workforce, and become like any other bunch of greedy capitalists watching the profit margins.”
“And that,” Priest said, “would be the same as giving in.”
It was still dark when Priest and Star got up on Saturday morning in Shiloh. Priest got coffee from the diner next door to their motel. When he came back, Star was poring over a road atlas by the light of the reading lamp. “You should be dropping Mario off at San Antonio International Airport around nine-thirty, ten o’clock this morning,” she said. “Then you’ll want to leave town on Interstate 10.”
Priest did not look at the atlas. Maps baffled him. He could follow signs for I-10. “Where shall we meet?”
Star calculated. “I should be about an hour ahead of you.” She put her finger on a point on the page. “There’s a place called Leon Springs on I-10 about fifteen miles from the airport. I’ll park where you’re sure to see the car.”
“Sounds good.”
They were tense and excited. Stealing Mario’s truck was only the first step in the plan, but it was crucial: everything else depended on it.
Star was worrying about practicalities. “What will we do with the Honda?”
Priest had bought the car three weeks ago for a thousand dollars cash. “It’s going to be hard to sell. If we see a used-car lot, we may get five hundred for it. Otherwise we’ll find a wooded spot off the interstate and dump it.”
“Can we afford to?”
“Money makes you poor.” Priest was quoting one of the Five Paradoxes of Baghram, the guru they lived by.
Priest knew how much money they had to the last cent, but he kept everyone else in ignorance. Most of the communards did not even know there was a bank account. And no one in the world knew about Priest’s emergency cash, ten thousand dollars in twenties, taped to the inside of a battered old acoustic guitar that hung from a nail on the wall of his cabin.
Star shrugged. “I haven’t worried about it for twenty-five years, so I guess I won’t start now.” She took off her reading glasses.
Priest smiled at her. “You’re cute in your glasses.”
She gave him a sideways glance and asked a surprise question. “Are you looking forward to seeing Melanie?”
Priest and Melanie were lovers.
He took Star’s hand. “Sure,” he said.
“I like to see you with her. She makes you happy.”
A sudden memory of Melanie flashed into Priest’s brain. She was lying facedown across his bed, asleep, with the morning sun slanting into the cabin. He sat sipping coffee, watching her, enjoying the texture of her white skin, the curve of her perfect rear end, the way her long red hair spread out in a tangled skein. In a moment she would smell the coffee, and roll over, and open her eyes, and then he would get back into bed and make love to her. But for now he was luxuriating in anticipation, planning how he would touch her and turn her on, savoring this delicious moment like a glass of fine wine.
The vision faded and he saw Star’s forty-nine-year-old face in a cheap Texas motel. “You’re not unhappy about Melanie, are you?” he asked.
“Marriage is the greatest infidelity,” she said, quoting another of the Paradoxes.
He nodded. They had never asked each other to be faithful. In the early days it had been Star who scorned the idea of committing herself to one lover. Then, after she hit thirty and started to calm down, Priest had tested her permissiveness by flaunting a string of girls in front of her. But for the last few years, though they still believed in the principle of free love, neither of them had actually taken advantage of it.
So Melanie had come as kind of a shock to Star. But that was okay. Their relationship was too settled anyway. Priest did not like anyone to feel they could predict what he was going to do. He loved Star, but the ill- concealed anxiety in her eyes gave him a pleasant feeling of control.
She toyed with her Styrofoam coffee container. “I just wonder how Flower feels about it all.” Flower was their thirteen-year-old daughter, the oldest child in the commune.
“She hasn’t grown up in a nuclear family,” he said. “We haven’t made her a slave to bourgeois convention. That’s the point of a commune.”
“Yeah,” Star agreed, but it was not enough. “I just don’t want her to lose you, that’s all.”
He stroked her hand. “It won’t happen.”
She squeezed his fingers. “Thanks.”
“We got to go,” he said, standing up.
Their few possessions were packed into three plastic grocery bags. Priest picked up the bags and took them outside to the Honda. Star followed.
They had paid their bill the previous night. The office was closed, and no one watched as Star took the wheel and they drove away in the gray early light.
Shiloh was a two-street town with one stoplight where the streets crossed. There were not many vehicles around at this hour on a Saturday morning. Star ran the stoplight and headed out of town. They reached the dump a few minutes before six o’clock.
There was no sign beside the road, no fence or gate, just a track where the sagebrush had been beaten down by the tires of pickup trucks. Star followed the track over a slight rise. The dump was in a dip, hidden from the road. She pulled up beside a pile of smoldering garbage. There was no sign of Mario or the seismic vibrator.
Priest could tell that Star was still troubled. He had to reassure her, he thought worriedly. She could not afford to be distracted today of all days. If something should go wrong, she would need to be alert, focused.
“Flower isn’t going to lose me,” he said.
“That’s good,” she replied cautiously.
“We’re going to stay together, the three of us. You know why?”
“Tell me.”
“Because we love each other.”
He saw relief drain the tension out of her face. She fought back tears. “Thank you,” she said.
He felt reassured. He had given her what she needed. She would be okay now.
He kissed her. “Mario will be here any second. You get movin’, now. Put some miles behind you.”
“You don’t want me to wait until he gets here?”
“He mustn’t get a close look at you. We can’t tell what the future holds, and I don’t want him to be able to identify you.”
“Okay.”
Priest got out of the car.
“Hey,” she said, “don’t forget Mario’s coffee.” She handed him the paper sack.
“Thanks.” He took the bag and slammed the car door.
She turned around in a wide circle and drove away fast, her tires throwing up a cloud of Texas desert dust.
Priest looked around. He found it amazing that such a small town could generate so much trash. He saw twisted bicycles and new-looking baby carriages, stained couches and old-fashioned refrigerators, and at least ten supermarket carts. The place was a wasteland of packaging: cardboard boxes for stereo systems, pieces of lightweight polystyrene packing like abstract sculptures, paper sacks and polythene bags and tinfoil wrappers, and a host of plastic containers that had contained substances Priest had never used: rinse aid, moisturizer, conditioner, fabric softener, fax toner. He saw a fairy-tale castle made of pink plastic, presumably a child’s toy, and he marveled at the wasteful extravagance of such an elaborate construction.
In Silver River Valley there was never much garbage. They did not use baby carriages or refrigerators, and they rarely bought anything that came in a package. The children would use imagination to make a fairy-tale castle from a tree or a barrel or a stack of timber.
A hazy red sun edged up over the ridge, casting a long shadow of Priest across a rusting bedstead. It made him think of sunrise over the snow peaks of the Sierra Nevada, and he suffered a sharp pang of longing for the cool,
