The Spot Page 5

  In Nebraska, smoking cigarettes in the shack and acting tough—with Byron in a leather cowboy hat cured from the sun and salt-stained, with the stitching coming loose where the crown was attached and the brim curled up in front—she let August bleach her hair (he had a sister who’d taught him how), and for a few days she felt like Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits—rugged, rustic, embraced not only by fear but also by something deeper, a landscape urgently, almost sexually, unforgiving. She felt during those days a new physicality; her body seemed born anew as her thighs slid against the denim. Her hips turned bony, hard, and she lurched like a cowpoke when she walked. They strove for a certain élan, a style to the mission, as if they might capture the spirit of Bonnie and Clyde—not the actual historical characters, who seemed messy and dirty, not to mention dead, but the ones portrayed by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the movie, hazed by the lens filter, eternally laughing and skipping their way through bank robberies and gas station holdups until they were devoured again and again by their love for each other and by the fate—a hail of bullets—that was waiting for them along that road in Louisiana. She felt an elegance emerge, not just in her movements but in her posture, her stance, the way she stood on the earth, facing the horizon, alone on the ridge, while the men worked on the plan back in the shack. Sometime around then a guy named Jamake appeared, a local Sioux Indian who arrived one afternoon on his motorcycle and offered to lend a hand. He looked squint-eyed, walked with a slight limp, and made smirking, knowing looks behind Byron’s back. When they hiked together, he put his hand against her back in a way that was unthreatening, keeping it fanned out high near her shoulders as he told her about plants that were edible and freely available from the land, prairie turnips and Jerusalem artichokes, and in the southern ranges the leaves of the lechuguilla, which had to be cut up and baked properly for several days. You don’t cook them exactly right, they’re as hard as bayonet blades, he said. There are things like that all over the place, man, things that have to be tempered under a steady heat for days on end or they’re just another thorny plant and not worth shit. Up on the tattered edge of the ridgeline they sat and talked, and he told her that he had been born in Utah and lived on the lam from the lawmen who were after him for some activities he had performed as part of the movement. And she told him about her early days living with Byron near San Francisco, in a bungalow with a view of the Pacific. She told him about her childhood in New York, with her businessman father, sailing toy boats in the Central Park pond. She did not talk about Hank, or about the war, or about those things that drove her to join the underground. There was a perplexity between them that was pleasurable and right. The conversation was limited. He withheld his condemnation of the white boys making plans down in the shack. He did not say—as he obviously wanted to say—that these were foolish rich kids playing a game and afraid of real confrontation; these were kids couched in money and self-righteousness and an old sense of propriety that was unearned and therefore unwarranted; these were boys who had been taught a predestination that went against the truth of nature. He did not advise her to ignore their orders—except in the way he looked when she told him of their plans (askance, squinting his eyes and spitting to the side). Instead he told her that he was pure fuckin’ AIM, nothing more and nothing less—American Indian Movement all the way, from Wounded Knee to Wounded Knee—while he fixed her with the gracious element of his eyes, dark blue in one but white and cloudy in the other. A sucker punch caused that a few years back, he said. I was walking along the road, and a man came up on his chopper and begged directions. I showed him the way to Highway 29, and in gratitude he struck me from behind with an implement, a crowbar or tire iron. He took that side of my sight but he gave me vision, pure Indian vision. And now I see the way I was meant to see even though, truth be told, I was actually born with the name Bill Winston, outside of Chicago, in Oak Park, and, until I reclaimed my real name, I was nothing but a plain old white man. Then he told her about the standoff with the state troopers somewhere out in the Great Basin, and how men and women (himself included) had blocked a supply road to a research center where the white man took advantage of the vast emptiness, securing a parcel, cordoning it with barbed wire and high fences and security checkpoints. You see, at night there were ghostly casts of light in the sky that killed the stars, he said. There were the appearances of strange flying craft that devoured the migrating birds and cut holes across the heavens, rending them apart so you could see the guts of the universe. So in protest we lay in the road and let the police drag the women into the culvert and the men, who gave no struggle, away into the system of justice you’ve created. You see, man, the sky was weeping and strange, and it was sorrowful and purple, like that bruise there on your head. So now the universe is a fucking mess. Then he kissed her, and she kissed him back, and he said, It’s fucked up. There just isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it, man. And then he leaned his head against her shoulder and wept quietly. When they met again up on the ridge, one final time, early in the morning with the dew on the grass and soft cobwebs on their cuffs, they made love quickly with their pants down around their ankles so that only their bellies seemed united, hot, eager. Byron was down below, packing up, loading stuff into the car while August checked the camp to make sure they weren’t leaving any clues behind. There was a fire in which the papers were being burned, sending up a trickle of black smoke into the morning sky, which was shrouded in a thin white haze around the edges but beginning to turn blue overhead. The guy named Jamake was moving softly over her, and she had her eyes open and was looking into his good one, trying to see something, and when he came she noticed that he didn’t blink but instead looked directly at her until he leaned down to kiss her with lips that tasted of ash, dew, and smoke. The wind was twining his hair around her lips and cheeks. Then, from down below, Byron was giving the horn a toot, a soft, short report that said: We’re ready to go now, and you’re gonna have to leave that ridge and come down from there, leave that Indian asshole behind and get in the fucking car. Up on the ridge she didn’t move for a minute as she lay against Jamake, who was reaching down, wiping her softly with a bandana, cleaning her up so that she might go off into the world. The car horn was sounding again, angry and persistent. It seemed there was nothing she could do but get up, smooth down her jeans, and hike back, holding tight to the side of the narrow trail, stepping carefully along the ridge where it fell off into nothing, a dusty wash of stones just starting to catch the full brunt of daylight.

  The part when the guns go off and the horn doesn’t honk: There is a random anarchy of the moment—amid the yelling, the shouts, the fear—smoothed by the swaying willow branches, which make a soft, almost broom-sweep sound against the chain-link fence; men face one another with weapons drawn in a standoff, posited, posted, tensions created; the wiry guard is stark-still, frozen, producing more fear in Byron because the immutability, the cold posturing seems—and this is a quick mind-flash—inhuman, his eyes unmoving. The larger guy sways on his heels, both arms out with his gun. The swaying is imperceptible to everyone except August; August, too, is moving a little, and he feels, amid the conjoining of many sensations, an awareness of his weight and heft, hanging over his belt, tightly packed in his legs, as a significant disadvantage. He is a large target. But he is too involved in the tension, in the urgent dynamic before him, to think too much about this fact. The entire thing resolves itself down into those positions, into that tension, into the guns drawn and the directions they are pointed while, from the car, from her vantage, she watches and tries to see and sees only one side, one angle of the action: two men dressed in uniforms of pale olive, with stitched patches indicating their names, one fat and one thin, standing fearfully with their guns out, beneath the direct implications of the noon sun; Byron and August out of sight, positioned almost behind the truck, just their guns visible, pointing; the bags of money weighty and heavy at the feet of the larger man; all frozen there for a moment in the fear and agony until th
ere is the flash of muzzle fire and then—in what seems to be a modulated time/space, not slow motion but rather something else, a kind of compact glimmering shimmer of movement—the fat man falls to the side, collapsing under the weight of his torso as his knees give, falling to the ground and then bowing down, prayerfully, his dark oil-slicked hair glinting in the light and his scalp bright red with sweat until another bullet hits and the top of his skull flowers with bone and spray; then the other man falls, too, his lean, slim body folding over sidelong and leathery; his own bones frail and delicate so that he appears to come down to the earth with a sliding motion, like a leaf in the wind, crumpling over himself.

  All noise and commotion held off for a moment until she realized that she had honked the horn and was leaning on it too long; that behind her in the parking lot a lady, pushing a cart, had paused to look over and was coming toward her; that she was still on the horn, the sound bending and turning in on itself; and the men were now waving to her to stop, lugging the bags in her direction, Byron with two to balance himself and August just two-fisting the bags in one hand while he waved his gun wildly in the other; she realized that behind the lady, far off at the entryway of the lot, there was the flash of red light indicating a cop coming, and then another flash of light behind it, all under that bright noon sun with the swish of willows to her left and beneath that, down past the chain-link, a musky earthen smell of the river that seemed to bring the whole scene—the cracked dirty macadam, the green Dumpsters stenciled with white lettering, the drab back doorways (each painted a russet color)—into some congruence with the natural world, the everlasting world that would eternally outlast these stupid sinning willful men who were dying by their own clock. So when she backed up and around to escape she was thinking of that smell, and of the river, and she turned too fast and struck the lady with the car, clattering her load, spilling her cart and sacks of groceries and knocking her to the ground. (She was an older lady, not so enfeebled but frail-looking, in a long smocklike coat, pale yellow, with eyeglasses of wire rims and a duskylooking hairdo, pulled up; she was one of those old ladies who went to the beauty parlor weekly and had her bouffant arranged and neatened and listened to the patter and gossip but with a certain reserve; she was originally from St. Louis and had a certain composure that came from the Middle West and still, at times, found herself strangely and oddly out of place in her New Jersey town, right on the border of New York.) The men shouted to her to stop and not to go, holding the bags up and then coming over and trying to stand in front of the car to block her way and to limit her options to two: to drive over them and kill them or to stop and let them aboard, to hold off; Byron had his gun forward and was trying to find her face through the glare of the windshield and she knew, right then, seeing him, that if need be he would shoot her and be done with it, because he had shown, in his beatings, that he had the capacity to hurt without thought and that his body was at times out of his control. He held the gun out and sighted along it and said stop and she did; she did stop for a moment, until she continued into her reverse turn, moving the car around the lady, who was trying to clamber up, and then swinging forward so that she was facing the police cars, which were wending around among the parking spaces, looking for something to lock on to, their sirens wailing loudly now. But they didn’t spot her, really; they were moving around to the right, to the south, and coming along the back side of the lot, coming around and heading toward the armored truck but not seeing her, apparently; she was now driving forward, slowly, not too fast—to avoid attention—but just fast enough to look leisurely. In a matter of one or two minutes she was out on the main road heading south; she was blending in with traffic and silently congregating with the others out shopping, running errands—the plumbing trucks, the delivery vans, the women loaded up with kids. She went from the scene behind the mall with death and mayhem to something else instantly; on the other side of the meridian a cluster of police cars—sirens wailing, valiant in their formation—passed quickly and unaware. She got on the old road heading north; it would be the long route but it would be safer, probably, and although she hadn’t heard all the details of the plan and was kept from knowing them, she did know one thing, and that was that the old road—which went up through the depression-ravaged Hudson River towns—would probably be safer.

  She would begin to look for the house; she would track it down intuitively. What she knew was only what she remembered from coming down; there was an old lumberyard in the town where she would turn right, gloomy old storefronts empty of wares and falling into disrepair, a store that sold party items and gags and magic tricks wholesale, and then, after that, an old public library, stately and grand up along a sloping hill. There she would turn down the narrow road that, from what she remembered, sloped toward the river; at a street called Ross she would turn right into another road, narrow and elegant; she would go back to the old house and sit alone and find a way into something else, she thought; the weeds outside would give under the wind and sway softly and it would be beautiful; the soft tarry smell would arrive from the road; the house would heave and creak softly under the hot sun, and she would go from room to room and examine them for clues, for some long-lost remnants of the life that had gone on there before it was reduced to broken glass, to long cracked wounds in the plaster that showed the lath behind; she would bow down on all fours to God; she would find herself in the basement amid the dusty light from the window wells and the smell of heating oil and the earthen floor, compacted into the corner there, under the old table, in the cobwebby recess she knew was there because she had gone with the men when they explored the house and Byron had bonged on the old tank while August, heaving his weight around, did a dance and sang “Sympathy for the Devil”; she’d feel an urge to spend the rest of eternity there in the dark and the cool, because right now, driving in the car, her desire was to get away from the bright sun and the sensation of the wild passing landscape that seemed so surfaced with light that it was impossible to look at; then in the morning if she saw some kind of new light from the window, sifting down through the motes of dust, she might go up and out again into a new world, entering with bare feet and walking the dew-wet road down to the river, where maybe if all was right and the world was back into some order she would find a cool cove loaded with myrtle and elderberry, and sit and watch the currents move and the boats far off. Maybe there, in that place, she would be located and identified and brought forth into the world of men and justice the way Byron said she would; then fate would play its hand and she’d be where she was intended to be, she thought, holding the wheel, driving carefully, avoiding speed traps, passing through a town named Newburgh that seemed depleted of all life and grace except where a few old grand homes hung on, big and robust, kept up nicely; she was a good and careful driver when calm, and she knew that one way or another she would get back to the hideout and fulfill the vision she had of how this whole thing would come to an end.

  All Wondering

  Let’s say the beach erodes fifty yards in at the rate of a yard a year, give or take a few. By the time the Atlantic reaches his body—by then nothing but bones, if even that—it won’t matter, Carl said. Unless his body works its way up and out, like a seed in reverse. You know, remember those old biology films showing in slow-mo stop-action the way certain seeds wiggle into the ground, taking advantage—I guess that’s the way to put it—of their natural designs in relation to the winds, wending down until they’re deep enough to root. All manipulation of form in conjunction with nature. Except, knowing Dad, his body might respond the other way, twisting up and out of the sand until some hiker comes upon a toe, or a brow. Just imagine his body emerging under a moonless sky with only the sweep of the lighthouse for company. Just imagine old Pop, old Dad, wondering where the hell he is, or at least theoretically wondering because presumably his wondering days are over. All his wondering has been relegated to some other realm, in the best of circumstances, or to the void, in the worst. Just imagine his bald p
ate exposed to the salt air—just about impossible to see in the sand, or a toe, already mentioned, coming up and out of the razor grass, or the brambles, and moving, depending on the freezethaw cycles, too slow for the human eye, but over time—if you could see the slowed-down action speeded up—wiggling softly in the manner of resurrected flesh, as one imagines it, Carl argued; or maybe even rising up, stiff-jointed, like a marionette in the quiet of the off-season, jerked around by invisible strings stretching up to the Holy Father. Or it’s just as easy to imagine the body doing the seed routine properly, Carl said, his voice suddenly husky and deep, caught up in a madness that came not so much from Dad’s body, it seemed, but from the lack of logic his argument was taking, gathered up into the sack of his grief, his voice barely audible. Burn the bastard. Freeze his ass. Shoot him into space. Plunge him into the center of the earth. At times, his thoughts, like perfectly out-of-phase sound waves, nullified themselves for a moment into a pure silence. Or the body might dig itself down into the soft pliancy, the liquescence of sand, yearned by gravity, twisting itself with the contraction of drying sinew and cartilage in the bright fall heat, during those clear Cape days before Thanksgiving (Carl said) when the snap of leaf mold and the scent of musket smoke hangs in the air, at least theoretically, because Miles Standish musket smoke is still up there, man, somewhere. (Carl lifted his hand and pointed vaguely in the direction of First Encounter Beach, where, almost four hundred years ago, the first hostile American shots were fired.) The corpse might spiral down (Carl said) until, with toes pointed and head haut, it drove hard to the bedrock. (He forcefully landed on each syllable, dividing the word into two.) Then, when he looked up at me with the mute, inaccessible eyes of a man sealed in the vacuum of stalemate, I saw that he was a chip off the old block. What Dad had contained, he contained. Now the original block was just solid matter, and Carl was the live chip leaning into his shovel to rest, looking out over the Atlantic while between us came a mutual agreement—unspoken—that the hole would have to go down at least fifteen feet to give the body a chance, to find a depth of equalization (as Carl later called it, groping retrospectively for the proper phrase), where the forces drawing our father up would meet on equal terms with the forces drawing him down. From that point it was all digging and digging, widening the hole against the sliding sand, working furiously, one taking a turn with the shovel while the other dug with his hands, working for several hours until we got down fifteen feet, stopping only on occasion to rest, to look out over the roar of surf—big, lazy-edged waves coming in on an angle, rolling themselves against the hook of the beach from one end to the other, each producing a shush sound from right to left while the sun, for its part, sank against the sharp horizon—invisible, over the verge behind us, paring away at whatever light remained of the day.