“Huh,” says Teko. He expels the sound with a rank sourness, like some gaseous discontent. He lowers first one leg and then the other and begins climbing down the ladder.
“I don’t know, man,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“Just. I don’t know. Never mind.” Teko waves a hand and heads for the kitchen.
Trout feels his release as surely as if he’d been held there on the lumpy, sprung couch by force. He looks and finds the pack of Larks still in his hand. The suitcase still open. The tapes still there, beside the shot glass glazed with yolk.
What Trout doesn’t know is that Teko and Yolanda have arrived at a sour, exquisitely paranoid consensus: The reason that Guy Mock wants all the material taped and in his possession is so that he alone can reap the financial benefits from the sale of the book when, having removed the tapes, he calls in the police death squads, which will then kill the occupants of the farm. To demonstrate the authenticity of his material, he will have the tapes of their voices. To facilitate their murder at the hands of the cops, Guy has relocated them to this particular isolated and indefensible property in Jeffersonville.
This fever dream quickly becomes the only possible scenario.
What Trout also doesn’t know is that Teko and Yolanda have come up with a counterplan. Today, after Guy and Randi arrive, Teko and Yolanda intend to kill them, along with Trout, and bury the bodies in the woods.
What about Tania and Joan?
Good question.
At the last minute, early in the morning, Yolanda decides to send them to town to buy some groceries.
Trout’s in his tweed jacket and gray flannels again. Traveling clothes, as he thinks of them. His watch tells him that it’s a little early to expect Guy, so he’s taking the air, waiting. He strolls toward the dark boundary of the trees, grasshoppers leaping out of the tall weeds ahead of his every footfall, his hands jammed into his pockets, shoes glistening and pants darkening from the heavy dew. He climbs a gentle incline at the edge of the woods and pauses. Turning, he sees the house, the lawn, the shaded entry to the road, the creamery, all laid out in the near distance below him. He also sees Teko, striding across the lawn, carrying an air rifle in one hand. Spotting him, Teko stops, then raises the rifle. Its barrel gleams as it catches the sun. A greeting? Or? Before Teko continues on his way toward the creamery, Trout notices that he awkwardly cradles something against his chest with his other hand. Trout peeks at his watch again. Then descends, quickly.
Inside the house, Trout can see that the cassettes are no longer on the coffee table.
“You’re wondering about your tapes.” Yolanda smiles at him serenely, but her body is taut, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Yes.”
“We’ll be holding on to those.”
Trout’s mouth falls open to form a question, though he’s not quite sure what it will be; his mouth is just following his upper body’s lead: head jutting forward, shoulders hunching—a pantomime of skeptical incredulity. He shrugs and juts his head, mouth agape, as if an insect has suddenly stung him on the back of the neck.
His question turns out to be: “Why can’t I have my tapes?”
“It’s a question of we have to safeguard our security. So they’ll be staying here with us.”
“I really don’t see why. It’s counterproductive. Guy will be very unhappy when he finds out.”
“Oh, fuck Guy!” Yolanda’s voice lilts pleasantly, as though she were talking to a child. And Trout is aware that his own voice sounds small, boyish, petulant, overcome. One fissure, and he has revealed everything.
“You almost,” she continues, “have me believing he’s fooled you too.”
“Fooled?”
“Please.”
Teko comes in. He still carries the BB gun.
“Beautiful morning,” he says. “Beautiful, beautiful morning.” Thrusting his hand into an open box of cereal on the kitchen table, he draws up a handful and proceeds to eat it. Mouth full, he says, “Hemingway figure it out yet?”
“He’s getting there.”
“I’m sorry,” Trout says, “I’m very confused right now. I’ve spent a week of my time out here, and I really don’t understand this at all.”
“Like you need an explanation,” says Teko.
“Please do explain,” Trout says.
“Lays it on thick, doesn’t he?”
“All I can say is, we are so disappointed,” says Yolanda.
“Disappointed?” says Teko. “Does Guy Mock think we’re an idiot? We’ve got Tania! Right here in her own words! Tania! Tania!”
“I really have no idea what you’re talking about. Guy’s loyal to you. He’s dedicated to this book.”
“Oh, yeah?” says Yolanda. “Then how come you’re not Norman Mailer?”
Trout is rendered speechless. After all, there are so many reasons.
Now here’s an unexpected development. Trout appears indirectly to have become the casualty of Guy’s self-assured persuasiveness. What Trout does know is that the editors Guy has approached have expressed an enthusiastic, though guarded, shall we say, attitude toward an SLA book. Certain conditions apply. The tenor of their stipulations being along the lines of: Bring us a lock of Tania’s hair, a fresh fingerprint, a Polaroid featuring the renegade heiress posed with the headlines of the day. And signed releases, too, would be a big plus. “Shit,” Guy had said. “You think an agent would help?”
Still, Trout is hesitant to reveal this intelligence. First of all, he doesn’t think that he can make as strong a case for the truth as Guy can for pie in the sky. Second, he knows the money situation here is dire, too dire, really, to abruptly withdraw the promise of “six figures” that’s infected everyone’s imaginations, induced a type of febrile, depraved expectancy that seems tremendously unrevolutionary, to say the least. And third, there’s the air rifle, which Teko cocks, slipping his finger inside the trigger guard.
“Are you going to shoot me with that BB gun?”
Teko must interpret this comment as an insult, an attack on the dignity of his weapon. Smiling his strange smile, he raises the gun to his shoulder and takes aim at Trout. Plainly, Trout reflects, he has in this case erroneously deployed a modifier.
“Teko!” Yolanda’s shout makes both Trout and Teko jump, and the gun discharges, shooting Trout in the hand. He and Teko both look slightly confounded by the blood trickling down his wrist, the back of his hand, between his fingers, by the meaty reality of the wound.
“Don’t get excited,” Yolanda says to Trout. “We’ll have a full discussion. What time’s Guy coming?”
The familiar clatter of the Bug. And warm greetings for good old Guy from Teko and Yolanda. Guy, wired and loopy and irritable, unfolding from behind the wheel of the VW for like the 863rd time in the last eight weeks, extending himself into country sunlight and a veritable chorus of hail-fellow-well-met salutations and good cheer. Guy, Guy, here’s Guy! What happened to Eat Shit? he wonders numbly. Oh, he’s tired of these people. He folds the front seat forward so he can remove the paper bag containing the spread he’s brought, a celebration lunch of cold cuts, cheese, bread, potato salad, slaw, and cold beer. Not every day you finish the first preliminary stage of a potential project that may eventually turn into the draft manuscript of a book somebody somewhere might want to buy sometime! It’s about as lame as that sounds, but Guy wants his revolutionaries optimistic and upbeat. The better to evict them from his life.
We’re so glad to see you! Where’s Randi?
Randi coming?
Where is she, Guy?
All this concern over Randi. So odd, so new. Refreshing, even. They’d always treated her before as a sort of appendage. Guy lifts the bag out of the backseat and turns, notices for the first time Trout’s ashen face, the bandage around his hand.
“What happened to you?”
“Just an accident,” says Yolanda. “Will Randi be coming later?”
“No,” Guy says. “Randi
took a pass today, I’m afraid. She’s feeling sort of traveled out. Frayed was one word she used. It’s known to happen; take a nice young person and run them ragged and there you go, a disinclination to take trips of this sort. And then there’s always the problem of the not-so-spacious backseat and who has to sit in it on the way back. Should I just go ahead and say, she has a hemorrhoid?”
“But she knows you’re out here?” Teko asks.
“Of course she knows,” Guy says, suddenly alert to the ulterior. There’s a kind of calm—physical, impenetrable, and stifling—that lies over things the way a woolen blanket covers up a bloody sheet. “Of course. What kind of accident?”
“Well,” says Teko, “I shot him. Can you believe it?”
Trout remains silent. He has a sullen, dazed look on his face.
“A mistake, Guy,” says Teko.
“Of course it was,” says Guy. He shifts the paper bag from one hand to the other. Teko and especially Yolanda stare at him fixedly. “And where are the others?” Guy asks.
“Tania and Joan? We sent them into town to run a couple errands.”
“I could’ve—” Guy begins to speak but stops. “Well. Done is done. Hope I don’t miss them. A nice lunch, and then your intrepid reporters are off.” And running. Guy has a very, very bad feeling.
On the kitchen table is wound litter: a bottle of antiseptic, some scraps of cotton and tape. The air rifle lies on the floor. The house smells of sweat and stale smoke. Guy sets the bag on the counter and rapidly begins to unpack the food, laying it out. Buffet style, as his mother would say. Eat it and beat it. They’ll take the tapes back to Ninetieth Street and see what’s there. Through all of it, all the difficulties—the thousands of miles, the thousands of dollars, the occasional sardonic report from Joan, the near-tears phone calls from Trout, the bulging suspicion that this was not, after all, going to be the book the educated middle class would turn to at bedtime to knock itself out—the project has persisted in Guy’s brain, burning there, just out of reach in his cranium, the apparition of its own perfect embodiment. Eventually he’ll grab hold of it, with or without the help of the SLA.
He’s appeared alone here today because of Randi’s refusal this morning, flat out, to get out of bed if the purpose of her rising was to travel to Jeffersonville. Just overflowing with hostility these days. Hot to get back to those brown California foothills, the tinderbox calm of late summer. There’s been scene upon scene over the last week or so. Tiresome and, irritatingly enough, ultimately persuasive. Randi began by pulling out the last few months’ bank statements, charting for him the oceans of cash that had flowed out of their hands. This never bothered Guy, but he understood that for Randi money was always a suitable way to frame an issue that had moral dimensions. He was like, OK, develop your thesis. Moving right along, Randi pointed out that if anything, he had less sympathy for the SLA’s tactics and objectives today than he’d had when he first heard of the group. That Teko, Yolanda, and Tania did not hesitate to demand money, food, shelter, transportation, supplies, and weapons but viciously rebuked the Mocks for their politics, values, and way of life. That Joan, too, now not only seemed to take their largesse as her due but appeared also almost to resent their ability to provide it. She suggested to him that it was only a matter of time before the feds linked the personal check Guy had written to Fire Lieutenant Lafferty to the place in South Canaan and were all over it and them.
Uh, Guy still hasn’t gotten around to mentioning his little indiscretion with Ernest to Randi.
But these are suddenly the problems of the past. There are more immediate problems to be dealt with, Guy can see that. He can be blind to many things, God knows, but the data rolling in here are hard to overlook. Missing parties. Wounds. Suspicious questions. He’s moving quickly, finding a bread knife, a bottle opener; fishing condiments out from around the uncovered plates of congealed food Yolanda has stocked the fridge with, yuck, getting things together in a hurry. He drops a saucer removing it from the cupboard and watches it fall, wheeling itself gracelessly toward the linoleum, absurdly slow. It bounces on impact, lucky break. He reaches for it, thinking of the traditions encased in a single life, secret and rich and headed for oblivion. The way, for example, he turns a loaf of Italian bread on its side, to easily slice it lengthwise. The way, say, he rings a plate with overlapping slices of cheese. The way he wipes his ass and then examines the toilet paper. The various stylistic distinctions of superficially indistinct men. Oh, how he does not want to die. Not ever, really, but certainly not here and now. Could be he’s just being paranoid. Could be that. But there is a dread feeling here, an alarm, a ghost vibe drilling its way right through his skin.
He turns from the counter, holding plates of food in both hands. Still no Tania, no Joan. Could it be that they’re already occupying the hole that waits for him and Trout? The modern way to go, standing at the edge of an open pit, at the head of the final queue.
“Here’s the food,” he says.
They eat hurriedly, without conversation. Trout remains sullen, wordless, making short, stabbing gestures at the food on his plate. Teko eats in his robotic fashion until he empties his plate, and then he immediately pushes it away. Yolanda lingers over her food. Guy notices that she makes faint humming noises as she eats. When he looks into her eyes, he discerns a sort of patient hostility there, latent and coiled. She’s been sitting on it since day one, but she studies him now with an anticipation that sends a chill down his spine. Does he imagine her pupils dilate at the contemplation of him?
Tania says, offhand, while they stand waiting for the clerk to finish slicing liverwurst for another customer, “They’re taking Adam’s tapes before he goes, you know. Guy’ll be pissed off.”
“Who?” asks Joan.
“Who else? I heard them talking up in the loft.”
“All that work.”
“Funny, huh? What a waste of time.”
“Why, I wonder.”
“Oh, I know why,” says Tania. “They think Guy wants to rip them off for the book. I’m like, what book?”
“Guy? Steal the book?”
“For the money, I guess. They’re totally paranoid.”
“Why? What else they said?”
“They said he was setting us up, that the whole Jeffersonville move was a setup.”
“A setup, God. I’m sure Guy has a secret reason for being us up here, but that’s not what it is. Must have been tough for you not to bust up laughing.”
“Oh, my God, it was. They said they had to get the tapes and shut Guy up before we got out of here. I’m like, where are we going now?” She yawns, glances at the wall clock.
“What do you mean shut Guy up?”
Tania offers a noncommittal shrug.
Joan’s reaction is delayed for a moment, but then she takes Tania by the elbow and leads her out of the store.
“Joan, we left the groceries.”
“Come on, honey.”
Whatever grievances she may have against Guy Mock, however much evidence she has gathered proving that his every move is informed by self-interest, however much of a pain in the ass he may be, however much better off she personally would be with him out of the picture, Joan is skeptical of Teko and Yolanda’s view of things, and she most assuredly does not want to see Guy Mock die at their hands because of some wacky misapprehension. Stiff them out of some of their advance, maybe, but sell them out to the pigs?
“What’s going on? Why are we rushing back?”
They hurry along the side of the road. A dog dashes across the yard before a house and stops at the edge of the lawn, circling, pawing the mown grass and barking at them as they walk past.
“Good dog,” says Joan.
It’s all been heading here, Joan realizes. Talk all that talk about guns and death, call people pigs and insects until they stop being people, until they’re nothing, vermin, just a problem, and suddenly it’s easy: You press a button; they die. Why not? She remembers with Willie, when his
beliefs, the gale force of his righteousness, weren’t close to being enough anymore. That stupid bomb factory! First they blow up IBM Selectrics, Xerox machines, and acres of indoor/ outdoor carpeting, all the things that make today’s modern offices so distinctive, so interesting. Then one day they’re trying to off a saloon full of cops. She’s glad he got caught, she’s glad. If he were to have tried something like this, she would have rushed to stop him. Is it prescience that moves her now?
After the meal Yolanda invites Guy and Trout on a little stroll.
“OK,” says Guy. “I think we have time. Have to hit the road with those tapes soon, though.”
“Oh,” says Yolanda, “couldn’t you just call Randi, tell her you’re spending the night? And for God’s sake, ask her to come.”
That’s it.
Still, Guy has to step back and admire himself a little; his impulse is to try to wheedle the tapes out of her, just so he can hold them, possess them. Despite the approach of death—his certainty that even as he and Yolanda chat pleasantly, Teko is sneaking up behind him, ready to stove in his braincase—he talks right on through, trying to gain the tapes even as he awaits the deathblow.
And then, from under the dark awning of the trees covering the road, Tania and Joan appear. Joan runs to Guy. She hugs him. She hugs him!
“What the—what are you doing back so soon?” asks Yolanda.
This is the moment when Guy realizes that he will live, will remain alive for the foreseeable future, overwhelming emotion flooding his system: deep relief—not happiness, but a grateful sense of reinstatement. Grateful for: the little birds. Grateful for: the blades of grass.
Prescience:
Guy is destined to leave behind his pride, a stack of cassette tapes, and about eight dollars’ worth of delicatessen food and to take with him both his life and Adam K. Trout.
Whose wounded hand will begin bleeding again near Port Jervis, New York.
Trance Page 37
