by Don Silver
The truck stopped, and an Asian woman got out, thin and attractive, with a deep summer tan. “Joan,” she said, sticking her hand out. “Keep your hands where they can see them and answer their questions, however ridiculous. These people have no sense of humor.” Lorraine hooked the bag with their clothes around her shoulder and lifted her daughter, who was asleep. The white clapboard house was dark, almost deserted-looking, except for a dim light on the first-floor porch.
“Nobody said there’d be a fucking kid,” a man said, shining a light in her face. Behind him, a group of people began a discussion about whether Lorraine should be allowed in the house with a child. It was typical communal bullshit, Lorraine thought—uptight utopians having an argument that could last all night long.
“I don’t see a problem,” somebody said. He sounded nasal, like the man she’d talked to on the phone. “You guys want to raise the next generation right, don’t you?”
Lorraine listened to the crickets and slowed her breathing to match the girls. She’d expected something like this, and she wasn’t worried. If necessary, she and her daughter would get a motel room in Scranton and wait for Frederick to contact them. The one the others called Alan stepped forward. He was short and twitchy, with a mustache and aviator glasses. He had a flashlight in one hand and a large silver pistol in the other.
“She’s just a child,” Lorraine said quietly.
Alan eyed Lorraine up and down, closer than was comfortable. “She’s already seen too much,” he answered.
A woman with a rifle came up behind him and whispered something. Alan continued staring at Lorraine as if he was trying to make a decision. “Take them upstairs, Pearl,” he said, finally.
The house looked as if it had been empty for a long time. There was no TV, no stereo, no books on shelves, no lamps, no carpet, no wall hangings. What looked like old newspapers and empty food wrappers were scattered across the floor, and a stuffed chair and two couches were pushed against the windows. Beside the steps were several boxes filled with bullets and an array of pistols; there were automatic weapons leaning against the banister. Lorraine noticed a faint odor of mildew, rotting particleboard, and body odor.
The girl they called Pearl was wearing a curly red wig that looked like a shag rug and a man’s dress shirt. Under her dark eyes were two groupings of perfectly round red freckles that could’ve been painted on. Her arms were rail thin, but muscular. Although she appeared to be five or six months pregnant, she had a starved look about her, and she reminded Lorraine of a cat trapped in a tree. Pearl led them to a bedroom that was empty except for an old mattress that had been pushed up against the wall, then stood in the doorway and watched as Lorraine took the girl’s shoes off and started preparing her for bed.
Lorraine must have fallen asleep herself, because the next thing she knew, Pearl had disappeared and Lorraine could hear grunting and shuffling from downstairs. She tiptoed to the top of the landing. “Who’ll drive her?” a woman said angrily. “As soon as possible,” Alan said. Somebody said something about finishing a book. “We need to deliver it to someone we trust.” It sounded like the woman who’d been holding the rifle. Then, out of nowhere, someone started upstairs.
Lorraine dropped to her butt and slid along the wall like a crab, hoping the floor joists would absorb her weight. Quickly, she turned the corner of the bedroom and slid onto the mattress beside her daughter, who exhaled sleepily. A second later, she saw Pearl standing in the doorway, her wig off, her brown hair tied back, wearing a T-shirt and no longer pregnant. She had thin, birdlike features and pale skin, and she looked familiar. Hollow eyes, a gash of a mouth, pencil-thin eyebrows—it was a face Lorraine had seen thousands of times—in newspapers, on magazine covers, and in television specials. Pearl, aka Patty Hearst, the FBI’s most-wanted radical, was here in Pennsylvania with the remaining members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Patty tossed her a blanket. “It’s for the girl,” she said.
The next morning, Lorraine was awakened by the sound of a truck and a guy yelling “Northeast Propane.” She scrambled to a window in the front of the house. The driver looked to be in his thirties, short brown hair, flannel hunting shirt, beer belly.
“What do you want?” Alan said from downstairs.
The man squinted. “I delivered to you guys earlier this summer.” Lorraine heard footsteps.
“I don’t care what you did when. Get back in the truck.”
The driver smiled, uncertain whether he was being teased.
“Be cool, Alan,” someone said. Lorraine heard someone giggle and then metal clicking and sliding.
“It gets pretty cold up here some winters,” he said warily.
“Fuck off, man,” Alan said.
“Whatever you say, boss.” The driver put his hands out in front of him and started climbing back in his cab.
Lorraine woke her daughter and carried her downstairs. Out back, behind the house, a pond with lily pads glistened in the slanted morning sun, and behind that, a large white windmill spun lazily in the breeze. The three Symbionese Liberation Army soldiers carried their weapons through the kitchen. With the others watching from inside, Alan led his comrades in push-ups, jumping jacks, and sprints, and then Patty set up beer cans for target practice. The man Lorraine had talked to on the phone, Jack, walked into the kitchen, his hair sprouting in all directions. He took a large cardboard box out of the refrigerator and lifted a stiff slice of pizza. “They don’t eat pizza, you know,” he said. “Too bourgeois.” Behind him, a tall woman named Mikki said something about going into town to get groceries. Lorraine asked Jack when he thought Frederick would arrive. “You mean Jim, sweetie,” he said, correcting her. “This is the underground. The trains don’t run on schedules, and we don’t use people’s real names.” He had a nervous tic that made him look like he was flinching for no reason.
When they finished training, Alan announced that Joan, Jack, Judy, and Mikki would accompany him downtown to get hardware and supplies while Patty, Lorraine, and the girl stayed behind. “Gimme your keys,” Alan said to Lorraine. “You can wander the grounds. Just don’t talk to anybody.” And for the next few hours, the three of them played tag on the trails, picked blueberries, threw pebbles at the windmill, and skinny-dipped in the pond. When the rest of them returned, they all had lunch and, after that, relaxed while Alan and Judy interviewed Patty out on the porch.
The book they were working on was to be a compendium of SLA military history and a political manifesto, loosely modeled after Prairie Fire, the Weather Underground’s primer, except it would include reflections by the now-famous urban guerrillas. “They just want a recording so they don’t get nailed for kidnapping her,” Joan whispered to Lorraine. “Even though they write out the answers in advance, Pearl wanders. When she drifts from the party line, they turn off the tape machine. They’ve wasted dozens of hours, and they still haven’t gotten what they want.”
Over the next couple hours, Lorraine listened as Patty Hearst, media heiress, described her transformation into Tania, urban guerrilla. By her account, Cinque, the leader of the SLA, simply let her true personality appear the way a photograph develops in the darkroom. Patty made it sound as though Tania was her real identity and Patty was a rich, naïve, selfish little girl who’d been brainwashed by her upbringing.
“How do you feel about your parents?” Judy asked.
“They have no regard for me, and I have none for them,” Patty said in monotone. “There is no doubt in my mind that if the Feds were lucky enough to find me, I would get it,” she said softly. “They have no intention of letting me live.”
For Lorraine, who sat braiding her daughter’s hair in the other room, it was like watching a sci-fi movie where enemy combatants infiltrate someone’s mind, forcing her words, her body, her entire being, to take up arms against friends and family. If Stardust hadn’t become restless, Lorraine would’ve sat there and listened to America’s most-wanted fugitive ramble all day.
While Alan, Judy, and Patty talked on the porch, Lorraine led her little girl out the back door and around front toward the Duster. She was thinking how odd it was that people still talked this way—railing against their parents and the Establishment—and about how she, too, was once preoccupied in this way. She remembered Frederick on their last night together in Cambridge. It’d been days since he’d had a good night’s sleep, and he was talking in circles. Haunted by Oneonta and his ineffectiveness in the movement, Frederick had been visited with ulcers and agonizing toothaches, in addition to chronic back pain, insomnia, and impotence that had hobbled him for years. What ailed him may have saved him, she thought. If he hadn’t been addicted to crystal meth, he might’ve been in the house when the Feds came. Lorraine lifted the bag of toys from the backseat and led her daughter to the porch.
As she mounted the steps, Judy crouched down and Patty rolled over onto her stomach, their nostrils flaring and their eyes glowing, peering down the barrels of their guns. “Drop it!” Alan screamed, pressing his pistol against Stardust’s forehead. Stardust held still, holding her breath, her eyes wide open, her mouth a perfect O. Nobody breathed. Before anyone could move again, Judy grabbed the bag from Lorraine and turned it upside down, spilling crayons, coloring books, and magazines with word games onto the rickety floorboards.
“You should be more careful,” Judy said, exhaling.
Lorraine and Stardust spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs reading, coloring, and trying to restore their breathing to normal. As the sun set, the soldiers drilled and then ate dinner downstairs. The atmosphere was even edgier than it had been earlier in the day. Just after eight o’clock, Judy heard a car wheezing in the distance. Wariness had turned to weariness, and with a mixture of embarrassment and tension, the others watched Alan extinguish the single bulb on the porch, while Patty and Judy loaded their weapons and took their positions.
Lorraine crouched behind a window upstairs, watching as a pair of headlights crept slowly toward the house. When it was about a hundred feet away, the lights went off, and they heard the door open and close. Lorraine held her breath. After what felt like forever, a man’s voice, low and relaxed, called out, “Anybody home?”
From inside, a flashlight panned the yard, highlighting a lean figure with his arm shielding his eyes. There must have been some discussion, because a few seconds later, Jack was dispatched to greet him. “Jimbo, it’s me, Jack.” The two men embraced, slapping each other vigorously. Lorraine hurried down the steps as Alan, Judy, and Pearl put their weapons down.
The first thing Frederick said, dropping his duffel by the front door, was, “Who did the decorating here?” His New England accent had faded and he was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and squarish tinted glasses. His upper lip, which had always been covered in a mustache, looked puffy without one, and his hair was shorter than Lorraine had ever seen it, except when he’d been swimming or had just gotten out of the shower. He was lean and sinewy, and his hands were coarse and tan. Gone was the smirk. Handsome and settled even, in a plain-looking midwestern prairie kind of way, Frederick looked smaller than Lorraine remembered him. Mikki, Jack’s wife, stepped forward and gave him a hug.
“Here’s the deal,” Alan announced so that everyone could hear him. “Judy and I will be making our own travel arrangements. You’re responsible for Pearl—”
“Hold on a minute,” Frederick interrupted, speaking to Jack. “The car ain’t much, but it’s mine for the next two weeks. The registration’s clean, and I took the backseats out, which is where she’ll ride, if she rides with me.” Then he turned to Alan. “We leave when I say we leave. We travel a route I decide. Two weeks, give or take, and I’ll deliver her to the Bay Area, to a spot of my choosing. After that, I’m gone. You dig?”
“Fuck that. You’re here as my guest,” Alan said, all eyes on him now. “You go when I say you go.” Although he was several inches shorter than Frederick, he stuck his chin in Frederick’s chest.
“Let’s be very clear about this,” Frederick said. He was grinning, and his eyes seemed lit from behind. “I’m here because I volunteered to drive the girl home. I’m not interested in you, your plans, or your cause, which, as far as I can see, isn’t really a cause at all.”
“Our comrades didn’t go down in a hail of fire to have their names dragged—”
“All you jerk offs did was shoot a school superintendent and rob a couple of banks.”
“Death to the Fascist Insect That Prays on the People!” Alan stiffened in salute.
Jack held up his hand. “Wait a minute, guys. We’re all on the same side here….”
At this point, Judy, who’d been watching them closely, spoke. “It’s okay, man,” she said, touching Alan’s arm. “Jim doesn’t have to agree with our positions to drive Pearl home.” Neither Judy nor Joan could take her eyes off Frederick. It was as if they hadn’t seen a man in months. Patty was watching Stardust, who was on the landing in front of her mother, rubbing her eyes.
“Okay if I put the girl to bed?” Patty asked Lorraine, who nodded. Alan made a dismissive gesture.
“I’m ready for some rest, too,” Frederick said. Judy and Joan both stepped forward, but Joan got there first. Frederick hoisted his duffel. “I’ll see y’all later,” he said, nodding to Jack.
Lorraine needed some air. With Alan’s permission, she let herself out the front door and circled the house, looking up at the moon, the peeling paint, the bare bulbs that hung in the second-floor hallway. The smell of pine trees and the sounds of night reminded her of summers in Boston. After almost seven years, Lorraine knew that if Frederick were ever to contact her again, it would be like this—hastily arranged, edgy, and remote—way outside her comfort zone. When she thought about him now, it wasn’t all charged conversations and the courage of your convictions. Lorraine’s love for Frederick had been desperate and groundless, fierce in the way you could be loyal to a concept. Imagining herself with him now brought on a feeling of weariness, of perpetual transience, of never having or wanting things beyond what she could earn in a week or carry on her back—the kind of life that was wholly unsuitable for a child.
After a few minutes, she let herself back in the house and quietly climbed the steps, pausing outside the bedroom when she heard her daughter say, “Make something up.”
“Okay,” Patty said. Lorraine slipped into the bedroom, where Patty and her daughter were lying side by side. “But you have to promise not to tell anyone, especially Teko and Yolanda, the people with the guns.” Lorraine took a crayon and opened one of Stardust’s coloring books. As Patty spoke, Lorraine transcribed.
“Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, many years before you were born, a man traveled across the kingdom and discovered gold. He traded gold for other riches, and soon he became the most powerful man in the land.”
“Like a king?”
“Yes,” Patty said, “like a king. Then the man found a pretty wife, who dreamed of having a son richer and more powerful than anybody in the world. And when their little boy was born, the mother taught him the ways of the world and filled his mind with stories about faraway lands and beautiful treasures. The boy was young and curious and brave and adventurous.”
“Not like the man downstairs?” Stardust said.
“Not like him at all,” Patty said. Except for the setting, she might have been a babysitter reading to a child. “Before long, the boy was old enough to leave his parents’ house and go to college. When he came back, he found a young princess to marry.”
“How do you get to be a princess?”
“I don’t know,” Patty said, pausing, “but they had five little boys, one after another. Can you imagine that?”
“I hate boys,” Stardust said.
There was a long silence, as if Patty was considering Stardust’s position seriously. “What the young man wanted most was attention, and so, with his father’s help, he started a newspaper. At first, the stories were accurate, but soon he realized that people wa
nted to read things that were exciting, so he started exaggerating them, even making some up. The wilder the stories, the more newspapers people bought and the richer he became. He was so successful that, after a while, a pretty movie star became his girlfriend.”
“He had a girlfriend and a wife?”
“One day, he decided he was going to build a castle out of marble and stone and fill it with paintings and statues. No expense was spared, and when it was done, he and his girlfriend had incredible parties with movie stars and foreign dignitaries.” There was a long pause, and it sounded as if Stardust was shifting position. Lorraine could see them both clearly now in the moonlight, lying side by side. If Patty was aware of her presence, she didn’t show it. “Even though he was the richest and most powerful man in the world,” she continued, “he was very sad.”
“How come?” Stardust asked sleepily.
“I’m not really sure, but I think it was because as soon as he had one idea, he came up with another one that he liked better. And the more he accomplished, the more he regretted not doing. Nothing was enough. He hated getting old. He didn’t want to die.”
“Me neither,” Stardust said.
“Nobody does,” Patty said softly. “And by the time he did, he was a jealous, grumpy old man.”
“Did the princess live happily ever after?”
“No,” Patty said. “She died, too.”
“That’s a sad story,” Stardust said.
Patty rolled over and knelt beside the bed, staring for a long time at Stardust. Lorraine set the crayon and coloring book down and shut her eyes. After a while, Patty sighed, long and mournful, then leaned over and gave the girl a kiss. “Good night,” she said softly. Then she brushed past Lorraine and she disappeared.
