Vida (43 page)

Actually, their mutual wickedness got its real kickoff when they were both fifteen and Ruby had a baby. At her age! Sharon, Natalie’s baby sister, was nuisance enough at ten, but Michael Morris Asch, called M and M by them, was too much to endure. To be expected to baby-sit for a screaming baby, to have their house turned into a large playpen and that little monster spoiled silly sent them into revolt. They cemented their own lifelong conspiracy as they fought their wars of independence side by side.

Sandy was a good-hearted liberal Democrat, against machine politics, for civil rights, devoted to Adlai Stevenson. At age sixteen, studious Natalie had already moved to his left, where Vida followed her. They collected clothes and canned food door to door for the voter-registration drive in Mississippi, where sharecroppers were being starved into submission. Mounds of bagged clothing took over the entry hall of their house. They were nonviolent but militant, and their heroes had been beaten, jailed and maimed in Alabama and Mississippi. They went to rallies with the air of prayer meetings where men on crutches and women with arms in casts told of events on that battlefield and planned local wade-ins, swim-ins, to desegregate parks, pools and beaches in Chicago. They picketed Woolworth’s on Saturday mornings. That was their rebellion against Sandy and Ruby, who kept asking, But what are you doing outside Woolworth’s in the rain? They marched, Vida flirted and Natalie argued with the boys in the picket line and they began to live in a wide world, they began to live in history.

I can’t make a romantic folly out of Joel, she said to herself, staring at the road, the walls of darkness to each side slipping under the car. This is my life, what I have made of it. I can’t give it up for anyone. My integrity is to go on.

Joel moaned in his sleep. His snoring stopped as he drifted up from true sleep into dreaming. His fingers convulsed in his lap. Once his whole body shuddered. Headlights behind her maintained a distance but were persistent. The same car had been behind her for close to twenty minutes. She slowed down more and more and put on her turn signal, waiting. The car hung back for a while. Then it speeded up and passed her. She remained at her slow pace until it had gone far ahead. Okay.

Why wasn’t she angry at Joel for trying to deflect her? For trying to get her to settle for survival? When he suggested flouting the will of the collective, she was angered because scared. What had they but their frail organization, thrust from a common history and built if at times jerry-built of a common politics? However, when he suggested the two of them chose going to ground together, she was flattered. It was a temptation to be resisted, but one whose very existence she appreciated. After all, Leigh had never suggested he give up his job, sneak out of New York and meet her in Dubuque, Iowa, to set up a new life together … He hadn’t, had he? Well, he had his political duties too. He was more serious than Joel, less serious about her, perhaps. She could not help being struck by that observation and wounded by it. Perhaps Leigh had never thought of the possibility. Either people imagined the fugitive life as romantic—robbing banks, meeting with vanished celebrities, escaping ahead of the posse with a pistol in your teeth; or they imagined that you must be hidden in a room literally underground (like Laura’s Newton cellar), confined to a safe cell or spirited out of the country. Few people could imagine the limited options that existed, but the fact remained that there were always options and daily problems of something to eat, something to wear, someplace to sleep, somebody to talk to, somebody to sleep with, work to do and rest to seize.

But Leigh had lived with her in Philadelphia, going back and forth each week. It had been as it was when they were first together: he had the interesting life, she worked as a secretary and he brought news of the world to her. His being in what he called Filth-a-delia was a mixture of sacrifice and retreat. If he had wanted to be with her again, why had he never brought it up, at least as a daydream?

With a muffled grunt Joel sat up. “My back hurts, “ he grumbled.

“Let’s stop at the next coffee shop that’s open. We can stretch our legs, one at a time to keep the car running.”

“Where are we?”

“Just passing our old hometown. Erie, Pennsylvania. I have some bad news to report: you’ve been fired from your siding business. Absenteeism”

“Good. Now I’m an ex-siding man for sure . . “ He yawned. “Want me to drive?”

“After we stop. Watch for a place: Something has to be open”

“Oh, for a bed. A nice big bed with clean sheets and some blankets. We’d hold each other and cuddle. In the morning we’d make love”

“To be with you makes me glad. Do you know that?”

“Why not? Am I not the greatest lover in Erie, Pennsylvania? And all points east and west and in between? At least, that’s the line you hand me. I’m beginning to believe it. All these houses of sleeping women, women lying awake beside fat and snoring husbands, they don’t know what they’re missing as we go by.”

“You were snoring a while ago yourself … “

“Hey, watch it. What’s wrong?” he shouted.

“I don’t know.” She gripped the steering wheel tightly, bringing the car slowly over to the side of the road. “It’s a tire. We got a flat”

They did. The right front tire was utterly flat. She had pulled off onto the gravel shoulder, where ice stood in the ruts.

“Damn bolts seemed to be rusted on,” Joel said, trying to turn them.

“I thought the tires were supposed to be new?”

“Pretty new. Probably picked up a nail.” She looked at the worn tread and hoped they did not encounter weather of the kind that had hit them when they’d had Tara. With a yell he finally got the bolt loosened.

After the tire was changed, his hands were too cold to drive. On they went toward Ohio, the waxing moon bright on the ice-glazed snow, the pale ribbons of highway. She felt as if she could drive forever under the moon. Fatigue was burning in her veins like Benzedrine. They were two ghosts in a private afterlife driving on. Her eyes felt full of ashes.

You are my sunshine

My only sunshine

they both belted at the top of their lungs. Joel had a fine deep singing voice, much deeper than his speaking voice. She sang in a wobbly contralto that sometimes came upon the melody and draped itself there in relief and sometimes wandered away lost, but remembering, always remembering the words. She was always the one who sang the words to the third stanza when everybody else gave out after one and a half. What a waste of brain cells.

As I walked out on the streets of Laredo

As I walked out In Laredo one day,

they warbled, more or less together. Coffee soon, by the light of the brillig moon.

Una mañana del sol radiante

Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,

Una mañana del sol radiante

Saldré a buscar al opresor.

He didn’t know the words to that or the other Spanish-language songs. “How come you know them?”

“Because of Lohania. She coached me in Spanish. We planned to go to Cuba together on a Venceremos Brigade in the spring, the next spring.” She rubbed her nose which had begun to itch. “She didn’t get to go either. I was under, she was waiting to go on trial … Lohania wanted to go to Cuba so bad, but she was scared silly they wouldn’t let her in because of her parents. We were still waiting to hear when the ceiling fell in.”

“But she’s out now? Do you want to go see her sometime?”

“She started using drugs inside, and I don’t know if she ever got clean. With a drug bust hanging over her, she’s too vulnerable. That’s how they recruited Randy. They sure got their money’s worth. He had real talent. And they expunged his record, too.”

“You talk about him awful cheerfully”‘

“We shouldn’t have let him penetrate us. We were too stupid and too naive. God, how he hated us! Except for Lohania. He got her a deal, I think. He wanted her.”

“Did he get her?”

She bit her lip. “I hope not.” The past was pressing too hard. “Look at the moonlight on the fields. Isn’t it beautiful? Maybe nobody loves this country as much as fugitives running before the wind, back and forth across it.” Moonlight on ice. Kevin was driving the stolen car, she was riding shotgun, Jimmy called out instructions from the back seat. That was the first year; they had no rules for survival. They drove across Pennsylvania to the town, the street, the house. Ice in the driveway. Jimmy fell. Then a flashlight caught them in its beam and they halted, feeling the bullets they anticipated. “A fucking trap!” Kevin grunted, and Kiley’s cool voice came out of the dark: “Well, it might have been, with you lunkheads barging in without even scouting. Really!” On the moonlit ice they had met and embraced; Vida had wept tears of joy. No more alone. Lark’s frail body in her arms, the chiseled miniature features of Kiley. Roger, tall and shuffling, carrying a rifle was the only stranger to Vida, though she knew him by reputation from his work in the antiwar movement in Seattle. Jimmy like Vida, knew Lark from New York SAW and Kiley from Boston SAW, but Kevin knew only Lark. They had founded the Network that night. Joel could not understand her loyalty to the structure that had kept her from utter despair and given her an organization. She said to him, “Nobody knows this country like those who hide in its folds and crevices. Our land. Our country. That’s what the screeching paper won’t say.”

Joel grimaced. “Sure. Let’s have a parade. First float, man branding a runaway slave. Second float, soldier bayoneting an Indian baby. Third float, Pinkerton shooting a striker. Fourth float, flyboy dropping napalm on pregnant woman.”

She tapped his knee. “There’s something in what you say, Mr. Bones. But it also produced us. This country is a long war. It’s our history too. Tecumseh and Mother Jones and Ida Tarbell. You must love who you are to love anybody else and to make good politics. Natalie always understood that. It took me a long time to see it.”

“You take yourself so seriously. How come you love
me?”

“Just bad karma, I guess. Want to sing old Beatles songs?”

“Doo doo doo” He thumped on the dash, “All you need is love, right? You guys didn’t dawdle in that stage long. When I started hanging around the Movement, all the guys had tossed out their love beads. They were wearing buffalo plaid shirts and carrying long knives. They had hair down to their belly buttons, they were all seven feet tall, they were always talking guns. ‘Nah, that Marlin 62 Levermatic is a piece of crap. Lousy four-shot clip’ Always saying, ‘Let’s go heist the Bank of America’ Wow, I thought they were gods walking. They pissed all over me. Treated me like a little boy. Till they found out I’m a mechanic. Listen, in the Movement if you can screw in a light bulb, that makes you a genius. If you know how to jump a car, you’re on your way. All of a sudden they accepted me. My feet didn’t touch the ground. If DePeuw—he was the honcho of our scurvy crowd—had told me to go spit in some cop’s face, I would have marched out and done it. Know what brought me into the Movement? Sex. Obviously the guys there were getting more. Those people were
havingfun”
He laughed. “Can you imagine anybody thinking that about little Marxist-Leninist study groups now with their paper
The Worker’s Crutch?”

“Like that Crumb character saying, Remember, boys and girls, keep a smile on our lips and a song in your heart when you go out to smash the state … But we’ve been having a pretty good time, love.”

“I didn’t know you’d been lovers with Larkin.”

“Oh, not really” So he had overheard her talking to Lark on the fire road; he had eavesdropped.

“What does that mean, he never put it in?”

“Come on! I mean we were never that serious as lovers. We just slept together a few times.”

“So if you don’t care about him, why did you sleep with him? Were you that hard up?”

“We were working together—”

“God keep you from ever working with a German shepherd”

“Joel, stop it! It was years ago.”

“When was the last time you slept with him?”

“How would I remember?” She remembered perfectly. It was just before she had gone back to California after last year’s Board meeting. On the anniversary of Attica, she and Lark had been delegated to carry out a memorial reprisal, planting a bomb in the Department of Corrections office in Albany. Knock out some records. The fewer records the state had, the better for everybody. They had spent two weeks together, living as husband and wife in a rented trailer. Strangely cozy, like a ship.

“Oh, there’s so many men you fuck now and then you just can’t keep them all straight, right?”

“You used to have a relationship with Kiley. I’m just comrades and friends with Lark. Why bring this up now?”

“I saw how you looked at him. Touching his face. Hugging him.”

“I saw how you looked at Kiley. So what? I know you loved her, and maybe you still do.”

“She’s as lovable as a pickax. I don’t know what I ever saw in her. Just a way to get hurt. The way you’ll hurt me too.”

“What is all this?” She had to pass a truck, straddling in to the oncoming lane. Her palms were sweating. “What are you suddenly upset about?”