American Woman (16 page)

“I was thinking about it all night,” Pauline said.

“It still sounds like a fucking Hallmark. ‘Evan, you were the man of my dreams.'”

“Oh, just let her,” Yvonne said, annoyed.

By that evening they'd moved from the typewriter to the tape recorder. The typewriter had been silent for stretches of hours; had then pecked like a hen thoughtfully; had sometimes erupted in great fluid bursts, like a rain of small rocks on the roof. At some point it had crashed on the floor; Jenny heard the bright ding of the carriage returning. Compared to those sporadic spasms the tape recording was a constant vague dirge. Someone droned on at length, stopped short, droned again in the same shaky rhythm. Someone else paced and mumbled intently. The tape recorder made a loud
clack
as it was turned on and off, like a branch being broken. She crept around the kitchen making toast and heating soup from a can, but when she knocked to see if they wanted to eat, all their efforts derailed. “Ah, shit!” Juan cried as she peered through the door. Now they had to start over again. They couldn't have background noise—that was why the windows were all shut again, and, less obviously, why the room's only lamp had been snuffed by a blanket. “
Listen
,” Juan said. There was nothing to hear but the night-insects sawing and creaking. But had there been noises like this back in Berkeley, Juan wanted to know? Just
exactly
like this? And listen now—Pauline and Yvonne tilted their heads, as if to sharpen their ears. A night flight was passing over, so far above that if it were daytime they would just see the jet as a tiny white flake in the sky. Its slight noise like a faraway ocean—but what if there was some Harvard-trained FBI pig who could hear that and say, “That was Pan American flight 405 heading from Chicago to London at thirty-nine thousand feet on June 9—let's search all points underneath its flight path?”

It wasn't until the next morning that she had any idea of what Juan had been talking about. The noise of the car's doors awoke her. Going to her window hugging herself against the early chill she saw the three of them crawling over the car like a scavenging pack of street urchins. She pulled on her jeans and went downstairs and out the back door, feeling the cold dew on the soles of her feet. For a moment she just took them in, seeing them outdoors and beneath sunlight for the first time. They were bloodshot and fevered and pale. Their hair was lank, and their clothes looked too big. Carol had bought the car used, with cash, and never registered it, but there had still been an old insurance card and owner's manual in the glove box. These had now been thrown onto the grass. The map she had bought on her trip into town had been hurled forth as well, and little balls of tin foil and dirty pennies and cigarette butts were raining onto the ground. From opposite sides of the car Pauline and Yvonne began yanking out the mats and digging into the seat cracks, all the while casting burning glances at each other as if to say, See? I thought of it! Juan slowed down, then stopped; he leaned heavily back on the car and for the first time looked at her.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Pauline and Yvonne didn't glance at her. “Finished eulogy,” Juan said, and from the gravel in his voice she could tell they'd stayed up the whole night. “Gotta go.” Juan heaved himself off the car with one arm. She saw he was holding the car keys. She'd left them clipped to the sun visor.

She took a careful step forward. “Go where?”

“Go deliver. A radio station. Pigs'll know we avenge our comrades.” Juan raked a hand through his thicket of hair. “Come on,” he said to Pauline and Yvonne. For the first time Jenny noticed a small package perched suspensefully on the roof of the Bug. From its size it could have been a sandwich, but there was something so disturbed about the way it had been wrapped, in many sheets of note paper secured with scores of different-colored rubber bands, that any person who saw it would find it suspicious. “Radio station?” she said.

Pauline and Yvonne had backed out of the car. “We have to get our tape
out there
,” Yvonne said, as if Jenny were dense.

“But that eulogy was supposed to be for you, to help you—to heal you and help you move on. You can't take it to a radio station.” None of them seemed to hear her. Juan was shrugging off his work shirt, then winding it in a loose mitt around one hand, and with that hand grabbing the package. “Okay,” she said. “That's good, you don't want to get prints on the tape. And your precautions last night, about background noise—I understand all that now. I hope I didn't compromise things. You wouldn't want to undo all that effort by driving into town in broad daylight to a radio station, when no one even knows that you're on the East Coast.”

“You can quit with your protocol lecture,” Juan said.

Now she'd run out of patience. “You can't just get in a car and deliver a tape! Have you forgotten that there are people out there who'd be happy to kill you?”

“I'll kill them! Come and watch me.”

“Give me the keys, Juan.”

“Don't tell him what to do,” Yvonne exclaimed. “He's in command here, not you.”

“Every day that we're silent's a crime on our comrades,” Pauline piped up hoarsely.

She tried to ignore them and win over Juan, the commander. “Give me the keys, Juan,” she said in a comradely tone. “Even if you're not seen, if you leave that tape at a station around here we'll get agents all over the place.”

“We're not going to
leave
it at a station,” Juan said with disgust, getting into the car. “We're going to
mail
it to one.”

“There'll be the postmark.”

“We'll mail it to someone who'll mail it
for
us.”

“Who? Everyone you've ever known is under surveillance!”

“You told us to do this!” Juan roared, jerking out of the car again—he wanted to lunge, but he couldn't get far without letting go of the wheel. “We want this tape on the radio
now
, we're gonna swear vengeance
now
—”

“You said so yourself!” Yvonne said.

“I meant you should do it for
you
, not to broadcast all over the world!”

Juan got back in the car, slammed the door shut and started the engine. The car jerked and belched as he stomped on the gas. “Come on, Y. Not you,” to Pauline.

“But what if you're caught?” Pauline cried.

It still seemed possible this was a ruse, a game of chicken, but Juan shoved the Bug into gear. It hopped forward and then stopped again. Pauline, suddenly sobbing, was struggling with the passenger-door handle. “Polly,” Yvonne admonished. Yvonne had both her palms pressed down over the door lock so Pauline couldn't lift it. “We'll be back, Sister, stop. Sister, stop it!”

“Goddammit, I'll go!” she said finally, running up to Juan's side of the car. “I'll do it, I'll do it right, just get out of the car. If you're caught it's the end of me, too.”

“When the pigs took your old man, did you just shrug and say That's okay? Go ahead Nazis, take my old man?” Juan yelled wildly. “Did you?”

At last Juan had turned off the engine and handed over the keys. Going inside she felt their three gazes suspiciously tracking her progress. From her room she got her letter to William and her postal supplies, so that once she was out of their sight she could repack the tape. Before going back down she glanced out the window. They were there, clumped together just next to the car. They knew they had to let her do this, though they weren't yet sure if they could trust her. She wasn't sure, either. Her first thought when she was finally driving away was of burying the tape miles off, where it would never be found. But she knew that she wouldn't. She'd been thinking again about death. The first year after William's arrest she'd never slept well, never through the whole night, and she still woke sometimes with a shock, as if William were dead. Yet his death was impossible to her; she knew this, because she couldn't be grateful for his life as it was. Did death seem more likely when someone had actually died? She thought the reverse must be true. Which was why mourning had to be done, vengeful eulogies written and broadcast. Maybe they were all trying to believe in death, the three of them to grieve properly, she to grieve less—she glanced back and saw them small in her rearview as the hillside rose up. Then they dropped out of sight.

2.

F
our days later she was at the phone booth beside the boarded-up diner on the outskirts of Liberty again. By now it was so familiar she entered it hardly noticing what was around her, and reflexively yanked the door shut. She dropped the battered plastic bag in which she hoarded small change on the booth's metal shelf, and began to sift through it for dimes. The bag was also full of lint and dust and other particles that weren't currency. In the heat that quickly built up in the tightly closed space she could smell the sweaty metal of the coins, and the less identifiable fragrance they'd picked up on their thousands of journeys. She sometimes gained a delicate feeling of comfort from a telephone booth. Feeling less displaced than placeless, and kept company by her fistfuls of captured but transient coins. Although her daily visits to this booth, since she'd mailed the tape, had been so brief as to be almost instant. That was as per her and Dana's traditional system: she would feed the phone coins, hear the line open, hear her loud heart. When Dana answered she'd say, “Did you get something?” When Dana said No, they'd hang up.

Today Dana said, “Yes. And I want you to tell me right now what this is.”

“I can't. You'll understand why later on. When you take it out of the envelope, wear dishwashing gloves. There's a second envelope inside. Don't touch it at all. That's the part to deliver.”

“I've already done that. I already opened up the outer envelope with gloves, and got out the inner envelope, with gloves, but it isn't just paper.” Dana's voice was thin. “I can hear something rattling in there.”

“Don't shake it. Just deliver it like I told you.”

“Fuck, Jen. What did you send me? Did you send me one of those things that the roadrunner sends the coyote?”

“No! How can you think—” She tried to put the cradle of the phone between her shoulder and ear and dropped it instead, so it banged on the glass of the phone booth. She grabbed it again. “How can you think I would do that?”

“Then tell me what it is.”

“Listen to the radio after you drop it, and you'll know what it was. Then you'll see why I can't tell you now. But it's safe for you, Dana, I swear.”

“I can't believe that you're doing this to me!” Dana said, hanging up.

The next morning they were all up by six, tripping over each other in the kitchen and knocking the coffee out of each other's cups. The radio was already tuned to their
A.M.
news station, and Yvonne sat at the table with a notepad and pen poised in front of her, white-lipped and tense. “We need to take notes on how they present us,” she said. “They'll do an update of the case, but they'll also convey attitude. What the sentiment is.” Juan had set the tape recorder next to the radio for the same purpose, but this made the radio scream and distort even more. “Piece of crap!” Juan exclaimed. Pauline carefully shifted the dial a hair and Juan said, “Don't you touch that again! Do you want us to miss it completely?”

At eight Juan dropped down to the floor and did push-ups while whistling. After a few he collapsed on his stomach, rolled onto his back. He lit a cigarette and smoked, staring upward.

By ten their vigil had disintegrated. Every day before this they had felt it might play any time, and so their anticipation had been diffuse, and immune to final disappointment. Now they all knew that the tape should play some time this morning. The chance that it wouldn't drove them away from the radio, and toward it again. They jittered past each other, pretending to be doing other things.

At a quarter to noon she pointed out, “It's just nine forty-five in the morning there. Stations open up late, especially college ones.”

“But they broadcast all night,” Yvonne said.

“The graveyard DJ, but they're in the sound booth, not the office. They don't go in and out the front door.”

“How do you know?” Yvonne said.

At twelve-thirty Pauline was overcome. “Change the station!” she said.

“This is the news station. If they're going to play it anywhere around here, it'll be on this station.”

“I'm going to listen to the car radio,” Pauline said, grabbing the keys. “I'm going to find a better station.”

“Get back in here,” Juan shouted. And then—

“Polly,” Yvonne screamed. “Polly! Come back, come in, now!”

She was back in the room instantly, and then they were all clustered around the tiny radio, as the announcer interrupted the regular programming to join station K____ in Boulder. Without further warning Yvonne's voice burst out of the speaker. Yvonne flushed slightly and adjusted her posture; a flowering of her sense of self-importance, yet there was something uncertain about it. Yvonne was not taking notes, but anxiously watching Juan for his reaction. Juan was gazing hard into the distance, ignoring Yvonne. Yvonne's section was a meticulous cascade of facts: of time, date, duration, snipers, 'copters, rifles, riot-gas canisters, injured black bystanders, corpses, and cost to the taxpayer. The facts on the ground, the particulars; then Juan seized them up and charged toward universals. Juan must have been waiting for his cue as tensely as if he had to deliver the speech now, on a stage. From on high he found murder and greed; he could see Vietnam; he indicted, convicted, condemned. The kitchen looked suddenly strange, as if it had just dropped around them. Midday sunlight, a heap of filthy cups and plates. Pauline was motionless in her chair, her eyes dark and opaque, her lurid hair standing out in a shock from her head. Juan was saying, “But the pig did not put out his fire until every warrior was cut down in the act of unleashing a last shot of defiance. And the pig did not put out his fire until each body was charred and the skin drifted upward like paper. And the pig did not put out his fire until only the bones were left over, and then even the bones crumbled up. The pig's greed is always his undoing. When he finally put out his fire, he assumed he'd destroyed all twelve comrades, because there was no way to know any better. Now he knows he was wrong.