Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  She would miss Philoctete; he made her feel safe. When she cried, he put his huge head on her bed pillow. He put his wet nose in her curls when she cried and she felt safe as houses. West Virginia safe.

  “You my Rebel Yella.” Abel had said that more than once. And he had said, “You are my rebel yeller.” Both phrases had changed things more than once. She was waiting to hear any of those words that night in the car.

  A previous night, halfway through A-100, Hope and Abel had got to fighting about money. He had said something mean and idiotic about the need for them to save money by her ironing his shirts, and something meaner and more idiotic about her cooking the food—culminating in his esoteric calculation that the total worth of what she brought to the marriage was less than fourteen thousand dollars a year. He had clearly been enacting a scene from an earlier marriage, his parents’, but she hadn’t known that then. She had just known, then, that he was crazy and mean. She had come back at him with an equally contrived and idiotic comment of her own. Then she had laid her head down on the pillow and cried.

  When Philoctete, teeth bared, had started herding Abel from the bedroom, he had called out plaintively, “It don’t have to be this way. You my rebel yella.”

  When she had called back, in a whisper, “Absolutely,” the dog had stopped showing his teeth. Getting the inch, going for the mile, Abel had recalled a funny story from the wedding. When Hope had started laughing again, Philoctete had let Abel back into the bedroom.

  Then Hope had let Abel into her body, and just before they had made the turn toward home, just before he and she had come, she’d whispered into his ear a question that she hoped she already knew the answer to: “Am I your rebel yeller?” He had answered her without words. Sometimes each found the other to be a fine and silent witness.

  The next day, they had returned to the Confederate Memorial. This time they had noticed the grave where Moses Ezekiel had been buried in 1921. Together they had wondered if his daughter, Alice, had attended the service. Out of the blue Abel had said, “The Institute will be heard from today.” Neither of them had been able to remember who had said it. But they had both known that whoever had said it hadn’t meant what Abel had meant: that the Institute would be used to attest the significance of black women. And then they had both, at the very same time, remembered it had been Stonewall Jackson.

  “You my Rebel Yella.” He didn’t say that in the car the night foreign posts were assigned. That night he wasn’t her safety, Philoctete was.

  Philoctete didn’t protect Abel the way he protected Hope. He protected Hope from Abel. Or so the dear girl thought.

  She didn’t believe she needed any protection the day he said foreign posts had been assigned. That day they wondered aloud if they should stop in the city for dinner as an offsetting treat, but they both agreed they had to get back to the dog, before he shat in the house.

  In their borrowed dining room with the stone floor and the eighteenth-century Tidewater Virginia table with its eight perfect chairs, with beeswax candles burning, and with old silver heavy in their hands, over the meal she had prepared in the early afternoon (chicken breasts stuffed with sausage nestled up to roasted apples and green beans), a snowy napkin in each of their laps, a napkin that Hope had ironed with her own hands, a squared-off goblet in each of their right hands, Hope looked into the face of her husband as he spoke, trying to make sense of Manila.

  What she thought she saw on Abel’s face was hope dashed. What she thought she saw was a man who hadn’t been given a proper chance. She thought wrong. They had chosen him for the Agency; they had chosen him for a secret and important life. They had anointed him with the right to tell necessary lies to his wife, and to whomever else he chose.

  As he spoke to her that night, spoke and watched the candlelight flicker in her eyes, his mind kept flashing back to watching her waiting on the other side of the intersection, watching her wait for the red light to turn green. A taste of sweet sage on his tongue perfectly suiting the chicken and the apples reminded him: She is too bright to cheat. She is more than they think she is, she is more than I thought she was. I must step farther away from her if she is not to know.

  The woman or the world would be his eventual choice, but this night he could have them both. He inhaled deeply the overheated air that irritated his lungs, puffing deep on the pleasure of knowing something even the establishment did not know.

  He knew, he could see down the pieces yet to be played, that she wouldn’t go with them for long, wouldn’t go with him for long. He knew, because he had made love to her, tentatively, curiously, felt her abundance, and love, washed in her sweat and scent, that she believed love eclipsed any and every darkness. He knew, because he knew she was fundamentally romantic and fundamentally powerful, that she would never be long intrigued by war games or warriors.

  She wasn’t Mrs. Right. She was Mrs. Right now. He would use her to assure his place in the ascendancy. She was his ticket to ride. As a tandem couple he and she were without peer or rival. No government could or would ever make her a regular agent. She was too much of a cowboy for that. But she would be an effective contractor, a true asset, for him and for his people. He knew all of that; he just didn’t know when or how it would happen.

  He seated himself across from her at the Gabbons’ table; he was establishing a distance. If he could keep his distance, he might keep her love. She might stay long enough to roll him a good way up the road, before she rolled on without him. Hopie be my Bobby McGee. He said it right out loud. It was an invitation and a description. It was his prayer. He wrote it in a Hallmark card. She kissed at the card. She loved him. He knew this when she said yes to Manila. Just like he’d known, when he hadn’t sat the second day of the bar exam, and had taken away all of their choices but one, that he didn’t really love her at all.

  Abel wanted to walk through the world with Hope because he thought she was a creature with an all-access pass to the planet. He wanted her to walk ahead of him opening doors, then he wanted to trip her up and have her fall in step two feet behind him.

  He wanted to be something more than a black southern politician, something more than the one who took the pleadings of an injured class to the powerful men in the nation’s capital on bended knee, with eloquence. He wanted to be an international man. An unhyphenated man. He wanted to be something more and the nation had chosen him for something more. Chosen her too. Only she didn’t yet know it.

  He didn’t think she would forgive the bugged house. Or, forgive the simple way they had taken advantage of her willingness to be of use. The Gabbons had had to go on an inspection tour. The ambassador and his wife had needed them. The Gabbons had told a lie very near the truth when they had set up the inter-view for house-sitting. They had said that they always chose someone from the A-100 class to look after their house when the ambassador went on a long inspection tour. They hadn’t said that they always chose the spy who would be in deep cover, that Mrs. Gabbon gave that man’s wife skills to be used in entertaining that would further the purposes of the government—some as simple as a recipe for an onion tart, a tart so pungent with olive and anchovy that it could hide a variety of off flavors, a tart without delicate eggs that might betray the presence of foreign ingredients by curdling.

  The importance of obeying rules precisely; they had used the dog to teach her that. Another thing she wouldn’t forgive if she knew.

  To give him an order she had to say his name, then the order, then his name, or he wouldn’t obey. On Thanksgiving morning she had been walking the dog and it had been arranged without her knowing that she would cross paths with a little Maltese Philo had been trained to attack. Philo had lunged at the little dust mop, but he had dropped back on his haunches when Hope had thought to order, “Philoctete, sit, Philoctete.” She was a natural. She used the ordinary and familiar tools at hand to do the unusual and unfamiliar job. So much she learned without knowing that she was learning.

  When Hope had turned up late
on the day foreign posts had been assigned, it had occurred to Abel that she might bolt before the adventure began. The possibility that he would enter his self-imposed exile from his family and home and from Hope all at the same time had chilled him colder than the wind and snow. He’d been wondering how high he could rise without her when he’d caught sight of her waiting for a red light to turn green.

  It would be a while before he discovered he could rise very high, very high indeed, as long as she played along a little. She misread his sadness and fear and said she would come with him. Said it would be all right. Said it was only eighteen months. She would pack up all her silver trays and he would stamp visas in Manila.

  How bad could it be? She could continue to sculpt. There would be amazing Philippine woods. They would be far, far away from everything, together. She loved him. She didn’t want him to hurt. It was Asia. She remembered that people spoke Tagalog there and that some people spoke Chinese. It would be all right.

  Eighteen months. They would smoke cigarettes, and drink, and make love, and when he came back he would have something more than a wrinkled white linen summer suit. They would make a baby. They would see the world. She was his girl.

  He didn’t know why he wanted to lie to her, but he did want to, and he needed to, and so he lied and enjoyed it. It was one of the first things he truly loved about being inside the fortress of the strong: the complete privacy of the thing. No one knew him. He was an authority unto himself. No one understood him; but for once it was not a bruising thing. He would wear the mask on every occasion. His government required it. He was happy to be of service, to the nation, to his woman, to himself.

  He was beginning again. This woman didn’t know his significance or insignificance. This woman would not punish him. He treasured all his masks, but each of the masks that served him best had been formed on his face just after some part of him had died.

  His birthday-I-am-a-man mask was on him now. He had put it on to tell her about Manila. And he had worn it to receive the invitation of the Agency. Just after the government’s proposal the man doing the asking had put his arm around Abel’s shoulders, looked him in the eye, and explained, “It’s a little bit like getting engaged: we don’t ask until we know the answer.”

  Abel had proposed to Hope very differently. The night they had made love in the cemetery on the snow, he’d been absolutely unsure what her answer would be. He’d thought she might say no. She had still been a bit angry with him for not having gone to the aunts’ funeral. She could be angry and love at the very same time. This was a revelation to him. He didn’t know it was a basic maturity. He knew she was smarter than his daddy and unafraid of his daddy— a man who had made strong grown men cry. She loved him and didn’t love his daddy. Hope was perfect for Abel.

  “I was not raised in your house,” she had said to Big Abel during their Roman summer, when, after she had gone down to Nashville to meet his parents, Big Abel had stormed at her for some trumped-up infraction but really for having lived with his son in sin. “I’m not afraid of you.” The way she loved him more than his father it was almost as safe and sweet as the feeling of the policeman picking him up in his arms. He would try to give her that feeling. He would be the policeman and one day he would pick her up in his arms and she would feel safe. Until then, while they lived at the Gabbons’, he did not begrudge her Philoctete. When Hope took Abel in her arms he felt safe.

  “What did he do in Manila?” asked Hope.

  “He packed the Marcoses out. He was there when they got on the helicopter. He was the last one to look into their bags before they took off. And he tried to find out how and when and if Cardinal Sin had communicated with the communists. But he failed at that,” said Nicholas, sounding sorry and proud.

  “If I had known more about him, and he had known more about me, things would have been better,” said Hope.

  “Different, not necessarily better.”

  “What policemen do you mean?”

  “Did I say policemen?”

  “That made him feel safe.”

  “All policemen.”

  Nicholas went out for a cigarette and a stop in the hall toilet. Hope, after availing herself of Abel’s en suite bathroom, went searching for a bottle of water.

  SIXTEEN

  BY FEBRUARY THEY would be off to the South China Sea in time for the People Power Revolution. On to all their new secrets. And to making Ajay.

  “And meeting me,” said Nicholas

  “And meeting you,” said Hope.

  But first they had to finish their training. They were the king and queen of the silent shout-outs. They were taught that skill before their first post in a chock-full class on coping with violence abroad. They had been taught to always have a place where they could meet in case they became separated—a place preferably nearby and a place far away. A place they never talked about. A place you have never been, preferably a place they could signal without naming. When it had been their turn to perform the assigned practice exercise in front of the group— communicate an evacuation location to your spouse during a conversation about impressionist painting in such a way that the others involved in the conversation can’t guess what it is— Abel had cheated and chosen Idlewild. She had guessed right off, and no one in the class, though all were armed with the most detailed biographical profiles and world atlases and all possible AAA Trip Tiks, had guessed where Hope and Abel were headed. A first, small career and marriage triumph.

  To celebrate their success he gave her a book by Bernard Lewis called The Assassins. She found the sect almost as intriguing as he did. They’d been followers of Hassan-i-Sabbah, a branch of Shia Muslims who had lived in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon long before those places were called by those names. The sect had disappeared in 1272 when their last stronghold had been invaded and seized by the Moguls. They had referred to themselves as al-da’wa al-jadida. Hope noted that Lewis’s book had come out in 1967. In the time of the Summer of Love, in a time of pot, and hash, and LSD, she wondered if some had been chastened by the existence of a cult rumored by Marco Polo to have ingested hash before they killed.

  When Hope started talking about the Summer of Love, Abel said, “Where I come from, the summer of sixty-seven was the summer of the war nobody noticed.”

  “Abel’s Civil War.”

  “That’s what you call the riot on Jefferson Street?”

  “That’s what I call all of it.”

  “All of it?”

  “The bombings, the murders, the funerals, the neck shooting, what you saw.”

  He kissed her. He liked the way his new wife always reframed everything to make him heroic. She loved him more than she loved the truth. He kissed her, then changed the subject. He turned from his private anxiety to a more common public anxiety.

  He told her about the strict rules the Assassins were said to have worked under. Told her that they had preferred to kill in a public place, close up, often wearing a disguise. Told her that they had preferred to use a blade, they had preferred to put themselves in danger with their action. And later they would allow themselves to be killed by their leader. Sometimes instead of killing they would leave a knife at the home of an enemy as a silent way of saying, we could have gotten to you; change course, or you are dead. All of that disturbed, but what disturbed Hope most, and what disturbed Abel most, was the alleged method of initiation into the club. Initiates were tricked into thinking they were about to die, then they were drugged, and when they awoke from their “death” they found themselves in a beautiful garden with wine and were told that they were in heaven. Everything they heard in the garden they believed.

  “When did they first approach him?”

  “Probably during Harvard, but not at Harvard.”

  Abel and Hope left for their first post barely six months after the wedding, in February 1986. In his pocket and in her purse was a diplomatic passport. Abel had proof that he was an important person married to an important person.

 
“What was it about Abel and planes?”

  “Trains, buses, and boats all had a history of being segregated.”

  “Planes weren’t part of his family trauma story?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why did they call their car the Flying Crow?”

  “That was the nickname of a train that carried people south from Chicago. It started out integrated and got segregated when it crossed into a Jim Crow state. The aunties said you could hear big grown men, black soldiers going down to those southern camps, crying in the night when the train crossed into Dixie,” said Hope.

  “Abel’s family knew about that too?”

  “Everybody black knew that.”

  “And the Joneses called their car the Flying Crow because . . .”

  “A black man rich enough to own a traveling car didn’t need to subject himself to a train. It’s a joke.”

  “You get him.”

  “I got him.”

  “Then you left and no one did.”

  “He didn’t choose a someone who could have.”

  “Sammie. I didn’t see that coming . . .”

  “When his parents got shot and killed . . .”

  “Outside a restaurant in New Orleans?”

  “A black man shot them.”

  “Big Abel wouldn’t give up his wallet.”

  “If we had been together Abel might have gotten over it.”