Karma (Five) (Three of Four)

I remember one day in the first week of the journey, when I asked Clyde Henry and Ted just what they felt Mancini had done to contribute to the fall of America. 

I meant this innocently. 

They didn't take it that way. 

They didn't bother actually reading anything printed throughout the internet about him other than the conspiracy of claims and declamations made against him by Seward Dance and various members past & present of Congress and the Senate. They didn't even know he used to be a lawyer. (*Whether one is to reliably defer to Wikipedia in the advent of the Popular Orwellianization of the past few decades is quite arguably beside the point: We were, after all, in deliberate pursuit of an enemy of the state, and even the most spurious piece of information might serve in illustrating the character of our target.) They weren't even consistent with what he looked like. They'd obviously both formed a personal sense of him, informed by his Mediterranean handle and his fugitive status in the eyes of the Confederacy. But the specific details ebbed and flowed within lapses of memory and fresh concepts spurred to life by the moment. His height, weight, hair color, eye color, mannerisms, tone of voice, accent: these were all subject to change from one day to the next. We'd know for sure when we arrived. 

"But, I mean..." I said, "what is it that he's doing?" 

"Doing?" said Clyde Henry, his eyes staring at yours, truly in the rearview-mirror. "As in what's he got his fuckstick pointed at this very moment?" 

"Don't be facetious," I said. "You know what I mean." 

"Now she's callin' us fascists, Ted. You care to educate the young lady just what's goin' on here? I'm a little busy drivin' at the moment." 

Ted turned around from the passengerseat. He looked annoyed, but focused. "It's like this, Marybeth: People have a way of tricking you into thinking they're saints or bogginaveiliahs or whatever, and so like you trick yourself into giving them the benefit of the doubt and you just believe anything they tell you... And Mancini is one of those; you follow me so far?... Good. He's just been settin' up in that house of his since the old days, eggin' folks on and agitating them until they're deaf, dumb and blind and there's not a blessed thing in the world short of the Hand of God --" "Or us," "Or us to prevent his traitorous ass from doing so.... That's what we're going up there for. That's what he's doing." He turned back around, satisfied, and busied himself with his phone. 

"Don't replay that one anymore than you have to," said Erin. "We're going up there because there's money in it. And what else are we gonna do?" 

I felt like an idiot with Ted's words sliding around in my tired brain, but Erin's voice and company massaged the irritation until it was barely a shadow and I found myself blissfully looking out the window, trusting in the great ineffability of things again. 

No one said more than they had to for the rest of the day after that. Clyde Henry and Ted split up the driving into shifts of four or five hours at a time, either resting or leisurely scanning their phones or smoking cigarettes when it wasn't their turn. And as night drew upon us, as the Forde rolled through some town between Alabama and Tennessee and we surveyed the landscape for a place among the abandoned buildings and abandoned roads that might remain peaceful until the following dawn and found one, I experienced a brand of serenity unknown to me before or since, and I fell into my dreams again wondering what I was made of. 

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