New acres of American sprawl: 1,000. Birds killed by domestic and feral cats in the United States: 500,000. Barrels of oil burned worldwide: 12,000,000. Metric tons of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere: 11,000,000. Sharks murdered for their fins and left floating finless in the water: 150,000 . . . The tallies, which he recalculated as the hour grew even later, brought him a strange spiteful satisfaction. There are days so bad that only their worsening, only a descent into an outright orgy of badness, can redeem them.
It was getting on toward nine o’clock when Lalitha returned to him. One of the drivers, she said, had found a spot two hundred yards back down the road where a passenger car could pull off and let the big equipment pass. The rearmost driver was going to back his truck all the way down to the highway and phone for the police.
“Do you want to try to walk up to Forster Hollow?” Walter said.
“No,” Lalitha said, “I want us to leave immediately. Jocelyn has a camera. We don’t want to be photographed anywhere near a police action.”
There ensued half an hour of grinding gears and squawking brakes and black bursts of diesel smoke, followed by a further forty-five minutes of breathing the rear truck’s foul exhaust as it inched backward down the valley. Out on the highway at last, in the freedom of the open road, Lalitha drove back toward Beckley at frantic speeds, flooring the gas on the shortest of straightaways, leaving rubber on the curves.
They were on the shabby outskirts of town when his BlackBerry sang its cerulean song, making official their return to civilization. The call was from a Twin Cities number, possibly familiar, possibly not.
“Dad?”
Walter frowned with astonishment. “Joey? Wow! Hello.”
“Yeah, hey. Hello.”
“Everything OK with you? I didn’t even recognize your number, it’s been so long.”
The line seemed to go dead, as if the call had been dropped. Or maybe he’d said the wrong thing. But then Joey spoke again, in a voice like someone else’s. Some quavering, tentative kid. “Yeah, so, anyway, Dad, um—do you have a second?”
“Go ahead.”
“Yeah, well, so, I guess the thing is, I’m sort of in some trouble.”
“What?”
“I said I’m in some trouble.”
It was the kind of call that every parent dreaded getting; but Walter, for a moment, wasn’t feeling like Joey’s parent. He said, “Hey, so am I! So is everybody!”
ENOUGH ALREADY
Within days of young Zachary’s posting of their interview on his blog, Katz’s cellular voice mailbox began to fill with messages. The first was from a pesty German, Matthias Dröhner, whom Katz vaguely recalled having struggled to fend off during Walnut Surprise’s swing through the Fatherland. “Now that you are giving interviews again,” Dröhner said, “I hope you’ll be so kind as to give one to me, like you promised, Richard. You did promise!” Dröhner, in his message, didn’t say how he’d come by Katz’s cell number, but a good guess was via blogospheric leakage from the bar napkin of some chick he’d hit on while touring. He was undoubtedly now getting interview requests by e-mail as well, probably in much greater numbers, but he hadn’t had the fortitude to venture online since the previous summer. Dröhner’s message was followed by calls from an Oregonian chick named Euphrosyne; a bellowingly jovial music journalist in Melbourne, Australia; and a college radio DJ in Iowa City who sounded ten years old. All wanted the same thing. They wanted Katz to say again—but in slightly different words, so that they could post it or publish it under their own names—exactly what he’d already said to Zachary.
“That was golden, dude,” Zachary told him on the roof on White Street, a week after the posting, while they were awaiting the arrival of Zachary’s object of desire, Caitlyn. The “dude” form of address was new and irritating to Katz but entirely consonant with his experience of interviewers. As soon as he submitted to them, they dropped all pretense of awe.
“Don’t call me dude,” he said nevertheless.
“Sure, whatever,” Zachary said. He was walking a long Trex board as if it were a balance beam, his skinny arms outstretched. The afternoon was fresh and blustery. “I’m just saying my hit-counter’s going crazy. I’m getting hot-linked all over the world. Do you ever look at your fan sites?”
“No.”
“I’m right up at the very top of the best one now. I can get my computer and show you.”
“Really no need for that.”
“I think there’s a real hunger for people speaking truth