“Where do you want me to go?”
“Out of town. Not too far.”
“This can’t be legal.”
“You let me worry about that. I’m pretty good in court.”
“O.K.,” Converse said.
Antheil relaxed visibly.
“You’ve just done something smart for a change. Maybe you’re getting smarter.”
“I hope so,” Converse said. “I don’t want you to panic,” Antheil said playfully. “I’m going to ask Mr. Danskin and Mr. Smith to come in now.”
He opened the door that led to the living room.
“Mr. Danskin,” he called. “Mr. Smith.”
Mr. Danskin and Mr. Smith entered with the air of men performing a mildly disagreeable obligation. Antheil turned to Converse.
“I think you all know each other.”
“It’s great to see a real loser really lose,” the bearded man told Converse. He was Mr. Danskin.
“I just told him he was getting smarter,” Antheil said.
Mr. Danskin shrugged.
“Who said he wasn’t smart?”
“You’re going on the road, fellas,” the agent said. “You know all about it.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Danskin said.
Antheil clapped his hands.
“O.K. So do it.”
“How long will we be away for?” Converse asked. “Should I bring some stuff?” He had hesitated to ask, fearing that the question might produce silence or even levity.
A brief silence did in fact ensue.
“Sure,” Antheil said. “Bring whatever you want.”
Mr. Smith came into the other bedroom with him to watch him pack. Mr. Smith was the younger, blond one. He picked out some shirts and a sweater. Everything was still in his suitcase; he put the clothes in a cardboard shirt box. When they went back to Janey’s room, Antheil was ad miring the drawing on the wall.
“That’s your counterculture right there,” he said.
No one disagreed with him.
“Converse,” he declared, “I’ve enjoyed talking to you. You just confirmed a whole lot of ideas I’ve had about the way things are going. I’m really glad to have met you.”
“You’re not coming?”
Antheil shook his head.
“You got nothing to worry about. You’ll be in good hands.” A thought seemed to strike him on the way out.
“You know I have a kid,” he told Danskin, “he’s twelve now. He lives with my lately wife. Last summer I sent him to survival school. Toughen him up for the big shit storm.”
“What do they do there?” Mr. Smith asked.
“What do they do there? They survive.”
Everyone smiled politely.
Mr. Danskin was looking at Converse.
“You never went to survival school.”
“No,” Converse admitted. “I don’t think they had them.”
_
HICKS DROVE ON SPEED. His fatigue hung the desert grass with hallucinatory blossoms, filled ravines with luminous coral and phantoms. The land was flat and the roads dead straight; at night, headlights swung for hours in space, steady as a landfall — and then rushed past in streaks of color, explosions of engine roar and hot wind. Every passing truck left in its screaming wake the specter of a desert head-on — mammoth tires spinning in the air, dead truck drivers burning in ditches until dawn.
Marge nodded in the back seat. Now and then she spoke and Hicks could not understand her. She scratched in her sleep.
The state did not seem like sleep to Marge. She had turned inward from the chaos of motion outside. Her head was filled with freakery — that she was turning to rubber, that her mind had been replaced by a cassette.
Security was fled. Sometimes she simply set the bag on the seat beside her. There was so much that she was prof ligate; the seat was sticky with it, grains of it glistened on the rubber matting of the floor. After doing up, she would sit beside him in the front for a while, but they did not speak very much, there was nothing that would bear exchange.
They stopped at night — so that Hicks could sleep for three hours or so, drop more speed, and put them on the road again. They avoided the Interstates, the military reserves, the Indian reservations, trying for roads that were obscure but not deserted.
Late in the second day, they passed miles and miles of spinach fields watered with sprinklers. Roads met at perfect right angles; the white farmhouses had groves of pale aspen surrounding them. A town called Moroni had a plaster angel in its dusty main square and they stopped there for gas and bought lunch meat and whole-wheat bread at a Japanese grocery.
By the time night fell, their road led upward over the slopes of half-fallen mountains where broken boulders were piled on each other’s backs. In the twilight, the great rocks came to look like statues and the scrub pine growing from the crevices beneath them like offering flowers.
They drove all night to climb the ridge. A few hours before dawn, Hicks pulled over to sleep.
“Who’s up here?” she asked him.
“My alma mater’s up here,” he said with his eyes closed. “My freaked-out old roshi. They have writing doctors — this guy is a writing roshi.”
“You mean he deals?”
“Deals isn’t the word.”
While he slept, Marge listened to owls.
Late the next morning, Hicks was laughing to himself as he drove. The sky was obscene in its brightness, the crimson rocks a bad joke. Then, gradually the route wound downward, switchback after switchback. Trees were thicker, there were wildflowers beside the road. Abruptly they were driving between clapboard buildings on a street of sorts, in a kind of town at the base of a sheer cliff that kept half the place in welcome shadow.
As they followed the road, Marge became aware that there were people among the unpainted buildings. The first group she saw were children — little girls in frilly white blouses with patent leather shoes. Then, before the next shack, a group of men in beige suits and dark ties. Some of the men carried books under their arms. Farther along, a young black haired woman in a pink blouse nursed a baby in the shade.
The road ended with a curving flourish over a sandy pit
in which lay a few car skeletons and the rotting remnants of a tepee. To one side of the pit was a cluster of orange and blue tents; beside the tents fifteen or so International Harvester trucks were lined up. The trucks were painted in bright colors, Mexican pastels. They were open in the back; each truck had benches across its van with lengths of knotted rope along the sides for hand grips. They were the sort of trucks which one saw carrying braceros in Mexico and southern California.
A group of silent people gathered slowly near the place where they stopped die Land-Rover. They were Mexicans, Marge saw, dressed with a curious formality. All the men wore the same cut of beige suit with wide lapels and thick stitching. Their dark ties were held in place with cheap tin tie clasps. Waves of lacquer black hair curved above their brown faces. There were little boys among them, small replicas of the men down to the tin tie clasps. Instead of shoes, they wore plastic sandals over socks; their feet were covered with dust. Marge stared at them through the insect-spattered windshield. They returned her stare without hostility and without greeting.
“Are those people really out there?” she asked Hicks.
Hicks turned over the engine and looked at her.
“I don’t know what’s really out there.”
He sat rubbing his temples, laughing at something.
Marge climbed out and faced the group. Hicks came around from the other side of the car. “Oh you mean these folks,” he said. “Yeah, these folks are really out here.”
“Hello, brothers,” he told them. “Hola, muchachos.”