“Do you remember him being all moody before?”
“I never knew him as well as you guys. You know, from living on Carleton Street? I’ve only got his visits to the Triangle to go on. But he does have that brooding side.”
“Hmmm …” Jonah leaned back and looked up into the eaves. “That’s what I mean about Buzz,” he said. “It’s like both of them have some kind of mystery. With Brendan it’s coming back from jail.”
Zac looked up too. Swallows’ nests clung to the church’s siding. “Buzz sounded like he knew a thing or two about prison.”
“That was weird.”
“Does Buzz talk a lot about stuff like that?”
“Not really. One time he told this guy Dennis that a baby like him wouldn’t last ten minutes in a holding cell.”
Zac frowned. “What was Dennis doing?”
“I don’t—oh, yeah, Buzz was smoking a cigarette and Dennis acted all shocked.”
“Buzz smokes?”
“Hey, I didn’t say I do!”
“I’m glad,” Zac said. “But why would Buzz come back with a put-down about jail?”
Jonah shrugged.
“Do you think Buzz’s mystery is about his family?”
“I never even went to his house.”
“That’s kind of curious.”
“With Brendan,” Jonah said, “I think my mom is deciding whether to let him be one of her projects.”
“Her ‘projects’?”
“Somebody she helps out.”
Zac stood, firmly setting aside a can of worms that wasn’t his to open. They still had an errand to run. “How ’bout we haul over to Cal Surplus before it closes?” he said.
—
The shop’s owner, a fit man with a salt-and-pepper brush cut, stood behind a display case bristling with knives, compasses, and binoculars. The store was otherwise empty when they walked in. Looking up over his reading glasses, the man reached to turn down a radio talk show. Zac nodded a greeting. “Just holler if you can’t find what you need,” the proprietor called after them.
Climbing equipment lay piled onto shelves in a back alcove. The banner team needed static rappelling rope, though Marty had instructed Zac to buy only if the rope was new and cost less than fifty cents a foot. The Cal Surplus price was twice that. Jonah whistled. “Sticker shock, huh?”
Zac spoke quietly, so the man up front wouldn’t hear. “Marty didn’t think we’d find a deal on rope today. We’re mainly shopping for hardware.”
“Who else is doing the action?”
“Need-to-know. And not here.” Zac picked out a silver, D-shaped carabiner. “We want eight of these.”
“What are they?”
“For attaching rope to something else, like a tree.”
“Or a hotel.”
Zac shot him a look. Jonah hadn’t been told about the bridge. As far as he knew—as far as he needed to know—the collective was planning to hang a banner off the roof of a building beside the Moscone Center. Zac flexed the carabiner’s spring-loaded gate. “Help me out Jonah,” he said. “See how this one goes back and forth? The way it feels really smooth?”
Jonah gave it a try. “Yeah, okay.”
“Find seven more just like that. Watch out for ones that feel stiff, or that don’t click shut just perfectly.”
While Jonah vetted the asymmetrical Ds, Zac picked out four similar devices with locking gates, four figure-eight descenders, and two pairs of belay gloves, one that just fit his hands, and one in the next larger size. Summing up in his head, Zac estimated they were on target. “Remember the story,” he said under his breath.
They dumped their haul onto a rubber mat atop the display case. “Doing some climbing?” the storekeeper asked, looking down a long, Grecian nose as he sorted and counted.
Zac nodded. “Scouts.”
“What troop?”
“Four-one-five,” Jonah said, improvising. “It’s in San Francisco.”
“Don’t know that one. I mostly get East Bay troops.”
The damage came to just under a hundred dollars. Zac paid cash, five crisp twenties.
“Just printed this morning,” the storekeeper said, inspecting the Jacksons closely before handing over a paper bag and change. He came around the counter to lock up behind them. “Had a gang of animal rights fanatics come in a few years ago,” he said as he took hold of the doorknob. “Bought my gear to do a protest up on the campus.” He stood blocking the door, staring Zac down with blunt suspicion.
Zac swallowed.
“Animal rights?” Jonah said. “I don’t think they have a merit badge for that.”
The storekeeper sneered, keeping his eyes fixed on Zac. After a long moment he pulled the door open halfway, and allowed them to sidle out.
Jonah gave an attenuated wave as the man flipped his window sign from open to closed. “Creepy,” he said.
“Yes,” Zac said, exhaling. “Something about places like that.” As they waited for a break in traffic Zac traced an arc with his free hand, framing his narrow build, his long straight hair, his flowing kurta. “I guess it’s not too hard for guys like that to peg me as the enemy.”
They scurried across San Pablo Avenue, then slowed as they stepped into a neighborhood of single-story, stuccoed Craftsman houses.
“Hey, Zac?”
“Hmmmm?”
“Where does the money come from?” Jonah asked.
“What money?” Zac looked around. No one was following them.
“For ropes and stuff,” Jonah said. “I mean, it’s like we dumpster dive and shop at Thrift Town so we can buy stuff to hang banners. Isn’t that kind of weird?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”
“How would you put it?”
Zac thought for a while before answering. “A few things,” he said. “First of all, you know our rent is cheap because Eddie doesn’t make money from the building.”
“Yeah. Because he likes having a political collective that he kinda-sorta belongs to.”
“Right. Like your mom says, we’re the penance he pays for living like a satyr.”
“And cheap rent lets everybody have jobs that pay squat.”
“More or less,” Zac said. “But it’s also the reason we can afford to tithe.”
“Oh yeah. Politics tax.”
Zac laughed, shaking off the storekeeper’s provocation. “Who calls it that?”
“Marty. Is that enough for all the protests?”
“Not always. But other people chip in.”
“Does my dad chip in?”
“Seth?” Zac reached to brush his fingertips across the intensely yellow blooms of a flannelbush growing in someone’s front yard. “I’m not sure,” he said.
They were nearing the BART station. “Anyway, does it make a difference?” Jonah asked.
“Does what make a difference?”
“Our politics and stuff. Is it making peace and justice?” Jonah kicked a spiky fruit, fallen from a sweetgum tree, off the sidewalk and into the gutter.
“That’s a hard question.”
“Yeah, but you must have thought about it.”
“I think about it all the time,” Zac said.
“So what’s the answer?”
Zac put his arm over the boy’s shoulder. “I don’t know the answer,” he said. “Most times I’m pretty sure that we’re fighting for lost causes.”
“Then why bother?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do. Because compassion is the path to the end of suffering. Because standing up for justice is a way to remain human. I think everybody at the Triangle believes something along those lines.”
“But nobody thinks we’re actually going to win?”
They were at the fare gates. Zac pulled Jonah’s ticket from his wallet and handed it to him. “Do you remember Krishna’s instruction on the field of Kurukshetra? About detachment from the fruits of action?”
“Um, I don’t think so.”
�
�I read it to you, from the Bhagavad Gita—but never mind. Your mom has faith that we’re going to win. Eventually.” They made their way to the escalator.
“My mom?”
“She’s our true believer,” Zac said. “In some ways it’s her certainty that keeps us together.” The noise of an approaching train rose steadily, its headlights glowing in the underground bore. “What makes you ask all that stuff?”
“I don’t know,” Jonah said. “I’m just thinking.”
FIFTEEN
Eddie Bourgeaut held title to the Triangle’s San Francisco quarters, but he lived in the remote heart of Northern California’s Mendocino Range, on acres owned by a commune he helped to found some twenty years before. Christopher kept one eye on a topo map, but was pretty sure the gravel-patched road beside Kitchen Creek looked familiar. He’d visited once before. As Brendan watched for potholes, he took in Douglas fir, leafy black oak, the occasional stand of second-growth redwood. Wide clearings opened into the woods where trees hadn’t begun to come back yet. The land would be recovering for decades to come from a century’s logging. “There,” he said, as Brendan steered the borrowed pickup around another hairpin turn. A plank hanging from the trunk of an old madrone marked the turn they were looking for: “Sleepy Hollow,” Eddie called his place. The painted figure of a pumpkin-headed horseman had all but faded from his weathered sign.
Up a steep dirt incline and a quarter mile farther into the woods, they came to his yurt. As Brendan cut the ignition, Eddie emerged from the structure’s wooden door, round-bellied in soft, deerskin boots and bulky overalls. “Not bad, boys,” he called out, gesturing with a carved elkhorn pipe as he exhaled a cloud of smoke. “You found the place before the Yeti found you.”
“I don’t know how you can stand it, Eddie,” Christopher said, hauling himself stiffly out of the truck. “No neon, no dirty needles, no espresso machines.”
“I can get all that! Quarter tank of gas and I’m in Fort Bragg. Brendan, it’s been a hell of a long time.”
“It has, Eddie, good to see you.” Brendan deflected Eddie’s embrace with a handshake.
“That was a crap deal you got handed in Mexico.”
“It was. I don’t expect to go back anytime soon.”
“But it’s done now?”
Brendan shook his head, declining Eddie’s proffered pipe. “If anybody wanted to ask questions I’m pretty sure they’d have picked me up already,” he said.
Christopher wandered over to Eddie’s makeshift garage, several thick blue tarps laced together and stretched between trees. A cluster of haphazardly dented vehicles crowded together beneath them.
“Chris, can I interest you in a hit of the county’s finest bud?”
“Not for me, thanks,” Christopher called back. “These are brilliant! Brendan, come look at these beauties.”
Eddie laughed. “You have a discerning eye.”
“Form follows function, right?”
Brendan ambled over to survey the cars, gauging the bounce in a station wagon’s strut, peering through a sedan’s grimy window. “Twenty-six, twenty-eight people?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
“That’s almost enough,” Christopher said. “Depending how the vans load up, some can ride with the tower crew.”
“We’ve got a few weeks yet,” Eddie said. “I’ve got my eye on one or two more of these lovely wrecks.”
“What’s the story on registrations?” Brendan was crouched down behind a wide-bodied Ford wagon, inspecting its banged up, black-and-gold plate.
“I’ve got people who can’t be on the bridge,” Eddie said, “but agreed to take their time noticing when a front plate goes missing off their car. We’ll swap just before the action, and look legal unless somebody actually gets stopped.”
“Nice.” Brendan popped the hood of a blue Monte Carlo. “This the one needs an alternator?”
“Yes, indeed. You found the part?”
“At a shop out in the Avenues,” Christopher said.
Eddie showed them around—the yurt, the well, the composting outhouse. Brendan smoked a cigarette while Eddie fussed with his pipe. They retrieved tools from the truck, and Brendan started to dig past the Monte Carlo’s bolts, belts, and brackets. Eddie lent a hand when Brendan needed one; Christopher took charge of fetching cold beers up from the creek.
For lunch they had picked up sandwiches in Hopland. The temperature was dropping by the time Brendan began to put the car back together, in midafternoon. Eddie started the engine, the alternator light on the dashboard blinked off, and they pronounced the transplant a success. Brendan and Christopher hoped to get back to paved road before nightfall, so they passed on Eddie’s dinner invitation.
“What do you hear about numbers for the public protests?” Eddie asked as Brendan poked around the rest of the vehicles.
“Not a lot,” Christopher said. “It’s mostly Nora and Zac going to the meetings. Leona Kim told me Meg is shooting for thirty thousand, but she thinks that’s high.”
“Thirty thousand is high? How come?”
“It’s not an antiwar march. Peace is easy to understand, transgenic agriculture is complex. Leona says unions and churches are all about Iraq. It’s been hard to get traction.”
“Well, you can’t ignore twenty thousand. Or even ten, not when we take over the damn bridge.”
“GeneSynth won’t decide anything,” Brendan said. “But it’ll sure as hell add to the noise.”
He slid into a Volkswagen Vanagon, its rear bumper held in place with baling wire. The engine caught easily, and Brendan circled around to listen. After a couple of minutes he killed the ignition. “All serviceable, I’d say. The van’s running a little rough, probably could use a timing adjustment.”
“They’re all going to Sebastopol next week,” Eddie said. “I know a mechanic down there, I’ll have him take a look.”
—
On the way up Christopher had asked more about Brendan’s time in prison. “It was animal,” was all he would say. “Eat or be eaten. That was the world for ninety percent of the guys.” Brendan insisted that talking about it wouldn’t help, that the road through Tlaxitlán dead-ended in despair. “If I can’t back my way out,” he said, “I’m done for.”
How the trip to Chiapas had come about, and how the bust went down, were easier terrain. Brendan explained that there was a principal contact and a guy who produced the loaded truck in Tucson. There had been a third fellow early on, he said, who had been yanked out of the picture without explanation. In hindsight Brendan wondered about that. Internal politics, he speculated, and still wasn’t sure whether some organizational rift he knew nothing about might have heightened his risk. They’d told him the hollow spaces behind the pickup’s body panels would be packed with military-grade satellite phones necessary to coordinate between Zapatista bases, across miles of dense rain forest. Brendan had said it before, and repeated it to Christopher on the drive that morning: his contacts had assured him there would be no weapons whatsoever.
As they wound back toward the highway, Christopher tried to imagine his friend’s long, skittish trek south. It must have seemed so abstract and unlikely to conceive an outcome as catastrophic as Tlaxitlán. Was Chagall leading him into the kind of trap that had snared Brendan? Or was that sort of worry a melodramatic conceit? “I’ve been thinking about when the Federales stopped you on the road through Oaxaca,” he said as Brendan turned off the last of the gnarled logging roads, onto smooth tarmac.
“I remember it well.”
“So you didn’t see anything when they opened up the truck?” Christopher asked. “What you were carrying?”
“They hustled me into an SUV with blacked out windows,” Brendan said. “Like a kidnapping. By the time they broke down the truck I was jammed in a cell with twenty other guys, sweating bullets over the screaming down the hall. Every few hours the Federales started in on somebody new.”
Christopher didn’t dare interrupt.
“A couple weeks ago you said the quantities in the indictment were closer to possible. Closer than what the press first reported.”
“Yeah, the indictment seemed plausible. Enough to make me wonder. It’s hard to be sure looking back, but the F350 might have been driving stiff. It’s possible the guys beefed up the suspension to support a heavier load.”
“Jesus.”
“What?”
Christopher watched Brendan’s profile out of the corner of his eye. That kind of thing, a beefed-up suspension, was exactly what he had meant when he asked whether Brendan’s handlers might have played him for a patsy. “I’m thinking,” he said, treading carefully, “if they set up the truck like that beforehand … wouldn’t that mean they were lying to you from the start?”
“Look, Chris, the Mexican government could have been as pissed off about telecom gear as they would have been by AK-47s. Maybe they’re the ones who lied, because a judge’ll hand a gringo five years for carrying a single round of ammunition across the border.”
“Seriously?”
Brendan nodded. “Special rules for norteamericanos. And the Federales are pragmatic. If that’s what would keep my ass locked up, why not play the case that way?”
“But—”
Brendan cut him off. “I really don’t want to go there. I’m already tied up in knots, it doesn’t help to pull the knots tighter.” Keeping his eyes on the road, Brendan slotted a CD into the pickup’s player. Percussion in staccato rhythms, dramatic sweeps of orchestral strings, and Kazem Al Saher’s mournful tenor filled the cab. Christopher watched out the window as they accelerated onto Highway 101 and sped south, following a steady march of telephone wires strung atop pocked wooden poles. He tried to visualize the surrounding acres as wetland, teeming with wildlife in the centuries before the state was logged, drained, burned, and given over to cattle and monocropping. At least the farms were smaller here, he thought. And a lot more of them grew organic than in the Central Valley. It was a start.
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