“You can, ah,” says Teko, “keep the lawn mower.” And the men move it off the back of the wagon, double time.
She’s about to get in when Yolanda reminds her, nodding in the direction of the two men. “Tania?”
“Oh. Yeah.” After straightening her wig, she removes her eyeglasses and smiles at the men. The younger one smiles back.
It’s now 4:33 p.m. Yolanda turns the dashboard radio dial searching for news reports, while Teko drives. At this hour, helicopters hover in position over the freeways that enlace the city, delivering traffic reports to the drivers anchored below. The unfamiliar road names, and the conditions on each, are enumerated over the radio. There’s no word yet of a manhunt, or the incident at Mel’s.
They stop at a shopping center called Town & Country Village. Tania enjoys these oases, the hand-painted signs in the supermarket windows, the faded placard outside the restaurant and cocktail lounge listing the specials. This one has a slightly rough-hewn theme, the storefronts framed in wood stained a dark brown. A boy in a blue apron retrieves the shopping carts scattered throughout the parking lot. He links them in a long unwieldy train and pushes them toward the entrance of the supermarket. A lot of crashing noise accompanies the task. It looks like not such a bad job. Tania’s only job, ever, was working at Capwell’s, in Oakland, clerking in the stationery department for two and a quarter an hour.
But her scalp is starting to itch like hell, and she is nearly overcome with anxiety when she realizes that Teko and Yolanda are discussing switching cars once again. Teko parks and they all get out of the Nova, Teko carrying the submachine gun concealed in a plastic shopping bag from Mel’s, which says brightly in red script Thank You For Your Patronage! with some sort of exploding curlicues or whatever all around the words. A festive-looking bag. They stroll around the shopping center periphery, listening to the thin strains of the Muzak, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which Tania has heard so often in such places she believes it must act as a subliminal inducement to shop. As this gives way to “Moon River,” an old pickup with a camper top pulls into a spot, and a man, youngish, in faded denim, with long hair, gets out and walks around to open the passenger door for a little boy. The boy wears a sateen windbreaker with applique patches shaped like baseballs. She thinks it’s called a varsity jacket. She’s fascinated with the little boy’s jacket. It’s new and clean and looks like the largesse of Grandma or Grandpa, or so she guesses.
Teko asks Yolanda, “How about that hippie’s camper?”
“How ’bout it?”
“Fill the bill?”
“Go for it, Teko.”
“You think?”
“Go go go go go.”
“I’ll talk to him, see what he says.”
The man has squatted to tie his son’s sneakers. Tania hears the boy’s high little voice carrying across the lot—it demands: “Tight! Tight!”—while the man squats, pulling the laces tighter, unaware of the presence of danger and revolution as Teko comes near, swinging the bag with the submachine gun nestled in it beside thermal underwear and socks and a flannel shirt. It unfolds like a two-reel silent: Teko hails the man, and they talk, friendly enough; Teko, speaking, gestures toward the camper, and the man startles, a little flurry of the arms and upper body; Teko lifts the muzzle of the gun out of the bag; the man leaps to his feet and grabs his son and dashes around the camper; Teko shuffles back and forth near the front fender, trying to keep the man in sight. When the man breaks away, Teko tears the submachine gun out of the bag and rushes after him.
“Oh, shit,” says Yolanda. Teko screams, gesturing with the gun, at the man, who is crumpled against the hood of a car, his arms draped over his head, moaning. Teko turns to Yolanda and hefts the gun, as if he were testing its weight.
“Should I off him?”
“Don’t, Teko.”
The man moans, “No, no.”
“Shut up! Should I just fucking off him right now?”
“Teko, you’ll bring the pigs down on us!” says Tania.
“No, no.”
“Shut! up! Who asked you?”
“Teko, she’s right, we better go now!”
“OK. OK. OK. Listen, you hippie dipshit. You listening? Listen! You tell anyone about this and we will be on you like white on fucking rice! We will cut off your balls! You hear? We will tear out your fingernails! You hear? We will take that kid of yours and roast him on a fucking spit! You hear?”
“No, no.”
“Do you hear me?” Teko holds the gun close to the man’s ear and fires into the air. He backs away. Yolanda and Tania are already running for the Nova; the gunfire releases them to their fear. “Close to You” is playing on the Muzak. The ice-cream families of America keep coming out of the shoppes, unawares, poised and carefree.
“I can’t necessarily agree with these tactics, Teko.”
“That’s why you’re not a general.”
“Don’t even start.”
“You might not want to admit it, but: it’s true.”
Yolanda is driving now. Tania is beginning to get hungry. It’s six, and the top-of-the-hour newscasts are reporting the incident at Mel’s and the Southern California manhunt for “suspected SLA members, possibly including kidnapped heiress Alice Galton.” Who is being sought for questioning in connection with the San Francisco bank robbery last month in which she was an apparently willing participant, in which innocent family men were gunned down; who has turned her back on her loving family and devoted fiancé; who has adopted the name Tania. Is she, as U.S. Attorney General William Saxbe claims, “nothing more than a common criminal”? Is she the mindless, programmed victim of brainwashing? Or is it more likely that she may have been coerced and is just waiting for the opportunity to send us all a message of reassurance?
There’s a hearty laugh in the Nova.
In any case, it is a mystery for the public and law enforcement officials alike. In any case, it is clear she is not what she once was.
The mood in the car turns sour again when the announcer reports that Teko had been caught stealing a pair of sweat socks.
“It wasn’t sweat socks. And I didn’t steal it.”
WILLIE WOLFE
Cujo
The exact meaning of those sprawling urban stucco barrens evaded him. Not that he’d been looking for it. But what did it all mean, the ugliness they’d wrapped themselves in, the beaten cars and shabby houses and dingy streets? He saw boys on the corner carrying golf clubs, black boys, a little younger than he was, never been near a golf course in their lives. He saw two men drive up to a house and furtively unload unopened cases of Viva paper towels and bring them inside, then come out on the tiny porch laughing when the chore was done. He saw two used condoms in the gutter and a third that had been inflated and a stylized girl’s face drawn on it with lipstick. It was like observing something a million miles or years distant.
Tania said that what they needed was to break out the Polaroid Pronto and take plenty of clear, crisp SX-70 pictures. Why? So he could look twice at everything, once to live it and again to try to understand, she said.
Typically for her, it was just apolitical enough to make perfect sense while seeming like a non sequitur.
You took the picture, you listened to the motor whine as it ejected the print, and then you held it by the one-inch border at the bottom, shaking it to get it to develop faster. She’d demonstrated, waving dry a snapshot of a grinning Cujo who looked just a little too much like Willie Wolfe, the all-American boy.
It was also apolitical enough to enrage Cinque, who only liked to use the camera these days to take heroic pictures of their army, the seven-headed Naga banner pinned to the wall behind them.
General Gelina cut his hair that afternoon. Gelina breached security to remove the surveillance drapes from the window over the sink and let a little daylight in. A towel was draped over his shoulders, and he sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, watching his damp hair fall to the cracked linoleum.
> It was quiet that day, with Teko, Yolanda, and Tania gone. He wanted to talk about Tania but didn’t know how to go about it. He shifted restlessly. There were other things to talk about, but he didn’t want to talk about them. The arrow of his consciousness flew directly to her.
Gelina understood, he thought. He and she and Tania were what he once would have thought of as “friends,” though the bourgeois connotations of the term could be quite simply mind-boggling, as could be the bourgeois connotations of almost anything. He had never realized how hard it was just to live.
Anyway, Gelina was a comrade, a very sympathetic and intuitive comrade, and as she snipped his hair, cutting away the remains of the bright red dye job that had so bothered Tania, guiding his head into position with gently prodding fingers, she gradually brought the conversation around to where he wanted it.
“I think your comrades will appreciate your new look,” she said.
“One comrade,” said Cujo.
From behind him he could hear Gelina sharply expelling breath through her nose, an understanding laugh.
“Sometimes a pretty effective costume isn’t what you’d call the most suitable,” she said, holding out a clipped lock of dyed hair for their scrutiny. “In acting, you learn how to get past it, get outside the sense of yourself to play a role you couldn’t ordinarily identify with.”
“As a guerrilla I could definitely appreciate the costume.” Cujo nodded as Gelina paused, scissors upraised, allowing him his gesture. “But as a man …” Cujo let the sentence hang.
Gelina began cutting hair again. “Hasn’t anyone been feeling comradely toward you lately?” She sounded amused.
“Well …”
“Sometimes some people feel more comradely than others,” she continued. “I see you gave Tania that little stone monkey face, the whatchamacallit. It’s cute.”
Cujo blushed. “The Olmec monkey. It’s Mexican.”
And Gelina very exaggeratedly put her hand to one side of her mouth, as if to shield her speech from eavesdroppers, and said in a stage whisper, “Sometimes when the heart speaks, you gotta listen. The bourgeois aren’t wrong about everything, you know.”
Cujo nodded.
“Some people shouldn’t talk,” she said.
“Like Gabi and Zoya and all their dykey dramatics. I mean, come on, what, is this a soap opera?” she said.
“Like you-know-who and you-know-who whose last name rhymes with Shepard, give me a break. It’s like The Honeymooners. You remember The Honeymooners?” she said.
Cujo agreed. “Yeah, Tania was saying, like, this is a big problem.”
“Oh, I can see how it would be for her. I really relate. I’m so glad I’m not on their team. Anyway.”
Gelina dipped a comb in a basin of water and ran it through Cujo’s freshly cut hair. Gradually, over the last few weeks, the awkward postadolescent had repossessed him. First he’d ditched the beret, then the wispy experiments with Ché-like facial hair. Now he sat, slunched forward, clean-cut and shorn, a silly smirk on his smooth face.
“All finished, hon.”
After the haircut Cin called Gelina to bed, and Cujo stayed sitting on the kitchen floor because he didn’t feel like watching them fuck. He felt lonely and blue and wanted Tania to come home so he could surprise her with his new hair. He dozed off.
It was about six o’clock in the evening when there came a knock at the door of the house on Eighty-fourth Street. A pretty odd thing to be happening at a secret hideout, thought Cujo, as he came awake. The phrase, secret hideout, just appeared in his thoughts from out of the past, the days when he was Willie Wolfe; from out of backyard stands of elms and sycamores and maples and other craggy trees of the Northeast, kids in striped tees and jeans and U.S. Keds scrabbling through, heading for some crude structure of plywood and two-by-fours, secret doings under the high armadas of furrowed cumulus drifting through a honed October sky and the wind shaking leaves from the trees, the explorations of that after-school wilderness ca 1963 fueled by Tang and Twinkies, Ovaltine and Oreos, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.
Wait a second. Huh? He was still waking up.
Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil were well-known as primary components of homemade explosives. The thought excited him, the thought of a bomb factory, another piquant phrase.
A knocking, an insistent knocking on the door in this tough neighborhood, where it paid to be what was the word? Reticent. Circumspect. His lips formed the name: Tania.
More of a thudding, now, the ham of an impatient fist striking the door: not Tania.
Back when Cujo was Willie Wolfe, when he was falling out of trees and kissing Amy Alderson on her sun porch and serving as sports editor for the Mount Hermon Clarion and swimming varsity, his dad, Skip, was the one who strode to the door in response to the chimes, brimming with authority. Young Willie had watched this banal act about a thousand times, slumped on the sofa or wherever he happened to be when it came to pass that Sally Brooks arrived to collect for the Shriners or Santo the gardener needed to get into the basement or little Kerry Sherman came around with her Girl Scout cookies and had never thought twice about it. And now here he was, Cassandra’s “my brother the Communist,” and was he supposed to draw his gun and take cover or answer the knock?
But it was a safe house and he was not Cassandra’s weird little brother anymore; now he was a revolutionary, committed, divested of emotional baggage and material wealth. But as soon as Cujo began thinking of his dad, his family, the jig was up; he was a basket case, meditating deeply on a loss that was politically incorrect to mourn and that marked a definite reduction of himself.
Cinque came in from the other room, sleepy, stiff-legged and bare-chested. Hitching his pants, he stuck a revolver in the waistband, undid the locks, and opened the door. Just like that. And Cujo watched, mouth agape.
It was Prophet Jones, come to call, six foot five and solid as a cannonball. Prophet Jones had first shown up late on the first night to check out his new tenants, scrutinize them in the wavering candlelight that illuminated the doleful space of the two rooms. He’d reminded them to lay low. Prophet Jones thought Fahizah might not have taken very seriously his earlier suggestion to that effect, made when she’d rented the place from him. He scolded them and criticized and looked from face to face, but mostly he stood looking down at Cinque while he did it. Cujo was in awe. Prophet Jones dressed down the Field Marshal as if he’d been just anybody. But he knew Cin was bound to respect him. It was the mutual respect that was only natural between a brother and a freedom fighter. Prophet Jones talked, and they all listened. Cujo loved that cadence; it jangled him right down to the white of his bones, set the marrow vibrating. Fungg-kayy! He loved the man’s name. He loved Fahizah’s story of the Malcolm and Huey posters on his walls, of his poised nonchalance when, in an effort to prove that she was indeed a general in the SLA, she’d pulled her submachine gun out of the Ralph’s shopping bag she was carrying.
Oh, how he couldn’t wait to be a real urban guerrilla! Oh, how he couldn’t wait to be black!
NIGHT IS FALLING. THE Nova is beginning to feel like bad luck rolling. Tania is still hungry, and all that neon against the darkening sky puts an edge on her appetite. Signs that rotate and light up in sequence, that point the way to satiety. A green arrow appears, and they turn. A circle shines yellow, and they speed up. Soon they are working through the cul-de-sacs again, the turn signal clicking and the brakes sighing softly, marking time.
“This car, it’s starting to feel a little, I don’t know.”
“I’m hip.”
“Dangerous, especially after the whole thing back at the shopping center.”
“Well,” says Teko, “I’m aware of that.”
“You always have to be, I don’t know, demonstrative that way.”
“Well. What do they say? Desperate times.”
“First the socks, then this gun thing.”
“It wasn’t socks. It was a bandolier.”
Entering a sm
all, unheralded city called Lynwood, they turn onto Pendleton Avenue and drive slowly for about two blocks before Yolanda pauses beside a parked Ford Econoline van that has a FOR SALE sign taped in the back window, listing a phone number and an Elm Avenue address. As it happens, the address is directly adjacent to where the van is parked. Yolanda gets out of the Nova.
Dan Russell contours himself to accommodate the shifting shapelessness of the beanbag chair, his right hand inside a Claude Osteen model MacGregor fielder’s glove. The fingers of his left hand rest idly on the thongs that will allow him to fine-tune the glove’s Adjusta-Wrist. Tomorrow’s the big game. He takes the glove off and balances it on his lap, gazing into the dark oiled pocket. The weight of the glove on his crotch begins to give him an erection, and he puts the glove aside and prods himself through his jeans as he stiffens. Then he begins to think about Geraldine. Now, Dan Russell is not supposed to masturbate before he pitches. Coach has made this abundantly clear, using a number of creative and evocative euphemisms, the most memorable of which makes reference to “keeping the pearl jam in the jar.” Also, Dan is motivated to stop by his grave misgivings about masturbating while he thinks about the transvestite alter ego of a stocky black man. Yet his fingers undo the snap at the waistband of his Wranglers. He thinks: Geraldine is not a woman; she is Flip Wilson in drag. He works out a compromise: If he must jerk off, he will substitute for Geraldine in his thoughts Mary Ellen Walton: wholly female, about his age, warmhearted, levelheaded, white like him, enduring the Great Depression back in the forties or whenever with John Boy and the rest, and, if he didn’t mention it yet, someone who is both white and a girl.
These two characters compete against each other on TV Thursday nights. Which happens to be tonight.
But then Geraldine sashays back into his mind, wearing a saucy double knit skirt and bright rayon blouse. Dan Russell puts one hand on her arm, another around her waist. “Don’t you touch me!” protests Geraldine. “You don’t know me that well!” He silences her with a violent kiss on her big black lips. He pulses involuntarily under his cotton briefs and then frantically pulls his dick out of his pants. This is not anything anyone has to know about: not the jerking-off part, certainly not the Geraldine part. In his mind he is twisting one of Geraldine’s arms behind her back, yanking the skirt up and the panties down. The sudden idea of Geraldine with dick and balls makes his own dick throb with excitement. Then his brother starts in hammering on the door.
Trance Page 2
