The Infinite Plan Read Free

the first black man you’ve seen, Judy. You already know there are people of many colors, and that’s the way it should be. We whites are in the minority.”
    â€œI see more white people than black ones, Mama.”
    â€œThis is only one corner of the world, Judy. In Africa there are more blacks than whites. In China people have yellow skin. If we lived farther south, across the border, we would be exotic creatures; people would stop in the street and stare at your white skin.”
    â€œJust the same, he scares me.”
    â€œSkin doesn’t matter. Look into his eyes. He seems to be a good man.”
    â€œHe has eyes just like Oliver’s,” Greg noted with a yawn.
    Toward the end of the Second World War, life was hard. Men were still leaving for the front with a certain adventurous enthusiasm, but the patriotic propaganda had not made solitude any more bearable for the women; for them, Europe was a distant nightmare. They were tired of rationing, of keeping the house in good repair, and of bringing up the children by themselves. The widespread poverty of the preceding decade was not to be seen, but neither was there prosperity, and farmers were still roaming the highways in search of good land—white trash, as they were called to differentiate them from others who were as poor as they were but even lower on the social scale: blacks, Indians, and Mexican braceros. Although the Reeveses’ only earthly possessions were the truck and its contents, they were better off than many; they seemed more refined, less desperate; their hands were free of calluses, and their skin, although tanned by life in the outdoors, was not, like the farm laborers’, as tough as a boot sole. When they crossed a state line, the police, experienced in distinguishing subtle levels of poverty, treated them respectfully; they detected no trace of humility in these travelers. They did not force them to unload their truck or open their bundles, as they did farmers run off their land by dust storms, droughts, or the machinery of progress, nor did they insult them, looking for a pretext to use force, as they did with Latinos, blacks, and the few Indians who had survived massacres and alcohol; they merely asked questions about where they were headed. Charles Reeves, a man with the face of an ascetic, burning eyes, and an imposing presence, would reply that he was an artist and was taking his paintings to be sold in some nearby city. He did not mention his less tangible merchandise, in order not to create confusion or find himself forced to provide long explanations. Charles Reeves had been born in Australia and had shipped half around the world in boats captained by smugglers and drug dealers. One night he had disembarked in San Francisco. This is as far as I go, he had decided, but his wanderlust would not allow him to stay long in one spot, and as soon as he had exhausted the city’s surprises he began his peregrinations through the rest of the country. His own father, a horse thief who had been shipped to a penal colony in Sydney, had passed on to his son his passion for that animal and for open spaces: the outdoors is in my blood, he had always said. Enamored of the wide-open country and of the heroic legend of the winning of the West, Reeves painted its vast panoramas, its Indians and cowboys. With his small trade in paintings and Olga’s fortune-telling, the family scratched out a living.
    Charles Reeves, Doctor in Divine Sciences, as he always introduced himself, had discovered the meaning of life during a mystic revelation. He would tell how he had found himself alone in the desert, like Jesus of Nazareth, when a Master materialized in the form of a snake and bit him on the ankle—look, here’s the scar. For two days he lay in agony, and just when he felt the icy clutch of death rising from his belly toward his heart, his intellect had abruptly expanded: before his feverish eyes appeared the