stood up out of the bushes. The girl said Jay told them maybe they could have a ride.
“Yeah,” the boy said. “I’m Henry and this is Barbar— Ellen.”