“I heard of them,” I said. “Started out getting people to register to vote. Pushing the ideas of a democracy, then they splintered. The ones that continued to call themselves the Mechanics were kind of like the radical branch that split off from the Students for a Democratic Society and called themselves the Weathermen.”
“You got it. The splinters all died out pretty quick without their original leader. He was a charismic kind of guy. Had come into the group as one of the Indians, but in no time was chief. A few of the Indians split, tried to form their own tribes, but the diehards stayed with him. And it took him to hold things together, keep the Mechanics on track.
“So the Mechanics got their monkey wrenches and went to work. Said to hell with this democratic society shit, the answers are in the street. You got to wreck some things to get them built up new and different. We went underground. Got guns, started hitting anyplace we thought didn’t jive with human rights or supported the war in Vietnam. There were lots of targets. We bombed a few ROTC buildings throughout the state. Moved on to other states. Traveled all over and didn’t get caught. We were a different kind of criminal than the FBI had dealt with before. Smart people with a smart leader. We had a cause, and there’s no one more dangerous than the zealot, and we were that in spades.”
“How many of you were there?” Leonard asked.
“Twelve at first. Took in a few more here and there off college campuses. Did some sneaky recruiting. We had been students, so we knew where to go to talk to the right people—people with a similar political mind. We hooked them in, fed them radicalism like pudding. The leader of the Mechanics was especially good at talking that shit. Thought he was one of life’s poets, one enlightened sonofabitch. Didn’t hurt either that back then every college kid wanted to be Che Guevara.
“We were good at what we did. Knew how to forge documents, make new identities. Worked what jobs we could get, spent very little, moved often. Stayed near college campuses mostly; all kinds of free stuff you can get at the bigger ones. Play it right and live simple, you can do well mostly on the labors of others. And that struck us as right. We saw ourselves as ripping off a capitalistic society.”
I had been sitting there trying to remember a name, and suddenly it came to me. “Gabriel Lane,” I said. “That’s who the leader of the Mechanics was. Goddamn! That’s you, isn’t it, Paco?”
“Long ago. I’m Paco now, and Paco I’ll be till they find me somewhere dead in a cheap motel and cart me off to a pauper’s grave.”
“I think you guys were fucked up,” Leonard said. “Doing what you did.”
“Our hearts were in the right place, but we got caught up, and pretty soon our hearts shifted. An innocent bystander dies when we bomb some capitalistic bank, some ROTC building, boy that’s tough, we hated it, but hey, it happens. The end justifies the means. We’d blow you up for peace and love.”
“General consensus is you’re dead,” I said. “You were supposed to have gotten killed in an explosion, if I remember right.”
“I may look blown up,” Paco said, “but here I am. Talking and smoking and making your morning bright and gay.”
“I’m gay,” Leonard said, “but I don’t know about the day and what you’re doing for it.”
“Gay?” Paco said. “You saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I fuck men,” Leonard said. “Does that clear it up for you?”
“I believe it does.”
“You say people died because of what you were doing?” I said.
“That’s right,” Paco said. “Toward the end we lost some of our own. Cops—or the pigs, as they were popularly referred to then—cornered four of the Mechanics in a house in Chicago. I was out at the time. Making a gun trade. Had two of the group with me. I forget what the rest were doing. But the bottom line is the cops got wind of where we were, hit the house, and killed four of us. Bobbie Remart among them. She was a top radical at that time. On the FBI list right under me. She was kind of my lieutenant. My lover too. After that, things went from being political to being personal.”
“You got to feel bad about that shit,” Leonard said. “I mean, I killed gooks in Nam, and I was supposed to kill them. Thought I was fighting for my country, doing what was necessary. Still feel that way. But I hate I had to do it. But you guys … I don’t know.”
“You don’t look to me like somebody who could do that kind of thing,” I said.
“You kidding,” Paco said. “I look like death warmed over … but I know what you mean. Listen here. You been around, you should know better. Can’t judge things by what you see. Look at something long enough, and it’ll start to look like something else. Watch me long enough, you might see something you don’t see now. Whatever, there won’t be any of the old me to look at. That’s a guarantee.
“Back then, I thought what we were doing was right. Like you thought what you were doing was right in Nam, Leonard. Felt we were patriots. Least until what happened to Bobbie. After that, I was like something taxidermied that moved. Right and wrong were words. I couldn’t see the line of difference anymore, couldn’t tell if I was crossing it or not. For me, that line has long been gone and nothing’s going to bring it back.
“Anyway, what happened was we were hiding out in this house in Chicago, and I had the Mechanics building a bomb to blow something or another to hell, and I was supervising. I was the one taught them how to build bombs, see, and I wanted to be sure they knew I was still the big daddy. Sasha was the one actually working on it, and the rest of the group were gofering for her. Way they were treating her was making me a little jealous. Sasha was strong-willed and kind of new to us, and the Mechanics weren’t turning to me quite as often as before. She was starting to get some of my thunder. I wanted her to make sure she knew her place, you know. I looked over her shoulder, and she was doing all right, working safe, but like I said, I had to be big daddy, and I said something to her about how she needed to work smoother, and she didn’t take to it. She was the only one had my number. Knew my ego. Knew how fucked up I was over Bobbie’s death. She planned to take things over. I could tell that. She could have done it too. Still had the cause in her. She knew my days as leader were numbered, that I was burned out, just doing by rote. She wouldn’t take shit from me. She turned around and started telling me what I could do with my advice, got her mind off what it ought to have been on. Must have let the wrong wires touch. Next thing I knew, the world was bright and hot, full of stone and glass, and I was rolling around in rubble. Ego and explosion had kicked my ass.
“I awoke outside, down in a pit, the house all around me, ears ringing, cold air cooling me down. Somehow the blast had brought the whole place down, and by a goddamn miracle, maybe because Sasha was in front of me, the explosion had thrown me away, caught me on fire, but not burned me up or blown me up.
“I found I could walk. I wandered off, lived under a porch for three or four days, and the people owned the house never knew I was there. When my ears quit ringing, I could hear them come and go and I could hear their TV playing. A dog came under there and slept with me. That’s what I did most of the time. Slept. And hurt. Hurt something awful. It was cold then, right at winter, nothing like the way it is here today, but cold. That blast had burned me so bad the weather felt good at the same time it made me shiver and feel sick. It being cold might have been what saved me, I don’t know.
“When I got strong enough, I got out of there at night, staggered to a phone booth, busted the phone box open, made it work without any money. Give me a bobby pin, and I can hotwire a jet. I called a man sympathetic to our cause, and he came to get me. When he saw me he gagged and threw up.
“I must have been a sight, all right. Skin burned off, top of my head open. Dirt embedded in my face. An ear gone. Looked like walking, breathing hamburger meat. Way this guy acted when he saw me, I wished the bomb had done me in. Wish that now.
“To shorten it up, he got me out of there and took me to Chub. Chub didn’t have what
he needed to take care of a case like me. He’d mostly handled gunshots for us before, and those only minor, but here I was with my head wide open, burned over most of my body, and him with just the basic stuff. He did the best he could, I give him that. He kept me there till I was better. Guess I ought to figure I owe him. But I don’t. I don’t even like the fat fuck. He fixed me up, and I gave him a cause. I consider us even. In fact, from that day on, it didn’t take much for me to consider myself even with just about everybody and everything.
“Chub made arrangements for me to stay with some other Movement people. One of them was Howard. He was living in Austin at the time, and I wanted to go back to Texas and rest, get involved again when I felt better. Or so I said, but I knew it was over. The whole dumb dream was through.
“For the next year or so, I went from one sympathizer to the next, being taken care of, passed around like some kind of exotic pet, one of the last of a dying species. The noble, wounded hero who gave his face for the cause.
“Then one by one there wasn’t anyplace for me to stay. Harboring a fugitive from the old days was no longer romantic; flirting with the law and danger was no longer fun. People had to take their kids to soccer games and work in the PTA. The really radical people were getting caught. The Weathermen were out of it by then. And that explosion had killed all the Mechanics but me.
“Oh, there were a few die-hards throughout the country that would put me up, but they liked to talk the talk and not walk the walk. On the whole, I was old, bad news. The bullshit times were over. That was it for Gabriel Lane.”
“So you’re hiding from the law?” Leonard said.
“Not exactly, but I don’t want any truck with them. I figure if the FBI thinks I’m alive they’re not saying. There was such a mess and mixture of bodies there, they had to have decided it got us all. But I’m not one to take chances.”
Paco reached into his mouth, took out his top teeth and put them on the table. So much for his fine smile; it was a fake. The gap where the teeth had been made him look truly horrible.
“Explosion got the real ones. Chub made these for me,” Paco said. “Fat bastard knows about medicine, both human and animal, and he knows dentistry. You got to give him that. I’ve had these teeth, what, twenty years maybe.”
He put the teeth back, fastened them to the back molars. “I bummed some, read about me in a few books and magazines, about my death and all, found that what we had done really hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans. We blew up some places, killed a few folks, and I’ve got no face.”
“How come you’re in with Howard and Chub?” I asked.
“The money. Howard got in touch with me. Thinks now that he’s been in prison he’s learned some things, that he’s an intellectual tough guy out to do some good. Ready to revive the sixties. Power to the people and all that shit. Thinks he’s gonna get this money and make some changes.
“But he decides he needs help to do it, and he calls around to some people he knows that know me, and they catch me next time I pass through. And that’s no easy feat, cause I go my own schedule. Work till a job plays out or I play out. Anyway, I got the word Howard has something I might want to get in on, something that would do some good. Like the old days. Money was mentioned and I got interested.
“Course, it’s really Trudy behind all this. I can see that. I know her type. She hears about this money from Howard, maybe one night after he’s put the pork to her, and they’re lying there thinking sweet thoughts, reliving the sixties like they do, and she gets an idea about it. Next thing you know, Howard’s looking me up, believing it’s all his idea. He gets in touch with Chub because he knows him too. We may not be much, but we’re all he’s got left from the sixties.
“I listen and figure a way to score. Can’t do this town-to-town shit labor rest of my life, so I’m in. But not for any goddamn cause.”
“And now,” Leonard said, “here we all are.”
“All right, goddammit,” I said. “I bite. What’s their plan for the money?”
Paco grinned his false teeth at me. “Trust me. Stay out of it. Take the money, like I’m going to take the money, and go on. I promise you, you’ll be a hell of a lot happier.”
12
Next day the weather cleared up some. It didn’t go warm, but part of the meanness went out of it. It was cold with no new ice and no high winds. The sky was flat as slate and the color of chipped flint. Leonard and I took his car down to the bottoms to see what we could see. I wanted to locate the Iron Bridge, find that money, get on with things; go away from this weird winter and Trudy, talk of the sixties and Paco’s failed revolution.
Although the house where we were staying was at the edge of the woods, it wasn’t the part of Marvel Creek legitimately called the bottoms. The bottoms are lowland with lots of trees, water, and wildlife, and it doesn’t start where it used to. Civilization had smashed the edges of it flat, rolled blacktop and concrete over it, sprouted little white wood houses and a few made of two-story brick and solar glass. Barbecue cookers sat in yards like Martians, waiting till the chill thawed out and summer came on and they could have fires in their guts again. Satellite dishes pulled in movies and bad talk shows from among the stars, and dogs, too cold to bark, too cold to chase cars, looked out from beneath porches and out the doors of doghouses and watched us drive past.
Beyond all that, the bottoms were still there. They started farther out from town now but they still existed. They were nothing like the Everglades of Florida or the greater swamps of Louisiana.Not nearly as many miles as either of those, but they were made up of plenty of great forest and deep water, and they were beautiful, dark and mysterious—a wonder in one eye, a terror in the other.
So we drove on down until the blacktop played out and the houses became sparse and more shacklike and looked to have been set down in their spots by Dorothy’s tornado. The roads went to red clay and the odor of the bottoms came into the car even with the windows rolled up: wet dirt, rotting vegetation, a whiff of fish from the dirty Sabine, the stench of something dead on its way to the soil.
Winter was not the prettiest time for the bottoms. Compared to spring it was denuded. The evergreens stayed dressed up, but a lot of the other trees, oaks for instance, went in shirtsleeves. Spring was when the bottoms put on its coat and decorated itself with berries and bright birds that flitted from tree to tree like out of season, renegade Christmas ornaments. Leaves would be thick and green then, vines would coil like miles of thin anacondas up every tree in sight, foam over the ground, and hide the snakes. Considering how thick the vegetation would be in the spring, how many snakes there would be, this bad old winter might come to some good after all. Like making Leonard and me some money.
Still, winter or not, the place was formidable. When I was growing up in Marvel Creek, folks used to say, you hang out down there long enough something bad will happen.
Perhaps. But some good things happened too. I caught fish out of the Sabine and swam naked with Rosa Mae Flood. When I was sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, I parked my car down there and made a motel of my backseat. Made love not only to Rosa Mae, but to other fine girls I remember fondly. Girls who made me feel like a man, and I hope I made feel, at least temporarily, like women.
The clay roads turned to shit as we went, and we had to go slow and easy, and finally Leonard said, “We oughta have something better for down here. Four-wheel drive maybe. We’re gonna get stuck.”
“Well, we can always go back to town and buy a couple. One for me and one for you. Could get them in matching colors even.”
“Just saying we could use it is all.”
“We won’t get stuck, Leonard. We’re the kings of the world. We do what we want, when we want.”
“Right.”
We eased on and I tried to make out landmarks, but there weren’t any. Everything had changed. I had the sudden sick feeling that I had no more idea where the Iron Bridge was than Trudy and the gang. I wondered if anyone knew where it was a
nymore. All I remembered was that it was not on the river proper, but off of it, and deep down in the bottoms at a place that looked like something out of a Tarzan movie.
“You got some idea where you’re going?” Leonard said.
“Of course,” I said. “You know me. I never been lost, just—”
“A little bewildered. Save it, okay? I can tell. You got no idea where we are.”
“It’ll come back to me.”
We went on down that main clay road and turned off on a few smaller ones that dead-ended against trees or the edge of the river. Some of the roads were so narrow we had to back our way out. Sometimes we had to back a long ways. Leonard loved that. He knew more foul words than I thought he knew, and I thought he knew plenty.
About high noon we were dipping down over a hill on the main road and there was a sudden sound like strained bowels letting loose, and the car started to slide right.
A blowout.
Leonard tried to turn in the direction of the skid, but the skid didn’t care. The ice on those clay roads would not be denied. The right rear fender struck a sweetgum with a solid whack and my seat belt harness snatched at me and pulled me snug.
We got out.
The car wasn’t banged too badly. I said, “I think it’s an improvement.”
“Remind me to knock a dent in your old truck when we get back, you like it so much.”
“While you’re changing the tire, I’m gonna look around. Looks kind of familiar around here.”
“Now the place looks familiar. Got a tire to change, and you know the place like the back of your hand.”
“I merely said it looks familiar. I’ll be back.”
“When?”
“About the time I figure you’ve got the tire changed.”
It didn’t look familiar to me at all, but hey, I hate changing tires and tires hate me. I know from all the bruised knuckles I’ve gotten over the years, all the quick moves I’ve acquired from avoiding slipping jacks.