The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Thinking now, as I had before, that October 1973 had been my last chance. By then I had been living as a fugitive for three years, and yet, I found in those weeks in the cabin with Jason, I had not yet become a criminal. I was still a college student gone awry, and everything was still possible for me: I could still keep a house, finish college, get a job. It could be a good job, too: a job that helped people, a job devoted to a cause. I wanted that. I wanted it very much, that October in northern Michigan. And as if we had been waiting for just such an opportunity, our lives fell into a domestic pattern nearly immediately, a deeply satisfying one.

  We stayed until the first snows drove us out: two full months. For two months we lived in total seclusion in the little cabin, cooking tinned food from an occasional trip to town, catching fish and finding local mushrooms, and once, when Jason found a gut-shot deer dying in the woods, a few weeks of venison. I baked from my mother’s recipes, breads so rich and varied that we could have lived on that alone. Jason pulled trout after trout out of the lake, which had once been stocked but not fished in years. We read: old Mr. Linder had left a copy of Buddenbrooks, and I read each evening to Jason, translating the German fluently, if sometimes approximately. We made love on our sleeping bags by the stove. We slept, bodies as close as we could be without becoming one.

  That was when I taught Jason what my father had taught me about the woods. How to keep the cardinal directions in mind, how to travel by topo map and compass, how to read a trail for animal spoor and tracks. I taught him the recognizable declensions of sun and moon, which allowed an approximation of the time as well as direction, and a few key stars. I taught him what mushrooms could be eaten, how to build fires, how to find water, what the noises were at night, and on one memorable occasion, how to deal with an angry black bear.

  A logging road, disused for decades, led out of the little clearing of the cabin and northeast for some miles, probably following an old Indian trail, itself probably originating as a deer path. Where it ended, bootleggers had cut it to the coast to meet boats carrying Canadian whisky; that path too was still discernible, these years later. That was where Jason, who had grown up in the city, developed what was to become a lifelong running habit, running those trails miles and miles through the woods.

  Watching him through the kitchen window one day, returning from his run, his thin, muscled body glistening with sweat, I had realized that I had never been so happy in my life.

  4.

  October 1973. The season’s clock ticked, a degree colder each day. We knew we could not survive a winter in the Linder cabin. But what were we going back to? Days, the questions were held at bay by the business of living, the hard work of surviving in the woods. Nights, by the fire, there was nothing to do but think.

  Little J. Struggling with loyalty to a group of people he no longer felt a tie to, with commitment to causes that he no longer felt he could affect. I can see him, your father at twenty-three, standing by the window of the cabin, shaking his head. “The time for Weather is past. At this point we’re just giving them an excuse to crack down on the left.”

  And me? My voice, echoing through time, a fatal weight carried in every word. “But that’s just the point. Their crackdown has taken on a life of its own. COINTELPRO is becoming the mainstream law of the land. Watergate’s proved that, Jasey—the FBI can do whatever it wants to dissenters, whatever it wants, and if they won’t do it, then the president can collect a few thugs instead. People aren’t going to put up with this forever.”

  “Aren’t they?” He seemed tired, which frightened me more than if he had been angry. “What’s going to change them?”

  “Stop it, Jasey.”

  “No, I mean it, Mim.” He turned now, lit a cigarette from his breast pocket, and leaned against the sink. “You can’t get a country awash in a wartime economy to take any serious notice of its government’s destructive role in the world, or of its own disenfranchised underclass. Never going to happen. Yeah, yeah: you can get them to try to stop the war—when they run out of blacks and have to start drafting white folk, that is. But even then, we’ve proved—proved, Mimi—that the government is completely impervious to popular protest. The higher the level of protest, the higher the level of repression.”

  Patiently, I explained the obvious. “So we give up? What then? How long do you think the third world’s going to stand being raped by us? How long you think it’s going to be before they find a way to slaughter innocents here, just like we slaughter innocents there?”

  “Mimi.” He crouched in front of me now, and while he talked, I looked into the black pupils of his eyes, as if hidden back there somewhere were a magic door, and if only I could find it, I could find the way out of our own logic. “There isn’t going to be a revolution. We did what we did. It’s time to move on.”

  “Jason. We’re already committed to Sharon’s operation.”

  “I don’t want to do it. It’s not even a Weather action.”

  “But I have to do it. It’s just a little thing.”

  “And after?”

  “Jasey. After, we surface. It’ll be our last job.”

  On an early December morning, as the first flakes of snow started to fall from a low gray sky, we packed our few belongings for the hike out. Cleaning the cabin’s tiny kitchen for the last time, watching the lowering sky, I felt tears in my eyes. And in that moment, I think, everything could have changed, then, before it was too late. Had not Jason approached me from behind, linking his hands across my stomach, and speaking softly.

  “Okay. Mim. I’ll come along a few steps. It’s our last job. Okay?”

  What did I feel? I held my breath. Then I let it out. “Okay.”

  “What’s the first move?”

  “Let’s go find a place to live near Ann Arbor. I’ll contact Sharon. We’ll start planning for the spring.”

  “Why spring?”

  There were three answers to that question. I gave him two. “Sharon’s got a trainee position at a Bank of Michigan branch in the Briarwood Mall. We’re going to give her the time to become a teller. And then, in the spring we can get away through the Upper Peninsula, after the snow melts. Vincent’s a careful planner.”

  “Vincent?”

  “Dellesandro. He’s Sharon’s contact.”

  “What do we do until spring?”

  “Establish identities. Work with Weather. Try to convince them to join us.”

  “Okay. But one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  I felt his thin arms tighten around me. “We go back to Weather as a couple. No collective living, no group sex. Just us. If they don’t like it, we leave.”

  I turned in his arms, now, and let my face into the crook of his neck, into the pulse-warm skin of his neck.

  What I said, my voice muffled in his neck, was: “Yes, Jasey. That’s a deal.”

  But what I was thinking, as I held onto him before leaving the cabin for the last time, was how much easier that would make the months ahead. Because I had, by this point, no doubt whatsoever that I was pregnant. In fact, I was three months pregnant, with a child due to be born in June.

  Which was the third reason why the Bank of Michigan robbery had to wait until spring.

  Dawn. July 2, 1996, sitting above the Huron River on a railway bridge, my head was in my hands now. Not seeing either the water running below nor the snow falling on that day twenty-three years before as we put on our packs and began the hike out to the Greyhound depot in Rose City.

  Just seeing blackness, pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes, like a child.

  And then, of course, I rose.

  Not being a child.

  Being an adult who had long ago gotten used to facing the truth. Stood, and walked across the bridge back to the path out of the Arb.

  If I was to be in the Linder cabin by the following weekend, I had a lot to do.

  Date: June 21, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg” .com>

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 32

  I feel a little guilty, being the one to tell you this part of the story. See, there are ways in which I have nothing in common with the others in what, I’m told, your mother likes to call “the Committee.”

  Obviously, I am responsible for everything that happened to your father in the summer of 1996, including that he abandoned you in a hotel room. Don’t think that the rest of the Committee often lets me forget that. Still, that’s not what I mean.

  I mean that of all of us, including you, I am the only one for whom the summer of 1996 was unequivocally a happy time. It was, for one thing, the time of my life when I made my career a national rather than a regional one.

  And that it was the time of my life in which I fell in love with Rebeccah Osborne.

  Isabel, I don’t know how you remember that summer, if you remember it at all. I don’t know if you remember it as a time of terror and dislocation, or if you’ve come to see it in another sense. After all, even given that you are so much younger, you must have figured out by now that you are not unique, that there are other children who had experiences much like your own, children of radicals, red-diaper babies.

  Not knowing how you remember that summer—not knowing, in fact, even how you are reacting to this—I have no choice but just to tell you what happened, and how it happened.

  And so, here is the truth of what happened, starting from that Tuesday morning of July 2, 1996, after Mimi Lurie closed the Del Rio Bar and went to walk in the Arboretum.

  When we left the Del after closing, Rebeccah and I walked Dr. Lewis home all the way across town to Awixa Drive, because he was, not to put too fine a point on it, loaded. More loaded, I thought, than made sense for a man who had had, with us, perhaps three or four drinks, which made me think he had been drinking in the afternoon—not to mention that he had a certain vagueness about him that strongly suggested marijuana. So loaded, in fact, that it was not until we got to his house that he remembered that he had left his car next to Angell Hall, and Rebeccah and I had to take his car keys and promise to park his car over by Rebeccah’s and bring it to him the next morning.

  Not that either of us were in any shape to drive, either, but from the Del to Rebeccah’s house was only a few blocks. When we left Professor Lewis at his front door, swaying somewhat, he collected himself enough to say to us frankly, “I haven’t done a very good job as an authority figure tonight, have I?”

  Rebeccah answered pleasantly, with that wide smile of hers. “Sure you have, Dr. Lewis.”

  I, perhaps mistakenly, took exception to that, on the grounds of journalistic accuracy, and pointed out that he had certainly not shown his authority in the matter of holding his liquor. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he found that comment less amusing than Rebeccah and I did. Still, he smiled while he watched us trying to repress our mirth—Rebeccah actually crossed her arms over her stomach and bent double. We were loaded too, after all.

  “Thanks a lot. It’s been a very strange day for me. One day, I’ll tell you about it.”

  That was a promise he was to make good on, although not until years later, when we started putting this account together for you.

  • • •

  As for me, I got a little hint as to how strange Professor Lewis’s day had been when I took his car keys from him. They were to an Avis rental.

  “Why would this guy have rented a car?” I wondered to Rebeccah on the way back across town. In fact, I guess I wondered it several times, because I was still wondering as she—less drunk than I, or so she claimed—drove it through the deserted, predawn streets to her house.

  “Hey, the fuck do I know? Maybe he’s having a secret affair.” Frowning with the effort to drive normally—she was, as I had assured her when she’d insisted on driving, equally drunk as I—she answered irritably, but I didn’t buy that. Ex-hippies don’t have secret affairs, they have open marriages, and I muttered as much to Rebeccah, but not loudly enough or clearly enough for her to hear, I think, as my head was thrown back on the seat and I was feeling too splendid to care.

  I cared even less when we got out of the car outside her house, and she started up the flagstone path with, it seemed to me, the expectation that I would follow. But no: halfway up she turned to face me, and in the night air we regarded each other for a moment.

  “So, do I still smell like an ashtray?”

  She answered by stepping toward me, so close that I could feel the warmth of her body against mine, and, with her left cheek next to my right, sniffing profoundly. Then she stepped back, so that her eyes were inches away from mine.

  “Nope. You smell like a piece of nicotine gum.”

  For a moment, we watched each other. On the slight slope of the path, she was a hair taller than I, and behind her head I saw over the roofs of the low houses and up to the sky. Then she said:

  “You know, the bozo who heads the squash team and has a job waiting for him in the Justice Department?”

  Not daring to speak, I nodded.

  “The one with the chiseled cheekbones and Paul Newman’s body?”

  Nod.

  “I mean, like, Cool Hand Luke Newman? Like, Cool Hand Luke who’s planning to be a U.S. senator after he makes his first couple mil, and wants to marry me?”

  This time I didn’t even nod, and she smiled.

  “He’s history.”

  “Is that right?” The words may well have come out in a falsetto.

  “Um-hmm.” Her lips against mine were dry, slightly chapped, soft in a way that seemed an insight into not her physicality, but her personality. Then they were gone.

  “I get off work tomorrow at ten.”

  This time my voice was hoarse. “Yeah? What time do you start?”

  Surprised. “Five. Why?”

  I looked at my watch. “That gives us more than twelve hours to make love.”

  Which were the last words I got in before she disappeared up the path and behind her front door, and I was walking home through the infinite, kind, midwestern night.

  2.

  How long had it been since I last felt good? That, if you’ll forgive me, Isabel, is what I was thinking about on the way back to my hotel, that night. My memory felt so corrupt, so littered with things I did not want to think about. But that night, under a sky of smudgy clouds, walking through a hot midwestern night in a pretty college town, if I could dance, I would have.

  On Wednesday morning, I called my editor and put in for the balance of vacation I had owing me, which amounted to nearly a month. The reaction I got was not so good. It involved, to my way of thinking, the words fuck and fired far more than behooved an august figure such as he. We ended the conversation with the understanding that the latter word would become applicable to me on Monday morning if I was not at my—and here, the former word came back into play in its adjectival form, morphologically identical to the gerund—desk by nine A.M.

  Upon which, with mutual expressions of goodwill, we hung up.

  It must have been right around then—that morning, while I stretched out on my hotel bed and fondly considered the various options my editor had left open to me, some of them requiring a physical dexterity I doubted that I possessed—that, for her part, Mimi Lurie was calling the owner of the Del Rio and telling him an emergency required her to take off for a while. And it was roughly the same time that, for his part, your father was leaving Dexter toward the north. It was also the day that Sharon Solarz was transported to Michigan, because the papers that morning showed her being led into jail in Ann Arbor, and a banner headline showed that a state judge had ordered a change of venue for her trial, which would be in Traverse City, due to the court’s concern about demonstrations and counterdemonstrations in Ann Arbor.

  None of that is what I remember that day for. In fact, I don’t remember the day at all, just the night, when I met Rebeccah at the
Del after work.

  Here, too, when I think back, there turned out in retrospect to be a hint that all was not as it seemed. This was contained in the surprising fact that the black-haired bartender who hated me was absent, the bald owner with the white fringe of hair having taken her place. When he came to serve us, Rebeccah turned out to be on good terms with him too, making me wonder, not for the first time, why a young Republican like her seemed to be on such chummy terms with every sixties burnout in Ann Arbor. He explained to her that the black-haired bartender who hated me, Cleo, had been called away for a few days on an emergency. The significance of that, of course, was lost on us. When he left, I turned to Rebeccah.

  “Tell me, why is a young Republican like you so chummy with every sixties burnout in Ann Arbor?”

  “Hey, Schulberg?”

  “Yes, Osborne.”

  “Shut up. Or do you want me to call the squash-team bozo back?”

  The answer to that question was, no, I did not.

  And that was only all the more true when, later that night, after I had walked her back to her house on East Ann Street, instead of leaving me on her flagstone path, she led me into the front door, through her neat little apartment, and into her bedroom, where, first turning me around, examining me gravely, as if for hidden defects, she put her hands on my chest and pushed me through what seemed like miles of high, thin air onto her bed.

  • • •

  An event that was, apparently, nearly as momentous for Rebeccah as for me, because Thursday she actually took the entire day off from her senior thesis—an exception to her puritan work ethic that I was not to see repeated ever again. Of course, it also was the Fourth of July.

  I spent the day watching the muscles of her back and neck from the stern seat of a canoe, which we rented to paddle on the Huron; the evening watching those muscles from a variety of angles as she cooked me dinner in her kitchen, and the night conducting a closer examination of their intricate, complex strength, in her bed, while the Fourth of July fireworks boomed in the distance. When she slept, she did so with her right arm across my chest, allowing me the chance to continue my inspection over the rounded muscle of her shoulder, all the while using the pad of my fingers to understand more precisely the fantastically tender skin on the back of her neck, extending, with an infinitely subtle set of gradations, into her back.