“All of a sudden you got this look on your face as if the wine was bad.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said.
“You didn’t look fine.”
Her voice was soft but insistent. I felt pressure around my fingers; she’d taken my hand, was squeezing it.
I said, “Okay. Beady for more weirdness?” I told her about Ike Novato’s research. Wannsee II. The New Confederation.
She said, “Crazies on both ends putting their heads together. What a lovely thought.”
“The expert at the Holocaust Center doubts it actually took place. And if anyone would know, she would.”
“That’s good,” she said, “because that is
We both drank wine.
I said, “How’s Matt the car basher working out?”
“No troubles so far. I’ve got him doing scut stuff, wanted to show him who was boss right at the outset. He’s really a meek little kid in an overgrown body. Pretty docile, no social skills. A real follower.”
“Sounds like Holly.”
“Sure does,” she said. “Wonder how many of them like that are out there.”
She let go of my hand. Touched her wineglass but didn’t raise it to her lips. Silence enveloped us. I heard other couples talking. Laughing.
“Move your chair,” she said. “Sit next to me. I want to feel you right next to me.”
I did. The table was narrow and our shoulders touched. She rested her fingers on my knee. I put my arm around her and drew her closer. Her body was taut, resistant. A tremulous, high-frequency hum seemed to course through it.
She said, “Let’s get out of here. Just be by ourselves.”
I threw money on the table, was up in a flash.
As far as I could tell, no one followed us home.
29
We fell asleep holding each other; by six-thirty the next morning we’d shifted to opposite sides of the bed. She opened one eye, rolled back to me, put her leg over my hip, fit me to her, eager for union. But when it was over, she was quick to get out of bed.
I said, “Everything all right?”
“Dandy.” She bent, kissed me full on the lips, pulled away, and went into the shower. By the time I got there she was out, toweling off.
I reached out to hold her. She let me, but just for a moment, then danced away, saying “Busy day.”
She left without eating breakfast. I sensed a reserve- a trace of the old chill?- as if the no-ugliness rule had sheltered us for a few hours, but at the expense of intimacy.
I showered alone, made coffee, and sat down with Terry Crevolin’s book.
Downright turgid
The book was full of typos and grammatical errors. If editing had taken place I couldn’t see it. Crevolin had a fondness for two-hundred-word sentences, random italics, creative capitalization, frequent references to “Ottoman manipulation,” “mercantile demonics,” “the new State-Management Bank,” and quotations from Chairman Mao. (“In wars of national liberation, patriotism is applied internationalism.”)
A sample sentence read: “None of the
All that and pictures, too- photo-snippets culled from textbooks and magazines, some of them sloppily hand- colored in crayon. Headshots of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and for reasons I couldn’t comprehend, Buddha, Shakespeare, and a rhesus monkey. Cloth-capped workers waiting in bread lines. Byzantine icons. Greek statuary. Dustbowl migrants with faces out of a Woody Guthrie song. The Egyptian pyramids. Butterflies. Two pages of ancient weapons- maces, halberds, long swords. A Sherman tank.
I tried to make some sense of it, but the words passed through me without being digested- literary fiber. My eyes blurred and my head began to hurt. I flipped to the last chapter in hopes of finding a summation, some central message I could make sense of. Something that would tell me why Ike Novato had sought out the author.
What I found was a two-page spread of a crayoned mushroom cloud captioned BEAR LODGE, R.I.P., THE GREATS. On the next page was a photo-reproduction of a newspaper story from The
IDAHO BLAST THE RESULT OF RADICAL BOMB
FACTORY ACCIDENT SAYS FBI
BEAR LODGE, IDAHO- Federal and local law enforcement authorities in this rural logging community report that an enormous explosion that took place during the early morning hours was the result of the accidental detonation of a cache of high explosives stockpiled by left-wing radicals conspiring to carry out a program of domestic terrorism and violent political protest.
The explosion, described by witnesses as a “fire-storm,” occurred at 2:00 A.M. and totally demolished a former lumber warehouse and several vacant outbuildings a half mile outside Bear Lodge, in addition to setting off fires in surrounding heavily forested areas that took six hours to suppress. Structures within the town of Bear Lodge experienced shattered windows and minor wood and masonry damage. No Bear Lodge residents reported injuries but ten people in the warehouse are believed to have perished.
“The ground just started shaking. It felt like an earthquake,” said Nellie Barthel, owner of the Maybe Drop Inn Tavern and Truck Stop in Bear Lodge, as she swept up broken bottles and glasses. “Or one of those sonic booms, but a lot louder. Then we saw the fire and smoke pouring into the sky from the east and we knew something had happened out there with those people at the old log depository.”
Tax documents obtained in Twin Falls reveal that the titled owner of the warehouse, Mountain Properties, had leased the hundred-year-old clapboard building the previous August for a six-month period to an “M. Bakunin”- believed to be an alias alluding to 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. “Bakunin’s” stated purpose on the lease agreement was “storage of agricultural materials and food.”
Employees and officers of Mountain Properties were not available for comment. However, residents of Bear Lodge (pop. 326) report increased activity in the vicinity of the warehouse during recent weeks, the “outsiders” hauling truckloads of fertilizer, sawdust, sugar and other materials along the quarter-mile service road leading to the four-story storage building.
“They must have bought the stuff somewhere else because they never came into town to shop,” said Dayton Auhagen, a buckskin-clad trapper who sometimes camped in the now-charred forests surrounding the warehouse. Auhagen described the warehouse tenants as “not from anywhere around these parts. But they minded their own business and we minded ours. That’s the way it is out here. We’re all individualists.”
Southern Idaho Regional FBI Agent-in-Charge Morrison Stowe had another view of the blast victims. “They were political radicals suspected of acts of urban terrorism or conspiracy to commit terrorism. The substances they were stockpiling are all potential nitrating agents and thus have a potential role in the manufacture of nitroglycerine-based explosives.”
Although he declined to specify the precise process of bomb manufacture, Stowe did say, “It’s not all that difficult. During the last couple of years there have been several manuals circulating among the subversive
