Troubled Waters (12 page)

“Absolutely.” I filled my voice with a teasing quality I didn't really feel. I wasn't at all certain I was up to this reunion. Seeing Dana and Rap had been hard enough. And I didn't want to know Jan any better than I already did.

I quoted from my imaginary plaque: “‘In this historic Victorian house a small band of revolutionaries lived for one short but significant summer. Thanks to their untiring efforts on behalf of the poor, absolutely nothing has changed. In fact,'” I went on, warming to my theme, “‘in the twenty-odd years since they lived here, more people are homeless, more children are hungry, and more people are unemployed than ever before.'”

The teasing glint in his eyes was gone. “Are you that cynical about what we did?”

“Why not?” My tone sounded coldly flippant even in my own ears, but I couldn't seem to soften it. “Look what we wanted to achieve versus what actually happened. We had high hopes, big plans, bigger mouths, and all we succeeded in doing was getting ourselves arrested.”
And getting you sent to Vietnam
was the part I didn't say.

He'd intended to become a VISTA volunteer, joining the domestic Peace Corps instead of the Army. His service with Amigos Unidos was supposed to be a down payment on the conscientious objector status that would allow the draft board to okay VISTA as an alternative to combat. Instead—

It was hard to see the summer of '69 as anything but a gigantic failure. The sense of futility might have been lessened if every migrant farmworker received a living wage, medical care, education—all the things we'd fought for. But with the conservative Right in ascendency and LBJ's Great Society mocked on talk radio, none of that summer seemed worth the price.

As we drove along the T-square roads, checkerboarded by corn and wheat fields as far as the eye could see, it felt as if we were spanning years as well as miles.

The van sped past Pearson Park, where we'd spent one memorable night drinking Cokes laced with rum from a jelly jar and feeding the swans. One particularly aggressive bird, demanding more Oreos, chased Jan up a hill, while we all laughed. I tried to capture the moment on film, but all I got were blurred images of tree and sky and a ghostly white object that might have been the swan. Or it might have been Jan herself, who was in her Indian gauze period and often appeared swathed in thin cotton skirts, looking like a member of an Asian religious sect.

It was the night Ted Havlicek first kissed me.

I'd closed my eyes and pictured Wes Tannock's lips on mine.

Zack turned at the edge of the park and headed north toward Oregon. Our Lady of Guadalupe was outside the town, near the fields where its parishioners worked. I remembered Spanish bingo nights and used-clothing drives and a fiesta with children dancing in ruffled skirts and bolero jackets. And the day care center where I'd played Candy Land with Belita Navarro.

The building was the same: cinderblock painted adobe brown, with a crude image of Our Lady of Guadalupe surrounded by Diego Rivera-style peasants in huge straw hats painted on the side. Father Jerry's house was a tiny white cottage with a crucifix over the door.

Zack drove the van down a dirt driveway behind the church, where little tan houses squatted like chicks behind a mother hen. They were dilapidated, roofs sagging and screen doors unlatched. A plastic wading pool sat in front of one house, a broken swing set stood beside another.

Jan Gebhardt sat in a kitchen chair on the cement slab that served as the porch of the last house in the row.

She waved as we came up. Zack was driving, and Ron wasn't able to wave, so I lifted my hand in a half-hearted gesture. Two cars were parked on the sparse grass at the side of the house; I wondered who was already here.

Zack pulled up next to the red convertible. It looked like a vintage something-or-other, the kind of car good girls didn't accept rides in when I was in high school. I decided it had to belong to Rap.

I opened the door and jumped down from the van, not sure whether I should wait for Ron or go ahead. Zack pushed the buttons that opened the back door and lowered the lift that would put Ron and his chair on the ground.

“I'll see you inside,” I said, and marched toward the little cabin.

Jan wore an oversized man's dress shirt with hand-painted irises on it. They were dusted with glitter and sparkled in the waning sunlight. Her black shorts revealed thin white legs with marks that might have been bruises or varicose veins. Her feet were in sandals, and her long toes looked like part of a skeleton.

She reached out a hand. I took it without thinking. It was so slender, the bones so pronounced, that I was afraid I'd break it, but the handshake was surprisingly firm.

“Thanks for coming to represent Ron,” she said. “I was really glad to see he had someone in his corner.”

I was not about to let this woman thank me for helping my own brother. I took back my hand. “Who else is here?”

“Rap and Dana are out back.”

“Thanks.” I walked past her and opened the screen door.

I stepped into what might have been a nun's cell. One ancient iron bed, one pine dresser with no mirror, one bed table upon which was a book I took to be the Bible until I got closer. It was bound in dark blue leather and embossed with the words “Alcoholics Anonymous.” A white plastic rosary hung over the bed, knotted around the iron bars so that the crucifix dangled over the single pillow. I wondered whether it belonged to Jan or if it had been put there to inspire whoever occupied the little room.

I also wondered whether Jan might not be more comfortable in jail.

There was a back door. I opened it and went out, realizing only then that I could just as easily have walked around the tiny cottage. Had I deliberately opened the front door instead so as to catch a glimpse of Jan's private life?

Rap met me at the door. This time the hat was a white Borsalino. “If it isn't the Little Sister,” he greeted me, using the nickname he'd coined back in '69 when he discovered I was a fellow Raymond Chandler fan. I hadn't liked it; I desperately wanted my own identity, and the reminder that I was Ron Jameson's little sister rankled.

I gave my standard reply, the one it had taken me the whole summer to come up with: “The Little Sister wasn't as innocent as she looked, Rap.”

“Too true,” he said, his crooked grin infectious. “Innocent girls aren't what they used to be. But then, what is?”

He took my hand and helped me down the concrete steps. I considered reminding him that he'd threatened me earlier in the day, then decided to play along with the pretense that we were having a pleasant reunion of old friends.

Dana sat at the picnic table, cigarette smoke wafting from one hand. For a moment I thought it was a joint, but then I noted the brown filter tip. She waved and called out, just as we used to do on the front lawn of the White House, “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Cassie come over.”

In spite of myself, I began to run. The childhood game, the fact that we were wearing jeans instead of court clothes, brought back some of the old feeling. Dana's faded lavender T-shirt said “Women's Writes.”

“I didn't know this town had a women's bookstore,” I said when I reached the picnic table. I was out of breath even from the short run across the grass.

“It doesn't,” Dana said shortly. She dropped the cigarette butt to the ground and stepped on it with her hiking boot. “Not anymore. It closed about eight years ago. It was my store.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I bet it was a great place.”

“Yeah,” she agreed without enthusiasm. “Trouble was, I wanted it to be strictly political. Lesbian, sure, but no crystals, no wicca, none of that New Age bullshit that's setting the women's movement back to the goddamn fourteenth century. So some little twinkie opens up a store called Goddessworks and I'm history. She's got a full line of tarot cards and a complete set of Lynn Andrews and I'm up shit creek.”

Ron's chair appeared around the corner of the house, but it wasn't Zack behind the handles. Jan pushed the chair, a smile of proprietary pleasure on her face. She propelled the chair toward the picnic table, settled Ron at one end, then bent down and kissed the top of his head. He looked up at her and smiled. It was a moment of almost unbearable intimacy.

Intimacy? Ron and Jan intimate? I remembered the kiss in the courtroom. But Ron couldn't feel anything below T-6, so how could they—

But was sex everything?

“Where's Zack?” I asked, looking around for the huge biker.

“There's a meeting at 6:30 in the church basement,” Jan replied.

“What kind of—” I broke off in embarassed silence. “Oh.”

Jan smiled and said, “If we finish early, I'll catch the end of it.”

Ron lifted his hand, slowly, and touched a heart-shaped plastic medallion around his neck. “Don't worry,” he said, “I'm as safe as that old lady in the commercials.”

I didn't get the reference until Rap clutched his heart, fell over on the picnic table bench, and squealed, “I've fallen and I can't get up.”

“If I need Zack,” Ron explained, “I just push this button and he'll hear it. He's got the receiver box with him.”

“So, how was Vietnam?” Rap asked the question with the mock brightness of a TV game show host.

“Hey,” he said, when we all glared at him, “it's what everyone else is thinking, right?”

“I don't believe you,” Dana muttered. “That was just about the crudest thing I ever heard.”

“Look, it's like the elephant in the living room,” her ex-husband countered. “We can spend the whole night pretending Ron's not sitting here in a wheelchair, or we can talk about it up front and then get past it.”

“Well, if you're expecting me to burst into tears and admit that I killed babies, you can forget it,” my brother said. “I was only there five months, not even long enough to buy postcards. And I was a clerk-typist in Saigon. I had a boring war—up until the time I got hit.”

“And how did that happen?”

“I went out on a field assignment. Notifying an ARVN family that their son was killed. A milk run to a nearby ville. Just a little jaunt into the countryside—but a sniper in the area shot at us and got lucky.”

“I knew a guy went to 'Nam,” Rap said. “'Course he was no hero. He was just another stoned-out fuckoff.”

“You don't get it, do you?” Ron's tone was as contemptuous as I'd ever heard it. “In 'Nam, the stoned-out fuckoffs were the heroes.”

Even Rap fell silent after that. Jan walked back toward the house. The silence grew as oppressive as the humidity. Mosquitoes buzzed around my legs and arms; I slapped at them, grateful for the diversion.

“How did she do it?” Dana asked nobody in particular. “How did she stay underground all those years?”

“Probably did the dead baby thing,” Rap replied.

That was not a remark that could go unchallenged. “What dead baby thing?” we all asked at more or less the same time.

Rap smiled his crooked smile; his favorite thing in the world was to know what no one else knew. “You find a baby who was born at about the same time you were, but who died shortly after. Then you take the name and birth date of that baby, apply for a Social Security card, and, voilà, you have a new identity. People do it all the time. Once you have the Social Security card, you get a driver's license and any other ID you might need.”

“You sound as if you speak from personal experience.” I wasn't entirely sure whether I was teasing or cross-examining.

He shrugged bony shoulders. “I get around,” he said. “I know a lot of things I don't actually act on.”

“Thank God for that,” Dana murmured. She squashed another cigarette butt under her heavy soles.

“Are we sure Wes is coming?” I asked, glancing at my watch. It was ten after six, and Tarky had said they'd have to cut the visit short. If they were going to be late arriving, it would be even shorter. But maybe that was the idea; maybe Wes didn't like this meeting any better than I did.

The screen door slammed. Jan stood on the porch, a big stoneware bowl in her hands. She stepped slowly and carefully as she walked across the grass. When she reached the table, she set the bowl in the middle. Potato salad. We were having a picnic, just like in the old days.

“Cass, could you help me bring a few more things?”

“Sure.” I rose from the table and followed her back to the house.

There were stacks of paper plates, plastic forks and glasses, bottles of soda. I reached for the nearest items, but Jan touched my arm.

“I wanted to talk to you alone.”

I pulled my arm away and stepped back. Her face was pale and intent. Her eyes bored into mine. “You have to listen, Cass, please.”

“I can't. I represent Ron, and you have your own lawyer. There's a conflict of interest, and I—”

“I don't care about all that legal shit.” The control she'd shown in court was gone; she looked ready to snap, to start pouring herself a drink, to do or say just about anything without regard to consequences.

But I had to consider the consequences. I was here for my brother, and however close this woman was to him, she wasn't my responsibility.

“I can't, Jan. I'm sorry but I can't.” I made for the door before she could stop me. I was moving so fast I didn't notice the man walking toward the picnic table. We collided, and I looked up into the tanned, handsome face of John Wesley Tannock.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

July 16, 1982

The cell door opened. Jan, newly awake after a night of stormy sleep, looked up with wary, bloodshot eyes. God, she hadn't been in jail since … when? The time she was picked up for d & d in the parking lot of the Rampage Saloon out on Alexis Road? Or, no, the last time was the shoplifting beef at the Woodville Mall. She'd been drunk then, too, had thrown up on herself and was marched into court smelling of vomit and vowing never to pick up another drink. That was three years ago; a lot more drinks had gone down the hatch, but at least she'd managed to stay out of jail.