Milo and I nodded.
“Can I get you coffee or something?” said Dinwiddie.
We shook our heads.
He said, “In the early sixties Dad got into another cash-flow problem and sold off most of the land he still owned in town- like the bungalows in front of us, the plot where the school is now. All of it gone, fast and cheap. He kept only this house- guess he was more sentimental than he’d ever have admitted. When he died I inherited it, started bringing my own boys up here. Until the drought. I figured it would be a good place- who bothers to come out here except truckers? Lots of Mexicans and old people- the two of them wouldn’t stand out.”
I said, “Makes sense.”
“I did it because I had to. There was no choice. Not after Ike raised my consciousness.”
He stopped, waited for a challenge, and when none came, said, “He’d talk about the Holocaust, how so few people had hidden Jews. How only the Danes had stood up as a country. How the whole thing could have been prevented if more people had stood up, done the right thing. You hear that, you start to wonder. What you would have done. The depth of your own principles. It’s like this psych experiment they did years ago- I’m sure you know it. Telling people to shock other people. For no good reason. And most people did it. Just to obey. Shocked total strangers, even though they knew it was wrong, didn’t want to. I’d always told myself I’d be different, one of the noble few. But I was never really sure. How can you be when it’s all theoretical? The way my life had gone, everything was theoretical. So when Ike called me, middle of the night, so scared, told me what they’d tried to do to him, I knew what I had to do. And I know I did the right thing. I’m sorry if it caused you-”
Milo said, “You pick up the old lady too?”
Dinwiddie nodded. “Both of us did that. She wouldn’t have gone with me alone. Ike was taking a chance, coming back to town, knowing they were after him. But he loved her, was worried about what might happen to her- especially worried because of the way she’d become.”
“What is it, Alzheimer’s?”
Dinwiddie said, “Who knows? She won’t go to a doctor.” To me: “Her age, it could be anything, right? Hardening of the arteries, whatever.”
I said, “How long has it been going on?”
“Ike said just a few months. Said she was such a bright woman- before the change- that most people didn’t notice anything different. Because when she talked she still made sense. And she’d always gone on about conspiracies- cossacks, whatever. So if she did it a little more, who’d notice? The way she is now, of course, you’d notice, but that’s just been the last few weeks. Maybe it’s the stress. Of hiding. I don’t know.”
He lowered his head, rested his forehead in his hands.
“So the two of you came back to town and got her,” Milo said.
“Yeah,” said Dinwiddie, talking to the hooked rug. “When she wasn’t home, Ike figured she’d either be at the synagogue or walking around. She’d always loved to walk, had started doing it even more- since the change. In the dark, when it wasn’t safe. We drove to the synagogue, saw there was some kind of party inside, and waited until she left. Then we picked her up and brought her here. She didn’t want to come, was yelling at us a lot, but Ike managed to calm her down. He’s the only one who seems to be able to calm her down.”
He looked down again, knitted his hands and swung them between his knees. “There’s something special between them. More than just family. The bond of survivors. He’s not even twenty, has been through way too much for someone that age. For anyone. So bear that in mind. Okay?”
Ike came back into the room and said, “Bear what in mind?”
Dinwiddie sat up. “I was just telling them to keep things in perspective. How’s she’s doing?”
“Sleeping. What kind of perspective?”
“Just everything that’s been going on.”
“In other words, coddle me out of pity?”
“No,” said Dinwiddie. The boy looked away from him. “Ike, about the shotgun-”
“Forget it, Ted. You ended up saving your own life. What could be better?”
Generous smile, startling in its suddenness. But largesse tainted by bitterness. Dinwiddie picked up on it, knew what it meant- an immutable change in the bond between them- and his expression turned to misery.
Milo said, “You ready to tell us what happened, son?”
Ike said, “How much do you know?”
“Everything up to Bear Lodge.”
“Bear Lodge,” he said. “Rural nirvana, some pipe dream, huh? All I know about that is what I’ve been told. By Grandma.”
“Where’d you live afterward?”
“Where’d I live?” The boy smiled again and ticked off fingers. “Boston. Evanston, Illinois. Louisville, Kentucky. I was a regular ramblin’ man.”
Another smile. So forced it was painful to look at.
I said, “Not Philadelphia?”
“Philadelphia? Nope. I’m with W. C. Fields on that one.”
“Terry Crevolin said your father’s family was from Philadelphia.”
“Family.” The smile opened and twisted and turned into an angry laugh. “My father’s family was wiped out fifty years ago. Except for one distant cousin. In Philadelphia. Fat-cat lawyer, I’ve never even talked to him- couldn’t imagine he’d welcome me with open arms.” Another laugh. “No, Grandma wouldn’t have sentenced me to Philadelphia.”
I said, “Those other places- was that your mother’s family?”
He cocked a finger at me. “You guessed it, smart person. You get the rubber duckie. A progressive series of nice middle-class Negro neighborhoods, where I wouldn’t stand out like chocolate syrup in milk. Nice hospitable relatives who tolerated me until they got sick of me, or got scared of what it meant putting me up, or things just got too crowded- the middle class likes its comforts.”
Dinwiddie said, “Why don’t you sit down, Ike?”
The boy wheeled on him. “What, and relax?” But he did lower himself into an armchair, stilt-legs stretching out onto the hooked rug.
A long silence. When Milo didn’t break it, I said, “Any reason you chose a Spanish surname?”
“Spanish? Oh yeah, that. I’d been using Montvert- some of my mom’s family were Creoles, so it seemed appropriate to go French.” Another joyless smile. “Then when I moved here I needed a new one. Covering tracks. I thought of Russian, for Grandma. But who would buy that on me? I didn’t want to attract attention. Then one day I scoped out Ocean Heights- it had been in the news, Massengil’s Jim Crow bullshit. I wanted to take a look at the place, see what KKK territory looked like in the eighties, took a drive through. Beaver Cleaverland. But I noticed they had all these Spanish names for the streets. Stone hypocrisy. So I thought, why not? Do ’em one better, go for Español. Which would be Verde. But that sounded wrong- like it wouldn’t be someone’s name. So I checked out a Spanish-English dictionary. Green. Slang for ‘novice.’ Which I was. An L.A. novice- go west, young man. Novato. Had a cool ring to it. The rest, as they say, is Will and Ariel Durant territory.”
Milo had started to squirm halfway through the speech. He said, “How’d it happen? The alley.”
“Boy,” said Ike, “you’re a real master of subtlety.”
“Fuck subtlety,” said Milo. “Let’s aim for truth.”
The boy’s turn to be startled. Then a genuine smile.
He said, “By the time they told me to meet them in the alley, I’d started to suspect something weird. Latch was too nice. I mean, the guy was an elected official and we were talking about murder, blowing things up. Him being really casual. As if it were no big deal. As if he were still a revolutionary. Not that I ever really trusted him in the first place. Grandma didn’t trust him- said the fact that he’d gone into establishment politics said plenty about him. So when be told me about the meeting, new information, I said sure, faked being all gung-ho. But I was suspicious from the outset.”