“Jesus Christ!” she screams. “I just boinked a Flawed, Dad!”
I pick up my clothes and run through the woods. Acorns lodge in my heels. Manly fluids sail off me. In spite of the fact that she was repulsed by the real me, I find myself thinking in wonder of her breasts and the ripples in her belly. I’d gladly marry her. Doing that every night would be a reason for living. But apart from the fact that I disgust her, I’m a fugitive. I’ve violated Disclosure of Flaws legislation. I long to hold her tight and say: You took my virginity and made me forget my Flaw. Let me stay. I’ll tape my claws, or file them down daily. We could adopt. But what’s the use? I saw the look in her eyes. For the first time in years I’m truly ashamed of my claws. How I hate them. Oh for a pliers and the resolve to pluck them out once and for all.
I sneak back to the Canal. Her folks are standing in front of the barge, along with a shouting mob of townies and a sheriff with a rifle.
“The way I see it,” her father says, “we’re entitled to whatever’s on that barge.”
“Oh no you don’t,” Buddy says, almost in tears. “This barge belongs to Mr. Blay.”
“Take what you want, folks,” the sheriff says. “I have no abiding love for Flaweds.”
“Blay’s not Flawed, sir,” Mike pleads. “He’s Normal as the day is long, and a nice, nice man. Fax him. Ask him. Please. I beg you.”
“He hires Flaweds,” the sheriff says. “He hires Flaweds who haven’t been fitted with bracelets and go around raping Normals.”
Rape? I think. Rape? But I don’t budge. I like Blay but no way I’m getting lynched for a bargeful of GlamorDivans.
The mob strips the barge clean. Buddy and Mike weep. I feel so bad. Poor Blay. No wonder Normals don’t trust us. We’re always screwing them over.
There’s nothing to do. I could kick myself. I had sure transport west. I had a fat paycheck coming. I’ve let Connie down for a meaningless romp. I start walking. Far off I hear a train whistle. Then I hear bloodhounds. I run like hell through the woods and then along the tracks. A freight pulls through going slow and I run beside it. Holy cow, I think, I’m jumping a freight. I’m in a boxcar that smells like hay. I’m flying by a dark field full of baying dogs. The air smells like water and stars shine in the black Canal as we fly across a bridge.
Next morning lake Ontario’s out the open door. The beach is littered with seagull corpses, which people are scooping up like mad for dinner. Fishmongers on the shore shriek at consumer advocates passing out pamphlets about the hazards of eating lake fish. It’s Dunkirk, then Westfield, then Erie, then Girard. I lie in front of the open door, and as in a dream, the nation unfolds before me. You can imagine a hill, but an imagined hill is not actual, no clover smell rolls off it, no ugly dog chases a boy down it into a yard where a father is scratching himself before a chessboard set up across a birdbath. You can imagine sleeping Ashtabula but no justice is done the earnest faces manning the security bonfire at the crossroads. Here a drunk shouts advice to a tree, here a fire burns in a field of alfalfa, here the train whistle echoes back from a wall on which is scrawled: Die Earnest Pricks. Near Cleveland I see a mob pursuing a pig past a gutted Wal-Mart. Finally the pig’s exhausted and stands heaving on a berm. The mob seems unsure how to proceed. Then some go-getter shows up with a crowbar. The pig takes a whack in the head, then discovers new energy and trots off again with the mob in pursuit. Fortunately at this point the train rounds a bend.
For hours we head west, through Sandusky, Port Clinton, then Toledo, where in a public park militiamen hold back the dispossessed with firearms while emptying Hefty bags of bread crusts into a fountain for public consumption. We pass through Angola and Elkhart, through fields of torched corn, then Chicago, racked with plague, where corpses are piled high in vacant lots beside the tracks and Comiskey is now an open-air penitentiary, then across the plains, where solitary people dressed in sacks wander across the horizon, reminding me of my own cursed family. Sweet-smelling dust fills the car. The nation goes on forever. I never knew. When old people said plenty, bounty, lush harvests, I put it down to senile nostalgia. But here are miles and miles of fields and homes. Nice homes. Once it was one family per. Once the fields were thick with food. Now city men assigned residence by the government sit smoking in the yards as we pass, looking out with hate on the domain of hayseeds, and the land lies fallow.
On the morning of the sixth day a family gets on in a hop-smelling southern Illinois town. The bearded dad offers me sunflower seeds and briefs me on his child-rearing philosophy. Discipline and other forms of negativity are shunned. Bedtimes don’t exist. Face wiping is discouraged. At night the children charge around nude and screaming until they drop in their tracks, ostensibly feeling good about themselves.
“We ran the last true farm,” one of the kids screams at me.
“Until the government put us out,” the wife says softly. She’s pretty the way a simple white house in a field is pretty.
“Now we’re on the fucking lam,” says a toddler. Both parents smile fondly.
“We’re knowing America viscerally,” says an older girl while digging at her crotch with her thumb.
“Indeed,” the dad says. “My kids are at home on the American road.”
“It’s good for them not to be so staid,” the mom says. “Get out and breathe the air.”
“Live the life that’s being lived,” the dad says.
“Abandon the routines that conspire to force us into complacency,” says the mom halfheartedly.
“Think of the memories they’re accumulating,” the dad says.
“Still, it wasn’t a bad farm,” the mom says.
“Darn it,” the dad says. “Negativity, Ellie. Nip it in the bud. Remember? Forging self-love by creating a positive environment. Remember? They took our home but they can’t break our spirit?”
“Sorry,” the mom says. “I forgot. I mean, it was positive, because I was saying how much I liked our farm.”
“Never mind,” the dad says. “I love you so much.”
Still, he looks tense. He goes to the door and hanging his feet out tries to teach the kids “This Land Is Your Land.” The kids are busy leaning out of the speeding boxcar and lofting spit at little houses along the tracks.
“Nice shot, Josh,” the dad says. “You sure nailed that garage.”
“Shut up, Dad,” Josh says. “When you talk to me it screws up my concentration.”
“Sorry, buddy,” the dad says.
At Springfield a nutty-looking guy in a dirty flannel shirt gets on and immediately divides the boxcar in half with bales. On his cheek is a burned-in crucifix.
“Some serious privacy’s going to happen here or heads will roll,” he announces. “I’ve had it with interpersonal relationships.” Then he takes out a huge knife and sets it just inside his boundary. Even the wild kids shut up. He stretches out to sleep.
Once the kids get used to him, however, they resume shrieking. One little guy in coveralls keeps reaching across the border to touch the blade. Mom and Dad seem perplexed. To restrain or not to restrain? The blade looks sharp. But why risk quashing his natural curiosity?
I stay out of it. Another fifteen minutes and we cross the Mississippi.
The knife guy wakes up.
“Touch it again, you’re fucked,” he says to the kid, who’s about five. The kid’s eyes go wide.
“Just a minute,” the dad says. “That’s my son whose self-worth you’re bandying about. Don’t you remember what a special place the world was when you were tiny?”
“Don’t jack with me,” the knife guy says, “or I’ll be pleased to cut out and eat your whiny little heart.”
“Pshaw,” the dad says. “Sticks and stones, my friend. That kind of confrontational attitude does nothing but make me feel a lack of respect for you.”