The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  My mother. “Because of you. Because if he did, you’d be the child of two legendary radical criminals. Sinai thought that even if he proved himself innocent, you’d still be sacrificed to the altar of the B of M for the rest of your life.”

  My father, disagreeing. “I don’t buy that. Even if Sinai…your father, had turned himself in, no way he’d be able to prove his case—not without Mimi’s testimony, or Sharon’s. Dellesandro, after they caught him, he never said a word about it. In my opinion, your father was looking at seventy-five to life, hard time. And I knew Mimi. She was not going to turn herself in, not if all she was doing was giving you an inmate mother. All your life, that would never go away. Your fugitive mother. All your life, they’d be watching you, keeping tabs on you, looking for contact with your mother. You’d never have any normalcy.”

  “Normalcy?” For the first time I looked up at them. “What about you, Daddy? An FBI agent consorting with a federal criminal, illegally adopting their child?”

  He answered without hesitation. “That’s our decision, not yours. We’ve always been willing to face the consequences. I’m lucky it took this long.”

  “Mom, Dad. Okay.” I sighed, tiredly, as if talking to children. “Okay. I get it. Everyone has to have birth parents. These are mine. Can we stop talking about it now?”

  “Well, yes and no, Rebeccah.” That was my father, and his tone was soft.

  “Which means?”

  “Which means”—it was my mother answering, and the answer was not without bitterness—“we have to see what’s about to happen. Your boyfriend’s already figured it out. And he’s a journalist. And then, the chances of Mimi Lurie surrendering to testify that Jason Sinai was not at the Bank of Michigan robbery, because he was away giving his daughter to us—they’re virtually nonexistent, Beck, there’s just no way she’s going to do that.”

  “So? Then what’s the problem? You’ve kept your secret this long.”

  “Well, darling, it’s not that simple. If Mimi won’t come forward, then we’ll have to.”

  If it were possible to be more shocked, then I was.

  “You’re not telling me you two are going to exculpate Jason Sinai?”

  They, too, looked at me in surprise.

  “Of course we are, Beck. If we can.”

  “But why?”

  “Because of his daughter, of course. His other daughter. Your half sister.”

  They watched each other now, each, no doubt, enumerating for themselves the consequences of that corroboration. And then, my mother smiled, and in that smile I saw the courage of people living purely in reality.

  “Don’t look so glum. Your father and I always looked forward to the chance to tell the truth. We’re proud of what we did that night. And we’re proud of every single thing we did that resulted in you.”

  Date: June 25, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 40

  And as your sister’s parents told her the deepest secrets of her life, way up north in the Linder cabin, Jason Sinai and I sat watching the two suns converge, one lowering out of the sky, one rising along the surface of the pond.

  It had taken him perhaps twenty minutes to confirm everything that I knew. Twenty minutes to dot the i’s and cross the t’s; to give me the one or two details that I hadn’t figured out.

  Now, finished, we sat side by side in the doorway of the Linder cabin and watched the two suns converge.

  I don’t know what he was expecting me to say. What I did do, however, was acknowledge the one fact he was still keeping from me.

  “Mimi’s run, hasn’t she?”

  He smiled, wryly. “I was hoping to have a little more time with her.”

  “Why’d you let her go?”

  “Oh.” He took in, and then let out, a deep breath. “If she’s to help me at all, she has to surrender. See what I mean? She can’t be captured. So she needed the head start. When the FBI gets here, they can chase me. They’ll think Mimi and I are together. I’ll lead them astray to the west, and she’ll escape to the east.”

  “Why’ll they think you’re together?”

  “Because you’ll tell them that. Won’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Will Mimi surrender?”

  I watched him in profile for a long time now, this strange man, staring into the distance, squinting against the suns. Then he actually smiled, and wearily stood up.

  “No.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “Oh, well. Before she can not surrender, she has not to be caught.”

  We walked back to the cabin now, and while I watched, he began changing his clothes from his backpack: jeans to shorts, and a pair of new Montrail trail-running shoes. I watched from the door, hearing the wind ripping the trees back and forth behind me.

  Then I said:

  “You know, I’m planning on making you my father-in-law.”

  He nodded, not looking at me but at his running shoes, which he was lacing carefully. “I gathered as much. Not very professional of you, is it, Schulberg? Falling in love with your subject’s daughter.”

  “Count yourself lucky, Mr. Grant. It’s a slippery slope, these ethics concerns. Maybe I’ll keep sliding down. Even mislead the police for you.”

  “I hope so.” He rose now, and in his smile I saw suddenly who I was dealing with: a man who had been living without pretense or illusions for most of his life. He turned and busied himself with assembling a small collection of objects—a tin container, some matches, some food, and some water—to go into a little day pack. When he finished, for a time, your father held my gaze from the depth of his brown eyes, but I did not think he was really seeing me. Then he said to me the following, and I tell you, Izzy, I knew as I was listening that I was going to be able to remember what he was saying well enough to write it all down, so deep an impression was he making on me.

  “You know, Benny, it was the best dream we ever had. That these motherfuckers could be made to stop. That the machine, the corporate machine, the government machine, the war machine, that it could be turned off. That real rights of real people could come before money. That ecology could come before corporations. It was the best dream we ever had, ever, and it put us in the same company as all the other people around the world who had the same dream; all the people who’ve dreamt the same dream in all the history of mankind. From the very beginning. Do you hear me?”

  I nodded, and he went on. “You can listen to what everyone says, you can think what you want. You can listen to the right-wing sons of bitches or the left-wing phony pundits. There’s no difference. You can think we fucked it all up, killed the antiwar movement, destroyed the New Left, whatever you want to. But when you remember me and Mimi, remember that no matter what any of our old friends say, the fact is that in every possible way—race, war, the environment—we were right. Our government has rolled over that dream, every single day since the sixties. Every single day it’s gotten worse. The poor are poorer, the rich are whiter, and the world is a worse place than it’s ever been before. And every single ex-hippie who occupied their Ivy League school’s cafeteria or got hit in the head at a protest, every one of them sitting back with their copies of the Nation, watching their kids go to college and checking on their 401 (k)s—every single one of them who tells you that tired bullshit about how badly we fucked up: they’ve lived their whole lives at the expense of what they once dreamed. It was the best dream any of us ever had, and that it failed, Benny, that the machine rolled on over the poor and the blacks at home and all Latin America and Africa and all of the people who so detest us abroad, it didn’t have to happen that way. If this country had made the three central ideas of the Port Huron Statement—antiwar, antiracism, and antiimperialism—the law of the land, today we’d be living in a safe, just, and prosperous society. Probably a safe, just, and prosperous p
lanet. All we ever asked them to do was to practice the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy, like they always said they would. And that they wouldn’t…it’s so sad, I can’t tell you.”

  He looked steadily at me, and when I made no response, finally he nodded.

  “The question you face, Ben, it’s not, which side are you on. That was never the question. See, in this thing, no one’s right, everyone’s wrong. The question is, do you want to keep company with the folk who are wrong my way or the folk who are wrong their way? If it’s them, hell, you know what to do. But if it’s me, then you tell the FBI when they get here that Mimi and I took off together and that we went west. Okey-doke?”

  With that he turned and started off at a slow jog toward the tree line, shaking in the wind and darkening in the clouding sky.

  When he disappeared, for a long time I listened to the wind crossing over the forest.

  It took the FBI, with the state police, perhaps another half hour to get there.

  When they did, I told them that Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai had taken off, by foot, together, and they had run west.

  Date: June 25, 2006

  From: “Daddy”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 41

  Midsummer, the logging road west from the Linder estate was generally dry, but large exposed rocks required constant adjustment to the step, either to jump over or to jump on. I was ready for it: no trail running anywhere is harder than the Catskills, either in the shape you have to be in to survive the physical challenges, or the grace you need to negotiate the obstacles.

  The first couple of miles I resisted the urge to hurry, loping along slowly on the full length of my foot, heel to toe, body loose, taking the shock with the strong quadriceps muscles of my thigh. Although one set of impulses kept pushing me faster, I paid serious attention to staying slow, eleven-minute miles, letting my body warm up and balance for a very long run. What I could not afford, now, was an injury—any injury.

  At 4:15, some five miles in, I stopped suddenly and turned around, pitching my hearing as far back down the trail as possible. Nothing: just my panting breath and behind it the gusty, angry wind bending the treetops hard one way, then the other.

  Above, the white clouds blowing in from the north showed virtually no blue, swirling and whorling in the wind, enough weather, I thought, to keep helicopters away. That meant they’d be coming by foot, perhaps with dogs. I was wearing one of Mimi’s T-shirts, the one she’d worn hiking in, because it smelled acridly of her sweat. This would be good for the dogs. But it also felt familiar, which now felt more important. And that made me notice, now, that there was inside me a great deal of anxiety.

  That was not good: nothing could be worse timed than fear, right now. Fear, I knew, is quick to affect your judgment, sometimes in ways of which you’re entirely unaware. It could sap all the energy I needed to run. It could cause me to trip, to fall, to injure myself in a way that, in turn, would stop me from ever running again. Molly never ran when she was anxious, for that very reason.

  Molly. At the thought of her, my anxiety swelled again, and I grew not only afraid but, what was worse, afraid of being afraid.

  Still breathing heavily, I reached into the trailpack for the little Army-Navy bullet case holding the dope I had buried at the Linder estate in 1973 and dug up the day before. In the saturated light through the clouds, above, the blue of the box’s surface was a pastel. And suddenly I so clearly remembered buying it at a head shop on Liberty Street, just for this purpose, to carry joints in. And then something else occurred to me: from far in my memory, dimly, I thought: “I saw Sharon Solarz that night.”

  Sharon. I closed my eyes and saw her, her curly black head of hair, her aquiline face, wearing faded hip-huggers and a black leotard top, dancing to Junior Wells and Buddy Guy at the Blind Pig, a cigarette between her lips and a Miller longneck in her hand.

  Without a second thought, as if I owed it to that twenty-two-year-old, I put the joint to my lips and struck a match.

  While I smoked, now, I took out my survey map. There was another eight miles to the end of the logging road, where it intersected with a dogleg of the state trail: one direction came twelve miles from a trailhead along Route 25, due west, the other direction led due north to the Oscada, some fifteen miles. If they learned from Benny where I—and Mimi with me, according to Benny—had gone, they could perhaps be getting a second team out on the 25 right about now. That meant I had eight miles to do against their twelve to arrive at the trail dogleg.

  I repacked the bag and looked up the trail. There was a steady grade up, now, and I thought I remembered that this would be the case for some time. As if doing an inventory of my resources, I checked my anxiety level and found it not lessened but somehow contained, painful but present in only one portion of my body.

  That thought, however, I failed to connect with the joint I had just smoked, perhaps because, stoned, I had forgotten having smoked it.

  Pack strapped on, I took a skip and began running again.

  Again, having forgotten the dope, I did not question my immediate, enhanced sense of my body’s balance. Knowing I was going too fast, I slowed and began running off my toe, using my gastroc to absorb the impact and to launch the leg, instead of relying on the tendon of my heel. The step was made all the easier by the fact that the little logging road had grown over with grass, a magically soft surface that folded beneath my running shoe and cushioned each step. When my gastroc, in turn, began to feel the use, I switched my gait back to a flatter-footed step that relied again on the tendon and sped up to tip the vectors of my weight farther forward. Tendon, I knew, would last longer than muscle even when injured. That it would take longer to get better, if it got better at all, in this case didn’t matter.

  Now the wind came to me as a huge curvaceous breath in the sky, shaped like a paisley, rustling precisely around me, the round orb of the fat end encircling my head, then gaily sending its energy into the thin twist of tail. My mind seemed to follow that tail right up over the ridge and then on west through the high sky of windy clouds, defining a precise topology of forest hill and dale, of lake and clearing, as it went. And across the distance of wind, I felt the chill waters of the Great Lakes in three directions, the water that was sending these big clouds tumbling inland on rushing wind, the water that was feeding this enormous canopy of the sky the high kinetic energy of storm.

  A sudden movement attracted me, and I saw, for several bright seconds, the tail quarters of a coyote, heading away. I stopped, but just briefly, and then leaned back into the run. In the wake of the animal’s escape I felt the metallic sensation of its fear emanating like rings on a lake’s surface when a fish jumps.

  As I ran for my life in the Michigan woods.

  The Michigan woods. I breathed in balsam with the wind, as if it could pass purely through my body, dissipating and carrying away fear. But now, stoned, there may have been terror in all the reality around me, but I was cleanly aware of it, without feeling afraid. What had happened? Calmly, I felt my way backward until I arrived at the joint, and as I did, I began to laugh. Ah, dope. The dope of my youth, apparently, had lost none of its potency.

  Then I stopped laughing and slowed my pace. On my watch I estimated that I had run off four of my eight miles.

  The lowering clouds had all but hidden the sun, now, and the evening was coming fast into the windswept forest. The deep woods during the approach of a Great Lakes summer storm. The sinking sun lighted the woods around me like a stage set. The hysterical wind poured through the trees; the plastic, nearly cartoonish colors shifting around me; the sky of fast-moving cloud, the dryness of the ripening leaves, deep green now. The road had sunk again into wetter land, and in the rutted track I ran thoughtless, an easy pace, catching footholds on the trail with my balls of my feet, shortening and lengthening my step between flat areas,
jumping, sometimes, across little runnels of groundwater.

  I came to the end of the logging road in two and a half hours, just as the sun had disappeared over a low ridge of hills. The remains of the old gate were there, but there was also a beaver pond that I didn’t recall. It was too dark to check the topo map. For a time I stood, hands on hips, feeling my breathing calm. Then I took off my shoes and socks and gingerly waded through the beaver pond. On the other bank, I set myself on a perch that looked back over the trail the other way.

  Where would Mimi be? Eyes shut, as if the big wind could carry my perception, I imagined sweeping across the topography of the peninsula toward the western coast. She was traveling a marked trail and had a flashlight—she could reach the coast road by midmorning the next day. If she were going that way—Mimi, I assumed, was heading for the east coast, Oscada perhaps, where she had a boat, or access to a boat. What I needed to do was to keep the police following me until ten or eleven o’clock. Then she would be free.

  If I could. The full night was coming in now, the wind lengthening and hooting through the forest. I was shivering. In the bag were a set of silk long underwear. I pulled off my sweat-soaked running clothes and put those on. Then I pulled a space blanket from the pack and made myself a little nest in the leaves at the side of the beaver pond, my little pack with my clothes and shoes against my stomach. Lying there, shivering slightly, I dipped a cup of water from the pond. With the water, I ate two PowerBars and some salted peanuts. I finished with an orange.

  Now I had no food left.

  The thought made me feel free.

  Free.

  An unexpected feeling to descend on me right tonight. Lying on my back, I lit another of the joints and smoked it quietly, like a cigarette, letting the pouring wind whisk the big lungfuls of smoke away. To be alone in a woods, with a wind to destroy all sound and the darkness to hide in. To be stoned, the good, old-fashioned dope—nothing like Billy’s hybridized bud—easing my fear, massaging my anxiety.