“I’m here to keep you from doing it. You can’t keep on with this, Bridge. It’s –”
“What?” Bridget asked. “Wrong?”
“It is wrong,” Jane said.
“And two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bridget mocked, and Jane was stung. It was one of the few things she’d told Bridget about her mother: something she used to say when Jane and Bobby were little and fought with one another, something she found herself saying to the children in her class sometimes. But it was true, after all, wasn’t it? Like so many sappy, annoying things people said to make a point. Actions speak louder than words. Fools rush in. He who hesitates is lost.
“Trouble is,” Bridget said, “their wrong is killing people. Your own brother, Jane, you may remember. And they won’t stop.”
“You can’t stop them.” Jane gestured at the duffel Bridget held. “This won’t stop them. Your whole life will be wrecked if you do it – and for what?”
Bridget shrugged.
She started walking toward the ROTC headquarters again, staying close to the edge of the woods. It was an easy target, Jane thought: one of those portable buildings, not unlike a big house trailer, tacked onto the old brick classroom building where her honors English class had met freshman year. Tom laughed every time they passed it and retold the story of how he and Pete, unwilling recruits, had once marched backwards during a military inspection, discreetly making their way to the last row of the last unit, then watched the parade of cadets continue on without them. How Pete had fashioned a removable cast for his leg to get out of marching at all for the better part of the semester.
ROTC was mandatory then; now its ranks were filled by a weird mixture of gung-ho guys and guys who joined with the misguided idea that if they had to go to Vietnam it would be better to go as an officer than a grunt. Stupid fuckers, she thought, surprising herself with the whoosh of rage that shot through her again. The lies the Army told students about the training they’d get in ROTC, the way they just ate up people for this war.
Bridget stopped just short of the building, stood listening. She turned slowly, in a complete circle, alert for any movement, any sign of life in the area surrounding them. Jane shivered in the frigid air.
“Look, all this has been prepared,” Bridget said in a low voice. “All I have to do is go in, put it in place. It’s perfectly safe. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake. We checked it out. Security is nil. There’s someone waiting for me –”
Cam, Jane thought. She should leave, she knew. Go home. Tom would come home in the morning, and she’d tell him she was sorry. She’d tell him, this time, Bridget was really gone. But the bomb was going to go off no matter what she did, and he’d say they had to call the police and tell them Bridget had been staying with them. If they caught her, Jane would have to testify against her.
“Hey,” Bridget said. “I can’t hang around out here any longer, okay?” She took a wrapped package from the duffel, then handed the bag to Jane. “Five minutes,” she said. “I go in, I come out. That’s it. Then you decide what to do. Go back. Get real and come with us. Your call.”
“I can’t –” Jane began.
“You can do whatever you want,” Bridget said. “You never have understood that.”
She walked lightly toward the building, bouncing a little on her toes. Raised a window that had been left slightly open for her and disappeared into the darkness inside without a backward glance.
Jane felt frozen beneath the vast black bowl of sky, attuned to the wild clatter of her own pounding heart. It was wrong what they were doing; of course, she wouldn’t go with them. If she left right now she could call the police from a phone booth. Maybe there’d be time to defuse the bomb, and if . . . when Bridget was caught the charge would be attempted bombing. Her father would get her the best legal help, and maybe, maybe . . .
Then there was the blast, the sound of her own voice screaming. And nothing after that, until hours later when she woke in a car beside John Cameron, dawn breaking, Christmas carols on the radio. The same songs her children had sung in the school pageant just two days before.
13
“Paint It Black”
Jane dreamed it for the first time in the motel room with Cam, the night after the bombing: following Bridget out of the icy night into the dark building, the explosion, and Bridget’s terrible, surprised expression in the moment before she fell backwards into the flames, her long red hair streaming. She woke, crying, and could not stop. Cam had been slumped, zoned out on the cheap orange chair he’d placed in front of the door to keep her from leaving. Now he stood, and in a step towered over her.
She stopped then, because she was afraid of him. She had deep, purpling bruises on her arms, where he had grabbed her, wrestled her away from the burning building. Jane turned away from him, curled into the fetal position, the dream images tangling with what she actually remembered, her mind scrambling to make sense of it all. She felt punched when the full knowledge of what had happened washed over her again: Bridget was dead; she, Jane, was here in a motel room with John Cameron. She clenched her jaw to keep from making any sound.
She was wearing an old tee shirt of Bridget’s that had been in the duffel Bridget thrust into her arms just before disappearing through the open window. It smelled of sweat and patchouli, nothing like the beautiful oxford shirts Jane used to borrow when they were roommates in the dorm with their lingering scents of starch and Shalimar. Vividly, Jane remembered the room they’d shared, moonlight falling across the twin beds where they lay facing each other, talking about Pete and Tom.
Tom.
She closed her eyes and sensed Cam moving away from her, satisfied that she would not cry out again. She was shaking, her teeth chattering. If she had not stupidly followed Bridget, if she had not heard Bridget leaving at all, she would be with Tom right now. She crossed her arms on her chest and held tightly to her elbows to calm herself. She would not think about Tom – the Christmas tree they’d decorated with its twinkling white lights, the presents beneath it that they’d meant to unwrap the night before. How he’d have gotten home from Evansville, found her gone, and assumed she’d chosen to go with Bridget. Which, in truth, she had. She saw that now – how she was always choosing Bridget when she should have been choosing Tom.
Even so, he would help her if she could only get back to him.
“It was government property that your friend blew up along with herself,” Cam had said. “You were with Bridget; do you think the fucking FBI cares why? And if you think I’m going to cut you loose, so you can get your hot-shot lawyer boyfriend to try to make some kind of deal with them, you’re crazy.”
Jane was terrified. She’d heard stories – who hadn’t? – about the FBI bursting into motel rooms, shooting first, asking questions afterwards. Someone, anyone, could have heard the explosion, come out into the street to investigate, and seen them driving away from campus. It would have been logical to be suspicious, to note the model of the car – maybe even the license number. For all she knew, the FBI was waiting in the parking lot of the motel right now. She and Cam would go out in the morning and . . .
But when morning came, they walked out, got into the car, and drove away without incident. At Cam’s insistence, Jane was wearing the wig she’d found in Bridget’s duffel; with short, brown, curly hair she looked like a completely different person. Cam had chopped off his long, blond hair and used electric clippers to give himself the kind of buzz-cut her dad used to give Bobby when he was a little boy. The short hair sharpened his cheekbones, deepened the effect of his hard blue eyes.
He hadn’t said a word to her this morning, except to remind her that when she talked to him – even when she thought of him – she was to call him Terry. Terry Gold. Last night, when they arrived at the motel, he’d given her a driver’s license and made her repeat the information on it until she could say it without looking.
Marianne Glazier. 926 Euclid Avenue, Apartment A. St. Louis, Missouri. Birth date: 5/4/47
. Marianne was 5'4" and weighed 115 pounds, close enough. She had brown hair, brown eyes. Jane’s eyes were changeable, sometimes green, sometimes hazel, sometimes gold, depending on the light, or on what she was wearing – which Bridget had always thought was hilarious. “Jesus, Barth,” she’d say. “You’re so fucking indecisive even your eyes can’t make up their mind what color to be.”
Jane felt like weeping. Did Cam feel any grief at all for her? Silent, burning rage was all she’d seen, so far – and directed at her. Did he really believe that what had happened was her fault? Was it her fault? Could what he’d said be true: that she’d rattled Bridget, following and confronting her, and caused her to make a mistake that made the bomb detonate too soon? Glancing at him now, his jaw clenched, driving into the dawn, it frightened her to think about what he didn’t know: yesterday afternoon, while he stood in an outdoor phone booth, talking, she’d rifled through Bridget’s duffel at her feet and found an envelope with a birth certificate, social security card, and driver’s license in it. Nora White. Shifting, balling her jacket beneath her head as if to find a more comfortable sleeping position, she’d dipped down for an instant and tucked the envelope just underneath the floor mat. She could touch it right now, a little security blanket at her fingertips, if she weren’t afraid that Cam would notice. Next time they made a bathroom stop, she’d loosen the insoles of her chukka boots and, the first chance she got, tuck the documents beneath them. She had no idea what she’d do if he searched Bridget’s duffel, looking for them. Maybe Bridget had kept them a secret – in case she ever needed to get away from him. The thought gave her a flicker of hope.
The radio was on, as it had been since they left Bloomington, though Jane tuned it out except for the news at the top of each hour. Nothing about the bombing since the spotty news stories on Christmas Day: there’d been an explosion, a body had been found – that’s all. Jane thought of the Weathermen who’d been blown up in the New York townhouse several years before. One had been identified from the print on a severed fingertip, all that was left of her; another had been completely obliterated, identified days later by a Weather communiqué.
“In case you’re wondering,” Cam said. “They never report this kind of shit. They don’t want people to know how many fucking pig institutions we’ve done destruction to.”
“I wasn’t,” Jane lied.
All yesterday, they had driven back roads going nowhere, it seemed – just away, finally landing at the motel on the outskirts of Salina, Kansas, where they’d spent the night. But this morning after they stopped at a truck stop for breakfast and filled the car with gas, Cam had another phone conversation, consulted a map, and headed purposefully north on a two-lane road, up through Nebraska, into South Dakota, and then east toward Minnesota. They reached Minneapolis in the early evening, and he pulled the car into the weedy backyard of a run-down house in a neighborhood at the edge of the city.
“Wait here,” he said.
As he walked toward the back door, a light went on in an upstairs window and the curtains parted slightly. Moments later a light came on downstairs. Cam knocked; the back door opened. Jane had taken off her boots earlier; she’d complain that her feet were too warm if Cam said anything, she’d decided, but he hadn’t noticed. Now, her heart pounding, she felt for the envelope with her fingertips. Cam was on the porch step talking to the man who’d opened the door, his back toward her – only momentarily, she knew. Quickly, she placed the license and social security card beneath the insole of one boot; folded the birth certificate and placed it beneath the other. Then slipped her feet back into them and tied the laces, all the while keeping an eye on Cam.
Cam. Fuck Terry. He couldn’t control what she kept in her mind.
He turned and beckoned her to join him, and the bump of the documents beneath her feet gave her courage as she crossed the yard. It was frozen in muddy ruts, dotted with clumps of dead leaves. Next door, a kid stood near a barrel of burning garbage, poking it with a stick. What if she called out to him, Jane wondered? Or just took off running? But Cam came down to meet her, took her arm. He introduced her to the guy on the porch as Marianne.
The guy nodded. Tim Garret was his name, he said. A lie, Jane knew. His wife – or girlfriend, whatever – was Betsy Dodd. A stupid name for a revolutionary, Jane thought. But, fine. She could play that game. She could be Marianne to them. In fact, as time passed, it was a comfort to her not to be Jane in their presence.
It was Marianne who endured Cameron’s rough fury. Marianne who was with him, in another of Bridget’s disguises, when he scoped out a recruiting office downtown for friends of Tim and Betsy who arrived a night later, set a bomb there to protest the “peace with honor” agreement that President Nixon had signed, and were gone by the time it went off – safely, this time – in the early morning. Marianne who held the gun he put into her hands, raised it, and fired at the beer can set on the fence post out in the country, near another safe house where some fugitive Weather people stayed.
Tim and Betsy worked nights, cleaning offices. The two of them and Cam slept in shifts in the daytime, so there would always be someone to watch her. Sometimes she woke to the constantly droning television and thought, for a moment, she was back in her parents’ house. Then she’d remember where she was and do her best to drift back to sleep again. She slept hours and hours, slept away whole days. When she got up, to go to the bathroom or drag herself to the kitchen to get something to eat, she felt as if she were walking in deep water.
She half-believed Cam was drugging her; but wouldn’t she feel less if that were true? She could fully wake up if she wanted to – she’d done it. The trouble was, she woke to grief so all-consuming that anything – oblivion – seemed better that trying to deal with it.
Evenings, Cam and Tim would sit at the table in the filthy kitchen, spouting politics, hatching plans that even Jane, in her stupor, knew were pointless and absurd. The war was over. Troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of March. Which only seemed to make Cam angrier, more bent on destruction. He talked about his father sometimes, the ruthlessness with which he and others like him pursued money and power. Yet it seemed to Jane that he was not so different, after all. The war had provided a means for him to exercise his own kind of ruthlessness, and now that it was ending he was enraged at having been beaten at his own game.
Jane watched Betsy sometimes and occasionally caught a fleeting expression cross her face that seemed very much to her like disgust. She looked increasingly haggard in the mornings when she returned after working her shift, and she and Tim often squabbled over stupid things. Who’d go to the grocery store, who’d be the one to take the car in for the repair when the muffler got so loud it was likely to attract attention?
During the first weeks Jane was there, Betsy was cruel to her in the presence of the men and ignored her when they weren’t present. Lately, though, she made a pot of coffee in the mornings and they drank it, sitting at the table together while Cam and Tim slept. She was not a pretty girl. Too skinny, with ropy muscles in her arms and legs. Her skin was so pale it looked blue sometimes. She had sharp, bird-like features. An inch of dark roots beneath her tinder-box platinum hair.
“Listen, I’m sorry about – your friend,” she said to Jane one morning in February. She gestured toward the television, where the Today host was interviewing Henry Kissinger about the troop withdrawals. “Fuck. What a waste.”
“Did you know her?” Jane asked.
Betsy shook her head, lit her fourth cigarette in an hour. “I don’t even know – Terry. Fucking asshole. Our luck he ends up here.”
Jane waited.
“I have half of a Ph.D. in linguistics,” Betsy said. “Can you believe that?”
Jane thought of the children in her classroom. Who was teaching them now, she wondered? How in the world had anyone explained why she’d just disappeared from their lives? She remembered the bulbs they had planted last fall: how she’d sent half the children outside, into the fi
eld behind their room and stationed the rest at the windows to call out at them when they reached the far edges of the planting area, which she had told them should be as far as they could see. Then they’d all gone out with trowels to plant the hundreds of bulbs that Jane had bought. Tulips, crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils, anemones. Tears filled her eyes when she thought of them, right now, pushing up through the frozen soil toward spring.
She couldn’t tell that to Betsy, though. So she just shrugged, as if to agree with her that for a person with half a Ph.D. in . . . anything to end up this way was, indeed, bizarre.
Jane wasn’t surprised when she and Tim didn’t return from work the next morning. Cam paced, peering occasionally through the front window at the sound of a car. Ten o’clock passed, noon, two. “Fuck this shit. Fuck,” he said, kicking the piles of dirty clothes, the trash that had overflowed from the can in the corner of the kitchen. As if Tim and Betsy were accountable to him, Jane thought. As if he owned them.
She wondered if Betsy had been feeling her out the day before, perhaps even contemplating an offer to find a way to take her with them. Then deciding it just wasn’t worth the risk. She would go by herself, she decided at that moment. They were alone in the house now. Cam hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours and, once his rage was spent, he laid down, exhausted, closed his eyes. Jane waited, preternaturally awake, making a plan.
Nora White was still tucked beneath the insoles of her chukka boots. Her parka was in the downstairs closet. Tim and Betsy had taken the grocery money they kept in a coffee can in the pantry, but Jane was pretty sure that Cam had a roll of cash in his duffel. She’d seen it the first night they were in the house together, when Cam left the bag open on the bed – perhaps intentionally, so that she would see the handgun set on top of his clothes and know he wouldn’t hesitate to use it.
An American Tune Page 15
