The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  I stopped now, and she, to my relief, answered calmly. “Okay. I know what you mean. I’ve talked to Professor Lewis about this. And in fact, what he said was quite a lot like what vets say. When the state steps in between what you want and what’s actually happening to you at the most basic level—like, you want to be home soaking in Epsom salts but you’re being beaten up and dragged into a Black Maria, or you want to be out getting your deer in the woods but instead you’re being forced to go down a booby-trapped Vietcong tunnel with a knife in your teeth—it’s a devastating experience. People never get over it.”

  I nodded, grateful to her for what she’d just said. So grateful, in fact, Isabel, that I went on and spoke for quite a while more.

  It’s that, Isabel, as smart as Beck is—as smart as you are—to a certain degree, understanding your father is not only about facts. It’s also about context. It’s about understanding that it’s 1969, and it doesn’t matter which side of the war you’re on, on either side, you see every day that the state is causing citizens’ deaths. You may support it, you may not, but it is a chilling part of your life. And there’s been so much violence: it’s so close you can touch it, that mass violence had swept through the South, violence of white Americans against black.

  And then what the fuck happens? What happens next? Not only does the war not end; not only is there no accommodation from government; but by Christ, Nixon is elected! Nixon! It’s like a nightmare. He brings with him this entire history of anticommunism and COINTELPRO and this vile, antidemocratic red-baiting. And then, one, two, three, there’s the bombing of Cambodia, there’s Kent State, there’s Jackson State. And you’re right there, right there waiting to go to Vietnam, or watching your friends go, and seeing this fucking all-out slaughter going on, day after day after day.

  I said all this to Beck, more or less like I’m saying it to you. Just imagine the choice, on one hand, between this jowly, unhealthy, vile, lying son of a bitch Nixon with his horrid little sidekicks, and on the other hand, this vast movement throughout the country where people are not just getting laid, and getting high, and listening to fine music, and having fun, but to boot, they’re right! Remember, this is the war that Martin Luther King called “that abominable, evil, unjust war in Vietnam.” What they’re saying is so obviously true, you can’t believe everyone doesn’t know it! The cold war is a damn excuse for an imperialist incursion that’s killing millions of foreigners while making billions for American defense contractors. Blacks are being systematically colonized throughout the whole country. Sexual repression and materialistic ambition is the name of the game, and the schools—the schools, with these caricatures of buzz-cut gym teachers and home ec classes taught by ladies in perms—these bogus schools.

  And in the middle of this whole thing, what happens? Do you have any idea what happens? Nixon bombs Cambodia. Don’t forget, Isabel, not all of the articles of impeachment brought by the U.S. Congress against Nixon were for Watergate. One was for illegally bombing Cambodia: a prosecutable crime if Ford hadn’t pardoned him. Nixon bombs Cambodia! And the National Guard kills four Americans in, of all places, Ohio, while they’re protesting. And just imagine now: all this being true, I come up and I say to you, Hey, Izzy, this is it, man. Each time we get freer—each step of the way we get more happy, and less tied down, and get better music; each time we open up the universities, and get better drugs, and have more sex—each step of the way, the state comes down harder, and now they are not only killing brothers, man, but white students too. So listen up there, Iz, I think, in a very reasonable and calm way, that it’s time to blow something up. You with me or without me?

  This is, more or less, what I said to Beck, that night in the Del Rio. And when I finished, she had finished her second beer now, and motioned for another, and her eyes were glistening a little, not just with drunkenness, I felt, but with engagement, and happiness.

  “With you all the way. All the way, there, Benjamin. In fact, I feel the same right now. That’s the problem. I got a cut rate, phony neo-liberal cracker from Arkansas in the White House, cronying around with his big-business friends, illegally selling arms to the Bosnian Muslims, aiding and abetting in globalization that’s playing dice with the economy and sending our environment right to hell, making interns perform sex acts in the Oval Office, and corrupting all the principles of fairness and democracy at every step. Know what I’m going to do? Get some fertilizer and some oil and blow up a federal building.”

  It had been nice while it lasted. “That’s bullshit,” I told her, “and you know it. That’s like saying that Nazis and partisans were equivalent because they both used machine guns. Or even, say, fundamentalist Muslims and Palestinian intifadistas are the same because they both use bombs. I hate that comparison.”

  “Nonsense. You’re twisting the entire question.”

  “I’m not. The most basic, most fundamental descriptive statement you can make about Weather and Timothy McVeigh is not that one was right and the other was wrong. And I don’t mean the obvious fact that Weather, as far as we know today, didn’t kill and McVeigh did. In any case, Weather has all the moral responsibility for encouraging the lefties that did kill, up in Madison and in Michigan and Boston.”

  Rebeccah was trying to interrupt, but I went on. “The fact is, Weather was making a last-ditch protest against a government that refused to obey the Constitution, and McVeigh was protesting a government for obeying the Constitution. Right? All Weather was saying was that this government has to follow what the Constitution says. It has not to declare war without Congress. It has to protect the Bill of Rights. It has not to take up arms against its citizenry when that citizenry avails itself of First Amendment principles. It has not to turn the apparatus of the intelligence establishment against its own populace. It has not to turn the legislating of our country over to the military-industrial complex. It has not to conduct a foreign policy in secret, and then attempt to squash the First Amendment when the press reveals that policy. Period.”

  She answered so quickly that she practically was pinching the corners of her mouth together to pronounce the words. “Okay. I understand. But the fact remains, the criticism of the radical edge of the antiwar movement isn’t from the right. It’s from the left. You go speak to Todd Gitlin, Rusty Eisenberg, virtually anyone who was really involved in SDS, and they’ll tell you that after Weather took over the national convention of SDS, they put the New Left to death. They’ll tell you that they were involved in a movement that could have transformed our entire country, and a gang of thugs—shortsighted thugs on an ego trip and a death trip—ruined everything.”

  I stared at her. “How do you know this?”

  “I’ve met all those guys. Jed Lewis is always having them out here as guest lecturers, and he always invites me to dinner with them.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Aren’t you the enemy?”

  “Ben, for Christ sake. It’s 1996.”

  She was watching me quizzically as she said that. But I shook my head.

  “I don’t see that. I don’t see any of the divisions of the war healed.”

  “That’s because you only speak to people when they’re on the record. You probably don’t even know any vets. You know what this one friend of my father told me? Had done three tours of duty in Vietnam, high ranking in CID, told me the one thing he reproached the Weather Underground with was that they didn’t use ‘command detonated explosives.’ Said that would have been much safer to bystanders than the bombs they did use, which were controlled by timers.”

  “Aren’t you rather contradicting yourself?”

  She answered with decision. “Yes. Yes, I am. But so what? My father has his balls blown off in Vietnam, and he can see the other side of the question. Shouldn’t we be able to also? Now, tell me something about yourself.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like…” She had turned in her seat now to face me, forming a kind of little island of intimacy in the crowded bar, defined by our
knees, which were touching. “Where you’re from. Where you went to school. Have you ever been convicted of a sex crime. You know, general stuff, like who the fuck you actually are?”

  4.

  What did I tell her? Well, I told her a lot, and it’s all going to stay just where it was then: in the sudden intimacy between us. I told her about my family, my parents, my childhood. I told her about college in Stanford and my famous fellowship at Yale. I told her about my job. And then, under close questioning, I told her about things more personal, things I’m not going to tell you. About Dawn Mahoney, for example. About my ambitions. Maybe I even told her about my novel in progress, I don’t know. I was, after all, drunk. What I didn’t tell her, however, was the thing most on my mind.

  You see, Isabel, people my age, when I was a kid, they didn’t see politics the way I did. They had come of age in an incredibly strong economy, had the highest of expectations, and couldn’t care less who was president. But it was in the middle of the strongest stock market in history, when money was literally flowing in the streets of cities like New York, that John Keane wrote in the TLS that three-quarters of the humans in the world didn’t have enough money to buy a book, most people had never, ever made a telephone call, and despite the fact that the World Wide Web was driving the whole world’s economy, less than 1 percent of the entire population of the world had ever even been on the Internet at all.

  In other words, everything that was true when your father got involved in radical politics as a boy was only truer in 1996, only it had been made worse by globalization. And no one cared! No one, among my peers, cared—or at least very few.

  To meet someone like Rebeccah, someone who had come to this kind of political consciousness, who knew as much as she knew…I think, Isabel, that Rebeccah’s awareness, her interest, and her curiosity, they were more attractive than her breasts under the thin silk of her black shirt that night, and that means they were very attractive, very very attractive indeed.

  We closed the bar that night, and because of Rebeccah working in the diner, we were allowed to stay after the bouncer locked the door and Cleo, the mean bartender, gave us a couple of beers for last call. And when they finally told us it was time to leave, we walked out into the empty street, not just me but the pair of us a bit unsteady on our feet.

  A wet little wind was blowing, chasing litter up the deserted street, lamps reflecting off the sheen of the sidewalks, like a stage. She led me down across First and, to my surprise, up a little stone culvert to the old train tracks that cut through the west side of town. Up here, out of the streetlight, a high sky of dirty clouds could be seen to be blowing across an inky sky, the clouds visible mostly by the appearance and disappearance of a waning moon. We each took a track and walked, for a time, in the silence of the wind. At last she spoke.

  “You know what I think?”

  “That you should probably drink a whole lot less if you want to be able to balance on train tracks?”

  “No.” She stepped over and nudged me off my track, then stepped up and, with one hand on my shoulder, balanced along. “About Sinai.”

  “Oh.” My shoulder felt suddenly tense, and she must have felt that too because, to my endless regret, she stepped off the track, walking now with it between us. “No. What?”

  She was quiet for a minute. Then she said the following: “I can’t help but notice that he’s exactly like my father.”

  I turned to watch her in profile. “In what possible way?”

  “In that…both of them, the most heroic things they did in their lives? Facing death? Risking everything for what they believed? Killing people, planting bombs?”

  She stopped talking, looking down as she walked, and after another moment of watching her, I said: “Yes?”

  And now she looked up, smiling. “They both did them for the wrong causes.”

  Walking next to this woman on the train tracks under a sky of scudding clouds, three-thirty in the morning in the spring of my twenty-seventh year. I nearly skipped, so alive did I feel. Such a big night it was, so filled with gusty breezes, the clouds running so fast, like, it seemed to me, the stream of time itself above my head, and next to me, this perceptive, original being.

  We walked in silence off the tracks and through the empty, silent, lilac-scented streets to her house. In front, I stopped and watched her, a cigarette in my mouth, hands in my pocket. For a moment, nothing happened. Then I was just about to turn when she spoke.

  “You know something, Ben?”

  “Um-hmm?”

  “I can’t even imagine kissing someone who smells so precisely like an ashtray.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. Just can’t imagine it.”

  Now she walked up the flagstone path to her apartment, and I turned away up the street, still smoking.

  But, not to put too fine a point on it, when Rebeccah Osborne woke up the next morning—or later that morning—to go on her daily run, she would have encountered, sitting at the end of the little flagstone path, a half-full pack of Marlboro Reds, and she must have understood what it meant, because she called me later that day at the Days Inn and talked to me for a long time, about nothing.

  Date: June 18, 2006

  From: “Daddy”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 26

  A field of brown dirt, acres large and surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. A low, flat concrete structure, ringed by plastic boxes and wooden pallets. A metal fence, next to which lean a few huge tractor tires, followed by a border of rusting Merck shipping containers, so far from the sea. Then, green lawns, and a double-spired red-brick church appears, ministering to the little neighborhood of frame houses slowly developing on the edge of the industrial expanse. A half-disassembled Mustang in a driveway. A neat lawn sporting a cast-iron jockey. And now green trees swaying high over the houses, nearly surreal in their luminescent glow: a swimming, cartoonish caricature of summer, motionless in the windless day, backlit by a high, hot, blazing sky. Driving into Dexter, Michigan, in a rented Ford Taurus, I realized, as if for the first time, that it was midsummer. A dry, hot, Michigan midsummer afternoon. And at the thought, all of my senses—sight, smell, hearing—swooned in unison, and I thought, I’ve seen this day before.

  I had left Milwaukee northward in Donal’s car a week earlier. This enabled me to cross the Michigan state line midwater on the ferry from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to Manistee, Michigan. Like that, I could both break my trail and approach Ann Arbor from the north, the last direction anyone would be expecting. That, I knew, was how Mimi would have done it.

  That, I knew, was how Mimi would have done it, and if I knew anything about this kind of traveling, it was because I had done so much of it with Mimi Lurie during the four years we were underground together, the five years between the town house explosion and the Bank of Michigan robbery.

  Mimi Lurie. On the upper stern deck of the ferry across Lake Michigan, watching for surveillance among the passengers milling on the deck, I saw her as I always saw her, her gray eyes alive, shifting left and right as she took stock of her surroundings, her lower lip between her perfectly white, perfectly even teeth, calculating.

  I had known her for two full years even before the town house, I had known her intimately, and never had I seen her as alive as when we had come to be full-time fugitives, constantly on the move, constantly afraid. Plane and train schedules, buses, directions: she absorbed them instantly, retained them precisely, as if enjoying some kind of genetic predisposition to schedules. Each move—to or from an action, a meeting, a safe house; across state lines; through a government office—was a puzzle to her, and she teased it and worried it until, when she made her move, it was so convoluted, so carefully fabricated, that it could only appear, in its utter randomness, to be innocent.

  Mimi. The Wisconsin shoreline disappeared into a blue haze at the end of the trail of wake
, the two blues of sky and water—approaching, approaching, and then effacing the distant shadow of green, land. I moved to the bow, now watching for the first green glimpse of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and I no longer thought of pursuers, or sanitizing my trail, or safety, but of Mimi. For if Mimi was an inventive, resourceful fugitive, always thinking ahead, never was she better than in the great northern woods of Michigan, where she had first learned to live by her own resources. In fact, everything Jim Grant had so famously known about the Catskills—and Jim Grant had three times led the New York State Police through the Blackheads, Mink Hollow, and Devil’s Tombstone to search for missing hikers—Jason Sinai had originally learned from Mimi Lurie, here, in the Michigan woods.

  Even taking this ferry, here, today. It was thanks to Mimi that I knew that to travel across water made detection much, much harder, for, as Mimi was fond of quoting, “water is a constantly moving and changeable thing.” It does not hold a trail, it does not carry scent, and its passage can be arranged through dozens of local, virtually untraceable means. The last advantage was worth, perhaps, more than the others all put together. Water gave you an unparalleled chance to look if someone was following.