From the beginning, she had loved to hear him talk; the passion in his voice made him seem older, part of an antic generation passing away from fashion. A Sixties boy in a Seventies world. They had been together that entire school year, his last, but her crush on him began the day she entered Forward High. How different he had been—scrawny and quiet—but even then she could sense his radical intelligence, his arms filled with forbidden books by the Beats and Baudelaire, political buttons on his knapsack, and the decals and posters inside his locker door. His heroes were Thomas Mer-ton and James Baldwin, Che Guevara and Bob Dylan. Zigging Left while most everyone else was zagging Right. And when, between his junior and senior year, he shot up four inches, grew out his hair, and started favoring clothes from thrift shops and surplus stores, he matched a renegade spirit with a dangerous look. Though the student body itself was resolutely white and middle class, he affected an air of being a citizen of the world, a brother to all mankind. His senior thesis was on Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the West, and beneath his graduation gown he wore a bright red dashiki emblazoned with the slogan “Don't Rock the Boat… Sink It!” She gladly said yes when he first asked her out, she gladly said yes to his every question, and the deeper her commitment, the greater grew his self-confidence, so that their quest for identity became enmeshed with desire and pleasure. They could no more separate from one another than cast off any other outward sign of who they were groping to become.
Letters had been arriving in his mailbox for months, recruitment propaganda from the Angels after he had answered a mysterious ad in the Painted Bird. Typewritten and mimeographed, the pamphlets bore titles such as “All that's Wrong with America,” “How Big Business Calls the Shots,” “The Atom Bomb and the Coming Civil War,” and other diatribes. When Wiley wrote back, the reply came from a man who called himself Crow, whose first letter was a call to arms: “The Twelve Objectives” on a letterpress broadside. The need for destruction in order to save the world. The Angels would take up where the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and all the other revolutionaries had failed. In July the summons arrived from Berkeley: Come join the Righteous Ones.
All through that summer after his graduation, she was tempted and impulsive. The thought of running off with him jolted her sexuality. She wanted to please him, to make sure he would really take her away with him. At the swimming pool, she'd skip her fingers down the front of his trunks and giggle at how such a simple gesture could arouse him even in that cold water. Hearing his arrival at the curb in front of her house, she'd flash him from the upstairs window, just to see him shake that brown mane and stare in wonder at her brazen decadence. They carried on when they could in the back of his brother's Pinto, or became wild things in the woods with hidden creatures watching, or had mad sex on his basement sofa as Mrs. Rinnick slept upstairs, and once in her parents’ bed when Paul and Margaret had gone into the city for the Civic Light Opera.
“Has that boy been here?” her father asked the next morning over cold cereal and the newspaper.
“No,” Erica lied.
Her mother, who had been crossing from the refrigerator to the stove, stopped in stride and looked behind her daughter's back at her husband hidden in the comic pages. She paused for the briefest moment to absorb the certainty of the lie, and hoped that Paul would accept the answer.
He licked his fingertips and turned the page. “Just that some things were different when we got home. The big popcorn bowl in the middle of the sink.”
Erica ran her finger along the edge of her juice glass. “I watched a movie. They showed The Graduate on Channel 11.”
From the cupboards, her mother cried out, “On television? How could they?”
“If you're talking about the naughty bits,” Erica said, “they censored it like everything else in this fascist country. It's just the human body.”
“One of my beers is missing,” her father said. “I'm sure there were four cans and now there are only three. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?”
Clapping the tabletop with her palms, Erica leaned forward. “I don't know anything about your precious beers. Maybe you drink more than you should. Maybe Mom just couldn't take it anymore and decided to have a little cocktail. But I can't stand the swill. You know what beer tastes like? Plastics. And if you want to make accusations, go ahead and accuse me, but I didn't do it.”
“Honey,” Margaret said. “Nobody's accusing anyone of anything.”
“Dad is like the FBI sniffing around for clues. Shoot first and ask questions later. What do you have against Wiley anyhow?”
Snapping the newspaper into shape, he folded it in half and pressed the crease fresh. “I only wondered why one is gone.” He modulated his anger, and an idea strayed to mind. “Maybe I lost count.” After their daughter left the room, Paul finished his coffee and went to his wife and dried the dishes. “I smelled him in the bed,” he told her, and reaching into his pocket, he produced a sandwich bag with the roach ends of two joints. “And these were in the trash. What does she take us for? Fools?”
A sinking weight filled Margaret's lungs and she sighed to expel it, but could not separate panic from the sorrow at coming trouble.
3
A whisper and fingertips on her bare skin. “Let's go.”
She blinked her eyes and saw him hovering above, his long hair curling down and framing his dark face, his shoulders broad as wings. Her dream of flying over the house had been interrupted, so she drew deeper into the pillow, tried to get rid of him and fight back to sleep.
“Let's go.”
Slowly aware of his physical presence, she arched her arms, stretched her fingers, wanting him to lie on top of her in the bed, to join her in the warmth of the blankets. She spread her knees apart to make a space for him, but he was not there. Instead, he tugged at the top of the sheet.
“Erica, let's go.”