American Subversive (6 page)

I don't know if these pages will ever see the light of day, or even, as I delve deeper into all that's happened, if they should. There are practical concerns, people still out there—friends. So I'll protect them here by changing names (Carter's and Jodie's, for instance), and when it serves to, leaving out the inner machinations of our Actions. Mostly, though, I have nothing to hide and nothing to lose, and what I'm relating here is as true as memory will allow.

I remember clearly what it felt like to sneak across that construction site under cover of night. I was dressed all in black and wore gloves and a ski mask. It had been raining on and off for several hours and the air still hung heavy, fog enshrouding the far-off streetlights. The grounds were deserted. The wall up ahead was blank and beckoning. I located the ladder we'd snuck in the day before and got to work, spraying haphazardly. The paint looked like blood, and I guess it was supposed to. I could hear Carter behind me in the darkness, wrestling with wood, tearing open packages of paper. A block away, phone calls were being made. I peered at my watch: two more minutes. Paint was everywhere. It started drizzling again. I moved the ladder along the factory wall, once, then again, as the giant words crept into being.
When I was finished, I whistled into the night—it was the signal to light the fire—then jumped down, grabbed the ladder, and placed it, for aesthetic purposes, back where I'd found it. I threw the paint cans into a pile of nearby debris and started jogging back toward the car. I glanced in the direction of Carter's fire. There should have been flames by now, but I saw nothing. Was it blocked out by machinery? Was my timing off? I looked at my watch again. I had just enough time to get across the site and duck through the hole we'd cut in the fence. But something wasn't right; I could sense it. I was now fifty or sixty yards from where the flames should have been—but still weren't. And there was no sign of Carter either. We'd have company soon, news trucks and squad cars. We'd been told to keep to the plan no matter what, but I stopped in my tracks, then ran back the way I'd just come, through the rain and the night, until I could make out a figure hunched over a hulking pile of wood wrapped in soggy paper. Carter was cursing quietly, urgently.

Hey,
I hissed.

He turned around, the look on his face wild, desperate.
What the fuck are you doing?
he demanded. You should be back in the car.

Yeah, with you, I said. What's wrong?

What do you think's wrong?
The rain!
I can't get the damn thing to stay lit!

Where's the lighter fluid?

I've been using it!

Here, I'll pour. You trail behind me with the flame. It'll still catch underneath.

He threw me the can of fluid. It was almost empty. I stepped up to the tepee-shaped pile and pushed aside the outermost layer of paper and wood. It wasn't dry underneath, but it wasn't soaked either, so I started spilling a trail of liquid into the depths of the sticks and stakes and kindling. Beside me, Carter leaned in and pulled the trigger of his industrial-size lighter, concentrating the flame precisely where I was pouring. A sudden flash of fire jolted us both, then died down before finally sustaining itself. We did the same thing on the other side—though I'm not sure we had to, as the flames were already spreading—until the container was empty. I threw it on the fire, grabbed Carter by the wrist, and we started running. I don't know who heard the sirens
first, but we slowed down a moment, before speeding back up, before sprinting, through the rain, past piles of steel beams, around cranes as high as clouds, and I felt it then, the unburdening, the sudden freedom of the anticitizen, the cool blackness of an illicit world—open and immediate and malleable for the first time. We didn't turn around until we were in the car, driving back past the half-finished factory. The fire was magnificent now, an inferno mocking the constructions of man. And behind it the massive red words flickered in eerie shadows like a warning cry, like a reason to live. We turned onto the main road and saw the first police car twenty seconds later. In the backseat we ducked down and giggled as it hurtled past us at a hundred miles an hour.

I was treated like a star after that, and it felt as if there were no turning back. In the countless retellings, Carter exaggerated my role until it sounded like I'd saved his life when all I'd really done was help light the fire. Still, what a fire it was! The arson led off the local newscasts, but we didn't rest on our laurels. By the time the West Virginia attorney general's office announced an investigation into the factory's permits, we'd already moved on to other states, other Actions.
Stages, each leading naturally to the next
. I learned how to pick locks, how to hot-wire cars. I was told to stop attending public protests (they didn't want me photographed or arrested). And soon, I was being introduced to a new group of people, solemn men and women who carried themselves with the confidence of bigger battles fought and won. They appeared late at night and peppered me with questions. They were looking for reasons to reject me, and when none surfaced, they changed their tone and invited me in. This was the realm of professional radicals—eco-warriors and anticapitalists. Within weeks, my old friends—the regional activists like Carter and Jodie—fell away. Hobbyists, my new comrades called them.

If we had a physical presence, a de facto headquarters, it was the dimly lit basement apartment we rented with cash in a run-down section of Raleigh. We started using it for meetings in late March, when the days were still short and the streets mostly empty. It was there, late one night, that I first met Keith Sutter. A housing subdivision was being laid out on contested Native American land in the Ozarks, and a few
of us stood huddled over a table, staring at a set of project plans we'd found online. Those nights, when our chosen target was still at a distance, when the factory or the warehouse or the gated community was still an abstract concept, lines on a blueprint, those nights were my favorites. The event was still before us, and the potential destruction, the victims, the
consequences,
were far off and always negligible.

Destruction, victims,
violence:
it seems an indelicate way to introduce Keith because, until that point, physical aggression had not factored into anyone's planning. Our Actions were pointedly small and precisely planned and never involved weapons of any kind—guns or explosives. Violence of that nature was so far from our thinking that it never even came up. That's not to say we weren't aware of other groups out there—other
people
—that went to such extremes. We were always hearing stories, and most of them, sooner or later, included the name Keith Sutter.

The rumor had been going around for days: that he was in the Carolinas. It was passed along in self-congratulatory whispers, as if his mere proximity were a validation of all our work. His physical appearance was a well-kept secret, so when he finally showed up, we didn't even realize it was him. He walked into the apartment with another man, and they milled around in the kitchen awhile. We were aware of them, as we stood over the table, but only in the dimmest sense (activist-types were always coming and going in the background of our lives, hovering on the edges of low-lit rooms at odd hours). If you weren't directly involved in an Action, then, for reasons of both security and plausible deniability, you steered clear of the talk surrounding it. So the two men kept their distance until we'd stashed away our maps and notes and dispersed. I walked over to get a beer, and that's when one of them put his hand out and said hello. It was that simple.

Did I know he was there to see me? I had an idea. Without trying to sound vain, I was aware of my growing status within the group. I was one of only a few women in our ranks, and I came without questions or complications—unless you count motive. But everyone had motives, whether made public or kept private, and mine were more than justifiable. What set me apart was my willingness to act on them physically. To take surveillance photos in the black of night. To
trespass with wire cutters and spray paint. To press forward where others held back.

I followed Keith out to a small patio area, and we sat down on two foldout chairs. Before us lay a narrow back alley that led off into the darkness. That's why they'd rented the place, I realized: the escape route. The multiple-exit rule. All of this I registered in an instant. How my mind was changing.

He didn't talk about himself; he didn't have to. Instead, Keith asked about my past—Maggie Valley and UNC, New York and Washington. I answered his questions. I had nothing to hide. He didn't mention Bobby, but I could tell he knew the story. He seemed to know everything I was saying. Which is when he told me why he'd come.

He was going to blow up a coal mine in eastern Kentucky.

Using explosives? I asked.

Yes, using explosives. It's in Pike County. A slope mine owned by Tarver Coal and Energy. They're responsible for twelve miner deaths in just the last two years. To say nothing of their aboveground offenses—the air pollution, contaminated streams, the cancer clusters. In
kids,
no less. Blue baby syndrome, ever heard of that?

Yes, I said, and waited for him to continue. I had also heard of Tarver Coal, and I knew what a slope mine was, and how it differed from a drift mine and a shaft mine. I knew, in fact, that over three hundred coal mines existed in Kentucky, and could even name most of the counties they were in. Why? Because I was a child of Appalachia. I'd grown up around coal, had friends and uncles and even a grandfather who had at one time or another worked underground. It was an awful business, dirty in every conceivable way, but
blowing something up
. . .

Keith leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, and explained his plan in a voice so low I had to strain to hear it. He would use nitroamine combined with mineral oil to set off a controlled, delayed-fuse explosion that would cave in not only the shaft, but the entire length of the mine. Why was he telling me this? And why in such detail? Because he was daring me to stop him. Daring me to stand up and walk back inside. It was a test. If I stayed silent, I'd become complicit. And then I'd be with him.

So I said, You shouldn't do it.

Really? Okay, then . . . Keith scratched the back of his neck, as if
disappointment had suddenly made his skin itch. What's the problem? he asked. The method? Bombs are no different from anything else, really. They just let us play in a larger arena. The rules are still the same, chief among them being
no human casualties
. But I understand. What I'm talking about . . . it's not entered into lightly. Now, it goes without saying, you can't discuss a word of this with anyone, including—

Keith, I said. What I mean is . . . there's a better target.

Excuse me?

Than the Tarver mine.

He looked directly at me for the first time, as if he'd only now decided to grant me total access. It was a neat trick, emerging from imaginary shadows, and it worked. I stumbled for a moment. It's not that he was physically overpowering; on the contrary, he was on the slight side. He had a close-cropped beard, and his face was hard and tan and a bit worn by the elements. His lips were permanently chapped, like a mountain climber's, but he still looked young, taut. His eyes were green and watery and somehow optimistic. In another world I'd have found him handsome. In this one I found him
strong
.

He was waiting for me to continue. So I did. If you're going after a mine, it should be aboveground, I said. A mountaintop mine. They're the worst. The mining companies don't even bother to drill down. They just remove the mountain itself, layer by layer, and dump the toxic excess—it's called coal slurry—into huge black ponds that they dam up and leave there until the protective layering leaks or bursts. And they leave what's left of the mountain, too, except it's not a mountain anymore. It's just a bald plateau. And your beleaguered miners? You don't have to worry about them because they'll have been replaced by bulldozers and bombs. Ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel, I believe, but that's your department. It shouldn't be hard to find out what they use. Just drive up to West Virginia and stick your head out the window. You'll hear the blasts.

Keith leaned back, a trace of a grin on his face.

That's very interesting, he said. But tell me, why blow up a mine that's already been blown up? Who would notice, or care? The object of every Action should be visibility, generating attention. A cave-in serves that purpose. It'll shine a spotlight onto a gloomy little corner of America, at least temporarily. And that's all we can ask for.

Keith was humoring me, but I didn't mind. I'd just been showing off, pretending this talk of bombs had no effect on me. Because it did. Still, he'd raised the stakes and I hadn't flinched. I went inside and (ignoring the curious looks) got us two more beers. We talked a while longer, about other stuff, music and books and places we'd been, and if you'd missed round one, you'd have thought it was the most normal conversation in the world. Hell, it could have been a date.

Finally, he stood up and dusted off his jeans. I need to get going, he said. Probably been here too long already.

Well, it was a pleasure to—

Do you want to come work with us? With me? This coming summer?

It was, I knew by then, what he'd come here to do. Recruit me. And before I knew what I was doing, or why, I said: Yes, I'd like that very much.

AIDAN