American Woman (34 page)

“No!” Pauline said wildly, holding fast to the door handle. For a moment Jenny thought she was going to go around to Pauline's side of the car and drag her kicking onto the pavement. Then she yanked the keys from the ignition and got out of the car. In the trunk were her duffel and accordion file. After a paralyzed second she pulled the books and tools and half her clothes out of the duffel and stuffed the accordion file inside; she left everything else. She thought by now Pauline might have locked the car doors, but Pauline was only gaping as if she'd gone mad.

“Then it's yours,” she said, throwing the keys in. “Good luck,” she added, and then she marched off with the huge duffel bag on her shoulder.

The duffel was still awkward and heavy and it would be at least five miles back to the bridge and over and then another few up-or downriver for a train, but once on the train she could go all the way. All the way north as far as the border. There must be some way to get into Canada. She would hike through the woods, then cross into Quebec. She wasn't so far from safety. She had stayed for too long with those people, had let them leach into her system as if they were water and she had been parched, and their troubles had somehow been hers and their pathway hers, too, but now all that wafted away. She had not, she reasoned, even been at the scene of the murder. She had been left in the switch car, but there was no one to say she had known what her purpose would be. Would a court believe Juan or Yvonne or Pauline? Her vision had cleared, a weight lifted . . . she hardly saw the road she was stumbling on. She was hardly aware that the morning was opening, really, that the sun wasn't a cool glow in silver fleece anymore but a hot white blaze square in her vision. She didn't have a free hand to wipe at her eyes and so she kept going, nearly jogging from angry adrenaline, everything smeared in her vision, but when the car came she didn't have to confirm it by sight. She knew what that car sounded like.

The car pulled alongside and Pauline leaped from it, nearly pitching them both in the gully. The duffel bag fell to the road. “
Wait!
” Pauline screamed, as if she were the one stumbling on foot while Jenny drove away. “
Wait
. . .” she cried. “
Wait
. . .” Pauline sank down onto the duffel. Between her hoarse sobs Jenny heard insects droning, and birdsong. Otherwise the hot morning was silent. Jenny's eyes seemed to parch and now she really did see, east for miles down the flat empty road toward the bridge and the river. At her touch Pauline flinched away sharply. But Pauline had vanished in terrible wails, and when Jenny dared touch her again she gave way heedlessly, the way sleepwalkers give way to guidance without waking up.

I
N A MOTEL
outside Kingston she bleached Pauline's hair blond, watching the old beet-red dye job and even the new growth of natural brown slowly give up their tints and turn orange, and then yellow, and then a pale yellow closer to white. Although she'd worn the thin gloves that had come in the box, her fingertips still itched and stung. Her eyes were still weeping from fumes. Pauline had twitched slightly with pain as the bleach began burning her scalp, and now her scalp was erupting with blisters. Pauline was bent over in the chair they'd brought into the bathroom, a dry towel around her thin shoulders and a damp towel pressed to her face. Jenny looked down at the bowed head, transforming again; then looked up at herself. The same self, though the longer she looked the less sure that she was. Pauline raised her head, dropping the towel, and their eyes briefly met in the mirror. Pauline's were swollen and red, from her earlier tears, or the fumes, or the pain, or all three.

“We can wash it out now,” Jenny said.

Afterward Pauline sat on the bed, her feet pushed in the sheets, her hands idly turning the comb. Her hair was yellow as straw and as squeaky and dry as a doll's. They'd given up trying to get the comb through it. Jenny sat at the cigarette-burn-covered table. The table was almost a Rosetta stone of cigarette burns, though the only thing on it was a thick-sided ashtray. The bright daytime sun was blocked out by the room's musty curtains, but the curtains were thin, and enough light leaked through to make dusk in the room. The lamps were all off. She knew it was irrational to feel safer like this, in the gloom. But she did, and she knew that Pauline did, and perhaps they both also felt shielded somewhat from each other.

After a while Pauline said, “Did Juan ever explain ego reconstruction to you? It's a game, but a serious game. It's a trust exercise.

“I can't even guess what that means. It builds trust? It can only be played with the people you trust?”

“It builds trust.”

“Sounds useful in our situation.” She knew her voice was sarcastic.

Pauline looked away, fiddling the comb. “I'll tell you the rules. If it's only two people, we each time the other. When I tell you to go, you say just what you're thinking of me, without stopping yourself, like you're lifting the lid on your mind. When a minute is up I say stop.”

Jenny lit herself a cigarette; she pushed the ashtray aside and set the cigarette down on the table. A mark started to form underneath the hot ash. “A whole minute?” she said. “A minute can last a long time.”

“We could each say the one thing that comes to our mind, when the other calls time. So instead of one minute, one thing.”

She could see that Pauline had a thing that she wanted to say; the game was only a shield, like the dusk in the room. “All right,” Jenny said. “I'll go first.”

“So you get it?”

“There's not much to get.”

“Then you're ready.”

“I'm ready.”

Pauline took a breath and said, “Time.” Jenny thought that she saw Pauline wince.

“I wish you'd say anything to me, as long as it's true.”

Pauline hesitated. “Is that all?” she said.

“Yes, it is. Okay,
time
,” Jenny said.

I
N THE BEGINNING
, Pauline said—not the very beginning, but after she'd been with the cadre a while—the leader raised the question of whether or not they should ask her to join, and asked all the members to vote. The cadre then numbered eleven, including the leader, and Pauline knew there was already talk of how good it would be to have twelve. Twelve could be nicely divided into four groups of three. It was better for combat. Its symmetry seemed powerful. Including the leader nine voted Yes for her, but two—Juan and Yvonne—voted No.

It wasn't as if making Pauline a comrade didn't represent a huge leap of faith. It had been difficult enough to win their trust to the extent that she had—to persuade them to trust her to see all their faces, so they'd take off her blindfold; then to trust her to go to the toilet and take baths alone; then to move around freely, so her atrophied muscles could heal; and finally to sit in on meetings and offer advice, because the month-old ransom talks with her parents were rapidly crumbling. All that trust had been gained only slowly and with great difficulty, and it was nothing compared to the trust she would need to be made a comrade. But Juan and Yvonne were their own unique problem, and their “no” vote was more complicated. Although they'd renounced their marriage vows as bourgeois, within the cadre they still showed a bond that would frequently cause them to clash with the others. Monogamy was disallowed in the cadre, but only Juan and Yvonne constantly pursued sex with their comrades, as if trying to prove something; and when one of them did sleep with someone, inevitably there were terrible fights. They voted with each other no matter the subject; they teamed with each other unless forced apart. They shared secrets; they gave off a conspiring air. Their loyalty to each other clearly trumped their loyalty to their comrades and even their leader, and although they denied this, the way that they did—standing shoulder to shoulder and seeming to yell with one voice—undermined what they said. They had been Pauline's most scornful captors and had fought every privilege she'd won, but they were themselves constantly on probation. Though the leader had said that Pauline needed everyone's vote, in the end Juan and Yvonne were overruled, and Pauline was admitted.

She had hoped this would make it all easier for her, but instead things got worse. It had been her captivity that had left her so weak, but Juan and Yvonne still complained that she couldn't keep up. They nicknamed her Princess, and Publicity Princess, and they ridiculed the way that she talked. In a more serious vein, they raised the subject of whether, if the cadre were ambushed by pigs, she would fight to the death or surrender in terror; or if God forbid they were taken alive, she would probably rat them all out just to save her own skin. But meanwhile, they were making the tape on which Pauline declared, “I will stay with these comrades forever, because theirs is the only just battle there is.” The tape had gone off like a bomb—the whole world had noticed. Graffiti on the streets, full-text reprints in major newspapers, establishmentarian shock. If the cadre had begun to look like a hapless and self-absorbed group of young people who had badly misplayed their first hand, and who had somehow wound up with less sympathy—even from the far Left—than the pigs they'd declared battle on, with the tape all that suddenly changed. Though Juan and Yvonne couldn't stand it, Pauline was their Sister, the ultimate prize.

After they'd robbed the bank, and then fled to Los Angeles, the long-deferred plan to divide the cadre into four groups of three—combat cells, that could act on their own or in concert with others—was finally implemented. Juan and Yvonne and Pauline learned that they'd be a cell. Pauline wanted to cry, but there was no private place where she could. Juan and Yvonne wouldn't even look at her. They argued with the leader as if she were not in the room, but he wouldn't be moved. The discord the three of them caused was a danger to everyone, and so the cell was a punishment for them, as well as a test.

Their first operation together was a basic supply run. A freak cold front had come in off the ocean, and several of their number had caught colds and wanted aspirin, and long-sleeved shirts, and socks. And the cadre had decided that they needed to be ready to leave the city, perhaps take to the woods, to a campground, and so the operation would also involve pricing camping equipment. Juan was given a couple hundred dollars in funds, in case the equipment seemed like a good buy. The house they had rented was in a run-down, mostly Black neighborhood, and the van they had bought and parked out at the curb looked like junk. So they were surprised, emerging gingerly from the house and moving quickly to the van, that they'd gotten a ticket. Juan snatched the ticket off the windshield, crumpled it up, and made to throw it onto the ground. “Don't,” Yvonne said. He threw it onto the dashboard.

Juan drove carefully, Yvonne in the passenger seat, Pauline sitting in back, on the floor. All three of them were wearing “straight” clothes: Juan wore a button-up shirt and beige jacket and slacks and loafers, and his beard and moustache had been trimmed. His handgun was tucked in his waistband, concealed by the jacket. Yvonne wore a peasant blouse with pretty stitching at the neck, a full skirt, a small revolver in the pocket of her skirt. Pauline wore culottes and a sleeveless blouse with a Peter Pan collar, cat's-eye glasses, her thin brown hair, not yet cut and dyed, pulled into a braid. Her converted .30-caliber carbine lay on a doubled-up blanket in the back of the van, alongside a Browning semiautomatic rifle, a Colt .45 pistol, and a sawed-off 12-gauge Ithaca shotgun. If someone approached the van, Pauline would flip the end of the blanket over the weapons, to conceal them. If someone continued to approach the van, perhaps the weapons would be used. Juan and Yvonne wore sunglasses, which did not look strange; it was a bright L.A. day, flat blue sky overhead, although cool. A larger arsenal was stored out of sight in a duffel bag, should they, while out on their mission, be somehow cut off from their comrades and left on their own for a long interval. It was all precaution, but it was also a series of actions drummed into the body, a dance, rehearsed numerous times. If the music began this whole dance would unfold without effort. So far, this hadn't happened, but Pauline could envision it somehow, like tennis, like driving a car. Movement unspooling, instinctively. She'd been training a lot, though indoors, and with unloaded weapons, and always aware, though she tried not to be, that sooner or later a voice would say “ambush!” In life such surprises were real.

Juan stopped at a drugstore for the aspirin while Yvonne sat in the driver's seat with the engine running, and Pauline remained in back on the floor. Juan had already bought that day's
Los Angeles Times
and Pauline was reading. There was a bulletin about themselves in the A section. Also a long article on the candidates in an upcoming local election, and their efforts to court the Black vote. Juan came back and resumed the driver's seat and they tooled around for a while in search of a sporting-goods store where they could buy the sweatshirts and socks and maybe the camping equipment. The van swayed back and forth around curves, its floor rattled and jumped. She kept reading. The Vietnam War was over, but it would never be over. So long as . . . “Hey,” Juan said. The van had stopped, though the engine still ran, humming and grumbling to itself. “Look alive, Sister. Yvonne's coming in with me to check out the equipment. Wait here.”

“Okay,” Pauline said. They were both being decent to her, and she felt gratified. But when they had gone she felt suddenly dizzy. She put the newspaper down and was struck by the sight of her hand. It wasn't visibly trembling, except for what the trembling of the van conveyed to it, but looking at it a wave of alarm passed through her. She broke out in a sweat. Crawling carefully to the front of the van, into the light shining down through the windshield, she peered out the driver's-side window. PACIFIC SPORTS—YOUR OUTDOOR STORE (
SURFING-JOGGING-BIKING-HIKING-HUNTING-FISHING-CAMPING-SKIING . . . SKATEBOARDS
). She had not remembered to look at her watch when Juan and Yvonne went inside. It was good to know how long things took, she was supposed to make this a habit. She knelt between the two bucket seats. Just a moment ago the back of the van had felt comforting to her, but now she was cringing from it. She rested her head on her arms, on the driver's seat, keeping out of the window but feeling its breeze. She wasn't thinking of anything that she could remember later, and that was the strange part—that her mind, so agitated for so long, was at that moment still.