The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

When had I last felt like this? And at the question, it was as if a tunnel had opened into my own past all the way back to high school nights when my parents were out, alone with a joint and the television; and further: hotel rooms with my parents, before my brother was born, with a foldaway bed in the corner. I closed my eyes against the wind whipping the treetops, against the darkening sky of clouds, aware that I was seeing forty years into the past, far beyond the time when I had lost my daughter, all the way into the time before my father lost me.

  I never went back to my family’s house after March 6, 1970, not once.

  It had felt like freedom, then.

  Now, huddling deeper into the space blanket and the little nest of leaves in the forest at night, I let my mind go where for years I had kept it away. The house on Bedford Street, my parents’ since the fifties, filled with objects from my grandparents’ Mount Morris—Jewish Harlem—apartment: their Katubah, their kosher dinner service kept in their oak sideboard. Its very rootedness was what had driven me away. The vast family—Sinais, Singers, and Levits, three cousins come together to New York in the last year of the last century, risen in a single generation, my father’s generation, to the pinnacle of what the country had to offer. The family richness that had gathered in accidents of history like puddles after a rainstorm—the hospitality of America to Jews, the continuity of life in New York through boom and bust—its very wealth, its very warmth. Like the march of a Greek tragedy, it turned out to be that a generation later, my generation, it would all be undone, as if the very richness of the family held its loss as a necessary consequence. In the roar of the wind I saw that I had had a vision of the end of a way of life, of my family dissolving like wood in water, crumbling with age, battered by tide.

  The wind hurled itself above me now, an endless pouring of energy, as if forming an impregnable roof above me, roaring through the miles and miles of empty forest, each tree shaking like a hand with a tambourine, each giving its voice to the roar of obliteration, and in that roar I huddled further into the delicious warmth that held my body within the blanket, like a magic spell.

  We go through life on a tongue of flame. The very basis of our existence is as insubstantial as fire. We think that love makes loss bearable, but that’s not true. Nothing in God’s creation made losing Rebeccah bearable, nothing ever would. Love makes loss not bearable, but beautiful, and the beauty of that child, the beauty of that child’s happy life, the beauty of the few days of it spent with me, it could have sustained me until the day I died.

  I saw her in Ann Arbor, Jasey. She’s so, so beautiful.

  I fell into sleep as under a magic spell, curled into the warmth of my space blanket, surrounded by the roar of the wind in the trees. And perhaps my beautiful daughters, after all I had done to them, perhaps they still sent their beautiful souls to share with me this last night of freedom, because it was a sleep as sweet and sound and as healing as any I ever had.

  In the morning there was a thick, still mist, the wind having gone entirely away.

  Six A.M. Not far from me I heard the snort of a deer. Was that a dog barking in the distance? I imagined the deer pausing to listen. Then I heard the steps of it startling and running away. The barking had come from the east.

  That would be team one, the one that had left from the Linder Cabin.

  I unwrapped myself from the space blanket, emerging into the chill air, and changed back into my wet running clothes. I left the blanket and the silk underwear where they fell—let the dogs find that, it would kill some time. In the backpack now were two joints left over, some caffeine pills, and some aspirins. I took the pills and aspirins, smoked half of one of the joints, and saved the other, with the remaining matches, in the little pocket of my running shorts. Then I walked around the beaver pond so as to leave a scent back to where I had slept, and then made my way back to the trail,

  A dog barked. This time under a mile away, and that was sure. What was less sure was whether I had heard a man’s voice calling also.

  Hunger suddenly welled up in my gut like nausea, and I leaned over to retch briefly.

  I was at the dogleg of the state trail now. Leaning over still, I took several deep breaths. Then I started the northern trail at a sprint, nearly my fullest speed, for twenty-one full minutes by my clock, three six-minute miles and a couple of minutes to spare.

  As soon as twenty-one minutes was up, I stopped dead, turned east off the trail, and climbed straight up a small incline, then made my way from tree to tree for fifteen minutes by my watch: a half mile at this pace. I turned at a right angle and, still sighting from tree to tree, made my way south for fifteen minutes, another half mile. Now I stopped and sat on the far side of a tree trunk, elbows on knees, head in my hands.

  Slowly my breathing calmed. Slowly my body temperature came down. In the wet clothes, I even began to shiver. In the fog, I sat and shivered for a very long time, perhaps an hour, making no sound.

  Now the mess of dope and exhaustion, the depletion of blood sugar, the overwork of endocrinal balances: my state of my mind was virtually impossible to take apart. And when at last I managed to put a name to the overriding quality of my consciousness, it was, to my immense surprise, loneliness.

  When had I last felt like this? Dimly I felt my way backward from place to place, year to year, all the familiar avatars of loneliness—Julia’s departure, Mimi’s flight—until, to my surprise, I arrived at the big, diffuse bruise of my existence, the time in my life when I, too, became a father who had abandoned a child.

  Oh lord, that child. Oh lord, Rebeccah at two weeks old. Two weeks of that translucent skin, that milky smell, the blue of her eyes.

  The morning after I’d left Rebeccah with Johnny Osborne, I went back to Ypsilanti for the last time. I cleared out the house, mechanically, without feeling, until I reached baby’s crib anyway. I told the neighbors that Mrs. Maynard had gone ahead with baby, and I packed the car and drove away, just as if I were in fact going to West Virginia. Down in Kentucky, I stored the contents of the car in a storage unit, paying for three years, and sold the car. The switch car, parked at the long-term parking at Lexington Airport three weeks before, by Mimi, was still there—Mimi had not taken it. And it was in this car that I drove to Chicago.

  Now, as I held my face in my hands, crouched behind a tree in a fogged forest, I remembered those weeks as if the present, when I had lost everything, had formed a tunnel through time to its counterpart, those days of driving west to Chicago. To my enormous surprise, I had found myself amazingly, endlessly homesick. And not for my house in Ypsilanti with my wife and child—they were gone now, a hole in my breast, too horrible even to contemplate, like a gunshot wound—but for my childhood home.

  It had seemed so close. As I drove west. My parents were sitting at their kitchen table, reading, or in the living room. My brother Daniel would be up in his room with Klara, my adopted sister, recently come from Israel, Daniel and Klara doing their homework or reading or smoking dope in the strange, conspiratorial friendship that had sprung up between them. In the downstairs study, the old dog, Replica, would be sleeping heavily, his white-flecked snout on two paws. And now, in the forest, in the very last moments of the run that had started then, out of all the things that could have come to me, the smell of my mother’s kitchen came to me with a shocking reality: lamb shanks with their thick marrow, briskets cooked in wine, baking breads.

  And while I was thinking that, I heard, directly behind me and at not more than fifteen yards, voices.

  I had not meant to be this close, for God’s sake. They were practically behind me—I could practically hear the dogs’ paws. The wind was against them; that was good. And there was no scent trail to me: they were on the path coming from the east, and I had looped down from the north. The thought was a comfort for the second or two before the dogs began to bark.

  Now I clenched shut my eyes, my heart exploding. In the muffling fog the dogs’ barking was everywhere, all around me. Would they stand at bay
, showing me teeth, or would they bite? I had always, deep down, been terrified of dogs. Like a baby, I hid my head under my hands and waited.

  Until, my panic subsiding, I realized the barking was moving west.

  The dogs had caught my scent on the northern trail and were pulling their handlers up that way.

  Quickly now I stood and bushwhacked south until stumbling out onto the eastern trail.

  And then I began to sprint again.

  There was no preparation now. There was no stretching, or bending, or slowly building up speed. They were going to catch me. The only question was when. And so I stretched my legs out as far as I could for every step, putting the fullness of my body strength into my speed, jumping from perch to perch along the trail, soaring over anything I could so as not to have to risk landing.

  Everything I was doing now was buying Mimi not even hours, but minutes. Capture was imminent; the only question was when. But how long could I keep running? You can, I knew, run only so far on physical strength. After a time, you start burning mental energy: determination, intention, willpower, fear, ideas. All these can power you beyond your physical strength, but as you use them, you impoverish yourself. Using mind’s resources for physical strength makes mind very vulnerable, and for the first time I felt, again, the distant noise of fear.

  I’d expected the rising sun to burn off the mist, but in fact as I ran, the fog deepened, fading the colors of the trees, hanging in shreds from the sky and snatches along the trail, dropping big wet drops of water. Like an acoustic wall, it seemed to bounce the sounds of my steps toward me, deadening any awareness of anything but the immediate. I kept moving through it, though, splashing through puddles and sometimes having actually to walk through slippery spots on the trail. At ten o’clock I stopped to drink from a little stream. That was when I realized that I had left without my backpack, and that in the backpack were the compass and map. And at the thought, the forest—the wet, dripping forest—rose around me like a sea, vast, undulating, impenetrable, with all the threat that the dope had been, since I had left, keeping at bay. Then a dog barked, not far, but also to the north.

  What was left now was the time it would take the dogs to follow my scent up the trail to the north, then down through my bushwhack.

  I pulled Mimi’s shirt off and flung it into the woods. Eyes to the ground, breath pulling in through my throat, I set the fastest pace I could and flew along the trail.

  In fifteen minutes or so I was at my vital capacity. Now, however, I’d run past most of my physical pains and could move more easily. I stretched out my gait to take as much as I could of the impact in my buttocks, setting my stomach muscles to absorb, also, the vectors of my weight from the hinge of my legs. I kept this up for perhaps forty-five minutes until the first dog reached me.

  I had heard it barking behind me for about ten minutes. When it actually reached me, however, it changed to a low throaty growl and came after my feet, going in at my heels with its growl, then barking again. It was a German shepherd but not, evidently, trained to attack, because it never jumped me, just worried my feet. I kept running, and in time the dog began simply running keeping up with me, occasionally barking.

  The second dog, when it arrived, was much more aggressive, making an immediate jump, jaws snapping at my hand. I felt a tooth tearing my palm, but I pulled away and put on a burst of speed. It jumped once or twice more, then joined the other dog in following at an easy lope, barking as it came.

  By now my lungs were burning, I felt my head hunching between my shoulders, felt my shoulders working into my speed the way I hadn’t run since a child in a game of tag. But that made sense, didn’t it? That’s all it boiled down to—a lifelong game of tag, keep running till they won’t let you anymore, only, in this game, you don’t really get a chance to be “It.”

  I don’t know what made the dog lunge. Perhaps it was that little dip in my courage. One minute I was running, the next minute the dog’s body was flipping over my shoulder, teeth hanging on in my neck.

  I hugged it, instinctively, to release the weight from my neck, then fell and rolled over it and over it. When I stopped I had my elbow under its throat, pressing up against its quivering body. Without its teeth, the beast was helpless, and its eyes bulged big and white from the short fur of its bony cheeks. The sight made an enormous rage come across me, a child’s rage, so pure that it seemed good. And I was that, wasn’t I? I was a raging child, raging against those who had lost me, those who had promised me, those who had told me lies, those who had never told me that all I loved was to go away. My hand was in the dog’s throat, grabbing the massive muscles in my fingers, all the while twisting the dog’s big neck backward. Now it whimpered, and the other dog bit me, hard, in the thigh. Still I pushed and pushed, until I felt the dog begin to grow limp beneath me.

  And then I let go and rolled over, too exhausted to move, thinking, Fuck it, killing this dog isn’t going to save Mimi.

  The dog I’d attacked fumbled to its feet, looked at me, then lay down next to me, panting. The one who’d bit my calf stood still for a time, baring his teeth and growling. Then it too lay down.

  And that, Isabel, is how the FBI found me, some twenty-five years after they first started looking. A middle-aged man lying bleeding on a trail in northern Michigan, attended by two exhausted dogs.

  Date: June 25, 2006

  From: “Amelia Wanda Lurie”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 42

  I was in Ypsilanti, Michigan, driving home to Little J and Rebeccah, when I heard the news on the radio. That Vincent had shot the guard. Senselessly, stupidly—after the robbery was already a success.

  The guard was dead.

  First a long movement of horror went through me, so horrible that I did not care about my safety, and I simply stopped the car and stared at nothing. Dead. Dead. The horror went through me, again and again, a peppery burning in my groin and armpits, a shudder through the muscles of my stomach. I don’t know how long it was until I came to myself, my hands holding the steering wheel, and realized that I was in a car, the getaway car.

  Getaway. There was no getting away from this, ever. And I think I may really have just waited there to be caught, or given myself in—I just no longer cared.

  It was only after minutes and minutes had passed that I remembered that I had to care, and why.

  Rebeccah.

  Oh, Rebeccah, the very weave of the world went out of any recognizable shape.

  I knew the consequences. I knew them clearly, and right away. I was an accessory to murder. My daughter was going to be raised by Johnny Osborne. And if I wanted her to have a normal life, I could never surface again. She could never know who her mother was, and never know who her father was, and I could never come back again. There was no emotion in this. I had known it could happen, and I knew what I had to do. The car I had was a rental from out of state, taken on a credit card stolen by someone Vincent knew. I drove it upstate to East Lansing and left it behind a small, closed mall. Then I took a bus to Traverse City.

  I had made someone die. Why would I be afraid of doing, myself, what I had made another do? Wasn’t that what we had fought for so long, to bring the real experience of the real war, the terror we were raining down on North Vietnam, home to our towns and cities? Didn’t we always say that we had to be prepared to experience the horror of the war we were prosecuting abroad? Then, it was theater: the explosions that hurt no one, the violence that left no dead. Now, it was real, really really real, and I found myself calm.

  The bus let me off at ten o’clock at night, outside a closed gas station in Grawn, Michigan. That was all there was to the town: a gas station, a bar across the street, dim lights through a dirty window the only sign it was even open for the two, three cars parked outside. A streetlight buzzed to an audience of circling moths.

  It was as if I had always
known what I was going to do. Without a thought I made my way across the road and into the woods, following a dirt road that took me up, and up, and finally to a gate opening to what had been, in the fifties, a Girl Scout camp.

  I made my way through the deserted camp, drawn by sentimentality, to the little lean-to I had stayed in when last I was a camper, years before. Nothing in it felt familiar, though: just a lean-to in the woods, falling apart. An instinct made me go to the corner. The same instinct made me curl into a ball.

  As if I had always known how to do this. As if genetically programmed in me was the fact that one day, I would have to die, and this was how I would do it.

  Four days alone in the woods. With the clothes I wore and no food. Four nights huddling in the little lean-to, four days wandering the camp where I had been a girl; the empty dining room, the counselors’ cabins, the offices. Four nights of lying dry-eyed, staring at nothing. Four days of living on water that I had collected from the swimming pond, growing lighter and lighter, every day, with hunger.

  On the fifth morning I woke at four, as if I had an appointment. The woods were still dark, the trees were clinging to the escaping night. I crossed the camp to its western border, then felt my way along the lake’s edge to the north. Here the state trail passed, heading straight west to Point Betsie, and by the first light of the sky I began to follow it.

  It was as if I always knew what I would do. I had taken a life, now I would give a life. I would walk into the woods, the dear woods that had been the one constant in my life, the woods next to Point Betsie where my father died. I would find a place to lie, and with my pocketknife I would open my veins and let my life drain into the ground, peacefully, comfortably. Slowly, feeling my way through the woods, just before dawn, like a fairy tale, it felt to me that it had always been meant to happen. The mist rising from the forest floor. The absolute hush before dawn. The summer air as fresh as if it were the first day of all time. First my father, then my brother, then my mother. Jason. And that dear, dear girl. It was as if it had always been meant to be this way: that I would be stripped down of all that was familiar to me, all that meant anything, until nothing was left but a girl, dizzy with hunger, walking into the fairy-tale woods.