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.

GEE was the perfect way for me to lash out against the chemical industry, which I saw as responsible for the destruction of my parents' marriage and for my mother's fatal case of hepatic angiocarcinoma. But eyen this had proved too confining. I chafed under the restrictions of GEE's nonviolent policy. I was a maverick, a hellraiser. I wanted to take truly direct action, they speculated.

All of these factors became focused in my irrational, all-consuming hatred of one man: excabinet official, now presidential hopeful, Alvin Fleshy. As a privileged person, an authority figure from my childhood and a leader of the chemical industry, he was everything I despised. I did everything I could to implicate him in chemical scandals, but I just couldn't pin him down. I was geared up for a media blitz against him just a couple of weeks before "the explosion," but had to call it off, sheepishly, when the evidence didn't pan out. Slowly the plan took form in my mind: employing the commando techniques of the eco-terrorist Boone (whom I had secretly come to admire), I would mine Pleshy's private yacht and blow him sky-high, like Mountbatten. Using my chemical expertise, I constructed a highly sophisticated explosives laboratory in the basement of a house I was renting from Brian Roscommon, a hard-working Irish immigrant and upstanding Newton resident. By purchasing my raw materials, bit by bit, from different companies, I was able to evade the ATFs monitoring system, which had been designed to foil plots such as mine. In an ironic twist, I bought the materials from Basco subsidiaries; they had records to prove it, which they had readily agreed to turn over to the FBI. I was able to build an extremely powerful mine in my basement and take it out into the Harbor on my GEE Zodiac. While I was planting the mine on the bottom of Pleshy's yacht, I was noticed by a couple of private security guards patrolling the area in their high-powered Cigarette boat. Using my commando skills, I slipped into their vessel in my scuba gear, killed them both and then burned their vessel in the Fort Point Channel to hide the evidence. I was so cold and calculating, the more lurid newspapers suggested, that I actually called the police and gave them an account of the incident.

Unfortunately, the whole plot unraveled when the highly unstable chemicals I'd (allegedly) stuffed into my basement deteriorated and touched themselves off. Bartholomew, my roommate, who had been growing ever more suspicious of my strange behavior, tried to place me under citizen's arrest, but I knocked him down and stole his van. Then I escaped, probably to Canada and, with the help of an underground network of environmental extremists left over from the days of the baby seal campaigns, eventually to Northern Europe, where I can live undercover, supported by Boone's clandestine operation.

"What do you think," I asked Jim. "Is it just plain old savage brilliance, or have I taken in too many organophosphates?"

"What's that?"

"Nerve gas. Bug spray. They're all the same thing."

The clippings taught me one thing for sure: Bart was playing it cool. I should have guessed it from the way he handled those cops in Roxbury. He was so full of shit he must be ready to burst. He was giving out one interview after another, sounding pained and shocked and kind of sad, and the media were lapping it up, portraying him as kind of a latter-day flower child in black leather. This man could survive anything.

"It's time for me to get out of here," I said.

"Why?"

"Because sooner or later they'll track me down. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm an official terrorist now, right?"

"Certified by the U.S. government."

"Right. And they have all these Darth Vader things they can do in the name of national security, right? They can bring spooks, Green Berets, rescind the constitution. Federal marshals, Secret Service, all the Special Forces cops. Sooner or later they're going to find my Zode in that lake. Then they'll just seal off these mountains and I'll never escape."

"Seal off the mountains? Don't insult me."

"I tell you, they'll find the Zode."

"Let's check it out," Jim said.

First things first. I shaved off my beard. I'd lost twenty pounds, which would also help. Jim scraped up some new clothes for me. The sun was shining, so I had an excuse to wear sunglasses. We borrowed a boat on a trailer and drove down to a small, clear lake. To the southeast it ran into a much bigger lake. From the northwest it was fed by streams falling clean out of the White Mountains. I could have taken the Zodiac a little farther up one of those streams, but they were shallow, and without a hole deep enough for a righteous sinking. So I'd left it in the lake, next to a bent-over scrub pine. Jim found us a boat ramp and we put in and headed for that pine. But there wasn't a damn thing. Not that I could see.

It was only twenty feet deep, and we could almost see the bottom from the boat. Jim went down in a mask and snorkel, looking.

"I wasn't that stoned," I said. "I put it here for a reason. That tree there, that was my landmark. I'd never forget that tree-there can't be two like it."

"I'm telling you there's not a damn thing there," Jim said.

I ended up going down myself. Jim didn't want me to, but by now I was feeling good enough for a short dive. I was nauseous most of the time, but sheer terror has a way of overcoming most anything. And Jim was right. The Zode was gone. I'd just about convinced myself that we were in the wrong place when I noticed a black splotch on the bottom. I went all the way down and checked it out: Roscommon's revolver.

"If the Feds had found it, they'd have brought an armored division to pick it off the bottom, right? We'd see cigarette wrappers and footprints on the shore over there."

There was nothing onshore either. "Except over here, where you tried to hide your footprints," Jim said.

"Okay, give me a fucking break."

Finally Jim convinced me that there just wasn't anything to be seen. "Maybe some of the Winnepesaukees found it. It's pretty valuable. Shit, if I found it, I wouldn't care if the Feds did want it. I'd take the damn thing and use it myself."

"It's some kind of weird mind game. Now I don't even know if we can go back. They're back there waiting for us."

"No way, ST. They're not that subtle. This is more like something you'd do."

He was right. But I hadn't done it, so that didn't help me much. There couldn't be that many environmental direct-action-campaign coordinators running around this neck of the woods.

He persuaded me that I was totally unrecognizable, that it was okay to go into town and get a cup of coffee. Actually I didn't want coffee because my stomach was so jumpy. I had some milk. We sat and watched the traffic coast by. And once, Jim tugged on my sleeve and pointed to the TV set up in the corner.

My Zodiac was on it. Upside down. Washed up on a beach in Nova Scotia. No footprints.

Then they cut to a map entitled "Intended Escape Route." It ran from Boston up the coast, about halfway up Maine, then straight east to Nova Scotia. But three-quarters of the way there, it was cut, severed by a question mark and a storm cloud. And then they had the obligatory footage of coast guard choppers searching the seas, CG boats cruising along the beach looking for bodies, picking discarded fuel tanks off the rocks, examining washed-up flotation cushions.

"There was a big storm the day after we found you," Jim said. "Maybe the Zodiac flipped over in that, and you . drowned."

"Look me in the eyes, Jim, and with a straight face, tell me you don't know anything about this."

He complied. We got back in the truck and headed for the reservation.

"I can only think of one thing," he said when we were almost there. "And if doesn't really lead us anywhere. It's just an anomaly. After we found you, a couple of the guys made a little side hike down to the river to refill our water bottles. They ran into some guys, some backpackers, who were crouching on the riverbank, running their stove, drinking some coffee. Hairy-looking guys, bearded, real granola types.

Maybe with accents. And these people said they wanted to get across the river. They asked where they might be able to find a rubber raft-you know, had we seen any around here recently."

"Kind of funny. Why didn't they find themselves a bridge?"

"Exactly. Kind of funny, since you were in the area, on a raft. But our guys didn't tell them anything."

"Special Forces, man. They can wear their hair any way they like. Shit." I didn't say "shit" because I was worried about them, though I was. I said it because I was getting hit with some stomach cramps.

When we got back to the Singletarys' trailer, I had to sit in the truck a while until they subsided. Then we went inside.

There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. His face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth, and I nodded back.

"Who ... you know this guy?" Jim said. .

"Yeah. His name is Hank Boone."

"Nice to finally meet you," Boone said.

"My pleasure. How'd you find my Zodiac?"

"We got a sighting of you, we knew the watersheds and we found it by the oil slick on the water."

"By following my trail of hazardous waste. Nice."

"Oh," Jim said, figuring it out. "That Boone."

Boone gave out kind of a brittle laugh. "Yeah."