Overhead he spots a paring knife, secured to its cardboard backing by two thick staples, a two-inch blade sprouting from a handle of drab green plastic. Sixty-nine cents. He removes it quietly from the backing, popping the staples to free it, and then slips the knife into his jacket pocket. He looks up to meet the gaze of an older woman, who promptly averts her eyes.
“Shhhhh,” he advises, mildly, bending to lift the basket. He strolls toward the front of the store, just another householder, for the items in his basket are truly quotidian: ball of twine, roll of tape, 7¾″ x 5″ notebook, pack of Bic pens, Prell shampoo for dyed hair, box of Tide, package of sixty-watt lightbulbs, and three cans of cat food for the ungrateful strays that make the backyard stink of piss and that Yolanda has unaccountably taken to feeding. They ought to keep a tighter grip on their money or soon they’ll be eating the shit themselves. Not that it’s an issue today: Susan had come through again, delivering, via Roger, four freshly purloined MasterCharge cards. The one he offers to the cashier is imprinted with the name Harland Funderbunk, no doubt some hapless sojourner at the Sir Francis Drake, and he watches edgily as she fingers the thick monthly circular, its every page covered with fine-print columns listing stolen credit card numbers, sitting near the credit card blanks. But she is only moving it out of the way.
Soon he’s headed out to the car, stopping to examine the newspaper headlines. Hey, hey, SLA, made page one again today. The anniversary of the kidnapping, and the general drift of the coverage appears to be that the pigs have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re doing. Not that Operation GALTNAP, as the FBI has dubbed it, has anything to do anymore with solving a kidnapping or rescuing a hostage. “Miss Galton will face a number of state and federal charges, including attempted murder, bank robbery, and kidnapping.”
Yeah, right. Teko accepts it as an article of faith that the pigs will simply blow them all away. Originally the marked-for-death belief had seemed a suitably fiery fantasy of Cin’s, the idea that they were the meanest, the baddest, the most extreme revolutionary army of them all, killing Uncle Toms with phony liberal agendas and their CIA handlers, firing on elderly bank depositors whose creaky joints couldn’t deliver them to the prone position quickly enough to suit, swooping down like angels of death upon the children of the ruling elite, so bad and so mean, so camped out on the raggedy edges of the lunatic fringe that the only choice the fascist insect would have would be to annihilate them.
Then, of course, the pigs had annihilated them, and what Teko had noted well was his own sense that some safety circuit that should have tripped before things had gone too far had malfunctioned or been entirely absent to begin with. What he couldn’t shake was what no one else could shake either, in the aftermath: the index of juvenile achievements attributed to his dead comrades, the glowing faces and carefully styled hairdos of their yearbook photos, the fact that it wasn’t their commitment to revolution or justice or even their having had their hearts in the correct place that he, personally, would have submitted as corroboration of their right to continue living, but the penumbra of utter conventional ordinariness that fell upon them to veil and contradict all that they insisted they were. All he insisted he was. It was the good people, from the comfortable houses and safe neighborhoods, turning out to bring those tortured bodies home and pass through those same leafy streets, a sad suburban cortege, to bury them in mahogany coffins with polished brass handles. It agitated him to realize that he had thought this marked them as different, exempt, that because their bail would have been made, because they had college degrees, because albums were filled with faded snaps of their birthday parties they would, at the critical moment, be allowed to avail themselves of privileges never before denied them. It agitated him to realize that despite all that had drawn him to Cin, filled him with near veneration, he had accepted Cin’s subfusc forecast as tongue-in-cheek rhetoric.
His belief in Cin’s prescience now is in fact the most prominent of the differences marking Teko from the new group of Susan, Roger, and Jeff Wolfritz. Overall, a bookish and chatty bunch, which is one reason why he’s chosen to involve them all in the Bakery Operation, so called. Get them out there, pointing guns at people and making elemental demands. Give me, give me, I want. The pure playground logic of it, get the superego the hell out of the picture for a change. It might even help if they actually were to shoot someone, to scorch the cost of commitment in their minds. Simple as yes/no, on/off, with us/against us, alive/dead; strictly zero sum, the reality from which they hide behind books and talk. That was the mistake he made last summer, allowing Guy Mock to talk him into disarming and laying low and then allowing the bitch, Shimada, to set a lackadaisical and insubordinate tone. If he’d been smart, they would have shaken up one of those hick towns, but good. It would have bound them together, made them stronger, announced to the world that the revolution had arrived on the East Coast. Instead they whiled the time away, drinking draft beer and playing shuffleboard in local taverns, loading change into the jukebox.
Another reason, then, to involve the others in the Bakery Op is to make them criminally complicit in the revolutionary activities of the SLA and end any conflict between their divided, their treasonously bifurcated loyalties. Which of course gives rise to a third reason (which he admits to himself only cautiously): He has to get these people serious because their casual attitude presents an obvious and attractive alternative to his own martial approach.
The wind stirs briefly, ruffling his collar and kicking up trash that has gathered at the curb. The barest threat of sun at the corner of the somber sky. Winter in Sacramento. He gets into the car beside his wife, putting the bag of supplies between his feet.
“Why didn’t you just buy it?”
“Buy what?” His hand moves to the pocket where he has concealed the knife.
“The paper.”
“Oh, God. And deal with the bitch preening all day? The star?”
Yolanda reaches over to pat his hand mockingly. Then she asks, “Oh. Did you remember the cat food?”
She backs carefully out of the diagonal slot. Too slowly to suit the guy behind her, mug in a pickup who hits the horn with the heel of his hand, once, twice, three times as she straightens out the wheels and then begins rolling forward, arriving at the intersection and bringing the car to a stop as the yellow light turns red. The guy edges forward, annoyed, until the pickup’s grille fills Yolanda’s rearview. Then he revs the engine, vehement bursts of noise as he toes the accelerator. The moment the light turns green his horn begins to sound.
“What a creep.” She turns around to see if she can get a glimpse of the guy, sees only the grille.
“Well, don’t make a scene,” says Teko.
Yolanda heaves a sigh. There are many questions she might ask, rhetorical questions, concerning the man beside her, concerning their marriage, that cry out for the intuitive second sight of a Dear Abby. Would the astute Abigail Van Buren, whose cornerstone opinion seems to hold that all problems are universal and that the practical solutions to them may thus be universally applied, agree with Yolanda’s unhappy conclusion that the only hope the marriage has is (deep breath) separation?
Ask yourself. Are you better off with him or without him? I suggest that both of you attend counseling. If he won’t go, go alone.