Wakefield by Andrei Codrescu

Author:Andrei Codrescu [Codrescu, Andrei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781504019880
Google: TDk1CgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0125U5LR4
Goodreads: 25948811
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2003-12-31T11:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

WEST

Wakefield points his rental car west out of the city, drives it through still-sleepy suburbs covered with snow and Christmas lights, past houses built of nothing more than fragile boards of pressed wood wrapped in twinkling light bulbs. The people in them sleep well, though they fell asleep watching war on TV, and Wakefield is grateful that these people, crammed together in shaky shelters by the freeway, are able to trust one another that much. They aren’t afraid that their neighbors will kill them and burn down their houses. They probably don’t even know their neighbors, because they rarely meet. And yet they trust one another enough to sleep, and their peaceful sleep is strong enough to wash over Wakefield as he drives past them.

What makes it possible for people who barely know each other, who live in straw houses, to sleep in America? It’s amazing, he says to himself, amazing.

The Devil chuckles. Oh, Wakefield, you are a naïve soul! What about the billion-dollar home security industry? I get ten percent of the profits! What about the locks and bolts and floodlights and video surveillance and fireproof safes and gated communities and bomb shelters? What about the gigantic gun business that’s been arming the populace since the founding of the republic? And what of the immense insurance racket that rakes in jillions from people’s fear? Even the poorest of the poor sleep with revolvers under their pillows.

Nothing has profited the Devil so much as the fear of crime: he gets his cut from every gun sold, every insurance policy, every security system installed, every lock, every fence, and every pepper-spray cannister in every women’s purse.

Wakefield has the luxury of time before his next gig for the art collector out West. When Wakefield was a young man he had made a generational right of passage: he drove to California a 1957 Oldsmobile called OhMy. It was 1966 and he was alone, like now, and sad. His girlfriend was supposed to go with him, but she changed her mind (another guy) at the last minute. He drove across the country with the Kinks, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Iron Butterfly, the Mamas and the Papas, his father’s well-thumbed road atlas, and worn paperbacks of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Leaves of Grass, and of course On the Road, published, wow, in 1957, the same vintage as OhMy. His memories of that trip are mostly visual, though: the night sky in New Mexico, a starlit immensity that made him dizzy; a downpour outside Denver that turned the road into a river sweeping smaller cars down the mountainside but not bothering OhMy a bit; a gigantic cowboy hat on top of a gas station in Texas where he bought jerky and beer; the softening of the light in the early morning desert. And that hitchhiker, a dirty, brown girl who took a long bath in the motel and spent the night. He left her at the Second Mesa turnoff to Old Oraibi in Arizona, by a sign warning white people to venture no farther.

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