But Polhaus thinks that he’s noticed something changing in Hank, something he might have missed if it hadn’t been for the tensions now evident between the Galtons. Lydia is one tough cookie. He’d become aware of that when she accepted another term as a UC regent in contravention of an SLA directive. If the kid ever comes home, Lydia is ready and willing, even eager, to do what she can to send her to jail. Polhaus thinks that he detects in Lydia a certain dislike for her missing daughter. It’s almost as if the distaste she evinced at the idea of Alice’s having joined the SLA were a masquerade emotion, designed to throw pursuers of her inner life off the trail. Lydia feigns — Polhaus’s pretty sure — angry confusion over Alice’s statements and actions, but the true and palpable sentiment is the fuming self-satisfaction you feel when someone fulfills the low expectations you had for them. Hank, on the other hand, seems truly lost and upset. He seems more the jilted and deserted lover than Stump (to Polhaus’s eye, Stump generates as much amorous heat as a night-light). In fact, Thomas Polhaus thinks that Hank will do anything to restore contact with his daughter, even aiding and abetting her fugitive life. And so he was pleased with his intuition when he learned that Hank was making overtures to Popeye Jackson and doubly pleased when he discovered that their go-between was Sara Jane Moore, who would become as tractable and willing an informant as one could wish for. All Sally has to do is tell him where the girl is first, before she takes it to Hank, and Operation GALTNAP is all sewed up, right here at home where it belongs.
But not today. Today’s news is more bullshit from Popeye pertaining to some issues clinging to his messy parole situation. He seems to have mistaken Hank Galton for his parole officer. Well, Hank asked for that particular headache.
“I am really not feeling so well,” says Sally. “Do you mind if I just sit for a few minutes?”
“No, Sally. Can I get you some more water? Some coffee?”
“Can’t you open that window?”
“No.”
“I don’t see the point.”
“Me neither,” says Polhaus cheerfully. “Sure is a pretty evening, though.” He lifts the telephone receiver, puts it down.
“I don’t know what to do with myself right now,” she says.
“Go home. Make a drink. Watch the news. Have a bite.”
“Is that what your evenings are like?”
“Just a suggestion.”
“Not a very exciting one.”
Is she flirting with him? Polhaus is pretty sure she’s giving some to Popeye; does she want to compare equipment?
“I’m afraid I don’t have much excitement on my mind. I have to prepare for a court appearance tomorrow. In Sacramento.”
That ought to keep her out of the office.
“Oh,” she says, “well.” She closes her pocketbook. Then she stands. “Have a good day in court tomorrow. Do you have to testify? Or are you just going to lend moral support?”
Thomas Polhaus has to smile. It’s one of the funniest things he’s heard lately.
TANIA AND JOAN CREEP through the woods, dense mixed stands of birch and willow on the flats, pine on the slopes. They are on point/ slack maneuvers, searching for the “enemy” team of Teko and Yolanda. Though today Teko has designated Tania and Joan as the pursuers in his new game, he and Yolanda are naturally disinclined to behave like prey for long. From far ahead they usually lay an ambush for the other two.
Joan takes a dim view of all this. She’s really just keeping Tania company. Tania is particularly terrified of Teko and Yolanda’s surprise attacks, Teko crashing out of the trees, screaming, tackling her and pretending to draw a knife across her throat or cutting her and Joan down with simulated gunfire. Frequently, when these assaults occur, she wets her pants.
“He always goes for me,” she says.
“He knows what I’d do if he laid his hand on me.”
“He’s worse here.”
“Honey, he’s worse everywhere.”
“Here” is Jeffersonville, New York, where Randi has found them a place, another nowhere, except this time more so. Up a private drive hewn out of the pinewoods that line the road, their house sits adjacent to an old forsaken creamery, surrounded by acres of wooded land. If their isolation from the outside world seems more complete than before, inside the house there’s a near-total lack of privacy; it’s one big room, with a sleeping loft. It’s a dusty place, void of character and charm, nothing like the Lafferty place. Tania finds dead spiders in the corners. She finds old newspapers on a shelf. She watches moths batter the overhead light. That’s the local color.
And it’s true that here Teko apparently has found much to nourish his authoritarian spirit. These military exercises he undertakes with great seriousness of purpose. Compulsory political study group every evening. The usual running, weight lifting, and calisthenics. He calls Guy repeatedly from town, urging him to supply the SLA with weapons for training, until Guy, ragged with worry about the steady stream of calls to his number from the remote upstate hamlet of Jeffersonville (as he pictures it being phrased in the papers), capitulates, bringing with him on his next visit two old Daisy Red Ryder air rifles, which Teko holds in his hands as if they had been sculpted from shit. Still, he sets up one end of the creamery for use as a rifle range. Guess who gets to pick up the BBs for reuse when practice is over. He plots and schemes toward the day when the group returns to California, the day the Revolution begins, anew.
A breathless day, overcast with occasional zags of lightning crossing the sky followed by the low rolling rumble of thunder, but no rain to relieve things, just the fraught light that passes through the storm suspended above them.
The two pupils sit side by side on upturned milk crates in the old creamery. Teko faces them, arms folded across his chest, Yolanda at his side. It’s the People’s elocution class.