It was stupid for a fugitive terrorist to go to a gas station, but in order to be a fugitive you have to fuge, and it's hard to fuge without gas. So I got a refill. The guy running the gas station was a dead ringer for Spiro Agnew and I couldn't stop laughing. He got pissed off and told me to hit the road. I did, gladly; if I saw Nixon, I'd shit my pants.
I guess in order for me to have gone to the gas station I must've made it to the land, right? Because that's where gas stations are. So I'd paddled all the way to Maine. To the Maineland. Now it was time to fuge inland, to ply my fugitive trade on freshwater. Like the Vikings, whose shallow-drafted ships enabled them to sail up previously unnavigable European rivers and pillage villages - that rhymed - previously considered invulnerable to marine forces. The Zodiac was the modern equivalent of the Viking ship. Someday I'd mount a dragon on the prow. By God, there was the dragon now! Or was it a seagull?
There was something involving a lake. This led me to a river, and from there to another, smaller lake. Ran out of gas, deflated the Zodiac, and sank it, using its own motor as a weight. Threw the gun in there too; it hadn't worked. Then I was in the White Mountains. Wandered there for forty days and forty nights. Before the Indians found me.
Zodiac
24
MY PUNISHMENT:dreams of a silver Indian who stood off in the distance with a tomahawk face and refused to look at me. Then I woke up in someone's Winnebago, sick as a dog and weak as a Fleshy handshake. When I stopped trying to sit up and just lay down again, I could look straight out a gap between the drapes and see Jim Grandfather's pickup parked outside the window with that Indianhead hood ornament.
They wouldn't let me look at newspapers for a week. The only newspapers they had were USA Today, which had dropped the story by that time, and a local rag that didn't pay much attention to Boston. I spent a lot of time staring at my exposure suit, which was hanging on the wall, torn to shreds and covered with muck. Jim didn't have to tell me it had saved my life.
I was being nurtured by the Singletary family, and indirectly by the whole tribe to which they belonged. Either they didn't understand how nasty the U.S. government could get when it thought it was fighting terrorism, or they didn't care.
Probably the latter. What could the government do to them? Take their land? Give them smallpox? Herd them onto a reservation?
The first couple days I used all my energy on dry heaves. We worked our way up to water after that, then Sprite, then duck soup, then fish. Every so often I'd wake up and Jim would be sitting there, hunched over a shoebox, making arrowheads. Tick, tick, tick. Little crescents of volcanic glass ricocheting around as he squeezed them off. “This one's in the Zuni style. See the detailing around the base?”
“You should get back to Anna,” I finally told him, one afternoon. “Don't fuck with me, man, I'm poison. I'm toxic waste at this point.”
“Welcome to the tribe.”
“Have they come looking?”
“They think maybe you went to Canada.”
“I thought I did.”
“No. You're still in love-it-or-leave-it land. Nominally. Actually you're in the-” he rattled off a twenty-syllable Indian name.
“That's fine, Jim. Can I buy some fireworks?”
When I succeeded in keeping a Big Mac down for a whole morning, they pronounced me one healthy white-eye. Jim administered his own exam, which involved a cigar. When I passed, he let me see the clippings from the national press.
They'd had all kinds of time for psychoanalysis. I learned many interesting things about myself. I got to see my high school graduation photo, in which I truly did look like a budding psychopath. It seemed that I, Sangamon Taylor, was a man with deep-seated psychological problems. There was some debate as to whether they were purely mental problems, or neurological too, caused by the risks I took with toxic wastes. But they were rooted in my unhappy childhood - my many moves during the early years, being dragged around by my father, a troubleshooter for a chemical engineering firm, and then my unstable home situation as a teenager. My folks had split up and bounced me around from one relative to another.
This, and my academic struggles, the newspapers said, had given me a deep-seated resentment of authority. When I'd scored around 1500 on the SATs, proving that I had near-genius intellect, that resentment was magnified. These fucking teachers had just been holding me back. Never again would I respect anyone in a tie. My career at B.U. had been one scrape after another with the autocratic administration. My only outlet: hacking up the academic computing system, which I did “with a kind of savage brilliance.” I sort of liked that phrase.