The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  This, it was clear to me, should last forever. This, I was perfectly convinced, mattered more than anything ever had, or ever would. Truth, justice, history, fuck that noise.

  Friday morning, my run came to an end. When I woke, I found her dressed and packing an overnight bag.

  Leaning up in bed on my elbow and starting a piece of nicotine gum, I asked brightly, “So, we’re going away?”

  “I am. You’re not.”

  “Aw, that’s not fair.”

  She sat on the side of the bed. “Sorry, buddy. I’m going home for the weekend.”

  My stomach sank, thinking of the solitude of the weekend ahead of me. Then it sank again, thinking of my editor’s deadline. I wasn’t, however, going to share either of those thoughts with her—I may have been falling in love, but I had my pride, and I had no intention of telling my adored object that I was going to spend the weekend sadly moping in a hotel room, waiting for her, then on Monday morning lose my job. But then my spirits rose again when she spoke.

  “I was thinking, my parents have a cabin in Point Betsie. If you want, we could meet there on Sunday and spend a few days. I was kind of planning to go up there anyway for a little time alone—finish my senior thesis.”

  She said it offhandedly, but I had a sudden feeling that she cared about my reply. So I said: “I don’t think so, Osborne. No thanks.”

  “Oh, okay.” She wasn’t looking at me.

  “See, I’ll be spending Saturday stalking your parents’ place, hoping for a glimpse of you. Where’d you say they live? Mind if I take them hostage?”

  Now she laughed and came to sit next to me. “I’ve been meaning to mention that. I told my dad I’ve been seeing you.”

  I nodded. “Smart move, Beck. Should I start running now or do I have time to get dressed?”

  “Um, my dad did seem to feel there’s a possibility that you’re using me to get to him.”

  “Yeah? Has your dad seen you naked lately?”

  “Not in a while, no. But I think I won’t tell him you’re meeting me in Point Betsie.”

  “So you’re suggesting I’m actually enough of a loser to want to sneak up to your father’s own country house, although he detests me, and secretly screw his daughter there?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “Okay. How do I get there?”

  After she left, I went back to my hotel and called my editor. This time, while his language was more or less the same, the message was somewhat modified. No, I told him, I had not gotten any further on the Sinai story. Yes, I told him, the trail seemed to have gone cold. No, I did not see that Maggie Calaway had won a temporary custody order from a Massachusetts judge of Isabel Montgomery-Grant pending investigation into Julia Montgomery’s current status as a drug addict. I didn’t see, I had to tell him, because I hadn’t yet seen the newspaper, which was embarrassing, given that I’m a reporter. Nor had I noticed that Sharon Solarz’s venue had been moved to Traverse City before he told me; however, I did not tell him this. Instead, thinking quickly, I told him I was going up to northern Michigan on Sunday to be sure to be there for Sharon’s arraignment on Monday morning.

  I didn’t tell him that I would be visiting at the house of the FBI field station chief there for the purposes of conducting a liaison with his daughter, although perhaps I should have. If I had, it may have mitigated the length, if not the content, of the speech he then gave me, the gist of which was that if I could remediate my ignorance about a story that I had myself broken, I could hope to stay over and cover the court appearance, but that if my expenses ran over twenty-five dollars a day I could pay them myself.

  Here, again, the word fuck entered his diction twice, first—interestingly—in its adverbial form modifying the transitive verb pay, and the second time as an adjective modifying the plural noun expenses, as in: “fucking pay your own fucking expenses.” It seemed to me that the language should have differentiated the adverb: fuckingly. The third and final instance of that word, however, seemed to have no grammatical relevance whatever, unless it could be considered a salutation of some sort, or a peroration, as it preceded him slamming down the telephone.

  That day, as I sat in my hotel room reacquainting myself with the Solarz story, I wondered what Rebeccah would make of this. On balance, I thought, it was easier to tell her that I’d be driving over to Traverse City to cover the arraignment than to tell her that I had quit my job and ruined my career so I could avoid having to leave Ann Arbor. In any event, when she called me late that Friday night, her voice thick with sleepy desire, she was fine with it. In fact, it seemed she had decided that I should come up and meet her at the Point Betsie cabin on Saturday, as she didn’t think that it would be good for her health to wait for Sunday.

  “You’ve done something to my hormones, Schulberg.”

  Saturday morning, I started the drive up to Point Betsie.

  Which was how it came about that I, too, joined what must seem to you to be a general exodus of people involved in this story to northern Michigan on the weekend of July 5, 1996.

  3.

  Point Betsie, when I arrived there on Saturday afternoon, was a collection of cabins that sat in thick woods around a little peninsular extrusion of coastline into Lake Michigan. From the wide front windows of Rebeccah’s parents’ house, none of the other cabins were visible, just an endless expanse of blue water rippling under an offshore breeze. Reflected from the water, the sun came into the house from two angles, making absolute the difference between inside and out, light and shadow. The windows open, the muffled clanging of a buoy bell drifted in.

  While Rebeccah opened the house, I wandered through: kitchen of dark wood, simple cabinetry, ordered and bare; bedrooms neatly put away; an office containing a computer and a radio setup, government-issued, no doubt. Upstairs, Rebeccah’s bedroom looked out over the water through narrow windows.

  Without talking, we pushed the two iron frame beds together and lay down, feeling the breeze through the window, listening to the distant sound of the buoy bell. The air, like the light, autumnal, northern and chill, although it was early July. Rebeccah took her shirt off and leaned over me, offering her throat to my lips as she moved her body weight onto mine. When she sat up to open my shirt, I ran my hands over the inverted curve of her waist, over her ribs, and onto her breasts. She looked up, drawing in her breath, and the sun fell from the narrow windows exactly over her throat. And I was raising my hand to that when a noise sounded from downstairs that could only be a knuckle against a wooden screen door.

  With a sigh Rebeccah came back to herself and, after leaning down for a long kiss, rose off me. She slipped on her T-shirt and made her way out and down the stairs. And I, after a moment, heard the following discussion.

  “Hey there, Becky. Your daddy here?” It was a man’s voice; and a well-known man, for he had clearly, by the sound of his voice, let himself into the cabin.

  “Hey, Timmy. No, he’s down to the city. What’s up?”

  “Oh, I was out this way. Thought I’d get these to him rather than have them sent downstate. No big deal.”

  “What is it? Photos?” Rebeccah’s curiosity struck me as polite, as if she were hoping he’d leave. At least, I hoped that’s what she was hoping.

  “Um-hmmm, yep. Check it out. Satellite pictures. You can buy them from a Russian company. Quicker’n getting ’em through government channels. Your dad’s been getting pics of the Linder estate done every other day.”

  “Is that right?” A pause, perhaps while she looked. “That’s the cabin, right? Cool. What’s that?”

  “By the cabin? Bears, I’m guessing. No cars have been up that road—we’d have known, ’cause your daddy has Fish and Game monitoring. There’s two.”

  Another pause. Then: “Well, I’ll get these driven over to your old man, I guess. You talk to him, tell him I stopped by, will you?”

  “Sure will.” The screen door slammed, and Rebeccah came back upstairs. This time I heard her dialing a rotary telephone
and reporting the conversation to her father. Then she came back into the room, took her shirt back off, and swung her legs over me again.

  A lot of other things happened that weekend. We had dinner out in the sandy garden next to the water. We made love again, hidden by the dark in the sand dunes, while a quarter moon crossed the sky. We spent Sunday sailing Rebeccah’s father’s Hobie Cat out of the little yacht club at Point Betsie. And Sunday afternoon, something big happened to me. It happened fast, as these things will, but once it had happened there was no going back.

  We had come in from sailing, and showered together, and while Beck was in the bathroom, I went downstairs to mix a drink. Which I was doing when Beck appeared, in a towel, her skin a flat tone in the light through the kitchen window.

  “What’s this, Schulberg?”

  I knew, right away, something high-stakes was happening. “Scotch and soda. Want one?”

  “I do not.”

  There was a silence.

  “Fuck, Beck. What is it you do want?”

  She answered right away. “A sane, healthy, kind father for my children.”

  “Isn’t that looking pretty far ahead?”

  She looked away now out the window, and I watched her shoulder blades, shadowed in the long light, while the buoy clanged far out on the water. When she turned, she said softly but clearly:

  “This is our first fight, or our last? It’s up to you.”

  We watched each other a moment now, while I tasted the peaty scotch in the back of my throat.

  “What about healthy and kind?”

  “What?”

  “Healthy. And kind. Father. But not necessarily sane.”

  “That’ll do.”

  So we went upstairs after our first of many, many fights. Without a drink.

  Sunday night, we swam in the light of the waning moon, then climbed upstairs together and, in the chill of night, like little children hiding, climbed under the blankets. We slept, arms and legs wrapped together, breath moving and falling in and out of synchronization and syncopation.

  Early Monday morning, before dawn, I woke as suddenly as if a floodlight had been turned on, eyes wide open in the dark. And, as if continuing a discussion rather than waking her in the middle of the night, I said: “Rebeccah. You saw people up at the Linder estate.”

  “Ben?” She sat up. “Are you awake?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re talking in your sleep, right?”

  “Uh-uh. In the pictures. The guy brought for your dad. You didn’t see bears, you saw people.”

  “Jesus. Ummm…no. Timmy said it must be bears. Says the only road in is monitored, and no traffic’s been reported on it.”

  “Uh-huh. And why is your dad monitoring the road?”

  “Ben?” I felt her head shift on the pillow. “Guess he doesn’t want any cars on it.”

  I considered that. Then I said: “And if someone hiked in?”

  She laughed sleepily. “They get there on foot, they’re unlikely to do any damage. My dad won’t care. Mind if I go back to sleep now, you wacko?”

  I did mind, and I told her so.

  What I didn’t tell her was why.

  I mean, I minded losing her company.

  But mostly I minded the fact that once she was asleep, there was nothing for me to do but lie there in the dark, thinking, thinking, and feeling my heart pound with entirely unwelcome certainty.

  Date: June 22, 2006

  From: Multiple Users

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 33

  Time: 10:29:54

  User: Amelia Wanda Lurie

  How did it all happen? It’s so hard to put together now. As if, at the end, everything accelerated, beyond my ability to differentiate event from event, toward its conclusion. As if, after meandering along for the past twenty years, the pace of our lives suddenly grew urgent as our paths veered to collide.

  In fact, it is a trick of memory that makes it seem so. In fact, events continued at exactly the same pace, the two of us drifting slowly—almost accidentally—toward each other.

  Little J. Jason Sinai. Your father. I can see him, that night in his hotel in Dexter—I can see him more clearly than just as if I were there: I can see him as if I were him. I can see him getting off the telephone with Jeddy; I can see him writing down the words “October 1973”; I can see him falling promptly into a sleep so black, so total, and so dreamless that when he woke, in the morning, for a moment he wondered if he had had a stroke.

  October 1973. With all the pain of age that he had for so long been holding at bay, your father swung his legs out of bed and began his trip to October 1973.

  A trip through time that started through space. To Rose City by bus, changing in Flint and Saginaw, each time cleaning his tail carefully, in Flint through a Woolworth’s, in Saginaw through the bus depot itself. In Flint he bought a new sleeping bag, a backpack, some Montrail trail-running shoes: this time, in this season, he felt the role of a suburban Detroit yuppie attracted less notice than anything else. In Saginaw, on the other hand, he switched personae diametrically, and bought a set of camouflage in an Army-Navy store and a complete set of angling gear. For each he invented a narrative: in Flint he was in sales at a company that made hospital accounting software; in Saginaw a machinist—and, incidentally, shop steward in Local One-oh-nine—at a tool and die factory in Kalamazoo.

  In Rose City he filled the backpack with food at the little Superette in town, just across from the diner where he and I had met in October 1973.

  None of this surprised anyone: to see a man dressed for war preparing to hike in to state land in Michigan raised not an eyebrow.

  Time: 11:29:04

  User: Jason Sinai

  A woman, however, would have, which was why Mimi took another route in. She drove her Mercury all the way to Alpena, nearly the northernmost point of the continental state, and sold it at a used-car lot. Then she walked into town, as if she knew the place. She shopped at the little grocery store for supplies and carried them in three brown paper bags to a white clapboard house. A young woman sat on the porch with two children in a muddy yard, next to a rusting dishwasher to which was tethered a puppy.

  The woman seemed entirely indifferent to Mimi’s arrival, as did the children and puppy. The thin man inside, however, sitting in shorts and a T-shirt in front of the TV, took notice, rising to turn off the TV and then sit back on the couch, attentively. Mimi spent a few moments giving him some marijuana—rental for a room in the house, evidently, because when it was done she went upstairs, unlocked a door to a room, and inside, extracted a full pack from a closet from which she changed into well-used hiking boots, shorts, and a plaid shirt. She left the house through the back door, crossing an expanse of stubby grass to the tree line, and stepped out of view into the forest before taking out a compass and a topo map and, crouching, figuring her direction. This she did quickly enough to show her familiarity with the territory—she neither needed to read the magnetic deviation from the map nor had to take bearings from it. Then she shouldered her pack and, holding the compass, pushed deeper into the woods.

  Time: 12:01:51

  User: Amelia Wanda Lurie

  When your father left Rose City by the North State Forest trailhead, the little parking area was deserted. There had been rain during the week, and a couple yards in, he stopped carefully to examine a mud puddle. The mud was thick and drying and held old and new deer tracks and what could have been a coyote or large dog, but no shoes. Looking up and as far as he was able, he counted three mushrooms growing in the middle of the trail. Gingerly, he stepped into the woods and around the mud puddle. Then, still moving slowly and carefully, he made his way through the woods for perhaps two hundred yards, until he came back down to the trail and began to walk.

  Time: 12:07:58

  User: Jason Sinai

  Mimi bushwhacked southwest from the little
house in Alpena, following her compass, until she broke through onto state land and the DEC trail. Then she pocketed her compass and, examining the trail for signs of recent use, as I had done at the trailhead far to the south, moved along carefully for a time.

  Unlike me, what she found was not reassuring. The mushrooms along the path, all sprung up since a recent rain, had virtually to a one been pulled, torn, and dropped. Farther down the trail a flat rock had also been turned, and on examination, four white marks showed on its side, as if scratched by nails. She stopped to consider this. Then, cautiously, she went on.

  The answer came soon. Straightening out, the trail crossed a stand of new pine, growing so thickly that it became a precise corridor through eye-level walls of green. In this corridor, in front of her, a black bear, perhaps three hundred pounds, ambled on all fours, stopping to turn rocks or taste mushrooms. Mimi stopped short and watched the bear as long as she could, until it rounded a turn. Then she went forward again, stamping her feet and whistling. As she approached the turn, she felt a high singing in her head, a high aria of danger, and closer yet, dizziness seemed to swirl behind her eyes. When she rounded the turn, however, the trail stood empty, the bear clearly having slipped into the woods. Feeling watched, she walked on.

  After seeing the bear, Mimi found herself with a sense of being irretrievably deep into the forest, at the mercy of the trail. It was an unusual feeling for her: like me, Mimi feels afraid when there are people by, and safe when she’s alone. Now, however, she felt as if the forest had tricked her, trapped her, and in fact there was no turning back: already the afternoon was enough advanced that she could no longer be out of the forest before nightfall. The thought caused her unaccountable fear. Not the energizing, challenging physical fear, the kind that can be a source of energy, but a debilitating and intellectual one, a force that drains. She walked against it as long as she could, for several hours certainly, and indeed was able to push herself to the little clearing that houses the junction of the state trail and the old logging road south. Here, beyond a barbed-wire fence and a small crowd of No Trespassing signs, the road runs into the Linder estate. Only then did she sit and rest, and when she did so, she realized that she was scared of her destination, not of the forest. The forest, to the contrary, was the ultimate hiding place. The forest, to a fugitive who knows how to use it, is the next best thing to being at home behind locked doors.