Because, Laura had told him, she was doing what she thought was right. Maybe some of the funds she donated to were shams, maybe not. But she wasn't going to miss the money, and it all came from her newspaper salary.
But there was another reason she gave to charities, and perhaps it was the most important one. Purely and simply, she felt guilty that she had so much in a world where so many suffered. But the hell of it was that she enjoyed her manicures, her steambaths, and her nice clothes; she'd worked hard for them, hadn't she? She deserved her pleasures, and anyway she'd never used cocaine or bought animal-skin coats and she'd sold her stock in the company that did so much business in South Africa. And had made a lot of profit from the sale, too. But Jesus, she was thirty-six years old! Thirty-six! Didn't she deserve the fine things she'd worked so hard for?
Deserve, she thought. Who really deserved anything? Did the homeless deserve to shiver in alleys? Did the harp seals deserve to be clubbed and slaughtered? Did the homosexual deserve AIDS, or the wealthy woman deserve a fifteen-thousand-dollar designer dress? Deserve was a dangerous word, Laura thought. It was a word that built barriers, and made wrong seem right.
She put the letters aside, on a small table next to her checkbook.
A package of four books had come in the mail yesterday, sent from Matt Kantner at the Constitution. Laura was supposed to read them and do reviews for the Arts and Leisure section over the next month or so. She'd scanned them yesterday, when she'd been sitting by the fireplace and the rain was coming down outside. There was the new novel by Anthony Burgess, a nonfiction book on Central America, a novel about Hollywood called The Address, and a fourth nonfiction work that had instantly caught her attention.
Laura picked it up from where it sat beside her chair with a bookmark in it. It was a thin book, only one hundred and seventy-eight pages, and not very well produced. The covers were already warping, the paper was of poor quality, and though the pub date was 1989, the book had a faintly moldy smell. The publisher's name was Mountaintop Press, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The title was Burn This Book, by Mark Treggs. There was no author's picture on the back, only an ad for another book about edible mushrooms and wildflowers, also written by Mark Treggs.
Looking through Burn This Book brought back some of the feelings that had surfaced when she was sitting in the Fish Market. Mark Treggs, as recounted in the slim memoir, had been a student at Berkeley in 1964, and had lived in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the era of love-ins, long hair, free LSD, happenings, and skirmishes with the police in Peoples' Park. He wrote wistfully of communes, of crash pads hazed with marijuana fumes, where discussions of Allen Ginsburg poems and Maoist theories mingled into abstract philosophies of God and nature. He talked about draft card burnings, and massive marches against Vietnam. When he described the smell and sting of tear gas, he made Laura's eyes water and her throat feel raw. He made that time seem romantic and lost, a communion of outlaws battling for the common cause of peace. Seen in hindsight, though, Laura realized there was as much struggle for power between the various factions of unrest as there was between the protesters and the Establishment. In hindsight, that era was not as romantic as it was tragic. Laura thought of it as the last scream of civilization, before the Dark Ages set in.
Mark Treggs talked about Abbie Hoffman, the SDS, Altamont, flower power, the Chicago Seven, Charles Manson and the White Album, the Black Panthers, and the end of the Vietnam War. As the book went on, his writing style became more confused and less pointed, as if he were running out of steam, his voice dwindling as had the voices of the Love Generation. At the midpoint, he called for an organization of the homeless and a rising up against the powers of Big Business and the Pentagon. The symbol of the United States was no longer the American flag, he said, it was a money sign against a field of crosses. He advocated demonstrations against the credit card companies and the TV evangelists; they were partners, Treggs believed, in the stupefaction of America.
Laura closed Burn This Book and laid it aside. Some people probably would heed the title, but the volume was most likely fated to molder in the cubbyhole bookstores run by holdover hippies. She'd never heard of Mountaintop Press before, and from the looks of their production work they were only a small regional outfit with not a whole lot of experience or money. Little chance of the book being picked up by mainstream publishers, either, this sort of thing was definitely out of fashion.
She put her hands to her stomach and felt the heat of life. What would the world be like by the time David reached her age? The ozone layer might be gone by then, and the forests gnawed bare by acid rain. Who knew how much worse the drug wars could get, and what new forms of cocaine the gangs could flood the streets with? It was a hell of a world to bring a child into, and for that she felt guilty, too. She closed her eyes and listened to the soft piano music. Once upon a time, Led Zeppelin had been her favorite band. But the stairway to heaven had broken, and who had time for a whole lotta love? Now all she wanted was harmony and peace, a new beginning: something real that she could cradle in her arms. The sound of amplified guitars reminded her too much of that hot July night, in the apartments near the stadium, when she watched a woman crazy on crack put a gun to a baby's head and blow the infant's brains out in a steamy red shower.
Laura drifted amid the piano chords, her hands folded across her belly. The rain was falling harder outside. The gutters that needed repairs would soon be flooding. But in the house it was safe and warm, the security system was on, and for the moment Laura's world was a sanctuary. Dr. Bonnart's number was close at hand. When the time came, she'd deliver the baby at St. James Hospital, which was about two miles from the house.
My baby is on the way, she thought.
My baby.
Mine.
Laura rested as the silvery music of another age filled the house and rain began to slam down on the roof.
And at a K-Mart near Six Flags, the clerk behind the counter in the sporting goods department was just selling a boy-sized rifle called a Little Buckaroo to a customer who wore stained overalls and a battered Red Man cap. "I like the looks of that one," the man in the cap said. "I believe Cory will, too. That's my boy. Saturday's his birthday."
"I wish I'd had me a squirrel gun like this when I was a boy," the clerk said as he got the rifle, two boxes of ammunition, and a small telescopic sight ready to go. "Nothin' better than bein' out in the woods doin' a little shootin'."
"That's the truth. Got woods all around where we live, too. And plenty of squirrels, I'm tellin' you." Cory's father, whose name was Lewis Peterson, began to write out a check for the amount. He had the work-roughened hands of a carpenter. "Yeah, I believe a ten-year-old fella can handle a rifle that size, don't you?"
"Yessir, it's a beauty." The clerk copied down the necessary information and filed the form in a little metal box behind the counter. When the Buckaroo was slid into its rifle case and wrapped up, the gun was passed across the counter to Lewis Peterson. The clerk said, "There you go. Hope your boy has a happy birthday."