by Liza Nelson
Back in the living room, Cleo was describing her plans to bring tourists to Esmeralda. I don’t know why they’d want to come; there’s not even a movie theater, let alone a water park. But Cleo kept talking about copying Key West.
“I want to build on the mystique of being located in the middle of nowhere,” she was explaining to Mrs. Rainey, who looked uncomfortable and out of place, as if all Cleo’s pink were making her a little ill. “So how do you like my watercolor? Has it worn well?”
One of the Bosells stood trapped in a corner with Uncle Hudson. He was always trapping someone in a corner to talk gardens. Mr. Rainey was talking to the newlyweds. Godiva glided among them all, decked out in her off-the-shoulders pineapple blouse and multicolored skirt that whirled like a rainbow in a blender whenever she moved. All she was missing was a hat of bananas. She kept disappearing into the kitchen, her skirt twirling through the doorway behind her.
The turkey was served a little after one and then Cleo brought out the games, board games like Parcheesi and Chinese Checkers no one else plays anymore. We were home by five. Godiva immediately announced she was going to bake some bread. She always does this. We’ve been somewhere and she decides she has too much energy left over so she starts some giant project. Around Thanksgiving it’s usually bread.
As she arranged her ingredients on the table and started mixing stuff, she sang at the top of her lungs, old Beatles and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan (my other namesake, I hate him!). Every so often she’d break into free-form dance steps that caused flour to rise from the open bag in dusty clouds.
I sat at the one uninvaded corner of the table, eating leftover yam and fruit casserole. To a stranger we’d have looked as cozy as a greeting card. That was the thing, for everything to seem just fine, as if the same old ground rules still applied. I forced myself to hang around because she expected me to.
“You used to love to help bake. Remember those little baking tins you had?” I guess.
“We had so much fun.” When Godiva tossed her hair back, flour sprinkled down. “You’ll come back to it. You’re just at an age when making bread is a little too sensual to handle.”
I cringed inwardly but said nothing. B.D. I might have exploded at such a ridiculous comment, but I was not going to waste energy on scenes with Godiva Blue anymore. Godiva shook more flour across her bread slab, a jagged piece of marble she’d found abandoned years ago and used only for her annual baking splurge at Thanksgiving. Watching Godiva punch and knead, it was hard not to be lulled by the familiarity of the warm room full of the sweet scent of yeast and cinnamon and chocolate—Godiva makes a killer chocolate bread.
“God, I do love Thanksgiving.” Godiva set a blob of dough in the unlit oven to rise and took another blob out. “The idea of a holiday when all you do is stuff yourself and be thankful. Done right it transcends religion. After all, nothing says you can’t pick which god, or gods, to thank.”
The same old ranting, easily ignored. Bits of dough clung to her cheek; flour had tamed her hair to a dull mud color. Godiva is an extremely messy cook. She had on a stained green turtleneck that pulled unflatteringly at her breasts and showed her heaviness. This is mean, I guess, but I swear she resembled a turkey.
The phone rang. Godiva has always hated the phone but since September, the stupid accident and all, she was getting more calls. At first we both ignored the ringing the way we often did unless one of us was expecting a call (and since the lock-in I’d stopped expecting or wanting calls). Then suddenly Godiva leaped toward it. Her hands were covered with flour so she cradled the receiver between her jaw and shoulder as she worked over her dough. Whoever was on the other end caught her attention. I swear she flushed.
“No.” Almost formal. “I’m baking bread with my daughter.” She wiped her hands on her apron and started to pace as she talked.
I took another helping of casserole. Godiva’s back rounded into the phone. She wandered into the other room, the long phone cord slinking after her. After a minute or two, she wandered back and reached for her lighter on the table.
“Yes.” She held the flame at arm’s length before she lit her cigarette. “I’m not sure.” She casually glanced in my general direction. “I’m not sure. Maybe later.”
As Godiva hung up, I had this fleeting hope even I recognized was crazy, that you were calling to say you wanted to meet with us and that Godiva was agreeing.
“I’m sorry, Noodle. It wasn’t important.” Godiva punched my arm lightly, then suddenly full of energy, tousled my hair the way she used to. I tried not to flinch before she gave it up.
“I’m crazy to hear more about the Iran-Contra thing,” she said and switched on the radio. Godiva listens to National Public Radio every night for about half an hour, as close to mass media as she gets, although she let me have a black-and-white portable television in my room because, she said, she didn’t want me to feel deprived and sneak to other people’s houses for my favorite programs.
I was playing with my fork, mashing my yam into hills and valleys when I realized what I was hearing on the radio. Instead of Iran-Contra, a reporter was describing some drug bust in South Carolina.
“Lehman and Tremp have been identified as members of the A.R.M., the American Radical Movement, an offshoot of the Weather Underground movement of the late sixties and early seventies.”
I could not quite believe my ears. Godiva was kneading dough, oblivious.
“Arrested Monday night as they were about to board a shrimp boat laden with one and a half tons of marijuana twenty miles north of Charleston, South Carolina, the suspects have been sought for years in connection with various terrorist activities including several bombings.”
I did not dare stop chewing my mouthful of casserole, afraid Godiva would notice, but Godiva was staring out the window, her hands in the dough.
“This arrest, like the Brinks robbery several years ago, raises the question for many who came of age in the nineteen-sixties— what happened to the idealism of that era?” The woman reporter’s confiding, slightly puzzled tone was gratingly similar to Godiva’s at times. “Why did college radicalism turn ugly, first to violence, now criminality.”
I did not want to hear any more. I was desperate to get out of the kitchen.
“Speaking with us now is Gerry Flint, a former Weather Underground member who has lived under a false name for the last eight years. You worked as a garage mechanic until you turned yourself in and received a full pardon last August, is that right, Mr. Flint?”
Gerry Flint had the high-pitched, rattling voice of a college professor. He explained how he’d married and fathered two children, how the family lived in a solidly working-class neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, where they were completely accepted. Accepted as what? I wondered.
“And do you still participate in political activism?”
“I don’t vote or anything.” He either cleared his throat or chuckled. “I’ve signed a few petitions with my new name, abortion rights, environmental issues, that sort of thing, but I’m no activist. No anti-nuclear groups or stuff like that. I wouldn’t be fool enough. Not that I really had done much of anything to make me worth seeking out in the first place. Nope, I’ve just been an average Joe. My one passion was, well still is, my son Hank’s soccer team, which I coached until my legal situation came up. We’re talking about my coaching again next spring in fact. The parents are standing behind me.”
I could not breathe. Could not move. Had he really named his son Hank? I glanced at Godiva punching her dough. No reaction visible.
“Why did you turn yourself in?”
“Well, I knew my parents were getting older, and now that I’m a parent, I wanted to clear things up, wanted Hank and Eden to meet their grandmother and grandfather. My folks have been great by the way. Extremely understanding.”
“Do you know the men who were arrested yesterday?”
“I’d heard their names round and about before Toledo when I was still on the move, but I nev
er met them personally. Living underground is a funny existence.”
If I’d only had a tape recorder I could play this for you sometime. But I remember every word.
“It can go either way. You can fit yourself right in, carve a safe place for yourself, or you can keep on the loose, move around, switch identities. If you go that way, you’re less likely to get caught I suppose but you’re also pretty much on your own. You might maintain some old contacts, keep in the political swim on the periphery. Well, not always on the periphery if you still want to blow things up, not that I ever did. But basically you’re isolated. That way of living was too lonely for me. I’m a nest builder. I’m a people person.”
“Is that what drew you into politics in the first place?”
“Sure. Good parties, good dope, if I can say that here, pretty girls.”
“The dough is on its own for a while,” Godiva said. I was listening so hard to the radio I almost didn’t hear her, had to swim back to the present of being together with her in our kitchen. “I’m heading out to the studio.”
She spoke nonchalantly, but I wasn’t sure. I felt as if I were watching a silent film of Godiva walking across the kitchen in slow motion. At that moment I almost wished I could tell her, could let the words out into the space between us, say in a clear clipped tone, “I know.” But there was no way. Meanwhile, being in the room with Godiva was unbearable. I thought I would scream.
The report had lasted no more than a minute or two, and Gerry Flint had said little that was exactly surprising. I already knew from my research most of the survival techniques of the hunted, how you get a phony ID, how you send messages to your families. However, he’d given me something far more important.
A paperweight Godiva made years ago sat in the middle of the table holding down some striped napkins. I picked it up. Although heavy in my palm, the glass ball filled with aqua and rose bubbles had an airiness, as if it were on the verge of floating away. For over a month, I had been searching old newspaper clippings and autobiographical books for some acknowledgment of your existence, and here it was. Gerry Flint knew you. His son’s name could not be coincidence. I knew I could look up his name, the real one and the fake one, in the Toledo phone book at the Grassly library. I could find out where Flint had been and find you.
That’s how I zeroed in on Eden. Flint wouldn’t actually talk to me when I called his house pretending I was a reporter, but there were articles about him in the newspapers the next few days. One mentioned some time he’d spent on a collective farm in Delaware. Eden, like his daughter. A little paradise for people who needed to disappear. Gerry Flint had stayed there long enough to name his daughter after the place. He had named his son Hank. After you, it had to be. Gerry Flint must have known you. Where else could your paths have crossed but Eden. There is no other possible connection. I am sure I am on the right path.
Ten
AT FIRST, WHEN Randall Spider Gervais sat down, pulled off his red snakeskin boots and said, “Don’t worry, my feet don’t smell,” I pretended to be too busy reading a magazine to hear him, but, in fact, I sat up a little straighter. I guess I’ve already told you, but bus travelers are pretty creepy, like they’ve been old forever. The sitting dead. So it was not all that flattering that he’d picked me to sit next to. Besides, by yesterday afternoon all the window seats were taken. But still, a little thrill ran through me that he was a guy, and an older guy, at least nineteen, maybe even in his twenties.
As for me, I was just starting to feel a little better, or at least less totally depressed. At least I’d stopped crying. But I was ready to back out. I mean, not really. I knew I had to find you. But had the wrong person decided to sit next to me, some responsible grown-up who looked at me hard and asked questions in that concerned adult-stranger tone, I admit I might have given up and slunk back to Esmeralda, your picture to remain in my wallet forevermore untouched.
If Randall Spider Gervais was sent as a first test of my will, he is a whole different kind of test. In his silvery cowboy shirt and those red boots, he does not appear to have one extra inch of fat, or skin for that matter, anywhere on his body. His head balances above his shoulders on a popsicle stick neck. The skin is pulled tight across his face from ear to ear, so that his nose looks like a folded sheet of paper. He could be two-dimensional. A fish with an eye on either side but no front. Not that he is ugly. He is not ugly at all. Just different. Dramatic. Mesmerizing. No just-one-of-the-guys Jimmy Cryder, either, that’s for sure. Boy, Jimmy Cryder was a whole other lifetime.
“Your feet stink,” I told Randall Spider Gervais after a few minutes. Did they ever. The smell was sour and moldy. Randall Spider Gervais was wearing black socks out of some nylony material that emphasized his bony arches.
“Yeah, but those boots like to kill me, they’re so tight.” His Adam’s apple bobbed with each syllable, but his skin was smooth in a tan, manly way. “Are you on your way to the D. of C., too?”
I nodded.
“Business or pleasure?”
“Excuse me?”
“Business or pleasure, ma’am?”
I just looked at him.
He wasn’t kidding. I mean, he was talking to me the way Jimmy’s dad might to a client in Esmeralda, but he was not a middle-aged real estate agent. Not by a long shot. I took the time to consider seriously what my correct answer should be.
You have to realize, he was the first person I’d seen anywhere near my age, not counting that crying baby, since Cass dropped me off, and then I was so nervous I barely said goodbye to her. I was trying to squeeze Godiva’s knapsack into the overhead rack when I looked out the window and there was Reverend Brasleton locking his car door in the Waffle House lot across the street. Squinting right at the bus like he was trying to see inside. It was probably the sun he was squinting against actually. Besides, the bus windows were tinted so I’m pretty sure he couldn’t see anything even if he tried.
Not that Reverend Brasleton was likely to talk to Godiva. Hardly. But if he’d seen me, I would have had to make conversation, explaining why I was in Perry taking the Atlanta bus or pretending I wasn’t. I could easily have ended up missing the bus altogether. Luckily Cass was parking the car around the corner, but when she came back, even though he was inside by then, ordering his chili fries or pecan waffle, all I wanted was for her to leave fast.
I’m assuming everything’s working out on her end. If they call Gram’s, they’ll assume we’re out shopping or eating somewhere, as long as Cass remembered to call her mother last night so Mrs. Culpepper would let Godiva know we arrived safely. I wonder where exactly Cass went with her friend. A male friend, I’m sure, although she didn’t say. She’s so mysterious. That’s why I trust her. She has her own secrets.
Meanwhile, I decided that the best approach with Randall Spider Gervais was to stay above it all.
“Personal business,” I said, looking straight ahead.
“I’m on a mission for the United States government myself. Highly confidential.” He spoke in a low drawl, not a whisper, but conspiratorial, as if he’d sized me up and I’d passed.
“Right, and I’m on my way to join a commune of bomb-throwing terrorists.” You’d have been proud of me, the way I didn’t miss a beat. There was no way he’d believe the truth put that way.
“A commune?”
I figured he didn’t know what I meant and started explaining how I’d already lived on a commune once, even if I didn’t exactly remember much about it, when I was really little, before we went to Gram’s because Poppo was dying. Godiva has told me stories about Magic House, but it’s hard to picture Godiva part of some group of friends, sharing everything, making group decisions. Now all she does is warn me against stuff like peer pressure. Isolation is her big thing these days. Only she’d call it independence.
Spider stopped me before I said much. Held his finger to my lips. Very gentle but spooky kind of.
“We might be adversaries someday,” he said. Adversaries! I
magine Jimmy Cryder talking like that. When I started to giggle, he looked offended.
“You’ll begin to understand soon enough.”
It was very weird. I didn’t believe for a second he was on a mission for anybody, but then again, who’d believe I was going to a commune of bomb throwers? I felt exposed, almost. Part of me was saying this guy is a nut case. But another part was curious. What made him say he was on a mission? Besides, he was taking me so seriously. A cute older guy taking me seriously. That was a first.
Evening was catching up with us. The countryside looked different, more exotic, the distant lights turning everything a kind of pewter. The world softened and I felt a reawakening of life’s possibilities. Everything and anything was possible. Did you ever have a moment like that? Now that your life is constricted, with so many options closed because of your past (not that I’m critical of any choice you made; I’m sure there were reasons), do you ever look back and remember a time when anything could have happened next? That’s how I felt last night.
Randall Spider Gervais started talking about his childhood, telling me how his mother was the belle of Meridian, before she married Spider’s daddy and started traveling in a downward spiral that ended when his daddy disappeared with all their savings while she was giving birth to Spider.
“When she died, so many roses and lilies came from all over to the funeral home, my step-daddy had to rent a tent, a big striped tent like they use for weddings, to hold them all.” Spider was seven years old at the time. “Next thing I knew, I was shipped off to military school, a junior junior cadet.” He pressed my finger against what he said was a scar above his chest. I couldn’t see it in the dark, but he said it was from his first fight defending his mother’s name. “Since that day I have never been without a weapon at my disposal.”
I let the idea of weapons settle in. His voice was so sweet, how dangerous could he be? I realized we were holding hands, had been for a while. I didn’t mind. His life had been so tragic really, even if his stories didn’t make sense.