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"They reach far into your life, don't they?" she said.
"Annie—"
"What else did he have to say?"
"Nothing. Don't let a man like that wound you."
"I don't care about him. It's you. Do you think I aborted my own child on a horse?"
"I don't think anything."
"You do. It's in your face. Is she the person I thought she was? Was she an easy piece for those weird people back in Kansas?"
"I don't have a doubt in the world about who or what you are. Annie, you're everything to me."
She put her fork down on her plate and looked into the evening shadows on the yard.
"I don't think I can handle this," she said.
"There's nothing to handle. It's over. I just had to find out if he was wired into the government. The Treasury people told me he wasn't."
But she wasn't hearing me.
She looked down at her plate, then back at me again. Her eyes were wet and her chin was dented with tiny dimples.
"Dave, I feel just like I did the night that man put his hands on me."
"Your family is involved with the peace movement, and the FBI probably collected some gossip on you all. It doesn't mean anything. They have files on all kinds of people, most of it for no explainable reason. They followed Ernest Hemingway around for twenty-five years, even when he was receiving electroshock treatments right before his death. Joe Namath's and John Wayne's names were on a White House enemies list." I touched her on the arm and smiled at her. "Come on, who was more American than the Duke?"
"I was seventeen. He was a Mennonite student from Nebraska, working in the home-repair program in Wichita for the summer."
"You don't need to tell me this."
"No, goddamn it, I'm not going to have the lies of those people in our lives. I didn't tell him about the baby. He was too young to be a husband. He went back to school in Nebraska and never knew about it. When I was seven months pregnant we had a terrible electric storm at the farm. My parents had gone to town, and my grandfather was harrowing on the edge of an irrigation ditch. He was an old-order Mennonite and he harrowed with a team instead of a tractor. But he'd never quit work because of weather, unless it washed him right out of the field. I was watching him from the front porch, and I could see the wind blowing dust around him and lightning jumping all over the horizon. The sky was blue-gray, the way it gets in Kansas when you see tornadoes start spinning out of the earth, way off in the distance. Then a bolt of lightning hit a cottonwood tree next to the irrigation ditch, and I saw him and the team and the harrow topple over the side.
"I ran across the field in the rain. He was under the harrow, with his face pressed down in the mud. I couldn't get him out, and I thought he was going to suffocate. I cleaned the dirt out of his mouth and nose and put my shirt under his head. Then I got one of the mules untangled from the harness. The phone in the house was dead, and I had to ride four miles down the road to a neighbor's house to get help. I miscarried in their front yard. They put me in the back of a pickup with a roof on it and drove me to the hospital in Wichita. I almost bled to death on the way."
"You're one hell of a girl, Annie."
"Why did that man tell you those things?"
"He wanted to rattle me, get my mind on something else. He figured he had one play left, and he was going to take it."
"I feel afraid for you."
"You shouldn't. Four of them are dead, and I'm still walking around. When I was in Vietnam I used to try and think everything through. Then one day a friend told me, 'Forget the complexities. The only thing that counts is that you're still on top of the ground, sucking air.'"
"Except you don't believe that."
"A person has to act and think in the way that works for him. I can't control all this bullshit in my life. I didn't deal any of it. In fact, I tried to deal myself out. It didn't work out that way."
I saw the sadness in her eyes, and I took her hands in mine.
"The only thing I'm sorry about is having brought problems into your life," I said. "It's the cop's malaise."
"Any problems I have with you are problems I want."
"You don't understand, Annie. When I told you about Biloxi I made you an accessory after the fact. So when I came over here this evening, I guess I did know what I have to do. I'd better go now. I'll call later."
