The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  Sam Westergard had his ideas. He was new and he was brash and when he raised his long lanky arms to serve that summer, he looked like a Moses, a Prospero summoning new powers from the air. He was beating me easily now. Somehow, somewhere he’d turned a corner in his play and I was struggling just to keep things competitive. Sometimes I brought Jen along and we all played a lighter brand of tennis, two-on-one, more relaxed. Other times I took my beating—three–six, four–six if I was lucky—and then Sam and I sat in the beech tree shade, stretching down, rehydrating, planning the revolution.

  “We occupy the White House lawn,” Sam said. “Or we bring the Hoovervilles back. We find some way to disrupt the Soline trial.”

  “That’s theater,” I said. “And insane.”

  “Or we occupy fucking Larry Bosch’s front lawn. ‘Here’s where Soline’s criminal CEO lives’—have you seen that palace of his up in Westchester?—‘here’s Bosch’s castle, and meanwhile thousands of his subsidiary workers are scrounging to make rent.’ ”

  “You’re going to put that on a sign—‘subsidiary workers’? You’re going to sloganeer that while you’re being dragged away for trespassing? It’s just theater, Sam. It’s impractical.”

  “Well, at least it’s something. And theater can be useful, can’t it? Anyway I thought we were just blue-skying here.”

  “ ‘Blue-skying’? Dear God, you sound like one of them.”

  “A joke, comrade, a joke! Give me a little credit. Besides, didn’t Mao or somebody say something about knowing your enemy?”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  Sam looked at me with a peaked high face, waiting.

  “If you’re going to do theater,” I said, “you do it small, pointed, with a name and a face and a street address you can access without the National Guard showing up.”

  “I’m on bated breath,” Sam said.

  “You’re on snark is what you’re on. I should have never given you that Eagleton to read.”

  “But I’m so glad you did! He’s actually funny! What’s wrong with a bit of levity, huh?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “But will this levity of yours hold up in one-hundred-fifteen-degree heat?”

  The question did the work I wanted it to—Sam blinking, quirking his head a little, a little smile of genuine curiosity on his thin, fleshless lips. He had never even attended an ISO meeting, had wrung his recent “conversion” (his word, not mine) out of a handful of books and pamphlets, ten at most, had a tendency to confuse basic concepts (base and superstructure, say), but he was genuine, I felt, articulate, and a good tennis partner. I felt confident I could get him in on some actual action: a woman named Maria Nava and her two children in a little foreclosed bungalow just off Baseline Drive in Phoenix, Arizona—this was the face, this was the address. We had heard through Alex about Maria losing her job and her benefits and her twenty-year retirement with Alta Gas after that company went down with the great pirate ship of Soline, which had acquired it in the last months of its plunder. Of course I’d read about the “preferred-stock retirement plans” that the employees, new and old, had felt pressured into taking, and how the company froze its workers out of those accounts once the stock began to plummet—these were some of the machinations the journalists most reveled in. Yet the particular details didn’t interest me much, if I’m honest. I knew a rabbit hole when I saw one, and I refused on principle to be shocked by Soline’s last-ditch tactics, as if there was anything novel in the executive class chucking its workers overboard. The fact was that Maria Nava was behind on her mortgage, the bank was making good on its shameless threats, and Soline was in clean, cool deposition rooms, lawyered to the hilt. If a settlement ever did come down, if it exceeded the legal fees, if it fought its way free of escrow and appeals court, if the burgeoning welter of other ifs fell eventually just into place—well, but Maria couldn’t wait for that.

  “I’m in,” Sam said.

  “You’re in? Don’t you want to hear the details first, the money piece?”

  “Sure,” he said, “but I’m in.”

  “Have you ever been to Phoenix before?”

  “Oddly, no. But I know the desert. I was born there. It’s in my Mormon blood.”

  “Weren’t you supposed to be born a tepid Protestant, or a good agnostic, with a last name like yours?”

  “One of the many wrong turns we Westergards have taken.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  I’d never been to Phoenix either.

  From the airplane the city looked more like a scorched cave floor than a city, sere browns and darker browns, beige buildings like stalagmites rising from the flat gridded spread of the valley where it gathered at the downtown. A few sputters of green resolved into trees as we sank back to earth, but mostly the city looked dry, and brown, and hot. Put a chunk of the world in a waffle iron, Phoenix comes out. You understand my bias. A child of the East Coast, I conflate beauty with greenery—I reduce it to that. This was Sam’s message to me on the car ride from the airport, with Alex driving. From the backseat he lectured loudly over the loud blowing air conditioner. He said I was making the classic, myopic mistake of enshrining fragile life, green life, as the lodestar of the aesthetic. But what about stubborn life, resilient life, brown and hard and drought-resistant life? Did beauty have to be so exclusive? Above the scrim of tract homes and power lines green scrub poked out of the mountainside like weird eyes, saguaro cacti sliding past with their strange stubby arms outstretched, half outstretched, in greeting. Sandstone scree lay all about, dully blushing, scored, sharing the sloping foothills with the cacti and scrub until the mountain broke vertically, shot up into shelves of dark rocky crag. Those canyon lines were what hemmed us in, what rose above us, our tallest buildings—the utter dominance of nature.

  “This really turns you on, doesn’t it?” I said to Sam. “This is sexual for you.”

  For a moment the foreground houses and chain stores abated as an open unfenced lot, a tract of land, really, flashed a closer sea of scrub brush, the sharp dry blooms blurring past like a cloud of anemone, wavering strange life. It was the desert reclaiming its own, or maybe the developers were just biding their time.

  “I’m saying I can appreciate the landscape,” Sam said. “You just look up a little and it’s there.”

  “Eli tells me you’re a poet?” Alex said.

  “Not really,” Sam said. “I write poems sometimes, I’ve landed in an MFA for poetry, but I don’t really think of myself as a poet.”

  “Sam and I are on the run from our chosen selves,” I said. “It’s really quite something.”

  Whatever that was supposed to mean. If it was bait, Alex didn’t take it. She was smiling the smile of a Mona Lisa, cryptic, distracted, beautiful. I’d forgotten how beautiful she could be in her tossed-off, anti-beautiful way: the tomboyish hair that she cut herself, the dark straight bangs that boxed in her round olive face, the large eyes, the strong and aquiline nose, a little ebony stud at the line where the nostril began to rise. Ancient people survived in her face, some of the Aztec blood this country and others had worked so hard to wipe out. Alex’s family lived in a town outside Tucson. Her mother had been a small, dark, elegant, slightly jet-lagged woman in teal jewelry when she’d come to visit Alex in New York the previous year, calling her Alejandra, taking me in with a standing, wary smile over the croque monsieurs and mimosas that we ate and drank amid the rowdy Sunday brunch crowd—my foolish suggestion. I thought we might have been riding in an Esposito car now, a Honda, simple, responsible.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a poet, is there?” Alex said.

  “No, there’s not,” Sam said.

  “You could help us liaise with the media,” she said. “Or maybe write press releases, who knows? I’m thinking we should go mainstream with this. Maria is the sweetest woman and she has the most beautiful, photogenic childre
n—I actually thought this—and her neighbors love her. Some of them joined us in the occupying yesterday. Some others brought over a vat of carnitas last night. No one’s not on our side this time, no one that matters. We should milk this.”

  The chain stores and white glowing strip malls had dropped away, the empty scrub lots multiplying. The tract developments with their trailing stucco walls and names like The Sunset, Shangri-La, The Desert Rose—these were soon replaced by the blinding ranches, the chain-link fences, the dead, crisped, yellow-brown lawns. We turned off Baseline Drive onto a smaller street, skirting the dirt field where a lone shirtless bedouin of a teen passed a soccer ball between his knees. In the car you could feel the sun pushing through the windows, compressing the air-conditioned air. You could feel the heat cradling the car. When we pulled up to Maria’s house and cut the engine, the heat rose around us like a flood. A pair of green tents had been set up in the front yard and quickly abandoned: They looked like weird shrubbery at either side of a red faded door that hid against the ranch’s rosy stucco. A small garage, too, connecting to the house’s main façade with its picture window, blinds drawn, the gray bleached segmented walkway curving up to the front door, the sparse hanks of stubborn crabgrass betraying the outlines of the individual concrete slabs. Red Spanish tile covered the roof, reddish gravel lay in the small garden planted with ground-hugging fierce shrubs I couldn’t begin to name. Poster-board signs and pickets surrounded the tents, studded the entire lawn. A handmade banner stretched most of the way across the low chain-link fence: SOLINE IS ON TRIAL, NOT THIS FAMILY! Another sign shouted for Soline CEO Larry Bosch to pay Maria Nava’s mortgage: LET BOSCH PAY BACK WHAT HE STOLE! PEOPLE OVER PROFITS! another sign said. HUMAN NEED NOT CORPORATE GREED! RIGHT IS RIGHT—COME TO THE LEFT! And several others.

  “We need to clean this up,” I said, “make the signs more pointed, less generic. This looks like an undergrad protest.”

  “And you sound like a grad student,” Alex said. “We’ll see what we can do, but check your hypercritical mode at the door, okay? This isn’t academia, thank God. I hear you’re dating jailbait, by the way.”

  Alex with her brown shining eyes watched my reaction and laughed deliciously, the car struck like a bell. “Yeah, we’ve got some catching up to do. Are we ready? Leave the bags in the trunk, we’ll get them after dark. The last thing you want to do is touch metal here in the middle of the day.”

  Inside the small house a group of twentysomethings, a few thirtysomethings, sat around the wall-unit air conditioner in the back of the living room, five to a couch, four to a love seat, a few hangers-on hanging off the armrests, smoking, talking in lazy, heat-subdued voices. On the couch I recognized several of my comrades from the New York ISO. We all exchanged greetings, hugs. I introduced Sam around. Out of the kitchen stepped Tiffany carrying a glass of water in either hand. She was unchanged from the grading sessions we’d had together with Hahn. I was surprised to see her, and surprised how happy I was to see her. I hadn’t known her to be more than rarely involved in ISO activities. How had she heard about this one?

  “From Hahn, actually,” Tiffany said. “And I’ve been following the Soline news, getting infuriated. And then from Ms. Persuasive here, who finally made me—”

  Tiffany stopped short, taking in Alex, who’d lifted her finger in Plato-pontifical mode—but now we saw she was actually asking for silence. A car idled outside, and it wasn’t Maria’s, apparently. Alex tilted her finger floorward to where blue and red light now skittered on the warm tile floor, just managing to penetrate the blinds. Then we heard the quick telltale whoop-whoop of a police siren. In an instant our quorum broke and reassembled in the front yard, ranging down the curving walk, standing guard in front of occupying tents, beside protest signs—a number of people from ASU’s progressive group, apparently, and Tiffany, Andrew, Dawn, Nate, Adam, Sarah, Ali, all from the New York ISO, and Sam, of course, a few others whose names I’ve forgotten, but a decent-size group, fifteen of us in all. We all shielded our faces against the sun, blinking and blinking in the sudden ferocious glare. Alex made her way to the front of the staggered group, leading Maria by the arm, or anyway leading a small compact woman I assumed was Maria—Sam and I hadn’t been formally introduced to her yet. I moved to within a few feet of Alex, feeling Sam’s clammy hand at my elbow.

  “What’s up?” he whispered.

  The police cruiser cut its lights, its engine.

  “Not sure.”

  “What happens now? Should we do something?”

  “Just sit tight,” I said.

  The first officer, a Hispanic woman not much bigger than Maria, stood behind an open passenger-side door. Her arms were held out slightly like a weight lifter’s, to make room for the belt riding high on her waist and studded with weapons like dark strange barnacles. When her partner finally unfolded himself from the driver’s seat, he rose high above the white wide car roof, a giant of a man. You expected this man to open his mouth and speak with the voice of Elohim. Instead, he approached the low chain-link fence with his partner—it came to her chest, his waist—and kept silent.

  “¿Toda está bien, señora?” the first officer said, addressing Maria. “¿Es usted la dueña de esta casa?”

  “Soy, sí,” Maria said slowly, a little coldly. “I am still the owner of this house, yes. Everything is fine.”

  The first officer introduced herself and her partner in English, names I instantly forgot—Officer So-and-so, and “up there” Officer So-and-so. No one laughed at the attempted icebreaker.

  “Are these friends of yours?” the officer asked Maria, gesturing.

  “Yes,” Maria said.

  The other officer’s radio sputtered and squeaked in its epaulette pouch; he seemed to startle a little. He leaked a few formalities out of the side of his mouth. His tall dome of a head, bald, stinging white, shone like porcelain except at the sides where the faintest shadow of hair still appeared. He wore mirrored sports glasses, like his partner, gray cargo shorts, a dopey blue polo shirt that hung oversize off him, Sam-like, with the Phoenix Police Department’s shield at its breast.

  “They’ve got your tailor, apparently,” I muttered back to Sam. “You sure you’re not consulting?”

  “Huh?”

  “What was that?” the giant officer said, lifting his voice across the yard. “Huh?”

  Not a giant’s voice, it turned out, but a pretty average basso. In brusquer tones the officer repeated his question.

  “Just having a conversation with my friend,” I said. “I assume that’s allowed?”

  Alex turned to me and said quietly, “Shut up.”

  “Why does your cop cruiser just say ‘Police’?” put in Adam Carr from deeper in the yard. “Shouldn’t it say ‘Phoenix Police Department’? PPD? You could spell it out phonetically.”

  Alex turned around and told him to shut up too—Adam smirking, unaccountable in his white-boy dreadlocks, a Bob Marley from Boulder, Colorado. We’d never gotten along.

  “Wow, that’s hilarious,” the female officer said.

  “Very original,” her partner said. He pushed his sunglasses up onto his head and took in Maria with his pinkish small eyes, strangely small for the size of the face—acres of cheeks, vast tracts of forehead and skull.

  “Ma’am, are you aware that it’s against city ordinance to keep standing camping equipment in your front yard?”

  “Sir, are you aware that that sounds like bullshit you just made up on the spot?”

  Adam again, ignoring Alex’s stare.

  The officer kept his eyes on Maria. I couldn’t see her face, only that she held it very still. From behind me I heard stiff crunching steps.

  “Hey!” the female officer shouted. “Hand out of your pocket!”

  It was one of the ASU kids—Jason, I later learned—young-looking in his upswept hair, his construction-cone-orange
shorts. He lifted a smartphone slowly. “Phone,” he said, “only a phone. I was just wondering if you had that ordinance number? So I could look it up?”

  “You think we’re lying?” the officer said.

  “No, no, not at all, not at all. I just want to look it up.”

  “ ‘Trust but verify,’ ” Adam said. “That’s your boy Reagan.”

  Maria said, “Please,” turning her straining eyes on us.

  “That’s okay, ma’am,” the tall officer said. “We deal with morons for a living.”

  “If we move the tents to the backyard,” Maria said, “would that be okay?”

  “We’re not here to write you up, ma’am. We just wanted you to be aware.”

  “We wanted to make sure you’re all right,” said the other officer. Then she added, quickly and lowly, “Si tus amigos le dan cualquier problema, avísanos, bien?”

  I’d caught the gist of the sentence, particularly the dubious emphasis laid on amigos. I’m sure Alex had too, a real Spanish speaker. Her back was long and motionless in front of me, rather narrow in a pale green tank top, a faint band of sweat, darker green, tracking the length of her spine. The spine straightened in surprise as Maria reached her arm around her, awkwardly, a stiff unpracticed gesture that told in Maria’s body language too.

  “They’re not causing any trouble,” Maria said. “They’re my friends. They’re helping me.”

  “We understand that,” the officer said, “but if that changes…”