"I don't know. I thought it was me," he said.
She giggled. "What are you doing?"
"Just washing."
"I think you already washed there." "A little more couldn't hurt."
She closed her eyes and leaned back against him, his soapy hand moving, and it started once again…
CHAPTER 18
Barbara Gow's house had gray siding, once white, and a red asbestos-shingle roof. A single box elder stood in the front yard and a swayback garage hunkered hopelessly in back. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded her holdings.
"It looks pretty bad," she said sadly. They were ten minutes off the expressway, in a neighborhood of tired yards. The postwar frame houses were crumbling from age, poor quality and neglect: roofs were missing shingles, eaves showed patches of dry rot. In the dim illumination of the streetlights, they could see kids' bikes dumped unceremoniously on the weedy lawns. The cars parked in the streets were exhausted hulks. Oil stains marked the driveways like Rorschachs of failure.
"When I bought it, I called it a cottage," she said as they rolled into the driveway. "God damn, it makes me sad. To think you can live in a place for thirty years, and in the end, not care about it."
Sam Crow closed one eye and stared at her with the other, gauging the level of her unhappiness. In the end, he grunted, got out of the car and lifted the garage door.
"I hope Shadow Love's okay," she said anxiously as she pulled into the garage.
She had picked them up ten minutes after Sam called her.
As they headed back to her house, they crossed the street that the apartment was on. There were cars in the street. Cops. The raid was under way.
"He was due back," Sam said as they got out of the car. "With all those cops in the street…"
"If he wasn't there when they arrived…"
"If they didn't get him, we should be hearing from him," said Aaron.
Barbara's house was musty. She was never a housekeeper, and she smoked: the interior, once bright, was overlaid with a yellowing patina of tobacco tar. Sam Crow dragged the duffel bag up the stairs. Aaron headed for a sitting room that had a foldout couch.
"You guys got any money?" Barbara asked when Sam came back down.
"A couple of hundred," he said, shrugging.
"I'll need help with the groceries if you stay here long."
"Shouldn't be too long. A week, maybe."
Twenty minutes later, Shadow Love called. Barbara said, "Yes, they're here. They're okay," and handed the phone to Sam.
"We were afraid they got you," Sam said.
"I almost walked right into them," Shadow Love said. He was in a bar six blocks from the Crows' apartment. "I was thinking about something else, I was almost on the block when I realized something was wrong, with all those cars. I watched for a while, I was worried I'd see them taking you out."
"You coming here?" Sam asked.
"I better. I don't know where they got their information, but if they're tracking me… I'll see you in a half-hour."
When Shadow Love arrived, Barbara stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek and took him straight into the kitchen for a sandwich.
"Somebody betrayed us," Shadow Love said. "That fuckin' Hart was in the street outside the apartment. He's passing out money now. The hunter cop too."
"We're not doing as well as I hoped," Sam confessed. "I'd hoped Billy would get at least one more and that John would make it out of Brookings…"
"Leo's still out and I'm available," Shadow Love said. "And you can't complain about the media. Christ, they're all over the goddamned Midwest. I saw a thing on television from Arizona, people out on the reservations there, talking…"
"So it's working," Aaron said, looking at his cousin.
"For now, anyway," Sam said.
Later that night, Sam watched Barbara move around the bedroom and thought, She's old.
Sixty, anyway. Two years younger than he was. He remembered her from the early fifties, the Ojibway bohemian student of French existentialists, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, her fresh heart-shaped face without makeup, her books in a green cloth sack carried over her shoulder. Her beret. She wore a crimson beret, pulled down over one eye, smoked Gauloises and Gitanes and sometimes Players, and talked about Camus.
Barbara Gow had grown up on the Iron Range, the product of an Ojibway father and a Serbian mother. Her father worked in the open-pit mines during the day and for the union at night. Her mother's Bible sat in a small bookcase in the living room. Next to it was her father's Das Kapital.
As a teenager, she had done clerical work for the union. After her mother died, leaving a small insurance policy, she'd moved to Minneapolis and started at the university. She liked the university and the talk, the theory. She liked it better when she heard the news from existential France.
Sam could still see all of that in her, behind the wrinkled face and slumping shoulders. She shivered nude in the cold air and pulled on a housecoat, then turned and smiled at him, the smile lighting his heart.
"I'm surprised that thing still works, much as you abuse it," she said. Sam's penis curled comfortably on his pelvis. It felt happy, he thought.
"It'll always work for you," Sam said. He lay on top of the blankets, on top of the handmade quilt, impervious to the cold.
She laughed and left the room, and a moment later he heard the water start in the bathroom. Sam lay on the bed, wishing he could stay for a year or two years or five, wrapped in the quilt. Scared. That's what it was, he thought. He put the thought out of his mind, rolled off the bed and walked to the bathroom. Barbara was sitting on the toilet. He stepped in front of the vanity and turned on the water to wash himself.
"Shadow Love's still watching that movie," Barbara said. The sounds of TV gunfire drifted up the stairs.
"Zulu," said Sam. "Big fight in Africa, a hundred years ago. He says it was better than the Custer fight."
Barbara stood up and flushed the toilet as Sam dried himself with a towel. "Is this the end?" she asked quietly as they walked back into the bedroom.
He knew what she meant, but pretended he did not. "The end?"
"Don't give me any bullshit. Are you going to die?"
He shrugged. "Shadow Love says so."
"Then you will," Barbara said. "Unless you go away. Now."
Sam shook his head. "Can't do that."
"Why not?"
"The thing is, these other people have died. If it comes my turn and I don't fight, it'll be like I turned my back on them."
"You've got a gun?"
"Yeah."
"And this is all necessary?"
"Yes. And it's almost necessary that we… die. The people need this story. You know, when we were kids, I knew people who rode with Crazy Horse. Who's alive now to talk to the kids? The only legends they have are dope dealers…"
"So you're ready."
"No, of course not," Sam admitted. "When I think about dying… I can't think about dying. I'm not ready."
"Nobody ever is," Barbara said. "I look at myself in the mirror, on the door…" She pushed the bedroom door shut, and the full-length mirror mounted on the back reflected the two of them, naked, looking into it. "… and I see this old woman, shriveled up like last year's potato. A clerk at the historical society, all gray and bent over. But I feel like I'm eighteen. I want to go out and run in the park with the wind in my hair, and I want to roll around on the grass with you and Aaron and hear Aaron putting the bullshit on me, trying to get into my pants… and I can't do any of that because I'm old. And I'm going to die. I don't want to be old and I don't want to die, but I will… I'm not ready, but I'm going."
"I'm glad we had this talk," Sam said wryly. "It really cheered me up."
She sighed. "Yeah. Well, the way you talk, I think when the time comes, you'll use the gun."
Shadow Love paced.
Sam lay at Barbara's right hand, asleep, his breathing deep and easy, but all during the night Barbara could hear Shadow Love pacing the length of the downstairs hallway. The television came on, was turned off, came on again. More pacing. He'd always been like that.