I watched Philipe as he talked, as he made the others repeat the time sequences of their portions of the plan, and I wondered why he had chosen me to be his partner. Not because I was his right-hand man, that was for sure.
Probably to keep an eye on me because he didn’t trust me anymore.
After the meeting, as we were getting up and leaving, he called my name, asked me to stay. I waited around while the others walked across the cul-de-sac to their respective homes.
Philipe pulled the red pins from his map, picked up the map from the table, folded it. “I know your opinion of this,” he said. “But I want you with us.”
He spoke as he was folding the map, not looking up at me, and I realized that, in his own way, he was trying to make up with me. He was trying to apologize. I leaned against the wall near the door, not knowing what to say.
He stared down at the pins in his hand, jiggled them. “It’s not easy being who we are,” he said. “What we are. There are no rules, no traditions. We’re making them up as we go along. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we can’t tell they’re mistakes until after the fact.” He looked up at me. “That’s all I had to say.”
I nodded. I was not sure what he wanted from me. I was not even sure what he’d said.
We stared at each other for a moment.
Then I walked out of the office, back to my house.
We drove to Familyland in silence, and the silence was tense. Philipe turned on the radio. A station I didn’t like. But I left it on because it was better than the quiet.
We parked near a light post with an “H” hanging from the pole and walked across the lot to the entrance.
The second we walked into the amusement park, I was struck by the enormity of what we planned to do, and I had to stop for a moment and close my eyes and catch my breath. I felt a little dizzy. I opened my eyes again, and saw hordes of people walking down Old Town, past the magic shop, past the Hall of History. A trolley passed by, pulled by a horse, its bell dinging. In front of me, at the end of the street, I could see the graceful fairy-tale spires of the Castle.
A family passed by us, the boy asking his father if he could have some ice cream.
This was serious. This was the real thing. I had not bargained for anything like this. I don’t think any of us had. Except maybe Philipe.
I had killed before, but that was different. It was personal. This would be the cold-blooded murder of innocent strangers. Mothers. Families. Kids.
I did not want to be a Terrorist for the Common Man, I realized. Maybe Prankster for the Common Man. Monkey-wrencher for the Common Man. But that was as far as I was willing to go.
“I can’t do it,” I told Philipe.
“You can and you will.”
“What if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll kill you. I’ll set off this detonator, and the explosives you’re carrying will blow your ass to hell.”
“You’d do that?”
“Try me.”
I shook my head. “I can’t kill innocent people.”
“No one’s innocent.”
“Can’t we just set these off somewhere where they won’t really hurt anyone? We’d still be making a statement, we’d still get the attention we want, but we wouldn’t have to kill anybody.”
“They’ll take us a lot more seriously if we do kill someone.”
“You sent letters off, didn’t you?”
“And our cards. Yesterday. To the park’s headquarters, to the Anaheim police, and to all the local newspapers, and TV stations.”
“That should be good enough. They’ll get the letters; we’ll plant the explosives; they’ll search for them and find them; we won’t have to blow up anything. We’ll still get the attention for our cause—”
“Why are you like this?” Philipe asked.
“Like what?”
“Why do you care so much about these people? Have they ever cared about you? Have they ever noticed you?”
“No,” I admitted. “But they haven’t done anything to hurt me either.”
“It has to be personal with you, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I really hate that about you,” he said. He looked down Main Street. He took a deep breath, sighed. “But sometimes I wish I was that way too.”
“Do you really want to go through with it?” I gestured around us. “I mean this is Familyland. Do you really want to do anything to hurt Familyland?”
He was about to reply, about to say something, when he stiffened, looking furtively around.
“What is it?”
“Something’s changed. Don’t you feel it?”
I shook my head.
“They know. They’re looking for us.”
“What—?”
“The letters must have gotten there early. Fucking post office.” He stared up the street, scanning the crowd. “Shit. I see them.”
Panic welled within me. “What are we going to do?”
“Get the others and get the hell out of here.”
I looked around, saw a lot of short-haired, gray-suited men on the sidewalks and in the street. Some of them seemed to be wearing walkie-talkies on their belts, speaking into transistor headsets. They’d infiltrated the crowd without me even noticing.
We hurried through Old Town toward Futureland, where Bill and Paul were supposed to be planting explosives under a seat in the Journey to Jupiter ride. “Who are those guys?” I asked.
Philipe shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“I didn’t see them until you said something. They’re almost as hard to notice as we are.”
“That’s what scares me.”
We found Bill and Paul waiting in line for Jupiter. We told them what was happening and the four of us hurried over to the Submarine ride to find Steve and Mary.
The gray-suited men were all around.
“Do they work for Familyland?” Bill asked. “Or are they cops?”
“I don’t know,” Philipe repeated. He sounded tense.
The men were everywhere, but they didn’t notice us. I was not even sure that they knew who or what they were looking for. We rounded up Steve and Mary and were about to head over to the Enchanted Mountain when, from hidden loudspeakers all over the park, a calm and reassuring, serious yet friendly voice announced: “Due to unforeseen circumstances, Familyland will be closing in five minutes. Please proceed to the main gate.”
Around us, rides were shutting down. People were being quickly and efficiently herded by cheerful young red-coated men and women toward the park entrance.
“—All guests will be issued complimentary return passes for two days at Familyland, the Home of Fun!”
The message was repeated.
“Get a move on,” Philipe said. “They’re closing in on us. Without a crowd for us to hide in, they’ll see us for sure.”
We found Pete and John waiting by the African Princess, Don and James standing in front of the High Seas Adventure ride. By now the park was almost emptied of normal tourists. Teams of the gray-suited men, accompanied by what looked like uniformed policemen, were patrolling the walkways and thoroughfares, walking into the rides and shops and attractions.
Philipe looked at his watch. “That’s it,” he said. “The others should still be outside. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
All ten of us ran back through Wild West Land. We hurried past the shops and arcades.
And saw Tommy and Buster walk through the front entrance of the park into a deserted Old Town.
They got several yards up the street before they were spotted. Then the gray suits were talking frantically into headsets and walkie-talkies, uniforms were drawing guns, crouching into firing positions.
“Run!” Philipe yelled.
“Get out!” I screamed.
We were all yelling, shouting at the top of our lungs for them to hightail it out of here, but they could not hear us and seemed oblivious to the fact that Familyland was practically deserted save for th
emselves and the gray suits and the uniforms.
A couple of the suits looked in our direction as we screamed, but we ducked into a doorway, were quiet for a moment, and were forgotten.
“Stay where you are!” someone announced over a loudspeaker.
We came out of our hiding place and saw Tommy running like hell back toward the entrance, having obviously figured out that something was wrong. Buster, though, looked confused. He stood in place, turning back toward Tommy, then back toward the men, not moving in either direction.
“Surrender your weapons!” the loudspeaker said.
For a second, it looked like a scene in a silent comedy. Buster stood there, puzzled, glanced around as if searching for someone else they might be addressing, then pointed quizzically toward himself as if to say, “Who? Me?”
Then there was a shot.
And Buster went down.
“No!” I screamed.
I started toward him, but Philipe grabbed my collar and pulled me back. “Forget it,” he hissed. “It’s too late for him now. We have to save ourselves.”
“He might still be alive!”
“If he is, they have him. Come on.”
We cut through the open patio of a restaurant, ran down a side path past some restrooms and a diaper-changing station, through a gate marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“What about Tommy?” Mary asked.
“He’ll make it back,” Philipe said. “He’s smart.”
We were behind Familyland’s false front, in what looked like a parking lot between office buildings, and we ran toward where we knew the main public parking lot was located. We sprinted past one of the buildings and through an unattended open gate, and found ourselves in front of Familyland. We were far away from where our cars were located, but amazingly, idiotically, they did not seem to have staked out the parking lot, and we ran unchecked to our cars.
Tommy was waiting by the Mercedes, and Junior and Tim were parked nearby. All looked worried and frightened, and Philipe shouted at them to get the hell out of here and make sure they were not followed.
I got in the Mercedes with Philipe, and we flew over the parking lot’s speed bumps, bottoming out as we skidded onto the main road. Philipe turned, then sped over the freeway, zigzagged through a residential neighborhood, and drove all the way down Lincoln to Los Alamitos before doubling back and hitting Chapman and heading home. We were not followed.
The rest of them were already waiting for us when we arrived, and Philipe parked in front of the sales office and told everyone to pick up personal effects, it was time to move.
“Where are we going?” Mary asked.
“We’ll find someplace.”
“Maybe they won’t find us here.”
“We can’t take that chance,” he snapped. He looked quickly around the group. “Everyone still have the explosives and detonators?”
We all nodded.
“Good. Let’s take this place out. I don’t want any trace of us left.”
“It’s daytime,” Tim said. “The models are still open.”
“Just do it.”
We each booby-trapped our own houses. James, John, and I quickly dumped all the trash cans—the used Kleenex, the empty food cartons, the old newspapers—on the kitchen floor. I poured lighter fluid all over the trash, then sprayed the rest on the downstairs carpets.
When we were all packed and in our cars, a block or so away from the houses, we set off the detonators.
We hadn’t planned it that way, but the houses went off in sequence, from left to right, and the sight was truly awesome. The explosives we’d gotten were obviously extremely powerful. Walls blew outward, flames exploded from underneath suddenly rocketing roofs, and in a matter of seconds our homes looked like wildly burning piles of junk timber.
The salesmen were running out of the office, yelling at each other, running around wildly. I knew that one of them had to have already called the police and the fire department, and I honked my horn, pointing toward the road, and Philipe nodded. He stuck his head out the window of his car. “Follow me!” he yelled.
He sped out of the subdivision, down Chapman, and the rest of us followed. Just past Tustin Avenue, a fleet of cop cars and fire engines passed us, going in the opposite direction.
We got on the Costa Mesa Freeway, heading south.
We took the 55 to the 405 and did not stop until Philipe turned in at a gas station in Mission Viejo. He had obviously been thinking while he’d been driving, and he came back to each of our cars and told us to fill up. We were going to go down to San Diego for a few days, he said, stay in a motel, lay low. He still seemed shaken, frightened, and he told us to pay cash for the gas and not just steal it—we couldn’t afford to leave a trail.
“You know San Diego,” Philipe told me. “You lead the way. Find us an anonymous motel.”
We drove downstate, and I led the way to motel row. We picked the Hyatt, one of the bigger and more impersonal places, and stole the keys off a maid’s cart, taking rooms on one of the middle floors. After dumping our suitcases in our respective rooms, we met in Philipe’s suite to watch the Los Angeles news on cable.
There was no mention made of what had happened at Familyland.
We watched the five o’clock news, the five-thirty news, and the six o’clock news, switching from channel to channel.
Nothing.
“Those fuckers,” Mary said. “They covered it up.”
“What happened to Buster?” Junior asked. It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d left Familyland, and his voice was quiet and unnaturally subdued.
“I don’t know,” Philipe admitted.
“You think he’s dead?”
Philipe nodded.
“Who but us would even notice or care that he’s gone?” James said.
We were silent after that, each of us thinking about Buster. I found myself remembering how happy he’d been on that day we’d trashed Frederick’s of Hollywood, how he’d said he felt so young being with us.
I felt like crying.
“Even if no one noticed that he was killed, the fact that Familyland kicked everyone out and closed down is news in itself,” Philipe said. “Either the company has enough clout to keep that out of the news… or someone else does.”
“Who?” Steve asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I have a bad feeling about it.”
We spent the next day at the motel, monitoring newscasts, reading papers.
The day after that, we went to Sea World.
Philipe got over his nervousness and paranoia extraordinarily quickly, and by that second day it had disappeared without a trace, leaving no residue. It was at his urging that we went to Sea World. He and the others treated it like a normal day, a normal outing, enthusiastically reading the list of times for the dolphin and killer whale shows when we arrived, rushing over to look at the shark tank. I could not believe that they could so easily forget Buster, that they could react so casually to his death, that they could carry on as if nothing had happened, and it depressed the hell out of me. Buster’s passing might not be noted by the world at large, but I’d at least expected it to have some effect on his fellow Ignored. Were we all this expendable? Were all of our lives this meaningless and inconsequential?
It was at Shamu’s show that I was finally compelled to mention it. We were sitting in the front row of the grandstands, had just been soaked with water after the killer whale had done a belly flop in the pool directly in front of us, and the other terrorists were laughing uproariously. “This is great!” Paul said. “I’m sure glad we came to San Diego.”
“We came here because we fucked up when we tried to blow up Familyland and Buster was shot to death and the scary ass-fuckers who blew him away were going to do the same thing to us. We’re not here on a fucking vacation!”
“What’s with you?” Philipe said. “Chill out.”
“Chill out? Two days ago, you made us blow up our damn houses b
ecause you thought those suits were chasing us—”
“That was two days ago.”
“Now Buster’s dead and we’re here having a great time at fucking Sea World!”
“It’s not as if he died in vain.”
“What?”
“He gave himself for the cause.”
“Oh, so now we should be happy to sacrifice ourselves for ‘The Cause’. We’re supposed to accept that as part of the cost of doing business. I thought the whole point of all this was to free us up so that we would not be cogs in a machine, just small parts of a large organization. I thought we were supposed to be fighting for individual rights. Now we’re just supposed to submerge our individuality in another group. Yours.” I met his eyes. “I, for one, do not want to die. For anything. I want to live.” I paused dramatically. “Buster did too.”
“Buster’s gone,” Philipe said. “There’s nothing we can do to bring him back.” He fixed his gaze on me. “Besides, why should we feel bad? Why should we feel guilty? We were always there for him when he was alive. We were his friends, his family, we provided a place where he belonged, and he knew it. He was happy with us.”
I didn’t want to believe Philipe, but I did. God help me, I did. I tried to tell myself that he understood the way I thought, that he was able to manipulate me because he knew me so well, but I could not make myself believe it. Philipe was right. Buster had been happier in the last year of his life than he had ever been before, and it was all due to us.
Philipe looked at me calmly. “I think we need to kill a celebrity.”
I blinked, caught off guard. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. As you said, we fucked up Family land. We haven’t accomplished anywhere near what we set out to do as terrorists. But I think killing a celebrity would get us a forum. We’d be able to take our case to the public.”
The Ignored Page 24