“Can I perform surgery on it?”
“It’s real clean.”
He spies Yolanda and disappears into the tollbooth. A moment later his voice interrupts Clapton’s backup singers. “Chaz help the lady in Window Treatments.”
A big pimply boy wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a clip-on bow tie under a shiny green vest approaches Yolanda. His name tag announces him as Chaz. “Help you, ma’am?”
“Oh. Hello.”
“Looking for something nice for your windows today.”
“No. Actually.”
But there are no further queries forthcoming from the boy, whose expression is as blank as a bowl of dough, and the journey from window treatments to hacksaws seems longer and more savage than she would have imagined.
“A saw,” she says.
“A saw. Oh”—and an eager look that hints at his contempt settles on his face—“you’re totally in the wrong place. That’s over there.” And he jabs at the air with his forefinger before turning away. Yolanda begins walking to the other side of the store, where another teenage boy in a similar outfit is waiting. This boy is named Douglas.
Clapton sings, “ … Every day the bucket goes to the well …”
“Help you find what you’re looking for today,” the boy breathes.
“Hacksaw,” she says.
“Hacksaw! You sure you need a hacksaw? Most people, I find, they’re like, ‘I need a hacksaw’ and whatnot when really they need something else.”
“I think I need a hacksaw.”
“Do me a favor. What are you exactly trying to cut? It makes a difference.”
“ … yes, one day the bottom will drop out . . .”
“Pipe.”
“Well what kind? Cast-iron pipe? Galvanized steel? Copper? Plastic PVC? It makes a difference, believe me.”
“Um. I don’t know. Pipe.”
“Inside or out? I know you’re wondering, ‘Why’s the guy asking so many questions?’ And you know, I’m not trying to denigrate the valuable addition of a hacksaw to anyone’s home toolbox. But let’s make sure we’re using the right tool for the right job, right? And after we figure out what that is, if you still want a hacksaw, we’ll set you up with a hacksaw.”
“What was the question?”
“Inside or out?”
“Inside.”
“Right. So. It’s probably not cast-iron then, so what you probably want is not a hacksaw at all but a pipe cutter.”
“You know. I should probably ask my husband. He knows.”
“He out in the car?” Douglas looks over her shoulder, very enthusiastic about extending the conversation.
“No. No. No, he isn’t. He’s home. With the baby. I’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
Dan Russell wants to know: “If you take over the country—”
“When, Dan,” stresses Teko.
“—what happens to a guy like my grampa? He’s pretty like, you know, Nixon’s the One. But he’s a good old guy I think. He volunteers and stuff. Is it OK if he’s like, all the same to you I’ll be voting for Governor Reagan?”
“That asshole,” says Teko.
“We take over, your granddad will see why Nixon’s not the one,” says Yolanda.
“What about Reagan?” asks Dan.
Hacksaw 3
Avery Trust-Rite Lumber & Hardware looks the way a workingman’s saloon does when the weary day flowers with night; several men in coveralls and carpenter’s pants line up on the customer’s side of the counter, bullshitting with the man behind, who actually paces its length on duckboards like a bartender, and why not?—a day spent on his feet, back and forth, crouching down, reaching up, cutting keys and mixing gallons of paint and smashing flower pots with a mallet to be mixed in with sacks of fragrant soil. The place stops dead when Yolanda walks in. She smiles, and they return amused looks. One man tips a Dodgers cap.
“Lady needs some help, Ed,” says the man in the Dodgers cap, and the other men on the customer’s side of the counter laugh.
Ed leans across the counter tiredly; thank God he’s not going along with the joke: “Help you, miss?”
“Yes, I need a hacksaw.”
Ed is starting to ask her if she just needs a blade or if she needs the whole thing when the men explode:
“—hacksaw? Oh, ho-ho-ho—”
“—she need with a hacksaw?—”
“—Whoa. Whoa. Lady gotta be careful—”
“—oh, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho—”
“—wouldn’t want to be her old man. Lady with a hacksaw—”
“—damn, god damn—”
“Miss?”
“The whole thing, please. The blade and the handle part.”
“I’mon tell you, I don’t know if you ought to sell her a hacksaw, Eddie.”
“Maybe one of those chamois cloths.”
“A nice feather duster.”
“Can of silver polish.”
“Oh, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho.”
“But a hacksaw—”
Ed shrugs. “Lady’s free white and twenty-one, and she can do as she pleases.”
“Now, who here’s wanting a hacksaw?”
Everyone turns to see a uniformed L.A. County deputy sheriff, carrying a roller tray, two rollers, a dropcloth, and a gallon of standard white, emerge from one of the aisles. He puts the stuff on the counter and stares straight at Yolanda.
“Lady right there,” says the man in the cap.
The deputy looks at her appraisingly, a slight smile on his face, drumming his fingers on the counter with an even rhythm. Yolanda knows the other men are with him on this. No way any of this is in fun anymore.
“Mind if I ask any special reason why you’re needing a hacksaw at”—and here he very pointedly gazes at his wristwatch—“eight forty-five at night?”
All of the men wait patiently for her answer. She smiles and tosses her head.
“My husband just escaped from custody, and we need to saw his handcuffs off.”
Amid the laughter Ed takes her money and bags the saw. As Yolanda is leaving, she hears one of the men sum up: “She ought to take that and saw the balls off herself’cause she has got some pair down there.”
Dan Russell wants to know: “Well I mean I just don’t understand why you robbed the bank in San Francisco if you’re these revolutionary army people and all.” He is on his knees behind the bucket seats in the front of the van, working away with the saw at the handcuff on Teko’s wrist.
“Well,” says Teko, somewhat nervously watching Dan at work, “running a revolution is pretty expensive business. You’d be surprised. You need vehicles—”
“But, I mean, I thought you stole the vehicles.” Dan shrugs and gestures to take in the van.
“This is a definite exception in the case of an emergency. I mean, ideally we purchase the vehicles legitimately. So called. Try and keep a low profile.” Teko winks. “Anyway. You need matériel. You need ordnance. Arms, ammunition, tools—”
“Sweat socks,” says Yolanda.
“Oh, I just. OK. Attention please: It was not sweat socks. It was a bandolier.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“Dan, let’s not get sidetracked here in the details, the minutiae of revolutionary struggle. I want to make one thing perfectly clear: We aren’t crooks. We’ve declared war on the fascist United States government, and the bank job was an expropriation of enemy funds in order to meet our simple revolutionary needs.”
“Oh,” says Dan.
DONALD DEFREEZE
General Field Marshal Cinque Mtume
He walked that patch of grass leading to the shack looking around as if the whole world had changed its constitution, had undiscernibly come apart and then reassembled itself along slightly askew lines. The truth hid in the shadows angling from the objects all around. There were signs to which an instinctive hustler was sensitive: the marked card, the bill protruding conspicuously from the unattended wallet, the calm quiet before a bust. Then again, ma
ybe it was just sitting in the car with that bald motherfucker Prophet Jones. Dude always got his nerves all blanged up.
It was a hostile place into which he’d been born, in whose light he now floated between the darkness at either end. He knew the darkness into which he’d exit differed from where he’d come in because it would be corrupted by his regret. The idea was to regret nothing: neither Gloria nor her children he’d accepted as his own nor the one or two he’d actually fathered with her.
There’d been a sense of receding since Tania’s annunciation; it was a tough act to follow. As he’d worked his way through his own early enthusiasm, that of his followers, and come to recognize that his army was already with him in its entirety; that he’d come up empty foraging for members even amid the Berkeley Left; that he hadn’t convinced political recruits so much as entranced true believers; that he’d done less to shape his enlistees into an army than they’d done to elevate him to its leadership, as he had come to see these things clearly, he’d also seen that his most incandescent vision had been realized as political theater rather than as a terrorist act. Its rulingclass victim had renounced her victimhood, disavowing the very self that had been victimized and thereby annulling the crime that millions had been convinced took place. Thus the SLA’s greatest success—the abduction and conversion of Alice Daniels Galton—a success that had brought it fame and notoriety and the power to make extortionate demands also clearly marked its limitations as well, for if Alice Daniels Galton was human enough to disappear into a new identity as one of the People, what did that say about the “fascist insect”? If the victim’s declaration that her ravishers were in fact heroes led to the People’s repudiation of her, what did that say about the People?
That it was the wrong time, place, ideology, and army everybody already knew. He’d sensed it since he saw a hundred doors in precarious dingbat apartment buildings and crappy bungalows close again and again on his primitive importuning, the gestures and cadence he’d learned in Buffalo from Reverend Borrows twinned with retread political oratory. The fearless Left covered its soft white ass, oh so politely. But while before there was always some residual feeling of hope, now, on at least one level, Cin knew he was totally fucked. Send the man out to procure field supplies using the local currency, easiest fucking thing in the world—oh what the fuck say he got sent to go shopping—and he tries to take some motherfucking socks off them. He walked back to the shack through the subtle unfamiliarity of the world, thinking about how losers seemed always to be packing up, how he’d been packing his bag up since the day he left Cleveland.
“I don’t like him,” said Zoya as soon as he came through the door. Out with the opinion, right up in his face, like she’d been doing from Day One. “I get a bad feeling.”
He ignored her. Whatever the others might have had to say to her about this they’d probably already said, because they stayed quiet.
“Uh-uh,” she repeated, “don’t like him.”
“Well,” said Cinque, finally, “you won’t have to see him no more. We’re booking on out of here.”
The shape the predictable protest took was: What about Teko, Yolanda, and Tania?, but Cin could tell it was inertia speaking, the tedium of unscattering everything that lay strewn around the house, stuffing it into duffel bags and grocery sacks; of bugging out of another safe house without even leaving behind one of the successively less grandiose valedictory gestures—e.g., the incendiary bomb at Sutherland Court (to “melt away any fingerprints,” Fahizah had said), the cache of papers they’d placed in the tub and then pissed on at Golden Gate Avenue—that had accompanied each previous evacuation, and his five troops had begun complying with the general order even before their objections ceased, as he fell into a meditative mood and fetched his bottle of plum wine to sit leaning against the wall, drinking and smoking.
Even as the chrysalis had cracked and Tania had entered dripping into their presence—taping her declaration of herself while posing for the photograph that seconded that declaration more persuasively than any words she’d spoken, the picture depicting her before the Naga banner, armed and ready for just about anything—Cin had felt the end drawing near. He painstakingly crafted what amounted to goodbyes to them all—to Victor, Damon, Sherry, Sherlyne, Dawn, DeDe, and, by implication, Gloria—to be tacked onto the end of that tape (after Fahizah’s curiously cultish anointment of him as a revolutionary messiah, which had swiftly and decisively destroyed any remaining credibility the SLA had with the Left), along with a couple of death warrants that he’d issued more in the spirit of rhetorical What the Hell than in true seriousness. There was just this strange foreboding that he would not be allowed to live through this. He saw himself dying in fire and smoke.
They packed up and then Fahizah and Cujo went to warm up the vehicles and for an instant, before he heard the engines turning over, he sensed, from some strange deep part of himself that was in touch with the darkness of childhood nightmare, hopeless encirclement, that waiting for him were highly efficient shock troops with rifles and tear gas and Nixon’s the One bumper stickers and flagstone backyard patios and weekend ticket plans at Dodger Stadium and color TV and a thousand other things that made him wince, waiting and snacking and sipping and chatting in their idleness and not even taking the whole thing seriously.
He wanted to go.
He wanted to wait.
He wanted someone to tell him what to do.
He wanted someone to come up and say, It’s OK.
Instead his sullenness generated a zone around him into which no one crossed. The evening brought a darkness to the two rooms that had the glow of his cigarettes at its center. He lit them, each one from the last, then absently field-stripped the butts. Fahizah and Cujo went and shut off the motor again after a while. Inside, it was implicit that silence was part of the bargain. Outside, the voices of young men, a shouting-out into the spring evening. It was like that feeling after a bad argument with Gloria, when he was crushed and empty, sitting there as depleted as after sex, while the world kept moving right outside the windows and you just couldn’t believe it was still going on, that anything still bothered.
“ORDERS, EVERYONE?)”
Yolanda and Teko are smiling! And before Tania has a chance to really think about it, she realizes that they’re happy simply to be here at the Century Drive-In! Workers of the world, unite-and let’s go to the movies! Though that would not, strictly speaking, constitute a Maoist aphorism. And of course she is not a member of the proletariat. And while the folks all around them enjoying The New Centurions from the comfy depths of their bucket seats may be the lumpen of the westward dream, they are also the bourgeois, putatively enfranchised, silent majority, and they surely are getting a different charge from this cops ‘n’ robbers melodrama than the SLA Three, who, though the major reason they’re here is to rendezvous with the others, are enjoying the rare opportunity to study enemy propaganda that their being here allows.
“Shoot ’em, kill the pigs!” urges Teko.
Forget she said anything.
Teko: Cheeseburger, Fries, Coke
Yolanda: Chicken ‘n’ a Basket, Fries, Tab
Tania: Hamburger, Onion Rings, 7-Up
Civilian Prisoner of War: Hamburger, Fries, Coke
A knit cotton blanket speaks from the back of the van, requesting extra ketchup. It’s the prisoner under there.
Old grizzled cop George C. Scott is showing the ropes to idealistic rookie Stacy Keach. Tania has heard that Stacy Keach overcame the obstacle of a harelip to become an actor. And what a beautiful and mellifluous voice he has! Like Orson Welles. She thinks instantly of the famous movie.
(As a countercultural document, the SLA finds Citizen Kane virtually useless. For one thing, its criticisms of the media are outmoded, made obsolete by the emergence of television as the major information source for most people. But mostly, there’s a problem with its reductionist preoccupation with Kane’s megalomaniacal villainy and its definition of that villainy
as merely the greatest flaw in his heroic makeup, which render the film romantic propaganda for the fascist establishment. Even now it’s said that Hank Galton’s forced exposure to the “underprivileged” has changed him; it’s said that he and the notoriously right-leaning San Francisco Examiner are beginning to address the concerns of “the people” and to run “hard-hitting” investigative pieces that “expose” things, lack of hot water and potholes and unsanitary conditions in the Western Addition and such. Tania’s not sure who it is who’s said these things. The Examiner, she thinks.
Alice has never seen Citizen Kane. Tania isn’t even curious.)
Tania wanders through the rows of parked automobiles, seconded by the enormous image of Stacy Keach, which itself approaches a parked car, intending to warn its occupants to leave the scene of some impending carnage. Little does he know. The helpful rookie leans toward the passenger window to address the lovey-dovey couple and encounters a young woman with a shotgun laid across her lap, pointed directly at him. Shock, surprise. She pulls the trigger, sending Keach flying. Tania hears Teko cheering from the van.
Right around when Tania heads back to report that she hasn’t seen any sign of the others and that their signal—a big paper cup set upside down on the speaker stanchion—is clearly visible, Keach is being dumped by his wife, who can’t really take it anymore: it’s hard being a cop’s wife; it’s all the worrying, the late hours. It’s the not knowing.
As if you ever do.
CINQUE
Later he heard the voice of a child in the street, a strong little voice forming sentences of pealing innocence. It was 11:50. Reverend Borrows: “There are two kinds of people in this world. The kind who auto-MATically look at the clock when they hear a child outside after dark, and those who do not.” He’d been sixteen when Borrows laid that on him, about to get caught robbing parking meters and sent up to the reformatory at Elmira. He got to his feet, stiff and cramped. He watched the shadows of the others as they followed suit, except Cujo, who seemed to have fallen asleep.
Trance Page 4
