“Yeah, I want to talk.”
“Here’s the number right here. Scranton Resident Agency of the FBI. If you’re fucking around, now’s the time to quit. Say, count of three?”
“He tried to involve my parents.”
“One, two, two and a half, two and three-quarters. OK, three. Here we go.”
“I already look like a fucking idiot.”
“Yeah, well, you won’t get any argument from me there.” Bricca picked up the phone and dialed, squinting at the number under the glass on his desk.
ROGER DRIVES TO THE Bay Area, listening to a special radio broadcast, The Kidnapping of Alice Galton: A Year Passes.
“Where is Alice?” the announcer intones. “The FBI doesn’t know but believes you may be the person who will telephone them someday and say the young woman with the mole on the right side of her face below her mouth is Alice — your neighbor or a salesperson at a neighborhood store.”
Even at this hour there is a slight slowing, the sense of a queue forming, as he approaches the Carquinez Bridge. Bridges make him consider all the things we take on faith. That this old relic won’t simply fall into the strait below, for instance. An earthquake measuring exactly what point what on the Richter scale would shake this thing to pieces? He glances over at the bridge’s twin, tries to remember which of the two is newer, is touted as being stronger, safer, more soundly constructed.
“Parents in well-to-do suburbs are asking themselves: ‘Are my children too sheltered? Have I given them too much and made their lives too easy?’”
His tires whine on the roadway grid high above the dark and churning water. The car drifts slightly to the right, and he corrects generously, overcorrects, recorrects. A series of corrections, brain handling these NASA-like calculations with dazzling speed, and all in the service of an old Chevy with crappy alignment, shimmying the vehicle back into the center of its lane. High above dark water.
The car dips suddenly, and he has crossed over onto solid ground, safe for another day. Cheers! Just ahead, another car’s blinker pulses once, twice, before it slips into his lane, and he drops back, calm and unruffled, happy to be over the span. A new program begins on the radio.
“The caveman was all right in his day. He squatted beside the fire, snatched his lump of meat, pulled it apart with his hands and teeth. If he saw anything he wanted, he grabbed it. If someone was in his way, he knocked him down.”
Right on. Kind of the way he feels. The evening ended with the four of them — he and Tania, Teko and Yolanda — sprawled on the front room floor around a pot of rice Yolanda had (grudgingly) made. The pot was scorched on its sides and bottom and missing one of its two Bakelite handles, and it looked forlorn and out of place on the shivered floorboards, a photo from a Life expose of urban poverty. They ate in sullen silence. Well, look at the time. Got to head back down to Oakland.
She walked him outside, stood on the porch with him in the cold evening air. Trucks rattled by on the overpass. He hugged her, drawing her slight body close, surprised by how exhausted he suddenly felt. But he resisted the dubious appeal of his customary bivouac on the front room floor. It’d been a difficult day; there was bickering, a splintered atmosphere from the moment Teko and Yolanda walked in. Tania seemed to shrug it off easily enough; she was used to it, and soon there would be a second safe house, paid for with the money obtained from the “bakery,” their coded term for the bank.
Roger isn’t quite sure yet how he feels about the whole thing of the bakery. The necessity of the second safe house is tautologically self-justifying, apparently: an additional safe house is required because one isn’t sufficient. This doesn’t strike Roger as a particularly revolutionary reason, really. Though so far the revolution hasn’t threatened to interrupt his idyll here; it’s been kept at a distance, postponed by cash infusions and stolen credit cards regularly provided by Susan, still toiling away at the Plate of Brasse. But a second safe house is beyond the means of a waitress pulling shitty shifts and her housepainter boyfriend.
Maybe they’re not telling him everything. But he doesn’t want to be, has never wanted to be, a wet blanket. Always a good egg. Always game. He allows himself to entertain only slight misgivings about what he’s committing himself to. Frankly, he’s more concerned about whether Susan will be displeased with the smallishness of her assignment, which is to involve sitting in the coffee shop adjacent to the bank and timing the sheriff’s department’s response. He’s hoping she won’t be. It’s right up her alley, really, an incognito moment, a camouflaging of purpose. Lingering over toast and coffee and feigning curiosity when the pigs tear into the lot, one eye on the sweepsecond hand of her watch.
“Who wants a caveman around today? Along with houses, tables, knives, and forks, we have developed standards of friendship and courtesy that make life a lot more enjoyable.”
Susan sits at her kitchen table, wearing an old terry cloth bathrobe of her father’s, all dangling threads, a comfortable ruin stolen from the back of his clothes closet on her last trip home. She looks at her cousin, sitting opposite her.
“Teko called me a semiretard,” Roger complains. He holds a cup of tea in both hands, his fingers interlaced. To Susan he looks amused rather than insulted.
“Nothing semi about it,” she says. “Reminds me. I made your excuses for you to Mom, as usual. But I think she still expects a call now and again.”
“I’m in no mood.”
“And I come off shift just raring to hear the latest dispatch from the lonely desert outpost of Palmdale.”
He laughs through his nose, an exhalation coupled with a short hum, as if he were clearing his sinuses.
“I’m serious, Roger, somebody needs to help me out with this woman.”
“She should take a class. Adult ed.”
“Perish the thought.”
“A creative writing workshop.”
“That I should suggest to Mom, with her clippings and her used paperback books of famous psychology cases and the history of England that she brings home in a shopping bag.”
“Art appreciation.”
“I’m going to suggest to her that she is an uneducated person.”
He shrugs, smiling: You win.
“Well, so what’s the latest dispatch?”
“They had a streaker last week outside the Civic Center.”
“There’s a Civic Center?” Roger raises his eyebrows in mock surprise.
Susan glances at the electric clock hanging over the stove. Greasy yellowish dust on its face. Two in the a.m. Tomorrow — today — she has lunch and the first dinner service at the Plate of Brasse.
The businessmen work you, but it’s the tourists who run you off your feet and then stiff you. Party of six on Tuesday ran up a check of more than a hundred bucks and then left her a deuce. After she did everything but compliment their ugly sweatshirts.
“And so what did you tell her for me?”
“I said a girl,” says Susan, “what else?”
Her cousin smiles secretly. “Next time, actually, you could tell her a brain tumor.”
“Oh, you are nuts.”