“Where else? Where? Bandolier, socks — who cares? You did it, you stupid bastard. You had to go and take it, and now we’re here, going in stupid circles nowhere. I feel lost, I feel totally lost and alone and stupid, stupid, stupid! for listening to anything you ever say.”
“Let me tell you something.”
“Don’t tell me anything.”
“Let me just tell you this, OK?”
“Don’t! Don’t tell me anything!” Yolanda opens her door and is out of the van.
“Oh shit. This isn’t good. OK. We’ll be back. Sit tight.” And Teko leaves.
Tania and Dan Russell are alone in the van. Outside, the scanty traffic speeds down the road, each car making its own clean, distinct noise as it passes, the sound of things going smoothly for someone else.
“You OK?” Tania asks the blanket.
“I’m OK,” says the voice of Dan Russell.
“Don’t be scared,” suggests Tania. “You’ll be OK.”
“I’m not scared,” answers Dan.
“I was scared,” says Tania. “I was really fucking freaked out. Man. They came through the door and they knocked me down and tied my arms and carried me out kicking and screaming. They hit me in the face and threw me into the trunk of a car. I thought I was gonna die.”
“Well. You’ve all been pretty nice to me.”
“We don’t want. See, look: they had to scare me. I mean, my head was so screwed up before you wouldn’t believe it. Plus, you know, they were planning for me to be with them, to learn with them, for a while. While with you we just need to have you with us for a little bit because of the van and all.”
“Would you be being mean to me if I were going to be staying for a while?”
Tania smiles through the dark at the blanket. “No,” she says.
They are quiet for maybe thirty seconds, and Tania watches Teko and Yolanda standing outside on the shoulder of the road. They’re not arguing now; they’re talking, working it out, and she suddenly feels both tremendous loneliness without the others, without Cujo particularly, and unexpected warmth for the two of them.
Dan Russell asks, “When did you decide to go with, join their army deal? Was there a plan with a deadline or something, or did it just like happen?”
Tania shrugs. “I just started listening and learning from like the day I was taken away, and I started changing my views about things. It was a real process, the way I see it, though I guess it seems like a real sudden change. But first it seemed like my dad wasn’t trying real hard to get me back, so I start wondering why isn’t he interested in complying with the spirit of the ransom demands, blah blah blah. I mean, he’s cheaping out in this kind of totally obvious way when, you know, my family’s got more money than God: let’s face it. So they helped me, my comrades, they helped me see that these are all signs of like a hidden agenda, that there’s serious pressure coming from somewhere to keep me from coming home because they don’t want to be seen as giving in to the SLA demands.”
“They who?”
“The pigs,” answers Tania.
“Oh,” says Dan.
“Because they’re really, you know, the People’s demands. And so they gave me all sorts of shit to read and talk about. We do a lot of studying you know. This was like George Jackson and Malcolm and Soul on Ice. Blew me away.”
“Oh,” says Dan.
“And plus it was getting pretty obvious that the FBI and police are going to be gunning for me, what with all the statements flying around the press where they’re just assuming that I haven’t been even really kidnapped, even, like it’s just this ruse, and the pigs are grilling Eric — you know who that is?”
“Your fiancé?”
“Ex. Who had totally nothing to do with it, which I didn’t either I might add. Anyways, and then my mom accepts her being reappointed by Reagan to the UC Regents, which is this totally bogus inflammatory thing and in such bad faith under the circumstances I just basically thank the reasonableness and patience of the SLA for not killing me right on the spot.”
Dan nods judiciously.
Outside, Teko and Yolanda have walked a little ways, hand in hand, and appear to be talking calmly. Tania sighs. Then she pats the blanket, which asks anyway why are the three of them on the run. And she sighs again and tells about Mel’s, and about how she fired on the store, and about all this driving around, and car switching, and how it was they decided on Dan’s van, and then about Mel’s again: the shots, the gun jumping away, how it was the first time she’d fired using live ammunition, and Dan asks her how it felt.
“It was a good feeling,” says Tania emphatically. “It was a good feeling to see my comrades come running across the street.”
He just meant the actual what do you call physical act of the shooting. How did it feel to shoot the gun?
The doors open, and Teko and Yolanda get in.
“We’re going to drive by Eighty-fourth,” says Teko. “Everybody stay down back there.”
The house on Eighty-fourth appears, sitting dark as they approach it. Not that there was any electricity to begin with. But the other cars have gone from the driveway and are not parked anywhere on the street, and the heavy surveillance drapes have been removed from the front windows. Teko sits behind the wheel staring rigidly ahead, proceeding at a steady 25 mph, while Yolanda and Tania both study the empty house as openly as they dare when they pass. Teko rounds the next corner with deliberate care, signaling ahead of time and decelerating into the turn. Then he gives the van gas, gradually bringing its speed up, heading for the anonymous arteries.
CAMILLA HALL — Gabi
What could be a more trusted component of American sensory experience than the feel of getting into a car for a long trip, the familiar abbreviation of the body as it settles into its seat? Gabi could have closed her eyes and imagined that she was heading just about anyplace as they set out into the ghetto night of Los Angeles. A little more than a year before she’d driven west from her parents’ in Illinois to reunite and reconcile with Mizmoon, who’d flown to Denver to meet her. Life aboveground was so near at hand. Even today she could feel the familiarity of the enveloping seat during that trip, her car clean from its months inside her parents’ garage, and well tuned, and an air freshener in the shape of a pine tree dangling from the rearview — her father’s idea — emitting its overpowering aroma. Taking turns at the wheel, driving back to the Coast, they read aloud to each other from magazines with campy quizzes and grave stories about failed marriages. They stopped, got out, stretched, and walked around. Fill ’er up, ladies? Her plain round face behind its eyeglasses was anonymity itself. Her most political act was the writing of faintly erotic lesbian poems. And Mizmoon, flying into Stapleton, opening little cellophane packages of peanuts and counting out money to buy headphones from a smiling woman in a pillbox hat, she herself must have looked more like a stewardess than a radical.
And now this. She shook her head (Cin’s eyes darting toward the rearview, to glare at her reflection, alert as ever for any sign of insubordination). One day Mizmoon had been talking about composting, the next about armed revolution. Was it that facile a set of alternatives? Had there been no sense of a complete overturning of one’s life, much less of a wholesale exchange of personalities, when she’d taken up arms? And Gabi just felt dumb, reciting for Mizmoon (“Zoya, damn it!”): I will cradle youlln my woman hips/Kiss you/With my woman lips. “Stupid little boudoir poems,” was what Mizmoon called them now. OK. All right. Gabi would follow her in good faith. She accepted that this was the love she just had to follow, wherever it led, even as it forsook her, turned on her, spit on her.