Mark laughed. Pretty resourceful.
It both relieved Sternberg and gave him the creeps. "An instant Datsun?"
After an interval of further interpretation and persuasion, a kind of undignified scramble for places ensues, resultant positions appearing above. DeHaven grinds gears — the gearshift in this car is up next to the steering wheel, where Mark has before seen only automatic shifts. DeHaven's manipulations of the idiosyncratic shift summon images of fencing.
He guns the car, which, instead of shuddering or rattling the way home-assembled things are supposed to, seems rather to gather itself more densely into its wedged shape. He guns it. We seem to be minus a muffler.
"Varoom!" shouts the clown, rolling down his window and laying quality rubber.
"Hibbego!" shouts J.D. Steelritter, thinking how if the speck of shit says For Whom one more time he's gonna. .
To the Egress. To the Funhouse.
And as they drive more deeply into the Central Illinois countryside, which encases them in a cartographic obelisk, walled at the sides and tapered to green points at the horizons front and back, Magda Ambrose-Gatz — who, way back, newly divorced, just twenty-one, way, way back, before recorded history as understood by the four young people here, had represented the very first housewife on the then-embryonic McDonald's national campaign to realize and reveal through interpretive tap dance that, hey, she deserved a break from the vacuum and hot stove her equally tap-happy husband had remanded her to, a break, today — Magda starts up a conversation in back, that hard kind to carry on from the hump, flanked by boys, her head swiveling like a tennis spectator, in answer to Sternberg's awed remark that he'd no idea there was this much corn on the whole planet. She explains that the usually awfully generous U.S. government won't reimburse Illinois farmers for leaving their fields fallow — the soil's too rich here, and the macroeconomics of the nation's richest fields dictate maximum tillage — and but that, in the dark screw microecon drives into the agricultural picture, that very fertility produced so much corn — so thick and tall that DeHaven must (as was in a way foretold) downshift and pump distressingly vague brakes at every rural intersection they pass, slow way down, scan for vehicles whose perpendicular approach the crops' sheer size would obscure — so much corn that it's literally worthless, oodles (her term) of bushels of Supply that intersect the market's super-(Sternberg's term) elastic Demand curve down near the base, where Supply equals oodles and Price equals the sort of coin you don't even bother to bend over to pick up if you drop it. There's agron-ometric bitterness in her voice, which resonates even at low volume — the result of breasts of high caliber, Sternberg figures — as she sketches with broadly historical strokes the unworkable marriage that sent her West from Tidewater regions, postwar, in time to marry a speculator in Illinois land, and then but how the land got so fertile it's worthless, if that makes sense, but how the speculator — presumably a Mr. Gatz? — was married to the land, and wouldn't leave, even after a foreclosure that forced them to live in his car, a car with tailfins, cervically pink (embellishment Mark's), so that soon she was having to do commercials, in nearby Collision, to supplement income; and then but commercial offers withered up as she aged (gracefully), and her face got sort of orange (inference Mark's) — and the speculator's attachment to land and car got to be… well, she divorced the speculator, who now dabbles in pesticides, though not the unfortunate brand currently viewed by pests as incentive, and now she's a flight attendant — an aloft waitress, she terms it — for a commuter line, with turboprops and unpres-surized cabins, though she still cameos in the occasional Steelritter BrittAir ad, though always from the rear, a rear which is shapely and not at all orange (inferences and embellishments flying like unspoken shrapnel all over the inside of the menacing car), and is touching, ever so lightly, Sternberg's own gabardine leg through Magda's brown skirt, though there's a good-sized gap of red vinyl seat between her other ham and the leg of Mark Nechtr.
And, in a way, there's a sort of colored gap between Mark Nechtr and everybody else in DeHaven's homemade car. He has no historical connection to where they're going, has never appeared in a McDonald's commercial, has no connection to anything here except D.L., through a mistake and miracle and the ethical depth to try to do what ought to be right by her, although shouldn't she be showing by the end of six months? And but nobody at the Reunion will know him, or want anything from him, and he's left his equipment in an O'Hare locker and a dish of overpriced fruit. He feels unconnected, alone, sort of alienated, in transit, tightly enclosed, surrounded by a vast nothing that's alive.
He asks Magda the obvious question about to whom the remark about the unworkable Maryland marriage had been a reference, given her hyphenated name, but the question is forfeit in a great high-velocity wind as J.D. torches another Rothschild, and his cracked window positively roars, and also admits a lot of odd little gnats, and Sternberg behind J.D. lights a 100 in retaliation and also cracks his window, and D.L. coughs significantly and flips on the Heathkit radio DeHaven has built into the deep-red dash of the car, loudly. The static of the radio as D.L. scans for something contemporary sounds, to Mark, like Atlantic surf. The mixture of J.D.'s and Stern-berg's lit offerings is a kind of violet gas that swirls frantically around in the sunlight that lights the eastern half of the homemade jacked-up car.
Sternberg asks, with a barely hidden pathos, if they're almost there yet.
D.L. homes in on an audience-participation-call-in program on a crime-and-gospel station that identifies itself in three-part slide harmony as Wonderful WILL. The program, at near the top of DeHaven's 110-watt capacity, is something called "People's Precinct: Real-Life Crimes," today's installment entitled "Murder or Suicide: You, the Audience, Decide." A stormy Midwest love affair ends in the impalement and death of one of the lovers. The other lover was at the scene, but only the dead lover's fingerprints are found on the weapon. "You," the announcer says, "the Audience, Decide." Giving a 900-number. Certain evidence is presented, and Mark feels the stab of a story that is his own, yet true about others.
Sternberg is asking Magda just where they are. The car moans on turns and clicks on smooth tar. They've already turned onto small rural roads several times. The two open windows are yielding still more little insects as they pass a rare night-black fallow field. The insects are weird, small, have transparent wings, seem not to fly, but just sit there, all over the windows' insides, inviting squashing; and, when squashed, smell.
D.L. looks up from her notebook and poem — the only person Mark's ever seen who can produce anywhere, even when being jouncily propelled — assumes her mean-nun posture at the radio's presentation of hideous crime, and shouts into J.D. Steelritter's red ear that one of the best indications that some sort of apocalypse is on the way is the fact that violent public crime's scales of practice are tilting: how it seems like, each year, violence reveals itself less and less as the capacity, and more and more as just the raw bare opportunity, to harm. DeHaven responds by shouting that the only really sure sign of cataclysm's coming is if the Cubs actually win the pennant, as this year they're in danger of doing. J.D. asks him to shut up, waving irritably at a tailgating car to pass. The car does pass, a Chrysler, crammed with Orientals. It's doing about 100.