Free The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon Page A

you had hiked out of the woods, changed into bathing suits, driven the quarter mile or so to Colgate Lake, and settled down on the grass, where I found J lying on a blanket, deep asleep, and you involved in a mudcastle-in-progress group project by the water’s edge.
    It was a perfect Catskill morning. A perfectly cloudless Sunday, wind softly blowing, late lilacs in bloom. Already the grassy beach at the lake was filling with its particular summer mix: weekend New Yorkers, Jewish and Italian; all kinds of Eastern Europeans from the Ukrainian and Latvian resorts up Platte Clove; canoes going into the water, and dogs, and children. Sharon Solarz would have to wait: I wasn’t taking this sleep away from J. So I lay back next to your daddy, the sun on the front of my body and the warmth of his skin on the side, and let the murmur of mixed voices and languages around us lull me to sleep. Russian in the group of pretty young girls next to us. A dog’s feet padding by, water shaking on my thigh from its fur on its chest. A voice in a canoe, far out on the lake, calling to another. Next to us, two couples with New York accents were talking in what sounded, to me, like middle-aged friendship. And what they were discussing was the arrest of Sharon Solarz, the night before, in Rosendale, of all places.
    And your daddy must have heard too, because when I turned my head on my neck to look at him, his eyes were wide open, staring at the sky. The air, suddenly, was thick with heat. Quickly now, I looked over at the group talking next to us, then back to your dad, studying the afterimage against the pink of the sun through my eyelids.
    It was a fifty-something foursome, two sets of parents up from the city, and now three of them were listening with interest as the fourth, lying on the grass with the
Albany Times
, gave a summation of the article, pausing after each sentence for discussion. He read next that it appeared that Solarz may have been in the area seeking to make a negotiated surrender. At this one of the wives snorted. That was the way they always did it, said the other woman, this one apparently a lawyer herself—a surrender would mitigate in favor of the defendant, so they always went for the arrest rather than the surrender, in order to get the harshest sentence they could. None of them seemed to have any doubt who “they” were.
    Your daddy and I listened. What next? Eventually, someone would say that Sharon to some degree deserved what she was getting: this wasn’t a Weatherman bombing, where only property was destroyed, but an actual armed robbery in which a guard was killed. And someone elsewould say that Sharon—they would all use her first name—Sharon’s only crime was having anything to do with Vinnie Dellesandro. And from there someone was sure to say how they knew Billy and Bernardine, only they knew them under their fugitive identities when they lived on the Upper West Side; or someone would say how they had dropped blotter acid with Susan Stern out in Seattle, or Chicago, or recently seen a letter from Jeff Jones in the
New York Times
, or had a friend who had a friend who had a friend who knew David Gilbert…A lulling, gentle conversation, four middle-aged ex-hippies discussing the familiar, comforting righteousness of their youths, of menace to no one.
    Except us.
    Because instead of the thousand things I could have predicted these guys would say, they said the one thing they shouldn’t have.
    “…says here she was coming to consult a lawyer in Saugerties.”
    “Lawyer? In Saugerties? What kind of lawyer would practice in Saugerties?”
    “Hey, babe, that’s where Jim Grant is. Must have been him. Who else could it be? The local bankruptcy lawyer?”
    By now, little adrenaline shots were running through my whole body and, I knew, your daddy’s too. We didn’t move, of course, and in time the foursome waddled off to the water, and we sat up.
    First, your daddy made a big show of looking at his