Trophies And Dead Things

I glanced around, saw a stick on the ground, and picked it up. Then I squatted in the dirt in front of her, drawing with the stick's sharp point. 'It was an oval. Like so. On this side, the letters A and M. And on this side, Kand A.'

I looked up at her. Her gaze had been drawn to the stick, and she was watching its motion intently.

'I'd guess there were more letters in between those,' I went on. 'Like these-E,R, and I. Am I right, Libby?'

She made a gesture with her hand, as if to erase the letters I'd just drawn.

When she didn't speak, I said, 'Amerika. The way people in the Movement spelled it-taken from the Kafka novel, and used to say that the United States was an imperialist, fascist, racist, militaristic country.'

Ross sank to the ground, staring at my drawing. Then she took the stick and added a peace symbol, the branches of the inverted Y converging at the R of 'Amerika.'

She said, 'I haven't thought of those medallions in years. I don't even know what happened to mine. Our talisman.' She laughed ruefully. 'From this vantage point, it seems like just one of those silly things that kids do-like sitting around in a clubhouse in a vacant lot and cutting your fingers so you can exchange blood oaths. But at the time it was a big deal: we'd each have a piece of this thing that stood for what we believed in and be connected forever.'

'In a way, I guess you are.'

'Yes. Yes, I guess so.' She sighed, then took them from me, examining them as they lay on the palm of her hand. 'Where did you get these?'

'One from Perry Hilderly's flat. The other was given me by Mia Taylor.'

'D.A. actually kept his?'

'Mia says he takes it out occasionally and looks at it. She thinks it has power over him, like an evil charm.'

I thought Ross might scoff at that, but she merely said, 'Maybe it does.'

I said, 'I take it this… talisman, as you call it, was something you shared with the other people who were involved in the Port Chicago bombing attempt.'

'You think you know a lot about us. But not everyone in the collective was in on the Port Chicago thing.'

'The collective again. What was it?'

She sank into a full sitting position, arms wrapped around her knees. 'We were a political collective, loosely affiliated with the Weathermen. The Weather Bureau-the top leadership-was supposed to control policy, but there was a lot of ideological struggle, and the Weather Machine was informally structured to begin with.'

'When was this?'

'Sixty-eight, sixty-nine. Things were bad: the Movement as originally conceived was losing momentum, and the cops were really cracking down on us. Everybody was dropping out, preparing for direct, violent action. On campus, the scene had shifted from Berkeley to S.F. State. So a bunch of us split for the city.'

'And?'

'Like I said, the Weathermen were pretty loosely structured. We just did our own thing.'

'Which was?'

She shrugged. 'Debated ideology. Engaged in political education. Refined skills that we'd need in the struggle.'

'Skills?'

'… Well, self-defense, propaganda, marksmanship, weaponry.'

'Bomb making?'

She nodded. 'But mostly what we did was talk-endless, intense talk. We were so self-consciously political. And romantic. We thought it was so damned romantic to live in a crummy flat in the Fillmore and share everything- clothes, food, money, drugs, sexual partners. God, when I think of how naive we were! We were going to change the world, but we knew no more of it than… than old Chaucer over there.' She gestured at the pinto.

'The individual Weather collectives were quite small, weren't they?'

'Well, yes, they had to be, in order to create trust among the members and prevent infiltration.'

'How many in yours?'

'… People came and went, but there were never more than six or seven of us at a time.'

'You and D.A. and Jenny Ruhl?'

She nodded.

'What about Perry?'

'He was… part of it. He had this job on a magazine and was supposed to get our propaganda across to the people through his stories. But he was not in on the bombing. He went to Vietnam as a reporter when that was still in the planning stages.'

Hilderly apparently hadn't told his comrades that he was so fed up with the Movement that he was willing to pay his own way to Southeast Asia. Nor that he'd thought about writing a story on the collective. 'Who else?'

'No one.'

'You said up to seven.'

'People came and went.'

'Who else was at Port Chicago with D.A.?'

She got to her feet, brushing dirt from the seat of her jeans.

'You, Libby? Jenny Ruhl?'

She turned and started for the tack room. I followed. 'What about Tom Grant?'

At the door she faced me. 'How many times do I have to tell you that I don't know Tom Grant?'

There was something in her voice-a tone oddly close to relief-that gave me pause. I watched as she entered the room, dumped the medallions that she still held on the desk, and collected a bridle and saddle. As she brushed past me and went back outside I said, 'What about the right man?'

She stopped halfway to where the horse stood. 'Are you talking about Andy?'

I covered my own surprise, asked, 'Was he there at Port Chicago?'

'Are you kidding?' She continued over to the rail, set the saddle on it, and began to bridle the pinto.

'Why wasn't he?'

'Because by then Andy Wrightman was long gone. It was… as if he'd never existed. 'Her fingers moved clumsily with the bridle, her hands shaking slightly; she had difficulty getting the tongue of the buckle through the hole.

'He was Jenny Ruhl's lover back in Berkeley, wasn't he?'

'One of them.'

'Was he Jessica's father?'

'God knows. For a while there Jenny was fucking a lot of guys. But yes, he probably was. The timing was right.'

'Did Andy Wrightman run off when Jenny became pregnant?'

'Yeah.'

'What do you know about him?'

Ross hoisted the saddle onto the pinto, positioned it, and squatted to buckle the girth. Her voice was muffled when she said, 'Virtually nothing. He was a… nobody.'

'Any idea where he was from?'

'No.'

'It's my guess that he was from somewhere in the Southwest, and that he came back to Jenny-at least for a while, and as late as sixty-nine.'

Ross straightened, her face red-whether from exertion or anger, I couldn't tell. 'For God's sake, where do you get these ideas?'

'Jenny's daughter tells me that her father came to see her with her mother once, when she was four years old. That would have been in sixty-nine. The man wore a string tie, as many people from the Southwest do.'

Ross seemed to find that amusing. She chuckled and said, 'All sorts of people wear string ties-including tourists who buy them on vacation. And as for Jenny's daughter, I don't know anything about her other than that