The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Early evening, and the sun, cooling perceptibly, cast long light into the little clearing. Her breathing calmed, and silence rose around her, and for a moment there was a pause, in which she could hear a breath of wind making its way lazily through the treetops to the south, moving eastward. It shifted and came toward her, carrying with it colder air from the shadowed depth of the forest, growing in volume as it curled over her, heading north. Then, like an audience stopping clapping slowly, it faded, and the air heated again in the resounding silence under the dome of sky.

  Time: 13:06:05

  User: Mimi Lurie

  Just before sundown, your father emerged from a long stand of primary growth to a rocky vantage on the cusp of a bowl between two short ranges. The valley was heavy with darkness as the sun disappeared behind the hills. The sky, however, was still bright, as if borrowing the light from another day in another part of the world.

  To one side, here, a little clearing sat next to the tree line, and in it he quickly built a fire ring, then gathered wood from the forest floor. When he had finished, the light was nearly gone, but he managed to put out a ground cloth for his sleeping bag and pitch a rainfly made out of a tarp. Then he lit a fire and warmed a can of beans. He ate hungrily, sitting by the little light, drinking from a plastic bottle of water, finishing his dinner with a Snickers bar that, he hoped, would kill his appetite until morning. Then he extinguished the fire.

  A waning half-moon was up, throwing patches of silver into the woods around him. With the fire gone, the distances rose, carrying noises from miles off: a woodpecker, a deer, perhaps a squirrel chattering at danger. The eerily distorted cry of owls rose, warping through the trees and over the little hills, nearly electronic in its spookiness. With a piece of climbing cord Jason hung his backpack ten foot above the ground, then tied off the cord, leaving it swinging softly in the darkness. He felt his way back to the sleeping bag now, and climbed in.

  Time: 13:31:21

  User: Jason Sinai

  Mimi in the morning, wrapped in her sleeping bag, opened her eyes suddenly, feeling afraid. In the chill dawn a mist hung over the forest, shortening distance and muffling sounds. For a time she tried to pierce the muffled silence with her ears. Then in fluid movements she rose, packed her sleeping bag, retrieved her backpack from its hanging place, shouldered it, and moved directly back onto the trail without peeing or having breakfast. In a few feet she found her answer: a thin, delicately curled spoor, still steaming—perhaps coyote, perhaps wolf: an animal had been watching her sleep.

  For a time she walked thoughtlessly, feeling the familiar weight of the pack, the welcome exertion of her legs. For a time, she managed to forget what she was doing here, in these woods of her childhood. The sun came up, warming the air, and intensely she felt the distances around her. She crossed a stream and stopped, using a tiny butane stove and a tin cup from her backpack, boiled water, then mixed in instant oatmeal. A whippoorwill was singing, and without realizing, she began to supply words to the song. It’s really real, Betsy. It’s really really real, Bet-sy. Finished eating, she washed out the tin cup carefully in the running stream, watching the sun reflected in the silvery little rocks at the bottom, the water brilliantly clear and purely cold. Crouching, she dipped her hand into the water, holding it until her bones ached. The words to the bird’s song had come to her from her father, her father who was always playing with his adopted language, who’d invented the birdsong’s words years in the past. It’s really real, Bet-sy, it’s really really real. To her surprise, she found herself crying. It’s really real, Betsy. But why hadn’t it seemed real? The years passing, one after the other. They were really really real. The irrevocable things that had happened, each one making her a different person than she had ever wanted to be. God, she had loved him. She had loved him. She had loved him. Like her hand ached in the cold water, she had loved him, that thoughtful man with his frail body and whitening hair making play with words all the while he was implacably being destroyed by men working for the government, deliberately, his work, his home, his life being removed, one by one. What had he ever done other than try to be decent? Even his famous communism had been nothing but decency, the idea that the gross inequities of the world must have some redress, that there must be a better way. America had saved him from the Nazis, for Christ sake, by VE Day he had put every penny—every single penny—he owned into war bonds. But decency, mere decency, it turned out not to be a right but a privilege, didn’t it? Decency, it turns out, you can die just for it and nothing more: not for justice, not for patriotism, not for truth, just for the chance to be a little fucking decent, that too was only for the rich in America.

  For a long time, Mimi Lurie watched her tears fall onto the surface of the stream and be carried away while in the ice cold water her hand ached, and ached, and ached. The whippoorwill, as if shunning her too, moved off farther from perch to perch, its song—It’s really real, really real, Bet-sy—tracking its passage as it grew fainter and fainter. Then she stood and, cherishing her bloodless hand, began to walk again.

  Time: 14:42:34

  User: Mimi Lurie

  Your father crossed onto the Linder estate from the south, and began following the old logging road in. The dusk thickened, like a syrupy substance poured into the space between the trees. He walked until he could no longer be sure he was on the trail. Then with real reluctance he finally gave into the imminence of night and made a camp, using the last few minutes of night to gather twigs for a tiny fire. That was unfortunate, because it gave him only the barest of light to open a can of chickpeas and one of sardines, which he washed down with water he’d taken from a stream that afternoon. Then, again, he climbed into his sleeping bag and lay awake, staring at the moon, which was no longer discernibly a half, while still days away from a quarter.

  Tomorrow he would reach the Linder cabin. Tomorrow. Tomorrow the question would be decided.

  Time: 15:01:33

  User: Jason Sinai

  Saturday morning at ten o’clock Mimi looked up from the mantra of her boot steps on the trail to see the blue of Linder Pond. Gingerly she stepped around it, watching the big midsummer tadpoles flick away frenetically. At the south edge of the pond lay a field of high grass, at the edge of which she saw emerge the roof of the cabin.

  She lay down on the trail and watched for a long time. Then, leaving her pack next to the pond, she made her way to the front door and swung it open on its rusted hinge.

  Two of the four windows had lost their glass. The wooden floor had sagged in at the middle, and the doors of the cabinets in the little kitchen all hung askew with the slope of the walls.

  Piles of leaves were collected in the corners. A nest had been made, and long deserted, on a rafter, and a decomposed raccoon lay against the wall, under it a leather-bound Goethe, chewed nearly beyond recognition by sharp animal teeth.

  The door swung shut on the breeze. With careful step she circled the room. When the door opened she turned and saw, first a shaft of thick, nearly autumnal midsummer light falling into the cabin, defining a corridor of swirling dust particles as it fell and splashing onto the wooden floor, and second, standing in the doorway, holding a shovel, a middle-aged man with, in his unshaven, wondering face, what was left of Jason Sinai, that is, me.

  “Don’t clean up. We won’t be here long enough to bother.”

  Those were her first words, and she said them in response to my first movement, when I broke the stare we held each other in and moved to scoop up the raccoon’s decomposed body with a rusted shovel I had just found on the other side of the lake from where I had watched her come in. A half hour before, when I had arrived, I had noticed the dead raccoon also. When she spoke, I paused in mid-action, listening without looking at her. Then I continued, deliberately, to shovel up the body and carry it outside.

  Time: 15:07:12

  User: Mimi Lurie

  I found him standing, leaning his forehead onto the shovel handle, outside in the tall grass
where he’d buried the raccoon. The sun, falling unimpeded through miles and miles of blue sky, showed him in cinematic composition. Now, watching him, I saw more of the child I’d known in the middle-aged man. His body had, of course, thickened, but so had his muscles grown. His hair, under his baseball cap, was black—dyed, I assumed—and thinned. And a fine set of wrinkles spilled down his face from his eyes. None of that mattered, however, when he looked up, and showed in his brown eyes that in no essential way had he changed at all. It was a surprise—a noticeable one, apparently, because he now spoke.

  “What?”

  I hesitated. “I’m just surprised.”

  “How little difference the time makes, right?”

  “How’d you know?”

  He shrugged and looked away, and while he did, a line of poetry came back to me: But across the open countryside/The grass is waving its good-bye/To someone waving his good-bye to us.

  Time: 15:12:12

  User: Jason Sinai

  When I could, I answered her question. “I’ve seen Jeddy, and I’ve seen Donal James. I noticed it with them. The age is like a disguise.”

  “That’s not the case with everyone.” Her voice sounded faint in my ears, in the distances of the field around the cabin.

  “We always did think we were better than everyone else, didn’t we?” I spoke, leaning on my shovel, looking at her with helplessness.

  Now it was her turn to shrug. “Time’s been on our side on that one.”

  “Has it?”

  “You tell me, Jasey. Name the neo-con from Weather. Who ratted who out? Who went corporate?”

  I squinted at her now. “Is that a fact?”

  “As far as I know, it is.”

  “You see someone, then.”

  She answered carefully, and I remembered how she was when skirting something she couldn’t say. “I don’t. I read the papers. I’ve seen some people act like jerks, but I haven’t seen one of us ever, in any profound way, betray anyone.”

  By way of response I turned back to the hole I was digging. For a moment I worked, until my shovel hit something hard. Then I leaned down into the grass for a time, then rose again, holding a thin tin box.

  “Remember this?”

  Wonderingly, she reached out for the box I was proffering, and opened it to reveal, wrapped in cellophane, five carefully rolled joints and a pack of matches from the West End Bar, in New York.

  “Jesus, Jasey. I thought you were burying the raccoon.”

  I was smiling. “Twenty-three years. Think this’ll still get us off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Um-hmm. I sealed it tight.” I reached across the distance between us, not looking at her, and took the box back. “Did you bring any soap?”

  “Yeah. In my pack. By the pond.”

  “So, I’m going to take a bath in the pond. If you’ll lend me some soap. Then I’m going to go clean up the cabin, no matter what you say. See, I have nowhere else to go.”

  “And me?” She spoke to my back as I began to walk to the water.

  “You, if you’ll hang out, I’ll make you some dinner.” I spoke without looking back. “Believe it or not, I packed in a bottle of wine. Then we can find out if that dope’s any good.”

  Time: 15:31:19

  User: Mimi Lurie

  I stood, watching him walk away.

  Thinking, so that’s how you meet Jason, is it?

  Clean up in a lake, cook dinner, drink a bottle of wine, and blow a joint?

  As if nothing has changed, and nothing has happened, and you can take up the conversation just where you left it, twenty-two years before.

  Moving slowly, now, I followed him over the uncut meadows to the edge of the lake.

  Date: June 22, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 34

  Sharon Solarz, in person, was a handsome woman with thick black hair and a face that had aged hard, bringing out a certain pugnacity that would not, in my opinion, sit well with a jury.

  In the Traverse City courthouse, she stood while Gillian Morrealle entered a not guilty plea to the judge and the judge remanded her without bail to await a trial date some six weeks forward. Afterward, Sharon was escorted out, handcuffed, and Gillian went out to face the reporters on the courthouse steps. I, alone among the reporters, made my way over to Rebeccah’s dad.

  It was, when you think about it, a pretty comical situation. But of course, I wasn’t feeling very funny. To the contrary, of course, I was pissed. The time when Osborne had a choice about talking to me was long past, and I had been planning to make that clear to him. In the event, he seemed to know it already, because he watched me approach with an impassive face, then shook my hand without surprise and, as if we had an appointment, walked with me out of the courthouse, away from the press, and down the street to his car.

  In town, the day was hot. The weather forecast had called for a storm, and although there was no sign of it in the endless sky of blue, perhaps the heat did have an ominous quality. We didn’t talk about much of anything: what was happening between his daughter and me made it impossible, of course, to venture outside of our most impersonal business. For his part, while he clearly knew that his daughter’s affective life was not within his control, I felt that he still wasn’t able entirely to conceal his dislike of me.

  I didn’t take it personally. In fact, I didn’t think about it at all. All I wanted to do was to stand there and look at him. To look at him and try to understand what in the world he could conceivably be up to. Of course, since we were walking side by side, and the guy was huge, and my neck therefore wasn’t capable of the angle required to look up at his face, that was impossible. So instead I subjected the region about the level of his underarm to my interrogation, and waited for later to stare at him.

  I got my chance, finally, to meet his eye when we reached his car and he stopped by the driver’s door, clearly showing that this was as good as it was going to get for me. So I took a breath and, speaking very carefully, pronounced the following words into the space between us.

  “Mr. Osborne, I need to ask you some questions. They’re on the record, and they have consequences. I think you have to answer them.”

  As soon as I’d spoken, I panicked briefly. Why was I the only journalist here? But he nodded, as serious as I, and I went on confessing my confusion, really, rather than accusing.

  “It doesn’t make sense that Sinai abandoned his daughter to save himself, and you knew that when we first met.”

  I saw calculation, but no surprise, behind his eyes as he considered that. Then he answered quietly:

  “Yes. It doesn’t make sense. And I knew that.”

  “The only thing that makes sense is that Jason Sinai has been searching for something or someone that could exculpate him.”

  Again, he considered that. “Granted.”

  Now I thought for a time, looking away, trying to choose my words.

  “Could…could Mimi Lurie exculpate Jason Sinai?”

  This time he answered readily, with a nod, as if I’d just settled something for him.

  “I want to go off the record.”

  That surprised me quite seriously. But I nodded, and he went on, this time in a surprisingly gentle voice. As if, suddenly, trying to help me.

  “Sure she could. Exculpate him. But think it out, Mr. Schulberg. First he’d have to find her and convince her to testify. And second, she’d have to surrender herself.”

  I was totally lost. And because we were off the record, I told him so. “How does that work?”

  He licked his lips. When he spoke, he lowered his voice. “Think it out. Think it out. Only one was in the bank with Dellesandro. That was Sharon. We know that because we know Sharon had gone through a training program and gotten a job as a teller. She could only do that under her own name, to g
et through the bank’s vetting process, right? Background check and such like. So where were Jason and Mimi?”

  Watching up at him, thinking, I repeated the question to myself, utterly at sea. “In the car, of course. That’s the charge against them.”

  “Exactly. In the car, the famous getaway car. So, Sharon left the bank, carrying one bag of money, and left Dellesandro inside the bank. He kept guard for two, three minutes until the car pulled up. Then he left. It was in that time that the shooting occurred.”

  I nodded. “The shooting occurred while Dellesandro was alone. So what? They’re all still accessories.”

  He answered in a flat voice, then watched my reaction. “Why did Sharon leave Dellesandro alone?”

  What my reaction was, was to stare at him for a long time, trying to hide the mental effort I was making from showing in my eyes. “You tell me.”

  “Mr. Schulberg, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But I do know that if there were two people out in that car, it shouldn’t have been necessary for Sharon Solarz to walk outside to call the driver. Do you follow me? One of the two should have been at the wheel of the car. The other should have been either in the bank, or keeping watch outside, ready to signal the driver to bring the car out. Instead, what happens? Sharon Solarz walks out of the bank, leaving Dellesandro alone. Why? Why did she do that?”