Going Down Fast (44 page)

She did not know what six months could hold. Vera haunted the corner of his eye by flashes: barefoot in pants and loose olive sweater. He felt removed from Sam and patient.

A goldbrown shirt brought out the blood in her cheeks. “Now you've let her move in with some guy and then you complain you can't reach her. All this static. I can't figure you both out. Are you looking for an excuse to give up?”

“Not hardly. But you don't patch up with someone by twisting her arm.”

“I don't see why not.” Sam looked with private meaning at Gino slumped against the wall. “If you do it nicely.”

“You want her to come to you.” Gino squinted up through the bottom of a popbottle. “Why should she? She has a scene going.”

“But she always does have.” In which she was just like him.

“Because she's open.” Gino scratched his crotch. “If you want to get to her you'll have to risk being open yourself.”

“All this good advice. Like the phony whipcream that squirts from a can.” Ten minutes with Anna and the kid was lecturing. Anna always turned gangly kids on. Sweet the kid would say if that word wasn't excised from his jargon: sweet, uh? also salty, spicy and bitter in layers the kid would never taste.

But what he minded the most was what he had come to think during the weekend, watching Sam and Gino and the friend who had come with them and slept too on his floor at ease, grubby from traveling and unsurprised and cheerful together. A few days before they had been busted at a demonstration at an induction center and they were full of comparative anecdotes about demonstrations and beatings and jails. That morning their friend had left on his way to the Coast. Sam and Gino would be catching a ride back in a few hours, hoping to arrive for their morning class.

He could no longer dismiss Gino as the son of a chemical engineer, though he found Gino still glib and fuzzy and product of Midland, still infuriatingly righteous and callow. He had watched them and saw that Sam was more theirs than his. They shared phrases and buttons and jokes, they sang scraps of rock and owned the same few books—which he had sometimes read but not in the same way. They shared more than a bed, more than a language and friends and style, though the style was important to them in ways he thought silly. They were at once open and closed, mistrustful of anyone who could not share their cool, easy style. They had political instincts different from his own, and perhaps more natural to them than his had ever been.

The kids were more and less isolated than he was. They had a total mistrust of the whole shebang that startled him. Where his generation had taken honors and bitched at the system, they dropped out. How will you make it? Oh, they said, by hustling. They turned seacold eyes on the establishments right, left, liberal, philanthropic, academic. There was scarcely a man with power or place they did not consider an enemy, yet they spent little time in the ritual cursing he remembered as the main social form of politics at their age. They struck him as naive because they thought meeting in their dingy storefronts and cranking out their mimeograph machines they could change the world: but already they had changed each other. They had a sense of identity and community he had had only in his music. They felt part of something, not in the disciplined but rigidly insistent way he had known with American Communists. Thrown down in random flat cities they found each other, in Fort Wayne and Davenport, in Tangiers and Guatemala City. They invested much hope in small countries whose geography was blank to him. They made him turn and examine his youth as a piece of history. They could say “the revolution” without giggling, without quotes, without a sense of absurdity. Harlan and he had called themselves radicals, but if they had referred to “the revolution” the quotes hung in the air and their tone was heavy heavy irony, self-deprecation and shame.

They struck him as good. Nothing would be given them but each other. They made him feel fat and sluggish. They made him feel that the pleasure he took in his work had drained something from his life that he must get back. He felt bought off. He had been allowed to do his thing and paid for it and sat on the shitheap studying blues archives, witnesses of past troubles. He would not be sorry to have them gone, for he was not used to envying. He was afraid for them, for Sam's rosy face and soft body. A few nights in jail were an experience: five years ground anyone down. No one had charm after that. He had met civil rights workers with the shattered reflexes of mental patients. This fat violent country wanted pretty longhaired radical kids no more than lice in its armpits and would squash them one by one.

A little after three in the morning they left, bookbag and laundrybag and bag of sandwiches and fruit, gone, and he lay on his mattress with his head echoing and did not particularly like being alone.

He stopped by concession row after work for several days before he was convinced nobody was there. First he sat parked in the VW hoping to catch Anna coming in or out. Then he took to banging on the door. Finally he leaned his forehead on the plateglass and peered in. Mail was piled below the mail slot, and lying nearer to the door was a key. Everything looked clean and neat and cryptic. Were they out of town together? Leon's old Buick stood at the curb looking as if it would never move, yet he could not get rid of the notion she might have gone off with Leon.

All they would tell him at ISS was that Anna had quit at the end of December. He hated to ask Paul, but they had other business. On Friday he picked up the kid after a meeting and they ate Chinese.

Paul was letting his hair grow—mostly up—and he looked tall and wild. Paul would carry a load of ornament. At first he had prized Paul for what remained of Vera in his looks and most his way of speaking. The resemblance had hurt but hooked him. He had felt protective of the kid and full of an unnerving urge to touch him. That had passed. Paul was Paul and not Vera (or only a little).

“What are you doing on your show tonight?” Paul asked him over iron steaks. “That Jack Custis thing, that was strong. That had pepper in it.”

He winced. “Thought there'd be backlash. Cries of pain. But Cal, my boss, called me in to tell me how he loved it. It was too tough, too beautifully brutal, Cal said, the real nitty gritty, and why don't I do some more? … Jack's sister finally turned over the records she has and Psychedelic is bringing out an LP. I wrote the jacket copy.” He took out a check for fifty dollars. “So the guy says, get in something about black power, that's very now.” He endorsed the check and shoved it across. “I know you have FBM contacts. Pass it on.”

“You meant to build a fire and only made fireworks.” Paul put away the check, giving the waitress a cool eye. “I thought you were down on them.”

“They're sitting ducks. And I want everybody in one movement, everybody wanting to change the system, shake it, break it. But I have nothing to offer except that I don't know where to start. Harlan's fighting, anyhow.” He rubbed his chin. “What's old Leon doing these days?”

“You mean aside from busting up the shopping plaza?”

“That was
him?
But …” He shook his head. “Were you there?”

Paul looked embarrassed. “Don't see much of him. Anna called to say he was in the hospital.”

So where was she? Saturday morning he went by her old place on the off chance she might have left a forwarding address. Her mailbox was stuffed with eviction notices. The hall hadn't been swept in weeks and a drunk had left an empty tenth and a stink of piss in the entrance. Dark as the mines. Feeling silly he knocked. No answer of course. Notice pinned to her door that if she did not remove her things by Monday
A
.
M
., the city would.

He knocked pock-pock on an empty room. He was turning away when he smelled something. Funny sharp smell like scorched food. He sniffed at the crack. Yes, from inside. He banged harder. “Anna?” Put his ear to it. Heard something, maybe. “Anna? Open this goddamn door, I know you're in there.” Alternate visions of her roasting in bed and some bum burning the furniture to keep warm. Yet he was scared. He could see his breath as he yelled, “I'm going to bust it down, Annie.” Old private eye flicks. Bust his shoulder first. Instead he took out his jackknife and slid it between the rotten wood of the jamb and wall until it nudged aside the bolt. He pushed the door open and walked in.

Woman. Anna. Wrapped in an old black winter coat, three sweaters and a scarf, she squatted behind a hibachi from which smoke curled. To her left was a pile of index cards she was checking one at a time against a typed list. Her hands were bare and she warmed them at the small flame. Over her the ceiling was smudged. She was bundled into shapelessness. She looked Eskimo, the skin of her face tight, the cheekbones slashes, the eyes squinted against the smoke black and tough with scrutiny. Stubbornly she went on matching the index cards against the list and making an occasional correction.

“Hello there.” He got down on his hunkers. “Having fun?”

“Working. Remember me, I don't believe in fun.”

“What are you burning there, old mice?”

She showed her teeth briefly. “My past.”

“Glad you're finding it useful.” He looked into the hibachi. Scorched notes. Letter fragments. Brown and shiny scraps with small gray lacunae of photographic images. “Here I am again, keeping you warm in war as in peace.”

“You and half a dozen others. Heroes all.”

“Including Leon?”

“Leon is in the hospital,” she said in a flat monitory tone.

“So I hear.”

“Did you hear which one?” Her eyes hoped.

He shook his head.

“
The
hospital.” She snorted. “That's all I know.”

“You're squatting here?”

“I slept at the project office last night. It got spooky at Leon's. The phone made me jump. I felt I didn't belong there.”

“You don't.”

Deep in the burden of wool she shrugged. She was round as a potato. Indifferent as the stone goddess on the door. She crouched behind the smoking hibachi with her nose smudged and her hands black with carbon and inkspots and the plume of her breath dissolving before her. Hobo over a campfire in a jungle.

He looked and looked, stymied. She took more cards and checked them. Only the faintest curl of her lips indicated she knew he was there. Her body was veiled and padded. She corrected a card and reached for another. He grabbed her by the arms and tipped her over against him. Her lips were cool and tasted of smoke. Her eyes widened in surprise and she tried to speak against his mouth. It was so much like embracing a large bag of laundry he lost her mouth and began to laugh.

“Let go of me, Rowley. I have a right to choose what I want.”

“You moved out of Leon's. Here you are.”

She glared. The scarf came off and her hair, warm from it, flowed over his bracing arm. “Maybe I'll marry him. He needs someone to look out for him—”

“And you need someone to look out for? I'll buy you a blind goldfish.”

She shoved the heel of her hand into his chest. “Stop belittling him.”

“Only want one thing he's got.”

“Didn't want it when you had it.”

“Older. Wiser. Hungrier. Poor Leon will get out of the hospital with his knees dragging and find this big strapping woman wanting to screw him back in again.”

Her eyes snapped. She struck fullforce against his chest, trying to thrust free. She was too bundled up to exert pressure and he held on.

“Victorian Anna. How come you get mad like that?”

Her temper dwindled and she touched her tongue to her lip. “Suppose it's a matter of my repressive upbringing among what C. Wright Mills calls the lumpen-bourgeoisie—a name I find suggestive of the texture of my mother's kreplach. I remember asking my mother what rape meant, and she told me that was what men did to women.”

“And what do women do to men?”

“Your father told you that was marriage—no?” Her voice was urbane. “How is your father lately?”

“In the hospital again. I drove Sam home. Grim scene. They want him to have another operation.”

She was covertly trying to wriggle out of his grasp, all the while asking nice questions. “Will another operation help? Do they hold out any real help?”

“Going to stick a warm poultice named Annie to him and watch the old king go. Come here.”

“I am nobody's warm poultice,” she said and spat in his face. Her eyes were narrow. She would not budge.

“With Leon hanging on your tit?”

“Ah, you're so sure you're better than he is!”

“For you? You bet I am.”

“Ha. Well, turn it into a mysticism. Rave about it the way he does about Caroline.”

“Caroline?”

“Don't you feel funny thinking she's married to that prick and going to have your baby? Don't you feel anything?”

“Hell, yes. It's a bad joke. The kid should come and shoot me in twenty years, but he isn't reason enough to live with her.”

“And I don't have
any
reason to put up with you.” Even her hands were closed against him into fists.

“Indifferent.”

“Hard as that may be for you to believe.”

“It's some good instinct makes you provoke me, because otherwise I might just give up and go home.” He yanked on her and she came dragging against him with willful clumsiness, making herself bulky and inert and thumping like an old boot caught on a line. She hid in her layers of garments and turned her face into his jacket. He was left to bury his mouth in her hair.

He fumbled at her looking for flesh. Boots, thick texture hose, finally a stretch of thigh—under her coat and skirt and slip his hand found and closed on hot sleek skin. God she was warm. Almost burned his hand. “Annie, I want you.”

“On rye or whole wheat? And who will you have for dessert?” She spoke muffled into his chest, hiding her face.