No, what she was thinking was Nevada. Maybe Stateline. Anything goes in Nevada and if she found a place in Stateline she’d be within striking distance of all those rich yuppies in Lake Tahoe, who all had horses that needed regular shoeing and TLC like horses anywhere. Or maybe Kingman, in Arizona. She’d been there once, just passing through but also to visit the funky little trailer court on old Route 66 there as a kind of pilgrimage, because that was where Timothy McVeigh had lived before he met Terry Nichols. Now there was a soldier, there was somebody who wasn’t going to take it anymore. Though maybe that was a bit extreme. She wasn’t violent herself and didn’t really believe in it and whenever his name came up she had to admit that maybe he had gone too far—she couldn’t see taking lives, though you could hardly call them innocent. Live and let live, right? Unless they keep on kidnapping you, keep on regulating you, keep on sticking their hands deeper and deeper into your pockets until you’ve got no pockets left.
Anyway, she entered into a contract with the court (TDC), picked up her car and drove home, where the poor dog ran and hid under the bed because of what he’d had no choice but to do on the kitchen floor, and that just made her all the more crazy. The subsidiary effects. They never thought of that. Never thought of what innocent creatures—truly innocent—they were torturing with their seatbelt laws and their drunk-but-not-drunk-enough nighttime patrols when anybody who wasn’t already asleep wouldn’t have given two shits if the streets were flowing with Cuervo Gold. But enough. She must have spent half an hour just standing there in her own kitchen, looking down on that piss stain on the floor, before finally she got down on her hands and knees and wiped it up, and then, because she wasn’t herself—she was trembling, actually trembling, she was so upset—she got out the mop, the bucket and the plastic bottle of Mop & Glo and redid the whole kitchen, just to take her mind off things.
She was just finishing up when her cell rang. It was Christabel.
“Just checking in,” Christabel said. “You all right?”
“I’m not hungover, if that’s what you mean. I wasn’t even buzzed last night. Not when they pulled me over. I mean, we did eat, didn’t we?”
“I feel so bad.”
“Bad? Why should you feel bad? The one that ought to feel bad is me. And the System. The System ought to feel bad, so bad it just rots from the inside out.”
“What I mean is, I should have been driving. I should never have let you, I mean, with what happened with the police last time around—”
She could hear Christabel breathing on the other end of the line, a series of deep, wet, patient breaths that were like a sedative. She could feel herself calming down. Christabel. Her best friend. Where would she be without her? “Don’t worry about me,” she said.
“Well, I am worried.”
“They can’t touch me.”
“What are you talking about, Sara—they’ve locked you up twice in the last, what, two months now?”
“What I’m talking about is I’m not going to be around, I’m out of here—I’ve had it, Christa, I really have—”
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to be like this again. If you skip out on this—”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got the money, I’m not going to burn you.”
“If you skip out they’re going to put you in jail, don’t you realize that? Don’t you get it? And not just for an hour or overnight either.”
She began to realize that on top of everything else the conversation was making her extremely unhappy, this conversation, even if it was with her best friend, even if Christabel only wanted to make her feel better, but she wasn’t making her feel better and maybe that was why she couldn’t help snapping at her. “So what are you now, a legal expert?”
“Oh, come off it, Sara—it’s just common sense.”
“Sure, and what do you know? You’re just a slave like all the rest of them. If you’d just read your Fourteenth Amendment, just read it—”
“Sara—”
And then she was quoting, from memory, because she was rankled and riled and she had to do something, “‘No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ You want me to go on?”
Nothing.
“Because I will. Because that right there is the essence of it, when the states gave up their rights and made all freemen on the land into federal citizens and then along comes the Social Security Act, surprise, to establish accounts in debit on every one of us, not to mention Roosevelt taking us off the gold standard—”
“Sara! Sara, listen, will you?” And here was Christa shouting at her, actually shouting at her because she didn’t want to hear the truth and never had. “Sara, I haven’t got time for this. I’m sorry. I got to go.”
“Yeah,” she said, and if her voice was bitter right down to the dregs, so what? “I got to go too.”
26.