“My wife and I are separated.”
“Recently?”
“Yes. As of December first.”
“And now you’ve got all these hang-ups that you could use some help with,” she said.
There was contempt in her voice but it was an old contempt, not aimed specifically at him. “Especially some help from a young chick.”
193
“I don’t want to lay anybody,” he said truthfully. “I don’t even think I could get it up.”
He realized he had just used two terms that he had never used before a woman in his life, but it seemed all right. Not good or bad but all right, like discussing the weather.
“Is that supposed to be a challenge?” she asked. She drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled more smoke.
“No,” he said. “I suppose it sounds like a line if you’re looking for lines. I suppose a girl on her own has to be looking for them all the time.”
“This must be part three,” she said. There was still mild contempt and hostility in her tone, but now it was cut with a certain tired amusement. “How did a nice girl like you get in a car like this?”
“Oh, to hell with it,” he said. “You’re impossible.”
“That’s right, I am.” She snuffed her cigarette in his ashtray and then wrinkled her nose. “Look at this. Full of candy wrappers and cellophane and every other kind of shit.
Why don’t you get a litterbag?”
“Because I don’t smoke. If you had just called ahead and said, Barton old boy, I intend to be hitching the turnpike today so give me a ride, would you? And by the way, clear the shit out of your ashtray because I intend to smoke-then I would have emptied it.
Why don’t you just throw it out the window?”
She was smiling. “You have a nice sense of irony.”
“It’s my sad life.”
“Do you know how long it takes filter tips to biodegrade? Two hundred years, that’s how long. By that time your grandchildren will be dead.”
He shrugged. “You don’t mind me breathing in your used carcinogens, screwing up the cilia in my lungs, but you don’t want to throw a filter tip out into the turnpike. Okay.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Listen, do you want to let me out? Is that it?”
“No,” he said. “Why don’t we just talk about something neutral? The state of the dollar. The state of the Union. The state of Arkansas.”
“I think I’d rather catch a little nap if you don’t mind. It looks like I’m going to be up most of the night. ”
“Fine. ”
She tilted the watchcap over her eyes, folded her arms, and became still. After a few moments her breathing deepened to long strokes. He looked at her in short snatches, shoplifting an image of her. She was wearing blue jeans, tight, faded, thin. They molded her legs closely enough to let him know that she wasn’t wearing a second pair or long-handles. They were long legs, folded under the dashboard for comfort, and they were probably blushing lobster red now, itching like hell. He started to ask her if her legs itched, and then thought how it would sound. The thought of her hitchhiking all night on 194
Route 7, either getting rides in short hops or not getting rides at all, made him feel uncomfortable. Night, thin pants, temperatures in the 20’s. Well, it was her business. If she got cold enough, she could go in someplace and warm up. No problem.
They passed exits 14 and 13. He stopped looking at her and concentrated on his driving. The speedometer needle stayed pegged at seventy, and he stayed in the passing lane. More cars honked at him. As they passed exit 12, a man in a station wagon which bore a KEEP IT AT 50 bumper sticker honked three times and blipped his lights indignantly. He gave the station wagon the finger.
With her eyes still closed she said: “You’re going too fast. That’s why they’re honking.
”
“I know why they’re doing it.”
“But you don’t care. ”
“No.”
“Just another concerned citizen,” she intoned, “doing his part to rid America of the energy squeeze.”
“I don’t give a tin weasel about the energy squeeze.”
“So say we; so say we all.”
“I used to drive at fifty-five on the turnpike. No more, no less. That’s where my car got the best mileage. Now I’m protesting the Trained Dog Ethic. Surely you read about it in your sociology courses? Or am I wrong? I took it for granted you were a college kid.”
She sat up. “I was a sociology major for a while. Well, sort of. But I never heard of the Trained Dog Ethic.”
“That’s because I made it up. ”
“Oh. April Fool.” Disgust. She slid back down in the seat and tilted the watchcap over her eyes again.
“The Trained Dog Ethic, first advanced by Barton George Dawes in late 1973, fully explains such mysteries as the monetary crisis, inflation, the Viet Nam war, and the current energy crisis. Let us take the energy crisis as an example. The American people are the trained dogs, trained in this case to love oil-guzzling toys. Cars, snowmobiles, large boats, dune buggies, motorcycles, minicycles, campers, and many, many more. In the years 1973 to 1980 we will be trained to hate energy toys. The American people love to be trained. Training makes them wag their tails. Use energy. Don’t use energy. Go pee on the newspaper. I don’t object to saving energy, I object to training. ”
He found himself thinking of Mr. Piazzi’s dog, who had first stopped wagging his tail, had then starred rolling his eyes, and had then ripped out Luigi Bronticelli’s throat.
“Like Pavlov’s dogs,” he said. “They were trained to salivate at the sound of a bell.
We’ve been trained to salivate when somebody shows us a Bombardier Skidoo with overdrive or a Zenith color TV with a motorized antenna. I have one of those at my house. The TV has a Space Command gadget. You can sit in your chair and change the channels, hike the volume or lower it, turn it on or off. I stuck the gadget in my mouth 195
once and pushed the on button and the TV came right on. The signal went right through my brain and still did the job. Technology is wonderful. ”
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“I guess so.” They passed exit 11.
“I think I’ll go to sleep. Tell me when we get to the end.”
“Okay.”
She folded her arms and closed her eyes again.
They passed exit 10.
“It isn’t the Trained Dog Ethic I object to anyway,” he said. “It’s the fact that the masters are mental, moral, and spiritual idiots.”
“You’re trying to soothe your conscience with a lot of rhetoric,” she said with her eyes still closed. “Why don’t you just slow down to fifty? You’ll feel better.”
“I will not feel better. ” And he spat it out so vehemently that she sat up and looked at him.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I lost my wife and my job because either the world has gone crazy or I have. Then I pick up a hitchhiker-a nineteen-year-old kid for Chrissake, the kind that’s supposed to take it for granted that the world’s gone crazy-and she tells me it’s me, the world is doing just fine. Not much oil, but other than that, just fine.”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“Good for you,” he said bitterly. “If the world’s so sane, what’s a kid like you doing hitchhiking to Las Vegas in the middle of winter? Planning to spend the whole night hitchhiking along Route 7 and probably getting frostbite in your legs because you’re not wearing anything under those pants?”
“I am so wearing something underneath! What do you think I am?”
“I think you’re stupid!” he roared at her. “You’re going to freeze your ass off! ”
“And then you won’t be able to get a piece of it, right?” she inquired sweetly.
“Oh boy,” he muttered. “Oh boy.”
They roared past a sedan moving at fifty. The sedan beeped at him. “Eat it!” He yelled. “Raw!”
“I think you better let me off right now,” she said quietly.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’m not going to crash us up. Go to sleep.”
She looked at him distrustfully for a long second, then folded her arms and closed her eyes. They went past exit 9.
They passed exit 2 at five after four. The shadows stretching across the road had 196
taken on the peculiar blue cast that is the sole property of winter shadows. Venus was already in the east. The traffic had thickened as they approached the city.
He glanced over toward her and saw she was sitting up, looking out at the hurrying, indifferent automobiles. The car directly in front of them had a Christmas tree lashed to its roof rack. The girl’s green eyes were very wide, and for a moment he fell into them and saw out of them in the perfect empathy that comes to human beings at mercifully infrequent intervals. He saw that all the cars were going to someplace where it was warm, someplace where there was business to transact or friends to greet or a loom of family life to pick up and stitch upon. He saw their indifference to strangers. He understood in a brief, cold instant of comprehension what Thomas Carlyle called the great dead locomotive of the world, rushing on and on.