Yolanda reaches over to pat his hand mockingly. Then she asks, “Oh. Did you remember the cat food?”
She backs carefully out of the diagonal slot. Too slowly to suit the guy behind her, mug in a pickup who hits the horn with the heel of his hand, once, twice, three times as she straightens out the wheels and then begins rolling forward, arriving at the intersection and bringing the car to a stop as the yellow light turns red. The guy edges forward, annoyed, until the pickup’s grille fills Yolanda’s rearview. Then he revs the engine, vehement bursts of noise as he toes the accelerator. The moment the light turns green his horn begins to sound.
“What a creep.” She turns around to see if she can get a glimpse of the guy, sees only the grille.
“Well, don’t make a scene,” says Teko.
Yolanda heaves a sigh. There are many questions she might ask, rhetorical questions, concerning the man beside her, concerning their marriage, that cry out for the intuitive second sight of a Dear Abby. Would the astute Abigail Van Buren, whose cornerstone opinion seems to hold that all problems are universal and that the practical solutions to them may thus be universally applied, agree with Yolanda’s unhappy conclusion that the only hope the marriage has is (deep breath) separation?
Ask yourself. Are you better off with him or without him? I suggest that both of you attend counseling. If he won’t go, go alone.
Though even Miss Van Buren might find herself stumped by Teko himself, if not by the reasons for Yolanda’s most recent bout of alienation from her husband. For the first time in more than a year, for the first time since she and Teko abandoned their neat, white-painted, plant-filled apartment to go underground with Cin and the SLA, Yolanda yearns for the unrestricted sanctuary of normal life, open, free, and sunny. It was while she and Teko were sightseeing in her hometown, Chicago, as they traveled leisurely westward, that these feelings had first intruded. They went to the Art Institute. They went to the zoo. They sat at the edge of the sand, the elegant facades of Lakeshore Drive to their backs, the first hint of winter in the wind that traveled to them across the choppy surface of the lake. All the rigors and trials of the long summer, all the objectives they’d held fast to melted away when she sank her strong teeth into a Vienna Beef hot dog. When they walked on Addison in the shadow of Wrigley Field, quiet now that the season had drawn to another unsuccessful conclusion, Cubs buried in the cellar twenty-two games out, Yolanda realized that she would be happy to perpetuate all this, that coming home and behaving like a tourist made her feel as if all the pleasures of the city had been arranged for her comfort and delight. When Teko suggested that they take a little trip to the West Side—he had a list of public housing projects he wanted to inspect—she’ d resisted, oh so slightly, just enough to put him off until it was time to head to the Greyhound terminal. The tired sign there, yellow with cigarette smoke, still said LEAVE THE DRIVING TO US, but beneath it a man wearing a vinyl jacket and jeans dirtied to a shiny greenish brown nodded, his chin bouncing on his naked chest. This was the sort of found wit that had always delighted roving photographers for the Sun-Times. Yolanda watched him offhandedly, marveling at the spindly prison tattoos that blossomed on his neck, clutching protectively in her hand the paper bag of goodies she’d bought at the five-and-ten. She felt as distant from the man, from that victim of society, as she possibly could. She felt, even, a spark of indignation that he’d allowed himself to fall into that condition.
Then they’d arrived in Sacramento, and there were Susan and Jeff and Roger and Tania, all cozied up in the tatty little W Street apartment. Yolanda couldn’t help noticing how tidy and clean things were, how sweetly Tania kissed her hello, how thoughtful and amiable Jeff and Roger were. And then Susan had performed for them, for an evening of safe house recreation, a dramatic reading from Telephone, a San Francisco Mime Troupe skit, raising the paperbound anthology, Guerrilla Theater, to proudly declaim the piece’s final triumphant line:
… In Cuba the phones are free!
pausing ever so slightly before emphasizing, with the slightest throaty soupçon of Latin inflection, “All of them!” Yolanda was charmed, thrilled, delighted—but Teko had reverted to form and started issuing ukases the moment he walked through the door. He’d worn her out at last.
Yolanda proposed, casually, to Teko that they rent a second safe house. She explained that she had come to see that it would be very difficult to continue, politically or militarily, without first sorting out gender and authority issues. After all, no black people had turned up at their door to assume leadership of the group, and Joan, who’d refused to play follow the leader to Sacramento and was living in San Francisco, refused to formally join them; so by default it was the women of the SLA who comprised its most inherently oppressed members—not a minority class per se, she knew, but as a potential revolutionary class the most promising. Experientially, the women were leaders, deserving of a spot at the vanguard of revolutionary change. She thought it would be a good idea to establish a separate women’s collective within the SLA to address the pertinent issues.
Teko mimed turning his pockets out.
So the Bakery. Yolanda has thrown herself into the job, typing up notes, making sketches, reconnoitering the area, staying focused on the little Sacramento hideaway she imagines. Can it be that revolution has become a means, an excuse, for her to further herself? If the goal of achieving revolution, and its goals, justify and affirm her sacrifices, then it follows that her own personal fulfillment can serve the revolution. She’s convinced herself of that much.
“I won’t,” replies Yolanda. She moves as slowly as she can through the intersection, the pickup behind, honking furiously, swerving in successive vain attempts to find a path around the smaller vehicle. The guy just blows and blows his horn.
Startled pedestrians raise their heads, hunting for the commotion. Their general look says, This doesn’t happen on the quiet, well-tended streets of Sacramento.
ERNEST SPREAD HIS HANDS wide, palms up. Below them, on the bar, and centered between them was the twenty-dollar bill he had placed there, a good-faith gesture, a fresh bill distinct from the small pile of change from which the bartender had been drawing to replenish Ernest’s bourbon and water, all of which, implicitly, was now the bartender’s personal property.
No soap. “You’ve had enough, bud. You’re not going to give me a hard time now, are you?”
Slowly Ernest picked up the twenty and put it back in his wallet. He rose carefully to go to the men’s room, trying to look dignified and poised as he sauntered to the rear of the saloon. They thought this was drunk? This wasn’t drunk. This was nothing. He could show them drunk.
Heated by a stout riser, the tiny WC was warm after the drafty barroom. Ernest settled on the toilet and all at once felt sleepy. Next thing he knew, someone was rapping on the door.
“Don’t pass out in my men’s room, bud. Come on now, I don’t want to have to come in there after you.”
Ernest knew this didn’t require a verbal response. He reached above him and pulled the chain dangling from the tank, felt the breeze on his ass, and then stood, wet his hands, rubbed the sleepers out of his eyes, and emerged. The bartender was back behind the bar. Two of six patrons who’d been scattered throughout the place had departed. His cigarettes and Zippo were where he’d left them. The pile of change remained untouched. Ernest took his coat from the rack near the door and shrugged himself into it, eyes on the high ceiling, the elegant woodwork climbing toward it, the stained glass over the archway that led into what had once been a rear dining room. Gilded Age refinement, on a miniature scale. Plenty of places like this remaining in Scranton, abandoned to their ruin once all the money had taken a powder. Ghosts. The bartender wore a flannel shirt and drew Pabst and Schmidt’s from the taps, working-class beers for his working-class clientele. Ernest imagined that not all that long ago the man walking the duckboards would have been in an evening jacket, with bow tie. Not that this was a bad guy. He had a feeling for bartenders. He
decided to give it one more shot.
“Hear the one about the drunk sleeping with his head on the bar? Bartender comes up, goes, ‘Buddy, you gotta get lost. You can’t sleep here, and you’ve had enough to drink.’ So the drunk sits up, thinks for a minute, then says, ‘Well, how about a haircut?’”
The bartender laughed, polishing the space in front of him with a rag.
“Come on, one for the road? It’s cold as a witch’s tit.”
“Not that cold.”
Ernest winked at him. “You don’t help me out, I’ll be sober when I see my wife.”
The bartender took a shot glass and filled it to the line with bourbon. “Champ, drink this up and then go home. OK?” He rapped twice on the bar with his knuckles. “Good luck. But then that’s it. Gabeesh?”
Ernest’s eyes filled with tears. A guinea bartender felt bad for him. A guinea bartender bought him a drink. A guinea bartender laughed at the expense of his nonexistent wife. For a moment he felt the familiarity of competing impulses, an admixture in this case of sentimental gratitude and murderous violence toward someone who dared condescend to him. For a moment he felt confusion. He hefted the shot glass, unsure whether he was going to throw the whiskey at the man or drink it down. In the end he drank it. No need to prove anything to this wop. He’d been cut off by better bartenders in better bars. He walked out. In a gesture of cavalier magnanimity, he left the change, three or four dollars, on the bar.
He thought maybe he ought to go see Lily. She would be up now, washing her hair to get the smoke out of it, listening to music or watching the late late show. The thought of her, of her little apartment with coffee perking in an old Silex maker on the kitchen table, made him happy. But when he pulled up across from Lily’s apartment building, no lights showed in her windows. He sat in the car for a few minutes, waiting, and then got out, taking a scrap of rag with him. In the front door was centered a small window of scuffed and scratched Plexiglas. Ernest wrapped the rag around his fist, double, and then punched out the little square of plastic, which clattered on the tiled vestibule floor. He reached through and let himself inside. The postman had tossed the day’s mail on the floor, and Ernest stooped and went through it. Nothing of note. He walked into the hallway and up two flights of stairs and then approached the door of her rear apartment, pausing there. The building was silent, except for the buzz of the overhead fluorescent and the hiss of steam pipes. He leaned his face against the door and pressed his ear to it, listening intently. Nothing. He knocked softly, then louder, then pressed his ear to the door again. No noise escaped the apartment. He wished he’d thought of phoning, but a surprise seemed like such a nice idea. So who got a surprise?
Live alone. Die alone. And, incidentally, wait around for a broad alone.
He went and sat at the head of the stairs and lit a cigarette. Who the fuck was this bitch anyway? He considered this lucidly. He knew he ought to feel tired, but instead he felt buoyant. He felt like talking. He felt like fucking Lily. He felt like drinking some more and driving around and then sitting in some brightly lit place eating his eggs at four in the a.m. He felt like going out to the cemetery and lying across the graves, pretending to be dead. He felt like throwing rocks through the windows of an abandoned warehouse. He felt like emptying a few clips at the range. He felt like going to a playground and flipping the swings, so that they wound themselves on their chains around the top of the swing set. He felt like standing on a rooftop, sailing 45 rpm singles away into the night, one after another. His knuckles began to ache. He reached between the banister rails and dropped the cigarette, hearing the infinitesimal sound it made as it landed in the ground-floor hallway. Then he lit another one.
It was murder being between jobs.
Suddenly he was in his car, his lights carving a tunnel into the darkness surrounding him. The impulse to leave, to stop waiting had come so abruptly that he’d nearly lost his balance lurching downstairs. His knee hurt from banging it on the door frame on the way out, and he squeezed it with his aching knuckles. Eventually everything starts to hurt. But the thing was that in the course of his solitary meditation on loneliness and rejection at the top of the stairwell, back when only his knuckles had been killing him, he’d suddenly drawn up an archetypal memory: of himself, at ten, sitting alone, forgotten, in the backseat of the car, driving home from some excursion, while Guy snuggled between his parents in front. As they entered the outskirts of Scranton, his mother had had the nerve, the horse-faced old bitch, to turn around and compliment him on his behavior during the ride, praise with which his pussy-whipped father murmured his agreement. And then Baby Guy had raised his head to gaze back at him, a look of arrogant self-satisfaction on his tiny buglike face. Ernest acted swiftly and decisively. Before him there’d been a jumbo ashtray, filled to the brim with butts and ashes. He pulled it out of its housing and shook it, emptying its contents, over the occupants in front. In the slipstream of air coursing through the car from the cracked wing window, the ashes scattered and flew, a blizzard of rank gray fallout that made his father swerve and nearly lose control of the car and his mother sputter with rage and confusion. And Guy? He’d cried and cried, his precious little eyes full of the gritty stuff. Ha-ha—bug-faced son of a bitch! His mother had waited patiently until they arrived home, then had removed Ernest from the car and taken him by the hand, leading him upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, where she laid him across the flowered spread and hammered his bare ass, beating him hard and with single-minded dedication, while he inhaled all the perfumy smells of her side of the bed. It was like fucking her.
Now, as periodically came to pass, it was time for Guy to get his. It seemed to Ernest that whenever he bothered to look up, not that he did all that often anymore, there was Guy, still nestled between their parents, still drawing far more than his due. Little bastard! Dragging them into this stupid plot of his, exposing them. And they ate it up, as usual. Whatever little Guy-Guy wanted. Well, enough of that. He happened to know a captain on the Scranton PD, Earl Fry. Always meant to look him up when he was in town, and what better time than this, when the security of the nation was at stake.
Police HQ was a forbidding old building, part citadel, part prison, part bankrupt public institution. Ernest responded to its looming presence uneasily, on some hindbrain level. A ramp led down from a gated archway beyond which the motor pool lay, but public parking was found in the court out front, deserted now except for a sheriff’s vehicle, probably there to transfer a prisoner to the county jail. He pulled up behind the sheriff’s car and got out, looked the place over. He felt good about the idea. It felt right. Bring the whole thing home where it belonged. Earl Fry. Old high school pal. Knew Ernest, and he knew Guy too. Ernest could imagine Fry rising from his desk to greet him, What a surprise, and then his jaw dropping as Ernest dumped the gift-wrapped news in his lap.
All there was, though, was a cop, with corporal’s stripes, behind a desk, leaning toward a sheet of paper half rolled out of the typewriter in front of him and daubing at it with Liquid Paper. The cop did a really professional job of ignoring Ernest until he’d finished his daubing, blown on the page to dry it, and then rolled it back into the platen.
“Help you?”
“Let me speak to Captain Fry. Please.”
“Off duty.”
“Who’s on duty?”
“There’s me. There’s Sergeant Durkin. There’s Lieutenant Bricca.” He did not say this in a friendly way, but as if he were reviewing an obvious set of data for the benefit of an idiot.
“Let me talk to Bricca.”
“He’s Code Seven.”
“What’s that? On the shitter?”
The cop studied him for a moment. “Dinner,” he said, finally.
“When’s he back?”
“What do you have?”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Suit yourself,” said the cop, indicating a bench.
“When did you say he was back?”
“I didn’t,
” said the cop. “He’s the lieutenant. You know?”
Ernest sat. He watched the cop type and file some papers for a while. Two patrolmen came in with a drunk who smelled like puke and led him around the front desk and down a corridor for processing, quickstepping him, as if they were tired of dealing with him. Back where the holding cells must have been someone started singing:
Hoya polski naga polka
Meenzata lavuso
Hoya polska gnocchi polka
Mordenchoo leverno
Polka chevy qualum cherchez
Lavooie hardehar
Return to me and always be
My melody of love!
It echoed down the corridor and into the lobby, and the cop on duty rose and slammed a door, cutting off the sound.
“I’m Polish, you know,” he said. “I hate that fucking Bobby Vinton.”
Ernest bestirred himself. “Shoot the bastard.”
“Shit no. Slow death. Death of a thousand cuts. Chinese water torture.”
“You want to shoot him in the throat. Never sing another note.” Ernest spoke authoritatively.
“That’d be nice. I hear the motherfucker’s getting a show on CBS next fall. Just what I need. The fuck.” He gestured, as if the man in the cell were Vinton himself.
A man in plainclothes came in holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Anything up, Casimir?”
“Yeah, no, Lieutenant. This man’s waiting for you.”
“Yeah?”
“He wanted Captain Fry.”
“Fry works human being hours.”
“So I told him.”
“He misses all the good stuff.”
“That’s what we all say.”
“Goes home and has his supper at six and watches prime-time TV like a regular taxpayer.”
“We were just talking about TV”
Trance Page 40
