Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“What was the question?”

“Inside or out?”

“Inside.”

“Right. So. It’s probably not cast-iron then, so what you probably want is not a hacksaw at all but a pipe cutter.”

“You know. I should probably ask my husband. He knows.”

“He out in the car?” Douglas looks over her shoulder, very enthusiastic about extending the conversation.

“No. No. No, he isn’t. He’s home. With the baby. I’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

Dan Russell wants to know:“If you take over the country—”

“When, Dan,” stresses Teko.

“—what happens to a guy like my grampa? He’s pretty like, you know, Nixon’s the One. But he’s a good old guy I think. He volunteers and stuff. Is it OK if he’s like, all the same to you I’ll be voting for Governor Reagan?”

“ That asshole,” says Teko.

“We take over, your granddad will see why Nixon’s not the one,” says Yolanda.

“What about Reagan?” asks Dan.

Avery Trust-Rite Lumber & Hardware looks the way a workingman’s saloon does when the weary day flowers with night; several men in coveralls and carpenter’s pants line up on the customer’s side of the counter, bullshitting with the man behind, who actually paces its length on duckboards like a bartender, and why not? — a day spent on his feet, back and forth, crouching down, reaching up, cutting keys and mixing gallons of paint and smashing flower pots with a mallet to be mixed in with sacks of fragrant soil. The place stops dead when Yolanda walks in. She smiles, and they return amused looks. One man tips a Dodgers cap.

“Lady needs some help, Ed,” says the man in the Dodgers cap, and the other men on the customer’s side of the counter laugh.

Ed leans across the counter tiredly; thank God he’s not going along with the joke: “Help you, miss?”

“Yes, I need a hacksaw.”

Ed is starting to ask her if she just needs a blade or if she needs the whole thing when the men explode:

“— hack saw? Oh, ho-ho-ho—”

“— she need with a hacksaw?—”

“—Whoa. Whoa. Lady gotta be care ful—”

“—oh, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho—”

“—wouldn’t want to be her old man. Lady with a hacksaw—”

“—damn, god damn—”

“Miss?”

“The whole thing, please. The blade and the handle part.”

“I’mon tell you, I don’t know if you ought to sell her a hacksaw, Eddie.”

“Maybe one of those chamois cloths.”

“A nice feather duster.”

“Can of silver polish.”

“Oh, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho.”

“But a hack saw—”

Ed shrugs. “Lady’s free white and twenty-one, and she can do as she pleases.”

“Now, who here’s wanting a hacksaw?”

Everyone turns to see a uniformed L.A. County deputy sheriff, carrying a roller tray, two rollers, a dropcloth, and a gallon of standard white, emerge from one of the aisles. He puts the stuff on the counter and stares straight at Yolanda.

“Lady right there,” says the man in the cap.

The deputy looks at her appraisingly, a slight smile on his face, drumming his fingers on the counter with an even rhythm. Yolanda knows the other men are with him on this. No way any of this is in fun anymore.

“Mind if I ask any special reason why you’re needing a hacksaw at”—and here he very pointedly gazes at his wristwatch—“eight forty-five at night?”

All of the men wait patiently for her answer. She smiles and tosses her head.

“My husband just escaped from custody, and we need to saw his handcuffs off.”

Amid the laughter Ed takes her money and bags the saw. As Yolanda is leaving, she hears one of the men sum up: “She ought to take that and saw the balls off herself’cause she has got some pair down there.”

Dan Russell wants to know: “Well I mean I just don’t understand why you robbed the bank in San Francisco if you’re these revolutionary army people and all.” He is on his knees behind the bucket seats in the front of the van, working away with the saw at the handcuff on Teko’s wrist.

“Well,” says Teko, somewhat nervously watching Dan at work, “running a revolution is pretty expensive business. You’d be surprised. You need vehicles—”

“But, I mean, I thought you stole the vehicles.” Dan shrugs and gestures to take in the van.

“This is a definite exception in the case of an emergency. I mean, ideally we purchase the vehicles legitimately. So called. Try and keep a low profile.” Teko winks. “Anyway. You need matériel. You need ordnance. Arms, ammunition, tools—”

“Sweat socks,” says Yolanda.

“Oh, I just. OK. Attention please: It was not sweat socks. It was a bandolier.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Dan, let’s not get sidetracked here in the details, the minutiae of revolutionary struggle. I want to make one thing perfectly clear: We aren’t crooks. We’ve declared war on the fascist United States government, and the bank job was an expropriation of enemy funds in order to meet our simple revolutionary needs.”

“Oh,” says Dan.

He walked that patch of grass leading to the shack looking around as if the whole world had changed its constitution, had undiscernibly come apart and then reassembled itself along slightly askew lines. The truth hid in the shadows angling from the objects all around. There were signs to which an instinctive hustler was sensitive: the marked card, the bill protruding conspicuously from the unattended wallet, the calm quiet before a bust. Then again, maybe it was just sitting in the car with that bald motherfucker Prophet Jones. Dude always got his nerves all blanged up.

It was a hostile place into which he’d been born, in whose light he now floated between the darkness at either end. He knew the darkness into which he’d exit differed from where he’d come in because it would be corrupted by his regret. The idea was to regret nothing: neither Gloria nor her children he’d accepted as his own nor the one or two he’d actually fathered with her.

There’d been a sense of receding since Tania’s annunciation; it was a tough act to follow. As he’d worked his way through his own early enthusiasm, that of his followers, and come to recognize that his army was already with him in its entirety; that he’d come up empty foraging for members even amid the Berkeley Left; that he hadn’t convinced political recruits so much as entranced true believers; that he’d done less to shape his enlistees into an army than they’d done to elevate him to its leadership, as he had come to see these things clearly, he’d also seen that his most incandescent vision had been realized as political theater rather than as a terrorist act. Its rulingclass victim had renounced her victimhood, disavowing the very self that had been victimized and thereby annulling the crime that millions had been convinced took place. Thus the SLA’s greatest success — the abduction and conversion of Alice Daniels Galton — a success that had brought it fame and notoriety and the power to make extortionate demands also clearly marked its limitations as well, for if Alice Daniels Galton was human enough to disappear into a new identity as one of the People, what did that say about the “fascist insect”? If the victim’s declaration that her ravishers were in fact heroes led to the People’s repudiation of her, what did that say about the People?

That it was the wrong time, place, ideology, and army everybody already knew. He’d sensed it since he saw a hundred doors in precarious dingbat apartment buildings and crappy bungalows close again and again on his primitive importuning, the gestures and cadence he’d learned in Buffalo from Reverend Borrows twinned with retread political oratory. The fearless Left covered its soft white ass, oh so politely. But while before there was always some residual feeling of hope, now, on at least one level, Cin knew he was totally fucked. Send the man out to procure field supplies using the local currency, easiest fucking thing in the world — oh what the fuck say he got sent to go shopping— and he tries to take some motherfucking socks off them. He walked back to the shack through the subtle unfamiliarity of the world, thinking about how losers seemed always to be packing up, how he’d been packing his bag up since the day he left Cleveland.