The whirlwind secret-hideout tour of 1972 also includes a meeting with Che’s cavalier daddy, who fails to introduce himself as such to a son he hadn’t seen in six years. That man “had a moustache which lifted and shivered as if disgusted by the life in front of him.” It certainly bore no resemblance to the photo of the angel-headed working-class hero (of a middle-class hipster) Che carried around with him.
In any case — faster than you can say turn on, tune in, drop the kid like a hot potato — the easy solution seems to be to throw money at the problem and the professor, sending her and the boy off to Australia where the help Dial’s been emptily promised fails to magically materialize — but where a new set of outlaw adventures begins along with the onset of freak-flag surprises, incongruities, contradictions, and incredibilities. The only constant is Dial’s maternal feelings for Che, and there was no question — even to the extent of safeguarding him from any and all potentially hurtful family truths — of a continuance of the protective bond that supercedes all other concerns: “He looked at her adoringly, little glances, smiles. She thought how glorious it was to be loved, she, Dial, who was not loved by anyone. She felt herself just absorb this little boy, his small damp hand dissolving in her own.”
Of course, “to live outside the law you must be honest,” and there are plenty of occasions in Australia for acting up and acting human: “Can you, she demanded, just for once, not have an opinion? You’re seven, for Christ’s sake.” Che is especially cranky, of course, about being swept away to a foreign country — it makes it so much harder for his father to find him — but there’s also bad first impressions abounding in Queensland, when their trailer is caught in a tropical storm rinse cycle; and a ride bummed with hippies is more angst, anxiety, and alienation than peace, love, and understanding.
One of these colorful counter-cultural criminals is Trevor, who becomes a neighbor and a potential father figure to Che when Dial buys a hideout on the edge of the tropics — two grimy bat-infested huts. Many of the other neighbors are regulatory commune-dwellers who find Dial "twitchy and sarcastic." But through all the confrontations and collaborations (e.g., "hippie industry" spurred by a missing Che) of life on the Aussie lam, or the apprehension and elation an active and inquisitive seven-year-old is capable of causing, “No one has the least idea of who I am. … How could these B-list hippies understand that Dial was an SDS goddess.”
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