We set off in search of other items. I had never seen my parents buy so much in one morning, not even at Christmastime. We left K-Mart and went to Sears and the Army-Navy Store. We bought flashlights and American-made canteens, knapsacks, hunting knives, rubberized sleeping bags, and new shoes for all of us. Spending money made Father cross. He haggled with the salespeople and complained he was being robbed. "I can afford to be robbed," he said. "But what about the poor wimps who can't afford it?" I had no idea why he was buying these things, and it was embarrassing to hear him argue. Even Mother was getting fussed.
At the drugstore, filling a wire basket with things like gauze and ointment ("For our first-aid kit"), he broke off comparing the prices of aspirin and went to the rack of magazines for a copy of Scientific American. He was annoyed that it was stacked with girlie magazines, and said, "That's an insult."
"Look," he said, gesturing to the rack, "half of it's hard-core porn. There are married men who haven't seen things like this. It's news to medical students! Can you believe this? Kids come in for Tootsie Rolls and this is what they see. But ask any grade-school teacher and he'll tell you it's just what the doctor ordered. Charlie, what are you staring at?"
I was looking at a naked kneeling woman on a magazine cover, her smooth shiny sticking-out bum like a prize pear.
"You're basically ogling a nudie," he said, before I could reply. "But get your last look — get your last look. Mother, people bury themselves in this trash and pretend nothing's wrong. It makes me want to throw up. It runs me mad."
Mother said, "I suppose you want them to ban it."
"Not ban it. I believe in freedom of expression. But must we have it right here with the comics and the Tootsie Rolls? It offends me! Anyway, why not ban it or burn it? It's junk, it belittles the human body, it portrays people as pieces of meat. Yes, get rid of it, and the comic books, too — it's all harmful. How's business?"
He was now at the check-out counter, speaking to the lady cashier.
"Just fine," she said. "Can't complain."
"I'm not surprised," Father said. "You must do a land-office business in pornography. They say the retail porn trade is the new growth industry — that, and crapsheets. Must be quite a satisfaction to rake in the bucks that way—"
"I just work here," the lady said, and punched the cash register.
"Sure you do," Father said. "And why shouldn't you sell it? It's a free country. You don't believe in censorship. You read a book once. It was green, right? Or was it blue?"
Hunted, that was how she looked. Like a nervous rabbit nibbling the smell of a gun barrel.
Father paid her for the first-aid equipment and said, "You forgot to say, 'Have a nice day.'"
Outside, Mother said, "You never give up, do you?"
"Mother, this country's gone to the dogs. No one cares, and that's the worst of it. It's the attitude of people. 'I just work here'—did you hear her? Selling junk, buying junk, eating junk—"
"We want some ice cream," Clover said.
"Hear that? Junk-hungry — our own kids. We're to blame! All right, you kids come with me."
He took us to the A & P supermarket, and just inside, at the fruit section, he picked up a bunch of bananas. "Two dollars!" he said. He did the same with a pair of grapefruits wrapped in cellophane. "Ninety-five cents!" And a pineapple. "Three dollars!" And some oranges. "Thirty-nine cents each!" He sounded like an auctioneer as he made his way down the fresh-fruit counter, yelling the prices.
"Aren't we going to buy anything?" I said, as we left empty-handed.
"Nope. I just want you to remember those prices. Three dollars for a pineapple. I'd rather eat worms. You can eat earthworms, you know. They're all protein."
He got into the cab of the pickup with Mother, and we climbed into the back. I could hear his voice vibrating on the rear window as we drove through Springfield. He was still talking when we stopped on the road for gas. We weie in sight of the river — it was full and swift, and budding trees overhung it. But it was as gray as bathwater, and rippling like waves in the factory suds were dead white-bellied fish.
The cab door slammed. "A buck ten a gallon," Father was saying to the bewildered man at the pump. The man had a wet wasp in each nostril, and a tag on his shirt said Fred. "It's doubled in price in a year. So that's two-twenty next year and probably five the year after that — if we're lucky. That's beautiful. Know what a barrel of crude oil costs to produce? Fifteen dollars — that's all. How many gallons to a barrel? Thirty-five? Forty? You figure it out. Oh, 1 forgot, you just work here."
"Don't blame me — blame the president," the man said, and went on jerking gas into our gas tank.
Father said, "Fred, I don't blame the president. He's doing the best he can. I blame the oil companies, the car industry, big business. Israelis. Palestinians — know what they really are? Philistines. Same word, look it up. And Fred, I blame myself for not devising a cheaper method of extracting oil from shale. We've got trillions of tons of shale deposits in this country."
"No choice," said Fred, and snorted the wasps into his nose. "We'll just have to go on paying."
"I've got a choice in the matter," Father said. "I'm not going to pay anymore."
Fred said, "That'll be eight dollars and forty cents."
For a moment, I thought Father was going to refuse to pay, but he took out his billfold and counted the money into Fred's dirty hand, while we watched from the back of the pickup.
"No, sir, I am not going to pay anymore," Father said. "Let me ask you a question. Do you ever wonder, seeing what things are like now, what's going to happen later on?"
"Sometimes. Look, I'm pretty busy." He squinted, hunched his shoulders, and backed away. Hunted.
"I ask myself that all the time. And I say to myself, 'It can't go on like this. A dollar's worth twenty cents.'"
"It's worse in New Jersey," Fred said. "I've got a cousin down there. They've had rationing since January."
"There's a whole world out there!" Father cried, pointing with his cut-off finger.
The man stepped farther back, frightened by the finger.
"Part of the world is still empty," Father said. "Most of it is still uninhabited. You eat asparagus?"
"Excuse me?"
"Know why asparagus is so expensive — all vegetables, for that matter? Because the farmers hoard their produce until the prices rise. Then they put it on the market. When they know they've got you, the consumer, over a barrel. They could sell it for half the price and still get rich. You didn't know that, did you? The guys who cut it get a dollar an hour, nonunion labor — just savages and spear chuckers who hoick it out of the ground. It's no trouble to grow — God does most of the work. Next time you eat some asparagus, you remember what I just told you. Oil companies do the same thing — hoard their product until the price goes up. I don't want any part of it. Wheat? Cereals? Grains? We give it away to the Russians to keep the domestic prices up when we could just as easily be makine it into moonshine or gasohol. In the meantime, pay, pay, and get the little Koreans to make us sleeping bags and outfit the army with Chinese knapsacks — no one asks where—"
At the mention of Chinese knapsacks, Fred said, "Hey, I've got some customers waiting."
"Don't let me hold you up, Fred." Father shook him by the hand. "Just remember what I told you."
On the road, Father put his head out of the window and said, "Did I set him straight? You bet I did!"
There were buds on some trees and tiny pale leaves on others, and a sweet sigh of spring was in the air. Cows stood in some pastures as still as figurines, and sloping down to the road there were small rounded apple trees foaming with white blossoms. I could tell from the way Father was driving that he was still angry, but in all this prettiness — the delicate trees in the mild flower-scented air, and the sun on the meadows — I could not understand what was wrong, or why Father had been shouting. He cut down a back road just before we reached Northampton. Here were some clusters of yellow wild-flowers and the bright blood-color of a cardinal, like a heart beating inside a bush's ribs.