“Well, get in.”
This was why people firebombed buildings. And how she’d like to bomb the police station and the DMV and this shithole too . . . but then Kutya was in there and she couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t even think of it. Most people—and Christabel was one of them—didn’t understand that government by the corporation was no government at all. Didn’t understand that it was the Fourteenth Amendment that converted sovereign citizens into federal citizens by making them agree to a contract to accept federal benefits—and taxes and all the illegal and confounding maze of laws that come with them. Taxes on your taxes. Do this, do that. You don’t like it, go to jail. But that amendment was unconstitutional and if you subscribed to it you were just a slave of the system and had no rights at all except what they doled out to you with one hand while helping themselves to your paycheck with the other. How had it ever come to this? How could people be so blind, so stupid?
It all came down on her in that moment in a funk of hopelessness, because what was the use? She’d fight them, she’d continue to fight them and do everything in her power to live free and beholden to no man or woman, fight till there was nothing left of her but bleached white bones spread out in the dirt, but not tonight, not now. There was nothing she could do. She was beaten. She ducked her head so that her hair fell in her eyes till the wind lifted it again, then climbed into the pickup and slammed the door.
“Where to?” Christabel asked, softening her look.
Christabel was a good friend, a true friend, the best she’d ever had, the one person who was there for her, wading through the shitstorm no matter what came down. And she was right, of course—they couldn’t sit here all night. Sara just shrugged.
“How about a drink? After all you’ve been through don’t you deserve it?” A little laugh. “Not to mention me.”
The truck rumbled. A plastic bag chased the breeze across the blacktop. She fixed one last look on the ugly buff building with its cheap knee-high vertical windows anybody could step right through and let out a sigh. “I don’t care,” she heard herself say.
They wound up going to a brew pub on State and she tried a pint of something called Mendo Blonde, but it tasted of hops and metal and just gave her gas, so they went over to Casa Carlos and had margaritas and chicken tacos and she ate too much and had at least two too many drinks. She didn’t even know she was eating, she was so upset. The food just seemed to disappear, tacos, beans, rice, basket after basket of the chips she dipped mechanically in the little cruets of salsa that began to clutter the table till there was no room to rest your elbow or even a forearm. And the margaritas too—as soon as she set down her empty glass there was a new one there to replace it. By the time they made it back home to Willits (twenty minutes on a darkened highway that seemed like hours), she was too exhausted to do anything more than collapse in bed after Christabel dropped her off. She didn’t even bother to turn on a light or pour herself a glass of water, just undressed in the dark, flinging her clothes in the direction of the chair in the corner, the house woeful and empty without Kutya there so that every creeping sound of the night was magnified, and if she was the kind who cried herself to sleep, she would have done it. She woke at intervals throughout the night, feeling as if she was being strangled in her sleep, a heavy shroud of sorrow and regret pulled up over her like a comforter made of dross.