Their mom figured some of Abbie’s anger and much of her new dark view of the world must have something to do with her new boyfriend, the German guy she had met in Seattle. Josh thought he sounded pretty cool and was sad they didn’t get to see him. Rolf traveled a lot, Abbie said, and that week was up in Eugene, Oregon, visiting with friends. She later let it slip that actually he had come back to Missoula two days before Josh and his mom were due to fly home.
“Can’t we at least meet him?” his mom asked. “Just to say hello?”
“He doesn’t do that kind of thing,” Abbie said.
“He doesn’t say hello?”
“He doesn’t do, you know, the meet-the-parents thing. All that bourgeois shit.”
“Ah. Well, you do it for us, okay? Say hi from the bourgeois shits.”
“Yeah, right.”
After the Lazy Spur and a week of Abbie’s anger, Cape Cod with his dad had turned out to be almost fun. Whale-watching was hard to avoid if you were staying in Provincetown because there wasn’t much else to do, especially when the weather was so miserable and the house had no TV and there wasn’t a single movie on anywhere that you hadn’t already seen. Come to think of it, maybe that was why there weren’t any whales around, not even gay ones. They’d all gotten too bored and gone off someplace else.
Just as the thought slid by, somebody at the rail hollered and everybody started babbling and craning their necks and looking through their binoculars.
“There, look!” the woman yelled. “At ten o’clock!”
For a second Josh didn’t know what she meant and had a sudden fear that they might all have to stay out here another five hours but then he realized she was giving the direction. And now he could see it. It was three or four hundred yards away and about the size of an ant, a black lump slowly rising from the water.
“Look! Look at him spouting!”
Then the captain, or chief whale-watcher or whoever he was, woke up and started telling everybody over the loudspeaker what they’d already seen for themselves. It was a right whale, he said, which was the name the whalers had given it on account of its blubber being so rich in oil. In other words, it was the right one, the best one to kill, a name the poor old whale must have been pretty proud of, Josh imagined, until he figured out the implications.
He felt his dad’s hand on his back now.
“Well, there you go, Joshie. Worth the wait, huh?”
For a moment Josh thought he was being serious, then saw the grin.
“Absolutely.”
“What do we think about the whales, save them or not?”
“I think . . . save them.”
The creature was diving now, its great tail hanging there in the air for a moment, then slowly sinking in a surge of foam. And that was the last they saw of it. The darned thing never came up again. But it had made scores of people’s day and they all sailed home with smiles on their faces, their lives just a fraction enhanced.
They drove back home the next day, chatting and listening to music and occasionally stopping, with appropriately affectionate jokes at Abbie’s expense, for both Starbucks and McDonald’s. Their talk about the elephant two nights ago seemed to have loosened things up between them and Josh felt, for the first time in as long as he could remember, totally relaxed in his father’s company.
“I know it’ll be a while,” his dad said as they stood by the car, waiting for the ferry to take them over to Long Island. “But sometime I’d really love you to come down to Santa Fe and, you know, meet Eve properly.”
“I’d like that.”
Neither of them said anything for a few moments, just stood there watching the boats out on the Sound, the seabirds whirling, the ferry coming in.
“Are you guys going to get married?”
His dad laughed. Josh didn’t know why. Just nervous maybe.
“It’s too early, Joshie. Your mom and I aren’t even divorced yet.”
“I know, but you and Eve are, kind of, living together, aren’t you?”
“I’m staying with her now, while I look for a place of my own.”
“Are you going to work down there?”
“I hope so, Josh. I’m talking to some people, got one little job going. I want to get back to designing houses. It’s what I always enjoyed doing, but for some reason I stopped. Got a little lost, I guess.”
He seemed to drift off into his thoughts. Down by the water a Stars and Stripes was billowing in the breeze, the hoist wire clinking against the pole.
“Maybe I should think about becoming an architect,” Josh said. He didn’t really mean it. He just wanted to please his dad and it was the first thing that popped into his head.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great, Joshie. I had no idea. You used to draw well. And what was that game you were always playing on your computer?”
“SimCity.”
“That’s it. Boy, you were so good at that.”
“I still play it sometimes.”
“You do?”
He put a hand on Josh’s shoulder.
“I think you’d make a fine architect.”
As they drove closer to Syosset, their conversation faded. Even in the late-afternoon sunshine, the shadow of their fractured home seemed to reach out and silence them. Josh led the way into the house and his mom made a big fuss of him without once looking at his dad, who had slunk in behind and was standing there, timidly waiting. At last, after she had asked Josh a hundred questions about the trip and told him that his hair needed a wash, she turned and looked toward his dad and gave him this funny, formal little smile.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
They touched cheeks. Like a pair of glancing icebergs.
“We saw a whale,” Josh said. It was the sort of thing a four-year-old might say.
“You did?”
“Yeah. It was a right whale.”
“Well, hey, I’m sure glad it wasn’t a wrong one.”
Josh picked up his bag and at the foot of the stairs turned and looked back. His dad smiled and gave him a peace sign.
“Almost peace, man.”
And with his one and a half fingers, Josh replied.
He took his bag up to his room and left his parents standing like strangers in the hallway. He heard his mom say something in a hushed and angry voice and then his dad wearily replying. It was about some letter she had received from his lawyers. Josh didn’t want to know. He put on some music and called Freddie on his cell phone to ask him what everyone was doing that night and did he have something good to smoke.
EIGHTEEN
The sad thing about it was that you never really got to see the full glory of your labors. You had to sneak in, set things up, and then get the hell out as fast as you could without being seen. The whole idea was that by the time the place went up in flames you were out of town and miles away. Of course, you got to see the pictures of the charred remains in the newspapers the next day, but it wasn’t the same as seeing the whole thing go boom.
The part Abbie liked best was spraying slogans on the walls and across those big showroom windows. This was basically her job, while Rolf set the fire. It was one long rush of adrenaline, knowing that at any moment some security guard could come strolling around the corner. She had gotten quite inventive with what she wrote. Her best efforts to date were Fat Lazy Polluters and SUVs = U.S. GREED, which had a kind of rhyming thing going. Rolf said she shouldn’t get too clever in case people missed the message. For example, Despoilers and American Avarice were too obscure, he said. He also made her vary what she wrote and the style she wrote it in, so the cops would think there were a whole lot more cells operating than there really were. The only thing it was important to keep repeating was ELF. Or better still, if time and space allowed, spell it out in full: Earth Liberation Front.
The one thing he was really strict about was not spending too long at the location. Hanging around was how you g
ot yourself caught, he said, so Abbie didn’t argue. He was probably the first person in her whole life whose instructions she felt happy to follow and whose every opinion she respected, usually without question. He knew so much, it was almost scary, like he had this amazing computer in his head. You could ask him absolutely anything—about politics or the environment or international affairs or the human rights record of the most obscure country you could think of—and he inevitably knew the answer. She loved to sit or lie beside him and just listen to him talk.
Abbie knew her awe and compliance had something to do with his being ten years older than she was. And it obviously also had something to do with what was going on between them sexually. From the very first time, he had completely blown her away. His body was so lithe and beautiful. She let him do things to her that she could never have imagined she might like. Things that, had anyone told her about them before, would have shocked, even disgusted, her. It was as though he had unlocked in her some secret room to which she now went willingly and unbidden.
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.