Freedom полностью

Late on a dismal afternoon in March, in cold and greasy drizzle, Walter rode with his assistant, Lalitha, up from Charleston into the mountains of southern West Virginia. Although Lalitha was a fast and somewhat reckless driver, Walter had come to prefer the anxiety of being her passenger to the judgmental anger that consumed him when he was at the wheel—the seemingly inescapable sense that, of all the drivers on the road, only he was traveling at exactly the right speed, only he was striking an appropriate balance between too punctiliously obeying traffic rules and too dangerously flouting them. In the last two years, he’d spent a lot of angry hours on the roads of West Virginia, tailgating the idiotic slowpokes and then slowing down himself to punish the rude tailgaters, ruthlessly defending the inner lane of interstates from assholes trying to pass him on the right, passing on the right himself when some fool or cellphone yakker or sanctimonious speed-limit enforcer clogged the inner lane, obsessively profiling and psychoanalyzing the drivers who refused to use their turn signals (almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity, the compromised state of which was already manifest in the compensatory gigantism of their pickups and SUVs), experiencing murderous hatred of the lane-violating coal-truck drivers who caused fatal accidents literally once a week in West Virginia, impotently blaming the corrupt state legislators who refused to lower the coal-truck weight limit below 110,000 pounds despite bounteous evidence of the havoc they wreaked, muttering “Unbelievable! Unbelievable!” when a driver ahead of him braked for a green light and then accelerated through yellow and left him stranded at red, boiling while he waited a full minute at intersections with no cross traffic visible for miles, and painfully swallowing, for Lalitha’s sake, the invective he yearned to vent when stymied by a driver refusing to make a legal right turn on red: “Hello? Get a clue? The world consists of more than just you! Other people have reality! Learn to drive! Hello!” Better the adrenaline rush of Lalitha’s flooring the gas to pass uphill-struggling trucks than the stress on his cerebral arteries of taking the wheel himself and remaining stuck behind those trucks. This way, he could look out at the gray matchstick Appalachian woods and the mining-ravaged ridges and direct his anger at problems more worthy of it.

Lalitha was in buoyant spirits as they sailed in their rental car up the big fifteen-mile grade on I-64, a phenomenally expensive piece of federal pork brought home by Senator Byrd. “I am so ready to celebrate,” she said. “Will you take me celebrating tonight?”

“We’ll see if there’s a decent restaurant in Beckley,” Walter said, “although I’m afraid it’s not likely.”

“Let’s get drunk! We can go to the best place in town and have martinis.”

“Absolutely. I will buy you one giant-assed martini. More than one, if you want.”

“No but you, too, though,” she said. “Just once. Make one exception, for the occasion.”

“I think a martini might honestly kill me at this point in my life.”

“One light beer, then. I’ll have three martinis, and you can carry me to my room.”

Walter didn’t like it when she said things like this. She didn’t know what she was saying, she was just a high-spirited young woman—just, actually, the brightest ray of light in his entire life these days—and didn’t see that physical contact between employer and employee shouldn’t be a joking matter.

“Three martinis would certainly give new meaning to the word ‘headache ball’ tomorrow morning,” he said in lame reference to the demolition they were driving up to Wyoming County to witness.

“When was the last time you had a drink?” Lalitha said.

“Never. I’ve never had a drink.”

“Not even in high school?”

“Never.”

“Walter, that’s incredible! You have to try it! It’s so fun to drink sometimes. One beer won’t make you an alcoholic.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” he said, wondering, as he spoke, if this was true. His father and his older brother, who together had been the bane of his youth, were alcoholics, and his wife, who was fast becoming the bane of his middle age, had alcoholic proclivities. He’d always understood his own strict sobriety in terms of opposition to them—first, of wanting to be as unlike his dad and brother as possible, and then later of wanting to be as unfailingly kind to Patty as she, drunk, could be unkind to him. It was one of the ways that he and Patty had learned to get along: he always sober, she sometimes drunk, neither of them ever suggesting that the other change.

“What are you worried about, then?” Lalitha said.

“I guess I’m worried about changing something that’s worked perfectly well for me for forty-seven years. If it’s not broke, why fix it?”