Time Bomb

“Decide.” Eye twitch. “Who decided? It was an accident-twist of fate. If I read it in a script, I’d call it hokey.”

“How’d you escape?”

“I was babysitting. Taking the kid to the doctor.”

“Which kid?”

“Malcolm Isaac. He was sick.”

“Why didn’t his parents take him?”

“Because they were sick too. All of them were. Puking their guts out. Some kind of intestinal thing- diarrhea, fever. Something they ate- bad meat. I’d just come up the day before. There were two groups, you see. Two cadres. I was part of the second, brought communications from the second to the first. We were all supposed to get together in a week or so. I was a vegetarian back then. Didn’t eat the meat. That saved me. Me and the other kid.”

“Rodriguez and Santana’s son? Fidel?”

“Fidelito,” he said. “He was just a baby, too young for meat, on formula because Teresa couldn’t nurse. So he was healthy too. Crawling around the warehouse, fat and happy. But Malcolm Isaac had it bad. Really high fever, diarrhea, crying in pain. Melba was worried about dehydration, wanted him to see a doctor, but she and Norm were too sick to take him themselves, So they asked me, and I did, Public health clinic in Twin Falls. Me and him and a bunch of loggers and Indians in the waiting room. They had a country-western station on and he was wailing over it, in pain. That didn’t impress the nurses. They turned up the volume, made us wait. Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. Funny the things you remember, huh? I was holding him, wiping his forehead with alcohol pads, when I heard it- beep beep news bulletin breaking into the country music.”

His own brow had broken out in sweat. He wiped it with the back of his sleeve. “Big explosion at a warehouse in Bear Lodge. No one else in the waiting room was even listening- they could care less. But to me it was like everything was caving in, like a big hole in the earth- everything just being vacuumed into it. Then the FBI guy comes on and starts talking about some bomb factory, lying through his government-issue teeth, and I knew someone had shafted them. Knew I had to run.”

“There was no bomb factory?”

He gave me a disgusted look. “Right. Lard and sugar and horse manure and sawdust- we were making a produce nuke, right? If it was that easy, half the farms in America would’ve blown up before Ronnie Ray-gun screwed them over.”

“Half the farms in America don’t have igniting devices.”

“Neither did we. The FBI stooge either made that up or planted it. The supplies we’d stockpiled were for growing, not destroying. Seeds, fertilizer. Organic fertilizer. The sawdust was for compost. The lard was for cooking and making tortillas- Teresa loved to make tortillas. The plan was to stockpile enough stuff to put together a decent-sized collective farm, big enough to be viable. A new Walden. We were gonna move in on government land that was going to waste just a few miles south- land that was ripped off from the Indians in the first place. The plan was to squat on it, liberate it, homestead it, plow, sow, then invite the Indians to join us in the establishment of a new collective state. We knew it wouldn’t last- Tricky Dicky’s Nazis would move in and overrun us. All we wanted was to last long enough to create something viable- for the press. The publicity would put us in a good light- the government destroying crops. What’s more all-American than farming, right? So we’d be the good guys. Black and white and brown and red working together. The establishment would be seen as putting out all the negative energy. Too threatening, so they destroyed it.”

“Who’s they?”

“The government. Or some free-lance running dogs, working for the government. Someone had to have poisoned the meat, planted charges, waited until all of us were in that warehouse, puking, weakened, then blew it to kingdom-come. Some sort of remote-control detonator. Death knell for the dream.”

“Collective farming,” I said. “It’s not exactly what comes to mind when you think of the Weathermen, FALN, the Black Army. People like Mark Grossman and Skitch Dupree.”

“That’s ’cause you’ve been programmed to think that way. Everyone in that warehouse- everyone in New Walden- was a fugitive from violence. We were sick of violence, sick of the way things had turned. Tonio and Teresa had just quit FALN. Skitch had taken a lot of crap for renouncing violence- even got shot at by Black Revo Army dudes because he changed his tune. Norm and Melba were the architects of the plan. They’d turned their heads totally away from violence.” He shook his head. “Bomb factory. Do you think Norm and Melba and Tonio and Teresa would have brought their kids into some bomb factory?”

People had brought their babies to Jim Jones. Sacrificed countless other innocents to other Molochs. I didn’t say anything.

He said, “I sat in that clinic waiting room, and I knew everything was over. I wanted to run. But Malcolm was hot as a skillet, needed to see the doctor, so I sat and waited and hoped no one could see I was ready to burst out of my skin. Finally we got seen by a nurse, after all that time. She gave me medicine, told me he’d probably be okay once the fever broke, to give him lots of fluids, come back in a couple of days. I left, walked around the corner, carrying him, kept walking until I found a car with the keys left in the ignition. Got in, laid him across the front seat, started it up, drove all the way through Nevada, into California. Stopped to buy apple juice and diapers, driving while holding a bottle to his lips. Hundreds of miles of nightmares, roads with no one else on them, him screaming for his mama, me constantly thinking someone was gonna get on my tail, gun us down. Made it all the way to L.A. before dawn.”

“To Venice,” I said.

He nodded. “Like I said, they’d never gotten along, she and Norm, but where else could I take him? I left him on the doorstep and split.”

I opened his book, turned to the Berkeley picture, and showed it to him. “The other people- they were the second cadre?”

Another nod. “They were a hundred miles up the Snake River, negotiating for building materials. The plan was to build log cabins. They had bought the stuff from a logging contractor but got delayed trying to find some way to haul it down- Teamsters gave ’em grief, didn’t want to deal with a bunch of goddam hippies.”

“What’d they do after the explosion?”

“Disappeared. Mostly up to Canada.”

He took the book. Gazed at it. Closed his eyes.

I said, “What happened to them?”

He opened his eyes and sighed. “These two”- he jabbed a finger- “Harry and Debbie Delage. They stayed up there- they were French Canadian. I think they’re teachers in Montreal but I’m not sure, haven’t had contact with them. With any of them.”

The finger drifted. “Ed Maher and Julie Bendix went to Morocco, moved around, and then came back, got married, had a bunch of kids. I heard she died of breast cancer a couple of years ago. He’s probably back east- his family had money… Lyle Stokes got involved in this New Age crap- crystals and past lives. He’s making a fortune… Sandy Porter I don’t know… Gordy Latch married that fascist’s daughter and became a scumbag politician… Jack Parducci’s a lawyer in Pittsburgh, joined the GOP.”

He stared at the picture a while longer, closed the book, and gave it back. “Fuck nostalgia.”

I said, “Who determined which cadre someone went into?”

“It wasn’t anything formal, just kind of natural selection. The first cadre were the leaders- thinkers, theorists.”

I said, “The second cadre fared a hell of a lot better than the first.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Nothing you haven’t wondered about yourself for seventeen years.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “I don’t wonder about anything. Wonderings a dead-end street.”

I said, “Why’d you choose Bear Lodge?”

“Randy Latch owned the property- her father had left it to her.”

“She was Mountain Properties?”

“Behind a bunch of dummy corporations- trust fund stuff, tax shelters. Her old man set it up for her. That’s why we pretended to lease it, so it would look businesslike, no one would dig into it.”