Russian Spring (40 page)

Out here, drifting off to sleep by an American river under these brilliant American stars, Bobby was content for the first time since he had set foot on these shores. At last he felt that he had in some way come home. At last he had found a piece of the America of his dreams, an America he could truly love.

The next morning, Bobby canvassed the people in the tents by the river, trying, as per Duke’s warning, to find a hitch that would take him all the way across the desert to Las Vegas. The best he could find was an old retired couple named Ed and Wilma Carpenter, on their way to Death Valley, where, they assured him, he should be able to catch a lift to Los Angeles even at this time of year; what with the Fuller Dome and all, it was a summer resort for Angelenos too, even with the heat.

“You can drive, son, can’t you?” Ed Carpenter asked him. “Wilma and I, we’re getting on a bit, and we could do with a bit of relief.”

Bobby thought about lying about it, but he had already told them one about being a
UCLA
student on his way back to school from visiting his folks back East, and besides he had no idea whether he could fake it once behind the wheel.

“ ’Fraid not,” Bobby said. “I never learned how.”

Ed looked at him peculiarly. “You go to school in
Los Angeles
, and you can’t drive a car?”

“Uh . . . I live in the dorms, and I’ve got a bike,” Bobby said, giving him a good European explanation. “And . . . uh . . . my folks, they don’t have much money,” he added when Ed didn’t seem to quite buy that for some reason.

Ed looked at Wilma. Wilma looked at Ed. They both shrugged.

“Well, why not?” Ed said. “The car just about drives itself, and
there won’t be any cops out there. Be good to have a young man to talk to. What you say, Bob, you want to try to learn how to drive? After all, you
are
a Californian, sort of. . . .”

“Oh, Ed!” Wilma cried. But she giggled, and the three of them climbed into the electrocruiser, Bobby in the backseat, and off they went, with Ed Carpenter at the wheel.

The car was a fuel-cell job with four-wheel electrodrive, air conditioning, plush bucket seats front and rear, a water-cooler, a little refrigerator, “our little living room on the road,” Wilma called it.

Ed and Wilma had owned a furniture store in Golden, and after ten years in business, they had put aside enough to put a down payment on the building it was in. Never thought they’d make enough to retire, but then three years ago, a developer came around and bought up the whole block to put in a shopping mall, gave them a nice price, and after they closed out the mortgage, they had enough money to buy a life annuity which paid out enough so they could indeed retire and take these little camping trips, see Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Zion, and now Death Valley. Their son Bill was a captain in the Air Force, flew Penetrators out of Edwards, and they were going to tool up there and pay him a visit later on.

They were a pleasant enough old couple, and as the car descended out of the western slopes of the Rockies into the dry and rocky high desert, they had exhausted their modest little life story and started quizzing Bobby about his.

Bobby had been dreading this a bit; it was going to be a long drive, and he didn’t like the idea of spinning long elaborate lies for these honest, open people, but it was second nature by now, and besides he was fearful of revealing his European background to the parents of a captain in the United States Air Force.

So he made up a story about his mom and dad back in Akron, she was a schoolteacher and he was a foreman in a steel mill, just plain folks, but they had managed to save up enough money to send him to
UCLA
, what with a partial scholarship he had gotten, where he was presently majoring in world history, thought he might end up teaching too, maybe even at a university level, who knows . . . ?

“World history?” Ed said somewhat dubiously. “What are they teaching about that at
UCLA
these days?”

“Pardon?”

“I hear tell they got
Reds
teaching history to you kids out in California, or so Bill says. . . .”

“Reds? You mean . . . Communists?”

“Oh, Ed!”

“Now come on, Wilma, everybody’s always hearing this stuff, now
we’ve got a chance to really learn something about it from Bob here. What about it, Bob?”

“What about what?”

“Well, for instance, is it true that those European-loving chrome-domes are telling you kids that the Russians won the Second World War?”

“Well, they sure don’t teach us that the Germans won it,” Bobby replied uneasily.

“ ’Course not! We went over there and gave that Hitler what for after the Peens all rolled up and presented their butts to the Krauts—”

“Ed!”

“And the Marshall Plan? They teach you how the Peens swindled us out of all those billions and never paid back a dime?”

“What?”

“See, Bill was right, Wilma, they don’t teach these kids a damn thing!”

“Now you watch your swearing, Ed Carpenter!”

“Now what about Vietnam? What do they teach you about the
KGB
selling heroin to the hippies and starting those riots in Chicago?”

“Uh . . .”

“I thought so! Why I’ll bet they don’t even tell these kids how
KGB
agents in the Carter administration sold out the Panama Canal to the Communists in Panama! Or the way the English started the Civil War to grab our cotton fields. Or how Fidel Castro killed Jack Kennedy.”

“Oh don’t be silly, Ed, everyone knows all that!”

Even in the air conditioning, Bobby started to sweat as nice old Ed Carpenter poured out the most amazingly bile-filled crackpot version of fragmentary history that he had ever heard.

The Mexicans had forced America into the Mexican War by invading Texas. Communist agents had created the stock market crash of 1929 so they could elect themselves
FDR
, whose wife, Eleanor, was an agent of the
KGB
. A senile Ronald Reagan had been hypnotized by Mikhail Gorbachev, who was a secret graduate of the Pavlov Institute. The Soviet entry into Common Europe was the first step toward the creation of a Soviet world empire, and Spaceville was a front for the clandestine creation of a European Battlestar America, which would be used to force the United States to give back the property that America had just so righteously seized. . . .

“
That
what they teach you at
UCLA
?” Ed Carpenter demanded.

“Uh . . . not exactly,” Bobby muttered dazedly. “I mean—”

“I thought not!” Ed declared triumphantly. “See Wilma, Bill was right, they don’t teach these kids a goddamn thing!”

“I will not have you swearing in front of this boy!” Wilma cautioned crossly. “What kind of people do you want him to think we are?”

Bobby had to choke back his laughter at that one at the time, but as the drive wore on, he had time to ponder the question seriously, and it perplexed him sorely indeed.

They came out of the western foothills of the Rockies into the most amazing landscape Bobby had ever seen. The Great American Desert stretched out before him under a pitiless blue sky, a vast wasteland of naked rock and searing sand in washed-out tones of dun and gray, an immense and apparently utterly lifeless nothingness that seemed to go on forever.

Here the road was arrow-straight, the traffic was sparse, and after about an hour, Ed Carpenter pulled over to the side of the road.

“Why don’t you take this stretch, Bob?” he said with a grin. “No way any cop can sneak up on us out here!”

And Bobby found himself driving the electrocruiser across the Great Desert at exhilaratingly high speed, while Ed, and when she could get a word in edgewise, Wilma, kept up a ceaseless patter.

Driving the car, even for a neophyte, was simplicity itself; there was power steering so forgiving you could take your hand off for five minutes at a time on a road like this, an accelerator pedal and cruise-control switch, a brake pedal, which Bobby never had to use once, a digital speed display, and that was about it.

The conversation, though, was deeply disturbing. One minute Ed Carpenter was expanding on the immensity of the landscape and the incredible courage of the pioneers who had crossed it in covered wagons, and the next he was ranting about the treacherous Peens who were befouling American Embassies and seizing American property. He would launch into quite a fascinating discourse on the creatures that lived in this wasteland, and then he would segue into a diatribe against the Mexican government, which was persecuting honest American homeowners in Baja, and which soon enough was going to get what it so richly deserved.

More disturbing to Bobby than the rabid jingoism, or the necessity of holding his tongue when the better part of him cried out to refute this vicious blather, was the fact that, despite what was being spewed forth, he
liked
Ed and Wilma Carpenter.

They had been kind to him. They were polite avuncular old folks with a feel for the country they were traveling through. Their love for America was genuine and somehow touching. They even let him drive their car.

Yet at the same time, they sincerely believed the most vile chauvinistic filth. Ed Carpenter’s ravings were exactly the sort of stuff that
the European media put in the flapping mouths of the worst sort of caricature Americans. What had happened to America to make them like this? How could good people like Ed and Wilma believe such stuff?

What was he supposed to believe about them?

Wilma took the wheel about fifty kilometers from the outskirts of Las Vegas, just as the billboards were starting to appear, and turned off onto a ring road around the city.

“We don’t go through Vegas?” Bobby said, rather disappointed.

“Goodness no!” Wilma replied. “The traffic through the center is terrible, and besides, it’s full of Japs these days, come to gamble away the money they’ve taken from us, and all sorts of prostitutes and perverted sex shows besides!”

“Not the sort of thing for a nice young man like yourself to see,” Ed agreed. “The American Ginza they call it, and the Japs can have it! Now Death Valley, where we’re taking you,
that’s
something to see, you’ll never forget it, I promise you that, Bob!”

Once they had skirted Las Vegas, a low range of sere mountains started to rise along the western edge of the road, and soon enough Wilma took a turnoff toward them, through a little town, and up the slope, to a view from the crest of the ridgeline that quite took Bobby’s breath away.

Below them stretched a long desert valley beneath the towering peaks of the High Sierras, an elliptical dry lake bed, all salt and sand, shimmering in the waning afternoon sunlight like an immense mirage, like something that wasn’t quite there. And flashing and gleaming in the middle of it like the faceted eye of a gigantic insect, a huge geodesic dome.

“Wow . . .” was about all that Bobby could manage to say. “It’s like . . . it’s like another planet!”

Ed Carpenter laughed good-naturedly. “Sure is something, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s the lowest piece of land on
this
planet, Bob, and hotter in the summer than the devil’s backside.” He pointed to a distant peak in the high craggy mountains on the other side of the Valley, where Bobby thought he could make out an actual frosting of
snow
near the top. “And yet there you have Mount Whitney,” Ed said, “which is the highest point in the continental US of A!”

“You’re right,” Bobby said softly, “this is a sight I’ll never forget, and I’ll never forget you folks for showing it to me, either.” And meant it.

The Carpenters were going to stay at Scotty’s Inn, which, Ed told him, was a tiny hotel where you had to book weeks in advance, and
“something of an old folks’ home, Bob, you wouldn’t like it anyway.” The Dry Wells Dome was where the young folks went, lots of rooms he could afford, and it would be the best place to get a hitch to
LA
in the morning.

So they drove him down to the Fuller Dome in the center of the valley floor, and said good-bye in the air-conditioned car in the parking lot outside.

“Well, it was pleasant meeting you, young man,” Wilma said. “Good luck to you in your studies.”

“And don’t you let those Reds in
UCLA
pull the wool over your eyes, you hear?” Ed Carpenter said as they shook hands.

“I won’t, Ed,” Bobby told him. “Traveling with you folks has sure been an education.”

He meant it too, and not entirely sarcastically, either, for the Carpenters had taught him an important lesson. Which was that people could believe the foulest things and still be good folks at heart. A lot of the people who had thrown blood and shit on the American Embassy in Paris were probably just as sweet on a personal level as Ed and Wilma Carpenter.

“Politique politicienne!” he could hear his father saying, and for the first time, he thought he really understood what Dad meant.

Then he got out of the air-conditioned car and was nearly bowled over by the wall of heat. Talk about another planet! This was like stepping out of a spaceship air lock onto the surface of Venus. The cruel sun seared his unprotected eyes. He could feel it frying his skin. He could actually see the heat waves coming off the hot metal of the parked cars.

He stood there for a few moments, taking in the incredible experience and waving a last good-bye to Ed and Wilma as they drove off, and then trotted quickly to the Dome’s main entrance.

The Dry Wells Dome was air-conditioned, of course, but they kept it at a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit to simulate an attenuated desert experience, and there were palm trees and desert succulents, as well as a big swimming pool fashioned out of some clever synthetic that mimicked frozen dunes of sand. There were rude cabins scattered among the trees, and a kind of main street reminiscent of Disney World, half a dozen restaurants, a drugstore, a liquor store, boutiques, a saloon, a small hotel, all done up like a brand-new mining town out of the Old West.

It was crowded inside the Dome, mostly with people in their teens and twenties, most of them with deeply bronzed skin and showing plenty of it, the men in bathing trunks or brief bikinis, the women parading around bare-breasted, Midi-style.