Free Live Free

empty land. Those Indians represented civilization. The beavers felled trees and built lodges, but the Indians killed the beavers and skinned them.”

Barnes said, “Then the whites came and skinned the Indians.”

“Precisely. But the frontiersmen who destroyed the Indians and their culture were destroyed themselves, with their culture, by the settlers who followed. Those settlers lost their farms to the banks, and the banks sold them to companies who have brought the advantages of corporate existence—immortality and amorality—to agriculture.

“In the cities, the same thing occurred. The early city of independent shops and restaurants is properly being displaced by one of chain outlets, so that progressively greater control is exercised. Perhaps none of you has ever understood before why they are called that—chain outlets.”

None of the three spoke.

“You see the progress? The old stores had to sell things their customers wanted. As they’re eliminated, the need for their kind of slavery is eliminated too, and the chains can sell whatever they want. Their customers have to buy it because there’s nothing else to buy. I ask you, all of you—how often have you gone into W. T. Grant’s and found there was nothing at all you wanted?”

They stared at him. Stubb said softly, “Sometimes I feel like I’m in the wrong movie. You’re Wolfe Barzell, and you’re about to turn us over to Mike Mazurki.”

“And you are Elisha Cook, Jr. in glasses,” the man in the duffel coat told him. “You don’t have to look at me like that, I’m sure you must have thought of it yourself. Where was I?”

The witch said, “You were about to tell us our part in all this.”

He laughed, throwing back his head and taking two unsteady steps to the rear until he leaned against the door jamb. “Your part? My dear, demonic, dumb bitch, I can’t have been about to tell you that. You don’t have one. Like Short there says, you’re in the wrong picture. There are no parts for any of you in this one. It’s the truth. You’ve been extras and bit players, all of you, all your lives. Now you can’t even do that.”

One hand left the Thompson and groped in the side pocket of his duffel coat. In a moment it reappeared holding a silver flask. Clamping the Thompson under his arm, he unscrewed the top and drank. “Who said he wanted some?”

“Me, sir,” Stubb told him. “Short.”

“Catch!” He tossed the open flask. It left a narrow streak of whiskey on the floor.

Stubb drank and handed the flask to Barnes, who offered it to the witch, then drank too when she refused.

“Let me put it like this,” the man in the duffel coat said. “The Indians used to be Americans—that’s what an American was. Then the trappers were Americans, the Americans of their day. Then the farmers, with their buggies and plow horses and white clapboard houses. Even today when you look at a picture of Uncle Sam, you’re seeing what those farmers were like dressed up to go to the county fair. Only farmers aren’t real Americans any more. Neither are Indians. Poor bastards of Indians aren’t even foreigners, and we like foreigners more than Americans, because foreigners are the Americans of the future. The trappers are gone, and pretty soon you’ll be gone too.”

He felt in his pocket for the flask, then seemed to remember he had thrown it to Stubb.

“You aren’t Americans either.” His voice grew angry and a little deeper. “There isn’t one of you, not a God- damned one, that owns a designer sheet. Or a set of matched towels. You don’t wear anybody’s jeans, and you don’t jog. You’re shit. You’re just shit.”

“I would sooner die!” The witch’s vehemence startled all three men. “I would sooner die than wear your blue jeans and be seen!”

“You’re not American,” the man in the duffel coat repeated. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“And have I ever claimed to be? Or wished to be? I am a Gypsy and a princess. And a dupe, because you have made me one. But I will speak for the Indians too, because they were nomads when they were shaped by their own thoughts and not by yours, and we are nomads now, who will remain so though you slay us.” She gasped for breath; it was almost a sob.

“You have overcome us, but you have not conquered us. To conquer us you must beat us fairly, and you have not beaten us fairly, and so you have struck us to the earth, but you have not won. To conquer us, you must have dignity too, and for that reason you have not conquered us. A man may flee from a wasp and be stung by the wasp, but he has not been conquered by the wasp; it remains an insect, and he is still a man. You deck yourselves like fools and chatter and hop like apes, and your princes marry whores. That is why even those you have crushed to dust will not call you master, and none will ever call you master until you meet a nation more foolish than yourselves.”

Grinning at the man in the duffel coat, Stubb applauded. Barnes took it up.

For a few seconds the man in the duffel coat was silent, shifting the muzzle of the Thompson from Stubb to Barnes and back. Then he said, “All right, I was trying to explain. I thought maybe it might do some good. We’ve been told to send you to the top, so that’s where you’re going.”

Stubb said, “This sounds more interesting than the philosophical stuff—I never really liked that. You’re flying us to Washington?”

The man in the duffel coat shook his head. “I said to the top. To the people who really run things, run the whole world. They want to see all four of you, I’ll be damned if I know why. You’ll leave as soon as the other one gets here.” He chuckled. “You don’t know it, but you’re lucky. In a few more years, you wouldn’t just take a plane—you’d have to go above the stratosphere, into outer space. It’s the truth.”

“The High Country,” Stubb said.

“That’s right, the High Country. It started just after Pearl Harbor, when everybody was afraid the Nazis might come up Chesapeake Bay. The government was exposed as hell, but it would have harmed morale to move it to some place like Kansas City, although Senator Truman and some others were for it. So they decided to put the key men on a plane and shuttle them around.”

Barnes asked, “You mean President Roosevelt? My dad used to talk about him.”