Jane Smiley: Golden Age

CHARLIE KNEW that the Highway 61 he was on wasn’t the one Dylan meant in the song, but he was glad to be on it — it was much more lost in time than 70, or 80, or 90. He’d already passed Keokuk, gone over a tiny bridge across the Des Moines River, toll ten cents. Iowa made Missouri look very strange. North of the border, towns were flat, with wide streets, grain elevators, and unpretentious storefronts. Houses and barns were close to the road, and fields were neatly planted in corn and beans. South of the border, the landscape was hillier and the houses, with their verandas and even a few columns, were set far up long driveways. He remembered from college that Missouri had once been a great producer of hemp. Charlie was in favor of hemp, but Riley, his girlfriend back in Aspen, was ready to wear hemp, live inside hemp walls, sauté her onions in hemp oil, eat hemp seed for breakfast, write on hemp paper, shampoo with hemp, rappel with hemp (Charlie preferred nylon), and then compost her waste products and grow more hemp.

When he got to Hannibal, he turned off the highway and drove through town; and why would you not leave this run-down but self-satisfied burg when you were eighteen, as Mark Twain had done, and head south, west, east, anywhere you possibly could? He stopped on 3rd Street and went into a café for a Coke, but the cigarette smoke nearly drove him out. At the Langdon farm, only Michael had smoked, and he did it on the back stoop, right beside a bowl of sand for stubbing out and burying his butt. Thinking of Michael made Charlie laugh. He’d acted like the arm wrestling was a joke, at least at first—“Oh, your face is turning red! Oh, your eyeballs are rolling! Okay, I’m going to actually try now!” laughing, sticking out his tongue. But Charlie could feel in his own arm and shoulder and in Michael’s grip that Michael was trying harder than he pretended; in the third round, he could feel the jolt of anger that held Michael’s arm steady just when Charlie thought he had him. It had crossed Charlie’s mind then that he could get a punch in the jaw, but suddenly Michael had smiled, backed off. Later, the other woman, the wife of Michael’s twin, came up to him and apologized. Of course, his mom would have called Michael a bully, but Charlie had a lot of experience with bullies — you outgrew them, you walked away from them, or you took them down in an unexpected way, like the time in seventh grade, before he’d outgrown anyone, when he noticed that his customary tormentor, Bobby Rombauer, had just gotten braces; when Bobby grabbed his shoulder that day, Charlie whipped around and smacked him on the mouth, flat-handed. Ouch. Bobby never touched him again.

South of Hannibal, the highway veered inland, through some areas that made Charlie want to stop and get out and run a mile or two, but he knew Mom was expecting him by dinnertime, and dinnertime was six — he could get a couple of miles in before the sun went down at eight, and maybe the humidity wouldn’t be so bad by then, anyway. She had been her usual agreeable self about this whole reunion thing. His parents had always been open about his adoption. He was blond, they were dark; he was tall, they were short; he misbehaved, they liked rules and catechisms and confessions and routine. She didn’t say what he knew she was thinking—“You’ll do what you want to do no matter what”—she just said, “That ought to be very interesting. Have fun!”

The one he liked best was still Tina, who had come by the shop in April. She was quiet and easygoing; even while taking him and Riley to lunch, she’d been looking at things, and not just the mountains and the clouds, which everyone looked at, but cobwebs and moldings and stray cats half hidden. She was observant, and when she left Charlie her phone number and a sincere invitation to come to Sun Valley for a visit, she’d doodled his own face beside it, a likeness that Riley now kept in her wallet.

It was sunny and getting hot; he drove into range of KSHE and turned the radio up. Some Guns N’ Roses carried him across the Missouri River, a beautiful and evocative waterway and, in Charlie’s opinion, the true main branch of the river. The bridge was a high one, taking him from the bluffs on the north side to the flatlands on the south side. The afternoon sunlight glinted in lengthening rays on the opaque water. He wondered if he would ever see his grandfather Arthur again. It was uncanny to meet your family as strangers, to look like them, to see yourself in them, but have feelings for them that were only random and new, not conditioned into you. And here he was — this was the oddest thought — alive, speeding through Chesterfield, knowing that in two weeks, when he turned twenty-two, he would have outlived his own father.

—

IVY WAS in the shower, and Richie was lingering over the front page of the Times , when he heard the telltale creak in the fifth step of the third flight of stairs — their flight of stairs — which meant that someone was on his way up, and certainly it was Michael, since Loretta and the kids were back in California; without them, Michael was an early riser. Why sleep when you could get on the motorcycle, zip across the Brooklyn Bridge, terrify everyone on Flatbush Avenue, then get something to eat? Richie hadn’t heard the bike, but the window of the co-op faced away from Eighth Avenue, onto the tiny yard behind their building. Always drawn to disaster stories, Richie had just finished reading the article about hundred-mile-an-hour winds, whirlwinds, and square miles of fallen trees southeast of London (didn’t they know what a tornado was?). The accompanying picture was of a beached ferry. A British radio announcer had named the storm “Hurricane Ethelred,” but so far only thirteen people had died. Michael shook the door handle as if he had a right to come in, and Richie got up from the table. On the way to the door, he picked up the coffee pot. Maybe a cup left.

Richie knew about the stock-market dip — everyone did. He had nothing to say about it. He hoped he could remember that when Michael began babbling. He opened the door. “Fuck,” said Michael.

Richie couldn’t tell if he was saying this in a positive way or a negative way. He stepped back and Michael strode in. Richie said, “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Michael said, “Fuck, I am rich. I am fucking rich.”

“Sounds like you’re the only one,” said Richie.

“I don’t mind that,” said Michael. “If you could’ve seen those guys yesterday, just standing around with their mouths open — what does Uncle Joe say? ‘Catching flies.’ You got some coffee?” He took a cup out of the cabinet and poured out the pot, then pulled out a chair and sat down. “What does the fucking Times say?”

“Haven’t gotten to the business section yet.”

Michael began rummaging through the paper, and found the article he was looking for. “Fuck!” he shouted. “Three hundred thirty-eight million shares! Ha!” He sucked down his coffee as if he didn’t even notice that it was hot, and leaned his chair back. His head grazed the window. If, Richie thought, he should lose his balance, he would certainly crack his head on the sill, maybe even break the window and cut open his scalp.

“A hundred points! A hundred and eight, really. You know how many points the Dow fell in 1929? Thirty-eight. So many guys are just completely fucked.”

“But not you,” said Richie.

“Fuck, no.”

He might as well be wearing a T-shirt — Fuck No, Fuck Yeah, Fucked Up, Fucked Over, Fuck Me, Fuck You. He did not talk like this when Loretta and the kids were around. “You have a plan,” said Richie, standing up to put some bread in the toaster.