by Steven Lang
‘Stop it Cody,’ she said.
‘Stop what, honey?’
‘You know …’
‘I don’t baby, I don’t. I live with all your talk of love. She reads Christina Rossetti for fuck’s sake, but she ties me up in knots, honestly I’m like a teenager around her, begging her for it.’
But Carl could take it no longer.
‘Really,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’
Not that he was Carl in those days. He’d been Robert, the only one of the Cordale family ever to make it to university. Historically speaking the settlement of Montana was a giant nineteenth century con, railroad magnates selling land to poor easterners who came out west full of dreams, only to find the soil was poor, the lots weren’t big enough to support even a small family, the winters harder than it was possible to imagine. But the Cordales – and this was the thing – Robert’s grandfather, had survived. He and his Lutheran wife had pasted newspapers over the cracks in their timber shack against the temperatures of fifty below, and in the spring they’d ploughed the hard ground, and two generations later they had begun to prosper. Robert, the fruit of the fruit of their loins, a young man out of Bozeman, had been sent to Missoula to learn a useful trade but had taken to reading Sartre instead, had been seduced by Cody and his ideas, by the idea that the world was changing, that the old order was bound to give way to the new, not eventually but right then, within his lifetime, within his very youth. There had been no end to the dreams of his generation.
And if Cody brought culture to Robert, then Robert brought the natural world to Cody. Robert’s escape from his family, and from those early signs of difference that had only grown larger in Missoula, had always been to walk in the woods. It happened that there were five separate mountain ranges within an hour of Missoula. He took Cody up into the Bitterroots, onto the Mission Range, up along the Clark Fork.
In those places Cody’s imagination was fired. He stood on the top of the ranges, looking out over the endless forests, the snow-capped peaks, the glaciers, the mountain lakes, the great torn scars of winter avalanches, the extraordinary unequivocal beauty, and announced that this was the true heartland of America, it was not in Washington or New York, not in any city or in any jerk-off national anthem, it was there in the wild places. This was what Whitman had been talking about, and Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, Henry David Thoreau. Cody always had a host of names to back him up.
The strangest thing was that Cody had chosen Robert to be his friend. Cody, the most remarkable man in Montana. Robert had never known a friend before. He didn’t know other men, had never known them, had always been on the outside. Cody took him as a friend and told him that in friendship there should be no barriers. That friendship meant talking about everything. Cody liked to discuss sex. For him talking about sex was almost as good as sex itself, to describe the wondrous crude detail of it was to revisit the act. That Robert wasn’t having any didn’t matter, perhaps even made it better for Cody. This, too, was something of their time, something magical which had been hidden from previous generations by the forces of repression. Hitching back from the woods one day the three of them took a ride in a pick-up. Robert rode in the front with the driver while Cody and Barbara sheltered under the tarp in the back. By that time she’d started fucking him, and that afternoon, in the back of the pick-up, she went down on him. When they got back to the loft, after Barbara had left, Cody told Robert about it, not to make him jealous, not to turn him on, simply because he was ecstatic. He’d been sitting on a pile of sacks, he said, the wind blowing his afro hair every which way, with Barbara sucking his cock, and he’d undergone a kind of secular epiphany. He described the mechanics of it to Robert, what it felt like, how she did it, but it was the revolutionary aspect he wanted to communicate.
Cody just had no idea, that was his problem. Every step towards a fatal act, when seen later, is so small that it seems impossible the players did not have the strength, the presence of mind to turn back. But then, because of the smallness of the steps, nothing at the time feels irrevocable.
All across America the sons and daughters of that great nation were rising up to oppose an unjust war and Cody, being at the forefront of everything, had managed to become the representative of an organisation, the nature of which, even the name of, he refused to specify. But it was through its influence that they started ferrying draft dodgers into Canada. Simple, honest, healthy work, doing something that counted.
Except it turned out that running occasional midwestern sons across the border into Canada wasn’t enough for Cody or Barbara.They required some larger statement. Cody had taken to calling their little group of three a cell. He said that it was in the interest of the members of the cell that they didn’t know the names of people in other cells so that if they were captured they wouldn’t be able to give them away under torture. He loved secrets so much he could have been an agent himself. He had acquired a roneoed copy of The Anarchist Cookbook.
‘Even the act of possession of this book is an offence,’ he boasted, already fluent in the language of dissent.
The bigger thing, this larger statement, and this was Barbara’s idea, involved a national service office in the old part of the city, a timber building not far from Cody’s loft. The plan, much altered, much debated through long nights, was to fill the back of a pick-up with a mixture of fertiliser and diesel and park it under the office, which was up on stilts, then blow the whole thing in the small hours of a Sunday night, when no one was about, setting it off with a detonator stolen from a shed on Cody’s father’s ranch. Thus destroying every record of every draft-eligible young man in the north-west of Montana in one bold act of resistance. They would claim responsibility on behalf of the Dental Floss Tycoons. It would be a blow against the government, but one that involved humour and satire, a witty stab at the military-industrial complex.
In the event, however, things did not go quite so well. The liberated pick-up had a tendency to stall. It fell to Robert to drive the thing, an old monster stolen that afternoon from a mall outside of town. It had been easy to steal because the driver’s window was open; indeed, it turned out, refused to close; so that later, close to midnight, the October rain that had set in fell on Robert as he coasted down the laneway behind the office, headlights off, full of the excitement and the terror of the task. On either side were high picket fences, beyond them the backs of old storehouses, their windows dark and lifeless. He stopped by the cyclone gates and Cody got out to cut the chain. The only light came from the next street over.
The rain was cold and hard. Robert pulled the hood of his parka tighter round his face and gripped the lower part of the steering wheel with both hands. He noticed that he was grinding his teeth.When the motor began to falter he gunned it gently. Even then it produced a deep-throated chortle. Cody was taking too long with the bolt cutters. As he rattled the chain past the hollow steel, too loud, the motor died. Cody swung around, the heavy tool dangling in one hand, the chain in the other, his face hidden within his parka but his feelings entirely evident. Robert turned the switch, pumping the pedal. The motor turned and turned, then caught, coughed, backfired like a rifle shot, then settled into its customary lolloping idle. Robert eased forward but could not make it through the gate in one turn. He needed to reverse back to straighten up, revving the motor with each crunching gear change. Without waiting for Cody he pulled in under the building and stopped.
It was dry amongst the concrete pylons and unnaturally quiet. Water dripped from the body of the pick-up. Cody slung the bolt cutters into the back. There was blood on his hand, running freely with the rainwater. It did not strike Robert as unusual. He was, however, unable to move from behind the steering wheel.
‘C’mon, man,’ Cody said. ‘Let’s go.’
‘I have to check it.’
He managed the door. Climbed out, got in the back and took the cover off the fifty-gallon drum. The little remote-controlled device was sitting there, snug like it was supposed to be, i
n the reek of ammonia. He extended the aerial as far as it would go. Small actions were possible, but had to be taken slow, like in a dream.
Cody was pulling at him.Together they made it through the gates into the lane.
‘What happened to your hand?’ he asked, but those words, too, seemed to come from somewhere else.
‘I got it caught in the thing when the link gave. Hurts like fuck. At the time I didn’t feel it.’
Barbara was a block away in a rental car.
They were twenty miles north when their bomb went off, destroying the whole building. That wouldn’t have been so bad, might even have been good, but a young man from the Army Reserve, woken by late-night calls from some central office and sent out to investigate, was standing beside the pick-up at the time.
On Monday morning Kelvin didn’t show. Carl made breakfast and sat on the veranda, waiting. He’d left the gates tied on the back of the Toyota because they were heavy and fixing them was a two-man job and right then he had no other use for the vehicle. Hanging them was what he had planned to do that day.
Without Kelvin he was at a loss. Certain the arrangement had been clear, he could make no sense of the boy’s absence and it disturbed him more than he was prepared to admit. Perhaps they had got to him. But for what reason, for what possible advantage? He went back inside, poured himself more coffee, then decided he didn’t want it. His fragile equanimity was missing. He’d put the bloody gates on himself. He’d use rope where he would have employed Kelvin. What he couldn’t do was sit still. The boy would show or he wouldn’t, he certainly wasn’t going to go looking.
He drove across to the new fence, the dogs racing beside him. The weekend’s rain had cleared the air. In the rich colours of the day he could almost forget his problems. The grass along the fence line where he’d pushed aside the scrub was beginning to come through and the long silky green blades were heavy with drops of water, silver in the morning light. He parked beside the strainer Kelvin had dug and hauled one of the gates off the back and into position, lifting one end at a time. He measured everything to see it was right and connected the augur bit to the saw and drilled the holes, but when he went to fit the hinge he realised he’d read the tape wrong and put the top hole exactly twelve inches higher than it was meant to be. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it at the time. It was only an extra hole in a strainer post in a paddock in the middle of nowhere but he was furious, as if he’d spoilt something valuable, irreplaceable. He stomped around the gateway calling himself names, mouthing obscenities. He drilled the hole again and wound the elbow hinges in with a pair of stilsons, then set about lining up the gate to drop it on. He slung a rope around the other post and tied up that end of the gate so it was level, but found this now interfered with the position of the hinge eyes. He abandoned the rope in favour of a lump of timber dragged in from the bush. By the time the gate was hung, swinging nicely, a job which should have taken half an hour had taken two. He was tired and sore. He went back to the house for coffee and took out a book.
The bombing achieved headline status in New York and Los Angeles. It received coverage in London, Paris and Tokyo.
In Montana there was no other news.
The reservist had been married, with children, of course. At midnight he had stood looking out of the bedroom window at the rain, the telephone in his hand. He would have resisted his duty of care for longer, might not have gone at all, but for his wife’s insistence that it was nothing, that he should stay at home. Something about the way she spoke unmanned him. When he saw the cut chain on the gate and the strange vehicle, he called for back-up on the two-way radio, but then decided to look anyway. There were little enough opportunities for heroism in Missoula.
Each day the mainstream papers found a new angle from which to display the anguish of the bereaved family and the wider community. What they had suffered at the hands of these animals, these un-Americans. Certain organs of the underground press managed a different slant. The death of the reservist was regrettable but he was, after all, a volunteer; he had willingly put himself in the firing line of what was clearly a war.What was important was that a decisive statement had been made by courageous individuals, men who were, it was hinted, heroes in the struggle against conscription.
These latter comments cut no ice with Robert. He was no hero. He paced in rooms, walked the city at night, abandoned all pretence of lectures. He even visited the bombed building, which looked curiously undamaged from the front because the brick facade still remained, blackened by the flames. It was not a place pedestrians normally visited. He had no reason to be there. But that was where a man had died. Robert had never even seen a dead man. He had done wrong. He would be punished, if not on earth, then in heaven.
He wanted it right then. The weight of retribution, no, call it by its name, the terror of retribution was on him and he walked in the shadow of death with no rod and staff beside him, it was the rod and the staff he feared, they were what would bring him down. Soon enough the law would search him out. And when it did, despite their carefully planned stories, despite his own best interests, he would be unable to lie. He would tell the truth and then, when he did, it would happen: his father would find out. His anger would be worse than God’s. No good to say, ‘I’m sorry Dad, it was a mistake, I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, I thought it was some kind of game, I thought that because the government was sending young men to die in Vietnam it was all right to destroy their paperwork …’ Stupid to conceive of explaining that to his father, this simple man who was the son of his father and his father’s father, this long line of simple men who might have been many things but were never traitors.
He was ashamed.That was the crux of it.Time and again he looked at the photograph of the man he had killed on the front page of the newspaper. This man in his army uniform, supposed to be one of the enemy, except it was Robert who was the criminal. He wanted them to come and find him. He would have been glad to confess.
It was not to be. Cody had been organising. They, the mysterious ones, had decided to get them out. At a meeting in his loft Cody told Robert and Barbara they were to take the northern route, to Canada, where safe houses would be waiting for them. He would go south. They were simply to leave, to get up and go and never come back to where or what they had been. Robert was stunned by the clarity and harshness of the decision. He didn’t question it. Barbara, however, was more than simply furious. She accused Cody of having an affair. This, she said, was his way out. With Cody anything was possible, but he had indicated nothing of the kind to Robert. Barbara showed no restraint. She lashed out at Cody, crying and yelling, beating at him with her fists while he denied all her claims, defending himself with his one good hand.
Kelvin rolled up midafternoon, clattering up the steps onto the veranda with Suzy. He stopped in the doorway, his hand on the jamb, back-lit by the sun on the paddock.
‘Where you been?’ was all he could manage in response to the boy’s greeting.
Kelvin waved the question aside, toeing the doorstep. ‘Got a bit sidetracked.’
‘Right.’
He came in. ‘Sorry,’ he said, but with his head down and to the side, mumbling.
Carl couldn’t help himself. ‘I thought you were working today.’
Kelvin said nothing.
‘I thought we had an agreement you were coming here to work.’
‘I said I was sorry.’ Kelvin looked up for a moment and then back down again.
‘Where did you get to?’ he asked, as if he had a right to know. He sounded like his father.
Kelvin made this same sideways move with his hand. ‘I went into town, to get some smokes, make a call.’
‘To Jessica?’
‘Yeah,’ defiant.
‘Already?’ And suddenly he was off, lecturing Kelvin on how to handle a woman, as if he knew anything on the topic, as though he was giving advice when in fact he was telling the boy what a useless shit he was because he didn’t turn up on time and wasn
’t there to help with the gate and because Carl had actually worried about his safety when he was probably off smoking dope with some of his other retread hippie mates, because this was who had replaced him with Jessica and he needed him to know her value.
‘If you don’t want me here I can go,’ Kelvin said, and just stood there, entirely defeating Carl with his sullen passivity, his lack of care. According to this, Carl was the one who needed him, there was no reciprocity.‘I just came over to see how things were. Last time I saw you we packed up kind of suddenly.’
‘No, I could use a hand. I put one of the gates on this morning. There’s two more to do.’
So back into the paddock with the tools, and this time it was easier because he’d done one already and because the boy was there, but the technical stuff was only part of it, the ease of being together was gone, the boy was present, helpful, necessary, but also withdrawn and resentful. Which pissed Carl off even more. If anyone had reason for resentment it was him.
At the end of the day, driving back up to the house, the work done, he invited him in for a meal, trying one more time.
‘I have some meat, some beer I bought in Bega.’
‘I’d like that,’ Kelvin said, ‘I was going back to Jess’s, water the garden and all, but to tell the truth I’d as happy stay here. There’s some sort of bash on at the main house and I’m not that keen.’ Just the smallest smile at the corner of his mouth.
Robert and Barbara had not been in a position to argue with Cody. Just one day later they set off north across the border, taking the route they had used with draft dodgers earlier in the year, braving the snow on the high country, camping in the early dark below the peak where the idea had had its conception.
