The radio was playing calypso now. We drank to our parents and birthdays and the right thing. Rafferty told me to stay loose. So far, he said, so good. Then he grinned and said, “Like the army, sort of. Hurry up and wait.” For the time being, he told me, no need to worry. Sarah had resources. There was no shortage of wherewithal.
Vaguely, a little drunk, he talked about the competing factions within the movement, how scrambled it was, the cliques and cabals and petty conspiracies.
“The political thicket,” he said, and shook his head. “Tangled, you know? Classic worm can. Slimy creatures, very messy. Panthers here, Weather guys there. Shades of red—like with blood, all types, you need a goddamn flow chart—SDSers and Quakers and the CPA and the PLP and God knows what all—let me think—the People’s Coalition for Peace, Dwarfs for a Nonviolent Solution. You name it. Lots of moral hairs to split. Head-smashers, ass-kickers. Hard-core weirdos. Liberation fronts. The League of Concerned Dieticians. If I had my way, I’d wipe out the whole rat’s nest. There it is, though. The famous network.”
There was a pause, then Rafferty shrugged and raised his glass.
“Screw it,” he said, “let’s drink. To the nonviolent dwarfs.”
We drank and refilled our glasses.
It wasn’t friendship, exactly, but it was something. We drank to moral hairs and split ends.
“Anyway, that’s the gist,” he said. “Where we fit in, I don’t know. Unaffiliated, I guess. Sarah wants to run her own little show. A ma and pa operation, whatever that means. Big dreams.”
“Franchise,” I said. “Kentucky Fried Terror.”
“Yeah, well. Forget the terror part. I’m not in this to bust skulls. Just a nice little subway system for guys like you and me. Fast and efficient.”
“Crack-ups?” I said.
Rafferty smiled. “No crack-ups. One thing about draft-dodging, it’s hardly ever fatal.”
“I meant—”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “Mental hygiene. Go with the shuffle, that’s all. Just flat-fuck live with it. Pretend it’s the right thing.”
“I suppose,” I said. “But sometimes—”
“Lost, right?”
“Pretty lost.”
We were quiet for a few moments.
“All right, then, lost,” Rafferty said. He smiled. “I guess we’d best drink to it.”
There were mobile shapes in the dark, rustlings and penetrations. We drank to the League of Concerned Dieticians. Later, after Sarah and Tina had gone to bed, we went inside and ate birthday cake and proposed toasts to mental hygiene and low profiles and safe houses and reformed fuzzballs and treaties of peace. We drank to Crazy Horse and Custer.
“To Herb Philbrick,” I said.
Rafferty seemed puzzled. Apparently the name didn’t ring a bell, but he shrugged and drank anyway.
By mid-October the cure was solid. Flat on my back, I basked away the daylight hours, staring up at a huge blue sky, alert to contrails and the whine of passing jets. There was an alternating current at work. A kind of giddiness at times, almost elation, and I’d hear myself laughing at the unlikely melodrama. Jesse James, I’d think. I could imagine my hometown draft board saddling up for the chase; that hide-and-go-seek feeling, fully revved, like a little kid playing grown-up games—slip under the bed and cover your eyes and giggle. Other times, though, it was grim. Shipwrecked, I’d think. Lying there, watching the sky, I’d seem to drift outside myself, outside everything. The law and history and the precedents of my own life. It wasn’t anything fanciful—I wasn’t ill—it was just disengagement. How much, I wondered, was real? I’d sometimes find myself hovering at thirty thousand feet. I’d contemplate the flight patterns and violet sunsets over Hudson Bay. I’d study Martian Travel for hidden meanings, sniffing the dried grass, smiling as I visualized the Trans World possibilities.
I’d tease the name, saying “Bobbi.”
Bobbi who? I’d wonder.
And there was Sarah, too, whose love and ministrations speeded recovery.
In the evenings, before bed, she gave me long professional back rubs, attending the vertebrae one by one, taking each toe to her mouth and sucking out the poisons and wickedness. There was some guilt, of course. There were unsaid things. Our lovemaking was often quick and formal. Bobbi, I’d be thinking, which was silly, and Sarah would regard me with flat eyes, just waiting, and eventually I’d find reason to look away. But even then she showed patience. Quietly, without sarcasm, she said she was proud of me. I’d done the proper thing. She knew how difficult it was, she knew about the pain.
“We all want to be heroes,” she said one afternoon. “That’s the constant. Nobody wants a bad rep. Ducking out, the big blush, I know. But I’ll tell you a true fact—you can’t die of embarrassment. Doesn’t happen that way.”
I watched the clouds.
A seashore scene, and we were beached up side by side. The blues were startling. It was an afternoon of repose, just the wide-open stratosphere and those long rhyming wavelengths of water and light.
For a time Sarah watched me through her sunglasses. There was a hesitation, then she reached into her beach bag and pulled out a new leather wallet.
“Yours,” she said, and passed it over.
Inside, under clear plastic, was a Social Security card made out in the name of Leonard B. Johnson. There was a driver’s license, too, in the same name, with my face affixed, and two credit cards, and a snapshot of Sarah in her Peverson cheerleading outfit. At the bottom of the photograph, in black ink, she’d written: With high fidelity, Sarah.
“The credit cards,” she said. “Don’t use them. ID stuff, just for show.”
“Leonard?” I said.
“You don’t like it?”
“Not much.”
Sarah sat up and massaged cocoa oil into her calves and thighs. Her skin was deep brown with good muscle definition. A hard act, I thought, in a hard world.
She laughed.
“Ah, well,” she said brightly, “what’s in a name? No real meaning. Know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Names and names, William. Meanings. Names don’t matter.” She rolled onto her stomach. Overhead there were sea gulls and wispy white clouds. “Anyway,” she said, “I hope it’s not an identity crisis. Leonard, I mean, it’ll grow on you. Very wishy-washy as names go. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, I’ll have your passport.”
“And then?”
Absently, Sarah traced a design in the sand.
“Nothing, really. New papers, new citizenship. We’re all émigrés here.”
She wiped the sand clean and started over, drawing an airplane, wings tilted at a steep downward angle. Her eyes, I thought, were wired.
“One of these days,” she said slowly, “you’ll have to stop grieving for the old country. It’s gone. Not there anymore.”
“A new world,” I said.
“Believe it.”
“New friends, too?”
She gave me a sharp look.
“Friends, too,” she said. “Who you think pays for all this? Those papers—the house, the groceries—somebody has to pick up the tab. They aren’t bad people.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied.”
“All right,” I said. “Generous people. What I’m curious about, though, is the repayment schedule. The fine print, the terms of agreement and all that.”
“A few favors. Odd jobs here and there.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Complaints?”
I shook my head. “No, just apprehensive. The law.”
“Well,” she said, “it takes some savoir-faire.”
Sarah studied her airplane in the sand. It wasn’t what she wanted, apparently, because she hit it with her fist and then flipped onto her back and watched the circling gulls.