The bill came. They divided it up and left a two-dollar tip on a thirty-six dollar charge because when you really thought about it the service was lousy and the food worse and the decor right out of a Tijuana whorehouse, and so what if the waiter gave them a dirty look when they were going out the door, he could go fuck himself, they could all go fuck themselves. Right. And then they were on the street, the air cool on her bare arms, September nearly gone already and October coming on, time dragging you through the year as if it had hooks on it, one holiday after another, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and then the big ones, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of it in service of what? Shopping. Spend, spend, spend. Make the corporations that much richer and the people that much poorer. Really, the only way to get off that wheel was to drop out and she’d told Christabel that till she was blue in the face, explained it over and over, patiently, in detail, and still she didn’t get it. Or wouldn’t.
Jerry Kane got it. And Jerry Kane died for it. He just got fed up to the point where quoting the UCC code and declaring his status to whatever Fascist disguised as a policeman just didn’t cut it anymore and so he took up arms because they gave him no choice. The final straw, or the next-to-final straw, was when they arrested him in Carrizo, New Mexico, at what he called on his radio show a “Nazi checkpoint, show me your papers, Heil Hitler,” a checkpoint set up for the sole purpose of harassing citizens, both natural-born and slave-state, and, of course, extracting money from them, moola, hard cash, as if they were anything more than just roadside bandits out of the old time, the lawless time when you protected yourself and your own and lived free. It wasn’t any different from what happened to her. They stopped him for no reason except that they had the guns and demanded his papers and when he refused to enter into a contract with them they hauled him off to jail under threat, duress and coercion and what he did was file a counterclaim alleging kidnapping and extortion against the arresting officers and the justice of the so-called peace of the so-called court. And then, two months later, he was on his way back from one of his seminars in Vegas to his home in Florida, and it happened all over again, and who could blame him if he just turned around and defended himself from fraud, malice and yes, kidnapping. Yet again.
He’d had enough. And when the two cops came up to the white van that was his own personal property on one of the highways and byways guaranteed for free and unencumbered access under the Uniform Commercial Code, he started shooting. West Memphis, Arkansas, Crittenden County. Two oppressors shot dead. But that wasn’t enough because the cops tracked Jerry Kane and his son to that Walmart parking lot and two more cops went down in a shitstorm of bullets and Jerry Kane and his sixteen-year-old son gave up their lives for it. For what? For seatbelts? For papers?
“Uh, Sara — Sara, earth to Sara?”
It was cold. She was rubbing her arms on the street that was all but deserted and the neon sign out front of Casa Carlos was like icing on a frozen cake and Christabel was standing there beside her trying to be funny. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay, okay.”
Then they were walking to her car, the sound of their heels like gunshots echoing out into the night and the traffic lights going red and green and red again and nobody there to know or care and Christabel was saying, “You going to be all right to drive?” and she was saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”
So she drove back to Willits on the road she could have driven blind and dropped Christabel off, a few pairs of headlights coming at her, nothing really. She was minding her own business and thinking ahead to Kutya and how he would have been missing her and holding his pee because he was the best-trained dog in the world and totally considerate of her, and if things seemed a bit blurrier than usual, that was all right, that was because it was dark and getting darker and she was sticking to back roads only now, taking a circuitous route home in the event there were any clowns in cop uniforms out there on the main road looking to harass, detain and rob people traveling in their own personal property to their own personal residence. Route 20, that was what she wanted to avoid, and she did, cutting a big rectangle or maybe a trapezoid around it, twice having to back up and pull U-turns because she somehow wound up on dead-end streets. But Route 20 was where she had to go at some point if she was going to get home, and finally, after having circumvented — or rectangavented — the intersection at South Main, she found herself out on the darkened highway at something like eleven o’clock at night. Minding. Her. Own. Business.
And then it all started over again, as if she were caught in a time warp. One whoop, then the lights flashing in the rearview. The shoulder of the road, the narrow view out the windshield. The sounds: bugs in the grass, the overzealous roar of the cruiser’s engine straining even in neutral, the declamatory tattoo of the officer’s boots first on the pavement and then on the tired dirt strip of the shoulder. The lady cop, the very one, bloodless, thin as a post, no lipstick, and something like joy in her eyes. The flashlight. The commands, License and registration, Proof of insurance, Step out of the car, and the same answers, or answer: “I have no contract with you.”
But they had the guns. They had the handcuffs. And they had their way with her.
25
THIS TIME SHE HAD to spend the night — in the drunk tank — with two other women, both in their twenties and both as dumb as boards and so polluted they couldn’t have stood up straight let alone driven an automobile, while she — she herself — was hardly drunk at all, and no, she wasn’t going to get out of the car and no, she wasn’t going to breathe into the Breathalyzer or stand on one leg or touch her fingertips to her nose or anything else. And why? Because SHE DID NOT HAVE A CONTRACT WITH THE REPUBLIC OF CALIFORNIA. And never would have. They could hang her, she didn’t care. But Kutya, poor Kutya, he was the one that had to suffer, just like the last time. He wasn’t in the Animal Control, but he was locked in the house and his bladder must have been bursting and what a trial of his conscience and all his training to have to go into the kitchen and take a sad guilty dribbling pee on the linoleum there. Where it would puddle. And stink. And dry up in a stain that would eat through the wax and take some real elbow grease to get out.
The judge was unsympathetic, a dried-up old bitch who looked as if her hair had been glued on. The bail money was doubled this time because of her failure to appear on the previous charge, and since Christabel didn’t have the money she’d had to go to a bail bondsman at an interest rate that would have put countries like Greece and Spain right under. Then there was the same charade at the impound yard, more bucks out the window, and she had to dig into her super-secret savings fund, the money she’d got when she and Roger split up and he bought out her interest in the house, money she’d told herself she’d never touch because it was going to be a down payment someday on a house all her own — once she’d saved up enough on top of that to meet the piratical amount they wanted because the banks hadn’t got done raping America yet.