“Believing in destiny isn’t worse than believing in anything else,” Palmer shrugged his shoulders. “It’s possible never to get in a stranger’s car during your whole life and then to slip and die in your own bathtub, isn’t it?”
“Exactly.”
“But just the same I wouldn’t let my daughter hitchhike, not even to the other end of town. These days—not for a moment. My God, I never was a goody two-shoes myself. I lost my virginity when I was 17 and my girlfriend was the same age. But at least we really thought we would get married. When I was young, if a man smiled at a kid and started talking to him, everyone around melted—look how he likes children! And in most cases, that’s how it really was. And now in the same situation, the kid is immediately whisked away, because everyone thinks this guy is a fucking pedophile. And goddamn it, in most cases they’re right again!”
“Do you like children?” the girl asked.
“No,” shortly answered Pete.
“But what about your daughter?”
“I don’t have a daughter.”
She became silent again.
“How did you get out here?” Palmer asked. “In the middle of the desert?”
“A guy who gave me a lift put me out of his car here.”
“Did he molest you?”
“No, he didn’t. But he was an asshole. I don’t know why I got in his car—I guess I just got sick and tired of waiting for a ride in this heat. He stank of sweat and smoked cheap cigars. At first we didn’t talk at all—he listened to country music.”
“He had thick hairy fingers and a cowboy hat. And he drives a shabby blue pickup,” added Pete.
“You saw him?” the girl was surprised.
“No, but if you see one guy like that, you’ve seen them all.”
“Well, that’s what he’s like, only the pickup is gray instead of blue. So, he listened to country, and sometimes he even tried to sing along. And then the music ended and the news came on. It was about that Dorothy Springles, the one who got her own husband locked up for rape.”
“I know.”
“Today the court said ‘no’ to his appeal or something. And this guy started yelling about ‘underfucked feminist bitches’ and stuff. And he finished by saying that the dumbest thing Americans ever did was to allow cunts and niggers to vote. It looked like he even believed that it happened simultaneously. Well, and… I spoke up. To tell the truth, I was way more polite than he deserved,” the girl glanced fearfully at Palmer, having thought too late that he could agree with the pickup driver. But Palmer didn’t express an opinion in any way. “Well, then he stopped the car and told me to get the fuck out. That I was a stinking bitch and so on. I wanted to tell him which of the two of us was stinking, but I didn’t dare. He was at least three times bigger than me and there wasn’t anyone around for 50 miles.”
“How long did you wait there?”
“Well, probably, more than an hour. A little more and I would be a dried up mummy filled with sand.”
“So you decided, just in case, to keep mum with me.”
“Exactly.”
“All problems between people come from two causes,” Palmer said. “First, they don’t tell each other the truth. And second, they do tell it.”
The girl looked at him respectfully.
“Are you a writer?”
“Nope, I’m not a writer. And not a maniac. And I don’t drop girls on the road in the middle of a desert—at least, not yet.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“By the way, I didn’t get your name.”
“Bettie.”
“Not very pretty,” slipped off Palmer’s tongue.
“What?” she seemed more surprised than offended.
“Sorry. Pay no attention. I’ve been having a bad time recently.” (“In the last 74 hours,” he added mentally. “Or in the last 50 years—depending on how you look at it.”)
“You can call me Liz if you want”
“Frankly speaking, I don’t like ‘Liz’ any better than ‘Bettie,’” he admitted. “But don’t sweat it. That’s just me. You aren’t angry?”
“Everything is okay, mister.”
“Don’t call me ‘mister.’ Call me Pete.”
“Okay… Pete.”
“That bothers you?” he immediately asked, noticing an uncertainty in her voice. “You think I’m trying to seem like one of the boys, as if I still were young? It’s unnatural for you to call such an old fart ‘Pete?’”
“You don’t look at all like an old… umm…”
“Don’t lie to me, Bettie. I know perfectly well how a 50-year-old looks when you’re 17.”
“Actually, I’m 18 already.”
“Is that so?” grinned Pete.
“Yes,” Bettie answered, thinking aloud. “I turned 18 last week,and I decided that I have had enough. Enough of a permanently drunk dad, enough of a mother who dad turned into a dumb animal long ago, enough of a brother all the time trying to pinch my butt or to watch me change clothes—enough of the whole nice little town of Bricksville, let it burn in hell. I broke my piggy bank, packed a backpack and went to the road. By evening I was already 200 miles away from home and I hope never to come any closer to it again.”
“And where are you going?”
“Dunno. Maybe Sacramento or Frisco. Or maybe I’ll find a waitress job in some roadside diner this side of the Rockies. I don’t have any definite plans. The main thing is to get far away from Bricksville and then we’ll see.”
“Can you do anything? Well, except housework.”
“Not much,” she admitted. “But I’m a fast learner.”
“Have you at least graduated from high school?”
“Yes… and my grades weren’t too bad. Though I hope that when Bricksville burns in hell, the fire gets the school first.”
“I see,” Palmer nodded. It suddenly seemed to him that the girl was looking at him with hope and he hastened to dispel it.
“I’m asking for no reason. Don’t think that I can offer you a job. For that matter, I’m unemployed myself now.”
“But your ride is cool,” mistrustfully noted Bettie.
“I’ve been unemployed for only 74 hours. 74 and a half now.”
“Bad luck for you, I guess,” she said sympathetically.
“It was bad luck for me when I was born.”
“Just the same, I don’t think everything is so bad,” she carefully offered after a pause.
“At your age I thought so, too. When you’re 18, it seems that you’ll be young forever. But you’ll hardly have time to sigh before you’re 36, and then 54. Anyway, you start to die much earlier. Did you know, that after 25, a human loses a hundred thousand brain cells per day? After 40 this process sharply accelerates and after 50 the brain starts to dry out noticeably. There’s no arguing with the fucking science… We try to deceive ourselves too long. At 40, we try to tell ourselves that we’re the same as always, though actually we’ve been sliding downhill for a long time. And at 50 you notice that you aren’t just sliding but accelerating with the wind in your ears. Hold the handrail, ladies and gentlemen, the next stops are Arthritis! Sclerosis! Cancer! Infarct! Stroke! Parkinson’s! Alzheimer’s! Do you understand, Bettie?”
“I think I do,” the girl answered without any real confidence, “but…”
“You don’t understand a damned thing. And then, when you realize that ahead of you is only misery and after that—darkness and void, you start to look back at your past, searching for at least some meaning. But there isn’t any, Bettie. Have you ever thought about how the life of an ordinary man is absolutely awful?”
“Maybe in Bricksville.”
“Forget your fucking Bricksville! As if in New York, Paris, or Venice things are different! Every day a man goes to work, doing some nonsense like advertising chewing gum or selling canned cat food. He may pretend that it interests him, or honestly admit to himself that he hates his idiotic job —it doesn’t change things a bit. For all his life, beginning in school, he diligently works like a squirrel in a cage to provide himself with money. What does he spend this money on? On food which several hours later is flushed down a toilet bowl, on buying things whose main purpose is to show how much money was spent on them, on vacation trips where he is baked on a beach like a pig in an oven or runs like a sheep in a herd following the guide and shooting views which were already photographed 300 million times by other sheep. Work and other routine activities leave him no more than a couple of free hours a day, and how does he dispose of them? He kills them watching stupid TV shows or playing poker. Then, if he is in the mood, he fucks his wife and if not—he just falls asleep immediately. In the morning, sleepy and angry, he again goes to work. And this goes on day after day. Somehow, he believes that all this is just a prelude to some bright and fine future—until it becomes obvious that the only future for him is a wooden box with decaying meat which will be pushed in the ground or into an oven, far enough from the eyes and noses of those who face the same fate later. And nothing will remain of him, absolutely nothing. Even the cat food which he sold all his life won’t be named after him.”