On the Run and Underground: When Your Mom’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted List

 

An excerpt from Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn.

One cold night in December, when I was not yet four years old, my mother woke me while it was still dark, pressing her face against my cheek and whispering, “We have to leave. Right away.”

I rolled off my mattress, stumbled blindly across our tiny apartment to pee, pulled on my jeans and sneakers, and followed her down the five flights of stairs without a word, walking on tiptoes so I didn’t wake the neighbors.

We stopped in the foyer. Outside, my father was already working under the streetlights, breath steaming through his beard as he chipped ice off the windshield and loaded our bags and boxes into the hatchback of a rusted blue station wagon.

I glanced up at my mom again. Under the bare bulb she looked pale, though her skin was still much darker than mine. Her hair, which she’d kept short and dyed red as part of her disguise, was finally starting to grow out, straight and dark, nearly black, down to her shoulders.

She stood still in the doorway, cradling my baby brother in one arm and holding my hand with the other, but her eyes kept flickering to the intersection—­following each car that passed, tracing the shadows of the men outside the bodega by the corner, keeping a close eye on anything that moved.

My father whistled twice, and my mom led me out through the glass door into the cold air of the street and into the back seat of our car, arranging the baby on her lap, turning to see that I was settled, and then cranking the heat up as high as it could go to coax us both back to sleep.

You grow up and you start to see how much you don’t know about your own family….You begin to see your parents’ flaws and contradictions. You understand that not everything they told you could be true.

She nodded that we were ready. My father glanced back to see if anyone was following, winked at me in the rearview mirror, and swung our car onto Broadway, toward Interstate 80, heading west.

I was used to this routine. It wasn’t the first time we’d had to pack up all our things in the middle of the night and take off on another long cross-­country drive. We ditched cars and apartments constantly, kept everything we owned in a few plastic milk crates by the door, and I carried my prized possessions in a backpack: a stack of comics, some crayons and paper, a couple of Star Wars action figures.

I liked to read comics while we drove—­I couldn’t understand all the words yet, but I could at least look at the pictures—­but that night, for some reason, my dad said it was too early to turn on the overhead lights; he couldn’t see through the glare on the windshield and had to watch for deer and hitchhikers by the side of the road. So the lights stayed off.

I lay back and looked out the window instead, the yellow lane markers swallowed up behind us, the tree line blurring over by the edge of the road, while my parents whispered to each other across the dark front seat of our car:

“Who should we call? Who’s going to meet us there?”

“They know where we’re headed now.”

“They don’t know where we are.”

The hum of the engine, the hiss of tires on asphalt, the warm air inside, and the constant sense of forward momentum made me feel like we were our own little world, sealed off from the outside—­and if we just kept going, kept driving, no one would ever catch us.

It was the closest I ever came to feeling totally safe in my family.

But we had to stop eventually, for food and gas, to use the bathroom and to stretch our legs. So, the next morning, I found myself standing in a long line with my dad at a rest-­stop Burger King, watching a group of kids my age roughhouse on the indoor playground of a Kids Club Fun Center, when a nice elderly couple started talking to me, just making conversation.

“Hey sweetheart,” the old man smiled down at me—­I had shoulder-­length blond hair at the time, and everyone always assumed I was a girl—­“you all on a road trip?”

I nodded. I knew enough not to talk to strangers.

“Chicago?”

I nodded again.

“Visiting family? Or just on vacation?”

I looked up at my dad. He wasn’t paying attention now; he was busy ordering our food, and I felt like I had to say something, just to put an end to this awkward conversation.

“We’re going to Chicago,” I told them, “for my mom to turn herself in.”

I was half-­distracted, watching the other kids in their gold paper crowns running around the Kid’s Club gym, hanging from the bright plastic monkey bars. But I noticed the woman was looking at me now more closely, a bit confused.

“How do you mean, hon?”

“We made a deal,” I tried again. “With the FBI. So I can go to school.”

This was so.mething I’d been told in passing, or overheard, without ever fully understanding what it meant, but as soon as I said it I knew—­from the way the couple glanced at each other, and then over at my father’s back—­that I’d made a terrible mistake.

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Ray Bradbury issued a special 200 copy edition of his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 in 1953. It was covered in asbestos, making the books resistant to burning. Copies are rare - and expensive. This one was priced at US $45,000.

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Lake Effect - Hillary Behrman

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He cooked and we ate our entire dinner including dessert out of one cast-iron frying pan, scooping up the last of the chocolate ice cream embedded with bits of grilled onion and potato. Our spoons, the only dishes I needed to wash because, he explained, “You never wash a cast-iron frying pan, just wipe it down, the residue of every meal you ever ate adds seasoning to the next.”

A slimy onion worm stuck in his beard, wiggling up and down as he talked.

“Samantha, are you even listening to me?”

When Dwight said my name, he paused after each syllable, like he needed to sound it out, like he was learning to read, like he’d never heard my name before.

“Sam. My name is Sam.” “Yeah. Whatever.”

He left the table.

I didn’t wash the spoons, just licked ’em clean and put them right back in the drawer. My mom would have been horrified, but impressed too, by my efficiency.

I was fourteen when my dad started leaving me in the care of random people, my mother dead less than six months. Most of the time he asked one of the female nurses he worked with at the hospital to stay with me. He was never gone for very long. But this time it was a guy from the pathology lab, Dwight—red haired, bearded, and so skinny I could see the hollowed-out joint where his leg hooked up with his torso. His jeans hung low on his hips, he kept his hands in his pockets, but that just made it worse, I mean really, get a belt.

After dinner we drove around, first downtown, then out to the industrial area by the river. Eventually we doubled back, heading away from the city and out along the lakefront on the freeway.

Lake Erie froze solid that year, but Dwight said the toxic sludge at the bottom of the river and the sheen of oil across the top would keep the Cuyahoga from freezing. He took the exit ramp fast, fishtailing on black ice, just missing the guardrail before regaining control of the car. Turning left and then right, we plowed across a flat white field that must have been a parking lot, our tires razoring straight lines in the fresh snow. He pulled the car right up to a cement barrier.

“What is this place?”

He jumped out. Ignoring my question. “Come on Samantha, live a little.” 

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The Boy Scout - A short story by David Ohle

The boy scout guides his wooden pedal car up the dirt road and parks it, in the shade of my turkey oak, without ceremony. The little car has tin-can headlights and a false grille. He approaches the steps and begins to climb, a box of rice cookies under one of his frail arms. It is a mystery how he crossed the bottoms in this handmade vehicle, how he avoided sinking in the soft mud ruts and being stung by the wasps in the sumac along the ditch-bank. Twice the boy scout drops the box of cookies, backsteps to the ground, recovers it, and climbs up again. He knocks gently, the sound is as though his knuckles are made of hard rubber. I open the door and allow him in. He sits on the sofa with yellow eyes and looks at my feet and says nothing. I offer him a bowl of soy soup, which he declines, casting his glances on the floor. His face is ageless and simple, with precocious whiskers on the jaw.

I build an oak fire in the woodstove and he warms his hands against the evening chill setting in. In the firelight I first become aware of the suggestion of a seam running down the front of him, over the nose from the khaki tip of the hat, across the lips and chin, into the neckerchief. He seems in the odd light to have been stitched together out of two unmatched bolts of cloth. His eyes are like coat buttons, the fists like ripe tomatoes. He smells of sodden laundry. Crickets bump against the tower window screens. The stink of pinesap and legustrum. The clack of crows in the sky.

I take a cold chicken wing from the refrigerator and offer it to him. His head pivots, the lips emerge tubelike from the face. He says no. At least he has finally spoken. We don’t want to sit here too long on the brink of conversation, like wax figures behind plexiglas. Coffee? Does he want coffee? Cola? I move around the living room mechanically, under an odd influence from this boy scout, as though he were a planet and I his satellite, he earth and I moon. Threads of black yarn drape his forehead under the scout hat, a mockery of hair. He has a sewn-on eyebrow above one eye and nothing above the other one, and a faded disk of scar on the chin. I talk about the weather and he listens without comment.

I ask him about a point of scout lore, and although his mouth opens and the dry tongue quivers, he says nothing. When he moves, which he seldom does, there is a faintly audible rasp, as though his joints are dry of lubricant. I ask him if I might sample one of his cookies. He indicates no. I have to buy or not buy without tasting. I give him the required amount in National coupons. I eat one of the cookies, which have no taste and little consistency. I remember myself as a boy scout, driving my pedal car intricately through alleyways in the city, eating bruised fruit when I found it at the backs of government markets. In the rear compartment of the pedal car I kept a change of khakis and extra shoes. If night came on me I’d throw out my bag and sleep wherever I was. I’ve seen tumbleweed, or something similar, blowing past the house recently. A wild pig comes every night and snufiles around for any garbage I might throw down. I consider dropping something heavy on him from the roof, breaking the spine, dressing him out, cooking him over a fire pit. The boy scout has been here several days now. I’ve noticed a spider’s thread from his shoulder to the windowsill. Two days ago he began an extended smile which has not yet broken. When the wind occasionally blows outside, the shiplap siding of the house gets to wailing in a high-pitched tone. The wind sock is full to the south, the awnings flapping. The fire in the stove belly has died hours ago, the sun’s last yellow angle is narrowing on the tower walls. The old clock is ticking on the mantel. The evening wears on. I rebuild the fire as the night cools and wear my flannel robe and long johns. Before dawn I see an orange light in the pines, someone walking with a lamp, Morning again.

An icicle has formed where the bathroom faucet dripped. The sun has come up in a haze. The boy scout is sleeping on the sofa.

The wind sock is deflated and the day is warming up toward noon.

By mid-afternoon I am perspiring in the humidity, wiping myself with a handkerchief. The boy scout remains dry and still.

A slow drizzle now, hanging on three days. On the fourth day I see an egg of sun above the tree line. A katydid is dead at the bottom of my teacup. Overnight the weather turns cold again, and the drizzle becomes a wet snow. My mouth is sour, my toothbrush worn down to the plastic. It will be nice to chew salty pork meat, sometime, whenever I can kill the pig. I should raise the awnings before the snow collects and breaks through the rotted canvas.

The wind sock is frozen stiff, pointing south. I see the pig outside, standing in the white. He pisses and leaves a yellow circle on the snow crust. The pedal car is gone, tracks of the wooden wheels leading off down the road. The awnings are frozen and won’t go up.

(Biblioklept)