Doing abstract work while staring at a computer was about the only thing that paid anything anymore, and much of that had been outsourced to low wage intellectuals on the Indian subcontinent – until their war. But even with the loss of the outsourcers, the pool of cheap labor was deep and was now moving into the northern province of the recently united Korean peninsula. But in the States many, if not most, people were unsuited for abstract employment. Fones had destroyed the nation’s attention span. And some of course, just preferred freedom to digital slavery.
From The Fall of it All – A History of the Big Dump
KIP RETURNS TO U.S. AND MEETS NATE AND PAULA IN SAN FRANCISCO
CHUBBY KNEW THE BAY AREA, AND HAD SEEN REPORTS of the earthquake, but seeing it up close was a jaw-dropping shock. The “cab” they had taken from SFO was an armored SUV, with a pop-top roof, and a hydraulic mount that could quickly push up a medium-sized “minimi” machine rifle on a swivel mount, but the guy in the front passenger seat, riding “shotgun” (who actually had a shotgun on his lap), said he had only deployed the “minimi” once, and that only to shoot over their heads.
Coming north from the airport, the catastrophe was not evident until just off 101 as you first came into the city. The Portola District was practically flattened. Homeless people picked through the rubble. It was like springtime in Berlin, 1945. All along, the streets were filled with hollow-eyed people pushing shopping carts filled with blankets and various other personal items.
Paula had insisted the cab take the long way, to show Kip the city, since he was planning on leaving the next morning. They drove around the Embarcadero, which, judging by the clean, smooth pavement, had just been rebuilt.
“The geologists say that a fissure a half mile down collapsed. Nothing to do with the San Andreas fault. Popped like a bubble, and then when the bay rushed in, that was it – North Beach wipeout. More people died than on 9/11 in New York. A lot of people survived the collapse of those apartment buildings, but then ended up drowning. After the first shock, people in the Financial District all ran down here to the Embarcadero when whoosh – the bay came in. None of the buildings up there even cracked, much less came down. Very strange.”
“And it looks like they are rebuilding in a hurry.”
“Yeah,” said Paula. “You can do anything with money.”
The next morning, the sun woke Kip up. He pulled a pair of shorts and a tee-shirt out of his backpack, and made his way out of the little guest room and into the living room, and then out the front door. As Kip came out on the porch, he smelled smoke and human shit. Paula reclined on a beach lounger, snug under a fleece blanket that doubled as a robe. Paula was drinking coffee on the porch above Fell Street, overlooking Panhandle Park, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. The earthquake had passed by the Haight and it was like an island that had been shaken but still was standing; there was very little damage to the neighborhood.
The fog was still clinging to the sky like lint, and it was chilly. Kip didn’t notice an older guy was sitting in the chair next to hers, until he nearly sat on him. The old guy’s eyes, still half closed, cracked open. He wore maroon sweatpants, flip flops, and an old blue sweatshirt. A candy apple red Beretta 9mm sat on the table next to him. Early as it was, still, there were many people already in the park, some who had crawled out of hidden nooks to continue sleeping safely, and others just sitting in the patches of sun that broke through from the east.
A (V)ICE cruiser, or Crush, or ICY (the nickname used on a wildly popular vlog entitled “The Vagrant Sluts of Sector Nine”), crept slowly across the park. The front driver’s side of the ICY’s darkened window was down and a dark-clad, commando-styled crew-cut blond dude was leaning out, clearly enjoying the pan- icky effect he had on the people in the park. The cruiser, with just-for-show spoilers jutting out of the armored hood, was a modified Ford Sandcat, SUV-like, armored all around. Mounted on its roof was the standard issue unmanned big-ass gun that purposely swiveled around, automatically following the crowd. People quickly hopped up off the grass, some just leaving their sleeping blankets, moving, some fast, while others stood rooted in place. Others gathered their stuff into old packs and bags, some posing with defiance. Nobody got out of the (V)ICE truck.
“Wooh!” Paula said, holding her nose, while checking the drama in
the park. “Fog’s almost gone this morning – kind of weird actually. Sleep OK?
Did you feel that aftershock earlier?” She threw her fleece robe off, revealing
an oversized red pullover and blue knee socks. The old man with wild bushy,
straw-like hair, who was sitting in the lounge chair, looked at Kip briefly,
smiled and nodded. He was munching on a half-eaten bagel and a slice of hard
white cheese. Kip looked at the little blue Beretta 70 strapped on Paula’s
ankle. His and hers, patriotic colors.
“If they see you packing, they keep moving,” she said, noticing Kip eyeing her piece. “It is awful we have come to this. I have never had to point it at anyone.” She knocked on the wooden door-frame. Kip shrugged, and looked over at the guy next to him, who reverted to half sleep.
“There’s a batch of scrambled eggs in the kitchen – help your- self. This is Nate.”
The old man slowly reopened his eyes.
“We get aftershocks pretty frequently. But hardly had any damage in the neighborhood – yet. You saw what it did south of here.” Kip gave a quick, disturbed glance at the old man, who was staring off into the oddly sunny morning. “I slept well,” the old guy said. “Not too foggy this morning, huh?”
Kip watched the people in the park while stretching and twisting. It was the first time he had slept in the US in over eight months. Where had he seen this old guy? “Yes! I was dreaming, but I definitely did feel something last night, dreamed I was floating – drifting on top of the waves. I am glad the house didn’t fall on us.”
Actually he had dreamed about Paula and Milana all on a big rubber raft. But the whole thing was indistinct and – foggy – and the shaking came at a peculiarly auspicious moment.
“Just a tremor. Kip, this is Nathan, my…roommate. Well…”
“I’m her boyfriend. She just uses me for sex, but I am fine with that. Maybe you’ve read my autobiographical novel of China…”
The China memoir! Yeah, Kip had read it, maybe a quarter of a century ago. Kip looked at the old man closely now – Nathan Schuette! Holy shit, he used to be so young…he had once been one of Kip’s heroes, back in the ’90s. On the cable talk shows, discussing all the hubbub about China back – years ago, maybe right after Tiananmen, or maybe before, it was a long time ago; that was the last time Schuette had been on Kip’s (or anyone else’s) radar. Two foreigners murdered in Beijing, and then a spate of stories linking Nate to them, and then – nothing. “I remember you,” said Kip, shaking his hand. “I mean, I remember the…the China story…”
Schuette turned with some difficulty to face Kip. “It is heartening that you read, although you could pick better writers. China no longer seems to exist in America’s consciousness. Since Real-Prez’s tariffs, trading has practically stopped. But one and half billion people are still there.” Nathan took a sip of coffee. “I know you too. Tech billionaires are a dime a dozen, but SwiftPad is different! And here you are, crashing on a couch in the Haight. Exactly as I would expect! The famous Kip ‘Chubby’ Rehain, the Steve Jobs of Portland, the creator of SwiftPad! I guess what they write about you is true. Paula says you two just got back from the Black Sea…” Paula was grinning.
“I wasn’t the creator of SwiftPad…just – sort of the midwife.”
“It’s good you’re spending a day or two here before going back to Oregon,” Paula said as she poured Kip a cup of coffee. “We are in some hurry, because your dad’s accountant wants us at the upcoming SwiftPad board meeting, very soon and there are many things to arrange, as well as…”
“We need to explain some things,” said Nate.
Dad’s accountant?
"Heber?” What did she mean – us, thought Kip.
Paula made a little face he couldn’t decipher. “Yeah.”
It began to concern Kip how much this woman was creeping into his life. What did she want? She had ripped him away from a good life, a life he was sure to which he could have adjusted. She just showed up in Georgia and he ended up leaving with her.
Now he was back in the fucking shitshow. This woman had a grip on him – in that mother-sister-wife-mistress way. But now, something about her was…different… And Nathan Schuette, the writer who opened a bizarre door into the history between the West and China. Her boyfriend? Clearly he was old enough to be her grandfather.
Out of the country for eight months, more or less incommunicado, in the wastes of Central Asia, and then finding refuge on the Black Sea, when Heber sent Paula to get him. Why send her? Didn’t she say she was Alice’s friend? Too strange to be a coincidence, Kip told himself; take a deep breath.
“I am going to jump in the shower,” said Paula.
Old man Schuette stared at Kip watching her walk away from behind his coffee mug, and then said, “The grossest, most bottom of the barrel aspect of any matter related to people will always override and blot out everything else. It’s the universal Gresham’s Law. The bad drives out the good. Gossip and trash beats beauty and facts. It is getting worse. We are in the garbage dump of history, the stinky hole at the end of the road that we have always hoped to avoid.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, yes you are. You poor fuck – how old are you?”
“Forty-seven.”
“Gen-X! Mr. X-Man. Sorry, you got the shitty end. Now it’s all about to turn to shit. We have arrived in the time of dread. Sorry, sport, it’s your burden, mine too, but not anything like yours. I am, as you can see, old. Nobody listens to the old and we get to get out, to exit before the curtain falls. Most of you X-people blame us. Sorry. But that won’t help; you can’t run from it anymore. We didn’t run, but just got rolled, in slow motion. I suppose if we had fought when the times were good, and we were young and strong, we could at least say, ‘Hey we tried to warn you!’ Which we did, some of us, but not very seriously, or in a direct way, not loud enough, obviously. That is on us, but saying so does you no good, sport. Sorry, It’s time.”
Kip looked at Schuette, but didn’t say anything.
“No,” Nate continued, “you are going to have to spend your best years dealing with the shittiest things in life. Sorry, but I don’t make history, just report. These should be your best years, and it is going to suck. As I said, sorry.”
That seemed like a pretty rude way to start a conversation, thought Kip. “I don’t believe in the guilt or innocence of ‘generations.’ People are just bounced by the forces of history. From the past and future it seems obvious, but not as it happens. That human nature is a fixed variable. You guys tried to pretend it wasn’t fixed.”
“Well, you may have something there.” Nate nodded his head in agreement. “My best years are back there. You can have what’s left, but…” Nate drifted off for a few seconds. “Ever since they overthrew whatshisface, or whatever it was, we have been pretending and acting as though everything was OK. Section 4 – the 25th amendment saved us from all the drama and we thought, shit, maybe it is turning around. Yeah, half the world becoming rubble, or parched, or broke, or just plain unlivable, but we wanted to come back from commercial break and find it all to be OK.”
Kip nodded. From what he had been able to gather from Georgian TV reports (especially after the Русски E-invasion that took over all the media everywhere east of Potsdam), the former first family had drawn the curtain, occasionally releasing a picture of the Ex (or the temporarily recuperating Real-Prez, depending on your preferred narrative). When they showed him in the media, some evidence of the date was always displayed, such as a TV news crawler reporting a recent event, like a note from a kid- napper proving his victim was still alive. Then, when @Real-Prez notes appeared like rocks thrown from a prison window, they sent out his first wife to give funny interviews about his dottering dementia, to satisfy the need to avenge the two and a half year national nightmare.
But now his replacement, Temp-Prez, had been emasculated in the primaries, and everyone thought it was going to finally be over – that it would get better.
“But we are in the same spot, only we are starting from a much worse position than before. Nothing has changed.” Paula shifted in her seat, and her robe opened just a peek. “Your foundation is thinking about getting involved with money – and maybe even – fine-tuning the SwiftPad Machine, to maybe put your thumb on the scale, if you catch my drift.”
“Slow down, you are way way ahead of me.” Kip stood up and slowly poured himself a cup of coffee. “Who and why…”
“There are some things you should know…”
“And what do you mean, my foundation?” Kip knew they had a few billion lying around looking for something to do, but didn’t realize they had a “foundation.” “I really have no idea. I have been out of the country and…I…”
Kip had read Nate’s China story years ago, about the discovery and then the loss of the physical evidence of the Old Testament in China, hundreds of years before Christ. It was all too heavy, the implications so bizarre that it was rejected by just being ignored. The world just didn’t want to hear how interconnected it really was. China was a mythological place, with no reality for the West; it was almost like the time before Marco Polo had returned.
Kip picked up the tablet that lay between them on a table and read the open tab.
According to voices friendly to the Temp-Prez, the Hoover dam was blown by the “Geronimo Unit”, which was actually a consortium of the drug cartels, revenging air attacks by the US against them inside Mexico. Speculation is that they bought the bomb from Islamists, who stole it from Pakistan. Lake Meade was now completely empty, along with much of the South- west’s water supply.
“It is not even clear who the ‘commandos’ were who destroyed the dam. (V)ICE claims there were no survivors, but that’s just the administration’s explanation. Rumors say the bombers all escaped. I can tell you one thing that only a few people know – it was an inside job. The bomb was made in the USA.”
Kip said nothing.
“Doug Turdashian picked up the most of the idiots who put us here in the first place, and then some,” said Paula. “Cadez wants to take the next step – round-ups of opposition – any opposition.” She had fire and anger in her voice. She looked hard and angrily at Nate.
Nate paused to sip his coffee, “Yes, Cadez is scarier. He doesn’t scare you though, does he, dear?”
Paula pointedly ignored Nate’s comment. Kip looked at her and back at Nate, but neither would give him a clue as to what he meant by that, or why he didn’t scare Paula.
Kip knew almost nothing about the recent politics, other than that Temp-Prez got crushed in the R primaries. His first thought was he was being hustled for a big donation by a bunch of scam artists. Sometimes he forgot that he was extremely rich. Now it dawned on him that Heber controlled his fortune.
“The Post is trying to control the SwiftPad phenomenon,” said Nathan. “They are riding a tiger they can’t get off. They don’t dare switch it off because it’s a drug, feeding the Post’s bottom line, and sedating the country’s anxiety.”
“The persuasive power of SwiftPad,” said Paula, “has over- whelmed the circuits. Everyone knows that this app is fucking with the public opinion in ways that no one understands, but they are so afraid of it, no one is suggesting it be ‘shut down.’”
“Your fucking application is a monster,” continued Nate. “The Post thinks they control it, but really it is controlling them. SwiftPad has a mind of its own. You guys should never have sold it – you should have deleted it. But obviously the money…”
We have a way to shut it down, Kip thought.
Paula looked at Kip as he was thinking this, and stared. Kip stared back, so she continued. “Hmm. Well.” They stared at each other, and neither said a word.
“The money…” interrupted old Nathan, who suddenly had a coughing fit that went on for a while. “You need to find a way to fix this – with money!” More coughing. “I don’t know if you can do anything else, but at least you have money. I have a feeling just talking to you that -”.
“That what?”
Nate smiled. “You don’t seem too keen on fighting to keep your company. If you don’t someone else will. I am asking what are you going to do about it Mr. Rehain?”
“Well…” Actually, Kip hadn’t given it much thought. He and G had talked about it some back before they built it and released it, about the various meta features of the app. One was a destruction or self-destruction function. It would delete itself and then remain in somnolent alert to prevent it from being relaunched. It required a zombie system that wakes, attack, and passes on the function to another zombie. It was just theoretical then, at least for him. But he knew G had designed that “feature” into it. He knew how she worked.
Nathan just stared, trying to recover his respiratory equilibrium.
Fuck, Kip thought, he had to talk to GG and figure out how to shut SwiftPad down. They could do it, but he didn’t know how. First he must convince her that it had to happen. Need to talk to G. Kip realized he didn’t really know how the backdoor was activated, only that it could be done. He tried to remember what she had said.
“You know something that you’re not telling us, don’t you?” Kip stared at Paula. She would not break him like she had done by the Black Sea.
“What do you two have in mind?” Kip asked. “I know Ben Cadez will actually be competent at taking us the rest of the way into some kind of permanent fascism. He is smart and will jail or kill the rest of us. His cold bloodiness flies out of every pore when he is on camera. We all know he will do it. But knowing it and doing something about it are two different things.”
Paula looked at Nate, who was smiling and breathing slowly to keep from coughing. “What do you think, Paula?” Nate said theatrically. “Is Ben Cadez really that bad?”
She glared at Nate. “Back at you,” said Paula sharply. “How far will you go to stop them? That is the question we all have to ask ourselves.”
Kip sensed an odd vibe between them. “What is going on? Do you two know Cadez?”
“Yeah,” said Paula. Nate smirked and shook his head and silently pointed at Paula. “Yeah, we do. But answer me, how far? Or are you just in it for the glamor?” Paula asked again.
It was a point of honor that he held his ground for now. Kip looked back and forth at them.
“How do you know Alice?” “Alice,” said Paula with a wide smile. “I met her right after her husband …your…friend Jim… when his father…died.”
“What! That was 40-some years ago. How have you have known Alice that long?”
Paula laughed, and looked at Kip closely. “I remember you and Jim coming in from one of your adventures on the Mary’s River. You were both scamps, intent on some mischief, that was plain. You don’t remember me, Kipling?”
“No, I – maybe…” The vertigo hit Kip again. That funny feeling he had about her in Georgia suddenly came back. A weird, color-strobing dizziness came over him. His perception of Paula began to shift as through a prism. Oh shit, he did remember her! He remembered feeling when she showed up in Georgia that she was old, much older than himself, much older than she appeared. But he hadn’t believed his own perceptions. And still didn’t.
He looked closely at her. With well-toned skin and clear sharp eyes she looked like a woman in her thirties. Early thirties really, maybe even younger. He looked at her hands. They were the hands of a young woman, a teenager. She smiled.
“I think you should listen to Nathan’s story…if you want to understand – all this,” said Paula, almost in answer to his own doubts. “It is not just his story…and I know there are things you want to ask me.”
Kip grabbed a bagel and said, “Yeah, let’s hear it.”
“OK,” said Nate jumping in. “but I have to start at the beginning. I am in this story,” said Nate, “so you have to make allowances. Fifty years ago, wasn’t it…” he looked over at her, as she laughed and nodded with a fresh sparkle in her eyes. “Yes, fifty years ago last January.”
"I was a freshman at the University of Kansas, just having finished the fall term, and was home for Christmas vacation, in New Jersey.
January 1970 was cold. I had the phone number of a guy who lived on Long Island who was headed back to Lawrence. Elwood was his name. He lived in my dorm, but, as I said, I really didn’t know him. He said to meet him at a shopping mall in Paramus, New Jersey.
My father drove me, and I told him not to wait around, but it was cold so we sat there, in the gray early morning, Dad with the window opened, smoking. It’s one of those scenes in your life that sticks with you for some reason.
An old AMC Marlin pulled up. The driver was a woman wearing a black stocking watch cap, brownish blond, mid-twenties. In the passenger seat was a tall, burr-headed guy, Elwood, who I vaguely recognized from the dorm. The Marlin was two-door, white on dolphin blue, a hatchback with a pretty cramped backseat and barely any room in the trunk.
The driver lit up my eyes, even bundled up in a thick blue peacoat. My dad saw her and I could see the smile on his face as he got out of his Caddy to help. She opened the hatch door. I had two bags, and there wasn’t room for both of them.
“We still have to pick up Wally,” said Elwood.
“I’ll ship one of them to you,” Dad said, then turned, smiling at the woman. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Why? You gonna call me up for a date?” She looked at my dad over her granny glasses. My dad gave her a Jack Benny shrug, but kept smiling at her just the same. Her eyes were piercing, certain and clear. She didn’t flinch. And she was older too – at least 23, maybe 25. I had only turned 18 the previous October.
“Well, son,” Dad said, still half smiling at the woman in the black stocking cap. He reached out to shake my hand, probably wondering if I understood what I was getting into. “Have fun.” He clapped me on the shoulder as I climbed in the backseat.
“Please get that suitcase shipped,” I said. “I’ll need those clothes.”
My dad nodded with an annoyed look, waved as we pulled away. I don’t think he ever took his eyes off of her. So we took off, down the Garden State Parkway, where immediately she hit us up for cash for the tolls.
Paula let out a stifled laugh. “She thinks it’s funny. Am I lying, darling?” “No. Not yet.”
Anyway, the engine didn’t sound all that good, and we got on the Turnpike near the Raritan Bridge and then headed down toward Pennsylvania where we had to pick up Wally in King of Prussia.
I sort of knew Wally from that first semester in the dorm, better than I did Elwood anyway. Funny guy, always up for going on a toot, ready to get high or drunk anytime of the day. It was lunchtime when we got there and Wally’s mom invited us in for kielbasa sausages and perogies. Finally after a while, Wally said we had to go, and he had even more stuff than I did. He was determined to pack it, and what didn’t fit was crowded into the small space we had in the backseat. My knees were up to my chin and I was not looking forward to driving 1200 miles like that, but we all agreed we would rotate seats often so no one had to sit back there for too long.
There were four of us in the Marlin. It was probably a 1962 or ‘63 model, honestly I can’t remember. I was at a low point in my life, stuffed in that sputtering piece of shit Marlin, wondering how to get off of academic probation, or even if I really wanted to go back to school. Sitting in that goofy car, mile after mile, I started to fall in love with her. I was still an unfucked virgin, you understand.
“You are making me blush, Nate!” Paula smiled.
“Yeah – right.”
We headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It got dark early, and we made a wrong turn and ended up driving toward Pittsburgh, where we ate dinner. By the time we got back on the road, we were way behind schedule and it was about one or two in the morning, somewhere past Zanes- ville in eastern Ohio. I was in the back seat, wrapped up in my heavy coat, settled into the journey across the frozen wastes of the heartland, innocently expecting to be snug in my dorm bed by late afternoon–early evening the next day.
Then a desperate cry of fear and horror suddenly woke me, a screaming plea of terror blurted out like a long island– accented DEATH RATTLE!
“The wheels are falling off! The wheels are falling off!”
The car was shaking and there was a sudden lurch, and we were hurtling off the freeway at 70 mph, into the deep and still accumulating snowbank.
It took us two hours to push the car back on the highway. It was so fucking cold. I was shaken out of a very deep sleep, slashed to the bone by the shock of getting out in the biting polar predawn, and pushing that heavy Rambler out of the snowbank, somewhere deep in the Ohio woods. Fucking torture. Elwood continued to swear that the front wheels had been shaking violently and driving into the snowbank was the only thing he could do.
Wally took over the driving and said it was steering fine. But, in fact, it would take us four more days to make the trip to Kansas.
Wally got a speeding ticket somewhere around Columbus and we had to pay fifty bucks to the cop right there or he would have run us in. Wally only had about twenty, so the rest of us had to cough up the remainder. We spent almost all of our money and I didn’t think we had enough for gas for the rest of the trip. We pushed on. She said she had a friend in St. Louis, so our plan was to see if we could get some cash there.
All this time I was dreaming about her, wondering if I could somehow get naked and – I was going nuts, couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“Kind of like now, right, baby?” Paula was laughing. “Exactly! How about you?” Paula shrugged her shoulders.
Anyway, I would have masturbated to those dreams, but it was crowded in that Marlin. She was so good looking, and so seemingly unmysterious, clean, direct, with a tomboy femininity, and me being six months out of high school, thinking she was somehow – it is hard for me to under- stand my 18-year-old self from the vantage of 70, but, well I believed in “purity” back then.
The Marlin made it to Vandalia, Illinois, less than two hours out of St. Louis, and bang. I was driving and I went to pass a truck, when, as I said, Bang! The sound of the piston rod breaking through the engine housing jarred my teeth. The Marlin coasted to a stop. Dead.
We would end up spending three days in Vandalia, and two nights in the local Fayette County jail, Vandalia being the county seat.
We had the car towed. Wally and I both negotiated with the owner of the garage, an old blind man named Wiley, who just yelled and slapped his cane on his desk, saying he wasn’t taking any shit from a bunch of rich Easterners. Wiley said he had a young guy who was “a damn good mechanic for a retard.” The mechanic was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen; he looked like a young Montgomery Clift.
Monty’s girlfriend had a horrible case of acne, and some- thing was wrong with her hip. But she was smart and relentless, walking Wiley and us through every imaginable repair scenario, figuring every way imaginable to get us on the road.
We tried to push off the decision to our lady friend in blue peacoat and black watch cap, but she insisted the Marlin belonged to a former boyfriend, and that she was fine with getting rid of the last vestige of him.
The four of us finally got out of Wiley’s garage to talk it over and decided to head out to smoke a reefer somewhere. We walked east until we hit the edge of town, and wandered past the last house when we found a path into a wooded flood plain. I was walking with her and she seemed to like me, but I didn’t know how to act on it. My mind could not get away from what she must have done to get a car from a guy, who she apparently no longer cared about.
We wandered into the woods, and the crunching untrodden snow. As we got closer to the Kaskaskia River, the trees thinned out. When we got to the edge of the embankment, we fired up a fat one, and passed it around.
It was cold and although it was only about 4 pm it was already getting dark. It would be another night in the Fayette County jail. The deputy at the desk there had said we could stay one more night, but that was it. The stoniness hit us all about the same way, and we just stood there on the frozen riverbank, smiling and shivering.
Elwood, who was still premed then, and eventually a botanist, saw some frozen white fungus on the bark of an alder tree. “This is pretty cool looking,” he said. He picked it off and broke it apart. Inside, it had an orange peachy color and it appeared to be growing on a number of trees on that embankment. Elwood put it on his tongue. “Wow. It’s tangy.”
“How do you know it’s not poison?” Wally asked.
“I don’t think so. I think it’s kind of a sulfur fungus.” He took another bite. “It’s pretty good.”
“You’re fucking crazy eating that tree shit.”
The Marlin woman in the blue peacoat took a bite too. “Wow – I bet this would be amazing cooked. What the fuck, right?”
Wally and I looked at each other and shook our heads. “It’s fucking freezing, let’s get out of here,” he said. We all headed back into town to claim our free, heated cells in the Fayette County jail.
As we walked back, I tried to hit on her, it was pathetic really, and what made it worse was she seemed to think it was cute. I remember she kept saying, “Wow” and “Wow.” But it wasn’t about me. I was still an unfucked freshman, as I might have mentioned, and she was a graduate student, a complete mismatch. She was nice, and stared at me, and I thought it must have been the pot, but we had been smoking the whole trip, and it had never affected her in the way she was acting now. She seemed to be giving me encouragement on my awkward approach, which I kind of appreciated in a resentful way. I mean I wanted to get naked with her, but I had no idea how. It was so fucking cold for one thing. And she was sleeping in the women’s section of the recently painted jail, while Elwood, Wally, and I held down the men’s side. They took our shoes and belts. Elwood wasn’t talking, only smiling and also oddly saying “wow” over and over.
The next morning our plan was to explore the town, and after a cheap lunch head over to Wiley’s Garage to see if Montgomery had fixed the car. Elwood and Marlin girl seemed to be having a moment and somewhat mysteriously headed off together, back toward the river, while Wally and I wandered around and found ourselves in a two-story, white-shingled building that had been a meeting house way back in the early 1830s.
Vandalia used to be the capital of Illinois. Abraham Lin-coln, then in the state legislature, hated the town, and used his powers of persuasion to get the state capital moved to Springfield, where it still is. The Vandalians, the ones we met anyway, still blamed Abe for consigning their town to Backwatersville. Apparently some Illinois politicians would congregate in this old house and discuss the future of Illinois or some such backwoods issue or the other. A couple of old ladies who volunteered there eyed us with distrustful sus- picion as we looked over the exhibits. I asked them, “Golly gee, ma’am, this sure is an interesting building, did Abraham Lincoln really work in this place?” Later I would wonder if Lincoln had eaten the tree fungus while living in Vandalia.
"Yes. I understand it is of a peculiar historical interest. To my mind he was the worst president we ever had,” she said as if it were my fault he had ever risen so high in the world. “He ruined this country and we are paying the price for it even now.” The old lady looked at us and ended the tour when Wally started laughing at her. I asked why she thought the country was going to hell, but she ignored me.
I was a little jealous of Elwood, wandering off with the woman in the blue peacoat. I had neither the experience nor the imagination to come up with a move that would have led anywhere with her.
So while Wally and I negotiated a deal to let Wiley keep the Marlin in exchange for some kind of transportation on to Lawrence (a short run really; we were almost to St. Louis, and then it was just across Missouri, 250 miles, and we were practically there). Paula and Elwood roamed the streets, looking and acting ecstatic over something that had happened between them. They were tight lipped, and I assumed they had found a warm, dry place to get it on.
When it came to buying gas for the remainder of the trip, she was tapped out and insisted we (Elwood, Wally, and I) had to come up with the money. So finally Elwood and Wally worked out a deal for another car (the Marlin had thrown a rod, and was basically only good for parts) that Montgomery’s girlfriend insisted would easily make it to Kansas. Her retarded boyfriend Montgomery, who was doing all the work, giggled, and I think he might have been smarter than Wiley gave him credit for.
So off we went, in another piece of shit car, down the highway, Wally driving. It was just getting dark as we left and it was cold. We got about five miles away when we realized that the exhaust was blowing through a hole in the floor of the car. We opened all the windows and were driving 70 mph, the temperature well below zero – note to rest of the world, zero Fahrenheit is minus 18 Celsius.
I’m in the backseat with her, and all four of us are laughing. There was no way we could make it to Lawrence like this, hopeless. Yet all laughing, and her snuggled up against me and I so happy. Even though I was soon to die of carbon monoxide poisoning or freezing, I was ready to go.
But then the car coasted to a stop. Another dead car. After an hour, a state cop pulled up behind us and listened to Elwood blurt out the tale of our auto adventure in Vandalia. He heard Elwood say we bought a car from Wiley with no legal plates.
Broke, soon to freeze if left on the road, we got a ride in the cop’s Crown Vic back to Greenville, and he took us to the jail.
The next day the same cop brought Montgomery’s girl- friend to Greenville (Janice, and she called him Luke) and she begrudgingly gave us enough bus money to make it back to Lawrence, while Monty would go back to finding bro- ken-down cars on the highway. The cop told us there had been complaints about Wiley and his gang before, although to be honest, other than “impounding” the Marlin, Wiley had done nothing wrong.
We all slept on the bus the whole rest of the trip, not talking at all.
When we got to the bus station in Lawrence, a long- haired, bell-bottomed guy came and picked up the woman in the peacoat. She wrapped her legs around him like a snake, and he carried her to his van. She waved to me as she got in.
“So that is how I met her.” Nate looked at Paula, who shook her head, laughing. “So this all happened 50 years ago?” Kip asked. She smiled. “Your taxi is here.” “If that story was supposed to explain things, I have to tell you, I am more confused than ever.” “Think about it,” she said. Kip looked down on the street and saw a tall black guy get out of a Prius. A white guy was next to him holding a shotgun.
“I’ll finish the story when we see you next week,” said Nathan.
“For the Board of Directors meeting,” said Paula. “Yeah. Yeah. OK.” Chubby was ready to get back home. “I’ll get my stuff. You really are coming up for that meeting?”
“We’ll be there."
