The Cobweb

After breakfast Desiree drank a whole big tumbler of water, the way she always did when she was about to breast-feed, and took Maggie into the den for a quarter of an hour. When the two emerged, Maggie was gurgling and happy, and Desiree had tears running down her face, knowing that she would never breast-feed her daughter again—now that she was going away, her milk supply would soon dry up. She hugged and kissed her mother and sisters-in-law very hard, then handed the baby over to Clyde, who handed her over to Becky. Clyde followed Desiree out to the garage, feeling light-headed.

 

“’Bye,” she said. “I’ll call you from the road somewhere.” She hit the starter and the engine whined for along time and Clyde’s heart jumped as he hoped it might not start; then the engine caught, and he felt himself go limp and helpless. Desiree gunned it a few times, the way Clyde had always told her not to, then backed it slowly out of the garage.

 

All of the neighbors had come out onto their front porches and were waving American flags and handkerchiefs and yellow ribbons at her. She honked the horn, shifted it into first gear, and drove away, holding down the horn button intermittently as she moved down the block, occasionally turning around to wave at Clyde, her little fingers fluttering in the truck’s rear window above the shadow of the Big Black Tarp all crisscrossed with ropes.

 

Then she was gone. Gone to war. Everyone in the neighborhood looked at Clyde, standing there in the middle of the garage door. He turned his back on them and, finding himself trapped with nowhere to go, climbed into the station wagon and punched the opener. The garage door closed behind him. He closed the station wagon’s door and found himself alone in a dark, quiet place. He leaned forward until his brow was resting on the wagon’s maroon dashboard. Finally his body began to heave and shudder, and he cried for the first time since he was fourteen years old.

 

 

 

 

 

September

 

 

Chapter Twenty-Nine

 

 

 

 

“This your first one of these?”

 

Dean Kenneth Knightly, piloting his rust-ravaged ZX across the Mississippi River bridge on I-80, glanced over at Kevin Vandeventer, who was sitting in the passenger’s seat with the window rolled halfway down, trying to fight back Knightly’s cigarette smoke. Though the wind blowing in through the rust holes in the floor did that better than any window.

 

“These what?” Kevin responded with a bit of an offended edge in his voice. He didn’t like the dean, his scuffed cowboy boots, his unfiltered Camels, his Texas accent, his blue blazer from K-mart. In short, he did not like the fact that the dean, despite his high position, made no effort to disguise his agro-American roots. “I’ve gone back to the beltway a number of times for Dr. Larsen, but I believe this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to attend this particular meeting.”

 

Knightly was tickled. He didn’t like this mousse-haired tadpole anymore than Kevin liked him. Partly, he didn’t like him for the simple and obvious reason that he was an arrogant little shit with a freshly minted Ph.D. and a closet full of suits with the outlet-mall price tags still on them. But that all came with the territory. He really didn’t like him because he worked for Larsen, and Larsen was crooked.

 

“Well, then, let me tell you a bit about where we’re going today, representing the Eastern Iowa University. We’ll be attending the thirty-eighth—I believe the program has it in Roman numerals, I believe that is ea-ecks, ea-ecks, ea-ecks, vee, eye, eye, eye. It is among the oldest postwar white-slave exchanges in the world, although most of the people we move now are brown, black, and yellow.”

 

He was just trying to provoke Kevin, and Kevin was too provoked to figure it out. “It’s fine for you to be cynical, but our job, in our shop, is saving lives and making the world a better place.”

 

The dean began to laugh. “What’s the Rainmaker up to now? A quarter of a billion lives?” He finished a cigarette and poked the butt through a rust hole in the floor of the car. “Look. Don’t get me wrong. There are some good things that come out of your shop, as you call it—people get fed, students get trained. But there are some wonderful babies born out of whorehouses, too. And you, Dr. Vandeventer, are working in the intellectual, multinational equivalent of a whorehouse in which, in the pursuit of legitimate goals, your pimpo magnifico, the fucking son of a bootlegger, provides services for a massive profit, breaking laws, treaties, moral and ethical guidelines—and working against his own country’s national interest.”

 

“Jesus!” Kevin exclaimed. He’d always been trained to be nice, polite, and not bring disagreements out into the open—especially with someone he was about to spend the whole day with, cooped up in cars and airplanes. He was knocked off balance by Knightly’s sudden double-barreled attack.

 

“Oh, he does have the best accountants between Chicago and Denver working for him. Just don’t give me that ’making the world a better place’ jive. What about all those fake Jordanians you’ve brought in?”

 

“What are you implying?”

 

“Hell, Dr. Vandeventer, I know the region. I’ve fucking been there. I know the accents. I know the way those people talk, walk, dress, and think. And if those people are Jordanians, then you’re Kim Basinger.”

 

Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George's books