Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  “Nobody know what they will do!” Betty said. “I never have stroke a dog before.”

  Mr. Gandy jumped on the new topic. “My goodness, would you like to stroke Estevan?”

  Betty frowned. She got up off the flowered chintz chair she’d been sitting on and bent to rub her hand along the back of Estevan’s neck.

  “Curly,” she said. She smelled her hand, looked at me, and went on stroking.

  “He’s just an old pet-grade boy,” Mr. Gandy said. “Did you know that gray is not an authorized color for a poodle? And yet here he is, a poodle and gray! Aren’t you, old boy? What do you think of Betty? Is she nice?”

  “What do you think of Chinese person touch you?” Betty said to the dog.

  43

  “I am so sleepy,” Betty said.

  I intended to have a word alone with her, but it had to wait while Mrs. Gandy showed us to bed one at a time. Betty was first, then me. In the bedroom Mrs. Gandy stripped the mattress and put new sheets on, though the old ones appeared clean. She had me sit down with her while she ran a smoothing hand over the chenille bedspread. “Tell me how you and Betty came together,” she said.

  I told her the same story I’d given Mr. Gandy, all vagueness and holes.

  “I don’t believe that, Angela.”

  “Betty may well be lying,” I said. “We’ll have to let the analysts sort it out.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean,” she said quietly.

  Well, yes. I did know. But this was my story, and I couldn’t change it now. This pushing back against an obvious cover was a very frustrating quality of Mrs. Gandy’s. Her husband had not believed my story, either, I’m sure, but he’d had the courtesy to accept it.

  She asked me whether I had something to sleep in, and I told her no. “There is probably something of Julie’s here,” she said. She brought some folded pajamas from a drawer. Then she started up the questions again.

  MRS. GANDY: Where is Ray, Angela?

  ME: I told you he’s on his honeymoon.

  MRS. GANDY: You said he was engaged. Has he been drinking awfully much?

  ME: Less, lately, if you want to know.

  I’m not sure why I let this bit of truth out. She knew his history, and even though I didn’t want to talk about him, I wanted her opinion.

  MRS. GANDY: Is he in a program?

  ME: No, he’s not in a program. He just decided to dry out.

  MRS. GANDY: It was so difficult for him before, you remember.

  ME: Well, yes.

  MRS. GANDY: We’ve all been worried about both of you. How is he doing?

  ME: I don’t know. I’ve been helping him some.

  MRS. GANDY: Helping him how?

  ME: Just bringing him tangerines, and sitting with him. Listening to him talk.

  MRS. GANDY: What does he talk about?

  ME: Oh, chickens. Africa. Someone named Celeste.

  MRS. GANDY: You know who Celeste is, dear.

  ME: No, I don’t.

  She studied me a long time.

  MRS. GANDY: What was your mother’s name?

  ME: Why do you ask me that?

  MRS. GANDY: Well, I’m a mother, and I’d like to think that if I were gone, my daughters would remember my name.

  ME: I do remember my mother’s name.

  MRS. GANDY: What was it?

  ME: There’s no need to delve into all of this. Let me get those pajamas on.

  MRS. GANDY: Angela. Celeste was Ray’s wife.

  ME: Oh.

  MRS. GANDY: I’m starting to see what’s happened. Did you even know that Ray had been married?

  ME: No.

  MRS. GANDY: Well. I never met her. They married in Stanleyville, and we never saw Ray then. The only contact was by radio. Alex was posted at the embassy in Leopoldville, and we were there, too, the girls and I. You remember that.

  ME: Yes.

  MRS. GANDY: Ray was quite alone in Stanleyville. No one at the consulate up there knew who he was. I mean, they all knew him, but they knew him as a businessman, not as an Agency officer. He had some elaborate cover operation going—something to do with a cigarette factory, or a beer concern. He’d spent years building it. And he was quite on his own. You can’t blame him for wanting a friend. You expect people to have friends. Marrying her was more complicated, because she wasn’t American. The Agency doesn’t encourage that. But there was a child.

  ME: A daughter?

  MRS. GANDY: Yes. And Ray wanted her to become a U.S. citizen, so he married Celeste, and Alex smoothed it out somehow with Headquarters and got the girl a passport.

  ME: Okay.

  MRS. GANDY: She was younger than you. I never saw her. She would have been four, I think, when the Simba rebellion happened.

  ME: What happened to her?

  MRS. GANDY: Well, we heard that she and Celeste had both been killed. The news was very broken—the consular staff in Stan-leyville had been taken hostage, and the Simbas controlled the airport, so we really didn’t know what was happening, outside of what Ray said in his messages to Alex. Then those stopped, too, and we didn’t know whether Ray was dead or alive. A long time passed with no word. And then the Belgian paratroopers landed, and there was a horrible massacre, but some got out, and Ray was among them. And when he showed up in Leopoldville, he had you with him, and he said you were Angela. We heard she was killed, we said. And he said no—if we’d heard that, then there had been a miscommunication. Angela wasn’t dead, she was here.

  ME: Please don’t talk about this with anyone, Mrs. Gandy.

  MRS. GANDY: But who are you, then?

  ME: There is just no need to delve into all of this. Let’s not do it.

  MRS. GANDY: I’ve always known something was wrong. You were older than you should have been, by years. Alex said not to talk about it. You were traumatized and wouldn’t let go of Ray, but I figured—

  ME: Enough. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

  MRS. GANDY: We’ll talk tomorrow.

  ME: No. We’ll never talk about it. There is nothing to be gained from talking about it.

  MRS. GANDY: I’m not sure that’s true.

  ME: I appreciate all of your kindness to me. There’s something you don’t understand. When you live a cover, you can’t be picking through it all the time. You just live it.

  I could tell that what I said did not satisfy her. She left that topic, but there were other things she wanted to know.

  MRS. GANDY: Do you have any friends?

  ME: Of course I do.

  MRS. GANDY: Tell me about some of them.

  ME: There are so many.

  MRS. GANDY: Who is your best friend?

  ME: It would be Helen Sanchez.

  MRS. GANDY: What sorts of things do you and Helen talk about?

  ME: Typical girl things. Boys and so forth. Please can I go to bed now?

  MRS. GANDY: Yes. Do you know that you are always welcome here?

  ME: Thank you. I’ll be fine once we figure out where to put Betty. I want that project out of my hands.

  MRS. GANDY: We’ll ride Babe and Red again tomorrow.

  ME: Okay.

  MRS. GANDY: Will you be all right alone in here?

  ME: Why not? I’m fine alone.

  She said good night and left, and I was just as fine as I said I would be.

  44

  Later, when the house was quiet, I crept along the hall. I found Betty sitting cross-legged on a high, twin-sized antique bed, bathed and dressed in checked pajamas, combing her wet hair with her fingers in a claw shape.

  “What are you say to that man about me?” Betty asked.

  “Never mind that. You broke your word.”

  “Huh?”

  “The deal was that you’d say nothing about my father!”

  “I have not made that deal.”

  “In the future I’ll know not to trust you.”

  She carried on with the finger-combing. “Why have you lie to him about your father?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You tell him your father has gone away to be marry. I don’t think that is true.”

  “Can everybody just leave my father out of it?”

  “Because if that is true, you will also have tell me that same thing! We have been ride in Scamp all those hours, so long. Why not tell me if your father has gone away to be marry? It is not true.”

  “I don’t like you,” I said.

  “Mr. Howell can get me a passport?”

  “He could help you, if you’d give him a reason.”

  “Mm. People will usually want something back for help you.”

  “That’s business.”

  “Chinese think business is for capitalist making money.”

  “Oh, please. Now I’m going to throw up.”

  “I have not serve Chinese revolution very well, but I will never betray my people’s revolution.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Try to understand what I will say to you, girl. You want me to do something I will never, never do.”

  I was surprised by a flutter of respect for that little brown space alien. I put it away. “You’re nuts,” I said.

  She unfolded her legs and stepped out of the borrowed pajamas. My patchwork print dress went on over her head.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Leaving.”

  “No, we are staying tonight.”

  “I am leaving tonight.”

  “We’re in the middle of the woods,” I said.

  “I can walk out of the woods,” Betty said. “Can walk one thousand mile.”

  She knelt to buckle her cloth and rubber shoes.

  “You’ve got no way to live,” I said.

  “It is easy to live. Nobody starve in U.S.”

  The hallway was dark except for a soft yellow line at the foot of the Gandys’ bedroom door. The Chinese moved quickly, as though she had planned her way. I touched something and it clattered against the floor. Estevan barked.

  I ran after Betty. Lights came on behind us.

  Outside, there was no moon. The air was wet and sharp. In the distance, a chorus of hepped-up voices answered Estevan’s barking. Coyotes.

  I felt Betty’s hand on my arm. We ran over the soft, crunching gravel.

  I had chased Betty to drag her back, and now I was getting into the Scamp with her. I don’t know why my mind changed. I stomped on the gas pedal. The porch light came on. The engine heaved but wouldn’t catch. Estevan lurched out the door, followed by Mrs. Gandy in a belted white caftan.

  My throttle-stomping had flooded the carburetor. But the hour’s wait in front of Sears and Roebuck, which had seemed such an inconvenience at the time, now served me well, as I had used that time to study the Scamp owner’s manual from the glove compartment. I held the gas pedal to the floor and turned the key again, and this time the engine coughed twice and roared awake. The clean gravel churned and flew.

  Mrs. Gandy watched us go, straight in her white robe, holding Estevan by his collar.

  45

  Sometimes it is better not to think the big thoughts. You want to focus on what’s in front of you. And yet the inside of a car at night seems like it was made for brooding, and there are places in West Virginia where, because of the mountains, you can’t get anything on the radio but static and weird electric whines. Weird popping strings and deep elastic hums. The world is dark like a box you’re inside of. Maybe you can sit through an hour of it without thinking, but to not think for a second hour is difficult with only the snapping electric sounds and nothing else to distract you from whatever’s in your head.

  I kept seeing those three awful children with the bows around their necks. I imagined the bows coming loose and the heads dropping off those rigid bodies in their starched old-fashioned outfits. Doll heads rolling in grass. The night mind is different from the daytime mind.

  My fists held the hard plastic wheel, and I thought of Ray’s big-knuckled fists pulling the wet sheet tightly around him during the time when he was sickest and didn’t understand where he was. So he’d had a real daughter. I could have guessed it, and maybe I’d known. That passport. I had studied it many times, wondering. The picture hardly mattered—babies look so much alike, and seldom resemble the people they grow up to be. That the year of birth was so far off had never been a problem. It was like Betty said—people don’t look and are easy to fool.

  There were numerous reasons for Ray and me never to have talked about that real daughter. I understood. It is a principle in clandestine work that you only tell a person what she needs to know in order to do her part, and there was no need—no operational need—for me to know about Ray’s wife and child. The thing that did upset me rather badly was the thought of what it had cost Ray to keep it all to himself. Perhaps it had cost him heavily. I thought about all those nights when I’d been upstairs with my shortwave listening to those goofy English lessons, while Ray was downstairs cracking the ice tray against the countertop and emptying glasses of bourbon into his body. A person never knows what’s in another person’s mind. I wondered whether Ray had not allowed himself to suffer too much. He could have told me about that daughter safely, because I am better at keeping a secret than almost anyone. To keep it by himself was too hard! I could hardly bear to think about it now. I choked back my sniveling so as not to wake Betty.

  Red and blue lights flashed behind me, and I jumped. Colored shadows crawled over the dashboard. I pulled the Scamp over to the soft edge of the road. All right: so this was it. But the police car only swerved and went by, its siren like a spade on my chest. Betty had sat up in the back seat. She lay down again.

  I felt completely lost. And then, all at once, I knew what I had to do. Ray wouldn’t like it, but I intended to bring this up with him. I would tell him that I knew about this daughter. That’s all. And if he wanted to tell me about her—well, I doubted he would. But at least she would have been spoken of, and her existence revived in this way.

  I felt a little lighter inside. Ray was my friend, and I was his. The hours to go before daylight didn’t seem so long anymore. From time to time I saw a pair of eyes like dimes looking into my headlights from close to the ground—small creatures at their business of breaking acorns. Ray and I were that way, too: busy animals put on earth to crack things open and eat what was inside them.

  I was sleepy and let my outside tires go off the road. Betty shouted. It did me some good. There was no point in killing us both in a car wreck out here in the mountains.

  Some color came into the sky. My eyes felt filmed over, and I can’t say how badly I desired to brush my teeth. Betty climbed up front.

  “Where are we?” she said.

  “Kentucky. We’re going out West for a while.”

  “Sign says we are going out South.”

  I explained to her that even on a trip out West, one is bound to go north or south from time to time, because of the nature of roads. “Also, signs can be wrong.”

  Folded on the seat was an Esso map of Kentucky. I switched on the interior light and told Betty the number of the expressway to look for. Betty was surprised to learn that the Scamp had a light that could be turned on inside. She studied the map without comment, then folded it wrong.

  I pulled over to study it myself. I had expected us to be on the expressway by now. For hours we’d threaded through the terrain as a creek would do. But my head was murky, and I couldn’t make out where we were.

  Later, when we did come to the expressway, we found that it was under construction. In the early weak daylight we saw clean notches cut through the mountain and two rows of concrete pilings, partly spanned. Sheets of plastic hung ragged at the raw end of a bridge deck. Steel bars jutted from it like fish bones.

  46

  By daylight I was a severe kind of tired. A white barn with red mud around it floated near the road. Some starlings had lined up on the silver roof, and their feet were stuck in the new paint, I imag
ined. I was consulting the Kentucky map while cresting a hill and holding the steering wheel with my left knee when Betty said, “Uh-oh. Cow in road!”

  I stood on the brake, and the Scamp slid sideways. One wheel dropped off the pavement. We rocked once and were still.

  The cow was black. It pulled its big head out of the ditch grass and rolled an eye.

  “You should not look at the map when you drive!” Betty said.

  “This free map was no bargain!” I said. “We’re not even on it! This so-called ‘Happy Motoring Guide.’” I wadded it up.

  “If a car will come over the hill behind us now, we are going to die,” Betty said.

  I tried to reverse the Scamp uphill, but the tire that had come off the road only spun. In front of us, the cow blocked the way. When I honked at her, she showed me her square hindquarters.

  “No more setting out without a plan!” I said.

  Evidently this cow had been honked at before. My honking didn’t alarm her in any way. She had never had shrill Communist slogans shouted at her by an arm-waving Chinese, however. That was new. Away she jogged, with Betty jogging after her. Betty looked different, chasing a cow down the road. Sitting in the car with her for hour upon hour it was easy to forget how small she was.

  I put the Scamp in drive and touched the gas, nudging it downhill and back onto the road. Around the bend, I caught Betty waving goodbye to the cow. The cow had gone back into her pasture at a spot where the fence was down.

  My stomach felt as though it had some air in it. The lesson I was learning, not for the first time, was that you can go without food and you can go without sleep, but you can’t go without food and without sleep. Betty, having napped and been for a jog, now bounced on the front seat and sang a Red Chinese grade school song, which she translated as she went. “All the flowers love him, baby goats also love him, people in field love him,” etc. She did not explain who him was. The song had hand movements to go with it. Politely I asked her to be quiet and stop bouncing or else I would certainly lose my mind, and she crossed her arms and went into one of her funks.

  47