The Divide (32 page)

Of course, she wasn’t dumb. She knew he’d found her at a time when she was vulnerable and almost driving herself crazy with rage and grief. But in a few short months he had given her this incredible new sense of purpose, made her feel that she had some value again, convinced her that she, that they together, could have a real impact on the way the world was. And for all these things, whatever happened, she would always feel indebted.

They had spent the summer, except for the week her mom and Josh came out, either on the road or living at the house on Fourth Street, which they’d had entirely to themselves. During that time they had hit two SUV dealerships—one in Sacramento and the other in Portland—burning a total of eighteen vehicles. Portland had been amazing. Apparently people could see the flames more than a mile away. It was on the front page of all the newspapers and even made the lead for a few hours on CNN. They watched it in a motel room just outside of Seattle where they holed up for two days, laughing and eating takeout and fucking until Abbie hurt so much she just couldn’t go on and they curled up like wounded animals and slept.

Their most recent outing, two weeks ago, hadn’t been such a success. They had driven down to Reno to burn some condos being built on land that was supposed to be protected. But something had gone wrong and the fire just fizzled out. Two of Abbie’s best pieces of graffiti still made the local news, however. She had sprayed
Stop Raping Nature
and
You Build It, We Burn It,
which would have been a little more impressive if they actually had. Rolf had gotten really mad about the fire failing and had ever since been trying to figure out what went wrong. He normally used cotton rags soaked in diesel oil and a delayed ignition, which was basically a cocktail of hair gel and granulated chlorine, the kind people used for cleaning swimming pools. He said he was going to find something better for next time.

Now it was late August and people were starting to drift back to Missoula. First Eric and Todd had showed up, then Mel and Scott, all bubbling with stories about their summer adventures and consoling Abbie because she’d been stuck in Missoula and must have had such a boring time. It was good to see them again and amusing to have such a secret. Everyone was nice to Rolf. But Rolf wasn’t interested and as the house filled up, he just quietly removed himself. He said he had to go away for a few days. He never told her where he was going and she never asked, though this time she had a pretty good idea. While he was gone, he said, maybe she should try to find someplace else for them to live, just the two of them.

With the autumn semester about to start, it was late to be looking. Anywhere at all decent was already taken. After three days, Abbie found them a room in a run-down sprawl of a house on a corner of Helen Street. The building was clad in mildewed clapboard and the room itself was dark and smelled of damp. It was on the first floor but had its own entrance at the top of a rotting wooden fire escape which poor Sox at first had trouble negotiating. There was a bathroom the size of a closet and a kitchen area whose every surface was layered with grease. Mel helped her move her things in and then the two of them gave the place a thorough clean and a coat of white emulsion and for five dollars got some red velvet drapes from the Salvation Army store on West Broadway. By the start of the following week, when Rolf called to say he was coming home, it almost felt like it.

He never said what time he would show up and, again, Abbie had learned not to ask. Sometimes he would arrive at five in the morning and just slip into bed beside her and make love to her. Today was the second day of classes and Abbie was supposed to have a two-hour biology lab which she decided to cut. With Sox in the wire basket behind her, she cycled over to the Good Food Store to buy something special for supper.

Rolf was a strict vegetarian and so now Abbie was too, though all her lofty principles could still be jeopardized by a waft of broiled chicken or bacon frying in a pan. She decided to make parmigiana, one of his favorite dishes. She bought tomatoes and basil and eggplant and buffalo mozzarella and Parmesan, all of it organic (which he wasn’t quite so adamant about, but almost).

Hacker was giving a party that night and Mel called and tried to persuade her to come. She said the whole gang was going. Why not bring Rolf along? If he hadn’t turned up by then, she could leave a message telling him to come.

“Oh, you know, I think I’ll stay here,” Abbie said. “I’ve got a paper to write and . . .”

“Abbie, come on, it’ll be a blast.”

“I know, I just don’t feel like it.”

“You two are like an old married couple.”

“I know, soon I’ll be knitting him a sweater.”

Everybody was curious about Rolf. All anyone knew was that they had met in Seattle, that he was the guy who had “saved her” when things turned nasty. Mel said how romantic it was and had already nicknamed him The Knight, as in shining armor. They were all curious to know what he did and where he came from, so Abbie told them what Rolf had told her to say: that he was doing a Ph.D. at Washington State on International Social and Environmental Change but was taking rather a long time about it. It even took a long time to say, she would joke then quickly steer the conversation to something else. Even if she had wanted to tell them the truth, Abbie wouldn’t have been able to come up with much more.

She laid the little table with candles and a bottle of wine and cooked the parmigiana and made a salad and had it all ready to serve at eight o’clock. And when, two hours later, after she’d taken Sox for another walk down to the park and up along the river and gotten home and Rolf still hadn’t come and hadn’t called her on the cell phone, she took the meal out of the oven, because it was getting too dried up, and sat at the table and ate alone, reading her book. It was a biography of Fidel Castro that Rolf had said she should read. Though she would never have dared tell him, she was finding it more than a little heavy going.

He turned up at eight-thirty the next morning, just as she and Sox were coming out the door and about to head over to the campus where she had a couple of errands to run before class. As usual, he had a different vehicle. They were nearly always vans, unmarked and nondescript. This time it was an old gray Nissan. She never asked how or where he got them.

Abbie waited on the little deck at the top of the fire escape and watched him walk up the steps toward her, Sox beside her, squirming and wagging his tail, not yet confident enough to go down to greet him. Rolf didn’t smile or say anything, just kept his eyes on her until he reached her. And when he did, he walked straight past her and she followed him back inside and closed the door and he turned and still without a word slipped his hands inside her jacket and held her by the hips and kissed her, then led her by her wrist to the bed and fucked her.

 

 

 

They were sitting cross-legged on the floor, the street map spread before them along with all the photographs Rolf had taken. He had numbered each picture and written neat notes on the back, detailing what it showed. The video footage they were now peering at on the little folding screen of his camera was a lot less clear because he’d had to shoot from inside the back of the van. He talked her through it, explaining what they were looking at.

The street was lined with trees, cars parked along either side. The neighborhood was smart but not as upscale as Abbie had expected, just like any average white-collar suburb. The houses weren’t huge, but they were well spaced, set back a little from the road. There were landscaped lawns, smart cars parked in the driveways. But there weren’t fences or gates or any of those “armed response” security signs. The camera was zooming in now.

“Is that the house?” Abbie said.

“Uh-huh.”

Rolf froze the frame.

“The street is quiet,” he said. “At night there’s hardly a car. After midnight only two or three every hour.”

“Is that his car in the driveway?”

“They leave it there to make people think there’s somebody at home. There are lights inside on time switches to give the same impression. They go on and off at precisely the same times every night.”

“It’s not exactly a palace. I thought it’d be a lot more fancy.”

“Don’t feel too sorry for him. They have a palace in Aspen and another in Miami where his wife spends most of her time. This place he uses only when he is in Denver and, even then, most nights he’s across town fucking his mistress.”

“How come you know all this?”

He gave her a baleful look and didn’t reply. It was the kind of question she wasn’t supposed to ask. There was obviously some sort of information network to which he had access, but all he’d ever told her was that he
knew a few people
who could find things out for him. She had once asked him if the woman at the squat that night in Seattle, the one in the corner working on the laptop, was one of them. But Rolf said these were things they shouldn’t discuss, that it was safer for her not to know. Abbie tried not to let his secretiveness bother or hurt her, but it did. It made her feel patronized and that he didn’t fully trust her.

“Okay,” she said. “But how can we be sure that whatever night we do this, nobody will be there? I mean, they’ve got kids, right?”

“Two boys. Both away at college. Anyhow, I have the house phone number. There’s a pay phone just three blocks away. All we have to do is call. If someone answers, we leave.”

He unfroze the picture. They were looking at a different place now, a narrow lane overhung with trees, like a tunnel. A concrete wall running along one side, with gates and Dumpsters.

“The front of the house is too exposed and there are movement-activated security lights. This is the alley at the rear. There may be lights on the back of the house too, but if they come on, nobody will see. The whole yard is surrounded with trees.”

The picture was shaky and dim but as the camera was lifted to peep over the top of the wall, Abbie got a vague impression of the rear of the house. A swimming pool with a little whitewashed summerhouse, a sloping lawn with flower beds, some glass doors.

“There must be some kind of alarm.”

“In the house? Of course.”

“So how do we set the fire? If you break a window, the alarm will go off.”

He smiled.

“They have a cat. Don’t worry, the woman takes it with her wherever she goes. Right now it’s probably sunbathing in Florida. But in the kitchen door there is a little flap. We strap a can of gasoline to Sox’s back and send him in.”

“We
what
?”

He grinned. Rolf didn’t often make jokes and when he did they weren’t ever that funny but she still felt dumb for not getting this one. Sox was on the couch, with his head on his front paws, watching them. Rolf ruffled the dog’s ears.

“The mutt has to start earning his keep sometime, right?”

“Oh, baby, who’s Poppa calling a mutt?”

She gathered Sox up and cradled him. He wriggled and tried to scramble up to lick her face.

“I’ll have to work something out when I see it,” he went on. “I’ve got some better ignition sorted out but maybe this time I’ll have to use gasoline. Cut a hole and feed in a pipe. Anyhow, that’s my problem.”

Abbie’s heart was already galloping. This was a bigger deal than anything they had done so far. And while SUV dealerships and empty condos were somehow anonymous, this was personal. They were looking at the home of J. T. McGuigan of McGuigan Gas & Oil, the man responsible for trashing Ty’s ranch and ruining his parents’ lives and livelihood. And now the bastard was going to pay for it. They would burn his house to the ground. Abbie only wished—well, almost wished—that McGuigan could burn with it.

But the ELF was strict about the use of violence. She knew the guidelines by heart. It was legitimate to inflict
economic damage
on those who profited from destroying the environment. But you had to take
all necessary precautions against harming any animal, human or nonhuman,
a definition that sadly seemed to cover even criminal pigs like J. T. McGuigan.

Until June, when Rolf had first disclosed to her his secret life—or, at least, a little of it—Abbie had never even heard of the ELF. What he told her made her suspect he was just doing his usual evasive man of mystery thing. But she gradually came to conclude that there probably wasn’t a lot more to tell. The group was modeled, so Rolf told her, on the Animal Liberation Front, which targeted fur farms and vivisection labs. ELF members were people who believed, as he did, that the environmental movement had lost its way, had been emasculated and taken over by lawyers and organizations that had become almost as big and bad and bureaucratic as the very corporations and government departments that they were supposed to be fighting.

The ELF had no centralized structure, Rolf said, no leadership or hierarchy. It was just people following their own consciences, acting individually or in cells, as the two of them were doing. And as long as they kept within the guidelines, they could strike wherever and whenever they chose.

Torching McGuigan’s house had been Abbie’s idea and she was pleased and proud that Rolf had so readily embraced it. She was doing it for Ty and his parents, taking revenge on their behalf, sending a signal to McGuigan and all the other greedy, bullying, destructive bastards that what they were doing was not acceptable and would not be tolerated. There was, of course, another motive which Abbie would never dream of mentioning to anyone and only barely acknowledged to herself. It was that, by doing this for Ty, she might in time feel a little less guilty about rejecting him.

When she had gotten back from seeing him in May, he had called her almost every day, asking her to come again or saying he could come to Missoula. But she kept making excuses and now he hardly ever called. She hadn’t told him about Rolf or even hinted that there was somebody else in her life now. Maybe it would have been kinder if she had. But she didn’t want to hurt him and was too much of a coward. In any case, she had the impression that he had guessed. But, really, what the hell did it matter? That was then. He belonged to her old life. He was a sweet guy but she couldn’t be doing all that
I love you
shit.