Vida (8 page)

It occurred to her he had asked her almost nothing about her life. That might be tact, but it might mean that her life had become unreal to him. She decided to risk a slight breach of Network security. Everyone had some discretion about discussing actions; and members of the Board had considerable freedom, used mostly for fund raising. “Did you hear about a pirate TV station that appeared in L.A. for a whole Monday night, on one of the vacant channels?”

“Yeah?” He looked more alert. “Sounded clever. People in masks reading all kinds of far-out news and gag interviews and alternating it with a showing of
Salt of the Earth”
A film about a strike among Chicanos and the women’s role.

“That was us.”

“No kidding? I didn’t think you had that kind of capability”“

“It doesn’t take much” she said.

“Will you do it again?”

“Not in L.A. They’re waiting for us.”

He chuckled. “You could do some real interesting things that way”“

“We did. We even wrote comedy routines on local politicians.”

He dropped her on South Street in Oyster Bay. Over the years she had hung around every town within a radius of twenty miles of East Norwich, where Natalie lived, except, of course, East Norwich itself. Thus at 7:30 she was wandering around with time to kill until 10 A
.M.,
when the call with Natalie was set up. Early morning was an awkward time. She marched along the streets of old clapboard houses behind front-yard fences overrun with the last roses of fall. Big cavernous trees whose leaves were streaked red and yellow loomed over her. This was how the landscape was supposed to be, bare to the bone in winter and brimming lush in summer, not the reclaimed desert of L.A. with its dry rivers. Finally she headed into the business district and settled in a laundromat. She could do wash from her pack and read a paper looking for the latest on Kevin.

She found it: a recap of his capture and a big feature on all of them, with that old picture of her taken in 1970 with a smirk and her eyes wide at the camera that embarrassed her, as if she were coming on forever to all and sundry. Ugh. Photos of Kevin, Jimmy and her. No photo of Lohania. No picture of Randy, whose name was not even mentioned.

No,
there
Randy was, not as a member of the Little Red Wagon, not as the agent who had entrapped them, but as an expert on fugitives: Randolph Gibney, on the staff of the Kings County D.A. She had heard he had finished law school. Did it make life hard for Lohania when something on them suddenly blew up in the media? Lohania Hernández y Isnaga, whom the paper called simply Lohania Hernandez, might have changed her name, might even be married. She had forgotten to ask Leigh for news of her, if he had any. Lohania had been the only one of the five members of the Little Red Wagon who had ended up serving time—so far. The usual paragraph about Jimmy’s death, the shoot-out and explosion. But nothing on what was happening to Kevin, nothing at all. It made her nervous. He could go up for thirty years, she thought, clenching her hands in her lap, fighting the bite of nausea. Whenever she had to think of prison, she told herself she could do it if she had to. People did. Her people did. But always she felt as if she were suffocating and gasped for breath.

Oh, she knew Kevin well, very well, as you know a man you were with for years. Even after they had stopped loving each other or whatever it was, even after they had begun fighting incessantly, they had had to deal with each other intimately. She was not even sure when they had really stopped sleeping together. Like pulling a burr out of a dog’s coat, cutting a shiny burr from Mopsy’s silky fur when Leigh and Vida had taken her to the country for a day: except that her disentangling from Kevin had been deeper, more painful. Cutting a barbed arrow from the thigh muscles. Something that ate deep and could not be uprooted from the flesh without ripping open a deep bloody wound.

They had certainly been close. At the height of their political unity they had been a single person. They had spoken the same words, screamed the same slogans; on tapes she had heard they even sounded strangely alike, speaking the harsh rhetoric of those times with the same jagged passion, the same desperate anger. Yet she did not know him intimately as she knew Leigh. They had never had a domestic life. They had faced death together, but they could not live side by side; they were not suited.

She knew what Leigh was capable of, she thought, putting down the paper and surveying the laundromat: what generosity or meanness, what he would do and what he could not do; she could have small surprises but not large ones. She had not the same conviction of having mapped Kevin. His bottomless anger made him unknowable. She could not be intimate with a volcano, or finally, with Kevin. Kevin did not always know what Kevin would do, although after he had done it he would slap together a set of reasons. Because of his charisma, because of his temper, because of his brute strength, few people challenged his reasons; she had been one of the few to do so, wrenching herself slowly free of him, a Siamese twin slowly sawing through the bridge of bone and gristle night after night. Let me live my life, she thought, and never see him again, never face him across a room, a courtroom, a field, a ditch. We would kill each other.

Yet she shuddered when she thought of him still after so many years, and the mud of shame filled her throat. Wrong, somehow all wrong. A compulsion gone rotten. She was able to make doing the wash last until nine thirty, when the laundromat began to fill up. Then she loaded her pack again; discarded the newspaper, tearing up the relevant page, and set out at a brisk walk. She wanted to locate a good phone: one in a real booth, not likely to be tapped, not too conspicuous and in working order. She called the operator with a question about collect calls just to be sure the phone worked.

At five to ten she moved into the booth to make sure she had it at ten. Pretending to be talking to someone, she located the numbers for Natalie, translating the letter code in her head into digits. She never dared carry anything resembling an address book, but used scraps of paper with apparent notes on them. At ten on her watch she dialed the first of the numbers. It rang and rang. Six, seven times. She had to hang up. It was dangerous to let pay phones ring too long, because somebody would pick them up out of curiosity or annoyance, and it did not do to call attention that a particular pay phone would ring at certain intervals. She dialed the second number. Natalie had to be there. Again it rang, rang. On the sixth ring she hung up.

Checked her watch. Could she be fast? She would wait five minutes and try again. Natalie could be late. With kids anything could happen. Natalie’s car wouldn’t start. She got caught in every red light. Again Vida mimicked making a call until it was five after and she could try the numbers again. This time for a change of luck she dialed them in the reverse older: first the second, which again rang and rang. Then the first. She let it continue this time. Ah, an answer.

“Hey, who’re you trying to call?” a male voice asked.

“Jimmy, is that Jimmy? Is Mom home?” Vida said quickly.

“You got the wrong number. This here’s a drugstore, lady.” He hung up.

So much for that today. Damn it, she was half tempted, but only half, to call Natalie’s house. Where was she? Was something wrong? Had Natalie forgotten? No, not possible. Now Vida had to kill a day until tomorrow. She thought about taking the Long Island Rail Road into the city and descending on Hank, but she didn’t want to. She felt nervous about him, a tingle of apprehension. That videotape in the drugstore; Kevin caught. No, she didn’t want to go into the city to wait, but she had to see Natalie. She was missing Natalie all through. She wasn’t scheduled to call into the Network until tomorrow, so they’d be of no help sheltering her overnight.

She wandered the pleasant old streets disconsolately, her fatigue sloshing in her limbs. Up since 4:30 after maybe three hours’ sleep, she was hungry, she was tired, she didn’t relish hanging around all day with a pack on her back. She also didn’t want to go sit in a restaurant and start pissing away the money Leigh had given her. A hairdresser’s, a boutique, a thrift shop, a news dealer’s, a health-food store. She paused. Health-food stores were useful for getting off the streets. She could usually chat with people working there, who wanted her to try their favorite diet or supplement. At least, she could lay her pack down and stand for a while reading a book on nutrition or a good herbal.

Alice and Eva and she had studied herbs and passed on what they learned to the other fugitives. In their yard in L.A. they grew thyme, rosemary, sage, comfrey, basil, horehound, fennel, lovage, sweet cicely, various mints. Herbs were cheaper than medicine and didn’t require prescriptions. Mostly fugitives had to doctor each other. The Network had a couple of doctors they could trust—one in New York whom Vida had seen when her leg was infected, and another in Portland—but they could not overuse them. Mostly they learned what they could and practiced on one another.

In Los Angeles the three women roommates had lived on a child-care job Eva had and what Vida picked up from an off-the-books job with a local food co-op. All through the summer Alice had been too sick to work. She had caught the flu in the spring, she was anemic and she could not shake a cough. They ate a lot of brown rice, backyard vegetables and co-op surplus for the week—fifteen pounds of potatoes one week, fifteen pounds of carrots the next. Vida found it frightening to watch Alice grow weaker without being able to help. When Bill, Alice’s boyfriend, came back from several months in Mexico, he had been shaken by her condition. The next day Bill and Vida broke a fugitive rule and shoplifted eight kinds of vitamin pills. After that Alice seemed to pick up and began spending part of the day sitting in the garden and sometimes felt well enough to weed or water.

This was a cozy store. Some health-food stores tried to look like pharmacies; they wanted to be scientific and respectable. Others wanted to be country stores with bins, big old-fashioned glass jars and long wooden counters. That was the style of this one, packed into a narrow slot between a pizzeria, not yet open for the day, and a news dealer’s, where her picture was hidden in the piles of newspapers. A woman with a baby in a stroller was picking over the meager selection of organic vegetables, but once she had paid and left, Vida was alone in the store with the husky blond woman behind the counter.

She wandered around looking at the grains in their bins, the oils and syrups, the vitamin pills and natural cosmetics. As she passed the cash register she set down her pack casually, partly so the shopkeeper would not think she meant to boost anything but mostly to get it off her shoulders. That felt better. She was dizzy with hunger. The fragrance of the breads and nuts filled her mouth with saliva. She glanced at the counter but did not see a newspaper anyplace. She hoped the shopkeeper did not bother to read the papers daily.

The woman behind the counter dialed a number. Vida froze. Then she drifted closer, picking up a can of yeast as if to read the nutritional information.

“Hi, yeah, it’s Rena. I thought you were going to come by last night … You did too say that … No, come on. I’m not guilt-tripping you, Sarah, I’m not. I just thought you said— … I did make cookies, the ones with the star anise, ‘cause I thought you said you were coming by, and I just wanted it to be nice again between us … Oh, never mind! … I didn’t say that! … Goodbye yourself.” Rena slammed the phone down.

No hidden messages. A lover lost, by the sound of it. She felt a pang of empathy that frightened her. She had not lost Leigh, just let the strength of the connection weaken a little. That was all. A momentary weakness.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” Rena asked crossly.

Smiling she came to the counter. Of course I am. She wondered for a moment whether to pretend she had been in the store before, to establish herself as local, to call Rena by name and thus make the storekeeper believe she knew Vida. But another idea impelled her. Rena sounded as if she lived alone. She could admit to being a stranger and try for a place to sleep. “Oh, I was just drawn into the store. I grow a lot of herbs myself. I’m from L.A…. What are these selenium tablets you have on the counter?”

“Wonderful stuff. It’s a cancer preventative … “

During the selenium spiel she examined Rena: about Vida’s height, but on the heavyset side, with short thick ash blond hair chopped off in a Dutch-boy just beneath her ears. Her large eyes were honey brown behind silver-rimmed glasses tinted pale rose, and she wore overalls and an old blue-and-red ski sweater. Rena blinked and smiled frequently now, quickly, as if asking if she pleased, her voice high and whispery for a big woman. Not much confidence.

Rena was talking about laetrile. Vida briefly debated telling Rena that she had been part of a group running laetrile over the border from Mexico and then immediately dropped the idea. The story was true: Bill had worked out the connection that had supported them in 1978, before the last time she had come East. But high adventure did not seem the right approach. Instead Vida waited for an opening to nudge the conversation toward herbs. She needed to gain a little authority with Rena, but not to scare her. Most of Rena’s information came from articles in the magazines put out by the supplement companies, who weren’t interested in pushing herbs. Ah, here …

“Yes, but thymol—that’s an ingredient in some of the commercial cold remedies—it’s oil of thyme. It’s a good expectorant—helps you get the phlegm out.” Really, flirting over phlegm! But Rena was paying attention now. Vida held forth, watching the shopkeeper carefully. She decided she could trust Rena enough to stay with her if she could manipulate Rena into offering shelter. “I’m East to visit my folks—they live in Philly—and I decided to come up to see an old friend of mine. I haven’t been able to find her. I hear she got married and now she’s separated, but I don’t know her married name”