do they have instead? You don't have bars and liquor stores, what do you fill all those empty lots with?'
'Churches, my man. Loads of God condos. Come Sunday you'll think you're celled up in a Pavlov ward, for all the ringing bells you'll suffer. Enough to drive you straight into the embrace of the demon alcohol.'
'Which you have to sortie out of the dry township to buy, yes?'
Bash grinned. Jonathan had rarely seen individual teeth so large. 'Now you're getting some notion of how this place functions, my son.' He stomped brakes and skidded to avoid a darting mongrel. Wet, ragged, freezing and starved, the dog shot a look of feverish panic toward the truck that reminded Jonathan of the wino in the bus depot. Maybe this was the bum's lost mutt. Dogs often assumed the traits of their masters
There you go again. Running.
He had not mentioned Amanda to Bash yet. He could predict Bash's feelings on the topic: You enjoy eating that brand of cow patties, he'd say. Good old Jonathan softens up and goes no, you're not being a bitch, darling, Bash would say. You fall for it every goddamn time, he'd say. Then he would yell that he gave up doing guilt a long time ago. Guilt doesn't exist, he'd say. It costs too bloody much and you never have anything to show for it, he'd say.
Not mentioning Amanda was another kind of flight. Running away could be a cleansing, declarative Act. Also cowardly - a child's response to a grownup problem.
Vehicles wallowing in snowbound lanes honked in the night. Water diffused the passing streetlamps into bold splashes of primary color.
Without noticing, Jonathan had begun rubbing his palms heavily along the legs of his pants. Out, damned guilt . His feet were roasting inside of his Justin boots as Bash's heater blasted.
The streets that ambled past the truck windows were dark, icy, sinister. The truck thrummed, wipers squeaking. Bash kept eyes front.
Jonathan cleared his throat, which seemed coated with a double scoop of thick gunk. 'So. Anyway. What do they call a district where you can buy liquor legally? A wet township?'
'Ho, ho, ho. I can see you're really gonna love it here. Near as I can reckon, the newspapers call them 'depressed neighborhoods.' They roll over to Division Street and shoot tape of derelicts whenever they need to emphasize our civic need to contravene urban decay.'
'Downscale?'
'Strictly.' Bash rubbed his lip with his index finger, as though miming brushing his teeth. 'You know that when winos freeze to death they turn black? No matter what color they were when they were alive. Weird. Like bones in an archeological dig. Spring thaw always unmelts a hundred or so every year - sterno and ethanol drinkers who sat down on a curb or a bus stop bench and got covered up by snowfall. When the snow goes away, you see loose clothing washing along the gutters when the sewers overflow. Some of 'em just melt right out of the clothes they were wearing.'
A glance in any direction confirmed that the snow here could bury or erase nearly anything. Jonathan saw featureless dunes of hard-packed snow, weeks old, with car bumpers sticking out. Sometimes the snow lifted the automobile from the street, like a glacier on the rise. It was simple to envision corpses, heatlessly entombed beneath the unyielding drifts of white.
In the surface streets, gray slush. Black ice. Oil-slick colored frozen puddles, and the waffled grain of a thousand thick-treaded tires. Fangs of snaggletoothed icicles depended thickly from every eave, dripping venomously tinted water. They fattened like stalactites, broke free and plummeted to the ground to assimilate into the frozen Arctic topography, to evaporate and rise into the filthy air. To condense again into new icicles.
'How the hell do you live in this?' said Jonathan.
'Stay indoors. Drink a lot.' Bash negotiated the first of
'Churches, my man. Loads of God condos. Come Sunday you'll think you're celled up in a Pavlov ward, for all the ringing bells you'll suffer. Enough to drive you straight into the embrace of the demon alcohol.'
'Which you have to sortie out of the dry township to buy, yes?'
Bash grinned. Jonathan had rarely seen individual teeth so large. 'Now you're getting some notion of how this place functions, my son.' He stomped brakes and skidded to avoid a darting mongrel. Wet, ragged, freezing and starved, the dog shot a look of feverish panic toward the truck that reminded Jonathan of the wino in the bus depot. Maybe this was the bum's lost mutt. Dogs often assumed the traits of their masters
There you go again. Running.
He had not mentioned Amanda to Bash yet. He could predict Bash's feelings on the topic: You enjoy eating that brand of cow patties, he'd say. Good old Jonathan softens up and goes no, you're not being a bitch, darling, Bash would say. You fall for it every goddamn time, he'd say. Then he would yell that he gave up doing guilt a long time ago. Guilt doesn't exist, he'd say. It costs too bloody much and you never have anything to show for it, he'd say.
Not mentioning Amanda was another kind of flight. Running away could be a cleansing, declarative Act. Also cowardly - a child's response to a grownup problem.
Vehicles wallowing in snowbound lanes honked in the night. Water diffused the passing streetlamps into bold splashes of primary color.
Without noticing, Jonathan had begun rubbing his palms heavily along the legs of his pants. Out, damned guilt . His feet were roasting inside of his Justin boots as Bash's heater blasted.
The streets that ambled past the truck windows were dark, icy, sinister. The truck thrummed, wipers squeaking. Bash kept eyes front.
Jonathan cleared his throat, which seemed coated with a double scoop of thick gunk. 'So. Anyway. What do they call a district where you can buy liquor legally? A wet township?'
'Ho, ho, ho. I can see you're really gonna love it here. Near as I can reckon, the newspapers call them 'depressed neighborhoods.' They roll over to Division Street and shoot tape of derelicts whenever they need to emphasize our civic need to contravene urban decay.'
'Downscale?'
'Strictly.' Bash rubbed his lip with his index finger, as though miming brushing his teeth. 'You know that when winos freeze to death they turn black? No matter what color they were when they were alive. Weird. Like bones in an archeological dig. Spring thaw always unmelts a hundred or so every year - sterno and ethanol drinkers who sat down on a curb or a bus stop bench and got covered up by snowfall. When the snow goes away, you see loose clothing washing along the gutters when the sewers overflow. Some of 'em just melt right out of the clothes they were wearing.'
A glance in any direction confirmed that the snow here could bury or erase nearly anything. Jonathan saw featureless dunes of hard-packed snow, weeks old, with car bumpers sticking out. Sometimes the snow lifted the automobile from the street, like a glacier on the rise. It was simple to envision corpses, heatlessly entombed beneath the unyielding drifts of white.
In the surface streets, gray slush. Black ice. Oil-slick colored frozen puddles, and the waffled grain of a thousand thick-treaded tires. Fangs of snaggletoothed icicles depended thickly from every eave, dripping venomously tinted water. They fattened like stalactites, broke free and plummeted to the ground to assimilate into the frozen Arctic topography, to evaporate and rise into the filthy air. To condense again into new icicles.
'How the hell do you live in this?' said Jonathan.
'Stay indoors. Drink a lot.' Bash negotiated the first of
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