The Company You Keep (40 page)

“Well, maybe they are.” Jed’s voice was gentle now. “And maybe some of that’s just show. And maybe optimism is not just a personality trait, but something you earn. They have plenty to be proud of, you know. The best work of their lives been since 1980, not before. That’s true for nearly every one of us.”

“But how do you live with it? How do you live with the past like that? Aren’t you just too ashamed?”

“Little J. Don’t get carried away. Do you know, when I lecture about SDS, once or twice a year, they have to give me Rackham Auditorium? When I get people in to speak about the Mobilization, sometimes we have to get a chemistry lecture hall—one of the big premed amphitheaters with closed-circuit TV for the overflow? Okay, proud, I don’t know. But not ashamed either. Not when you see the number of people who respond to us. Not when you see the number of kids who want to hear us talk—I mean young kids, J, freshmen, sophomores, kids who were born in the late seventies.”

I was watching him, now, my mouth slightly open. “So? What’s it mean?”

“It means two things, Jasey.” Jed looked away, licking his lips, and for a moment I saw what he must look like when he lectures, saying something he’s thought out to the last degree of clarity. “Firstly, there is a thirst in this country for a meaningful political involvement. These kids, they are…impoverished. They long for a way to engage the system. That’s one.”

Now he thought again, and this time he spoke more slowly. “And it means that no matter how wrong we may have been, the government was equally wrong to mass all the force of its law and its police against the antiwar movement. After all, they killed us. We never killed them. At least, Weather didn’t. And that, in turn, means that no thinking person can ever remember how wrong we were without also remembering that the government, with all its power, was even more wrong.”

Jeddy was quiet now, eyes absent. Then he focused again, as if just
having reached a conclusion in an internal argument, and nodded. “No more, no less. Don’t you forget it, J. We may have fucked everything in the world up, but not as bad as they did.”

And it was only then, after that long afternoon drinking, and in that same quiet, scholarly voice, that Jed Lewis asked me:

“So why do you want to find Mimi?”

I didn’t answer immediately. And then, in fact, I didn’t answer at all. I just shook my head and looked at the table. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Okay. Then why me? What makes you think I can help?”

Still looking down. “I don’t. I think you can find the guy who contacted you on behalf of the Brotherhood to give us money to go get Dr. Leary out of jail in San Luis Obispo.”

“I see.” Jed was staring at me now. “And how would that help?”

“Because after B of M you gave his name to Mimi, by way of Donal James. In a sealed envelope.”

Jed considered that. “I guess you won’t tell me how you know that, will you?”

“No.”

“I see. And why, Jase? Why would I help you now, after all these years?”

Patiently, as if explaining a self-evident fact to a child, I told him: “See, Mimi’s the only person who can get me my daughter back.”

Night. On Miller Road two little lanes of tarmac cut through fields of midsummer corn, chest high. The headlights of the rental car were out of balance and cast an odd oblong of light off the side of the road. I drove with my left elbow up on the open window, my head, resting on my knuckles, pounding from my afternoon of drinking with your father. Driving back to town.

I’ve tried hard to remember what I was thinking about, that ride home. I distinctly remember stopping for coffee and aspirins at a gas station, parking my car, and finding myself, minutes later, standing under a buzzing streetlamp, staring at the oil-stained tarmac, lost in thought.

It had been a long time since I’d last stood thus in such a place, a country gas station, at night.

It had been a long time since I had last spent an afternoon drinking with a friend.

It had been a long time since I’d last thought so long about a decision.

I like to think I was worrying about your father. What your father was up to. How he thought Mimi could get his daughter back for him. I like to think I was feeling how desperate your father must be, a man his age, on the run, losing everything. Or that I was wishing that things had turned out differently.

I tell myself I was, as will happen as forty draws into the distant past and sixty into the immediate future, musing on the simple materiality of time, the quarter century of it that had passed since last I’d sat in the bar in Dexter. Perhaps I was simply letting it wash through me, through and through me, the feel of that time.

But I suppose I have to admit, to you, that the process that went on in my mind during that drive home, that drunken drive during which I had to bite my lip and shake my head to keep myself focused on the road, was just fear, and not for your father, but for myself. I was afraid of what your father had asked me to do, far more afraid than I had been of going to Dexter. Dexter, that had been dangerous, but it was a journey through space. What was ahead of me now, it was a journey through time. Back to the time before I was what I had become. Back to a time when all that I was, and so depended on being, now were things for which I had come to feel a deeply private, heartfelt contempt.

And yet I got back to town and went about the tasks ahead of me without any hesitation, as if I had planned them all out before, which should say something in my defense. I remember, without another thought, parking by Angell Hall and going in to my computer, where, despite the fact that the screen was shimmering in front of my eyes, I successfully retrieved a telephone number of a man I hadn’t spoken to in twenty years—I’m not going to tell you how. And I remember coming out again into the summer night and realizing that I was far too drunk to drive. For a time I sat on the stairs of Angell Hall, searching for the energy to walk to a public telephone. Nor, I must tell you, did that take long. It just took a single vivid memory of Jason Sinai, talking to me, to make a little puff of adrenaline bloom in my stomach, and I was up and walking again, fairly steadily, downtown.

Later—much later, when Rebeccah and Ben and I reconstructed that night—the kids didn’t believe it was pure coincidence that I decided to make my call from the public phone at the Del. It was sentimental, I admit that. And it was stupid—I didn’t need to be drinking anymore. Call me sentimental and stupid, but the fact is, after midnight I walked into the virtually empty Del Rio and sat down at the bar, a few empty seats away, as it turned out, from my student Rebeccah Osborne
and a young man sitting next to her who would soon be introduced to me as Benjamin Schulberg.

According to Ben—I don’t remember it myself, which I think you’ll find understandable by the time I get to the end of my part in this story—there was something distinctly odd in the way the bartender approached me. It seems that in the two or three nights in a row that Rebeccah and Ben had met at the Del, even Rebeccah had come to share Ben’s conviction that the bartender didn’t much like him. Now, as they watched her approach me, both of them felt strongly that something even stranger was going on. She served me a beer and a shot of bourbon without a word, shook her head emphatically when I asked her if she could give me a few dollars in quarters, then returned to the far end of the bar and showed me her back. That was when I turned to find Rebeccah and Ben staring at me with interest.

“Hi, Dr. Lewis. How are you?” This was Rebeccah speaking.

“Rebeccah.” It took me a moment to place her, in this context, looking like a woman—she was wearing lipstick and drinking a martini—rather than a girl, as I usually saw her, in jeans and carrying a book bag. “How are you?”

“Fine. Uh, Dr. Lewis, are you okay?”

I wasn’t sure if she was referring to my inebriation, which turned out to be more evident than I thought, or the baffling encounter I’d just had with the bartender. In the end, I decided to assume the latter. “Well, kind of. I needed some quarters for the telephone. The request would appear to have offended the bartender.”

“Well, Cleo’s a little touchy, I guess. Let me run over to the Diner and get you some. How many?”

I asked her for twenty dollars’ worth, which, if it surprised her, she didn’t show. Rebeccah left the bar after introducing me to Ben, ran across the street to the restaurant, while Ben and I made small talk. When Rebeccah returned, I took the roll of quarters she’d brought and made my way to the pay phone.

As to the conversation that occurred, I guess Mimi has already told you the name of the person I was calling. His telephone rang, some two
thousand miles away on the coast of California. And when I introduced myself by the name of Duane Compton, a name Mac McLeod had not heard in twenty-six years since handing me ten thousand dollars for the rescue from San Luis Obispo of Timothy Leary, there was a pause.

“Wow, Mr. Compton. Nice to hear from you, man.”

I laughed. “I doubt it. Would you like to call me back?”

“No need, no need. What can I do for you?”

Now there was a silence. Then I laughed again, but this time nervously. “Well, how sure are you about this telephone line?”

“Very sure.”

“Okay.” I felt reluctant, but Mac should know. “Um, look. A guy I used to know has got it in mind to find an old girlfriend. He thinks that this girlfriend, I might have pointed her in your direction in ’74. And that you might have stayed in touch with her since then.”

“I see.” He answered readily, unsurprised, which surprised me. “And what if she doesn’t want to be in touch with him?”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you. I mean, I’m thoroughly convinced that my friend will not, um, importune her, you know? I mean, I was pretty skeptical myself. Didn’t want to get involved, and all. And to be honest, there’s no love lost between me and this guy, so if I believe him, he can be believed. You know? But I spent the afternoon with him, and I really put him through his paces, and…Look. There’s a lot at stake for him. He just wants to talk. I trust him. I don’t like him, but I trust him. And I think that my friend and his ex-girlfriend need to trust each other right now.”

A pause, and across the country, I could feel McLeod calculating. Then: “I don’t buy it. There’s nothing for them to trust each other about. They all face the same decision, same problem. I don’t see that they can help each other.”

“That’s not actually the question, helping each other. My friend has a child.”

“Ah.” This was a point that evidently struck home. Mac answered slowly. “And how does that change matters?”

“It may not change them at all, who knows? But, well, my friend thinks that his ex-girlfriend can help with the child. And I thought, if
there’s a kid at stake, that would make it up to her to decide, don’t you think?”

“Maybe.” He conceded the point. Then, suddenly focused, he sounded more familiar. “Can I reach you at this number?”

“When?”

“Within the hour.”

“Okay. I’ll wait.”

In the Del I hung up and, tiredly, stepped back to the bar. Watching the strangely hostile bartender, I picked up my beer and was going to settle in for the wait when I remembered Rebeccah Osborne and her boyfriend, both of whom were staring at me with that kind of curious hopefulness students display when you meet them socially. Reluctantly, I moved down the bar to them and asked the unfriendly bartender for a round of drinks.

But before the round arrived, the telephone rang behind the bar and she answered it, then turned her back altogether and bent over to listen, leaving us without drinks. Nor was it a quick call, and after the bartender ignoring us some more, I said, “Listen. I’ve got to wait for a call on the pay phone. I’m going to move to that table there.”

They nodded politely, clearly showing the disappointment on their faces, and I hesitated. Then I found myself talking again. “So, if you’re up to it, why not join me? Seeing the bartender won’t serve us, let’s get the waiter to bring us some drinks over at the table.”

And so spontaneous, so untroubled, was their pleasure at the suggestion that out of all the bullshit of this day, I remembered why I had started teaching in the first place and began to feel, as we made our way over to the little table by the telephone, that perhaps things were going to go back to normal; that everything was going to be the way it was before Little J e-mailed me, after all.

When I left Jed, I went back to my motel, the single motel left in Dexter—a five-story brick rooming house on the main drag, offering day and night rates.

I took no care for security. As far as I was concerned, the entire town of Dexter could know that two middle-aged men had gone on a bender at the single bar in town—wasn’t the first time, won’t be the last.

But no one asked me anything, looked at me, worried me: this was central Michigan, and here the right to privacy was worth, if not fighting for, at least shaving your head and getting a swastika tattooed on your chest for. Once inside, I meant to sleep off the five, six drinks and couple of joints Jed and I had consumed. Instead I found myself, after a short time lying on the bed in the dark, going back out and across the street to the liquor store to get a pint of bourbon. Then I lay down again, but instead of sleeping, sipped from the mouth of the bottle and went back through the conversation I had just had with my old brother in arms.