by Peter Carey
We’ll be back in the valley by the time it hits.
This was a good guess, but it would turn out to be incorrect because, as the Ford passed the Caboolture exit, they saw the mother and the boy trudging north.
It was Trevor who called stop, Trevor who lived in a stockade at the top of a very steep unfriendly road, whose most common expression was “your alarm clock is your key to freedom,” who woke every morning at 5 a.m. and hid out in the bush until it was clear the police would not raid him, Trevor, who saw spies and traitors everywhere, said, Pick her up.
By now they were two hundred yards down the road, but John stopped.
Back up.
No need.
Trevor turned and saw Dial running at him, her yellow hair rising in snaky waves, her titties like puppies fighting inside her shirt.
5
Inside the Ford were smells which the boy could not have named or untangled—long wisps of WD-40 and marijuana, floating threads of stuff associated with freaks who made their own repairs, dandelion chains of dust and molecules of automotive plastics which rose up in the moldy heat, 1961, 1964, 1967.
At Kenoza Lake he had gotten accustomed to moldy paper, books with yellow pages, the rotting leaves in late November, the smell of dairy cows across the lane. As he scrambled across the busted sunken boneless backseat of John the Rabbitoh’s wagon, he tried to like where he had come. His dad would maybe smell like this exactly, underground.
You OK, baby?
I’m cool, he said.
As the first fat raindrops splatted like jelly against the windshield, the mother pulled him close against her generous breast. She was all he had for now.
Trevor, said the snaggle-toothed passenger, not looking at the boy. His skin was smooth and taut but his edges were all raw and poor, like he had crawled along a drainpipe to arrive here.
Dial, said the mother.
Trevor was now offering drugs and the boy was certain that he was through the doorway which had been waiting for him all his life. His grandma had always fretted about it, being stolen back by revolutionaries. She never spoke directly to the subject, so he had to listen through the wall—his history in whispers, brushing, scratching on the windowpane.
The edge of the storm took the car like a kitten in its mouth. The driver stared into the rearview mirror. Where you heading? he asked the mother who was already dealing from the pack.
She answered, North, which made the boy certain it could not be true. He had three wild cards which were very good. He drew his finger across his throat to tell her he would win.
The lemmings are going south, said Trevor.
What’s with that? She matched the discard pile, red on red.
Cyclone, said Trevor. Going to wash Noosa Sound back into the sea. Bang! Bang! Those houses are going to be walking round the sand like crabs.
Beach, he thought. He was down to three cards already. The mother’s hand was getting all weighed down.
You’re American? Trevor asked her. What we call a cyclone, you call a hurricane.
Uno, cried the boy. Triumphant.
I can’t read or write, Trevor announced, frowning at the card. He asked the mother, How far north?
The mother hugged the boy to her and he hid from Trevor’s inquiring stare. I don’t like to plan, she said.
She did not deal another hand. Instead she held the boy as they traveled through the storm, whispering that she loved him, stroking his head.
When he woke the car had stopped. It was raining on his legs and the mother was not there. Three doors were open shaking violently in the wind. Outside was dark, and the storm came inside the car and lifted the Uno cards and slapped them around the windows.
Dial!
He was alone, illegal, “on the lamb.” The rain hurt his legs like needles.
Dial!
He pulled himself into the seat, his bare legs retracted, his back straight, his hands balled into fists. He was way too scared to cry but when the mother finally returned he shouted at her.
Where were you?
Shush, she said, reaching out for him, but he drew away from her bony cold hands. Behind her the bushes slashed and squabbled in the dark.
You left me!
The road is flooded.
Where is the driver? He was scared to hear himself, so loud, like someone else.
Dial was not scared. She paused and narrowed her eyes and pushed back her sodden hair which dripped across his face.
He’s coming back, she said evenly. We’re all coming back, OK?
OK, he said.
He watched silently as she dug down into her big lumpy khaki bag, deciding that he would not take candy, not even chocolate.
What will happen now, he asked, but he could already see she did not know, had nothing to offer, not even candy, only a big blue sweater which she wrapped around his legs.
6
Not so long ago Dial had been sitting in a pleasant room near Poughkeepsie, New York. She had been dressed in a black cashmere sweater and a simple gray skirt and her Charles Jourdan court shoes had already produced their first expensive blister on her heel. There was, in this particularly cozy office, a Tabriz rug on the floor and a painting, clearly by Roger Fry, on the wall opposite. If it was puzzling that the chair of an English department, whose place of work this was, would own an artwork quite so valuable, then the location of the office, inside the gatehouse of Vassar College, suggested a history that might finally make it all explicable. Dial was a socialist, but snob enough to find this irresistible.
It was an early Monday afternoon in mid-October. All the crap with the selection committee, the so-called P&B, was finally done. The Pound scholar, who had been the committee’s first choice, had been nice enough to go to Yale instead. The Austen professor had been sucked up to, the prickly dean had been pacified and now there was nothing left to do but enjoy this milky tea, and maybe elicit the story of how this steel-blue Roger Fry had come to this American wall where it managed to look so dull and erotic all at once. There was a sleepy log fire in the grate and Dial could look down at the rolled lawns which, in spite of the efforts of the gardeners—three in sight just then—were littered with the tweedy colors of the fall. Dial experienced a delicious sense of possession you could never get from a state-owned park.
As the faculty had observed all day, the vermilions of an East Coast fall, the “red peak,” was just one weekend away. This was not an excitement she had ever felt in Dorchester where the yellowing leaves on the highway dividers suggested death by poisoning and triggered angry memories of too-thin coats, chilly ankle-high drafts blowing down the hallway of her childhood home, her “study.”
Dial’s companion settled back into her teal wingback chair and predicted the red peak once again. This was Patricia Abercrombie, a Chaucerian of fifty, lumpy, round faced with piano legs and a pasty sad sort of face with deep vertical lines in her upper lip. To Dial there seemed to be something missing, a lack of some element of character that made her appear out of focus or underwater. Indeed, if Dial was now insincere in the surprise she showed about the coming red peak, it was mainly in the hope that if she could only demonstrate enough interest, enough goodwill, she might penetrate the Abercrombie bark and somehow touch the living wood.
Patricia Abercrombie, being thirty years a Vassar girl, and far sharper than she appeared, retreated from all this shallow brightness.
I believe, she said at last, raising her pale red eyebrows as she lifted her cup. I believe we have a friend in common.
Oh? said Dial, to whom this seemed beyond the bounds of possibility.
Susan Selkirk, said the chair.
Now it was Dial who had her heartwood touched, not pleasantly.
You know of whom I speak?
Yes, I was at school with her.
The chair’s eyes clearly registered this for what it was, a cowardly attempt to deny a friendship. Susan was our son’s friend, she said softly. But she was our orphan baby, really.
Oh.
I think she’s terribly lonely, the chair said.
Of course, said Dial, hearing a sort of moo in her false sympathy.
That’s the other side of everything, said the chair, holding her gaze. Very sad and very lonely. Poor girl.
Patricia Abercrombie broke away to write something on the corner of her New York Times. Dial watched with perfect numbness, having gone through the entire selection process assuming that this aspect of her history was unknown and would, had it been unearthed, have immediately disqualified her. She watched as the chair tore a small strip from the Times. Dial knew what it was going to be. It was impossible, but it would be Susan’s phone number.
On the other side of the world she would recall the weird mixture of fear and satisfaction she had felt as she took that paper in her hand. Patricia Abercrombie smiled at her. This time Dial did not notice the lines on her lip—but the glint in her green eyes. God, she thought, who in the fuck are you?
Nothing more was said about the piece of paper, and soon she walked with Patricia Abercrombie across the grass where she was “delivered” with her secret blistered heel into the care of the dean.
Whatever conspiracy had been enacted was not acknowledged. There was not so much as an extra squeeze in their farewell handshakes and it would not be until, years later, reading Vassar Girls, that she had any inkling of the eccentric power she had brushed against so casually.
And what will you do now? the Dean asked her, when Patricia Abercrombie had gone, and her social security card had been copied and her health plan had been selected.
I think there’s a train to the city at two.
No, I mean until the spring semester.
You know, she said, and in that second she was vain enough to feel her youth, her beauty, her whole possibility. You know, she said, I have not the least idea.
What luxury, said the Dean who had previously been her greatest obstacle. How lovely.
And that afternoon, at Poughkeepsie railway station, Dial, whose real name was Anna Xenos, redeemed what had once been her father’s backpack and lugged it to the bathroom and kicked off her shoes and changed out of what seemed to her to be a rather specious sort of drag. Sitting on the toilet, she repacked so that her interview clothes were on the very bottom. She changed into tights, a camisole, not so much for warmth as protection against the abrasions of a long Nepalese dress patched together from reds and browns and tiny mirrors. She had carried a Harvard book bag to the interview, worn casually as Cliffy girls did that year, over the shoulder and on the back. Now she fitted the bag into the pouch where her father had once carried shotgun cartridges, and, still sitting on the toilet, pulled on a loose-fitting pair of fur-lined boots. Her blister thus soothed, she steadied herself with one hand and undid her hair and fluffed it out not minding, no matter how often she said the opposite, that she did, indeed, look kind of wild.
She was on the 2 platform just as the train from Albany came in, and when she boarded she found a telephone waiting, directly opposite her. If not for this she might never have called Susan Selkirk. But she was high on life, on possibility, and she was on the phone before she even took a seat…215? Philly? She wasn’t sure. It took six of her quarters. Ridiculous. Like phoning a rock star or a famous author whom your aunt had known, something you only did because you could, because you were not nobody.
Hello, Susan. It’s Dial.
Give me your number, said someone, not Susan. We’ll call you back.
There was a number, too. She gave it, not unhappy to see a few quarters returned.
She waited for the famous felon as if she were herself some kind of actor in a film, resting her head against the glass, watching the power lines dance like sheet music across the reflection of her extraordinary dress. She was about to talk to America’s most-wanted woman. She was going to MoMA before it closed this afternoon. She was staying with her friend Madeleine on West Fourteenth Street. That’s all she knew about her future. She had no lover, no father or mother, no home but Boston whose “rapcha” and “capcha” occasionally burst the surface of her speech. She watched the power lines rising and falling beside the Hudson and thought, Remember this moment, how beautiful and strange the world is.
When the phone rang, she saw her hair reflected in the sky.
Hello.
Well, said that piercing girlie voice, if it’s not the “bvains.”
Hi, she said not at all offended by the “bvains.” Rather pleased.
Far out, cried Susan. Dial had forgotten how she sounded, the shrill pitch.
What a coincidence, Susan said. Listen I’m going on vacation, you dig. I was just wondering where you are?
Dial could see the conductors walking through the car. The conductor could see her. But she could see Susan Selkirk in the Boston Globe, photographed from the ceiling of the Bronxville Chase Manhattan. What might or might not have been a revolver was in her hand. That was what had happened to SDS. Students for a Democratic Society?
No shit, said Susan. I was just talking to my mom about you. I mean, like, now.
Your mom remembered me?
She’d rather remember you than me. But listen, I sort of was wanting to say hi to my guy.
Which guy?
He was your guy too.
On the telephone, blasting through Croton-on-Hudson, Dial blushed, pulling her hair by the roots, looking at her staring face in the glass.
The baby, Susan Selkirk said. For Christ’s sake. I mean my son.
Right.
Call back, Susan Selkirk said suddenly. Tonight. Can you do that for me? Please, please. This is not cool, not now.
I’m going out to see The Godfather with Madeleine.
You’re seeing the fucking Godfather.
Sure. Why not?
There was a silence and Dial didn’t rush to fill it.
Sure, said Susan, why the fuck not!
Another silence.
I need this favor, Susan said at last. If not for me, then for the Movement.
Dial was a sucker. Susan knew she was a sucker. She wandered back down through the car, hefting her awkward heavy pack, laughing incredulously at herself, at Susan Selkirk who could still issue commands like the revolution was a family business. For the Movement! Please.
She tucked the phone number in her purse and let her mood be made by bigger things, by the great luxury of time, a fall day with sunshine, and the Hudson still as glass. If Susan Selkirk affected her at all, it was only to highlight the richness of her new life which was intensifying daily—Vassar, MoMA, Manhattan, all the possibilities suggested by this gorgeous ride beside the Hudson with the sun pushing down above the golden Palisades.
By the time the train dipped underground at 125th Street, she had forgotten Susan Selkirk. And it was only very late that night, on calculating her expenses and counting the remaining money in her purse, that she found the scrap of paper. When she called it was not because of any deep friendship for Susan. But she had all the time in the world, so she made an arrangement to meet her near Clark Street in Brooklyn. Susan, quite typically, sent two strangers to interrogate her and again she was too curious to be decently offended.
Later all she would remember was their teeth, big and long on one, small and square on the other, but both young women’s mouths were full of perfectly straight teeth, clear signs of class that contradicted their dowdy clothes which were a sort of depressed portrait of the unhappy working class. Their hair had been cut gracelessly with kitchen scissors and they had about them a severe judgmental quality that made Dial feel too tall, too pretty, too frivolous for their company.
You know the kid, right? Her son?
Once I did. Freshman year.
She wants to see her son.
Susan does?
We don’t use names. OK.
The one with the long teeth was tall and skinny. Her dowdy little sweater was gray cashmere. She lit a cigarette and smoked it with both hands pushed in the pockets of her
thrift store coat.
OK, said Dial. It did not help her that she noticed the privileged teeth, the expensive sweater. Neither undercut the moral authority she had been raised to respect. She never could be far enough left for Susan, SDS, herself. She thought the student left were fantasists, yet when the Maoists told her she would be shot after the revolution she was inclined to believe it was true.
She’s going on vacation, dig?
Dial understood that vacation was code for something else but she was staring at the girl’s stringy blond hair, wondering if there was something in that un-made-up face, something under those pressing dark eyebrows, that might give Dial human entry.
It’s dangerous, the girl said, looking over her shoulder at a skinny beat-up plane tree as if its shivery branches might reveal a bug. The grandmother will let you take him.
Mrs. Selkirk has no idea who I am.
Yes, she does. If you meet with her at eleven, you take the kid back by noon. Done. That’s all we’re asking. You will have done your little bit.
Little bit, thought Dial. You patronizing little bitch. Do you actually know Phoebe Selkirk? she asked the short one. Have you met her?
Listen, Susan is begging you. You know, like begging, man.
Dial thought, You said her name, moron. Plus where does all this “man” shit come from.
Oh sure, she said.
You know why the old lady trusts you? You want to know? You want to just stand there being sarcastic?
Dial shrugged. But of course she wished to know.
You never talked to the Post.
And that, of course, was completely true. Not just the Post but the News, the Globe, even the Times. And that was why she would call Grandma Selkirk, because the old lady, at least, had seen the steel at Dial’s core, that although she could not stand Phoebe Selkirk’s Upper East Side ass, she would never betray her trust. That was who she was.
Dial dropped a dime in Brooklyn Heights, and the phone rang on Park Avenue. Hello, she said, this is Anna Xenos.
Yes, I am recording this.
The Selkirks were like animals in the zoo. How amazing she should know them at all.