American Woman (29 page)

She heard a car start. She had also heard footsteps, the back door, voices loudly debating together, but all of that she had ignored. She got to the window in time to see the Bug driving away.

Downstairs she found Pauline watching out the front window, clutching the transistor to her chest. It was hissing with static. “I'm too recognizable,” Pauline said. “They wouldn't let me go with them.” She wiggled the transistor's antennae, touched the dial, then hugged it tightly to her chest again, no more tuned in than before.

“Where are they going?”

“Into town. To survey the terrain.”

“Why? What for?”

Pauline shook her head; she knew, but was not going to say. “He'll tell you,” she said.

Juan had hidden his purchases when they got back from Monticello, but now she saw what they were; in the bathroom and in their bedroom, boxes of L'Oréal hair dye, combs and brushes and scissors, eyeliners and lipsticks and powder, lengths of Ace bandage, reading glasses for both men and women, pillow forms that must have been from the sewing-supplies store, had emerged from their place of concealment and been strewn everywhere on the floor. There were two dresses lying empty and twisted across the rumpled double bed. Both were conservative, even prissy, with cap sleeves and darts. One was pink and one yellow. Both were size four. Pauline watched as Jenny riffled the bedroom, but said nothing to stop her. The bedroom was ripe with the smell of sweat, and dust. And sex. Dirty clothes, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles, plates crusted with food, cups lined with a skin of dried wine, were so thick on the floor she had to push things aside with her feet to take steps. She left the bedroom and went into the bathroom; in the bathroom was a blizzard of hair. When she returned to the front room Pauline said, blurting it out, “They'll be all right, won't they?”

“I don't know,” she said after a moment. “I don't know what they're doing.”

“Don't be angry, Jenny. Juan's in command. He has to tell you himself what he's doing. Don't leave!” Pauline cried.

“But you won't tell me what's going on!”

“You can still stay. Don't leave me alone. Find some music.” Pauline thrust the radio at her. “Do the crossword with me. I found an empty one. I've been saving it.”

Juan and Yvonne were gone for almost two hours. When she and Pauline heard the Bug on the hill again they both leaped up; Jenny rushed out the back door and stopped short in her tracks. Yvonne was made up and coiffed, legs shaved, in a powder blue dress, but it was Juan's transformation that stunned her. Juan's guerrilla beard was gone, exposing round cheeks and a cleft in his chin. And his hair was cut off—it fell neatly above his ears, and the ears, exposed, stood out alertly. His shirt was tucked in, trousers belted. He looked like a midwestern college kid studying crop yield. She might not have recognized him had they passed in the street.

“Not bad, huh?” Juan said, walking past her. “We clean up pretty well.”

Yvonne was stepping out of a pair of sandals. “Those are awful,” she said, walking barefoot the rest of the way to the door.

“Where have you been?”

“Town,” Juan said shortly. “Hey, Princess. Don't look so freaked out.” Pauline threw her arms around him; Yvonne came and smiled gaily and Pauline rushed to hug her as well.

“Give me the keys,” Jenny said to Juan quietly.

“Later,” Juan said. When he saw her face he said, “Come
on
. We just went for a nice country drive.”

Behind her, Yvonne was still hugging Pauline. “I wish you could have seen the sights with us, Sister. I brought you a treat.” It was a copy of
Newsweek
, with Pauline on the cover. Beneath her face the word
WANTED
had been crossed out and replaced with
MISSING
. “Isn't that wild?” Yvonne squealed, as Pauline held it and stared.

T
HAT NIGHT
after dinner Juan called a council. “The reward offered for us is more than he'd get for a book, I would bet you,” Juan said. “And he wouldn't have to split it up. He could keep the whole thing.”

“He wouldn't do that,” Jenny said, at the same time as Yvonne said, “He'd get busted for harboring,” though this hadn't been what Jenny meant.

“Bullshit,” Juan said. “Harboring's hard to prove, and he's smart. He'd make a nice deal for himself. It ought to be tempting for him.” All through dinner the little radio had been tuned to the
A.M.
news station to the extent it could be tuned to anything, and in the silence after Juan finished speaking its whining and hissing seemed to scrape on the bones of Jenny's skull. “Anyway, let's start this fucking council,” Juan said. Jenny rubbed her thumbs over her eyebrows and snapped off the radio irritably. Looking up she felt everyone's gaze on her.

“Sorry,” she said. “It was bugging me.”

After a moment Juan said, “You see, we're starting our council.”

“I heard you.”

“You need to leave,” Juan clarified.

Between hearing his words and understanding them she experienced a very slight delay. “Right,” she said, standing up stupidly.

She slept badly that night. The next morning she was still tangled up in her sheets, trying to block out the light, when Pauline came and lightly knocked on her door. Pauline looked oddly happy. “Come down,” she said, smiling.

Downstairs Juan looked as if he hadn't slept either. His eyes were bright with manic calculation. He was unfolding a wad of notepaper. “Jenny,” he said. “There's coffee. You want coffee? So, you know, we had to hold council, we had to vote, but it turned out good for you, we all voted for you. I know you hated us making you leave.” Gripping both ends of the notepaper he scrubbed the sheets against the door frame to flatten them.

“I didn't hate it,” she said. “I just want the car keys.”

“But in our situation, it's not that we would ever have secrets from you so much as we feel responsible
to
you,” Juan went on, ignoring her interruption. “We couldn't lay our plans on you until they were formed, and I had it all firm in my mind how and why things would go. Now I do, and I can answer your questions and deal with your objections, because I know that you'll have them. Day after tomorrow is Sunday, and we're going to hit that kid Thomas's store. Not with him, don't bugeye like that. He doesn't have any idea, it won't touch him at all. His boss makes the deposit into the drop safe at the bank on Main Street. He does it alone, and he's a very small guy—Y and I checked him out yesterday. We'll approach, boss'll hand it right over, and then we'll be able to get out of here.”

It took her a moment to find her voice. “No!” she said.

“Just listen before you say no.”

“No! This is your wonderful plan? Are you out of your mind?”

“I know it's not the kind of thing you like to do,” Juan went on, seeming unsurprised by her objections. “You like to blow things up that belong to someone who can always replace them, like the federal government. You like to do things that make you feel morally superior but don't make any difference, except getting your lover's ass thrown in prison.”

“Don't be an asshole.”

“I'm just saying, Jenny, that you have to leave the moral high ground sometimes. Our high purpose now is survival. We don't have the good options. And we don't have your stash of cash, either.”

She felt herself color; at the edge of her vision she saw Pauline's eyes widen slightly. She wondered if Pauline was surprised at the invasion of her privacy, or if she'd been part of it too, and was merely surprised Juan had told.

“Your two hundred thirty-two dollars and, uh, what.” Juan consulted his sheets of paper. “Some small change. Don't be mad at us, Jenny. We went through your shit. It was ages ago. We just needed to know who you were.”

“Fuck you, Juan!”

“Jenny.” Juan stretched and looked at her perplexedly. “We made this plan with room in it for you. We want to make it up to you, that you'll never get your cut from the book. I know that's why you're here. I don't hold it against you—you've got to survive just like we do. The three of us agreed last night to give you a full fourth of the take, though we're doing all of the planning. It won't be the big bucks a book might have made, but it'll carry us all for a while.”

Pauline, like Yvonne, was watching her with less suspense than confidence; they actually seemed to expect she'd relent, and not just relent, but become infected by their enthusiasm, which they'd caught from Juan—or perhaps the idea, like everything that they did, was a product of bad alchemy, a miniature collective insanity none of them could have sustained on their own. “No,” she said. “No, I will not commit stupid armed robbery, Juan.” When she looked at Pauline and Yvonne, they seemed truly surprised.

“Then you go,” Juan said, suddenly brusque.

“Oh, Juan,” Yvonne said. “That's so harsh.”

“If she does the thing with us she stays, if she doesn't, she goes! You think we should keep her around as a witness?”

“I'll go gladly,” she heard herself say. “I'll go now.”

Juan only hesitated a moment, and then threw the keys at her. She raised a hand and felt them smack into her palm. Juan's and Yvonne's and Pauline's six-eyed gaze, suddenly strangely opaque, tracked her out of the room, and then she was striding past the foot of the stairs and through the kitchen with its warm pot of coffee and out the back door. Juan had thrown her the keys in a fit of his idiot temper, and even now he'd be realizing what he had done. He'd come storming out, red-faced and thwarted. She only needed to drive into town and call Frazer. This was his problem, now. She was aware of feeling more than a little bit pleased that everything was backfiring for him. Crossing the grass toward the car she heard the back door open and shut, a strangely leisurely sound. She dropped into the Bug's driver's seat and turned the key in the ignition. There was nothing, not even a cough. She gave the gas a few pumps; still nothing. All three of them had filed out the back door and now they stood at wide intervals, watching: Pauline on the back step, Yvonne several paces closer, eyeing Jenny with stern disapproval, but still a fair distance away; Yvonne seemed to sense that this moment was a crisis in Juan's leadership he desired to resolve on his own. Juan had come up to the driver's side window; he stood there observing as she turned the key and stamped furiously on the gas a last time. “Excuse me,” she said to him coldly.

He stepped aside with what was almost great politeness, and she shoved the door open and got out again. At the back of the Bug she yanked open the deck lid and stared at the engine. Juan came and studied it also. One of the spark plug wires was missing. “I only took it on the long, long-shot chance you'd say no to our plan,” Juan remarked thoughtfully. “You can hot-wire a car, can't you, Jenny? Of course you can. You can do everything. I couldn't let you try jamming the works, once we'd let you in on it. But I really didn't think you'd say no. I'm surprised and I'll even admit that I'm kind of upset. It's not just that my plan'll work best with four people. We can do it with three: it's less elegant, sure, but we'll do it. I'm upset that you seem to have more sympathy for a store-owning pig than for the people we're trying to help. The People!
Your
People, Third World People—”

“When can I actually leave?” she interrupted impatiently. Juan's encouraging, comradely aura snapped off like a lamp.

“When you can't interfere with our plan.”

“And when's that?”

“When I say! I guess we'll finish the job and take off, and you'll walk into town. Find a bus stop or something.”

“I could walk to town now.”

“But I'd stop you,” Juan said. His tone was so simple it took her a moment to realize he was threatening her. He was wearing the gun in its holster. It was so much a part of him now that she sometimes forgot it was there. Her eyes fell to it and Juan smiled, seeing what she was seeing, and knowing what she had realized. “Just sleep on it, Jen,” he suggested.

“I don't need to,” she murmured.

“Who knows? Maybe you do. Because this—” and he gestured, at the shimmering maple above them, at the steep hill beyond, at the barn, and the woods, and the shriveled-up patch of the pond, and the summer, she realized. “This is over,” he said.

S
HE WAS SITTING
on the floor of her room going through William's letters when she heard the Bug's engine start up. She went to the window in time to see Juan and Yvonne drive away, both in sunglasses, smoking, their windows rolled down, Juan's left elbow protruding, Yvonne's right, as if they and the car comprised one entity that had always been self-sufficient.

She went back to the letters but couldn't stand to look at them. She had meant to find a way to compress them, but going page by page through the thick bundle she couldn't find anything to cull but the occasional white envelope with her old alias and old post office box printed on it in Dana's neat hand, and even these she could not throw away. Most of them she'd discarded long ago, and the few that remained seemed like rare artifacts and their absence would not have diminished the bulk anyway. She removed them, replaced them, retied the bundle and stared at the wall. She heard Pauline coming upstairs.

“Packing,” Pauline said when she reached the doorway. She said it as if she'd found Jenny slaughtering a chicken, or performing some other blood-curdling and difficult task.

“Just thinking about it. Don't worry, I'll pack soon enough.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” She didn't feel like arguing. She wound the leftover tail of twine around and around the letters. She'd been trying to imagine herself on a bus, her duffel on the rack above her, the accordion file on her lap, but she could only see it from the outside, like a scene from a movie. Her head dark and vague through the grit-coated window.