When Katie turned away from the Western Union counter, the teller mumbled, “Have a good day, Miss Stevens.”
A man leaning against the wall, wearing a cream-leather jacket too thin for the weather, his hair a dark frizzy cloud straggling into sideburns, lifted eyes from his newspaper to look right at her. The newspaper still had a Super Bowl story on its back page, even though that was two days before. Nothing moved in the man’s face, like he was looking into an empty closet.
Katie yanked her hood up, hit the door and moved at a clip across the frosted sidewalk. She slid into the Ford behind Eric and Bill.
“Something’s fucked,” she said.
♤
A few days before, Katie—going by “Alice Stevens” out in the world—sheltered in a dry cleaners’ doorway, trying to stand within its pocket of humidity. Eric had received an unsigned letter to the P.O. box, sent from Mendocino, saying someone needed to call Portland at this particular time. The cell didn’t use the apartment phone for movement stuff, and such tasks often fell to Katie, because she had no warrants out.
She watched a diner opposite, a bright cube on a block otherwise dim and flyblown. Two black men passed her, collars flipped, hands in pockets, one in a watch cap. They didn’t even glance at her. This neighborhood was borderland, not one race or ethnicity, not prosperous, not dangerous, not interesting; dusty apartments with Christmas decorations still up, old shops, vacant storefronts: the kind of neighborhood Katie and friends favored at that time.
She checked her watch and peered around, hoping the dry cleaner people would think she was waiting on a cab, if they noticed her. She scanned the diner. Cops didn’t frequent it, but Katie always took care. In ten minutes she saw no uniforms or obvious undercovers—no unlikely salt-and-pepper duos, no lone guys in brand-new hippie gear. She crossed.
The diner was one of those places that served a downhome menu—burgers, pie, meatloaf special—but where everyone turned out to be Italian. Stepping through the door felt like entering an orchid house, outside’s chill lingering on her cheeks. A few families sat in booths. Four old people gossiped with a jowly counter man. Most turned as Katie entered, but just inside the door, stairs dropped down to basement bathrooms. As Katie took those stairs, faces turned away.
The stairs ended in a vestibule, carpeted and paneled, with a sprung couch and two old Sports Illustrated copies rumpled on a cockeyed end-table—a clammy space that repelled the restaurant’s warmth. A payphone hung on the wall between twin toilet doors. Eric called this “the perfect phone.”
She pulled the unsigned letter from her pocket, rattled in coins and dialed the Portland number. She knew Oakland comrades would travel up there to use a particular safe house—take the train, work the phone all night, take the train back. She pictured Californians shivering by a wheezy fireplace, ducking into Oregon drizzle for toilet paper, beer, canned soup.
“Emma G.’s residence, who’s calling please?” answered a male voice.
“This is Alice Stevens. I’m a friend of Santiago Orozco.”
Twenty years before, a teenager called Santiago Orozco had robbed a filling station in Arizona, then given a reporter some poetic quote about the deed. Life magazine picked it up, someone remembered it, and the name became underground code.
“Sister Alice,” the voice said, papers shuffling. “You calling about the eggplants?”
“I got the eggplant delivery last week,” she replied on cue. “I’m calling to ask if Uncle Gary dropped by.” Uncle Gary—not his name—starred in major motion pictures. Someone in the revolutionary world knew him.
“Right on, right on. I see, yeah. Uncle Gary’s gonna send you all a chocolate box. Nice big one. Wendy Underwood will have it for you Tuesday.”
Wendy Underwood meant “Western Union.”
“Wendy Underwood, Tuesday.”
“That’s right. You just be you.”
“Just Alice—got it.”
“Nice chocolate box. Everyone liked that last party, so go ahead and throw another one.”
“Right on.”
“You know—keep folks in the mood?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Take care, Sister Alice.”
She heard descending footsteps. A man—clean-shaven, dressed beyond his age in a camel overcoat, unfashionable hat, silk scarf and shiny patent leathers—looked her over as they passed on the stairs. He grinned like she was the funniest thing he’d seen in an age.
“Using the phone, kid?”
She hustled up and out into a cloud of her own breath.
♤
When Katie got back to the apartment from “the perfect phone,” she found Mary, alias Susan, eating brown rice from a saucepan. She asked after Eric (alias Robert) and Bill (alias Stephen).
“Out,” Mary said, chewing, one syllable oozing marijuana. “Looking for a TV. Gonna boost one—so they said. Eric wants to watch that football game.”
Eric had talked about this Super Bowl all week, fascinated that a team—Miami?—might finish the season without losing a single game. “Progress takes a lot of forms, man,” he had declared. “The way the league runs, it’s actually socialism if you study it. And the Dolphins? Played thirteen, won thirteen? That is a cadre.”
This reminded Katie of a conversation two years prior, with a comrade going by Juliet. “Keep in mind about your movement guys,” Juliet told her. “These motherfuckers can rap about ideology all the ding-dong day. Comes down to it, they still love football, red meat and doggy style. Your revolutionary man is still an American man. Shit you just put up with. Unless—” Juliet’s eyes narrowed through the smoke— “you decide to go another way.” Things got complex for a couple months, before a day when a car pulled up, Juliet threw her bag in the back seat, climbed in, and that was the last they saw her.
Anyway, that was in a different city entirely.
Mary set the saucepan down, and Katie finished the rice. Then the two sat close to the kitchen radiator, a jazz program playing on an old Hitachi the size of a motel Bible. Katie wore fingerless gloves to sort pages of manifesto paragraphs and poetry lines, some in Eric’s hand, some in hers, decorated by Bill’s obscene ball-point doodles.
This mess needed to become the second issue of Tinder Box, the most celebrated radical publication of national scope since at least ’69—a journal immediately hailed as an asset to the movement in these dark, grinding times of factional ruptures and declining national scenarios. Katie tried to put the papers in provisional order, not for the first time. Mary worked on a small watercolor, magenta and yellow splashes drying pale on the table.
♤
Next morning, Eric jockeyed pans, a red union suit stretched over his long frame. Bill sat where Mary had sat, inking a politico-sexual cartoon. In Bill’s work, wild-haired characters enjoyed acrobatic coitus while exchanging Mao quotations. Eric fried bacon, potatoes and sausage. Katie could see he was full of coffee, maybe speed, riding a shiny mood. She nursed coffee herself, propped against a counter.
Mary drifted in, bleary from sleep, scowled at the meaty pans, poured coffee and left.
All three bobbed to “Tumbling Dice.” The song was already out of rotation for most stations, but Bill possessed a knack for the radio dial. He kept a mental chart of disc jockeys and schedules, and could pull in great songs like a water witch. Music made Katie feel more comradely toward Bill, forgiving of his barbaric humor, hard doctrine and unrequited desire to turn the cell into a group-sex thing. Since high-school coffeehouse days, she had fixated on singers, bands and songs the way her father monitored market news. Wonderful to hear the Stones, Charlie Watts suavely thunderous—a comforting, homecoming feeling. They all refused to listen to the Beatles after “Revolution.”
The men had come home late with a Luxon portable television and a green space heater with the brand name TORCAN, one corner dented in. They told uproarious tales of dickering at a stoop sale—vulture relations, a dead old lady’s things—after failing to figure out how to steal minor appliances.
“Turns out, we’re just not that kind of outlaw,” Eric said, glittering with amusement.
Eric, any more, could slide quickly from this rowdy joie de vivre and hamming up his Colorado roots into brittle intensity. His face would change. He locked his jaw and drilled into you with Marx, Lenin and criticism/self-criticism. Even after a couple years of this, this behavior still struck Katie as a tumorous growth within Eric’s personality. She had never seen it in their early days, after they met in Chicago, the day the activist telephone tree rang her apartment.
She had lived then with two other women, also newly returned from Friends Service Committee work. Police had attacked a demonstration, and anyone listed under “first aid” on the resource lists got the call. Roommate Anne drove them to a South Side townhouse—flaking paint, blinded windows—where they found a wrecking yard of black eyes, split scalps and mild concussions. In her memory, Eric materialized in a bathroom: gray T-shirt, shorts hiked to reveal punctures sprayed across one thigh by a riot gun loaded with rock salt. Dirty-brown hair framed his long face. He was all precise shapes like that, lean as an anatomical chart. He smoked a joint, tapped ash into the sink and offered wry comments, his voice twangy, an accent of open skies and long roads. She remembered her hand trembling as she cleaned and tended the wound.
They slept together for six months, off and on. (In a revolutionary context, relationships should remain fluid.) Eric operated on much deeper strata than her, wrapped up in court dates, fundraisers and direct meetings with leadership. The following spring he left town without much preamble. She didn’t see him for almost a year. She moved to Madison to work on the newspaper Connections after deciding that journalism—more specifically, her capacity to get a paper out, to sit over raw copy and glued-up layouts until they resolved into the actual thing that rolled off a shuddering press—presented her best opportunity to foment to the vast necessary changes.
One bleak February morning, Eric had knocked at the back door of her cheap cottage. She found bruises and lacerations collaged across his body, two days old. He had been living at an old farm near a military base, with comrades who claimed dynamite expertise. Eric was on the porch when the farmhouse disintegrated in a glowing roar, and woke up in the yard next to a crater. As he walked down the road, he passed firetrucks and sheriffs’ cars headed the other way.
Twenty-four hours after Eric arrived, Katie left the cottage doors unlocked and started living underground.
Her chief clandestine asset was that she was nobody. No felonies, no pictures on post office walls. Katie had never detonated a statue, led a riot or held up a bank, so she could assist bombers, rioters and bank robbers. If she ended up in any histories, it could be for Tinder Box. The publication was, of course, pseudonymous, but Katie caught herself imagining a day, a liberated future, when all could be told. Her articles and manifestos might be gathered under one cover, a capsule of one activist’s evolving thought. Readers in some enlightened polity might experience revolution as she experienced it, squinting at a notebook during quiet moments in the apartment—like she was writing her way towards the new day, clause by clause.
When “Tumbling Dice” faded, Bill twisted the dial to a soul station and found “Superstition,” right as the horns hit for the first time. Bill and Eric whooped and bolted around the kitchen with pseudo-streetwise abandon that Katie hoped no other comrades ever saw, but which made her giggle. She rocked gently to Wonder’s spiky groove. She wanted this album, but the cell didn’t own a hi-fi.
The radiator knocked. She gazed out at the next apartment building, its windows crusted with ice. Unraveled tape on a power line whipped around.
♤
As breakfast dishes piled in the sink, Katie recognized an unspoken agreement that this Super Bowl offered a holiday from ordinary discipline. Made a certain sense. After Uncle Gary’s money arrived, Tinder Box production would become urgent, the funds intended for a print shop outside Akron that asked no questions, various movement quadrants expectant.
Eric and Bill had stocked the refrigerator with beer and hot-dog fixings. The TORCAN space heater dried the air like a kiln. Dope came out early and sweetened the atmosphere. She and Mary worked for a while over the living room desk, evaluating draft covers Mary had designed. Letraset type on bright red construction paper, black graphic flames licking up from a border rule? Or a hand-written title in feminine script on blue, sunflower bursting in the middle? They placed options side by side and solicited Bill’s artistic views.
“Speaking frankly, these come off bourgeois,” he said. “If you’re making me choose, obviously the red and the flames.”
“Well, like, what is your vision for this magazine, Bill?” (Mary and Bill often had sharp interactions. They had robbed two banks together with marginal success before being shunted, like Eric and Katie, into propaganda and logistics.)
“I could draw you a cover for the ages, but they’d have to sell it in a brown wrapper.” Bill was already deeply stoned.
Katie read through her alternate story runsheets. She wondered whether the lead manifesto should address the Paris peace talks, Kissinger’s reported progress with Tho.
“Bunch of bullshit, most likely,” was Eric’s opinion. “Do we buy the news?”
Bill nodded from the sofa, where he fidgeted with his ukelele. “‘Their Peace Is Our War’—put that in the fucking headline. Like, either way, the struggle continues.”
Katie rolled her eyes, but after a moment’s thought jotted “THEIR PEACE = OUR STRUGGLE” on scratch paper. Not bad. It might be smart to get ahead of it.
It was already dark outside when they switched on the television, mounted on a red milk crate. Eric jimmied the antenna, tuning in a green field in washed-out sunlight.
“Jesus Christ, look at it,” Bill said. “California dreaming, I guess.”
Katie allowed herself her first beer and tried to remember one thing about football. Television voices struck her as surreal. “The Xerox Corporation … who make information their business—worldwide.” A marching band formed giant characters—“V I I.” A semi truck rolled into the stadium, towing a scorched space capsule on a flatbed. Did anyone else in the nation recognize how fucking bizarre this was? A long car circled through the stadium, three men perched out of its sunroof: “The crew of Apollo XVII!”
They looked like aging schoolteachers. Katie tried to imagine these suburbanites—one, a geologist, the announcer said—sealed in that capsule, a hundred thousand miles from anyone.
“And there they are, folks,” Bill declared. “The Last of the Mohicans. If only old J.F.K. could see us now. Twelve years later, it all ends with a slow joy ride.”
Eric snorted. “It always does for J.F.K.”
The game began and progressed. Mary had observations. “It’s absolutely unbelievable that there is a football team called ‘Washington Redskins.’ And that’s Washington-Washington, right, not Washington State? Just about says it all. Interesting that they allow, even encourage, some forms of violence, but then other forms of violence, the man throws the little handkerchief. I guess we’re rooting for the Miami team? The smartest other mammal, they say. And it seems like they’re the immigrant team. They have a lot of immigrants on this team? This is one-hundred-percent a late-empire, decline-and-fall trip. Gauls in the Coliseum.”
Katie regarded the contest as slow-paced debauchery with odd bureaucratic interludes. Strange to think of millions watching this helmeted writhing, pile-ups followed by meetings and announcements. Eric argued that it possessed some folk-art integrity, some redeemable working-class genius, but eventually he conceded that this game had proven dull.
“You mean they come in different flavors?” Mary drawled from her easel.
Katie slow-sipped a third beer, her limit, and surrendered to rare contented boredom.
The Miami team was ahead. The televised LA sunshine at last started to fade. The Dolphins, their grass-stained white uniforms suggesting after-dinner mints, performed a kicking play, and even Katie understood something was not right. The ball ricocheted off a Washington “Redskin.” Players’ movements went wobbly. Only a second passed—a dragging beat—but Katie could tell that not one man on the field knew what to do. The small guy who had kicked in the first place caught the ball. He made a flailing motion, off his balance, and the ball bobbled up like a stunned pigeon, announcers’ voices sliding into agitation. Then one of the Washington players snatched it, and sprinted hell-for-leather into a seeming acre of space.
“Garo Yepremian, holy shit!” Eric roused himself to the sofa’s frame, his face split by a child’s grin. “That is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” (Katie knew this was not true.) “Garo Yepremian. Garo Yepremian, holy shit.” He repeated the toothsome name—the kicking man, Katie learned: Miami’s flailer—a few more times. “Well,” he concluded, “that’s what you get for abandoning the socialist project.” He gave Katie a short, animated, convoluted biography, portraying this Garo as a Yugoslav defector, recruited to America by a fed propaganda program that coveted foreign athletes. “Just like the CIA sends Louis Armstrong to Africa,” he said.
Years later, by chance, Katie would learn this was all completely inaccurate. Eric tended to graze and tangle information. Even so, his expansive moods always stirred her. She let the game end, Miami victorious despite Garo Yepremian, and heaved herself from the sofa. She unplugged the TORCAN space heater, waving off Mary’s protest, and carried it towards their bedroom by its plastic handle, shooting Eric a look on her way.
♤
The cell had a green 1968 Ford Custom 500. Late Tuesday morning, Katie, Eric and Bill yanked the doors until they opened with a frozen crackle. Katie sat in back, Bill drove, right hand hovering around the radio dial all the way. Mary wanted to get more painting done.
They used a Western Union on downtown’s questionable side, where normal banks and pharmacies mixed with bail-bond offices and storefront lawyers. Varied people did business around here, most faces graven with defeat and distraction. Cars came and went. Bill slid into a spot right in front of Western Union. Per practice, Katie dressed young but square, her brown Sears Junior Bazaar parka’s hood up before she left the car, cold knifing through pegged slacks.
This branch consisted of a small waiting area—linoleum and gray paint—and two tellers working behind glass. Not much to it. A few characters usually idled here, the tellers too apathetic to roust them. This time, a Latin-looking guy thumbed a paper against the right-hand wall; a muttering woman sat in a chair by a hissing heater vent, surrounded by paper grocery bags. Katie lined up behind a silver-haired man who spoke with a stagey British accent. She regarded the floor, filmed with mud, streaked with heel-marks, and wondered why the revolution had to unfold in so many rooms like this one.
Katie passed her Alice Stevens license under the partition. A teller gave it a rote glance. She typed on a computer and counted out hundreds. Katie kept still as she watched money stack up. A typical wire brought in $600 or $700. This pile kept growing. Katie’s pulse flickered.
The money felt like trouble coming across the metal tray, felt hot to the touch.
♤
“Something’s fucked.”
The Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses” rumbled on the radio, unattended. Eric gave a tight nod. “Yeah, two dudes just checked out the license plate.”
“A goddamn traitor in Oakland,” Bill said, eyes on the rearview. “Car behind.”
“Left lane, beat the light,” Eric said. “They’re pulling up—Katie, get down.”
As she ducked, she caught a beige sedan coming alongside, two men in front, the driver’s long hair somehow striking a corny note even in that fleeting glance. She was down in the floor’s gum-wrappers and grit, rattling around as Bill squealed into a left turn, then ripped half of a long sidestreet block.
“Hold up, hold up,” Eric said, twisted around to look back. The car bucked. “They’re stuck at the light. Katie, you go. Straight shot east to the apartment. Get Mary and the magazine stuff and the money to the rendezvous. We’ll lose the car, meet you there.”
She unlatched the door and bumbled out, then paused. Bill revved in neutral: “’Nother one gonna be coming, man, just fucking go.” Katie sprinted into a defile between apartment buildings. The Ford screeched away. She stood in that shadowed spot and inhaled twice, summoning a street-grid map to mind.
She heard a metallic thwack edged with bright shattering. She eased forward. Forty yards away, she saw the Ford splayed across the intersection, nose-to-nose with a car she could barely make out. The passenger door opened. Eric stood up with a resolute motion, then took one strange step back and clapped a hand above his eyes. She could see Bill in silhouette, moving as if still turning the wheel. Katie couldn’t tell if Eric was bleeding, and almost went to him.
Noise and blur filled the street in front of her: the beige sedan, another identical car and a regular police cruiser, coursing down both lanes. All jerked to a halt at the crashed Ford, Eric looking at them, hand still on his forehead.
♤
“Combination of the Two” ricocheted around Katie’s mind in fragments as she moved fast, but not too fast, breath steaming in billows all around her, blistered shreds of Janis’s voice crashing unwanted into her own calculations—maybe her brain’s way of setting a pace.
The car registration (owner, Alice Stevens) tied back to the apartment (renter, Alice Stevens). She carried a few core identity documents but not all. She also had the Sandra Carter driver’s license on her. Did anything in that apartment, any paper scrap or old photo, connect to her real identity? Or was all that in a safe-deposit box in another time zone?
She forced herself to skip the first payphone. At the second, she dialed the apartment, hung up after two rings, waited thirty seconds, dialed again, hung up after three rings. She imagined Mary at her easel, motionless, absorbing the signal: Walk out the door, right now.
Katie had $5,000 in her handbag.
♤
What they called “the river trajectory” consisted of illogical twists and turns, used to reach meetings with comrades or above-ground contacts, devised to trick any tail into revealing itself. This routine led to the river, which itself took eccentric curves, almost carving neighborhoods into islands. The authorities aspired to build parkland down here, but had so far created only vacant strips of mud—like concrete in this weather—with a bark-dust walking trail frequented by winos, stubborn birdwatchers and students looking to get stoned in something like nature.
This path looped her into a neighborhood well removed from the crash site: an old immigrant district where small-time grocers crowded sidewalks with fruit and vegetable crates. Cops let this area self-regulate. Katie was not exactly a fit, but no one paid her much mind. College kids must kick around here often, bothering people for oral history projects and taking Photo 101 black-and-whites. She entered a discount clothing store on a main-drag corner. As she remembered, it was huge and staffed by a few indifferent middle-aged women who smoked cigarettes and gossiped in a foreign language. Katie filled a cart, working from intimates to outerwear. The dressing room door had a hook lock. Before she tried on the clothes, she took out the money, holding each bill up to the light, studying all fifty serial numbers. She couldn’t detect any marks or sequence—maybe the feds, or whoever, left Western Union out of it.
She noticed a small rack of housewares and added scissors to the cart, then dove into the jumbled shoe aisles and found glossy black knee-high boots with silvery eyelets, a couple years out of style but vaguely sexy—why not? Before going to the register, she rehearsed some brainless lines about a job interview. (Except for the boots, her selections hit a secretarial-pool note.) But the counter lady didn’t say a word, just pointed at the total. She’d picked enough clothes to justify breaking a $100.
She walked a half-mile to a gas station with a restroom around back, another place she’d scouted when the cell first moved to the city. It traded in fortified wine and didn’t seem invested in respectability. She swapped every item of clothing, clattering and shivering in the tiny space, trying not to touch the toilet or let bare feet linger on the floor. The boots proved most awkward—Katie wedged her back into a corner to pull them on. With the scissors, she chopped rough curtain bangs into her hair. She put in faux-gold hoop earrings, wrapped a cotton scarf around her head in lieu of a hat, and realized she should buy make-up somewhere.
Old clothes went into the shopping bags after a final check of pockets; shopping bags went into the trash outside, after a scan for watching eyes. Katie left the parka, a quality garment, crumpled in a gutter for someone to find. Her new coat didn’t fit right, but had fake-fur lining.
She needed to sit somewhere warm, food in front of her. She wanted a drink.
♤
Katie ordered a martini and the beef barley soup with sourdough roll. The place was dignified, but not too high on itself to have a TV running, sound off, above the bar. Middle-aged people in frayed tweed and decade-old wool sat over drinks and french fries, mostly alone, but no one was looking to meet anybody. A woman could sit by herself. The barman wore a white shirt and kept an easy-listening station going low: Sinatra’s “Cycles” when she walked in.
So the apartment was blown, as was the Alice Stevens identity. She decided to assume Sandra Carter wouldn’t be safe for long. That raised the question of her real name, but also questions of aiding and abetting, harboring fugitives, maybe wire fraud, god knew what.
Mary was probably at the rendezvous point, a metro train platform on the far west side, trying to be Susan. Mary did not function well in public operations, Achilles heel of those bank robberies she and Bill pulled. She tended to look like a woman either about to vomit or produce a tommy gun and yell “this is a stick-up!” Mary would pace that platform until the feds arrived.
Katie had some faith in Eric, but he had become so erratic. He might assault a detective and go out in a blaze of pistol shots. He might give nothing but name and Social Security, like a hero. He might cop a plea and run for Congress someday. For an instant, she thought of Sunday night, his hands on her hips, his stubble roughing her mouth, but she crushed those thoughts.
Bill would crack. And if Oakland was infiltrated—seemed likely—that rendered the whole West Coast unreliable, at least any connection Katie could tap. She didn’t have direct contact with leadership, always Eric’s thing. Compartmentalizing information worked until it didn’t. Here she was. Should she wander into another town’s co-op bookstore and hope to overhear some magic word? Take out a cryptic classified in the Bugle-American? The right next action was to finish the soup.
Katie occupied herself with an orphaned page of the previous day’s Times, short wire bulletins from afar. It calmed her to imagine a fifth-tier editor late at night, carefully trimming the Reuters item about some poor bastard in Zanzibar, sentenced to death for smuggling cloves. What was this world? The five o’clock local news came on TV and a man down the bar asked for sound. His shaggy hair, mustache, askew wide tie and baggy maroon suit suggested a legal-aid attorney or community-college professor.
The news anchor spoke over the quiet radio. “City police working with the FBI apprehended two alleged members of a radical underground network after a downtown traffic accident today,” et cetera. Eric and Bill’s goggle-eyed mugshots and real names flashed, but nothing about anyone “at large.”
“These dumb sons of bitches,” the man at the bar said, maybe to the barman. “Behold the very bullshit that got us Dick Nixon all over again.” Katie didn’t at first register that he meant them: the cell. The news babbled on about human interest and high-school basketball. Katie finished the soup and ordered another martini. She would have to spend more like this. Keep money rotating, break big bills. That was a consideration now.
♤
After the second martini, she went looking for a second bar. Snow buzzed around, more like frozen dirt than anything poetic, or even made of water. She hunched along among pawn shops, discount appliance stores, Greek restaurants and folding-chair meeting halls.
Her second bar proved to be a saloon clad in rough boards, a rustic one-story oddity between tenements. It faced the street with a single window and a steel door propped open with a plastic ashtray. Above the door, the old wood bore a painted cowboy, yeehawing on a faded bronc. A man in biker leathers sat on a stool inside the door.
He wanted a one-dollar cover. She asked what for.
“Some rock-and-roll band. I don’t fucking know, sister, I just sit here.”
The room was long, gloomy, forty degrees warmer than outside, a bar down its right-hand length. Interior walls wore the same grainy panels as outside, and Katie shivered to imagine running a hand along and pulling back a palm flayed by splinters. But the smell, a fuggish envelope of beer and cigarettes, felt maternal and familiar. Katie took an empty barstool.
She had not expected a crowd, and squinted among indistinct bodies milling down the narrow space. She saw some long hair and one fringe jacket. Anxiety spiked. Had she stumbled into a hippie place—cop magnets, always avoided? Then a man sat next to her and rested hands like two desiccated birds on the bar. He wore a tight, full-body jumpsuit made of red vinyl and metallic, opaque silver glasses, his hair just a scrim. He was not a hippie.
“Are you here to offer us a sensational deal on personal checking accounts?” he asked, voice wheezy and feather-light.
“Sorry?”
“Have you come to explain compound interest?”
“Excuse me— ”
“Just that you look like a lady from the bank. Are you Miss Judy from the bank?”
Katie grasped that he was younger than her, perhaps by years. He called to a bartender whose hair was a white shroud and who wore blue factory coveralls. “Steve-o, Miss Judy from the bank needs a beer.” The white hair swayed and the barman put a glass like a jam jar in front of Katie. She carefully extracted loose bills from her coat pocket, but her neighbor precisely gripped her wrist—so close to her handbag, she flinched involuntarily.
“No, Miss Judy, you are on the guest list. Steve-o, Miss Judy is on my guest list. We all might need low-interest loans at any moment, or personalized investment advice guaranteed to secure a pleasant retirement. Be nice to Miss Judy.”
The bartender moved in a full-body slouch, his face a pile of wrinkles, purple bags under each eye. “Guest list, huh? Suppose you start playing then.”
“Are you in a group?” Katie asked.
“In fact, I am in two groups. Both are on the retail portion of the path to musical stardom, making friends one by one. I mean to say, welcome, Miss Judy. Thank you for coming to our performances. I have a strong feeling about you. Now—off to prepare, just like the boss here said.” He popped off the stool with a singular hop and loped down the boxcar-shaped space.
Katie ordered two more small beers in quick succession, folding a dollar on the bar each time. On his fourth pass, the bartender tucked the money in a coverall pocket.
“What kind of music do you bring in here?”
“Music of no kind. Fuckers like Kenneth who can’t get gigs to save their life.”
She nodded without understanding. The beer tasted contaminated. People entered in ones and twos. They wore dirty puffer vests or thin trench coats, moth-eaten sweaters or vaguely European scarves, strange antique alpine headgear or burglar stocking caps, new denim or old Army pants, hair shaggy or chopped short without much regard for gender. Indoor sunglasses seemed in fashion. Men and women ordered jam jars of beer in low tones.
A thought came straggling along: she should write about this scene in Tinder Box. She had sprinkled the first issue with acerbic “cultural notes” alongside essays on the military industrial complex and the inner-city situation. Of course this impulse made little sense now, all Tinder Box materials being lost. In any case, what the fuck would she say about this? Strange people in a random room. A fringe trip, far removed from the matrix of empire, resistance, vanguard, the Tinder Box spectrum of concern.
Then a different possibility coalesced in her alcoholic haze. Tinder Box now existed only in her very own head—and, yes, in the form of the money, some of which she’d need to survive, but not all. She could wait tables in some greasy spoon, hole up in some roughshod mountain town. With Eric and Bill and Mary off the scene, she could remake the magazine—make it just how she wanted, just what it needed to be to stoke the struggle. It would be hers.
A pealing organ chord coaxed Katie off her stool and she weaved through the crowd.
Kenneth sat under the lights behind a Hammond organ with wood paneling, an instrument maybe expropriated from a church basement. He still wore his glasses, posture so extreme his thin torso took a convex curve. He held a minor chord—held it and held it until it became first excruciating, then hypnotic. A woman stepped up from the crowd and took a microphone; the chord changed slightly without breaking its drone. The woman was skinny too, but perhaps outweighed Kenneth. Her body swam in an oversized black cardigan over a red-and-white striped shirt and a dancer’s leotard. And she did start dancing—spasming in some loose accord with Kenneth’s incremental shifts of key. She lifted the mic to her lips now and then to yelp a wordless shout or breathy single syllable, dark hair flailing everywhere.
Katie didn’t move except to lift beer to lips. She needed a bathroom; she thought about a west-bound bus. Then she realized she could just buy a goddamn car off the street.
Thirty-six hours later, she would be in a graveyard in North Dakota, tracking in the snow, searching for infants’ tombstones with birthdates close to her own.
♤
April 7, 2025
