Me and Champ are hiding out, easing along. He’s across the parking lot under the trees right now, talking to a couple of guys about guitars. I’m sitting at one of the picnic tables in the yard. Today is the first day it’s warm enough to sit outside. Until now we’ve been eating in the cramped dining room or in the basement, if there’s no space at one of the three tables upstairs. We come here six days a week for lunch. The church opens its back door at eleven in the morning, where we line up with our trays, then we’re all kicked out by two. The food’s not great, but it’s good enough. Very nice of the parson, and me and Champ appreciate it. Helps us get by.
It’s been four months now we’ve been on the run, lying low. Four months since the cops grabbed all the rest of them. Lucky for us we were on an excursion when it all came down. Of course, anyone who can read a newspaper or has a TV knows all about it. That’s how me and Champ learned what had happened, saw it on TV in the motel room. First they busted into our sweatshop in New Mexico and liberated the hostages, then a couple of hours later they hit Matt’s house in Boston. You’ve got to commend them for a good operation. Now, with the trial getting close, you know how itchy they are to get their hands on the couple they missed.
I met Matt three years ago. He had a storefront then, and his organization was called The Labor Brigade. I was a dishwasher in the restaurant down the street and I went in there one day to ask for a job. I figured a place called The Labor Brigade would get me a decent job. There were a couple of girls stuffing envelopes, and I told one of them, turned out to be Sylvia, what I wanted. She laughed and said they had lots of work, but they didn’t pay. Strictly volunteer. I said something rude and left. Back scraping plates in the restaurant I was telling Fizz, my co-worker, about it, and he told me all about The Labor Brigade. “They fight for our rights,” he said. “Look at us, slaving at minimum wage and never getting enough hours to make anything. More than twenty-five hours and they have to give us benefits, so we all work halftime. It’s the shits,” he said. “Those guys fight for us, and people like us all over the world.”
I was temporarily sharing a basement room with Fizz, sleeping on a single futon on the damp floor. At least, I told him it was temporary, but I’d been there four months and just couldn’t make enough money to get a place of my own. I worked irregularly, about twenty hours a week, and spent the rest of the time hanging out with Fizz or bumming quarters at the arcade. The next week I went back to the storefront and told them I’d work with them for a while. Just something to do.
Matt’s a young guy, late twenties, just a couple of years older than me, but he ran this big operation. He’s kind of tall and lanky with a gaunt face and curly brown hair. Turns out his old man’s a fat-cat lawyer-type working for a couple of big corporations making bags of money, and Matt is, or was, on some kind of monthly allowance. That’s how he got started, and he fights the very organizations his father works for. He told me that he and his father can’t stand each other, and argue about everything, but the one time I met his father he told me he was very proud of his son, and the work we were all doing. Go figure.
They started me off folding mail-outs, stuffing envelopes, licking stamps, and carrying stuff to and from the post office. Fizz was right about their mission. Back then they were mainly focused on the migrant worker issues of California. There was a policy brewing that would prevent illegal immigrants from getting access to any of the social services in California. Matt’s contention was that California depended on the illegal workers, needed them for the economy to run, and they were therefore entitled to all the benefits of any American worker. It was an uphill battle that was eventually lost, but that was the fight we were in.
Besides Matt, the organization had two fulltime employees, Sylvia and Bernard, who got paid a subsistence wage, and about eight or ten volunteers, some of whom worked full time and others I never even saw, who did telephone work from home. Matt spent most of his time on the telephone or away from the office in Washington DC and other places, lobbying politicians and corporations and talking with other groups like ours. One day I asked him what he got out of all this, and he looked at me and said, “What do you get out of it?” When I didn’t answer he went back to what he was doing.
Sylvia is another weird case. She has kind of a horsy face but a body to die for, and long black shiny hair. Her dad is also rich. He owns a string of newspapers around the country and was getting big into the Internet. He’d sent her to Brown, but she’d met Matt and eventually dropped out of school to live with him in Boston. He calls her our media maven, and she spends hours each day reading and criticizing her father’s publications, as well as others, writing almost daily articles pointing out the biased reporting, the under coverage of important social issues, the blatant falsities printed and reprinted as fact. Most of her pieces didn’t get published, but she told me that she was collecting them for a book. Her father had long ago cut her off, so she was a rich girl struggling with poverty. She and Matt had broken up the previous year, but she stuck with the organization and the cause.
The person I liked to hang out with the most was Bernard. I guess he’s a computer geek, but I liked him a lot. He’d let me sit beside him at the computer and he’d explain what he was doing and how he knew what to do. I think I learned a lot from him, but I’m still no good at computers. He spent most of every day searching the Internet for information relevant to our cause, and editing it then compiling it into The Labor Brigade’s monthly newsletter. He was also always working on our web site, putting in new links to other sites, and coding flashy little eye-catchers. That was his day job. It was at nighttime that he did the fun stuff, hacking into the computer systems and web sites of the corporations whose labor practices we found fault with. Getting in initially was a very tedious process involving a lot of guessing and poking and probing, and the use of password-busters and encryption-busters, code he either wrote or found on the web. But once he was in it was paradise. We cruised the email, the on-line diaries, inter-office memos, everything you can imagine. We came and went softly, leaving as few footprints as possible. If the access was via the web we used a different service provider for each excursion. I thought we would become buddies, me and Bernard, but we never did. He never wanted to go for a beer or to the arcade. He just hung out at the office, living on pizza and cola, and kept the information coming in.
*
Me and Champ live in the woods. He has a small tent and if it’s raining hard I share it with him, but mostly I sleep under a tarp in the trees. His tent is an animal’s den, with dirty clothes and garbage in every corner. Both of us pretty much stink, so sleeping in the same confined space isn’t much of a pleasure. Besides, Champ snores. Hygiene is a problem when you live in the woods. I wash every day at the church, but we’re not allowed to do our laundry in the bathroom sink, so even though I get pretty clean, my clothes are rank. This town sucks for panhandling, so it’s hard to scrape together enough to spare anything on the Laundromat, although I did that once. Basically, whatever money I manage to get I give to Champ for tobacco. I’m afraid he’ll get desperate and hold up a convenience store some day, and that will be the end for us. Champ’s not too smart, although he’s pretty cagey. I think the reason we stay together is that neither of us trusts the other. I figure if I can keep Champ out of trouble we’ll be okay.
Champ showed up at our Boston offices at an opportune moment. It was the day after Bernard had downloaded a video clip of David Snyder, the CEO of Silko Inc., announcing a big wage increase to his labor force in Bangladesh. There he was on a podium with the American and Bangladeshi flags behind him, blowing somehow in an indoor breeze, spewing all the usual rhetoric about global trade and communal values. The raise of 5 percent was a big number in a worthless currency, and turned out to be a one penny an hour increase, from twenty cents to twenty-one. Matt watched this performance and went ballistic. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “You son of a bitch! I’ll have you stitching polyester shit together seventy hours a week for twenty fucking cents an hour! You pompous, nation-raping, child-abusing, son of a bitch!”
So the next day Champ walks in. He’s a big guy, and ugly. He was an odd sight looming in the doorway, dressed in black tattered denim and blacker more tattered leather with long greasy hair tied behind with a shoelace. “I’m with you guys,” he growled. “I read about you over in Minnesota, and figured you needed some help.” We all just looked at him in silence. “I hate those fuckers more’n you do,” he said.
Matt pointed his chin in his direction. “You got a gun?”
“Damn right,” said Champ, and he pulled a man-sized pistol out of his jacket.
“Let’s talk,” said Matt, and he and Champ went for a walk in the park. That day was the last in the life of The Labor Brigade. We closed up shop and moved into Matt’s garage. At least, most of us did. Four of the volunteers were told the organization had folded, so thanks and goodbye.
The new organization was dubbed the World Labor Organization as a poke at the World Trade Organization, and it had a more radical agenda than its predecessor. We went underground. We met frequently, but not regularly, and not always in Matt’s garage. All written communications were to be encrypted, no cell phones, no chatter with strangers. We had a new mission, dangerous and illegal. The few of us who were employed elsewhere quit and began working fulltime for the WLO and were paid living expenses and a small stipend. We were going to build a secret sweatshop, and the employees were going to be kidnapped senior executives of the companies that ran third world sweatshops. Matt sent Max and Myrtle, the only married couple in the organization, off in their VW camper to find the spot. We agreed that, although we were going to pretend the sweatshop was in Latin America someplace, it was really going to be in the States. Bernard was given the task of finding out everything possible about the CEOs of a long list of target corporations, while Matt and Sylvia began planning the strategy, the media campaign, etc.
Matt wanted four forced employees in his sweatshop. If we only got one or two we’d just be labeled as crazies; three or four would make us an organization to recon with. Clearly the best strategy would be to grab them all at once, but we hadn’t the manpower for that. So, Matt wanted to plan the four kidnappings in advance, then execute them all one after the other. It was a good plan, but it didn’t work out that way. Anyway, Champ and me were told to hang loose for a while, and to spend some time with Bernard and Sylvia figuring how the snatches might be pulled off. I spent as much time as possible looking over Bernard’s shoulder, but he ignored me, he was so intent on his new mission.
Champ lived in a tent back then, too. He’s really quite a radical guy, paranoid, you might say. He believes that big corporations followed his, and everyone’s, every move. He told me that any given Tuesday someone could log onto a computer in New York or Singapore and know what I’d eaten for dinner, where I’d spent the night, how much cash was in my jeans, and which way it was hanging that morning. Maybe he’s right. So he lives without a bank account, a social security number, a job, or a girl friend. He eats when and where he can, bathes as little as possible, and rolls his own. He’s been arrested three times but never spent a night in jail. I asked him where he got his nickname and he told me proudly that he’d been the street fighting champion in his high school in Fresno, and had kept the title in every city he’d been to since. I told him that I didn’t know there was such a competition, and he just said, “Figures.”
Champ has three scars on his face and four more that he showed my by taking off his shirt. He has a knife wound across his left cheek from ear to gullet and another just below the other eye. There is a bullet wound just below his left nipple and a scar from a machete across his belly. The scar that runs the length of his right bicep is cleverly worked into a tattoo of a Celtic sword, and his back is welted by a series of lashings his father had given him with a bullwhip. When I asked about broken nose and vertical scar in the center of his forehead he told me that was from walking drunk into the edge of an open door. It was two weeks before I could get him to tell me about the broken front tooth. He’d been having a thing with a woman who wore a wedding ring, and when she told him she was breaking off their relationship he got a bit rough and she slugged him in the face, her diamond ring taking out half his tooth. He’s not too proud of that one.
*
Pastor Hee-haw runs the church here. I found out his name is Herbert Haw, but when I heard him laugh one day, the name made sense. He’s a skinny, middle-aged guy with a long graying ponytail, and a ferret face. Not an unkind face, really, but sharp and pointy with beady eyes. His wife is the solid, plain mid-west farm girl, with no sense of humor that I can see. She has long blonde hair that you know is all hers, and she keeps it hanging in a hank over one shoulder or the other covering one of her big breasts. There aren’t many women I’ve seen that I didn’t want to sleep with, but she’s one of them. There’s kind of a cold intensity about her that would take the starch out of anyone. Gives me the shivers, really. She and Pastor Hee-haw have no kids, so maybe he feels the same way. Champ thinks I’ve got it backwards, and she’s grown cold and bitter because he’s such a useless weenie. Who knows? Personally, I sort of like the guy.
Anyway, Pastor Hee-haw’s a frustrated lecher, you can just tell. There are usually thirty, forty people that show up for lunch, and almost half of them are women. Some with kids, but mostly not, some with men, but mostly not. They probably have men someplace, but they’re mostly on their own, or in pairs or groups. I guess they live in shacks and low rental places around town, I don’t know. Me and Champ don’t talk too much to anyone because we don’t want any questions. Women would complicate our already complicated life. Champ is probably always the worst dressed and dirtiest person in the church, and I’m somewhere near the bottom myself, but almost everyone is dressed pretty rough. The women mostly wear long, faded skirts and loose blouses, bangles and big boots. They have hair everywhere and a couple of regulars have broken or missing teeth. Nevertheless, Pastor Hee-haw is always sidling up to them and trying to make small talk. They’re nice to him, of course, ‘cause he’s feeding them, but there’s something unsavory about the guy, and we all see it. Maybe he gets lucky once in a while. It’s hard to tell.
So, the other day it was cold and wet and the turnout was pretty light. We were all crammed into the dining room and Pastor Hee-haw came in and decided he wanted to say grace. Usually there is no grace, we just get our food and eat it, but this day the guy was inspired, I guess. Anyway, there is a small stage in the dining room, just a ledge, really, at the front, and he stood up on it, and said we should bow our heads in prayer. So most stopped eating, and some bowed their heads and closed their eyes. Well, it turns out that right there in front of the pastor is this young hippie girl, who has just taken off her big winter coat, and is sitting there in a little halter top and not much else, with curves and round flesh anyone would die for. The poor old pastor is looking right down on her, probably isn’t much he can’t see, and he’s trying to mumble some thanks for the food. You can see his eyes bulging out of their narrow little sockets behind his granny glasses and sweat running down to the end of his ferret nose while this cute young thing is staring up at him adoringly. “… Thank you Lord for this, thy bounty, which you’ve bestowed upon me in such generous proportions…” The guy just went on and on not wanting to give up the view, I guess. Finally his wife came in and understood instantly what was happening. She gave a mighty cough which halted the pastor in mid-sentence. Everyone, including the girl, laughed as Pastor Hee-haw made his exit, then we got back to what we’d come for.
*
It took Max and Myrtle about a month to find the right place, but finally we got the encrypted message we were waiting for. Everyone but Bernard piled into Matt’s van and we drove down to New Mexico to check it out. It turned out to be an abandoned copper mine about thirty miles east of Las Cruces, in the middle of nowhere, down fifteen miles of rutted track. The place had about a dozen buildings of which only two were serviceable. The mine itself had been dynamited shut, so there was no way into the shaft. It was perfect. We told the owner we were doing some research for the auto industry and wanted a one-year lease on the place. He just shrugged and took the cash. There was no electricity, or water, the tin roofs leaked, and wind blew through holes in the walls. It would be a hundred and twenty in the summer and freezing in the winter. Like I said, it was perfect.
We spent a couple of days designing our sweatshop, or maquila, as these things are called, then quietly began ferrying out all the supplies and tools and lumber the work crew would need. We got a gas-powered electric generator and four barrels of gas, an enormous propane fridge and stove, and six big bottles of propane. We loaded the fridge with food for a month then Sylvia, Matt, Champ and me drove back to Boston. We figured the maquila would be ready in a month, so we needed to get cracking.
Of course, target Numero Uno is David Snyder, CEO of Silko, Inc., since he inspired the whole thing, but there were about forty others on the list. The Internet is a wonderful tool for criminals. Bernard had the goods on about fifteen of them: where they lived, where they ate, who they lived with, where their kids went to school, what their security arrangements were at home and at the office. We knew where they traveled, what they liked to drink, what kind of cars they drove, even their waist- and shoe-size. For seven of them he managed to hack into their office systems and show us their calendars. Of the fifteen, we chose four: the two worst offenders, Snyder and Milt Draper, CEO of Megaton, plus Richard Brown, president of Clothes Horse, and Sam Stoner, CEO of Mix ‘n Match. All were in the clothing business and all used exclusively sweatshop labor in the third world. Megaton was by far the worst offender, with the rest in the top twenty. There were two female CEOs that we could have chosen, but we figured that would just complicate things. We all admitted to enough chauvinism to let them off.
Me and Champ were to be the heavies and Sylvia the wheel. We spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to nab Snyder and finally decided it had to be from his house. Trouble was, we didn’t know much about his house, so we piled into Matt’s van and drove out to Portland, Oregon, which is where Silko, Inc. is located, to case the place. Snyder lived in a walled estate above the river in a ritzy neighborhood. We got a cheap motel down by the freeway and began rotating through six-hour shifts watching the house and learning the neighborhood.
There were only two entrances to the Snyder estate, one a gate for automobiles and the other for pedestrians. They were adjacent and both could be opened by remote control from the inside or outside, or with a key. Mounted above each gate was a video camera that was, undoubtedly, monitored by a security person inside. Further scrutiny revealed two cameras at each corner of the property. They were mounted on top of the corner-posts, one looking in each direction along of the wall. There seemed to be no alarms besides those on the gates. During the day a team of gardeners came and went through the pedestrian gate. By watching them closely Champ determined that they were unlocking the exit from the inside by pressing a button or lever in the wall a few feet to the left of the gate.
One night at about three in the morning I put a ladder up against one of the corner posts and Champ climbed up and stood on top of the wall, straddling the cameras, out of their field of view. Carefully I passed the ladder up to him and he placed it on the inside of the wall then leapt down into the grounds. He spent a few minutes finding the button that opened the pedestrian gate before he spent a half hour wandering around the yard.
Snyder was a family man, coming home most nights at about seven for dinner. We sat across the street and watched his black limo slide in through the gates. At about eight he and a couple of bodyguards would re-appear to go for a run along the river. By nine they’d come puffing up the hill together and disappear through the small gate for the night. We knew from his tax returns that Snyder had four employees living in the house, but we didn’t know if the two bodyguards were included in that count. It would make sense that he’d employ a cook and a housekeeper. His kids were eight and eleven, so there was probably no need for fulltime childcare. From the cameras we surmised that there was at least one security guard there all the time, and Snyder had a chauffeur. We guessed that his fellow joggers were the latter two, who probably took turns with the driving and security duties. This probably meant that there were no security personnel watching the monitors in the daytime, nor during the evening jogs.
The next evening all three of us were in the van, and after the trio loped past and the street was clear, I helped Champ get over the wall again with the ladder. He scouted around the back of the house and hid behind a laurel hedge. He heard the joggers return and then about fifteen minutes later Snyder came out alone onto the back patio in a dressing gown. He dropped the gown onto a chair and slipped naked into the hot tub. About ten minutes later a woman brought out a tray with a decanter and a glass, and set it down beside him. Champ heard him complain to her that she’d taken her time. He said it made him realize that the hot tub and Scotch was something Snyder did every evening. By midnight we were back in our room and the plan was hatched. We sent a message to Matt that the first duck was in the sights, then we drove to Oklahoma City to line up the second one, Milt Draper, CEO of Megaton.
*
I don’t have so much time to write anymore because I asked Pastor Hee-haw for a job and now he’s got both me and Champ busy all day. He told us he’d pay us five dollars a day to work around the church. I told him we’d do it if he’d feed us three meals a day. We settled on two meals a day, plus coffee in the morning. So now we work from nine until eleven, when the kitchen opens, then from two, when it closes, until five. So that’s only five hours a day. After the first day of just picking up trash around the yard and in the hedges and stuff, then burning it all in a barrel at the back of the property, we went for our money and Hee-haw handed me a five-dollar bill. When Champ asked for his the pastor said the deal was five bucks a day for both of us. Champ looked from me to him, his throat getting thick and his face red. “No fuckin’ way!” he snarled, and the pastor quickly handed him a stack of ones and muttered something about a misunderstanding.
“A buck an hour! A buck an hour,” fumed Champ on our way back to the tent that night, “and he thinks we should work for half of that. Some fuckin’ Christian he is. We should sic the WLO on his weasel ass.”
Anyway, Champ isn’t digging through ashtrays or scrounging smokes all the time now, and I feel a lot safer.
*
Of course Megaton is the biggest retailer in the world, and we had lots of information from Bernard about Draper. His was one of the calendars we had access to, so we knew everything about his past movements, and what was planned for the next few weeks. One curious thing we noticed was that he had every Tuesday afternoon blocked out without explanation. Champ said, “That’s when he bangs his girlfriend.” It turned out that Champ was right.
We spent three leisurely days driving down to Oklahoma then we got back into our routine watching our prospective victim around the clock. He is a fat old fart who stalks around with a sour look on his face. For the tenth richest man in the world he sure is a misery. A misery and a workaholic. He has two identical black limos, each driven and cared for by its own chauffeur/bodyguard. He left his house at six every morning in one car and was returned at about nine at night by the other. He seemed to spend every waking minute holed up in his office tower, a building we had no luck getting into. As we’d hoped, Tuesday was different. At one o’clock his limo emerged from beneath his building and drove across town. We followed it into the underground parking of an upscale apartment block that overlooked the Canadian River, then watched as Draper’s morning chauffeur escorted him into the elevator. I sauntered over and watched the lighted floor indicator blink up to the top floor, the seventh, where it stayed for about a minute before making its way back down. The chauffeur returned to his limo and drove away. While Champ scouted the outside of the building I took the elevator up to check out the seventh floor. There were only two apartments, penthouses I guess, off a long hallway with a stairwell at either end. I walked down the stairs and hung out in the van with Sylvia. At four the other limo arrived and in a couple of minutes the afternoon chauffeur descended with Draper and took him back to the office.
The three of us hung around Oklahoma City for another week. Champ tried several times to get onto the grounds of Draper’s house, but without success. The following Tuesday Sylvia dropped me and Champ off at the apartment block then went back to watch the office building. We stood in the stairwells behind the doors at either end of the seventh floor hallway, each door opened just a crack, and at one-twenty the elevator door opened and the chauffeur stepped into the hallway, gave it a quick glance, then stepped out of the way as Draper pushed past him and headed to his right towards Champ’s end. “See you tomorrow, Mr. Draper,” said the chauffeur before he returned to the elevator, but Draper paid him no mind. As the elevator door closed Draper was only about halfway down the hallway. When he got to the apartment door he found it unlocked. He entered unceremoniously, swinging the door closed behind him. Champ heard a deadbolt click home.
It had taken us almost two weeks, but we’d found the opening we needed.
Of course all of this was happening in November of 1999, which was when the World Trade Organization meeting with all the protests was happening in Seattle. By the first week in December the press coverage of the WTO was dying down and Matt was desperate to light a fire under it again by putting our plan into action. He thought Sylvia, Champ and me were taking way too long coming up with good kidnapping plans, and was hounding us every day to get out of Oklahoma City and on to Minneapolis, where Clothes Horse is located. We’d only been in Minneapolis sixteen hours, not long enough to do anything, when we got word that the maquila was ready, and we should go pick up Snyder. Sylvia and Matt had a heated telephone conversation that night, but Matt got his way. We would go with our initial two, then pick up two more in the New Year. So we loaded the van and headed back to the west coast.
*
Our labor arrangements with Hee-haw only lasted a couple of weeks. Our first real job was to scrape the peeling paint off all the exterior wood on the church and the parsonage, then to prime and paint it. Fortunately the buildings themselves are stucco, but that still leaves a lot of wood: the front and back steps, the porches, the door and window frames, and the eves. He got us ladders and wire brushes and scrapers. It took us two days just to finish the prep-work.
One day after lunch we were putting on the second coat of white trim and this hippie chick comes up and starts hanging around, talking to us. Lunch that day was the first time I’d ever seen her. We try to ignore her, but she’s kind of persistent and after a while she says she wants to help paint. I figure it’s a good way to get rid of her, so I hand her my paintbrush and head towards the grass under the trees. “No,” she says, “I don’t want to help you, I want to help him.” She means Champ. So I tell her that she’s got a brush, she can help him, but she puts it down in the paint tray and puts her arms around Champ’s back. “Hey!” he says, and she backs off. “Let me do the high stuff. Let me do the high stuff.” She could be fifteen, she could be twenty-one, I can’t tell, but she’s acting like a real kid. Finally, Champ picks her up from behind by the waist and swings her up onto his shoulders. She pulls her long skirt up around her thighs so it’s not over his face, then hangs onto his forehead.
She squeals as Champ squats down and picks up his brush in one hand and the bucket of white paint in the other. He hands her the brush, and walks over to the window frame he was painting and tells her to get busy. When she starts to apply the paint she begins to slide backwards off Champ’s shoulders. He’s got her by the ankles, but it’s not helping, so he reaches back with both of his hands and supports her under the butt. Now she’s giggling. We’ve masked off a two-inch strip on the window and the surrounding stucco, but she’s slopping paint on everything. “Hey,” yells Champ, “take it easy. You’re making a fucking mess.” He takes one hand off her butt long enough to take the brush away from her. Then he hands her a rag. “Wipe it off,” he says, returning his hand to the preferred spot. The paint comes off the glass easily enough, but the stucco’s going to be a problem.
Just then Mrs. Hee-haw stepped out onto the porch. “Put her down!” she yelled. “What do you think this is, a circus?” Champ scowled at the parson’s wife but didn’t say a word as he let go of girl and she slid down his back. He didn’t give me so much as a glance as he took the girl’s hand and they sauntered off around the church. I don’t know where he took her, but I hate to think it was his tent. Anyway, I never saw her again.
*
Two days later we arrived in Portland late, took a motel and slept until noon. After breakfast we checked out of the motel, packed the van, and drove over to Value Village to get a few supplies. We would need three ski masks, two cloth bags, a roll of twine, another of duct tape, a short rope with a clasp on the end, and a pair of handcuffs. We spent about an hour getting everything ready, then, while Sylvia went to a drug store, Champ watched me blow eleven bucks in the video arcade.
By seven we were parked in front of the Snyder house in the pouring rain. “Bet’cha he doesn’t run in the rain,” I said. “Bet’cha he does,” said Sylvia. At eight sharp, the gate opened and the trio of joggers appeared and headed down the road. As soon as they were out of sight Champ and I donned our masks, I got the ladder on the wall and Champ scaled it and disappeared. I put the ladder back into the van and me and Sylvia settled down to wait. Snyder and his men were back early, at eight-thirty, and we started watching the pedestrian gate for any sign of movement. At nine-ten Champ was there, giving us a curt wave to get our attention. We scanned the empty street then blinked the van’s interior light on and off. We saw Champ reach up and slide one of his bags over the camera, then open the gate. Out he came with a hooded, but otherwise naked, man in tow. As he crossed the street he pulled the string that was attached to the bag on the camera and handed it to me to reel in. I slid open the van’s door then closed it after them. I handed Champ the chloroform as Sylvia slid it into Drive, and we eased down the slick, dark streets and onto the freeway heading east.
Champ told us how it had gone. He’d taken up his position behind the laurels and waited. After about an hour Snyder appeared as he had the previous evening, but this time he was carrying his own booze. He left his wrap in the shelter of the porch and flipped a switch that turned on the jets of the hot tub then he quickly descended through the rain to the patio and slid into the water. Champ waited about five minutes to make sure no one was joining him and let him have a few sips from his glass, the last he’d be having for a while, then very slowly he crept around the hedge and crouched right behind his victim, the roar of the jets providing perfect cover. Snyder was playing with his glass in the water, letting it float away from him in the moving water then retrieving it to take another sip. In a single movement Champ wrapped one hand around Snyder’s mouth and with the other held a razor-edged blade to his throat. Snyder tensed but didn’t move. “You cry out, you say a word, and you’re dead, pal,” Champ whispered in his ear. “I was told to bring you dead or alive, and it doesn’t much matter to me. You understand? Nod if you understand.” Snyder nodded. “Okay,” said Champ, “then stand up real slow and step out here beside me. One false move and you’ll be wearing a smile you never wanted. Understand?” Again Snyder nodded, then slowly he pushed himself to his feet, Champ rising with him, keeping the knife to his throat and his mouth covered. “I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now,” Champ told him. “You keep it shut.” Quickly he stuffed a sock into Snyder’s mouth, slid a cloth bag over his head then bound it across the mouth with duct tape. “You still breathing?” he asked. Snyder nodded as Champ handcuffed his hands behind his back then slipped a noose around his neck and clipped the other end of the rope to the cuffs. “Let’s go,” he whispered, and, walking beside him, one hand on the rope at his neck, the other with the knife in his back, they made their way around the house to the gate.
It took us twenty-four hours of non-stop driving to get to Las Cruces, Sylvia and me switching off every few hours. Champ wrapped Snyder up in a couple of blankets, but kept him chloroformed the whole way. Snyder’s room was ready for him, and we dumped him on his cot and, leaving Max to watch him, the three of us headed for the bunkhouse for some shuteye.
The next morning, while Matt’s press release was being anonymously dropped off at the New York Times, Sylvia, Champ and me got our first look at the operation. It was pretty grim, but functional. In the middle of the big building were four workstations, each with a cutting table and a sewing machine. Electric cables ran across the floor from the electric generator in the corner of the room. A storeroom with a wooden floor had been converted into an outhouse, and in the outhouse, besides the crapper and a stack of Spanish newspapers, was a rusty barrel full of water with a ladle hanging from it. The sanitation facilities.
There were four windowless, variously sized rooms for the four laborers. Each was equipped with a cot, a table and chair, a bucket that was to serve as a chamber pot, and, built securely into the wall, an electronic device that had a heavily protected speaker and a coin slot. This ‘virtual child’ was Bernard’s invention. It’s function was to play screaming child noises until it had been fed a coin, and it was powered by a car battery that was recharged when the generator was running. In one of the top corners of each room a video camera and a floodlight had been installed behind an impregnable Plexiglas and wire screen.
I have a copy of the press release as it appeared in papers across the country:
1. The average wage of its workers in Asia, Africa, Central
and South America, and Mexico has reached $1.00 per hour.
2. At least one half of its manufacturing operations in those
regions have been allowed to begin union organization.
Mr. Snyder will be permitted a five minute video press release
every week until he is re-instated as CEO of Silko, Inc.
Signed: The World Labor Organization
The World Labor Organization is pleased to announce an
addition to its workforce. On Monday, December 13, 1999
Mr. David Snyder, previously the President and CEO of Silko,
Inc. of Portland, Oregon, joined our clothing manufacturing
operation in a secret location in the third world. Today Mr.
Snyder is being given the day to acclimatize, to become
familiar with his new surroundings, and to recover from his
arduous travel. Tomorrow, after a pregnancy test and five
minutes of job orientation, Mr. Snyder will commence his six-day,
sixty-nine hour work week sewing a variety of the polyester
garments that bear his previous company’s logo. Mr. Snyder has
taken a pay-cut from the $23,921 per hour he reportedly earned
last year to $.32 per hour, which is the average wage Silko,
Inc. pays its third world workers according to a recent survey
conducted by The Human Rights Watch of Washington DC. He will
work eleven and a half hour shifts six days a week with occasional
forced overtime to support himself and his two virtual children.
He will be allowed two five minute bathroom breaks per day plus
a fifteen-minute lunch break. No talking with his co-workers
will be permitted, and slow or shoddy workmanship will be
discouraged with beatings. Mr. Snyder’s employment will
continue until his ex-company, Silko Inc. has met the following
conditions:
*
Last Sunday me and Champ were hitchhiking into the town here to do a bit of panhandling. It’s about three miles and we’d walked almost half of that when a guy in a red Chevy Suburban pulled over. But instead of just opening the door for us he got out and came around to the side of the road to talk to us. “Where you going?” he asked. He was a middle-aged guy in blue jeans and not much hair.
“Just into town,” I told him.
“You sober?”
“Well, sure,” I said, looking from him to Champ. “We got no money.”
“How ‘bout weapons? Got a gun or switchblade hiding in there someplace?” He was talking to both of us, but looking at Champ.
“What d’ya take us for?” I said, “a couple of banditos? We’re just hitching into town.”
“You can’t be too careful picking up hitchhikers these days,” he said. Champ was looking at his truck then looking up at the sky. I walked over to get in but the guy held his ground. “Your friend here,” he said to me, “he got any weapons on him?”
“’Course not,” I said. I turned to Champ. “Tell him I’m right.”
Champ scowled at the two of us, then reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a penknife. He opened the tiny blade and started to clean beneath his fingernails. “Figured I’d slit your fucking throat, man, with this here Gurka knife. Know what I mean?” Then he pushed past us muttering, “Piss-ant weenies” and continued to walk into town.
*
Of course Champ was armed to the teeth. He always carried two pistols and his switchblade. He had at least one more gun that he left in the tent. I’d never seen the penknife before. Anyhow, back in New Mexico… I wanted to stick around to see how David Snyder did at the sewing machine, but Matt wouldn’t have it, and by noon that Monday we were headed to Oklahoma to nab our next employee. “You’ve got a date with Draper in twenty-four hours,” Matt told us. “Don’t be late.”
At one o’clock the next day Champ and I were in position. We had ski masks over our faces and each of us had a pistol. Although we felt we needed the guns to convince Draper we were serious I insisted that they not be loaded. Champ was disgusted, but I think he agreed. As far as I know neither of us was prepared to kill anyone. Suddenly the elevator chimed and the door slid open. The chauffeur did his thing and withdrew. Champ waited until Draper was three feet from the apartment, then he calmly opened his door, pointed his pistol at Draper’s face and said quietly, “Not a sound, Mr. Draper.” In a flash the old man slapped Champ’s gun away from his face, bellowed, “Mopsy! Call the cops!” and hightailed it down the hallway towards me. Just as Champ began to give chase the apartment door opened and a thirty-year-old woman dressed in red silk nothings and fluffy red mules burst into the hallway and screamed. Champ stopped short, whirled and made a grab for her, but she was too quick. She ducked his flying arm and scrambled back through her door, slamming it hard on his outstretched fingers. Champ’s shoulder hit the door next, and in a second he had screaming Mopsy by the neck with his good hand firmly over her mouth. In the meantime I had tackled Draper and had him face down on the carpet in a hammerlock, with the muzzle of my gun pressed hard into his neck. “Squeak and you’re both dead,” I growled in my best growl, and he seemed to believe me.
Champ dragged Mopsy down the hall then managed to get the gag we’d intended for Draper into her mouth and bound with duct tape. He then bound her hands together behind her back with more of the stuff and dragged her, still struggling, through the exit door into the stairwell. I kept the pressure up on Draper while Champ wound forty feet of duct tape around Mopsy, securing her tightly to the handrail. He then knelt at Draper’s head and forced a ball of duct tape into his mouth then stretched a piece across his quivering lips. At Champ’s signal, I eased up on Draper and told him to get to his feet. As I forced his arm as high up his back as possible, Champ slipped a cloth sack over his head followed by a noose as he’d done with Snyder. Leaving Mopsy squirming hard against her bonds we descended the fourteen flights of stairs to the parking level, me in the lead checking every corner, and Champ following with a tight grip on Draper’s neck.
We didn’t want to burst into the parking garage if there were any witnesses there, so Sylvia and I were carrying low-power walkie-talkies that we’d picked up in the kids department at Walmart. “All clear?” I asked, leaning heavily against the door. “Wait!” she said. “There are people just walking out to their car.” In fifteen seconds Champ and Draper had arrived. He gave me a hard look. “We’re waiting,” I whispered. The seconds crept past. “Now?” “No. Wait. They’re just getting in. Another few seconds.” Through the door we suddenly heard a car engine. “Now?” “No! Another couple just got off the elevator. The first car is gone, but now…” Suddenly Sylvia was drowned out by an enormous caterwauling from up the stairwell. Somehow Mopsy had gotten loose, at least gotten her mouth loose, and she was screaming at the top of her lungs. “POLICE! POLICE! CALL THE POLICE!” There was a clattering above us. Mopsy was on her way down.
“Sylvia, we’ve got to come now. Someone’s coming.”
“No! There are people just twenty feet from the door!”
“Then get them out of the way. Get your van around here, right here. Right now. We’re coming out in five seconds!”
We heard a squeal of tires over Mopsy’s screams, and I pushed through the door. The van was just five feet away, and I sprang for its sliding door and cranked it open just in time for Champ to bundle Draper through it. He pulled the door shut behind him and I jumped into the passenger seat beside Sylvia. “Now, go!”
Sylvia slowly backed the van down a ramp to turn around. I looked frantically behind me. Champ had Draper on the floor and was lying on top of him as he groped around with his broken fingers for the chloroform. Through the side window I could see a couple at their car watching us curiously. “Step on it, Sylvia,” I growled, ducking down in my seat. She put it into drive and we slowly bumped up the ramp into the sunshine. “There will be cops here in thirty seconds,” I snapped at her.
“All the more reason to take it easy,” she said. “Just shut up and let me drive.” She pulled up to the traffic light at the end of the block, then signaled a right turn and merged into the traffic. About five blocks down the street she got into the left lane and signaled a left turn. We had to wait for almost a minute to cross the traffic.
“What are you doing? We’re supposed to go straight!” I was yelling now. “The freeway’s right there ahead of us.”
“Alternate route,” she said, glancing back at Champ. “We’re taking the alternate route.”
“Who the fuck says?” I leaned over to grab the wheel. She slapped me hard across the face.
“Champ, help me out here,” she snapped, and in an instant Champ’s arms were around me, wrestling me back into my seat. Suddenly three cop cars, sirens wailing, were flying down the street towards us. Sylvia was just about to make her turn, but she waited for them to pass, then calmly crossed behind them into the residential street. “If the cops are alerted,” she said, “we stay off the freeways. That’s where they’ll be looking for us.”
“All right, all right,” I said, shrugging off Champ’s embrace. “You’re right. Let’s just cruise out of here.”
About fifteen minutes later the houses thinned out and we were on a country road winding west through bare winter fields. Sylvia produced an exquisitely detailed map of eastern Oklahoma from under her seat and gave me the task of navigation. After about an hour we pulled into a one-pump gas station and Sylvia went in and bought some ice for Champ’s broken fingers that were looking like blue cucumbers. It was dark before we crossed the state line into Texas, and I headed us towards Lubbock, where we thought we’d finally be safe taking the freeways. We arrived at the maquila just before dawn, to face a frantic Matt. We were six hours later than expected.
*
Of course, we were all over the news. With the Snyder snatch we’d had enormous coverage, but, by nabbing Draper we’d created an international incident. On Thursday morning, when our press release, announcing yet another addition to our workforce, hit the streets, there was no one who didn’t know about it. The World Labor Organization was as famous as the PLO and Greenpeace, and was universally vilified. All around the world, labor rights organizations and activists joined in denouncing us. The response was so swift and uniform that Matt flew up to Boston to add the voice of The Labor Brigade to the chorus, figuring that silence would bring him unwanted attention. The only praise we got was from where we didn’t want it: two anarchist groups in Canada, a few from around the states, and someone from Indonesia got a letter to the editor printed in the Washington Post. Nevertheless we knew that, secretly, the whole world was rejoicing. We were doing what every labor organization wanted to do, but felt it couldn’t. In the end they were all trying to play the crooked game that was controlled by politics and money. We had suddenly raised the ante so high they were all out of the game. Only the big boys were left.
On the day we kidnapped Draper, Snyder’s company offered a half-million dollar reward for information leading to his release. Two days later Megaton offered five million for Draper and the capture of the perpetrators. CNN said that the FBI had dropped all other cases to work on this one. The atmosphere around the maquila was both euphoric and grim. We were in it now, up to our necks. Sylvia demanded that we take no further action, do nothing but monitor the situation for at least a month. We were only two weeks from the millennium change, and who knew what havoc that would bring? It only made sense to lie low. Matt disagreed, but said we should give it a week. One week for things to cool down then the three of us would go up to Minneapolis to get Richard Brown. In the meantime there was lots of work for us to do with our two captives.
They were like day and night. Snyder invariably took the path of least resistance. He did everything he was told and never said a word. Draper resisted everything. He was drugged when we unbound him and put him into his cot to sleep it off. Five hours later he announced his return to consciousness by breaking a leg off the table in his room and using it to destroy his furniture, then to try to beat down the two-inch metal door that kept him incarcerated. On the video monitor we were able to watch him go at it for almost half an hour, until he collapsed into a corner. He sat there huffing and puffing, eyeing the camera he’d been unable to disable. “Sons of bitches. You sons of bitches.”
One of the rules of the maquila as that the captives would never see our faces and never hear our real voices. Therefore the PA system, through which they were mostly addressed, was electronically distorted. As Draper sat muttering in his corner he heard his first words since his capture, and they didn’t sound human. Matt said, “Of course, you will pay for the destroyed furnishings out of your wages, Mr. Draper.” Draper leapt to his feet and exhausted himself by wailing the table leg against the video camera’s protective shield. When he stopped for a breather, panting pathetically up at us, Matt intoned, “I assure you it is quite indestructible.” Draper dropped his weapon, pulled the torn mattress off the broken frame of the cot, flopped down on it and fell asleep.
In the mean time Snyder was working his second day at the sewing machines. He had spent all of Monday in his cell except for a single trip to the bathroom so he could empty his chamber bucket. He’d been fed three small meals of tortilla, beans, and rice with water and a can of coke to wash it down. Through the PA system Matt had given him a brief explanation of why he was there, read the press release that ran in the New York Times, and told him to read the documents in the file on his table. When he had finished the reading there was a document he was to sign acknowledging that he had read and understood the contents of the file. The file contained reports that exhaustively documented the working and living conditions of the employees of Silko, Inc. There were over a hundred pages of testimonials that described the grueling work schedule, the overbearing and unscrupulous overseers, the endless minor extortions, the forced overtime, the destruction of family life that the seventy hour work week caused, and finally, the inability to live on the wages paid and the unavailability of any other work due to the gigantic presence of the maquilas in these politically bankrupt regions of the world. The file contained copies of the hundreds of ignored proposals and pleas presented to Silko Inc. on how to improve the lives of its workers, and reports from international and national labor groups decrying Silko’s labor practices, their union busting, political manipulations and graft. Snyder apparently read every page and when he finished he signed the last page and returned the file to the table without a word.
On Tuesday morning at six a.m. he was awakened via the PA system and five minutes later escorted by a masked Max to the lavatory then on to the dining room (a cubbyhole with a table and four chairs) where he ate a tortilla and beans and black instant coffee. He was allowed to return to his cell until seven o’clock, at which time Max, his voice distorted by a device inside his mask, explained to him how to cut and sew the Hawaiian shirts that were this week’s project. Max and Myrtle switched off every two hours, and on the first day were very patient with Snyder as he quietly tried to learn the rudiments of sewing. After lunch Max proudly donned his trainee’s first wearable shirt and paraded about the maquila. At seven-thirty, after two five-minute bathroom breaks and a fifteen-minute break for lunch, Snyder was paid ninety-three cents in American coins. Max explained to him that this was thirty-two cents an hour for eleven and a half hours, less twenty-five cents for breakfast, fifty cents each for lunch and the dinner he was about to receive, another fifty cents for the virtual bus ride to and from the factory, and a dollar for the daily rent of his squalid room, that by rights he should be sharing with four other people. After dinner, back in his cell, Matt informed him over the PA that for that night only he would be spared his two virtual children, but starting the next night he would find that he needed most of what was left of his wages to feed them. If there was anything else that he wanted, anything at all, he only had to ask for it. If he could afford it, he could have it. He added that funeral expenses for virtual children were very high and the death of a virtual child might result in the loss of work, which would probably lead to his starvation.
*
Would we have gone that far? I doubt it. None of us was crazy. Torture and murder were not our game. But it’s funny what happens to people once they cross the line. We’d been dedicated, law-abiding labor rights activists who’d given up months and years of our lives for a just cause. Suddenly we’d given up much more. Now we were serious criminals, by any definition. How far we’d push now that we had so little to lose had become a real question. Each of us probably would have given a different answer. I think, of everyone, I had the most reservations about it all. It had seemed daring and fun when we were planning it, but seeing these pathetic gray men being so humiliated and bullied didn’t sit right with me, no matter what they were responsible for. I had a feeling that the most we could accomplish would be token gestures and empty promises. Matt argued that we’d already accomplished enough to make any outcome worth it: we’d given the labor practices of these companies too much press for them to survive. Consumers were already massing behind the cause, and, despite their condemnation, other labor groups and analysts, suddenly with more press than they’d ever dreamed of, were exhaustively enumerating and discussing the issues. We’d already won.
“If we’ve won,” I told him, “then let’s go home. Let’s all skip while we still can.” Every one of them condemned me. We were going to hold the course. They eyed me warily. “Okay,” I told them. “I’m in.”
*
Milt Draper made life difficult for everybody, especially himself. While he slept after his rampage a meal of beans and rice was slipped into his room. Upon awakening he smunched the whole mess onto the camera encasement, which largely obscured our view of him. Matt told him that that was his last free meal. The next one would be lunch on his first day of work. He then delivered his welcome message, explaining to Draper why we’d brought him here and what was required for him to be released. Draper sat unmoving in his corner staring at his feet. Suddenly Champ entered the room. He silently placed a file folder on the floor before Draper then used a cloth to wipe away the food that was impairing our view. After Champ had left the cell Matt instructed Draper to read the contents of the file then to sign the last page. Draper leaned forward, grabbed the file, and methodically began to rip each page into tiny pieces without giving them so much as a glance. As he ripped Matt spoke to him quietly. “Mr. Draper, you should know that help is very far away. The FBI is looking for you, but they have no idea where to begin. They haven’t even guessed what part of the world you are in. In the mean time, we, who do know where you are, don’t like you and would be quite happy if you were dead. We believe the world would be a much better place if you weren’t in it. For most trash, if one looks hard enough, one can find a use, and we have found a use for you, as I’ve already explained. So, be useful to us and you will live and even return to your miserable life pretty much as you left it. If you don’t cooperate we will gladly put you out of your misery. We are fanatics with a very clear agenda. We want you to understand this.” It took Draper an hour to shred every sheet.
We left him alone for twenty-four hours with no food or water. He spent most of that time curled up on his mattress. Then Matt sent Champ in again with another folder of documents, but this time with a couple of other items. Champ placed the folder in front of Draper and nudged him with his black-booted toe. Draper sat up and glared mutely at Champ, hooded in black, who moved away to stand in the middle of the room. In his right hand he held a pair of pliers and in the other a pair of tin-snips. For five minutes the two stared silently at each other, then Matt’s voice came in over the loudspeaker. “Mr. Draper, for your safety and security you must cooperate with us. The sooner you do the sooner you’ll be released. We do not wish to use violence, but I believe you know that we are capable of it. The man before you is Jesus. He’s a good man. Very obedient. I have instructed him to remove a small inessential piece of your body, a piece of his choosing, every twenty-four hours, starting in half an hour, until you comply with our simple demands. You have been warned. It should take you no longer than four hours to read the material we’ve given you. At that time there will be a short quiz. Jesus will keep you company while you read.” That got the ball rolling. The next day there were two sewing machine operators.
*
Champ has this thing about the parson’s wife. Ever since the hippie chick, he’s been watching her, following her, talking about her. We long ago quit our job, so there’s no reason for us to be hanging around here all the time, but that’s what we’re doing. Today he just walked right up to her and said, “Mrs. Hee-haw, you’re looking very pretty today.” I couldn’t believe it. She smiled demurely as if it were a compliment and turned away. You know that Champ must be the ugliest, smelliest brute she’s ever seen, but I’m sure he had her blushing. He tells me that she’s a lonely woman. “Lonely, maybe,” I snort, “but not desperate!” He gives me a hurt look. “You don’t find me attractive?” That cracked us both up.
So he makes me a bet. He bets he can get the parson’s wife into bed within forty-eight hours.
“What we betting?” I can’t believe my ears.
“What you got?”
We empty our pockets. Less than four bucks between us. So that’s the bet. It doesn’t matter anyway, since I’m back to giving him all my money for smokes.
Champ leaps to his feet and beats his chest, a most unlikely Don Juan. I tell him he should brush his teeth so he borrows my toothbrush.
*
On Snyder’s seventh day, which is Draper’s fifth, it was time for the weekly video press release. Sylvia tacked a white sheet up against the wall in the dining room and after dinner Snyder was told to sit in the straight-backed chair in front of it. Matt had reminded both of them the day before that this was going to happen so they could prepare for it. The promise was that they could say anything they wanted to, anything at all, for five minutes, and we’d get it to the media. The only rule was they had to stay seated. Once they stood up the performance was over. We wanted to give no hints about our location by showing any part of the maquila, not even the wall behind them.
Snyder surprised us all by just sitting there. He didn’t say a word or make a gesture. He just stared straight at the camera. The only movement was his blinking eyes, and a couple of times he swallowed. I guess he’d decided that anything he did would further our cause, so he did nothing. The world would know he was alive. That was enough. After five minutes of silence we shut off the camera and took him to his cell.
Of course, everybody’s already seen these videos a million times on TV, so there’s nothing much I can add. Draper ranted and raved, cursing the FBI for their ineptitude and us as a bunch of terrorists. He gave them as much information as he could about where he was, describing the cold at night, the relative warmth in the daytime, and the absence of rain. He described the filthy living conditions, the constant surveillance, the lousy food. He bitterly complained that an innocent, taxpaying, American citizen could be picked up and trundled out of the country, and no effective action was being taken. What was he paying taxes for? He demanded that his company make no concessions to our demands.
When it was all over, Matt tacked on a little comment in his electronically disguised voice, stating that while the average middle-class American paid about twenty-five percent of his or her income to the IRS, Milt Draper paid only six percent, while his company, Megamart, paid only three and a half. He also stated that if Silko and Megamart on average tripled the wages of their garment workers it would add, on average, less than a twenty-five cents to the cost of each piece of clothing, and in many cases, less than a nickel. He suggested that everyone in the United States would be glad to pay that slight premium if it meant lifting a vast segment of the third world out of poverty. I figured that his little speech would be largely ignored by the media, but I was wrong. It was played over and over on all the stations for days.
On December 21 Matt told Sylvia, Champ, and me to get up to Minneapolis to nab the Clothes Horse CEO, Dick Brown. He figured that over Christmas things might be a bit laxer. I disagreed with him, saying that it was in their routines that we discovered the openings we needed, but he just blew off my arguments, pointing out how we’d bungled it with Draper, getting away by the skin of our teeth. “Just go watch him, watch him, then grab him when you can.” As we piled into the van he added, “I’ve complete confidence in you three. Good luck and Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas to you too, fucker,” Sylvia muttered as we drove off. The three of us agreed that Matt was crazy and reckless, and that we wouldn’t do it. Instead we drove Sylvia to Boston so she could spend Christmas with her mother and Champ and me went on to Minneapolis just to scope out the situation. No kidnapping was going to take place.
Three days later the bust happened. In the early morning of December 24 the maquila got raided, then, a few hours later, when Sylvia and Bernard were both there, the office in Matt’s garage was hit. The FBI had it scripted perfectly.
*
Technically, Champ lost the Mrs. Hee-haw bet because it took him eight days instead of two, but I didn’t hold it against him. After that he started paying the lady a visit about every other day. He complained the parson don’t really do anything, like go to a job, so it was hard to schedule things with his wife. “She’s a firecracker,” he’d tell me. “A real maniac in the sack.” I noticed he started coming back to the tent with clean clothes, even a new shirt. It made me nervous and I told him so, but he just shrugged.
It turned out that they did more than just soil the linen. Mrs. Hee-haw liked to talk. One thing she liked to talk about was the upcoming trial of those terrorists that kidnapped the CEOs. It was curious, she said, that someone had blown the whistle on them but had not claimed the reward. It had been in all the papers that an anonymous caller had tipped off the FBI to the location in the New Mexico desert. Her theory was that one of the two guys who hadn’t been captured yet had been the snitch. I just shrugged and said, “Shows what she knows,” but it set Champ to thinking.
Then early one morning, just after dawn, I was sleeping under my tarp in a slight drizzle and Champ finally guessed what you’ve already figured out. He jumped on me like I was a Brahma bull and caught me by the throat. “Fucker!” he spat in my face. “Fucker. It was you! In Minneapolis you turned yellow and ratted. You fucking traitor!” I just lay there doing my best to breathe. “Was it for the money? Huh? Or to save your own hide? You cut some deal? They’re our friends, you son of a bitch.” And he went on like that, slowly strangling me.
When he finally eased up on my neck enough for me to answer him I told him he was a fucking idiot, and he slapped me so hard my right eyeball popped out and flew off into the trees. While I screamed fucking murder, clutching at my face, he groped around in the weeds looking for the thing. It took us two hours to get to the hospital, Champ dragging me along cursing and swearing the whole way. We’d long ago ditched our ID, of course, and without medical insurance, money, or a bank account, the woman at the reception desk told she couldn’t help us. Champ dug around in his jacket pocket then rolled the lop-sided, squishy remains of my eyeball, covered with dirt, pine needles and lint, across the desk and said, “We were just horsing around and it popped out. It’s no big deal. It’s happened before. We just need someone to stick it back in.” I only heard part of this, because at the sight of the eyeball I fainted dead away.
When I came out of sedation it was late afternoon and my aching face was half wrapped in bandages. Champ was sleeping on the bed next to me. “Hey,” I said. When I tried to sit up a wave of nausea rolled over me. Champ sat up kind of groggy and scowled at me. “I don’t care why you did it,” he said. “You’re a snake, and I don’t give a shit. Just tell me how you were going to get the money.”
I told him that I’d always intended to split it with him. “It’s a lot of money, and they’re lunatics,” I said, “the whole bunch of them.”
He didn’t even listen to me. “How were you going to collect the money?” he demanded. I told him that we’d agreed on a signal, a password, that would identify me. Champ didn’t even pretend he was going to come back to share it with me. He just threatened to kill me if I didn’t tell him how to collect it, so I told him. At least I think I did. Maybe I wasn’t exact enough, or maybe I left something out. I don’t know, but it didn’t work for him and a part of me feels bad about it. I guess the money’s beyond reach now.
*
Well, that was a month ago and the trial’s over. You know what happened: big time losers every one. Especially Champ, because he did the actual kidnapping, the actual holding of the gun to the temple, the knife to the throat. Bernard was the lucky one, getting only three years.
Me, I’m on the run again, thinking of getting down to Mexico or maybe Australia. For the moment I’m doing okay. I’ve got my own place, just a room in a basement, really, and I’ve got a girlfriend. She’s a waitress in the restaurant where I work, and she digs the black patch I have to wear over my empty socket. I don’t mind washing dishes again. It’s just minimum wage and only twenty hours a week with no benefits, but I’m getting by. Kinda how I came in.
Taos, July, 2000