"And?"
"Like I said, the Weathermen were pretty loosely structured. We just did our own thing."
"Which was?"
She shrugged. "Debated ideology. Engaged in political education. Refined skills that we'd need in the struggle."
"Skills?"
"… Well, self-defense, propaganda, marksmanship, weaponry."
"Bomb making?"
She nodded. "But mostly what we did was talk-endless, intense talk. We were so self-consciously political. And romantic. We thought it was so damned romantic to live in a crummy flat in the Fillmore and share everything-clothes, food, money, drugs, sexual partners. God, when I think of how naive we were! We were going to change the world, but we knew no more of it than… than old Chaucer over there." She gestured at the pinto.
"The individual Weather collectives were quite small, weren't they?"
"Well, yes, they had to be, in order to create trust among the members and prevent infiltration."
"How many in yours?"
"… People came and went, but there were never more than six or seven of us at a time."
"You and D.A. and Jenny Ruhl?"
She nodded.
"What about Perry?"
"He was… part of it. He had this job on a magazine and was supposed to get our propaganda across to the people through his stories. But he was not in on the bombing. He went to Vietnam as a reporter when that was still in the planning stages."
Hilderly apparently hadn't told his comrades that he was so fed up with the Movement that he was willing to pay his own way to Southeast Asia. Nor that he'd thought about writing a story on the collective. "Who else?"
"No one."
"You said up to seven."
"People came and went."
"Who else was at Port Chicago with D.A.?"
She got to her feet, brushing dirt from the seat of her jeans.
"You, Libby? Jenny Ruhl?"
She turned and started for the tack room. I followed. "What about Tom Grant?"
At the door she faced me. "How many times do I have to tell you that I don't know Tom Grant?"
There was something in her voice-a tone oddly close to relief-that gave me pause. I watched as she entered the room, dumped the medallions that she still held on the desk, and collected a bridle and saddle. As she brushed past me and went back outside I said, "What about the right man?"
She stopped halfway to where the horse stood. "Are you talking about Andy?"
I covered my own surprise, asked, "Was he there at Port Chicago?"
"Are you kidding?" She continued over to the rail, set the saddle on it, and began to bridle the pinto.
"Why wasn't he?"
"Because by then Andy Wrightman was long gone. It was… as if he'd never existed. "Her fingers moved clumsily with the bridle, her hands shaking slightly; she had difficulty getting the tongue of the buckle through the hole.
"He was Jenny Ruhl's lover back in Berkeley, wasn't he?"
"One of them."
"Was he Jessica's father?"
"God knows. For a while there Jenny was fucking a lot of guys. But yes, he probably was. The timing was right."
"Did Andy Wrightman run off when Jenny became pregnant?"
"Yeah."
"What do you know about him?"
Ross hoisted the saddle onto the pinto, positioned it, and squatted to buckle the girth. Her voice was muffled when she said, "Virtually nothing. He was a… nobody."
"Any idea where he was from?"
"No."
"It's my guess that he was from somewhere in the Southwest, and that he came back to Jenny-at least for a while, and as late as sixty-nine."
Ross straightened, her face red-whether from exertion or anger, I couldn't tell. "For God's sake, where do you get these ideas?"
"Jenny's daughter tells me that her father came to see her with her mother once, when she was four years old. That would have been in sixty-nine. The man wore a string tie, as many people from the Southwest do."
Ross seemed to find that amusing. She chuckled and said, "All sorts of people wear string ties-including tourists who buy them on vacation. And as for Jenny's daughter, I don't know anything about her other than that she existed."
"And you know nothing about Andy Wrightman?"
"I told you, he was a nobody, a nothing."
"It's funny: when I went to see D.A. the other day, I described Tom Grant to him, same as I did to you. You know what he said?"
"Where D.A. is concerned, I have no idea."
"He got very excited, said, 'Wrightman!'"
Again Ross bit her lip, then gave me a long, measured look. "I have to ride over to see the neighbor who runs cattle on my land. I want you gone by the time I get back. And don't come again."
"I need to ask-"
"No more questions. I told you before: it's an old, sad story, and I don't want to talk about it. I've said far too much already."
"D.A. came to see you yesterday afternoon. What was that about?"
Her eyes narrowed as she mounted the pinto. "I suppose Mia told you that?"
"Yes."
"She would. Mia's young and insecure. She can't understand what D.A. and I have… had. So she puts the easiest interpretation on it and is jealous. Every time he takes off, she thinks he's coming here. But he doesn't. I haven't seen him in a good long time, and I don't expect him in the foreseeable future."
Abruptly she turned her horse and urged him into a trot. I watched as she took the trail under the trees-not toward the ranch of the neighbor who contracted to run the cattle, but toward Abbotts Lagoon and the seacoast.
When she was a fair distance away, I went over to the barn. Inside I could hear sounds of activity-the kid she'd mentioned who cleaned the stalls. Ross had neglected to lock the tack room; I went in there and retrieved the medallions from where she'd tossed them on the desk. Then I began looking around.
There was a calendar blotter on the desk, with notations in its squares of upcoming pack trips and rentals. Next to it was a phone and a neat stack of periodicals such asHorse & Rider. The center desk drawer held the usual assortment of pens, pencils, and paper clips; the deep bottom drawer contained files. In the one above it were blank checks, envelopes, a ledger, and a box of business cards. But toward its back, in a separate compartment, a framed photograph lay face down.
I took the photo out and found it was a color shot of Ross, Hilderly, Taylor, and a woman whom I first mistook for Jess Goodhue. They were grouped on the wide stone steps of some building-I thought it might be Sproul Hall at Berkeley. While Ross, Hilderly, and the other woman were seated, D.A. stood behind them, one arm raised in a clenched-fist salute. Ross didn't look much different than she did today; Hilderly I recognized easily from the old photos I'd seen in his albums. But Taylor was another man entirely: his stance was aggressive and proud, his eyes burned fiercely. Seeing all that intensity, however poorly preserved on film, made me understand how D.A.'s internal fires could have flared out of control and burned themselves out in the bitter aftermath of failure and imprisonment.
The other woman was such a mirror image of Jess Goodhue that I knew she had to be Jenny Ruhl. She'd passed on her elfin facial features to her daughter, and her hair-while long and straight-had the same dark sheen. Next to Hilderly's and Ross's lankiness, she was tiny and compact, also like Goodhue. But while she smiled brashly at the camera, her eyes held none of the uncompromising quality of Jess's. While her daughter's photos impressed the viewer as direct, Ruhl merely looked tough and defiant. I suspected the difference was in their upbringings: Ruhl was from a wealthy family and probably had had everything handed to her; Goodhue had had to rely on her natural strength to survive.
I stared at the photograph a while longer, wondering whose eye had been behind the camera's lens. Wondering why Ross had framed it and kept it all these years. And wondering about the disparate reactions of these four people to the cataclysmic events of the late sixties.