Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"Well, any comments?" she demanded after she had apprised him of the situation and her plans.

"I'm jealous," he replied. "You get to go flitting off to fight evil, and I have to stay here and be evil."

"I thought you were the good guys."

"Oh, yeah, maybe once a week. Meanwhile, 75 percent of the cases we handle involve putting black and Latino kids in jail forever for selling dope. The really evil still flourish, as you may have noticed. And my youth and beauty are fading and every day is like every other day, and it's hot as a bitch in here, and you're wandering away to the cool mountains to wipe noses. It's not fair."

"You're right. Are you going to whine any more?"

"Yes. I might even get all red and sweaty and snotty-nosed."

"Seriously, what do you think?"

Karp paused before answering, detecting one of the numerous no-win queries (Am I too fat? Does this look good on me?) that husbands are so often called upon to answer.

He said, "It seems like a charitable act as long as you don't get involved. I assume Lucy is going to watch the boys. You have no problems with that?"

"Of course not-for a couple of days? She's the most responsible creature on God's earth. They'll be prepping for seminary by the time I get back."

"Maybe I'll take some leave anyway."

"Do that. What did you mean about getting involved?"

"I meant involved. Legally, emotionally-it's not your problem, it's a complex situation in a part of the world you don't know diddly-squat about, and where you're liable to make things worse." In your inimitable fashion, Karp thought, but declined to say.

"Make things worse? Gosh, this is just fucking great. I volunteer to upset my life and go help out a couple of kids I barely know, and all the support I get from my family is a kind of insinuating suspicion. For crying out loud, don't you trust me?"

No, thought Karp. "Of course," he said.

She decided to leave just before dawn, to get free of the citybound traffic and be out on the great American road at sunup. Having committed herself, having spent the whole of the previous evening generating quality time with her sons (Monopoly, casino, hours of Tolkien) and explaining what she was doing, having overinstructed her daughter and her manager, she felt for the first time in a long time like the old Marlene, or at least like the nostalgic memory thereof. As she loaded her bag and dog into the Dodge, she discovered she was humming the Pirate Jenny song from Threepenny Opera.

She stopped when she saw that her daughter, dressed in an old flannel bathrobe, was watching her from the doorway, smiling.

"Off on an adventure," Lucy observed. "You're as happy as a puppy."

"It's not an adventure, " answered Marlene a little testily. "It's a very dull mission of mercy. I should be back in a week, tops."

Lucy shook her head pityingly. "Oh, Mom…"

"What? What's with this 'Oh, Mom'? I fail to understand why everyone is making such a big deal out of this. Could you please explain that?"

Lucy walked over and embraced her mother and kissed her cheek. "Take care of yourself, okay? Call me when you get there, and give my regards to the Heeneys."

Marlene made agreeable noises and hugged her back, thinking at the same time that their natural positions had somehow been reversed, that Lucy was being understandingly parental and she childish. This thought occupied her mind for the two minutes it took her to get off the property and out onto the dark road. She punched up the radio: AM, oldies. Marlene had a tape player in her console but rarely used it. She liked the local stations, liked the way they waxed and waned as the miles vanished under the wheels, little driblets of what remained of regional culture in America. The station took her into the City, around the fat underbelly of Brooklyn and over the Verrazano to Staten Island and Jersey. The sun was well up when she drove onto Interstate 78 in the middle of the Garden State, which, to her surprise, was quite gardenlike in these parts, and took it west into Pennsylvania.

By noon, she was in Youngwood, Pennsylvania, and hungry. She drove off the turnpike, ate at a Hardee's, walked and fed the dog. Full of unhealthy greases and sugars, she continued onto the 70 cutoff and then south on 79 to Charleston. South of Charleston, the land rose, the divided highway petered out at Logan, and she found herself on winding, two-lane blacktop running along mountainsides covered with dark second-growth timber. The radio was all country and western and static now, the little stations fading in the valleys and bursting out again on the ridges. As she drove deeper into the southwestern part of the state, she began to see the marks coal had made on the country. Scrapes of blackness against hillsides, with huge gallowslike structures rising above the hills, and factories with brick smokestacks and square yards of smashed windows. Once she crossed on a narrow bridge and saw a newer industrial complex of some sort tucked into the curve of the river below, lines of ocher buildings, shooting out white smoke and yellow, and a smoky flame like a badly trimmed candle twisting above a tall pipe. The river was a bright medicinal green. By three she was in Robbens County, climbing a steep grade and then descending past several roadside crosses and an escape road for runaway trucks. McCullensburg was at the bottom of a fourteen-mile-long, seven-degree grade, built on what looked like the only halfway flat patch in the county.

It was not a pretty town. The usual strip development hung on its outskirts, gas stations and fast food and little, sad, hopeful businesses in concrete-block structures, a beauty shoppe, an upholsterer, a lawnmower guy. She turned left on Market as directed and passed through the business district. Like many towns in this part of the world, it had peaked around the late nineteenth century when coal was king. The two-story brick and stone buildings were of that era, and the courthouse square had a courthouse in it, this a handsome Federal-style building flanked by old trees, complete with white columns, a portico, and a tall cupola. Six streets and the town was gone. She proceeded along Route 199 into the scant suburbs, small bungalows with aluminum siding mainly, and squat, ugly, manufactured housing, with the occasional faded wooden carpenter-Gothic Victorian. She took a turnoff marked 3112, whose blacktop soon became rutted gravel hairpinning back and forth across the steep face of a mountain.

The large mailbox that said HEENEY had been shot full of holes. The house itself was set in a grassy field surrounded by a neat white fence, and hanging over it loomed a group of large, dark oaks. The renovated farmhouse had a cedar shake roof, two cobble chimneys, and a fieldstone foundation, obviously of considerable age, but well maintained; two stories, painted buff with dark red shutters and trim. The original barn of the place stood broken-backed and sagging, covered with creeper, but a weathered shed near the house served as a garage. She saw the Heeneys' GMC there and a very old and dusty Ford next to it. She parked and got out, groaning and stretching. She let the dog out, who did the same.

The front door of the house popped open and there was Dan Heeney, looking worn and even younger than he had on Long Island.

"You got here."

"I did," she said. "Here I am to save the day, just like Mighty Mouse. But first I need to pee."

"Uh, sure, right," he said, as if unsure, and led her (and she her dog) into the house. It was spacious and well furnished with local stuff, hooked rugs and country chests, set off nicely by a few pieces of the kind of fine old cherry and mahogany accumulated by families that were well-off in the late 1800s. Marlene thought of Rose decorating this place on a fairly tight budget, out of trips to swap meets and castoffs from her family, and felt a pang of loss deeper than expected for a woman she had scarcely known.