Consequence

by Steve Masover

  Selecting a brush cutter alongside the fence, Chagall jimmies open its gas cap, releasing a cloud of refined petrochemicals. A tool he has forged for the purpose catches on a filter set deep in the fill pipe. Twisting, Chagall reams open the tank’s throat.

  He removes a handcrafted device from his pack, and inspects its timer and trigger. His hands are sure as he fastens wires to a soldered cradle, yet Chagall performs the rites of war attentively, as if this were his first time in the field. Exactness is all that stands between success and martyrdom. He slots a blasting cap into place, and slides a gauze sleeve over the cradle to guard against accidental sparks. Now he lowers the device into the brush cutter’s fill pipe, pulling back a centimeter when the detonator touches liquid.

  He repeats his drill, rigging two knuckle-boom loaders farther down the row, then a clot of skidders at the center of the yard.

  —

  At just shy of three thirty Chagall circles the perimeter, checking for evidence he doesn’t mean to leave behind. The timers are counting down to four fifteen. Satisfied, he shoulders a lightened pack and exits the way he came in.

  There’s no need to wait for the fireworks. He’ll see the glow as he crests the southern ridge, heading deeper into the wild than heavily equipped pursuers can follow.

  THREE

  Sprawled against the trunk of a budding sycamore, Brendan James watched the Triangle’s front porch through half-shut eyes. He was scrawny as a speed freak, gritty as Duboce Avenue used to be before the neighborhood gentrified. Mothers with toddlers, hipsters with iPods, even the occasional gutter punk stepped around him gingerly, hugging the inside edge of the sidewalk. No one answered the collective’s doorbell when he’d rung, maybe a half hour before. He didn’t mind. He wouldn’t say prison had been an enriching experience, but Tlaxitlán sure as hell taught him to wait.

  After a while longer, Jonah turned the corner, sun glinting over his long blond hair. He’d grown it out just like his mom’s, Brendan thought. And he was taller by a foot since Brendan last passed through San Francisco. Approaching home, Jonah scowled at nothing in the manner of coddled norteamericanos who have little to scowl about, and scuffed clear of Brendan’s legs. Didn’t even look up.

  Brendan cleared his throat as the kid fumbled for a key. Jonah stopped. Turned. Looked like he was deciding whether the sun-scorched man outside his gate posed an actual threat. Crusty denim and muddy boots. Reddish stubble blurring bony features. Hair cut to bristle.

  “Where the hell’ve you been, kid?”

  He watched recognition dawn as he stood and let himself grin. Joy, incredulity, and cool battled for ascendancy in Jonah’s face. The boy stood paralyzed, hand hanging slack in his pocket.

  Brendan did the math. Thirteen years old. “How ’bout you open the gate, Jonah Rayle?” He stepped forward to wrap Allison’s son in a bear hug. “I gotta take a wicked piss.”

  Jonah laughed. “Nobody said you were coming. Nobody even told me they let you out of … Mexico. Does Chris know?”

  Brendan shrugged and turned to his beat up motorbike, parked by the driveway. He unbuckled a pair of saddlebags.

  “That’s all?”

  “You know me,” Brendan said. “He who travels light—”

  “—travels far.” Jonah held the metal gate open, then let it clang shut behind them.

  Brendan winced at the sound of steel on steel, of the latch snicking into place. He forced his breath steady. The kid hadn’t meant to startle him.

  He stood aside as Jonah unlocked the inner door, at the bottom of the Triangle’s steep staircase.

  —

  “Cheers,” Jonah said, raising a bottle of ginger beer and keeping his voice low. They were sitting at the table in the third-floor kitchen, an artifact of the building’s past life as separate flats, and a mindful distance from where Marty lay sleeping downstairs.

  “To long-awaited Ithakas.” Brendan tilted his porter in Jonah’s direction. The kid looked puzzled but let it go. “So Marty’s been sacked out all afternoon, you think?”

  “The bathroom looked like a slasher movie before Mom and Nora took him to the emergency room. Mom said he got eight stitches.”

  “From a bike accident? And now he’s sleeping off painkillers?”

  “I guess so. But if he heard you ring the bell he probably thought it was Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Jonah reached for a bag of tortilla chips.

  “Damn …” A single frying pan and a lightly rusted wok hung from the rack over the stove. A dented kettle sat atop a back burner. It looked to Brendan as though no one had cooked a meal in the upstairs kitchen for ages. “So what else is news around here?”

  “Nora was on TV twice after they lost the case of those guys in Eureka,” Jonah said around a mouthful of chips. “Those protesters who got pepper sprayed at that congressman’s office? She’s doing an appeal.”

  “Doesn’t the Triangle have a ban on TVs?”

  “It’s not a ban,” Jonah said. “We just have better things to do with our time.”

  Brendan laughed. “You sound like you’re training to be a press spokesman.”

  “Ha ha. We watched Nora on the internet, I can find it again if you want. Did you know Gregor moved in downstairs?”

  “That kid with crazy-long dreadlocks?”

  “He’s going to City College now. Gregor cut off his dreads when he moved into the downstairs flat. He might shave the rest, like Marty, and get a tattoo on his head. It’s supposed to hurt, but at least he can grow his hair back.”

  “Guess it’s too early to worry about male pattern baldness,” Brendan said. “So what’s Marty up to besides getting stitches in that thick skull of his? Is he still doing computer support for that healthcare outfit?”

  “Yeah, same job.”

  “Chris never mentioned Nora’s pepper spray case,” Brendan said. “But he kept me going, really, all the stories he sent about you guys.”

  “What did he write about me?”

  Brendan thought for a moment. “How everybody flipped somersaults about picking out your middle school.”

  Jonah rolled his eyes. “Yeah, it’s bad enough if you have only two parents.”

  “So where’s Chris now? At the Reporter?”

  “I don’t think so. Friday he’s usually off work.”

  “Anyway.” Brendan knocked back a mouthful of porter. “The house must be feeling pretty empty these days.”

  Jonah was tapping a complex rhythm on the tabletop.

  “Only six of you left.”

  “Yeah.”

  Brendan saw he was meant to ask about the performance. “Last time I was here you were way into skateboards. Now you’re taking up drums?”

  “Tabla,” Jonah said, withdrawing his hands. “Ever since this guy Ravi Shankar it’s this major instrument for Indian music.”

  “You know, your mom and I saw him in a concert over in Berkeley, when we were in college.” When we were lovers, he thought, and wondered whether he should have said that, whether Allison had already clued her son in. The Triangle made a conscious practice of welcoming Jonah into fully adult membership in the collective. Not pushing him, but not boxing him into an airbrushed childhood either.

  “Seriously?” Jonah asked. “You guys saw Ravi Shankar live?”

  “At the Greek Theatre,” Brendan said.

  “I can’t believe Mom never told me that. You know Zac’s really into mythology stories from India, right? He took me to see this movie, The Mahabharata. It lasted all day, but they had an intermission for lunch and we went to this awesome chaat place. After that we went to a bunch more Bollywood movies. The love stories are corny, but the war ones are crisp. You can get the soundtracks as MP3s.”

  Brendan must have looked puzzled, because Jonah began explaining the craze for music over the internet. He might as well have been speaking in tongues. Compression protocols, Grokster, Kazaa, LimeWire, 64-bit players, the RCAA.

  “How’s your mom doing?” Brendan asked after a pa
use. “You guys getting along okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Jonah glanced at the clock over the stove. “She’ll be home from the preschool around five.”

  “What kind of political work is she doing?”

  “Um … death penalty, genetic engineered food, stuff like that. And she’s teaching karate at the dojo.” Jonah grimaced. “My dad had to get a new job after his dot-com went broke, but it didn’t matter because of stock options from the one before that.”

  “Since when are you interested in finance?” Brendan was careful to mask his irritation. Never mind that Seth had stolen Allison’s heart. They’d been young, freer then with love and loyalty. But the fact that Seth had ditched her and the kid both, not four years later—it still made him want to smack Jonah’s father.

  “I’m just sayin’. Dad talks about stocks all the time, Mom says I pick it up like lint.”

  Jonah emptied his bottle and jumped up to put it in the recycling bin. Opening the refrigerator, he stared inside for a while. Then he closed it again. He poured a glass of filtered water from a pitcher on the counter and sat back down.

  “What about you?” Jonah rubbed an imaginary spot from his glass. “What was it like in … where you were?”

  Brendan looked out at the backyards behind Hermann Street, at satellite dishes aimed into a sky ribbed with wispy clouds. “Lonely,” he said, doing his best to sound cavalier. “Hungry. Boring more than anything else.” He tongued a space in his mouth where there’d once been a premolar, until a guard they called El Dentista performed unsolicited surgery with a right hook.

  “What—so—why did they bust you?” Jonah was asking. “What was in the truck?”

  Brendan held the boy’s eyes for a moment. Jonah looked back at him, steady and assured. He knew exactly what he’d asked. “Radio equipment,” Brendan said. “Medical supplies. Stuff like that.”

  “For the people in Chiapas, right? For Subcomandante Marcos?”

  Brendan shrugged, looking away again. “For the Federales. That’s who took it in the end.” The Mexican government couldn’t touch him now, but it wasn’t easy to shake rigidly schooled habit. His lawyer could never have cut deals for a gringo revolutionary.

  “But—”

  Brendan knew what Jonah really wanted to ask.

  The press in Oaxaca reported that he’d been carrying more weaponry than could fit in a fleet of pickups, let alone the single truck he’d been driving. It was anybody’s guess what Jonah had been told, or what he’d found online.

  “It’s over,” Brendan said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” He watched the light fade in Jonah’s eyes. Himself, diminishing. “I’m not even sure I know the facts myself.”

  Jonah sat still. “Whatever.”

  “It’s not like they tell you anything. The cops, the system. The real business happens in a judge’s office, to spare everybody the embarrassment of passing bribes around in open court.” Brendan imagined how he must sound to the boy. Lame. But it was true: he’d been locked up fourteen months and still had no idea how he’d been screwed, or by whom.

  “If they …” Jonah swallowed. “If you don’t know what’s going on, how can you decide what to do?”

  “I’m not sure I get what you mean.”

  “Everybody protests one thing, then some other thing. Mom and everybody else goes to million-hour meetings. People get beat up by the cops, you get majorly busted. And nobody knows what’s going on? What’s the logic of that?”

  “Those are hard questions, kid. Hard questions with long, convoluted answers.”

  “Dad says we’re tilting at windmills. Like Don Quixote.”

  “Some people think anything that’s not about self-interest is foolish.” Brendan sighed. “I don’t think that, and neither does your mom, or Chris, or anybody else at the Triangle. Maybe Seth is still trying to talk himself out of something he once believed in. Maybe stock options are the windmills.”

  Jonah looked down. “I better do homework,” he said.

  “Okay.” Brendan wondered if he’d overstepped.

  Jonah pushed away from the table and disappeared into his bedroom, a converted porch between the kitchen and the back stairs. He shut the door behind him, harder than he needed to.

  —

  Brendan tiptoed through the second floor for a cigarette out back. When he returned upstairs an Indian raga was floating down the hallway from Jonah’s room. He turned to the front of the building. A wall had been knocked out since his last visit, sacrificing the old guest quarters to expand space used for meetings. Little else had changed since the collective connected the building’s top two floors some ten years before, shortly after moving in. Brendan recognized the same leaky sofas, the beanbag pillows sewn out of remnants from Berkeley’s now-defunct Fabric Land, a scarred coffee table. Opposite the fireplace, a Che poster hung in the same aluminum frame that once graced the Carleton Street kitchen, south of the campus. Where he and Allison had shared the sunny front bedroom, and still believed that her talent for galvanizing a crowd of students on Sproul Plaza vaulted them into some utopian vanguard.

  Neatly bundled wires snaked out from pocket doors that separated the front room from the collective’s library. Brendan examined them closely. The bundles ran along the molding and fanned out to tiny polypropylene speakers fixed to the bay windows. Like translucent jellyfish, he thought. The setup had to be Marty’s. Part of his endless snoop-proofing, not that the Triangle ever discussed political secrets in the house.

  He leaned against a window frame and idly counted BMWs parked along the curb out front, then along Sanchez Street around the corner. After Oaxaca, Brendan felt the city’s wealth as an almost physical hurt. On the sidewalk his battered Kawasaki seemed to wriggle and wave through the sagging windowpanes. A dark-haired woman paused to stare quizzically at the bike. It took a moment through the foreshortened perspective for him to recognize Nora coming home at the end of a workday. All kitted out in lawyer’s drag.

  He listened as she climbed the stairs. A thread of familiar inflection whispered up through the floorboards. Marty was awake, then. Brendan took a deep breath. He crossed toward the staircase and began to descend. Nora must have heard him. She stood in the hallway, stifling a cry when he came into view.

  “What?” Marty asked from their room.

  “It’s okay,” she called back to him.

  Always disciplined, Brendan thought. He drank her in, her hand slowly sinking away from her face to reveal dimpled cheeks that softened the severe, analytical set to her mouth. Like coming into harbor, back among his oldest friends. He stepped off the last stair and opened his arms wide. Nora nearly squeezed the life out of him, neither of them making a sound. Then she led him into the dim bedroom.

  “Marty,” she said.

  “Mmmmph.”

  The invalid’s eyes were covered. Dim light shone off his shaven head. Brendan couldn’t see the bandages from where he stood in the doorway.

  “Marty, don’t sit up. You don’t have to move, even. Brendan is here.”

  “Brendan?” Marty fumbled the towel away from his face. Nora pulled Brendan to his bedside. “Jesus Christ, boy, where’d you come from?”

  “Thought I’d head north for a spell. Jonah let me in.”

  “Fuck, Brendan.”

  “Yeah. At least that. What’s with the Mad Max act?”

  “Stupid,” Marty said. “Tourist in a Land Rover came up on me, wheel slipped into the gap along the Muni rails. Fucking inelegant.”

  “We can have a contest. You’ll win on stitches but I’m gonna kick your ass on days out of commission.”

  “They let you out?”

  “It’s a long, crooked story. Plenty of time for all that later.”

  Nora let go of his hand, reluctantly, Brendan thought. As if she were afraid he would fade as suddenly as he’d reappeared. “When was your last pain pill?” she asked Marty, pulling a prescription bottle out of the chaos beside the bed.

  “Two thirty,
maybe. I’m done with ’em, it’s like thinking through sand.”

  “Percocet?” Brendan asked.

  “Vicodin,” Nora said. “The hard stuff. Do you hurt now, Marty?”

  “The stitches sting. Everything else is just cramped up. Nothing a drop of whiskey wouldn’t fix.”

  Someone was coming up the stairs. Nora cocked her head. “Allison,” she said.

  Brendan straightened. She stopped at the landing, then approached the bedroom door. As she entered, her mouth puckered, words all but formed. No sound came. Brendan watched her register his emaciated frame. The same sharp attention Jonah had shown; Allison had taught him that.

  He couldn’t say whether she’d changed. Brendan thought he detected a faint etching at the corners of her steady blue eyes, a crease beside her mouth that might have been new. Perhaps it was only the light. She stood as easy and sure as ever.

  With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

  that is not natural in an age like this,

  Being high and solitary and most stern …

  Yeats, but he couldn’t put his finger on the title. Maud Gonne cast as Helen.

  Allison broke the silence. “When?” she asked.

  “Last week. Mom dragged me home for a few days, to fatten me up.”

  She made an overt show of inspecting him now, head to toe. “Your mom’s a good cook. She couldn’t do any better than that?”

  “Cut me some slack, okay?”

  She set down a canvas bag and gathered him in, holding on as tightly as Jonah had, and Nora, only longer. “You could have called when you got past the border,” Allison rebuked him softly.

  The smell of her hair, after all that time.

  “I … I picked up the phone, Al. More than once. I couldn’t think what to say.”

  FOUR

  Christopher took the first outbound train that came through Montgomery Station, disembarking at Church Street. The short stretch from Market to Duboce was packed as ever.

  Marty had taken his spill somewhere on these blocks. Christopher didn’t see any stains on the asphalt that screamed “bike accident,” though there were plenty of candidates. One could have been the dregs of somebody’s mocha, another a spilled ice cream cone, several the dirt-crusted drippings from leaky oil pans. One furry patch by the inbound J line tracks looked suspiciously like flattened rat. What goes down on a busy city street fades fast, he thought.