speeches in that old-lady house, and I couldn’t help feeling depressed.
A few minutes later, Philipe emerged from the hallway with two packed suitcases. “All right,” he said. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“Go?” I said. “Go where?”
“Anywhere. I’m through with this dump. It’s time to move on.”
I glanced toward James, Steve, the others. They seemed just as surprised and taken aback by this as I was. I turned again toward Philipe. “You want to move? Get a new house?”
“Not a bad idea. But, no. I want to travel.”
“Travel?”
“I think we need to go on a trip.”
“Why?”
“We’ve been a little too active lately. I think we need to take a breather, let things cool down. We’re starting to attract attention.”
“I thought attracting attention was what we wanted.”
“This is the wrong kind of attention.”
“What does that mean?”
He looked at me solemnly, evenly, and I understood from that look that he did not want to talk about this in front of the others. “It means we need to take a vacation for a while.”
“How long is a while?” Buster asked.
Philipe shook his head. “I don’t know.”
We were silent then. I imagined us taking off, moving away from the city to some small town in the great Northwest, some little logging community where the pace of life was slow and everybody knew everybody else. Would we blend into the background everywhere, I wondered, or just in cities? Would people in a small town eventually get to know us? Would we be noticed?
Probably not.
“Let’s go,” Philipe said. “We’ll stop by everyone’s place. Pick up what you need and what we can carry in the cars, and we’ll hit the road.”
“Where?” Pete asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“North,” I said.
Philipe nodded agreeably. “North it is.”
We decided to limit everyone to two suitcases — the amount we could fit easily into the trunks of the cars — and we stopped by Tommy’s, James’, John’s, and Junior’s places before we got to my apartment. I didn’t know what I wanted to bring, but I didn’t want to waste time thinking, trying to decide, so I quickly looked through the cupboards and closets, dug through the dresser, picking up shampoo and underwear and shirts and socks. In the dresser, I came across Jane’s old pair of panties, and a feeling of nostalgia or deja vu or melancholy or something flashed through me, and I had to sit down on the bed for a moment. I held the panties in my hand, turned them in my fingers. I still didn’t know where Jane was. I’d tried calling her parents the week after my walk to their house, but when her father had answered the phone I’d hung up.
I wanted to get in touch with her now, to let her know I was leaving. It was stupid, but for some reason, it seemed important to me.
“Almost done?” Bill called from the living room.
“Almost!” I called back. I stood, dropped the panties into the suitcase and closed it.
I took a last look around my bedroom. I didn’t know if we were really going on a vacation, if we would be gone only until things cooled down, or if we were going to be gone for good and I would never see this place again. An absurd sadness came over me at the thought that we might not be coming back. A lot of my memories were here, and I suddenly felt like crying.
“Bob?” John called.
“Coming!” I took a last look around the bedroom, closed the second suitcase, picked both suitcases up, and walked quickly out the door.
Seven
We were gone for three months.
We traveled north, through California, stopping at tourist spots along the way. We went to San Simeon, tagging along for free with a group of paying customers. We visited the Winchester Mystery House, leaving the tour group unseen and spending several nights in that spooky old mansion. We went to Santa Cruz to ride the roller coaster, stopped by Bodega Bay to see the birds.
We lived for the most part in motels, those glorious monuments to facelessness. We never saw the chefs who cooked our meals nor the purveyors of room service who brought them. We were gone when the maids made our beds and exchanged our dirty towels for clean ones.
The rooms themselves were interchangeable, decorated by anonymous firms who dealt in bulk with the stylishly sensible. There were always twin double beds separated by adjoining nightstands topped with securely anchored night-lights, a long dresser atop which perched a swivel television, bolted in place. There was always a Gideon Bible.
I wanted to hate living this way, knew that I should, but I did not. I loved it. We all did. We did not tire of either the food or the accommodations. This was our milieu, this was our native element, and we basked in it. The ordinary, the average, the standardized, this was what we felt comfortable with, and though we avoided five-star inns and stayed primarily in moderately priced motels, from our point of view we were in hog heaven.
We did not pay for food or lodgings, but aside from that and a few five-finger discounts on souvenirs, we suspended our illegal activities. We really were on vacation — from both our regular lives and our roles as terrorists — and it felt great.
We moved up into Oregon, through Washington, into Canada, before finally starting back down again. I had never before been out of California, and it seemed exciting to me to leave the state. I was seeing things I had never seen before, that I had only read about, and it made me feel more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan, and gave me a sense of satisfaction.
I loved traveling, loved going to all these places, but it was our nightly bull sessions that I really looked forward to, that gave me a sense of purpose. For it was here, for the first time, that we discussed who we were, what we were, how we felt, what it meant to be Ignored. We tried to find meaning in our existence, and for once it was not Philipe telling us how we were supposed to feel, but all of us expressing our thoughts and emotions and trying together to make some sense of our lives.
I had never before been a part of a group, had never before belonged to any clique or circle, and it felt good. I knew now what people saw in teams and fraternal organizations, the bonding they felt being with like-minded individuals, and it was wonderful. I was free to be myself because I was with others who were just like me. The atmosphere was relaxed and easygoing. We talked seriously and honestly, but we were not solemn, and we had fun together. We would often brag to each other about our sexual prowess, a juvenile, junior high school kind of exaggeration. We all knew none of it was true, and I suppose it should have seemed pathetic, as old as we were, but somehow it made us feel better. Philipe would tug on his pant leg just below the knee, pretending that his penis hung that far down, and say, “Why did God bless me so?”
Buster would say, “Is that all you’ve got? When I lie down, dogs mistake it for a fire hydrant.”
And all of us would laugh.
We were together so often, so rarely apart, that for a long time I did not have the opportunity to speak with Philipe alone about why he’d really wanted us to get away from Southern California. I was tempted to ask him on several occasions, but we were always within earshot of the others, and I remembered that look he’d given me in his house, and I always decided to wait for a more opportune time.
That time finally came when we were at Mt. Shasta. For once,
