Vida (26 page)

Time to check in. She dialed. “Hi. Peregrine reporting. Who’s this?”

“It is I” said Kiley’s crisp high voice, assuming quite correctly but, Vida felt, a little arrogantly that she would be recognized. “We need to talk. Preliminary to the full BOD.”

The Board of Directors—what had at first been slang for the central committee of the Network had taken over, so that the joke had become the real name—were due to meet, but now Kiley was pushing for something less formal. “How about Goat Heaven?” Agnes’ farm, up in Vermont. “Or Hardscrabble Hill?” Eva’s name for the farm they had all lived on, a name from an old song about circumstances not far from what theirs had been that desperate time in ‘73-74.

“We’ll leave word both places. How soon?”

Suppose they got Tara moved tomorrow. Well, give an extra day for problems. “Friday?”

“Friday we’ll have word at both places. Meet a day or two later.”

“I’m not alone” Vida said. “You know him rather well”

“I do?” Kiley waited her out.

“He has big green glass eyes like a stuffed pussycat” Vida said.

“Oh … Mechanic.”

Mechanic? A connection closed in her head, two wires finally touching. Joel was Mechanic: the wizard deserter who fixed old cars that Kiley had discovered. “Should he come? Can he come, rather?”

“I never used to bring him” Kiley said. “But if you want. It’s not official, after all” She hung up for punctuation.

Maybe she shouldn’t, she thought wryly. It would certainly be a test of his true interest. She hurried back to the motel. What was on Kiley’s huge and pointed mind? Lucky that Joel was a mechanic, given the condition of the car they were to use.

The car belonged to the son of the woman who was sheltering Tara, and it was home because it had needed a new clutch. After they delivered Tara and her children, they were to bring the car up to Goddard, near Plainfield, Vermont, where the son was studying social ecology. The car was a bronze Subaru several years old that had been driven through fire and mud and storm, but Natalie insisted that the garage had checked it out thoroughly and put on snow tires.

Joel wore dark glasses and a ski cap pulled low on his forehead, concealing his hair. She had a frosted ash blond acrylic wig over her dyed brown hair and different dime-store glasses than she usually wore. It was just getting light when they pulled into the driveway, right on the dot, but the woman was not waiting. Vida had to go and rap on the door of the little apartment tacked on the back of the long, low brick house. She hoped that it was the right door and she was not waking the other families who lived in this house—three apartments in all. She could see her breath. The sky looked as if it might rain or even snow—low ranks of clouds scrambling by, tumbling over themselves in the strength of the wind blowing off the cold gunmetal sea just three blocks to the east. In the early-morning stillness she could hear the surf. No lights were on in either of the neighbors’ houses, but a cat crossed from yard to yard, ducking under a boat trailer. Where the hell was the goddamned woman named Tara? Her stomach tightened.

Lightly she rapped on the door. She did not want the neighbors, the occupants of the other apartments, to wake, to observe. Joel looked absurd standing in the driveway beating his hands together to keep warm, with the ski cap pulled down and sunglasses on at dawn of a cloudy day. She rapped again, restraining the impulse to shout.

Finally the door opened. Tara, a plump blond woman in her late twenties wearing a print pantsuit and a neck brace, peered out at Vida, a baby crying behind her. A boy bundled up so he was shaped like a beet in his maroon wool coat sat on a kitchen chair with his legs stuck straight out. A glass of milk was sitting on the table in front of him, and something pinkish had spilled on the floor.

“I’m Cynthia. We’re here to transport you. We expected you to be ready”

“We’ll be ready in a second. Tommy! Drink it down. We have to go soon.”

“Don’t want it. It’s cold.”

“All right! But don’t tell me you’re hungry in a little while!”

Tara, juggling the crying baby on her right arm, took the glass in her left hand and emptied it into the sink. “We just have to clean up breakfast dishes—”

“Leave them.”

“We can’t go and leave the breakfast dishes. It’ll just take five minutes”

She hardened herself. No delaying tactics. “We’re leaving now. If you want our help, put on your coat and come … Your shelterer will clean up. It’s just one more favor. The biggest favor you can do her now is to clear out before your husband arrives and shoots up the place.”

“We’re not catching a plane. I just have to clean up the kitchen.”

“Tara, this car leaves now. Get in it or stay. We have other deadlines to meet. You aren’t the only woman in trouble.”

“Oh. You help other women.” Tara paused in her dashing to and fro. “Just a minute.” She put the baby under her arm, still squalling, and rushed to get a suitcase. “You can take this out. And the baby’s things” She pointed to a plastic carryall.

I’m a genius, she thought. That was the right thing to say to get her moving. Stooping, she picked up the suitcase—Jesus! full of gold bricks, no doubt—and the carryall and staggered out to the car.

“What’s happening in there?” Joel hissed, his shades shoved back on his striped ski cap like aviator goggles.

“Just stow this stuff in the trunk. Put newspapers over ours so she doesn’t see what our gear looks like.”

“Just get her out of there! We don’t want to be seen”

“Honey, I’m trying” Briefly, nervously they touched dry lips. Over her shoulder, as she trotted back, she said, “Put the food in the car. The Bloomie’s bag full of sandwiches and fruit Sam gave us.”

“I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” Tommy was shouting. “You took my milk”

“You said it was too cold” Tara was writing a note. “You wouldn’t, drink it” SORRY FOR THE MESS, it said.

“But you threw it away! I wanted you to warm it on the stove.”

“We have food in the car” Vida said. “What goes out next? Where’s your coat?”

“Your doggy, Tommy. What did you do with your doggy?” Tara asked frantically, trying to shove her arms into her fur coat while holding the baby.

“Let me take the baby”“ Vida said. Reluctantly Tara handed the baby over, and Vida cuddled it. She had not held a baby since Vermont, that winter of ‘74. She saw a pacifier on the counter, and as the sobs checked she offered it, and the baby sucked. Better. “What’s … baby’s name?” She avoided a pronoun.

”Beverly. She’s a real good baby. I don’t know what she’s upset about this morning.”

“Ralph” Tommy said. “Call him Ralph”

“Where’s Ralph? Maybe I packed him” Tara said.

“Don’t you leave Ralph!” Tommy kicked the chair legs. “I won’t go!”

Tara was grabbing objects from here and there and dropping them in another carryall. “Look in the living room,” she said to Vida. “It’s a Huckleberry Hound dog.”

Whatever that was. Toting the baby, she fumbled for a light and looked around the small living room. She found a child’s tennis shoe, a plastic fire engine and another pacifier. In the bedroom beyond, she found a heating pad, still plugged in; a cane; a bottle of liquid makeup; a pair of panty hose and in the crib, a lurid doll that had to be Ralph. “Got it!” she called.

Tara had just dropped her purse and was lowering herself to grope for it. Vida saw that Tara could not bend her neck and realized she was partially immobilized from the last beating. Vida felt embarrassed at being judgmental about the lack of organization. “Can I help? I found these things”

“If you can reach my purse. You can give me Beverly back”

Vida recovered the purse, dropped what she had found into the second carryall and bundled Tommy out the door. Tara needed the cane to hobble down the cement steps. Finally Tara was packed into the back seat with Tommy beside her and the baby on her lap, and Vida slid into the driver’s seat. She had promised Joel, who was a little intimidated by the network of expressways around New York, to drive the first leg. “This is Dick, Tara”

“Dick … Oh, that’s my husband’s name.”

In the rearview mirror she could see Tara peering with sharp anxiety at the back of Joel’s head, which must look sinister.

“Why don’t you call me … Sam, then? That’s my middle name.”

She smiled, because Sam had been Natalie’s courier, meeting them before dawn and his school day with the food and final directions. For a moment she had hugged her too-tall, gawky nephew, and then she had given him an eagle feather she had been carrying for him since a meeting with Native American activists. “They’re in more danger just sitting in their kitchens than I am running before the law,” she had told Sam. Sam was the next generation, her inheritor, the child she might never have now. “The Feds are an army of occupation on the reservations. The war with cavalry is still going on. Ambushes. Running cars off the back roads. Burning families out”

“What do you think that kid gets from your one-minute commercials for the revolution?” Joel asked afterward. “Handing him some damn feather”

”He’s not some random kid. He’s Natalie’s son.”

Joel laughed. “Probably grow up and join the John Birchers.”

“He’s half grown. Joel, even in America, not everybody hates their parents. Leigh always loved his. They were old commies. His politics are real different, but there’s respect. His old man’s dead, but he still goes to see his mother in Miami twice a year.”

“What good old bourgeois virtue. Hot shit. You want to go see mine? We can find her at the local beauty salon getting her hair bleached or lying down with a headache drinking vodka in the afternoon because it’s not supposed to leave a smell on the breath. I always could smell it.”

Now they sat in uncomfortable silence till Joel tuned the radio to rock music. He had positioned himself to watch the rearview mirror for a tail.

“Er,” she said awkwardly as they went over the bridge, “we were told you’d pay us half on pickup and the other half on delivery”“

“Half?” Tara sounded vague. In the rearview mirror Vida saw her clutch her purse. “Oh, is that what they said?”

“They told us that,” Joel said humbly. “But if they told you something different … ?”

“That’s what we were told by the woman in charge”“ Vida said firmly. If something went wrong and they had to ditch, let them at least get that. “Oh … half. That’s a hundred now?”

“That’s right,” Joel said. “I mean, you have it with you anyhow, right?”

In the rearview mirror she saw that Tara was looking scared, her hand at her soft, rather large mouth. “Suppose you just leave me, then?”

Joel turned around in his seat. “We’re as scared as you are, Tara, but we won’t dump you anyplace. We promise!”

Carefully Tara counted out the hundred to Joel. “Do I get a receipt?”

“You get safety”“ he said grimly. “Let us hope. Your body is your receipt” They were getting off to a rotten start, and it was a damned long way to Brattleboro.

“Mommy, I’m hungry.”

“Oh, Tommy, why didn’t you eat your breakfast?”

“You spilled my milk out.”

“You wouldn’t drink it! I asked you to, remember?”

“It was cold. I hate it cold. You got to warm it in the pan for me.”

“We didn’t have time, Tommy. This lady was in a hurry.”

“There’s food in the bag” Joel said. “Why don’t you help yourself? Tommy can have something to eat from the bag back there.” His tone was coaxing, conciliatory.

”The kids aren’t usually like this” Tara said. “They’re upset by it all. They don’t know why we keep running. We never even moved before. We always lived in the same house.”

She could hear paper rustling, so she assumed Tara was taking a look. “A chicken sandwich. You want a chicken sandwich, Tommy?”

“No. I hate chicken. I want my milk.”

“An apple. How about an apple?”

“I don’t want an apple!” He started to bawl, and the baby woke and started to cry with him.

“How about a banana?” Tara asked desperately over the din.

Joel turned in his seat. “How about a banana, Tommy? We can both eat bananas, like monkeys!” He scratched his head, grimacing.

Tommy stopped crying, although the baby continued. “How come you got sunglasses on?”

“I like them. I like bananas too. How about you?”

“Yeah, I like bananas—”

“Good. Will you eat one if Mama peels it for you?”

“You peel it! But how come you like sunglasses?”

“How come you like bananas?” Joel still imitated a monkey, taking the banana and peeling it. “They taste good.”

“Dark glasses feel good.”

Tommy ate a banana as the baby sniffled back to sleep in Tara’s lap. A short silence was broken by Tommy, asking if they were there yet. Then he said, “I got to go, Mommy.”

“Oh, Tommy. Already?”

“Mommy, I got to!”

“Number one or number two?”

“Number one.”

“Can he do it by the side of the road?” Vida asked. “On the Cross Island Parkway?”

“All right.” Vida took the next exit and pulled into a Shell station, parking off to one side. “Take him in”