American Woman (18 page)

After a moment Juan said, “You first, man.”

Frazer strode off and they heard his trunk open and boom shut again. When he reemerged from the side of the house he had a long, slender gun in each hand. He stopped a short distance from where they were sitting and propped the guns against the trunk of a tree. “How about a trade?” he suggested.

Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline were all staring at the guns. “A trade?” Juan said.

“A trade. Or maybe I should hold on to these until you've kept up your end of the bargain? Because I have the weirdest feeling, I don't know why, that you haven't even started to work on the book. Maybe it's the way you've been acting like you don't understand why I'm here. Maybe it's that I slept on the front room couch last night, and when I woke up I noticed the big box of paper and shit that I gave you, and everything in it is your eulogy tape written five hundred ways, and not a page of the thing we discussed. Am I right about this? There's no harm done so far, but I'd like you to be open with me.”

Yvonne and Pauline had turned pale; Juan was gaping at Frazer as if he were choking on something. “And you'll hold on to those until we've kept up our end of the bargain?” Juan said. “Those aren't even real guns! What do you think we are, man? What are you trying to do to us?”

The two girls looked wildly from Frazer to Juan. “Not real guns?” said Yvonne.

“They're rifles,” said Frazer.

“Air rifles,” Juan said. “BB guns. Did you think that I can't tell the difference?”

“You said you would help us!” Pauline said. “And you made us all give up our guns and you said you'd replace them.”

“I am replacing them.”

“With those?” Juan exclaimed.

“Not
even
with these unless you show me you've made a real start!” The trio was suddenly silent. “I am helping you,” Frazer went on, in a quieter voice. “But you, you've got to pull yourselves together. I know you're in pain but you have to get moving. People look up to you, did you know that? Did you know there's graffiti about you on the walls of the college I got fired from? I walked past it yesterday. It says how much they love you, and that their hearts are with you. That made me feel good, to know that you're here, and safe, and that I had a little to do with that. I am helping you. But you have to fucking help yourselves, too.”

“Don't tell us what to do, man,” Juan said, but Jenny saw his eyes glitter, and she thought he might cry right in front of them.

“I'm not,” Frazer said. “I'm not telling, I'm asking. I'm asking.”

For a long time they all stared at their gore-covered plates. The wind picked up and Jenny felt goosepimples prickling her skin. “These play guns are pretty ridiculous,” Juan finally said. He got up slowly, unkinking his knees, and then he crossed the grass to where Frazer had put them and picked the guns up to look at them.

“I know,” Frazer said, “but I've had delays and these came to hand, so I wanted to get them to you. At least you can do target practice.”

“We've had delays, too, but we'll get it together,” Juan sighed. “We'll keep up our end of the bargain. Am I saying the right thing?” he demanded.

“Yes, baby,” Yvonne said. She went and put her arms around his waist. They made a strange tableau, Juan standing with arms extended, a long gun in each hand, and Yvonne softly wrapped around him.

Frazer stayed, talking easily, pouring whiskey and wine, as the western light slanted more steeply, and their shadows grew long, and the campfire fell into embers. By the time he was standing to leave, as sunset began, he had brought them around. They were all laughing, even Pauline; they were lazily sprawled on the grass in the quickening wind. They had finished their steaks. Frazer told the story of one of his firings, imitating the pop-eyed indignation of his strait-laced colleagues, the sangfroid of the black kids he'd coached, his own half-goofy, half-swaggering triumphs, and she lay in the grass being warmed by the whiskey, and watching. When he really was leaving—he didn't want to, he didn't! . . . but he had to get back to the city—Yvonne abruptly embraced him, a belated apology, and then Juan and Pauline did as well. “You too, Jenny,” said Frazer. She stood lazily out of the grass and went toward him, the pleasant haze of the whiskey around her, and let herself be enfolded. “See?” he whispered, his breath in her ear.

“Venceremos,” Frazer called out to them, as he started his car.

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING
she was sitting high on the hillside above the house with a mug of coffee and a book when she heard the back door, and looking down saw the three of them slowly emerge. They didn't see her, mixed in as she was from their vantage with the forest behind her. Juan put his hands on his hips and looked assessingly at the long open slope the house sat on. Then, after an awkward transition, as if he were throwing himself in cold water, he started to run.

Once he was actually moving he moved with surprising ease. Yvonne and Pauline followed, Yvonne readily, Pauline less so. Pauline wasn't clumsy, but she seemed to require more mediation between herself and the earth. Jenny could imagine her erect on the back of a horse, or slicing through the water with an elegant crawl, but jogging seemed wrong for her. Still, Pauline jogged after Juan and Yvonne with unsure, choppy strides, and vanished as they had behind the far side of the house. Juan and Yvonne reemerged a beat later, abreast. When Pauline reappeared she was already a half lap behind. By the end of the exertion, which did not go on long, Juan and Yvonne might have circled the small house ten or twelve times, while Pauline's orbit had grown so slow, and so far out of sync, that Jenny couldn't count any of them correctly. Pauline sank down on the back step and put her head on her knees while Juan and Yvonne did a series of toe touches, and then Juan shook Pauline by the shoulder, she rose, and all three went back into the house.

The brief spectacle weirdly thrilled her; she had to set her book down and stare over her coffee at the hills growing haloes of gold in the strengthening light before she understood why. When she was a child she and her father had lived for a while in Japan. Seeing Juan and Yvonne and Pauline run like that, in their tight little circuit, had made her think of gym class at her Japanese school. All the boys and girls wearing identical brilliant white trousers and shirts and soft caps and thin sneakers; sometimes they'd played team games, with balls, and when they all grew too hot they would thoughtlessly take off their shirts, boys and girls, even when they were twelve and thirteen. But mostly they'd jogged. All of them, paired, in a winding defile in their blinding white clothes with their footfalls in perfect accord. Singing, they'd jogged through the streets of their cramped little town, while the old people waved. Singing, they'd risen out of town on the gravel-paved road that soon turned into dirt. Her first few times, gasping and blistered, she had fallen farther and farther behind, and perhaps she'd been taken back down by an older classmate. But soon, as with the language, as with dress and regime and friendship, she grew able to do it. They had jogged, a great body of children, as if they were going to war. Past the wet scrolled eaves of the frail ancient houses, and the eaves of the temples with their banners of prayers. She remembered the road out of town, the stones denting her thin canvas sneakers, but sprinting past tiredness and pain to a fleet-footed joy. They would jog endless miles, the whole day, though this couldn't be true. It was school, after all, and they had all the usual subjects. But it was jogging en masse she remembered, the small wooden shrines on the roadside far out in the country, the long-distance walkers bent over their sticks, the road level between the drenched fields, distant hills rising round from the green, level ground. Their town miles forgotten. She tried now, but she couldn't remember a single adult.

She found them in the kitchen, red-faced and a little bit trembly, all smoking in silence. “You jogged,” she said, and they looked furtive, even embarrassed. “There's better places to jog than just in rings around the house,” she went on. “There are all sorts of fields, when you go left from the barn. I think this place was a dairy farm once. Most of it's hilly, but some of the fields are level. There are pastures back there. And you can't see them at all from the road.”

As she'd thought they would, they seemed a little resentful that she was suggesting anything to them, but they also seemed, though reluctantly, curious. “Security,” Juan said shortly. “In the house, behind the house, and right near the house are secure.”

“What about the pond?” Yvonne asked him.

“What about it?”

“We could go swimming in it.”

Juan looked at Yvonne witheringly, and Yvonne sighed and shrugged, but after that Jenny felt more encouraged. She could tell that they longed to be outside; they longed to
do something
. Frazer had put them at ease, and she was starting to think that the secret was just taking action. You couldn't leave them to transform themselves.

Over the next few days, while they were slumped on the couch drinking wine, or perhaps more adventurously clumped outside around the fire pit drinking whiskey, she started to inquire about the things they'd done before. When their comrades were all still alive, had there been—exercise?

“There was physical training and war games,” Juan said. “Always limited, obviously, by our urban setting, and the importance of staying low-profile.”

“Right,” she said.

Another morning she remembered Frazer's mention of target practice. “So, you used to do target practice?”

“More than
that
.” Juan seemed amazed by her ignorance. Hadn't he told her about combat training? Though it was true that once Pauline was with them, the cadre hadn't been able to go outside anymore. “We stayed sharp,” Juan explained. They'd practiced search-and-rescue, ambush, self-defense, although it had been hard in a three-bedroom railroad apartment. Tripping over electrical cords, freaking out downstairs neighbors.

“Of course!” she agreed.

Finally, one morning Juan handed her a supply list as she was preparing to go buy the papers:

           
wine

           
beer

           
cigarettes

           
whiskey

           
one (1) bag approx 5 lbs unmixed cement

           
one (1) lg bag sand or gravel

The cement turned out to be for old flower pots and paint cans Juan had found in the barn; filled with it, they were stuck onto short lengths of broomstick, to serve as barbells. The sand was for filling up socks, which were tied off with twine and then made into loops, to be ankle and wrist weights. The barn had also yielded a few stacks of shaky sawhorses and these were set up in one field for an obstacle course. In another Juan paced out a half-mile loop, and soon the weeds there were flat from the number of times he and Pauline and Yvonne had run over it. The wrist and ankle weights were a process of trial and error; Pauline's ankle ones were too large and kept flying off her feet, so she was always looking for them in the grass, and her wrist ones chafed her from the twine. But Juan sat squinting beneath the front-room lamp for hours one night with a needle and thread, and modified them with a T-shirt he tore into strips. He made a schedule:

           
8
A.M.
rise

           
8–8:30 washing, eating

           
8:30–11:30 field training: physical strength/readiness, combat strategy, weapons (when weapons arrive)

           
11:30–12 ego reconstruction

           
12:00 lunch

“What's ego reconstruction?” Jenny asked.

“Cadre stuff, can't discuss that,” Juan said.

Once Juan and Yvonne and Pauline had worked out a routine she constantly saw them jogging, through the overgrown pasture uphill from the house, or up the dirt track that made a long S from the house to the barn. They were usually so far away they were just jerky movement against the landscape, but even then she could almost immediately tell them apart. On his stout piston legs Juan moved squarely, with almost no bounce, like a human bull-dozer. Yvonne bounced and bounded in arcs like a deer or a colt. Pauline was the slight form that always lagged badly behind. They ate now, and stayed awake in the daytime, and asleep in the night; she wasn't startled by their unsteady movements at dawn anymore. They went red, and then brown, from the sun. Even Pauline slowly took on a healthier tinge, and the dark circles under her eyes correspondingly faded. Sometimes they fought, but with rediscovered and intense energy, as if fighting were a heady relief after weeks of grim union. The sawhorse hurdles were too tall for Pauline, and when the wind blew the right way Jenny heard passionate disputations; Pauline once came running full tilt toward the house with a red-faced Juan chasing her. And yet at the end of the day they would lie in the grass drinking beer—even their drinking seemed somehow more wholesome—and going over the progress of the day with earnest absorption, talking over goals met and goals still fallen short of, race times, numbers of repetitions. They'd found tools in the barn, an electric bandsaw and a lathe and a handsaw and drill and all sorts of other surprising and functional things, and Juan finally took the handsaw, Pauline watching, and shortened the hurdles.

One night Juan said, in the middle of dinner, “We'll resume combat drills tomorrow. We ought to be in good enough condition. If we aren't we'll have to get that way, fast.” He didn't look at anyone particularly when he said this, but the comment seemed directed at Pauline.