Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Anyway, this is all done pretty nonchalantly, and not like they are trying to test Randy's mettle or anything, and so he doesn't imagine that it qualifies as a true bonding experience. If, hypothetically, the Impala throws a rod in the desert and they have to fix it with parts stolen from a nearby junkyard guarded by rabid dogs and shotgun-packing gypsies, that would be a bonding experience. But Randy's wrong. On Day 2 the Shaftoes (the male ones anyway) open up to him a bit.

It seems (and this is abstracted from many hours of conversation) that when you are an able-bodied young male Shaftoe and you are a stranger in a strange land with a car that you have, with plenty of advice and elbow grease from your extended family, fixed up pretty nicely, the idea of parking it in favor of some other mode of conveyance is, in addition to obvious financial folly, some kind of moral failure, pure and simple. That's why they are driving to Whitman, Washington. But why (one of them finally summons the boldness to inquire) why are they taking two cars? There is plenty of room in the Impala for four. Randy has gotten the sense all along that the Shaftoes are dismayed by Randy's insistence on taking the redundant and repulsively scarred Acura, and that only their formidable politeness has prevented them from pointing out the sheer madness of it. “I do not imagine that we will stay together beyond Whitman,” Randy says (after being around these guys for a couple of days he has begun to fall out of the habit of using contractions—those tawdry shortcuts of the verbally lazy and pathologically rushed). “If we have two cars, we can split up at that point.”

“The drive is not that far, Randall,” says Robin, slapping the Impala's gas pedal against the floor to rip the transmission into passing gear, and careening around a gasoline tanker. From the initial “Sir” and “Mr. Waterhouse,” Randy has been able to talk them down into addressing him by his first name, but they have agreed to it only on the condition (apparently) that they use the full “Randall” instead of “Randy.” Early attempts to use “Randall Lawrence” as a compromise were vigorously denounced by Randy, and so “Randall” it is for now. “M.A. and I would be happy to drop you back off at the San Francisco Airport—or, uh, wherever you elected to park your Acura.”

“Where else would I park it?” Randy says, not getting this last bit.

“Well, I mean that you could probably find a place where you could park it free of charge for a few days, if you did some looking around. Assuming you wanted to keep it.” He adds encouragingly, “That Acura probably would have some decent resale value even considering all the body work it needs.”

Only at this point does Randy figure out that the Shaftoes believe him to be utterly destitute, helpless, and adrift in the wide world. A total charity case. He recalls, now, seeing them discard a whole sack of McDonald's wrappers when they arrived at his house. This whole austerity binge has been concocted to avoid putting financial pressure on Randy.

Robin and M.A. have been observing him carefully, talking about him, thinking about him. They happen to have made some faulty assumptions, and come to some wrong conclusions, but all the same, they have shown more sophistication than Randy was giving them credit for. This causes Randy to go back and review the conversations he has had with them the last couple of days, just to get some idea of what other interesting and complicated things might have been going on in their heads. M.A. is a pretty straightforward by-the-book type, the kind who'll get good grades and fit well into any kind of hierarchical organization. Robin, on the other hand, is more of a wild card. He has the makings of either a total loser or a successful entrepreneur, or maybe one of those guys who will oscillate between those two poles. Randy realizes now, in retrospect, that he has spilled a hell of a lot of information to Robin, in just a couple of days, about the Internet and electronic money and digital currency and the new global economy. Randy's mental state is such that he is prone to babbling aimlessly for hours at a time. Robin has hoovered it all up.

To Randy it's just been aimless ventilating. He hasn't even considered, until now, what effect it has been exerting on the trajectory of Robin Shaftoe's life. Randall Lawrence Waterhouse hates Star Trek and avoids people who don't hate it, but even so he has seen just about every episode of the damn thing, and he feels, at this moment, like the Federation scientist who beams down to a primitive planet and thoughtlessly teaches an opportunistic pre-Enlightenment yahoo how to construct a phaser cannon from commonly available materials.

Randy still has some money. He cannot begin to guess how he can convey this fact to these guys without committing some grievous protocol error, so the next time they stop for gas, he asks Amy to convey it to them. He thinks (based on his hazy understanding of the rotation system) that it's his turn to be alone in a car with Amy, but if Amy is going to convey this data about the money to one of the boys, she'll need to spend the next leg with him, because it must be conveyed indirectly, which will take a while, and because of that indirectness, time will then need to be allotted for it to sink in. But three hours later, then, at the gas stop after that, it naturally follows that M.A. and Robin must be placed together in the same car, so that Robin (who now knows and understands, and who gets out of the Impala with a big grin on his face and punches Randy affably on the shoulder) can pass the message on to M.A., whose recent conversational gambits vis-à-vis Randy made no sense at all until Randy figured out that they thought of him as a beggar and that M.A. was trying in a really oblique way to find out if Randy needed to share any of M.A.'s personal toiletry items. At any rate, Randy and Amy get into the Acura and they head north into Oregon, trying to keep up with the hot rod.

“Well, it's nice to have a chance to spend some time with you,” Randy says. His back is still a bit sore from where Amy struck him whilst asserting, the other morning, that expressing one's feelings was “the name of the game.” So he figures he will express those aspects of his feelings least likely to get him in serious trouble.

“Ah figgered you 'n' ah'ud have plenny a tahm to chew the rag,” Amy says, having reverted utterly to the tongue of her ancestors in the last couple of days. “But it has been ages and ages since I saw those two boys, and you've never seen 'em at all.”

“Ages and ages? Really?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

“Well, last time I saw Robin he was just starting kindergarten. And I saw M.A. more recently—he was probably eight or ten.”

“And you are related to them how, one more time?”

“I think Robin is my second cousin. And I could explain M.A.'s relationship to me, but you'd start shifting around and heaving great big sighs before I got more'n halfway through it.”

“So, to these guys, you are a shirttail relative they glimpsed once or twice when they were tiny little boys.”

Amy shrugs. “Yeah.”

“So, like what possessed them to come out here?”

Amy looks blank.

“I mean,” Randy says, “from the general attitude they copped, when they fishtailed to a stop in the middle of my front yard and leapt out of their red-hot, bug-encrusted vehicle, fresh from Tennessee, obviously the number one mission objective was to ensure that the flower of Shaftoe womanhood was being treated with all of the respect, decency, worshipfulness, et cetera, properly owed it.”

“Oh. That's not really the vibe that I got.”

“Oh, it wasn't? Really?”

“No. Randy, my family sticks together. Just 'cause we haven't seen each other for a while doesn't mean our obligations have lapsed.”