Budding Prospects Read Free Page A

only by the most venial infractions. There had been the usual traffic violations, an unfortunate incident on the steps of the Justice Department during one of the Washington marches, and a fine for carrying an open container on the streets of Lake George. But that was about it. Certainly, like any other solid citizen with inalienable rights, I broke laws regularly—purchasing and consuming controlled substances, driving at a steady sixty-five on freeways, fornicating in water beds and hot tubs, micturating in public, knowingly and willingly being in the presence of persons who, etc., etc. On the other hand, I didn’t litter, extort, burgle, batter, assault, rape or murder. At thirty-one, endowed with the cautiousness and conservatism of maturity, I could arguably consider myself, if not a pillar, then at least a flying buttress of bourgeois society.
    Still, two hours after Vogelsang had left, and despite a weariness that verged on narcolepsy and a steady blinding Niagara of a rainstorm, I was on my way to Lake Tahoe to take my first irretrievable steps into the lower depths.
    At four a.m. I pulled into a truckstop and sat hunched over the counter on a cracked vinyl stool, spooned up grease and eggs, listened to moronic country-inflected yodeling from the jukebox, and drank eight cups of coffee that tasted of death and metal. The rain had stopped, and I watched myself in the dark, water-flecked window for a moment, my face lit by neon and the flashing lights of semis, and saw that my eyes glared and cheeks bristled with the look of criminality. Or tiredness. Then I left some money on the counter, stumbled out to my rust-spotted Toyota, and drove on up the hill to where dawn was flaring over South Tahoe.
    I missed the turnoff for Cherniske’s place, everything uniform at this altitude, snow on the ground like a fungus, trees as alike as a forest of Dixon pencils. Without thinking, I swerved to cut a U-turn and was nearly annihilated by a California highway patrolman doing about ninety on urgent business. The thing that saved my life—and the patrolman’s—was the supersiren with which the CHP car was equipped, the sort of deadly, heart-seizing klaxon fire trucks use when approaching intersections. I was halfway through my illegal U-turn, horizontal to the flow of traffic and already obstructing an entire lane, oblivious to sirens, lights, the possibility of runaway logging trucks, when the klaxon slapped me like an angry hand. My foot went to the floor, tires squealed, brake drums clapped like cymbals, and the Toyota lurched to a halt as the CHP cruiser careened past the front bumper, inches to spare. As he passed, the patrolman gave me a quick sharp look of murderous intensity—a look that said, I would shoot you here, now, no questions asked, as automatically as I would shoot a rattlesnake or a junkyard rat, but for this appalling emergency that requires my dedication, bravery and expertise—and then he was gone, a pair of taillights skidding round a corner in the distance.
    Mortified, I pulled the car round just in time to avoid theshrieking ambulance for which the cruiser had been running interference, humbly shifted gears, signaled, and swung onto the wet glistening blacktop road that snaked through the trees to Cherniske’s place. Almost instantly there was a thump, the wheel was jerked from my hand, and the car veered wildly for the shoulder and a clutch of nasty russet-barked pines. I’d been driving since I was sixteen and, groggy though I was, rose to the occasion, snatching the wheel back and regaining control without missing a beat. Calmly, almost clinically, I noted the cause of my minor emergency: there was a groove in the road. A deep insistent gash that seamed the right-hand lane like a furrow, as if some absentminded sodbuster had neglected to lift the plow blade while rumbling home on his tractor. I would have thought nothing more of it but for the fact that the groove seemed to be going in the same