Farber looks slightly distracted as he slowly walks to the lip of the stage. He thrusts his arms stiffly into the air to form the familiar V signs. Then he turns abruptly and walks off. Though a few have applauded automatically, most of the audience is astir with unease. They feel cheated. “Comedy Tonight,” it had said outside, and this guy got up, and just what did he do, exactly? A woman summons Tania. She appears furious. Everything’s our fault.
“What’s wrong with that man?” she says.
FIFTY THOUSAND TIPS. THIS is a measure of something Thomas Polhaus has never encountered in a lifetime of investigative work. He expects the public to take well-known cases to heart, he expects civilians to follow developments as reported in the press and to form commensurately ill-informed opinions concerning the Bureau’s work. He expects an above-average level of interest in the cases that set the screen aglow on the six o’clock news. He expects the people who want to get into the act: search here, dig there, check this out. Fields full of sheep shit in Petaluma, swampy lowlands, eerily lit by will-o’-the-wisp, near Modesto; places so lonely it ached to know that you were there looking for nothing. He expects that, always. He expects the delicately private reaction that the wider social phenomena in which the Bureau has become involved—the civil rights movement, the Left as a whole—can engender in a certain type of person. But this protean case is different. GALTNAP tosses away all the usual assumptions. It isn’t only a question of having an opinion about the case or the Bureau’s handling of it (of course there was more of that than usual). It isn’t simply that people either like the girl and sympathize with her family or despise her and her entire clan and want her shot on sight. There is also a feeling that people are calling, in effect, to ask the Bureau to investigate them, to understand them, to explain them to themselves, that at the kernel of each call, each letter, each message tied to a brick, is a secret, some concealed thing illustrious and profound to the sender but unutterable. This held true for both the patently frivolous leads and the ones Polhaus felt obliged to take seriously. Polhaus feels for them, understands that in every case the Bureau, and he himself, have disappointed, by failing to immediately decipher the secret, to recognize what is concealed.
The fifty thousand tips were the usual mishmash. After sorting through the mention of lost husbands and second wives, through noise complaints involving neighbors and neighbor dogs and neighbor stereos, through references to Madison Avenue and to the Pope; after hearing of the man who’d fucked his mother-in-law’s Thanksgiving turkey, coming in the chestnut and sausage dressing, of the woman who overheard her doctors discussing murdering her; of the man whose mother constantly projected psychic pain waves into his head from the back bedroom in which she sat smoking, pretending to watch her soaps, of my street was ripped up four separate times in the last year—once phone, once gas, once electricity, once water—and this is a known fact, and no one does anything. Sort through all that, and the tips found the missing girl sitting on a bench on Whipple Avenue, reading a paperback Peanuts book. They placed her on El Camino Real, passing out religious tracts. She was at shopping malls and weddings, serving kosher meals at Grossinger’s, and blending in with the crowd at ethnic festivals and Uriah Heep concerts.
The ones to which Polhaus pays close attention are the tantalizingly reasonable ones, which place a thin girl with a mole on her face at a gas station on 1-5, filling up a dusty Nova or a Maverick. She got gas. She bought American cheese and Campbell’s soup. She drank coffee and paid with a twenty. Because if these are not genuine sightings, they are at the very least duplications of actual events in which she was involved. The agents’ reports on their interviews with the service station attendants and waitresses and checkout clerks are his own personal pornography; with vague hostility he can imagine her right into the rhythm of these dull events. So this is what it’s like without the protection of the dazzling name, without the allowance checks and the trust fund income. How do you like it now? The kid had held one job. One god damned job, working the stationery counter at Capwell’s. Probably sounds pretty good around now.
GARY KEARSE ARRIVES AT the farmhouse out of the blue one afternoon. Though Yolanda’s account of their cross-country trip had been imbued with a careful affectlessness, it’s clear that she is excited to see him. The sudden infusion of raw sexual hunger into the usual SLA routine of gaudy self-abnegation has a turbulent effect. All Kearse and Yolanda have to do is smile at each other across the table. Not since before Mel’s has sex been acknowledged as a part of life, though mostly this has had to do with everyone’s habitual reluctance to have sex with Teko, who has handled the subject by recasting sex as simply another component of the cadre’s overall requirements, like ammunition and sacks of rice.
Drew and Diane Shepard married for more or less typical reasons at a more or less typical age. Still, it was a good little wedding, fun, unpretentious, the sort of wedding lots of people might be happy to have had. It was held at Drew’s mother’s house in Indianapolis. Most of the guests had driven up from Bloomington. A local judge officiated. After being forced indoors by a sudden storm that had thundered across the pancake expanses at the heart of the state, everybody crashed all over the living room where the ceremony had been held. Nobody had to dress up. Drew’s mom was cool that way.
And later, after Diane’s parents, slightly shaken and not quite sure what to make of this hairy little man their daughter had married, had been driven to the motel where they would be spending the night, after Drew’s mother had received a sustained ovation from her young guests for testily shooing away the two patrolmen who’d driven their cruiser up onto her lawn to shut down the noisy, cheerful party, after Drew had spent an hour in the backyard discussing the MC5 with a biker he knew vaguely, after all that, the groom and his bride retired at last to their bedroom (up the stairs, first door on the left, right next to the bathroom). The sky had cleared, and the soft light of the moon, its cool glow, fell into the room; Diane moved, became naked in the moonlight, became liquid metal flowing there at the head of the bed. Drew and Diane had been living together for months, but Drew felt a momentousness at this instant, watching his bride disrobe. Her having married him, her disrobing for him as his wife: these things struck him as unique gifts to him, as if he were being allowed to probe a virgin orifice. Because in fact it was true, that by virtue of the transformative power of the ceremony, their renovation into husband and wife, she was again new, she was again something that she would never be for anyone else.
He knelt on the bed in the dark, throbbing with lust, awaiting her approach. This was long before he had thrown off the shackles of bourgeois propriety, and he was completely unconflicted in his fierce desire to fuck this woman who was now his wife. And it was a desire that had stayed with him. Through it all, General Teko wanted nothing more than he wanted that Indiana bride, lustrous in the Indiana moonlight, with the sound of water running through the pipes inside the wall.
Nobody else, however, has any way of knowing about any of this, least of all Yolanda, who has always taken at face value Teko’s oft-professed conviction that the sexually monogamous relationship is an unforgivable impingement on individual rights. She certainly has never seen herself as liquid metal, as virginal again, as uniquely Teko’s. She smiles at Kearse across the table. He smiles back over the rim of his mug of Red Zinger, crossing his left leg over his right knee and fingering the three diagonal stripes embroidered onto the side of his sneakers. Teko slams plates and glasses into the cupboard while Tania washes up at the sink.
“Looks like rain again,” he says.
Yolanda stretches, languorously. “I’d like to get a walk in before it starts to pour.” Back arched, arms coiled behind her head, her eyes are on Kearse.
“I’d sure like to stretch my legs after that drive.”
Teko slams a glass into the cupboard. It breaks against an earthenware bowl, a jagged edge slicing into his fingertip.
“Ouch,” he says. “Shit.”
“What a klutz,” says Yolanda, slackening into her normal posture. “We’re not going to have any glasses left by the end of the summer.”
“You want to run some cold water on that,” says Kearse. “Before you wash it.”
Teko grunts in answer. Giotto-perfect circles of blood form an ellipsis across the countertop as he carries his injured finger delicately to the sink, holding it above his heart and squeezing it at its base with the fingers of his other hand.
“May I?” he says, gently shouldering Tania out of his way. In the sink he tenderly washes his hand with Octagon. Tania marvels: The guy’s so calm. She wishes he’d hurt himself every day. But of course she knows, she knows, knowing the two of them as well as she does, she just knows that this is yet another episode of the Teko and Yolanda saga, just as she knows that although the moment idles, free of any sense of danger, Teko is transmitting a clear signal to his wife, who is ignoring him, who couldn’t be less concerned with the man at the sink wincing and sighing, who at present is very suggestively cutting into a Sara Lee pound cake.
“Delicious,” Yolanda says, putting the tip of the blunt knife into her mouth and licking off buttery residue. “Mmmmmm.” She stares at Kearse. She says, “So good.”
“How about a Band-Aid?” says Teko.
“Teko. They’re all the way in the bathroom,” says Yolanda.
“I’ll get you one,” says Tania.
“Oh,” says Teko, “that’s all right.” He wraps his clean wound in a dish towel and goes to the bathroom.
“Acts like he’s going to bleed to death,” says Yolanda, before filling her mouth with cake.
When he gets back, his finger is rather showily dressed in gauze and surgical tape, tinged merthiolate red beneath. He wiggles the finger, as if to satisfy himself that it still works.
“Well, we’re on our way,” says Yolanda. She and Kearse stand.
“Jeez, well, what about the rest of us? I think we all want to take a nice walk.”
“You’ll just have to catch up,” answers Yolanda. “You take way too long.”
“But my finger!”
“If you’d cut the damn thing off, that’d be one thing. See you!”
Kearse and Yolanda go out. Tania watches as Teko silently cleans the pieces of the broken glass from the inside of the cupboard and throws them away. She goes outside and sits on the lawn before the house.
Joan’s voice comes from behind Tania and from way down in her diaphragm: “Mmmmm, delicious.”
“How about that?” says Tania, without turning around.
“Suck … my … knife, Yolanda.” Joan utters this in a baritone.
“Oh, God,” says Tania.
“Oh, Gary,” says Joan, coming around and throwing herself on the fragrant grass, arching her back, moaning. “You make my labia tremble!” She and Tania burst out giggling. Then the front door opens, and Teko emerges in his jogging clothes. Tania turns her wrist to glance down at a watch that hasn’t been there since February. But she knows without checking that it’s nowhere near five o’clock.
“They’re right,” he says, “it’s a great day for a walk in the woods.”
It’s a lousy day, overcast again and humid.
“We’re OK here,” says Joan.
The usual stretching. Eyeglasses in their usual spot on the porch rail.
“Well, I’m off for a jog,” he says. He takes the usual brisk steps, huffing and puffing, and then launches into his usual canter. His feet pound in their usual way against the ground as he runs up the path he has worn into the grass and then turns into the woods. Everything as usual, except that it is too early and the day feels too different, as if they had somehow misused it. Though Tania and Joan hug their knees and laugh, sitting like any two girls on a square of lawn anywhere in America, the tone is dark with premonitory shadows. Though Tania knows that Teko would probably behave exactly the same if Yolanda were planning to cuckold him with a genuine urban guerrilla—especially if the act were to leave him with nothing more than a bum finger to keep him company—she feels that Kearse is an intruder, a tourist lazily dipping into their revolutionary ways and conventions. Why’d he have to show up?
They talk and read and doze as the misshapen afternoon crawls by. Once an enormous burst of lightning lashes across the sky, bridging the clouds, yielding an enormous and instantaneous crack of thunder, and as the still air begins to move, cool now and reeking of ozone, they gaze upward, seeking the rain that seems sure to come. Tania sees Teko’s figure come out of the woods and make for the creamery.
“I’m head inside now,” says Joan. “I’m like a cat about getting soaked in your clothes.”
“OK.” Tania lifts a hand in a lazy farewell, her eyes on Teko’s back as he muscles the creamery door, sliding it open a few feet on its stubborn track and then vanishing inside.
She studies for a moment the dark gash the open door forms in the face of the creamery. After getting to her feet, she begins walking that way, not quite sure why. The first drops of rain splat on her back, and she feels them, warm through her T-shirt. She thinks of the circles of Teko’s blood on the countertop. The rain comes down steadily. She can hear it now, falling softly through the trees and, as she approaches, hammering on the corrugated tin roof of the creamery. Hiding behind the broad door, she creeps along the apron of concrete laid outside the creamery entrance and peeks into the opening. Teko has drawn a tall silhouette on the wall, comical, unmistakably Kearse’s, and he is firing at this target with one of the air rifles. She steps inside.
It’s deafening in the creamery, a steady pounding on the tin roof that echoes throughout the unfilled spaces of the building. Shafts of gray light fall through the noise from window slits overhead. Teko stands in the shadows, engrossed in his shooting, firing, cocking the rifle, and firing again. The sounds of the gun and of the pellets striking the wall are lost in the battering noise of the rain. Tania reaches up to smooth her hair, gathering the wet locks at the back of her head and squeezing them, wringing out the rainwater onto the soaked fabric of her shirt. She shivers now. She’s cold. It was funny, and now it’s not so funny. She has never really thought of him as a man before and now she’s struck by her curiously mingled feelings of empathy and schadenfreude. When Teko turns and looks at her, he seems unsurprised at her presence.
She asks, “Did you catch up with them?” She has to shout.
“I caught up,” he shouts back.
“How far did they get?”
Teko inclines his head vaguely.
“Oh.”
Teko turns, raises the gun to his shoulder, and fires again.
“New target?”
“Yup.”
“Tall.”
“It is that.”
“So. Are they heading back to the house?”
He asks, “Who?” Then: “Oh.”
He says, “I don’t know what they’re doing.”
He says, “I don’t know what they’re doing right now.” He turns, raises the gun to his shoulder, and fires again.
“They’ll get pretty soaked.”
“Pour cold water on them. That’s what they do, right?” He laughs curtly, but to Tania it’s just a smile and a shake of the head, silent in the drumming noise. She looks at the silhouette, gangly and absurd, its head perforated with tiny punctures, its torso. Tania notices the crudely drawn sneakers on the silhouette’s feet, with three diagonal stripes running down the sides.
“Go ahead and keep shooting,” she shouts. “Don’t let me bother you.”
“I don’t want to. These guns stink.” He throws the rifle. It lands without a sound in the clattering din. They stare at the spot where it lies for a moment. Teko asks, “You want to know where I found them?”
“OK?”
Teko advances on her, two big steps toward the little girl shivering in her wet T-shirt. “I found them in the woods. Under a tree. Fucking. Like a pair of animals. Like hippies.”
Tania says, softly, “I’m sorr
y, Teko.”
“What?”
“I said I’m sorry!”
“Sorry about what?”
“I just am.”
“Don’t be sorry!” And then he turns his head, the voice is lost again, there is only an outraged animation amid the noise. Tania can’t quite believe it, but what she thinks she hears, the voice moving in and out of intelligibility, of audibility itself, are the words security breach. Teko shrugs and pulls at himself, his mouth moving.
Security breach.
Security breach?
“—security breach—”
“OK,” says Tania.
“‘OK.’ Don’t patronize me.”
“OK.”
“You think you’re clever. You think you know something. You don’t know shit. I’ve been telling you that all along.”
“OK. I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t know shit!”
“I don’t know shit!” They are screaming at each other through the racket of the buffeting rain.
“I’m sick of this,” Teko says. He reaches out and grabs her by the upper arms with freezing hands.
“You try to work democratically and all you get is disrespect.
… a total lack of discipline.
… you all act like you’re at sleepaway camp.
… from now on I just take what I want. No more asking.
… or something.”
He seems to be airing a couple or more different grievances. Tania feels dizzy. His icy fingers still clutching her right arm, he reaches down and unsnaps her jeans, poking her in the crotch as he gropes for the zipper.
“Come on,” he says.
The wind rattles the big door in its frame and the hammering intensifies, panning now across the roof in slow strafing surges. Cataracts of water fall inside through the window slits and into the darkness below. Teko unzips her jeans and tries to yank them down, “Come on now,” he says, “help me.” The breath he chants into her face is sweet, putrid, cigarettey.
“No, Teko, I don’t want this.”
Trance Page 34
