"John Kessel - The Baum Plan For Financial Independence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

The Baum Plan For Financial
Independence

by John Kessel

—for Wilton Barnhardt
When I picked her up at the Stop 'n Shop on Route 28, Dot was wearing a short black skirt and red
sneakers just like the ones she had taken from the bargain rack the night we broke into the Sears in
Hendersonville five years earlier. I couldn't help but notice the curve of her hip as she slid into the front
seat of my old T-Bird. She leaned over and gave me a kiss, bright red lipstick and breath smelling of
cigarettes. "Just like old times," she said.

The Sears had been my idea, but after we got into the store that night all the other ideas had been Dot's,
including the game on the bed in the furniture department, and me clocking the night watchman with the
anodized aluminum flashlight I took from Hardware, sending him to the hospital with a concussion and me
to three years in Central. When the cops showed up and hauled me off, Dot was nowhere to be found.
That was all right. A man has to take responsibility for his own actions; at least that's what they told me in
the group therapy sessions that the prison shrink ran on Thursday nights. But I never knew a woman who
could make me do the things that Dot could make me do.

One of the guys at those sessions was Radioactive Roy Destry, who had a theory about how we were all
living in a computer and none of this was real. Well if this isn't real, I told him, I don't know what real is.
The softness of Dot's breast or the shit smell of the crapper in the Highway 28 Texaco, how can there be
anything more real than that? Radioactive Roy and the people like him are just looking for an exit door. I
can understand that. Everybody dreams of an exit door sometimes.

I slipped the car into gear and pulled out of the station onto the highway. The sky ahead was red above
the Blue Ridge, but the air blowing in the windows was dry and smoky with the ash of the forest fires
burning a hundred miles to the northwest.

"Cat got your tongue, darlin'?" Dot said. I pushed the cassette into the deck and Willie Nelson was
singing "Hello Walls."

"Where are we going, Dot?"

"Just point this thing west for twenty or so. When you come to a sign that says Potter's Glen, make a right
on the next dirt road."

Dot pulled a pack of Kools out of her purse, stuck one in her mouth, and punched the car's cigarette
lighter.

"Doesn't work," I said.

She pawed through her purse for thirty seconds, then clipped it shut. "Shit," she said. "You got a match,
Sid?" Out of the corner of my eye I watched the cigarette bobble up and down as she spoke.
"Sorry, sweetheart, no."

She took the cigarette from her mouth, stared at it for a moment, and flipped it out her opened window.

Hello window. I actually had a box of Ohio Blue Tips in the glove compartment, but I didn't want Dot to