Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  “Her work is stressful,” I said.

  “What work?”

  “She’s studying to be a park ranger.”

  “Not stressful.” Betty went to the sink and loudly rinsed her mouth out. She came back to the bed.

  “So Betty has an aunt,” I said. “That’s the first you have mentioned of any relatives.”

  “Everybody has got some relatives.”

  “Do you miss this aunt?”

  “Only miss my old parents,” she said.

  Suddenly she had a small paper packet in her fingers. She tore it open and sprinkled black pepper into her palm, and she began eating the pepper with the point of her tongue.

  56

  The hot day crept by, broken only by a walk along U.S. 11, the highlight of which was when Betty saw two garter snakes lying together and jumped sideways over a ditch. It was a wide ditch and she landed running. If I had known she was afraid of snakes I would not have pointed them out to her. Now it was evening, and Betty was lying down in our room. Marilyn went off alone to visit another pay phone, then asked me into her room to talk.

  “Do you think Ding accepts the Aunt Marilyn story?” Marilyn asked.

  “She’s practical-minded,” I said. “She’ll go along with it until she has a reason not to.”

  “All right. I need you to do something, Angela.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to signal Ray. Call him in.”

  “Why don’t you call him in?”

  “He’s not responding. You have a way to signal him, right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  She sat on the edge of the dresser. Two lamps were on, and the curtains were pulled. From her large purse she unfolded a copy of the World News Digest. “I tried the crossword,” she said. “It’s too easy. There is an interesting set of personal ads in the back, however. Here’s one signed Boney Maroney.”

  “I’m not Boney Maroney.”

  “I know, I already talked to her. She’s a high school band director in Indianapolis. And she’s a man.”

  Marilyn poured herself a cup of gin.

  “You are going to have to trust me, Angela.”

  “I have trusted you,” I said. “I’m here, aren’t I? I could have left at any time.”

  “No. If you leave I will quickly find you again. The reason is, I don’t work alone. Nobody does in this trade. We’re a machine, and we have to trust each other. Working alone is how you ball things up. It’s poor tradecraft. Believe me on this, because I know.”

  She began to pace and lecture me. I was risking my life and Ray’s by not cooperating fully, she claimed. I thought I knew everything because I had partly grown up at the Farm, but in fact I was only a precocious child who had read a few spy books. I did not understand the real methods of clandestine work as it is practiced in the field, she said. “You’re fourteen! You’re driving through mountains without sleep in a car registered to Ray Sloan, and you’re not even a legal driver. And Betty!”

  Our eyes met and she looked away from me.

  “I’m sorry to be rough, Angela. It amazes me you’ve gotten this far. People always seem to be looking past you.”

  “People look past me because I have no value to them.”

  “But now you do have value. You’re Ray’s vulnerability.”

  57

  ME: How do you figure that?

  MARILYN: I don’t need to spell it out, do I?

  ME: Yes.

  MARILYN: Maybe I should start by explaining to you how an Agency cover works.

  ME: I think I know, but go ahead.

  MARILYN: First of all, an Agency cover is known to a number of people. Your supervisor knows, and so does his supervisor. It’s all written down. Some friends in the Agency will know about it, too. An Agency cover is not a secret that is kept only in your bosom. If you have secrets that are only known to you and Ray, then those are not Agency secrets, Angela. They’re just secrets. They might even be secrets from the Agency. Do you understand?

  ME: No.

  MARILYN: Second. We might live an elaborate cover overseas, but not at home. We don’t run around D.C. using false names and false passports. The Agency would not send a girl to public school with a false birth certificate.

  ME: Come to the point.

  MARILYN: The point is that Ray has been hiding something.

  ME: What?

  She handed me a stiff, glossy snapshot. At first I did not recognize anyone in it. The woman’s hair was covered with a scarf, and she was laughing. Her teeth were a bright blur. She looked happy and rather glamorous. The man wore a light suit and sunglasses and held a baby.

  MARILYN: Who are those people?

  ME: I don’t know. You tell me.

  MARILYN: Well, there’s Ray Sloan, looking quite a bit younger and more dashing than the Ray we know. And according to the file, he’s with his late wife, Celeste, and their daughter Angela. Which would be you, correct?

  ME: Babies all look the same to me.

  MARILYN: You’d recognize your own mother, though.

  ME: She died a long time ago.

  MARILYN: How old were you?

  ME: I forget.

  MARILYN: That’s a lie. You can’t have forgotten how old you were when your mother died.

  ME: I was seven.

  MARILYN: The girl in this picture was four years old when her mother was killed. She would be twelve now. You’re fourteen, right? About to turn fifteen?

  ME: A lot of people were killed in Stanleyville. Some of them don’t have files.

  MARILYN: What are you talking about?

  ME: I’m saying not everyone in the universe has a file somewhere. Some people are born and live and their names are never typed onto a form.

  MARILYN: Has Ray been decent with you?

  ME: Of course he’s been decent with me.

  MARILYN: Not “of course.” He has or he hasn’t, but it could be either way.

  ME: He took me in after my family was murdered.

  MARILYN: Has he ever used you like a girlfriend?

  ME: No. You’re disgusting.

  MARILYN: It’s an unusual arrangement that you two have. He told his chief of station that you were his daughter. Lying to the C.O.S. is not considered good. Why would he do that?

  ME: Maybe it was the only way he could keep me.

  MARILYN: It’s true, the Agency doesn’t encourage its officers to adopt foreign orphans.

  ME: There’s your explanation, then.

  MARILYN: But why would he want to keep you?

  ME: I don’t know.

  MARILYN: Is there something Ray feels guilty about?

  ME: Like what?

  MARILYN: Are you aware how his wife died?

  ME: No.

  MARILYN: The Simbas made a spectacle of it. They were—

  ME: I don’t need to hear it.

  MARILYN: We think the child died in a similar way. What about your parents?

  ME: What about them?

  MARILYN: What happened to them?

  ME: Simbas killed them.

  MARILYN: What’s your real name?

  ME: Stop it!

  MARILYN: You probably have relatives somewhere.

  ME: Everybody has got some relatives somewhere.

  MARILYN: There is no need for all of this to be buried, Angela. This is extraordinary. It isn’t normal.

  ME: Ray is my family. He’s the one who took me in.

  MARILYN: Did Ray have something to do with what happened to your parents?

  ME: Of course not. What do you mean?

  MARILYN: I’m asking whether your parents were involved with Ray. Were they part of his network?

  ME: I was seven!

  MARILYN: Okay. You wouldn’t know.

  ME: You have got everything backwards and inside out.

  MARILYN: Maybe so. It was a rocky operation in Stanleyville—no local contacts, and most of it was off the books. Ray’s network is something of a legend, though. He had these b
eer trucks traveling all over rebel-held territory. The Simbas were devoted to beer, so the trucks always got through. That’s how we found Che Guevara there. One of Ray’s drivers heard about a white man training rebels in the bush. Che was trying to teach them French, apparently. So they could be politicized. What a plan. I’ll tell you this: Ray Sloan was a first-rate operator in his day. I guess he just lost it when they killed his family. Understandable. He certainly earned his downtime at Camp Peary.

  ME: He was a valued instructor there.

  MARILYN: Right.

  ME: Are you implying that he was put out to pasture?

  MARILYN: Did you ever wonder why they call it the Farm? Anyway, call him in. We’ll get it straightened out. We’ll get you set up, too, Angela. I’ve seen the birth certificate you gave the D.C. school system. What did you do, make it yourself?

  ME: It worked.

  MARILYN: But it won’t work your whole life. Suppose you want to get married someday.

  ME: Give me a break.

  MARILYN: Suppose you want to work for the post office. You’re going to need a sure enough birth certificate. Can you call Ray tonight?

  ME: No. It’ll take a few days.

  MARILYN: You should not have chosen a weekly paper for your method of communicating.

  ME: I’ll make the call in the morning, at nine.

  MARILYN: Nine it is. Where’s Ding?

  ME: I think she’s sleeping.

  MARILYN: You should do the same. We’ll talk tomorrow. Go to bed.

  She turned her back to me, refilling her cup.

  58

  I don’t know why I hadn’t expected Ray’s wife to be so beautiful. She had dark eyes and that gorgeous, careless smile. Ray wore the smallest grin on his mouth, as though he were trying to contain it. He held the baby tightly in both arms.

  I was sitting on the curb outside Marilyn’s room. I studied the picture, which she had neglected to take back from me.

  Why did it surprise me that Celeste was so attractive? Ray was a nice-looking man. It was hard to imagine him keeping a glamorous woman entertained, though. The Ray I knew was not a conversation-alist, and he didn’t attend parties. He wore the same shirt two days in a row. He would wear a pair of pants until something got on them.

  It never had occurred to me before this moment that I had not known Ray at his best. What a disappointment it must have been to him, to lose this wife and the child who would have resembled her in many ways. Disappointment is not an adequate word, but I don’t know what other word to use. The disappointed Ray was the only Ray I’d ever known.

  Why had he wanted to keep me? At such great risk? I couldn’t imagine why. I was no beauty. My personality was something less than scintillating. Maybe he’d kept me just because I insisted. After losing everything, I clung to him.

  I remembered my own mother well. I had a stock of memories and went through them often enough. My mother was sturdy, not glamorous. She had brown hair and only sometimes trimmed the very ends. She wore it up, but I remember her bathing me with her hair down and color in her face from the heat. Each memory was something trivial, yet they glowed for me in a strange way. I remembered my father shouting at her in the kitchen; my mother crying; my mother with a pencil behind her ear; my father running into a storm to grab a goat that was loose from its pen. He did that for me, because I was afraid the goat would be struck by lightning. My father was good, though he did shout sometimes.

  I found myself sitting there crying on the curb outside the motel rooms, crying because my life was so wrong and backward. I was this hard thing—this clipping or scrap of a person. I would never be normal.

  None of that matters to anyone but me. I mention these thoughts only because they came to me at this crucial time. I was about to make a step. I must make the call and place the ad to ask Ray to come back to me. It was against his instructions but I was relieved to have a need to do it because I was worried about him. I only had one question to answer first.

  I got up and pushed into Room 9. There was Betty, cutting an apple with Ray’s yellow-handled pocketknife. I snatched it away from her. “Where did you find this?” I said.

  “On the ground.”

  On inspection I saw it was not Ray’s knife but a similar, cheaper one with a stainless steel blade. I gave Betty’s apple knife back to her.

  “Listen,” I said. “I know you’ve been talking to my Aunt Marilyn when I’m not around.”

  “No, I have not talk to her. What is that?” She meant the snapshot in my hand.

  “It’s nothing.”

  She took the picture and studied it. “Is this your father?”

  “Give it back!” I grabbed her wrist in order to take the picture back. I got it.

  She pulled free. She went into the bathroom, shutting the door and locking it behind her.

  At the door I said, “You’ve talked to Marilyn in private. I know you have. She knows your name. I heard her call you Betty.”

  Silence.

  “I was stupid to trust you,” I said. “I tried to get you papers so you wouldn’t be deported, and now you have lied to me about Marilyn. You may even be working for her. I suppose you are. You are a liar.”

  The door unlocked and came open one half inch. “I have never talk to Aunt Marilyn alone,” Betty said.

  The door closed again.

  59

  That couldn’t be true. Marilyn had called her Betty; I’d heard it. I’d been careful only to use the name Ding with Marilyn.

  I was standing there by the motel sink outside the bathroom door when it occurred to me what had happened. Blood rushed to my skin. I had been very stupid.

  It wasn’t Betty who was working with Marilyn, it was the Gandys. After leaving their house I had driven all night through the mountains. I’d have been easy to find, easy to tail. In the morning, Marilyn changed my tire (after putting the nail in it herself, no doubt). Then she followed close so I would detect her. I had given myself the credit for making her, just like she meant for me to do. I let her develop me, in my state of crazed exhaustion. I was seeing old ladies in the road; then here came Marilyn with her war stories. She’d “lost an asset.” I was sucked in and quickly involved. She showed me that snapshot and fed me a lot of lies and bogus hints about Ray Sloan. “Is there something Ray feels guilty about?” What a poor sucker I had been. Nothing but a poor sucker. If not for the one slip on Betty’s name, Marilyn would have turned me.

  I saw it now. I had almost been doubled. The way Marilyn did it was to make me wonder who I was. Was I real? But it didn’t matter. Ray was real: he was out there, alone and maybe sick, and I could still be true to him. Idaho meant bug out.

  Now I knew what I had to do. I tucked the stiff snapshot away. I slid it down in the brown envelope which also held my nine remaining hundreds.

  It meant leaving Betty behind for good. The thought didn’t please me. In spite of her foreign manners and Communist beliefs, she had been a companion to me. I’d put some time and energy into her, and I didn’t like leaving her in Marilyn’s hands. Marilyn would not indulge her with shopping and gum as I had done. In the future, Betty would find herself doing as told, and it would cause her some pain. On the other hand, if her story about the party-official boyfriend convinced the right people, she’d get asylum and a legal set of papers. She could work anywhere, then. Even her dreamland of Sears and Roebuck.

  As I tucked the brown envelope back into my knapsack, I kept out one of the hundreds. I slipped it into a pocket of Betty’s black pants.

  Just as I was doing this charitable deed she popped out of the bathroom. There was no warning flush, as she’d been in there only hanging out, a trick she had borrowed from me. My hand was in her pocket.

  She snatched the black pants and gave them a close looking-over. She even smelled them.

  “What are you up to?” she said.

  60

  “Four-foot-ten,” I said.

  She blinked. “Why will you handle my pants?”
/>
  “I was looking for a quarter for the candy machine.”

  “You have put one hundred dollars in here.”

  “I don’t like to keep all our cash in one place,” I said. “That’s not smart, in case my knapsack gets stolen.” I held it up by the strap for her to see—my knapsack with the sunflowers on it. It was a good lie and would have worked, had I not already told her the other lie about the candy machine.

  Yet she accepted what I said with a nod. She folded the pants and set them back on the dresser where they had been. They were clean—she had rinsed the lake water out and dried them on the shower rod. The white blouse was draped over the chair back, also clean. Betty sat on the edge of the bed and held her green hairbrush.

  I got on my side of the bed with my back against the headboard and my black oxfords on. I had the knapsack on the floor nearby. All I had to do was wait for Betty to get to sleep, and then I’d slip out the door. Marilyn was into her gin; she’d be asleep soon, too, if not already. If I didn’t get lost I could be in Bristol and on the new express-way in under an hour; I’d abandon the Scamp in Virginia and would be on a Greyhound bus before Marilyn knew I was gone.

  Betty held the brush in her lap. I asked her if she wanted the television on.

  “No.” She laid the brush on the nightstand and got under the covers.

  “No brush hair tonight?”

  “My hair is not important,” she said.

  “Nobody’s hair is important in the long run of things,” I said.

  I took my shoes off and laid them together on the floor beside the bed, where I could get into them quickly in the dark. I faked a yawn. “I’m so sleepy I could fall asleep just like this, right in my clothes on top of the bedspread.”

  Betty said nothing.

  “Time for lights out,” I said. I switched off the lamp.

  “Goodbye,” Betty said.

  I sat up and switched the lamp back on.

  Betty lay there like a small angry mummy. Her eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling.

  “I don’t owe you anything, by the way,” I said. “You’re in your box and I’m in mine. Anyway, Marilyn’s not after you, she’s after me.”