MINUS 044 AND COUNTING

They traveled north through autumn burning like a torch.

The trees were not dead this far north, murdered by the big, poisonous smokes of Portland, Manchester, and Boston; they were all hues of yellow, red, brilliant starburst purple. They awoke in Richards an aching feeling of melancholy. It was a feeling he never would have suspected his emotions could have harbored only two weeks before. In another month the snow would fly and cover all of it.

Things ended in fall.

She seemed to sense his mood and said nothing. The driving filled the silence between them, lulled them. They passed over the water at Yarmouth, then there were only woods and trailers and miserable poverty shacks with outhouses tacked on the sides (yet one could always spot the Free‑Vee cable attachment, bolted on below a sagging, paintless windowsill or beside a hinge‑smashed door, winking and heliographing in the sun) until they entered Freeport.

There were three police cruisers parked just outside of town, the cops meeting in a kind of roadside conference. The woman stiffened like a wire, her face des­perately pale, but Richards felt calm.

They passed the police without notice, and she slumped.

“If they had been monitoring traffic, they would have been on us like a shot,” Richards said casually. “You might as well paint BEN RICHARDS IS IN THIS CAR on your forehead in Day‑Glo.”

“Why can’t you let me go?” she burst out, and in the same breath: “Have you got a jay?”

Rich folks blow Dokes. The thought brought a bubble of ironic laughter and he shook his head.

“You’re laughing at me?” she asked, stung. “You’ve got some nerve, don’t you, you cowardly little murderer! Scaring me half out of my life, probably plan­ning to kill me the way you killed those poor boys in Boston—

“There was a full gross of those poor boys,” Richards said. “Ready to kill me. That’s their job.”

“Killing for pay. Ready to do anything for money. Wanting to overturn the country. Why don’t you find decent work? Because you’re too lazy! Your kind spit in the face of anything decent.”

“Are you decent?” Richards asked.

“Yes!” She stormed. “Isn’t that why you picked on me? Because I was de­fenseless and . . . and decent? So you could use me, drag me down to your level and then laugh about it?”

“If you’re so decent how come you have six thousand New Dollars to buy this fancy car while my little girl dies of the flu?”

“What—” She looked startled. Her mouth started to open and she closed it with a snap. “You’re an enemy of the Network,” she said. “It says so on the Free­-Vee. I saw some of those disgusting things you did.”

“You know what’s disgusting?” Richards asked, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the dashboard. “I’ll tell you. It’s disgusting to get blackballed because you don’t want to work in a General Atomics job that’s going to make you sterile. It’s disgusting to sit home and watch your wife earning the grocery money on her back. It’s disgusting to know the Network is killing millions of people each year with air pollutants when they could be manufacturing nose filters for six bucks a throw.”

“You lie,” she said. Her knuckles had gone white on the wheel.

“When this is over,” Richards said, “you can go back to your nice split‑level duplex and light up a Doke and get stoned and love the way your new silverware sparkles in the highboy. No one fighting rats with broomhandles in your neigh­borhood or shitting by the back stoop because the toilet doesn’t work. I met a little girl five years old with lung cancer. How’s that for disgusting? What do—”

“Stop!” she screamed at him. “You talk dirty!”

“That’s right,” he said, watching as the countryside flowed by. Hopelessness filled him like cold water. There was no base of communication with these beau­tiful chosen ones. They existed up where the air was rare. He had a sudden raging urge to make this woman pull over: knock her sunglasses onto the gravel, drag her through the dirt, make her eat a stone, rape her, jump on her, knock her teeth into the air like startled digits, strip her nude and ask her if she was beginning to see the big picture, the one that runs twenty‑four hours a day on channel one, where the national anthem never plays before the sign‑off.

“That’s right,” he muttered. “Dirty‑talking old me.”

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 614