The Darling by Russell Banks Page A

her friend, the other girl, the one with the kid. Never came to any of the office parties, didn’t hang out in the bars, not even the bar where her friend worked. Really kind of an ordinary girl, I guess. The kind of person you don’t actually notice. You could call her a loner. More a loner than a loser. Like whatzizname, Lee Harvey Oswald .
    Basically, it was a childish fantasy, wanting to survive your own death so you could overhear the postmortem, read your own obituary, attend your own funeral, and I indulged it often. But at the same time I was aware of something rumbling beneath it, a hidden desire to get caught, to fail in a spectacular, even suicidal way, and it made me very nervous. It was the feeling I sometimes got driving over a high bridge: one quick tug of the steering wheel to the right, and it’s over the edge and straight down. I had to force myself consciously to resist that impulse, or else pretend that I wasn’t on a bridge—no, I was driving across the Plains, somewhere west of Iowa, nothing but flat, solid, grassy ground beneath me stretching from horizon to horizon.
    WHEN HE WASN’T WORKING with me in the basement or driving his cab, Zack had taken to traveling to New York City for days at a time. “I’m making some very cool contact down there with our black comrades-in-arms,” he told me. “These brothers, man, they’re the forward force of the revolution, the elite corps. A lot of them have been in the joint, some of the brothers are vets back from ’Nam, man. And they’re pissed . They make Weather look like candy stripers, man.”
    I asked him if they were Black Panthers, but he said, “No way, these guys are in deep cover, man. And the kind of action they’re into is almost beyond politics. These brothers are much heavier than the Panthers.” Again, I believed about half of what he told me. But the half I believed lifted my spirits. For years, ever since the Civil Rights movement got taken over by blacks, and the white college kids like me and the white lawyers and clergymen were sent home from the South, leaving us with only the splinters that were left of the antiwar movement—SDS, Weatherman, the Yippies, Diggers, and so on, all of whom were white and middle class—I’d felt somehow cheated out of my true mission, as if in my chosen line of work I’d been deprived of an essential tool, and that tool was black people. Practically from childhood, and especially in high school and college—thanks to my father’s old-time New England hierarchy of values, I’m sure, and his heavy emphasis on noblesse oblige—my heroes had been the nineteenth-century white abolitionists, most of whom were educated, upper-class women from New England. Like me. And my father had nothing for those women but unqualified praise and admiration. “Among all our distinguished ancestors, Hannah, those female abolitionists are the ones I hold in highest regard. The others, the men, all they ever did was make money. Until I came along,” he’d add, laughing, as if he, a world-famous pediatrician who wrote best-selling books on child care, had somehow managed to avoid making money.
    I wanted to know more about these mysterious black proletarian warriors in New York City with whom Zack claimed to have initiated an alliance. But beyond offering hints, winks, and vague allusions to plans for bank robberies and high-jacked armored trucks and heavy weaponry, he wouldn’t tell me anything specific or concrete, which disappointed me, and after a while I figured they were largely a blend of rumor and fantasy cooked up by Zack and some of his male friends, the New York–based members of Weather. Radical white-boy wet dreams.
    Until the late-winter night that he came banging on our door at two A.M. When I let him in, he collapsed on the floor in the hallway, bleeding through his jacket, and I knew right away it was from a bullet wound. I’d seen enough of them in the emergency room at Peter Bent Brigham not