Tania: Hamburger, Onion Rings, 7-Up
Civilian Prisoner of War: Hamburger, Fries, Coke
A knit cotton blanket speaks from the back of the van, requesting extra ketchup. It’s the prisoner under there.
Old grizzled cop George C. Scott is showing the ropes to idealistic rookie Stacy Keach. Tania has heard that Stacy Keach overcame the obstacle of a harelip to become an actor. And what a beautiful and mellifluous voice he has! Like Orson Welles. She thinks instantly of the famous movie.
(As a countercultural document, the SLA finds Citizen Kane virtually useless. For one thing, its criticisms of the media are outmoded, made obsolete by the emergence of television as the major information source for most people. But mostly, there’s a problem with its reductionist preoccupation with Kane’s megalomaniacal villainy and its definition of that villainy as merely the greatest flaw in his heroic makeup, which render the film romantic propaganda for the fascist establishment. Even now it’s said that Hank Galton’s forced exposure to the “underprivileged” has changed him; it’s said that he and the notoriously right-leaning San Francisco Examiner are beginning to address the concerns of “the people” and to run “hard-hitting” investigative pieces that “expose” things, lack of hot water and potholes and unsanitary conditions in the Western Addition and such. Tania’s not sure who it is who’s said these things. The Examiner, she thinks.
Alice has never seen Citizen Kane. Tania isn’t even curious.)
Tania wanders through the rows of parked automobiles, seconded by the enormous image of Stacy Keach, which itself approaches a parked car, intending to warn its occupants to leave the scene of some impending carnage. Little does he know. The helpful rookie leans toward the passenger window to address the lovey-dovey couple and encounters a young woman with a shotgun laid across her lap, pointed directly at him. Shock, surprise. She pulls the trigger, sending Keach flying. Tania hears Teko cheering from the van.
Right around when Tania heads back to report that she hasn’t seen any sign of the others and that their signal — a big paper cup set upside down on the speaker stanchion — is clearly visible, Keach is being dumped by his wife, who can’t really take it anymore: it’s hard being a cop’s wife; it’s all the worrying, the late hours. It’s the not knowing.
As if you ever do.
CINQUE
Later he heard the voice of a child in the street, a strong little voice forming sentences of pealing innocence. It was 11:50. Reverend Borrows: “There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who auto-MATically look at the clock when they hear a child outside after dark, and those who do not.” He’d been sixteen when Borrows laid that on him, about to get caught robbing parking meters and sent up to the reformatory at Elmira. He got to his feet, stiff and cramped. He watched the shadows of the others as they followed suit, except Cujo, who seemed to have fallen asleep.
“All right, comrades,” he said. “Let’s get on out of here.” Fahizah spoke, her voice coming from near the kitchen. “We have just enough time to get to the rendezvous, I think.”
“Rendezvous?” said Cinque.
“We were supposed to meet up at the last show at the Century Drive-In.” She added: “Um. You picked it.”
“Well, why the hell didn’t you mention it before now?”
“Well, I. I thought, it seemed like you, like you wanted, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” demanded the Field Marshal.
“Like you wanted us to be quiet, like you needed to think things over.”
Because of a painful corn that had formed on the ball of his left foot, what Cinque had thought over was this: Reverend Borrows liked to treat the smallest cuts with iodine that hurt so bad it felt like you were trying to scare the dirt out. It was a pleasure to him to treat wounds, to sit with his teenage boarder with surgical tape and a blue box of cotton and little brown bottles of stinging ointment between them, disinfecting and bandaging up his cuts and scrapes. Cinque had let him do it too.
It was information of a kind, neither more nor less important than anything else he might think about. Always expecting him to have like these great thoughts, damn.
Reverend Borrows’s daughter was Harriet. If Borrows had let him marry her when he got out of Elmira, everything would be different now. OK, she was only fourteen. But with the reverend’s permission he would have waited around, learned a steady trade, gotten work. Instead he floated to Newark, swum into the waiting maw of Gloria Thomas, twenty-three, drop-dead gorgeous, mother of three.
“Too dangerous. We’ll check out the drops tomorrow. What we need tonight is to get out of here and find a place to stay.”
Was there a hint of discontent in the ranks as they filed out the door in quiet pairs, himself and Gelina, Cujo and Fahizah, Gabi and Zoya? Well?
PATRICIA/MIZMOON SOLTYSIK — Zoya
Once a senior class treasurer … She divided and redivided the money, enjoyed seeing it split into equal parts. No “more or less.” Her best work was done at a desk, in bright light. She liked thinking and plotting. She liked the look of an idea as it took shape on paper. She liked the look of a number in a box or a circle. She wished she had a typewriter. She enjoyed working with reams of paper, generating drifts of ideas from out of nothing. The sheer accumulation, as the stack of papers mounted, as collections of receipts grew fat in a stained number ten envelope imprinted with the address of the Berkeley Public Library. Where she worked for a while and helped organize fellow workers in a labor dispute. This was something she would put on a resume one day, after the revolution, at the very bottom so that people could see what a long way she’d come.
At the library it had been thought that she had difficulty communicating with older workers. She categorically disagreed.
The dispute had ended up with the library’s remaining a nonunion shop. Still, she reminded herself, significant advances had been made.
Leaving stuff like that behind — the receipts, the notes, the drafts, the lists, the correspondence—killed her, not just because the others pointed out that their movements could be tracked exactly if such a rich trove of evidence were to fall into the wrong hands (she had to admit that she didn’t care, instinctively disliked the idea of vanishing off the face of the earth) but because it was a comfort and a relief to watch evidence of herself add up on the record. White drifts of her self, piling up on a tabletop on either side of the blue Smith-Corona portable. She wished for personalized checks, for a business card she could give out. Checks were better; they came back. She wrote graffiti on the walls of the safe houses instead.
And now maybe this was not what she wanted. She had grown used to things not being precisely as she wanted them; that was no longer her life’s objective, so it wasn’t where the problem was located. The problem was not quite knowing what the objective was. Zoya knew armed struggle was not about to happen down here. These people were in love with their Chevrolets and Smoky Joes: so what? They would come around. That wasn’t the problem. Inevitably her mind returned to Gabi. She couldn’t help thinking that Gabi had manipulated her into a situation where the ultimate point was for her to be with Gabi. This was unacceptable, and the word she used to describe it in her thoughts was travesty, a travesty of her beliefs. At the same time, she just had to look at Gabi — shlumpy in her fatigues, apart from the others — to feel an unwelcome wave of guilty feelings wash over her. It was like trying to abandon a kitten and hearing it calling for you from the back alley. Gabi cried from the physical effort of her training. She lumbered through drills, bulky and awkward, and Zoya wished she would just stop. Gabi stubbornly made it plain that her ideological commitment was less than 100 percent, and the fact of her actually having lived among the third world poor to whom her father ministered made everyone suspicious, including, Zoya realized, herself. Gabi had settled in as the butt of the cadre’s jokes. Cin gave her a horrible time. She’d seen her unmet sexual needs become the topic of an evening’s discussion more than once, and Zoya resented the implication that she was the one obliged to satisfy them. The whole focus of Zoya’s involvement in the group now was to keep Gabi from having a negative net effect on operations. Hand-holder. Babysitter. She jollied her and walked with her. Explained why they weren’t on the same team.