“We’re fine,” he said, as if he couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t be. “We’re going back out in a couple of hours.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“We’re getting everyone organized,” Myles said. “It’s going to be even bigger than yesterday.”
McGee wondered who the we was, who the everyone, how in her brief absence Myles had somehow gone from being lost to being in charge. But she could see by the way he carried himself that he preferred to pretend nothing had changed, that this was the way he’d always been. And she understood that now, and for a long time to come, this was how he’d make up for that kiss.
Myles was in no hurry to explain anything, so it was Holmes who described what had happened after they separated, how they’d been driven along a huge crowd up into Capitol Hill. The state of emergency was supposed to be only for downtown, Holmes said, but the riot cops kept coming. It was a residential neighborhood, people hanging out in bars and restaurants. It was as if they were being invaded.
“The people came out to the streets,” Holmes said. “A couple kids took over a city bus. The cops came after us with everything. Gas, sticks, grenades. We kept pushing them back. Every time they thought they’d stopped us, we came back for more.”
“I’m sorry,” McGee said. “I shouldn’t have left you.”
“It was amazing,” Myles said. “Too bad you missed it.”
Myles woke them up after just a couple of hours of sleep. He’d been making more calls. The city had gotten wind of the plans. The curfew had been swapped for a “no-protest zone” through twenty-five square blocks of downtown. Signs and leaflets were banned, and bags were getting confiscated without warrants.
“So much for the Constitution,” Myles said.
It was the first time McGee had ever heard him utter the word.
The day picked up where the previous one had left off. But when they met up with Myles’s new friends at Pike Place Market, it was clear yesterday’s puppets and clowns and marching bands were a distant memory. The morning fog lifted; tear gas took its place.
But Myles seemed happy. Everyone around them seemed to know who he was. Now McGee was the one following him.
§
Compared to the drive that had taken them west, the drive back home seemed interminable. After five days of marching and shouting and clashing with police, the protest had ended. The WTO meeting had collapsed spectacularly. The police and the National Guard had waged war and lost. For the first time in McGee’s life, she was leaving a demonstration with a sense of something having been actually won.
After all that, how could the long drive back to Detroit not feel like a letdown? She had final exams waiting, term papers to write.
Following four days in jail, Inez and Kirsten had had their charges dropped, along with hundreds of others. Myles had been among the people organizing the march that won their release. As soon as the protests ended, Fitch had reappeared, just in time for the celebration. Everyone was so jubilant, Fitch even succeeded in getting Kirsten to sleep with him.
And something that no one had seen coming had happened between Inez and April, too. There were five other people in the back of that van, but April and Inez whispered the 2,500 miles to Detroit as if they were alone.
Up in front, there was a much different kind of solitude. McGee and Myles took shifts at the wheel, alternating with Fitch. When it was just the two of them, radio stations would drift off into fuzz without either one of them noticing. Every exit on the interstate brought them closer to what McGee was already assuming would be the end.
On the second day of the drive, Myles spotted the carnival from the highway. He took the exit without asking anyone’s opinion. They were in a town no one in the van had ever heard of, and the things they saw outside their windows made no sense, at least not in early December, with at least two inches of snow on the ground. Around the perimeter of a small lake, a midway of sorts had been set up, though the only ride appeared to involve horses and a wagon stacked with blankets.
But when McGee got out of the van and drew closer, she saw mittened hands tossing darts. Bundled faces squinted along the sights of air rifles, taking aim at rows of tin ducks. There were small crowds everywhere, at the bucket toss, the high striker, the ring-a-bottle.
At the ladder climb, a teenage boy in a pom-pommed hat tumbled over and over onto his ass while his girlfriend cheered him on.
Mixed in with the games were small clapboard shacks blowing puffs of steam from their hatches. They were selling all kinds of things, all of them hot: cocoa and pretzels and sacks of peanuts and caramel corn, the smells so strong they cut through the cold.
Myles took the lead, with McGee a few steps behind, the others straggling at the rear. Fitch had brought a flask, but he couldn’t seem to get either Holmes or Kirsten to take any interest in it. Many of the townspeople turned to watch them come, as if seven haggard, unshowered kids off the highway were a stranger sight than a winter carnival in the middle of nowhere.
April and Inez laced their fingers and swung their arms, imitating young girls instead of lovers.
“What are we doing?” McGee said to Myles’s back.
“We’re having fun,” he said, and he led her to a booth where dozens of fishbowls had been arranged in a flat-topped pyramid. For a dollar, a fat man with hands like tarantulas traded Myles four Ping-Pong balls. Myles offered two of them to McGee.
“You first,” he said.
She shook her head.
“All right,” he said, stepping up to the railing. “I’ll go first.”
He pitched his ball forward, and it bounced from bowl to bowl before coming to a rest in the snow.
“Your turn,” he said.
But she didn’t want to play. The games were rigged. Everyone knew it. So she passed the balls back to Myles, and he tossed another, and it landed again in the snow.
But on the third try, he nailed it, the ball clipping the rim and swirling down, as if through the mouth of a drain.
Myles threw up his arms and shouted, his breath exploding outward, and Fitch and Holmes and April and Kirsten and Inez closed in around him. McGee watched the carny reach under the counter, and in a moment of panic, she pictured a goldfish frozen in a block of ice. But it was only stuffed animals, a blue bear and a green dog. The carny held them in his outstretched hands, and Myles took his time considering them, examining the animals front and back, touching their shiny, fluorescent fur, each in turn. What was he looking for? What did he see?
In the end, Myles took the green dog, handing it to McGee with a satisfied grin. He’d made a decision about her. Ever since then, she’d wished she knew what it was.
Nine
When he thinks back on it, the trip to Mexico feels like a beginning. But it is also an end. Six years past, but he remembers every detail, as if part of him were still there now. A long, narrow side street submerged in the murky darkness. The tall brick walls on either side funnel exhaust from the boulevard, and he coughs into his sleeve. Somewhere within his body, it’s as if a lever has been pulled. Something, he’s not sure what, has been set in motion. He can feel the sensation even now in his memory, almost like vertigo. He stands in front of a nondescript steel door. A single light burns on the outer wall. Shadows move about on the sidewalk, closing in. The door suddenly grates open. An elderly woman in large, pirate-like hoop earrings looks Dobbs over skeptically and steps aside.