“A serious blemish on an operation that was otherwise extremely well done,” says Teko.
Guy had expected something more from these bright people — the pep chairman and straight A student, the social chair of Chi Omega, and the art history major whose society wedding had been scheduled to take place this very month — more than for the three of them to sit here answering his questions with all the earnest insincerity of entry-level job applicants. They so wanted to provide the “right” answers. They were so convinced that there were right answers, and that he was looking for them. Now the big one:
How about the kidnapping?
“Which one?” More laughter.
“Well, that’s just it. You’re laughing. But there’s something,” Guy says, “about taking people by force, making them come with you under duress.”
Teko and Yolanda look back at him brightly, attentively, though there’s something about them that gives the impression that they’re bracing for a body blow. Guy turns his eyes on Tania. She recedes into the couch, as if she were embroidered on its surface, an anchored superficiality. Her own eyes are steady, and looking at nothing.
“It’s just, it’s everything freedom isn’t, whatever the ‘reason’ may happen to be. I guess you could argue for the political necessity of Foster’s assassination; you could even make a case for shooting those people at the bank, if you really really had to. But there’s something about taking over a person’s life and making it something other than their own.”
“Oh, Dan Russell loved every minute he was with us,” says Yolanda. “I could tell.”
Guy says, “I’m not talking about god damn Dan Russell, and you know it.” He surprises himself with his sudden change of tone.
“What are you talking about?” Yolanda’s face is rigid, lean with anger, and she sits straight up. Mean, Guy thinks. Mean woman.
In the end, Guy leaves, exhausted, without having made a single commitment to these people. Susan walks him to the door, holding his forearm, gripping it as they step out onto the walkway, gripping the arm as they move down the stairs and into the courtyard. She is leaning in, pitching for his aid. She is saying Angela: Angela this, Angela that, invoking — not entirely fairly, Guy thinks — the name of her dead friend. Ultimately, hers is not an appeal to his politics. Guy tries to imagine what it must feel like: to catch fire, and burn. He finally takes hold of the hand hanging on to him, holds it gently in his as a prelude to dropping it and walking away.
He is excited and troubled. The SLA sat there stripped naked — figuratively, anyway — bereft of comrades, friends, lovers, an operative sense of purpose, and all because they didn’t show up. What’s more, they lost the revolution. We can’t forget that they lost the war, even if not many people happened to notice it, that’s what it was to them — the Naga banner their battle flag, “Death to the Fascist Insect” their rebel yell — and in the end they were massacred by the state for having waged it, massacred in an act of lawlessness under color of authority. As General Teko carefully pointed out, most of the people in that house had not been charged with any crime before being surrounded; they were as innocent as the day they were born, were, in effect, martyrs to the cause, although they were at war with fascist Amerikkka (which word Guy noticed Teko had found a distinct way to pronounce), and Guy stayed with Teko despite this minor sophistry, thought he was right on, but then Teko had gone into some strange obsessive rap about Gigantic Black Penises and White Cunts and Bourgeois Fear while Yolanda and Tania accompanied him with this fake black churchy thing (“Tell it!” “Uhnhhuhnh!”), so Guy had carefully sorted through his memories until he located one of a breathtakingly cold swim he’d taken in Lake Tahoe one morning in early summer, of devouring the contents of a picnic basket after having emerged shivering from the jeweled water, one of many pointless reminiscences that spangle his consciousness, and it tided him over until Teko quit with all the dick talk.
So. They are these defeated people, crumpled up like old Dixie cups someone pissed in before deciding to toss them, fucked up with grief and regret. Right? No, they are giving him shit: “What kind of car is it you drive?” “Who’d you say it was that published your book?” “How big of an advance would a book like this be likely to get?” “Where will we be staying?” These American revolutionaries are interested in the amenities.
The afternoon has had an unusual effect on him. In having sat in a shabby North Berkeley apartment across from the fugitive heiress, the girl whose absence has been the strange floating turd in the punchbowl of jeunesse dorée, Guy feels that he has experienced the sense of wonder you might undergo in opening up an oyster and finding a pearl. So Guy decides he is going to be expansive about it. So they’ve fucked everything up, and they’re mostly wrong, and every exchange they shared with him wobbled at the edge of argument. So the Shepards take a scattershot approach to assigning blame, at times conveniently impugning the dead. So there is not even a single focused reason that will serve to clarify his own motives. He sees a group of people. He sees a narrative. He sees himself having lunch with an editor.
He’s not exactly sure how he’s going to swing it. At least a couple of round trips are in store for someone, and there are the void distances of the interstate, where every caged body becomes an all too obvious ornamentation of the scrub ‘n’ sky landscape, where smokies in their cruisers lie in wait for miscreants, parked in the scant shade at the side of the road to avoid sunshine so hot it splits rocks and the sand-blasted bones of dead mammals. How obvious is the most famous girl in America? He’ll Clark Kent her: glasses and a bun.
The wind is high, bending the tops of the trees, when Randi decides to call it quits for the afternoon. Guy’s been out all day, and she managed to clear chunks of cement, probably left over from the construction of that damned patio that seems designed to unambigously demarcate the limits of one’s outdoor enjoyment, from out of her garden patch, to add fresh soil and fertilizer, and to stake and trellis her tomato seedlings, though it’s probably a little late to be dealing with tomatoes. But she can see and taste them — ripe as blisters, their buttery tang, late summer’s bounty — and it keeps her working through the afternoon. The boxes of KITCHEN STUFF have yet to be unpacked, but it just seemed like one of those days when staying indoors was like asking for an engraved invitation to a total comedown later on, a malignantly gloomy mood from which she would have demanded to be coaxed by Guy, if she could get him to sit in one place. She has been working without gloves, and the dirt has been driven up under her fingernails and embedded in the creases of her hands, inlaid streaks of black, and she admires her hands in the bright kitchen light before scrubbing them in the deep porcelain basin, admires them because dirty hands give shape to another moment in the day’s orderly progression, from clean to dirty to clean again, the dirt spinning down the drain.
She puts on a sweatshirt and goes back outdoors to muscle the patio furniture onto that concrete pad; she swears to God it looks as if you could land a helicopter here if you wanted to. The wind, with its hint of someplace else’s chill gale. She listens for the unmistakable sound of a VW Bug. Tonight she’ll put out the citronella candles, and they’ll relax outside.
HANK WALKED SLOWLY DOWN Burlingame Avenue, a penciled list in the breast pocket of his shirt. The day was bright and clear. He could hear the whistle of a Southern Pacific train behind him as it moved through the station without stopping.