Удушье (Choke)

In whatever motel they got, when he crawled into bed the Mommy snapped her fingers and asked for his pants, his shirt, his socks, his underpants, until he'd passed them all out from under the covers. In the morning when she gave them back, sometimes they were washed.

When a cashier asks for quarters, the boy said, they mean a pretty woman is standing there and everybody should come look at her.

'Well, there's more to it than that,' the Mommy said. 'But yes.'

Sometimes the Mommy went to sleep against the car door and all the other cars drove away from around them. If the motor was on, sometimes red dashboard lights the boy didn't even know were there would light up to show all kind of emergencies. These times, smoke came out through the crack around the hood, and the motor stopped by itself. Cars stuck behind them would honk. The radio talked about a new tie-up, a stalled car in the center lane of the freeway, blocking traffic.

With people honking and looking in the windows at them, being on the radio, the stupid little boy figured this was being fa­mous. Until the car horns woke her up, the little boy just waved. He thought about the fat Tarzan with the monkey and the chest­nuts. The way the man could still smile. The way humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

The little boy smiled back at all the angry faces glaring in at him.

And the little boy blew kisses.

When a truck honked its horn, then the Mommy jumped awake. Then slow again, she pushed most of the hair off her face for a minute. She pushed a white plastic tube up one nostril and breathed in. Another minute of nothing went by before she took the tube out and squinted at the little boy sitting next to her in the front seat. She squinted at the new red dash lights.

The tube was smaller than her lipstick, with a hole to smell through at one end and something that stunk inside. After she smelled it, there was always blood on the tube.

'You're in, what?' she said. 'First? Second grade?'

Fifth, the boy said.

'And at this phase your brain weighs, three? Four pounds?'

In school, he got straight A's.

'So that makes you, what?' she said. 'Seven years old?'

Nine.

'Well, Einstein, everything those foster parents of yours have told you,' the Mommy said, 'you can forget it.'

She said, 'Those foster families, they don't know what's im­portant.'

Right over them was a helicopter flying in one place, and the boy leaned so he could look straight up at it through the blue part at the top of the windshield.

The radio talked about a gold Plymouth Duster blocking the center lane of traffic on the beltway. The car appeared to be over­heating.

'Screw history. All these fake people, they're the most impor­tant people for you to know,' the Mommy said.

Miss Pepper Haviland is the Ebola virus. Mr. Turner Ander­son means somebody just threw up.

The radio said emergency crews were being dispatched to help clear the stalled car.

'All that stuff they're teaching you about algebra and macro­economics, forget it,' she said. 'You tell me, what does it get you if you can square root a triangle and then some terrorist shoots you in the head? It gets you nothing! This is the real education you need.'

Other cars edged around them and took off squealing fast and disappeared to other places.

'I want you to know more than just what people think is safe to tell you,' she said.

The boy said, 'Like what more?'