by Neil Gordon
That was a chance you had to take advantage of whenever you could.
Earlier that day, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, under a noonday sun, I had pulled abruptly into the ferry terminal, put the Jeep Cherokee in line, then climbed right out and onto my hood and stared backward. The view was perfect: anyone pulling in here had to come to an immediate stop, and a car deciding to drive on would be sure to show some hesitation. As for the people around me, I was unconcerned with what they thought: there could be any number of reasons why a man would do what I was doing: standing on top of a car, a salute over my eyes against the sun. Say, looking for my wife. “She’s coming up from our place in Oak Park with the kids and the dog; me from downtown. Figured we’d stay in touch by cell, but damn battery’s out again—I cannot remember to recharge that thing. Hell if I know whether she’s already crossed or not.” I rehearsed the explanation to one of the other white middle-aged males in line standing next to their Explorer, or Suburban, or Jimmy. My company was Donnelley, the massive midwestern web printer—web in the old sense. We were up to our cabin in the woods in Point Betsie. I rehearsed it, but I didn’t say it: as long as no one was paying me any attention, there was no reason to interact.
But no one asked, despite the geniality with which I gazed, casually, around at my fellow passengers. And no one was following. On the boat, I bought a Heineken and drank it, watching the wake west: Lake Michigan at two o’clock on a late June afternoon, pleasure boats moving at random pattern behind them; a tanker going in to Chicago; a regatta at distance to the right. As the Wisconsin shoreline disappeared, I examined the other passengers, slowly, carefully sectioning off quadrants of the deck and looking at faces. No one moved in a way that might be anything other than the random milling of boat passengers. No one looked at me with a casual glance that was not casual. No one looked first at me, then at someone else. That didn’t mean that Wisconsin police hadn’t followed me to the shoreline and called ahead, nor did it mean that the ferry’s bridge was not in touch with the police: the disadvantage of a ferry was that everyone knew where it was going. But that, too, had its advantages: if someone were waiting on the Michigan coast to start running a surveillance pattern, the weak point of their operation would be the start.
And I was watching.
I wore khaki shorts and a black T-shirt with a pocket, neither bought with Donal at Banana Republic but afterward, at a Gap. I wore my hairpiece, under a Cubs cap, but the phony mustache had been replaced with a real one, grown in and dyed black and part of an emerging goatee. I wore sunglasses, a camping model with side panels protecting from peripheral glare, and the picture was completed by, visible through the back window of the Cherokee, a backpack and sleeping bag, a tent and binoculars, a canteen, a fishing pole, a camping shovel, a packable tackle box, and sticking out the back window, a molded plastic kayak. I had bought it all from an advertisement I’d seen in a Laundromat bulletin board in Racine, when I’d gone to get my passport.
If anyone had asked, at home in Chicago I was a pressman in the Donnelley plant, the one down by the convention center. That was easy—I’d worked a web press out in California in 1973, just after the Pine Street factory had been busted, when like everyone, I was rebuilding my thing from the ground up. And if I met anyone who worked for Donnelley—unlikely, but I’d be sure to ask first—I did the same job, but at Edwards Brothers in Ann Arbor, and if they knew people at Edwards, I was new, just moved up from Pennsylvania. Just to be safe, on the way to the ferry, I’d gone to Madison and stopped at a cybercafé; done a search on web printing and come up with the on-line version of Production Weekly from Ziff Davis, in which I’d been able to familiarize myself with the issues a pressman would be apt to discuss nowadays: on-demand printing, computer-generated plates.
I had another reason to get on the Internet. After reading Production Weekly on-line, I went to www.uofm.edu and did a search at the University of Michigan faculty directory. Then I went to Hotmail, opened a new account in the name of Paul Potter—a name anyone my age recognizes as a onetime president of SDS—and sent a single e-mail to [email protected]. When that was done, I continued east to the ferry, slowly, convolutedly, stopping often and always looking back.
• • •
By the time I came to the ferry and stood up on my hood, watching the cars pull up, shading my eyes against the high sun with a salute, I’d been sleeping out of the back of Donal’s Cherokee for four days, making a slow way from Milwaukee north to Racine, over to Madison, slowly putting my character together, pausing at the little intersections of inspiration and luck to add details to my emerging identity. It had been inspiration to stop at every Laundromat I passed to see if there was a neighborhood bulletin board, luck to find the grunged-out car mechanic selling his father’s old stuff. The mechanic’s father had been a serious camper, served in Korea, died the year before of bone cancer. The mechanic didn’t give away much about whether he had liked his father or not, just waited while I looked quickly through the things, spread out in the living room of his father’s small house, his mother sitting, back to us, in the kitchen. I went back to the Laundromat, washed the sleeping bag in the industrial capacity machine. Waiting, I read in a local paper where the cost of paper, a big industry here, was rising due to a new environmental initiative passed by Wisconsin’s left-leaning legislature. Seemed midwestern printers were going as far as the Scottish Highlands, where years of forest planning was starting to yield the first harvests of spruce, for paper.
That was a good day, three solid pieces falling into place.
Other days were not so good. South of Grayling on the 75, a state trooper pulled up next to me, looked up at me with attention, spoke to his partner, and looked back for a long moment. I looked down at the cop, nodded, then back at the road. When after a full thirty seconds—horrible seconds, each one longer than the one before; familiar seconds, nearly identical to those Mimi Lurie spent on the Troy, during the Coast Guard search—they were still next to me, I looked back and with an interrogative expression motioned my head to the verge, mouthing, “Should I pull over?” The cop shook his head, and only then did the cruiser pull ahead of me and into the distance.
Worry grasped at me for a long time after that. I left the highway at the next exit and drove north on two-lane roads, reading a map next to me on the seat. In the Big Rapids State Park I registered, put my car next to a trailhead, and hiked into the woods. Then I left the trail and doubled back, making a bivouac fifty yards uphill from the trailhead and watching my car through the binoculars. If there were anything like a nationwide search for me they would, I knew, include the state parks registry—the local federal marshal’s office would be sure to check the park ranger’s log, since the vast northern woods were made for criminals. I watched for two days, lying there virtually without moving but to wriggle my sleeping bag over my body during the nights. I’d brought no food, so I didn’t eat; I had luckily had a fresh thermos of black coffee in the car, which I drank in tiny sips, carefully keeping a caffeine headache at bay. For two days no one came. Still, I spent another two days carefully picking my way downstate again on local roads, circling back through parking lots, side streets, to look for anyone who might be following.
Was any of it necessary? Perhaps I had shaken off a pursuer; perhaps there was no one there to elude. The ID was good; the news reported me consistently as missing, the issue kept alive by the steady progress of Sharon Solarz’s arraignment in Ann Arbor. But each occasion of caution mathematically steepened the probability curve of my getting caught, and if so far that curve was, happily, an abstraction, the time could come when mathematics became very real indeed.
More important, maybe, was that if I were going to succeed in what I had in mind to do, I felt I owed it to Mimi to travel not just clean, but very clean.
On the boat, I watched Wisconsin disappear 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 gr
een land.
When the green disappeared entirely, I walked to the front of the boat, peering into the distance until in a precise reverse process, Michigan appeared.
Saginaw. Altogether, it was two days for me to cross the state of Michigan, watching behind, and when I was convinced I was clean, I drove into town and rented a U-Haul Storage shed, one of twenty-five garages built into the ground floor of a largely deserted warehouse, up the 75 behind a multi-acre generating facility. The clerk, an Indian or Pakistani boy, clearly filling in for his father, was eating a curry while he worked with an Eight Is Enough rerun on a black-and-white TV. That was why he neglected to check my driver’s license when I placed it—admittedly at an inconvenient angle—on the counter. I quickly pocketed the card lest the boy remember and wrote an invented name on the contract. This, I took as a big—big—piece of luck.
In the storage garage I neatly packed the Korean vet’s belongings and with regret parked Donal’s Cherokee—I did not want to part with it, but the Pakistani or Indian boy’s error, which left no paper trail to Robert Russell, made it an unmissable chance to break the chain between me and Donal. Inside the storage garage, by the light of a bare, low-wattage bulb, I found the clothes I’d bought with Donal where I’d carefully packed them on the inside of the zip-up cover holding the spare wheel. I dressed now in black jeans, a blue denim shirt, and Timberland boots, and packed the rest of the clothes into a small leather bag. I took also my toiletries and makeup. Then I locked the storage garage, pocketed the key, and walked the side of the road back into town.
In a motel room, that night, local TV advertised a secured credit card to credit risks. “Foreclosure? Bankruptcy? Bad or no credit? Visit the Credit Doctor.” Immediately following the thirty-second spot, it was repeated in Spanish. In the morning I secured a card with two thousand of the dollars my brother had given me, paying an annual charge for the card of three hundred dollars. The Credit Doctor also offered loans as low as fifty dollars, on a hundred percent interest, provided the borrower was ready to have the Doctor electronically receive payment directly from the borrower’s employer. I found a Rent a Buggy franchise next and rented a 1991 Ford Taurus. On the floor, under the seat—I was hiding my makeup there, having slit the carpet with a single-edge razor blade—I found a card from an auto repossession company.
And so it was in a 1991 Ford Taurus that I approached Dexter, Michigan, some thirty miles west of Ann Arbor, through Michigan countryside of a nearly surreal green, a swimming, cartoonish caricature of summer, shimmering in the windless day. And so it was I thought, I’ve seen this day before, and my senses swooned in unison, sight, smell, hearing. I’ve seen this light dropping from a high Michigan sky of pastel blue; I’ve smelled this dry heat, tinged with balsam from the great softwood forests to the north; I’ve heard the vast ululation of silence through these fields of green; and I’ve tasted this sense that nothing is real, nothing is real.
And at the thought such a wave of familiarity poured through me, for of course, such a sentiment was an old, old one, felt by a near child, a college student, who first came to Dexter with Jed Lewis nearly thirty years before.
Date: June 19, 2006
From: “Jed Lewis”
To: “Isabel Montgomery”
CC: maillist: The_Committee
Subject: letter 27
Paul Potter. Paul Potter, with a Hotmail address.
A surprising e-mail, to put it mildly.
In 1965 Paul Potter was the president of SDS and the author of a speech delivered at an early march on Washington that I can still quote by heart. I should be able to: standing in front of the Washington Monument on April 17, 1965, Paul Potter convinced me in three statements, echoing across a sea of people, that everything in my life had to change.
First he said:
The further we explore the reality of what this country is doing and planning in Vietnam the more we are driven toward the conclusion…that the United States may well be the greatest threat to peace in the world today. That is a terrible and bitter insight for people who grew up as we did.
Then he said:
I do not believe that the President or Mr. Rusk or Mr. McNamara or even McGeorge Bundy are particularly evil men. If asked to throw napalm on the back of a ten-year-old child they would shrink in horror. But their decisions have led to mutilation and death of thousands and thousands of people. What kind of a system is it that allows good men to make those kinds of decisions?
And finally, in the calm and humble passion of his delivery:
I believe that the administration is serious about expanding the war in Asia. The question is whether the people here are as serious about ending it. Maybe we, like the President, are insulated from the consequences of our own decision. Maybe we have yet really to listen to the screams of a burning child and decide that we cannot go back to whatever it is we did before today until that war has ended.
Paul didn’t mean to convince me to do what I did for the fifteen years after I heard that speech. I went much beyond anything he ever did, including participating in the illegal and immoral dismantling of his SDS, including engaging in multiple fistfights with multiple policemen, including planting numerous bombs at numerous targets, including being arrested again and again, including meeting with my country’s enemies on foreign shores, including plotting the illegal overthrow of my government. But he never stopped being my dear friend, not even the years I was underground, and when he died in 1984 of cancer, a larger part of my happiness than I cared to admit died too.
His was the first death of a friend between 1970, when the town house blew up, and 1984, and as it turned out, the first of the slow series of deaths of friends—from cancer, from accident, and from suicide—that all of us experience on the other side of fifty.
In retrospect it strikes me as fitting.
Paul ended my innocence about life in 1965, and some twenty years later he ended my innocence, too, about death.
When, therefore, in April 1996, I got an e-mail from Paul Potter, barring the improbable existence of an Internet Service Provider from the Great Beyond, I felt strongly that it must be from someone else. You see, I am a highly trained academic. My mind leaps to these insights.
Like a gazelle.
For a time I contemplated the e-mail on my university-issue Mac in my Angell Hall office—my extremely good corner office, overlooking campus and guarded by a secretary, as befit the chair of the Honors Program, which I was in 1996—not bad for a person who had been on academic probation from 1970 to 1980, while on the FBI’s most-wanted list.
Well, I remember it’s Brendan’s birthday coming up. What are you going to get him? Not shoes again? How about a barrel of those big pickles I loved when I was a kid?
I looked at this e-mail for a long time.
Then I erased the letter and left the office. In a moment, I came back and set the computer’s hard drive to defragment—naggingly, I’d reflected before I’d left the building that the erase command only trashed the name; the file remained on the hard drive until it was reformatted, or—which also worked—defragmented.
I crossed the campus in noonday sun, a man of fifty whose age showed neither in his hair, which was full, nor in his carriage, which was straight, nor in his clothes, which—during summer semester anyway—were virtually the same jeans and T-shirt I’d have worn on this same campus thirty years before, but in his face, where wrinkles radiated out from the corners of his eyes, and his stomach, which had grown. My son, Brendan, had a birthday on July 1, which was a few days away, a Monday. But why would I get him shoes? I walked across campus, down Liberty into Sam’s Shoes, where I wandered, looking: Stride Rite, Timberland, Sebago, Dexter.
Dexter.
From nowhere, like a soap bubble rising and bursting, I saw big German pickles served out of a tub in a dark bar. It was somewhere I’d been with Jason, somewhere not far. We had driven there. It had been summer. And the town it had
been in had been…Dexter.
Now it came back to me in a detailed memory. It was during the building of the I-94 overpass, and we’d gone right into the Army Corps of Engineers field office to requisition dynamite. Nan, who had in this action as in most done all the intelligence out of a secretarial job for a related company, had gotten it all: letterhead, paperwork, company routine—all the way down to floor plans of the field office’s entrance, allowing us to walk in, wearing jeans and hard hats and carrying rolled-up blueprints, talking casually, and go directly to the right office. Nan had gotten it all, and so solidly, so competently, that we hardly felt afraid handing in the forged requisition form.
Nan, myself, Jason, and Mimi: this was the Ann Arbor “affinity group,” later “cell.” Mimi planned, Nan executed. Nan was a mole, they used to say, but Mimi was a field officer. Nor was it lost on your father and me that we were rank and file. Waiting for the Army Corps office to fill the order, we’d done what troops do everywhere: stood in a bar, drank too much, a bravado to show each other how unscared we were. Mimi watched into the window of the office from a parked car with binoculars, and when she saw that the explosives had been pulled and packed in four little wooden boxes, she’d walked into the bar, ignoring us, and ordered a Stroh’s. If she had ordered Bud, we would have walked out and split up to the two parked cars, your father waiting for Mimi to join him, me waiting for Nan. As was, Little J and I finished our beers, went out and picked up the dynamite, and drove it straight from Dexter across the country to Oregon, knowing that crossing the other way, to Michigan, was dynamite that had been stolen out there. That, too, was a Mimi invention: the risks of transporting explosives, she said, were less than the risks of being traced ex post facto by a chemical signature found at the site of the explosion. That’s why, insofar as the FBI ever traced any of our explosives, they never found the suppliers—at least, not within two thousand miles of the explosion itself.
