Freedom полностью

One late afternoon, a Friday, his tenth day at the lake, when he was returning in the canoe with some fresh unsatisfactory bittern footage, he heard car engines, loud music, and then motorcycles coming down the long driveway. By the time he got the canoe out of the water, Mitch and sexy Brenda and three other couples—three goon buddies of Mitch’s and three girls in sprayed-on bell-bottoms and halter tops—were unloading beer and camping gear and coolers onto the lawn behind the house. A diesel pickup was idling with a smoker’s cough, powering a sound system loaded with Aerosmith. One of the goon friends had a stud-collared Rottweiler on a towing-chain leash.

“Hey, nature boy,” Mitch said. “I hope you don’t mind some company.”

“Yeah, I do mind,” Walter said, blushing, in spite of himself, at how uncool he must have looked to the company. “I mind a lot. I’m here alone. You can’t be here.”

“Yes I can,” Mitch said. “In fact, it’s you that shouldn’t be here. You can stay tonight if you want, but I’m here now. You are on my property.”

“This is not your property.”

“I’m renting it now. You wanted me to pay rent, and this is what I’m renting.”

“What about your job?”

“I quit. I’m out of there.”

Walter, near tears, went into the house and hid the camera in a laundry basket. Then he rode his bicycle through a twilight suddenly drained of charm and filled with mosquitoes and hostility, and called home from the pay phone outside the Fen City Co-op. Yes, his mother confirmed, she and Mitch and his father had had angry words and decided that the best solution was to keep the house in the family and let Mitch do the repairs on it and learn to take more responsibility.

“Mom, it’s going to be party central. He’s going to burn the house down.”

“Well, I just feel more comfortable having you here and Mitch on his own,” she said. “You were right about that, sweetie. And now you can come home. We miss you, and you’re not really old enough to be by yourself all summer.”

“But I’m having a great time out here. I’m getting so much done.”

“I’m sorry about that, Walter. But this is what we’ve decided.”

Biking back to the house in near-darkness, he could hear the noise from half a mile away. Cock-rock guitar soloing, blunt drunken shouting, the dog baying, firecrackers, a motorcycle engine sputtering and screaming. Mitch and his friends had pitched tents and built a big fire and were attempting to flame-broil hamburgers in a cloud of pot smoke. They didn’t even look at Walter as he went inside. He locked himself in the bedroom and lay in bed and let himself be tortured by the noise. Why couldn’t they be quiet? Why this need to sonically assault a world in which some people appreciated silence? The din went on and on and on. It produced a fever to which everyone else was apparently immune. A fever of self-pitying alienation. Which, as it raged in Walter that night, scarred him permanently with hatred of the bellowing vox populi, and also, curiously, with an aversion to the outdoor world. He’d come openhearted to nature, and nature, in its weakness, which was like his mother’s weakness, had let him down. Had allowed itself so easily to be overrun by noisy idiots. He loved nature, but only abstractly, and no more than he loved good novels or foreign movies, and less than he came to love Patty and his kids, and so, for the next twenty years, he made himself a city person. Even when he left 3M to do conservation work, his primary interest in working for the Conservancy, and later for the Trust, was to safeguard pockets of nature from loutish country people like his brother. The love he felt for the creatures whose habitat he was protecting was founded on projection: on identification with their own wish to be left alone by noisy human beings.

Excepting some months in prison, when Brenda was alone with their little girls, Mitch lived in the lake house continuously until Gene died, six years later. He put a new roof on it and arrested its general decay, but he also felled several of the biggest and prettiest trees on the property, denuded the lakeside slope as a playground for his dogs, and hacked a snowmobile trail around to the far corner of the lake, where the bitterns had once nested. As far as Walter could determine, he never paid Gene and Dorothy a cent of rent.