Byron elaborates on the plan: You’ll give the horn a good threesecond toot to cover the shots (one-apple, two-apple, three-apple), and then another shorter one to make it sound as though you’re signaling someone inside to come out. We’re a great nation of horn blowers, he adds vis-à-vis the plan, so no one’s gonna notice so long as it sounds like a normal, audible transaction, like you’re calling to someone to come out, or giving someone a friendly warning. The passing of a signal. My sister’s boyfriend used to sound his horn outside our house all the time. Late at night he’d pull up in his car, tap the horn, and I’d look out my bedroom window and watch her sneak out. Then one night he drove up and gave a delicate little signal, just the lightest tap, you could barely call it a honk, and I watched as she skipped down the sidewalk, got in his car, and disappeared into the firmament never to be seen again. So a horn honk is perfectly apropos. No one’s gonna notice if you do it right. Later that afternoon, as they drive through eastern Pennsylvania, barreling down toward the Delaware Water Gap, she thinks about the apartment on Park Avenue and how as a young girl she had looked out at the evening traffic, counting the taxis and the buses, listening intently until the mull of noise that normally lay submerged beneath consciousness would dissolve to reveal the sounds of horns. She thought of the view — all the way down to Grand Central if she stuck her head out the window and arched to the right — and the sad elegance of the light, near nightfall in winter. The blueness of the vista, the glory in those lights.
The parking lot is glazed with heat around the car, and near the doorway to the store the men are still stuck in the rhombus of tension, moving slightly in a congruence, a sidelong motion, while August crabs his hand behind his back, signaling away. There isn’t really fear inside her; there’s nothing except a bag of air inflating against her rib cage, and her fingers light on the metal horn band that makes a half circle around the steering wheel, unwilling to push — no, it’s not that simple. She conspired with herself to avoid making a sound that would cover the shots, and she knows what she’ll do next, and she does it, backing the car up and then heading off across the parking lot, not too fast, but fast enough, naturally, focusing her eyes straight ahead and trying to picture Hank in her mind, his boyish face in his uniform, the collar tight up against his neck, and his smile, bright and hopeful, as he tells her not to worry, that he’ll be back in the summer and they’ll go to Lake George together just like the war never happened; trying to keep that vision in front of her and her hands steady, she drives onto the main road and heads east, while a wild posse of police cars — old ones with rounded fenders and single dome lights — roars west in a fury of rage and torment.
In Nebraska, smoking cigarettes in the shack and acting tough — with Byron in a leather cowboy hat cured from the sun and salt-stained, with the stitching coming loose where the crown was attached and the brim curled up in front — she let August bleach her hair (he had a sister who’d taught him how), and for a few days she felt like Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits—rugged, rustic, embraced not only by fear but also by something deeper, a landscape urgently, almost sexually, unforgiving. She felt during those days a new physicality; her body seemed born anew as her thighs slid against the denim. Her hips turned bony, hard, and she lurched like a cowpoke when she walked. They strove for a certain élan, a style to the mission, as if they might capture the spirit of Bonnie and Clyde — not the actual historical characters, who seemed messy and dirty, not to mention dead, but the ones portrayed by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the movie, hazed by the lens filter, eternally laughing and skipping their way through bank robberies and gas station holdups until they were devoured again and again by their love for each other and by the fate — a hail of bullets — that was waiting for them along that road in Louisiana. She felt an elegance emerge, not just in her movements but in her posture, her stance, the way she stood on the earth, facing the horizon, alone on the ridge, while the men worked on the plan back in the shack. Sometime around then a guy named Jamake appeared, a local Sioux Indian who arrived one afternoon on his motorcycle and offered to lend a hand. He looked squint-eyed, walked with a slight limp, and made smirking, knowing looks behind Byron’s back. When they hiked together, he put his hand against her back in a way that was unthreatening, keeping it fanned out high near her shoulders as he told her about plants that were edible and freely available from the land, prairie turnips and Jerusalem artichokes, and in the southern ranges the leaves of the lechuguilla, which had to be cut up and baked properly for several days. You don’t cook them exactly right, they’re as hard as bayonet blades, he said. There are things like that all over the place, man, things that have to be tempered under a steady heat for days on end or they’re just another thorny plant and not worth shit. Up on the tattered edge of the ridgeline they sat and talked, and he told her that he had been born in Utah and lived on the lam from the lawmen who were after him for some activities he had performed as part of the movement. And she told him about her early days living with Byron near San Francisco, in a bungalow with a view of the Pacific. She told him about her childhood in New York, with her businessman father, sailing toy boats in the Central Park pond. She did not talk about Hank, or about the war, or about those things that drove her to join the underground. There was a perplexity between them that was pleasurable and right. The conversation was limited. He withheld his condemnation of the white boys making plans down in the shack. He did not say — as he obviously wanted to say — that these were foolish rich kids playing a game and afraid of real confrontation; these were kids couched in money and self-righteousness and an old sense of propriety that was unearned and therefore unwarranted; these were boys who had been taught a predestination that went against the truth of nature. He did not advise her to ignore their orders — except in the way he looked when she told him of their plans (askance, squinting his eyes and spitting to the side). Instead he told her that he was pure fuckin’ AIM, nothing more and nothing less — American Indian Movement all the way, from Wounded Knee to Wounded Knee — while he fixed her with the gracious element of his eyes, dark blue in one but white and cloudy in the other. A sucker punch caused that a few years back, he said. I was walking along the road, and a man came up on his chopper and begged directions. I showed him the way to Highway 29, and in gratitude he struck me from behind with an implement, a crowbar or tire iron. He took that side of my sight but he gave me vision, pure Indian vision. And now I see the way I was meant to see even though, truth be told, I was actually born with the name Bill Winston, outside of Chicago, in Oak Park, and, until I reclaimed my real name, I was nothing but a plain old white man. Then he told her about the standoff with the state troopers somewhere out in the Great Basin, and how men and women (himself included) had blocked a supply road to a research center where the white man took advantage of the vast emptiness, securing a parcel, cordoning it with barbed wire and high fences and security checkpoints. You see, at night there were ghostly casts of light in the sky that killed the stars, he said. There were the appearances of strange flying craft that devoured the migrating birds and cut holes across the heavens, rending them apart so you could see the guts of the universe. So in protest we lay in the road and let the police drag the women into the culvert and the men, who gave no struggle, away into the system of justice you’ve created. You see, man, the sky was weeping and strange, and it was sorrowful and purple, like that bruise there on your head. So now the universe is a fucking mess. Then he kissed her, and she kissed him back, and he said, It’s fucked up. There just isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it, man. And then he leaned his head against her shoulder and wept quietly. When they met again up on the ridge, one final time, early in the morning with the dew on the grass and soft cobwebs on their cuffs, they made love quickly with their pants down around their ankles so that only their bellies seemed united, hot, eager. Byron was down below, packing up, loading stuff into the car while August checked the camp to make sure they weren’t leaving any clues behind. There was a fire in which the papers were being burned, sending up a trickle of black smoke into the morning sky, which was shrouded in a thin white haze around the edges but beginning to turn blue overhead. The guy named Jamake was moving softly over her, and she had her eyes open and was looking into his good one, trying to see something, and when he came she noticed that he didn’t blink but instead looked directly at her until he leaned down to kiss her with lips that tasted of ash, dew, and smoke. The wind was twining his hair around her lips and cheeks. Then, from down below, Byron was giving the horn a toot, a soft, short report that said: We’re ready to go now, and you’re gonna have to leave that ridge and come down from there, leave that Indian asshole behind and get in the fucking car. Up on the ridge she didn’t move for a minute as she lay against Jamake, who was reaching down, wiping her softly with a bandana, cleaning her up so that she might go off into the world. The car horn was sounding again, angry and persistent. It seemed there was nothing she could do but get up, smooth down her jeans, and hike back, holding tight to the side of the narrow trail, stepping carefully along the ridge where it fell off into nothing, a dusty wash of stones just starting to catch the full brunt of daylight.