When they left New York, they kept the apartment because they were so flush with the spoils of controversy that Randi didn’t feel like arguing with Guy over the crummy $250 a month, though she definitely could have seen it going toward something more substantial. But Guy started in, pulling dubiously accented French phrases like pied-à-terre on her like concealed weapons, and she just tuned out: like, OK, zzzzzzz — nap time! When Guy went to work on you, it was like Last Year at Marienbad forever. And if he wanted it, so what? He was the one who’d gone to all the trouble of getting fired. He’d even gotten Spiro Agnew pissed off at him. (“Yeah, look what that got him,” said Guy.) They piled their effects into boxes and labeled the boxes and piled the boxes into a U-Haul trailer and attached the trailer to their car and got some maps from AAA and some film for the camera and headed cross-country in a variation on a hardy American theme, hoping against hope that in years to come, as nostalgia became their dominant style of utterance, they would have completely forgotten that they spent a big chunk of the time creeping down the highway, bickering, afflicted with indigestion.
They came back to the East Bay. No place like it in the world. Randi loves the endless spring you earned after the months of rain, the soft summer nights when the other side of the bay is covered with fog and yecch. She likes the street people and the campus nearby. And they have friends here, which had been hard to swing elsewhere.
But Guy is already getting restless. He was definitely a person who needed something to do. Her, you give her some potting soil and the new Ross MacDonald, and she could disappear for about maybe three days. Some fresh lemons to squeeze into lemonade, a jug to fill with teabags and water and stick in the sun for a day. Give her a broom and a porch covered with sand and dried mud. She can pass months like this, marking time by the diurnal succession of events, flowerings, ripenings, gatherings, emptyings, endings.
Guy takes one look at the boxes on the floor, rinses out a water glass in the sink, and fills that with the All-Bran. He eats standing over the sink. He, what is the right way, he bolts his food. Not every time but when it’s useful to him. She knows he has some big plans because he doesn’t want to sit down with her and hold forth for an hour.
“What are you doing today?” she ventures.
“Susan and Jeff’s.”
“The barbecue!” says Randi, as if it were the solution to an enduring mystery, Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick. Susan Rorvik and Jeff Wolfritz had taken custody of their big barbecue grill when they’d left for Ohio, and they never had replaced it.
“Something’s on the fire, all right.” Spooning bran into his mouth, Guy hunches and unhunches his shoulders a few times, which Randi takes to be a form of laughter. Whatever. She is into her day now. She will begin penciling out a list soon. Tops on it is getting the KITCHEN STUFF unpacked and into cupboards and drawers because when your personal things are inaccessible it means you are dwelling in a state that is akin to death. It’s a long June day and she wants its Alpha and its Omega down on a piece of scrap paper where she can keep an eye on them. She sees herself in the backyard as evening falls, drinking something cold at the round table, amid the petitioning of the crickets, the bougainvillea darkening in the failing light. California.
Guy finishes up and puts his glass and spoon in the sink. It’s time to head out. He goes into the spare bedroom and gathers up some things he thinks he might need: a portable cassette tape recorder, a yellow legal pad, a copy of The Athletic Revolution, some pens. He puts these things in his shoulder bag and then pauses. The tape recorder would probably scare them off. He removes it. Now, a gift. As in other times of uncertainty, he refers to the movies. In which one bears evocative gifts when visiting prisoners or fugitives or soldiers far from home, chocolate bars and cigarettes. Always, the guy called Brooklyn (played by William Bendix) asks, “How the Bums doin’?” The emissary is maybe played by Robert Montgomery: “Two games behind the Cardinals last I heard, Flatbush.” Then Bendix gets shot by the Japs.
He gets shot. Guy thinks of the footage. He watched it in a dingy bar up near Columbia, that little house burning for the cameras. Very weird, staring at the palms hard-edged against the flames and red smoke, the lives of those people roaring into that distant sky, while with one hand he searched around in a jar for a pickled egg in this place that felt as old as thankless endeavor itself. Strictly drunks, no students. It was the sort of place where his brother, Ernest, would have taken up residence.
A guy sitting next to him at the bar, said he was a vet, pointed at the screen. “Search-and-destroy. That is a fucking search-and-destroy op, just like Vietnam. Fucking textbook.” OK, so this was not just any old bunch of kids standing up for their rights. They armed themselves and wrote inflammatory communiques and shot progressive public school administrators and kidnapped people and robbed banks and shot innocent bystanders. He understood the pull of the suggestion that they’d “asked for it.” And he further understood that police logic found its source at a strange and alien fountainhead. But the point was that something seemed wrong about this. The point was that pinning down the SLA in a house and setting it on fire seemed pretty extreme.
Susan had said: “She particularly, Guy, is very scared and plus very sad because of, you know, Willie, and they are all freaked out, but they’re doing pretty well under the circumstances, though I think she’s kind of paranoid because she’s thinking she’ll be singled out. Like, shot on sight. And I wouldn’t say that she thinks that’s the worst thing that could happen to her right now either. But I think what they really need is to get the hell out of California for a while.”
Jesus, now how is he going to break this to Randi?
But what a fucking gas!
Cigarettes and chocolate bars he figures they can manage all by themselves. So far their ordeal hasn’t required this kind of denial of the flesh. He is amused to think of revolutionaries, down from the hills, pausing at roadside restaurants to order their food from tasseled menus the size and shape of Monopoly boards. He’s been to those places on I-5 and 101 and 99. You could try to apply your survival skills to the wilderness, to gather mushrooms and roots, but in the approximate center of the Golden State, cleared and furrowed and planted with the world’s bounty, the big difficulty was to find a decent place with free refills. He moves back into the kitchen carrying the shoulder bag. The back door is open, and he sees Randi half inside the storage shed in the yard. Sitting on the counter is yesterday’s loaf of zucchini bread, about a third of it gone. He shoves it into a brown paper bag and carries it to the car.
Guy has a fantastic idea in mind that’s arrived so fully formed that he can’t help thinking that he subconsciously conceived it sitting in Morningside Heights on that barstool beside the drunken vet and then filed it away for it to reappear at the proper time, which presented itself when his old pal Susan Rorvik called to tell him that she’d been contacted by Yolanda of the SLA. That had been a shocker; after Susan had organized the rally at Ho Chi Minh Park, Guy just assumed she’d be under surveillance by the Pigs. He can’t believe the SLA has taken the risk of contacting her. Still, maybe that’s a measure of their desperation. The SLA was unloved within the Movement, that’s for sure. At best they were considered a joke; at worst they were suspected of being a front for the CIA. Now that they’ve been martyred — and gotten plenty of press in the process — opinion seems to be shifting. Here’s where Guy figures he can help out. What he wants to do is to write a book-length treatment of the SLA experience: their ideas, their goals, their viewpoint, basically their side of the whole fucking story. Sure, there’ll have to be a certain emphasis on Tania, but every show has its star, and he figures if he presents it to the fugitives as a saga about their carrying on in the face of adversity, while pitching it to publishers as the Insider Story of the Missing Heiress, things will work out fine. They have to. Guy’s feeling a certain in-betweenness regarding his life these days that he’s getting a little tired of, and after years of having taken for granted his ability to wander into situations where he’s grossly out of place, wander in and deliver congressional testimony or wangle a faculty appointment or an editorship or swing a book deal, he’s still shaken by his sudden dismissal from Oberlin.