Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  And then I began to marvel at myself. Was I truly sitting here on this bucket under the stars, trying to figure out how to make a mean, wiry Chinese girl apologize to me? Look how torn up I am, I thought—like a child in school, all because of some things this nut job has said which have hurt my feelings. What? That was insane. Or was it?

  When I saw what she had done, I jumped off my bucket. How had I failed to see it before? The cunning Chinese had handled me right into the same position that I had handled old Henry into: coming in early, staying up late, taking foolish risks, craving approval, and generally doing everything asked in the manner of a good-hearted pet. All for someone else’s benefit, namely hers! There was a term for this kind of involvement. The Chinese had me under discipline.

  I did not walk, I ran across the yard. Ducking through a clump of trees, I breached an unusually sturdy spider’s web. The threads pulled and snapped. I spun, slapping at my face, neck, and hair.

  Break something else, I told myself.

  I found the pair of ruts that would lead me through the hemlocks to the road. I thought I would run all the way into town. But my head was hurting again. Then I remembered the van. It would be like an Eeyore to leave the key in it.

  I went back. Yes, the key was there.

  68

  I sat behind the wheel a moment trying to picture the way Eeyore had brought us from town. We had passed a furniture dump. That would be on my other side now, going back.

  My mind went off into another place, and I sat wondering emptily.

  Voices and running footsteps brought me back. I ducked to the floor as the van door slid open behind me.

  There was a violent tussle in the back of the van. It seemed one person was shoving another into the van and beating him or her. I recognized Dirk’s pipey voicings, though I couldn’t tell which end of the beating he was on. The other voice was Wilhelmina’s. They were not fighting, however. They threw their bodies against the greasy daybed at the back of the van.

  Long minutes of this went by. When it was over there was a period of quiet before they spoke.

  DIRK: That Renee is sweet as pie.

  WILHELMINA: Mm-hm.

  DIRK: I would like to lick her up one side and down the other. WILHELMINA: Kitten.

  DIRK: Not for my sake, but only for hers and that bourgeois boyfriend’s. I want to smash monogamy at their house. Hand me that thing.

  WILHELMINA: Here you go.

  A match flared. There was silence, then the dark smell of cannabis smoke.

  WILHELMINA: No, thanks. I don’t want any of that right now.

  DIRK: It’ll make you less uptight.

  WILHELMINA: Don’t police me, Dirk.

  DIRK: Do you see any potential in the blond kid?

  WILHELMINA: I don’t know. She must come from money. She has that do-what-I-say way about her.

  DIRK: Like you do.

  WILHELMINA: I can’t help it.

  DIRK: If she’s a runaway, she’ll hate her parents.

  WILHELMINA: But does she hate them creatively? Or is she merely pissed off because Father won’t buy her a pony? If she only hates Father because Father won’t buy her a pony, then she is no use to us yet. She will have to be de-educated, then radicalized.

  DIRK: Recruitable?

  WILHELMINA: She’s still too fat. Let her go hungry awhile, and then we can begin to vandalize her worldview.

  DIRK: What about the Chinese?

  WILHELMINA: I don’t know. Maybe.

  DIRK: I want to blow up America.

  WILHELMINA: Hey, good idea.

  DIRK: The stuff gets more volatile the longer it sits.

  WILHELMINA: I know.

  DIRK: Hit me.

  Three blows followed. Dirk moaned.

  WILHELMINA: I want you to sleep somewhere else tonight, kitten.

  DIRK: Why?

  WILHELMINA: Your fingernails are bothering me.

  DIRK: You are a real white girl, you know it?

  WILHELMINA: Oink. Hit me back before you go.

  DIRK: I don’t want to hit you right now. I feel mellow.

  WILHELMINA: Mellow?

  There was silence, then a blow, and the van door slid open and shut.

  69

  Wilhelmina moaned by herself on the floor of the van, and then she stopped moaning. Her nose whistled, though she kept sniffing and, from the sound of it, batting at her nose.

  She began to talk again, just above a whisper. “I did it with Dirk, but I didn’t let him sleep with me,” she said. “I don’t want you to sleep with me. I’ll only sleep in groups of three or alone.”

  I almost answered her! I don’t want to sleep with you, either, I almost said. But something stopped me. Wilhelmina thought she was alone. She was talking to herself, or else to a person who wasn’t here.

  “Sleeping in pairs is sad and bourgeois,” she murmured. “If I don’t get up right now, I’m going to pee on myself.” She slid the door open, and I heard her scuff off.

  Quietly I wormed between the seats and slipped out the door that Wilhelmina had left open. I crouched by the front of the van. There she was, not too many steps away, urinating in a square of moonlight. She held her head in both hands. When she was finished she rose a little, wagged her hips, and jogged back into the van.

  I would have paid a thousand dollars for a shower right then. Instead I found some dry pine needles and rubbed them all over my arms and clothes. Then I sprinted for the road.

  The stuff gets more volatile. What stuff? It did make me pause. What did they want to recruit me for?

  It took me a good thirty minutes just to get down the rutted half mile between the hemlocks to where the main road was. I kept having to stop and convince myself that Dirk and Wilhelmina were only a couple of high-talking jackass hippie kids. None of their talk had meaning, because it was mainly designed to impress themselves. I’d go a little further, then I’d find myself imagining Betty in some county jail, trying to figure out what to do with a pan of cool oatmeal. Would she recognize it as food? I’d stop and spend some minutes reminding myself how sneaky and hateful Betty was. Bug out, I told myself. No es mi problema.

  The sneakers she had stolen for me were a pretty good fit. I wished she had stolen some socks to go under them.

  I wondered what would ever come of me. How long would this bugout last? When would I see Ray? Would I ever go to college? The thought came to me that I might never see Ray again, and I put it out of my head. A more precise way to describe it is that I put the thought in a box and closed the lid. I put the box on a shelf.

  I tripped on a root and wished I were in bed somewhere asleep. I got to my feet and reached the road. The walk to town would take me till daylight. I told myself, The first car that comes by, I am going to put out my thumb, and if the car doesn’t slow down I will jump out in the road and wave my arms so that it has to slow down.

  I waited a long time. A gray possum wandered into the moonlight and fumbled around on the pavement in its I’m-a-possum-please-run-over-me way.

  No car came. I took the box down from its shelf and unpacked it along with some others that were there. Ray. My mother and father. Celeste and her baby named Angela. I looked closely at what was there, and I noticed what was missing. There were many things I didn’t know because I had never asked Ray. Other things I wondered about that no one could ever tell me. What if my life had been different? It is the idlest question ever posed. My life was what it was.

  A set of headlights approached. A pickup slowed and bent its course to spare the possum’s life. I went back to the campfire and shook Betty awake.

  70

  “Give me a cigarette,” I said.

  Betty sat up and rubbed her eyes. She blinked at me awhile. Then she produced a crooked half pack of Raleighs from one of her secret pockets and shook two out. She lit a match in her backward Chinese manner, swiping the book against the match head.

  “Tell me how to do this,” I said.

  “You have never tri
ed smoke a cigarette before?”

  “I’ve seen it done a half a million times.”

  Frowning, she set the two cigarettes in her mouth and lit them both. She showed me how to take some shallow puffs to draw the smoke into my mouth. I did it awhile.

  “Good enough,” she said. “Now you can smoke.”

  The smoke made my teeth feel as though I had dried them with a paper towel. “We’ve got to talk,” I said.

  “I am here,” Betty said.

  I paused to collect my thoughts and arrange them. Serious lies needed telling, and for once I meant to get my lies straight ahead of time.

  “First some old business,” I said. “I want to offer my sincerest apology for sometimes taking a domineering tone with you. Do you know what I mean by domineering?”

  “Yep.”

  “All right. And do you accept my apology?”

  “I accept it.”

  “That is settled, then. Now I want you to tell me what your intentions are, regarding this country.”

  “Don’t know what you are talking about,” Betty said.

  “Well, you’re a Communist, correct? And you’re against the U.S. So what are you going to do about it?”

  “I would like to take a bath.”

  “Suppose you had the chance to strike a body blow at capitalism. For example, what if someone said to you, ‘Let’s go plug all the toilets at the courthouse’? Vital records are generally in the basement, so any flooding would cause a degree of mayhem.”

  “I don’t want to cause mayhem now.”

  I studied her awhile. A pine cone she’d kicked onto the coals was crackling like an old record, and Betty was finishing her cigarette all the way. She always smoked them right down to the filter eventually, though it might take her a couple of sessions.

  “What are you looking at?” she said.

  “We are friends,” I said. “Aren’t we?”

  “You are strange.”

  “I am going to give you some information that you must hold very closely. By this I mean you must not tell it to anyone, and if you do, I will deny that I said it. Understand?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve discovered that Dirk and Wilhelmina are political informers,” I said. “They pretend to like revolution, but if they learn that you’re from Red China they will surely report you to Nixon’s Secret Service.”

  “I thought U.S. does not have political informers.”

  “Oh, we have them. Ours are very treacherous. Don’t be surprised if one of those hippies asks you to help plan a riot soon, or place a rock on some railroad tracks, or hand out flyers. It will be a trick, you see. When they suspect someone is a Communist, they are allowed to use special methods.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “No. Do you believe me?”

  “If those hippies work for Nixon, I feel bad for that man.”

  She lay down on her towel and closed her eyes.

  71

  In the morning, when Renee pushed aside the front door shower curtain of the red cottage, her ears were pink, and her eyes were puffy. She wettened her hands on some dew to wash her face. Then she knelt with a pan at the fire, searing cubes of stolen Spam while Eeyore and Dirk sat watching her like patient male coyotes.

  “Where is Wilhelmina?” I said.

  “She likes to sleep in the van,” Renee informed me sweetly.

  I walked off toward the woods, as though to use the facilities.

  The trick I had in mind was an old one: provoke Dirk and Wilhelmina to some mild illegal action, tip off the authorities, and get out of the way. If I could recruit Wilhelmina, Dirk would follow. Wilhelmina was a hard target, however. Where was her vulnerability? It wasn’t money: her family had that, yet she lived in a shack. And it wasn’t Dirk. They were intimate, but she disliked him.

  I’d been chewing on the problem for a while when a better question came to me. What would Marilyn do in my position? I did know her work, after all. I ought to have learned something from her. How would she crack a nut like Wilhelmina? The answer: solid brass.

  I went around to the van and slid the door all the way open. Wilhelmina sat up on the daybed.

  “You’re a pig,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You’re a G-man, a shoe. I know it. You work for the FBI!”

  She pulled aside some lank, dark hair, revealing a shallow crease down the middle of her white forehead.

  “What makes you think that?” Wilhelmina said.

  “All this patter about my oppressing a brown sister. You’ve taken it straight from the handbook! I know a Hoover when I see one.”

  An idea crept over her face. “I think you are the pig,” she said.

  “That’s right. Stolen Tuna Squad.” I spat on the ground.

  “You may be a narco pig! Are you waiting for us to cross the state line? Is that it? Well, we won’t.”

  “I’m not a narco pig.”

  “If so, you can prove it by smoking some gage.” She patted the bedding around her, looking.

  “That wouldn’t prove anything,” I said. “A person can smoke some gage and still be a pig.”

  We stared at each other awhile, and then I stepped up into the van. The air was foul inside, but I slid the door shut behind me. Wilhelmina sniffed and rubbed sleep from her eyes. She didn’t look so militant now. She looked like a woman who’d fallen asleep on the bus and missed her stop.

  “I am not a pig,” I said. “I am hiding from the pigs.”

  “Why are you hiding from the pigs?”

  “Ding and I belong to an independent Maoist cell,” I said. “We are moving like fish in the sea. Do you know what I’m saying, sister?”

  It will sound grandiose, but I felt like Leopold Stokowski when I saw the color come up in her neck. I had made that happen. She must have been physically salivating, because I heard her slurp.

  I fed her some details. Ding and I were just off a two-week campaign of domestic sabotage. We had poured red paint into public mailboxes all over Baltimore. “We also injected glue in stamp machines,” I said. “But now the Postal Inspection Service is on our tail. Don’t speak of this with Ding.”

  “Why not?”

  “For security reasons, we never mention the action out loud. Or if we must, we refer to the action by the code word of It.”

  “It?”

  “Right. That’s the code word for the action.”

  “It,” she said.

  “Don’t keep saying it, sister.”

  We went on like this until I felt pretty sure I had her on the hook. All my answers were ready. Yes, I had rioted plenty, before I quit high school to go underground. My political awakening happened on a field trip to D.C., when I heard a boy in a brown corduroy suit read a speech about Cambodia. His motorcycle helmet had a scuff on it from a Chicago policeman’s billy club. Ding’s criticism of me the night before was genuine; we made it a practice to criticize each other just as often as we had the chance.

  Wilhelmina wanted to know whether Ding and I were “lesbians.”

  “Certainly not,” I said, once I understood her meaning. “That kind of thing doesn’t serve the revolution very much.”

  “Is Lucy your real name?”

  “No.”

  “What is your real name?”

  This was one detail I didn’t have ready. It seems simple enough, but in fact it is not so easy to come up with a real-sounding name when someone is staring at you waiting. Finally I said, “I don’t have a real name.”

  “Everybody has a name,” Wilhelmina said.

  “Not if you stole your own birth certificate from the courthouse and set it on fire.”

  As I heard myself say this, I became depressed. Too much, too far! I had blown the pitch.

  Wilhelmina let her jaw hang until she had to drag her sleeve across her mouth, removing the drool. “I’ve got to get some food,” she said. She slid the van door open and trotted off.

  72

  Wilhelm
ina eyed me fervidly across the campfire while spooning down her breakfast. Then she led me to the cottage and into the off-limits room. Dirk reclined on a mattress on the floor.

  “Lucy says that she and Ding did some postal actions in Baltimore,” Wilhelmina informed him.

  They had me describe the actions again. “This is all new to me,” Dirk said. “Are you with the Baltimore People’s Front?”

  “No. We are an independent cell.”

  “Most of the Baltimore militants report to the People’s Front.”

  “Not us. We worked out of a hotel on St. Paul called the Fletcher.”

  “I know the place. It’s near the Peabody Institute.”

  “Correct.”

  “You probably know the brothers in the Eager Street Collective, then.”

  “I’m not familiar with any collective on Eager Street.”

  “There’s some greasers living with a lady named Mother Swink on Pratt. Bunch of tire cutters.”

  “I don’t know any Mother Swink.”

  “What about the Midwives of Violence, at the University of Maryland? You must have heard of them,” Dirk said.

  “Nope.”

  “Have you heard of the University of Maryland?”

  “Don’t talk down to her,” Wilhelmina said.

  “I wasn’t talking down to her. I’m trying to ascertain her place in the movement.”

  “You don’t know every single militant in Baltimore,” Wilhelmina said.

  “There’s some Ho-ists at Towson State.” He swiveled his small eyes. “Who are you friends with?”

  “You don’t know much about security,” I said to Dirk. “You’ve just described the order of battle for half of Baltimore County. If I were a pig, you’d have compromised all of them.”

  “Dirk, you pinhead!” Wilhelmina said.

  “I don’t trust her.”

  “I do,” Wilhelmina said. “Your work pouring paint in mail slots was laudable,” she said to me. “I dig that. But revolutionaries have to organize. I wonder if you’re ready to take the next step.”

  “What step?”

  “Would you fight a pig in the street?”