An idea lifted out of my resentment.
"Another agent," I said. "Surely there is some way to have this case transferred to another agent?"
He ruffled papers on his desk. "Let's see. You've had seven already: agents Bulleigh, Paroseit, Ghoone, Saydyst,
Blutzucker, Fradequat and Beeste. None of them wants to take responsibility, none of them wants to deal with it."
Leslie's patience broke. "Are they crazy? Don't they want the money? Do they understand this man is trying to pay them, he isn't trying to run away or make a deal for thirty, cents on the dollar, he's trying to pay them in full! WHAT KIND OF STUPID GODDAMN IDIOTS ARE THEY?" She was yelling, tears of frustration in her eyes.
Marquart remained as calm as though he had played this scene many times.
"Leslie. Leslie? Leslie! Listen. This is important for you to understand. The Internal Revenue Service is staffed by some of the least intelligent, some of the most frightened, vicious, vindictive people ever to hide behind a government office. I know. Three years, I worked there. Every young tax attorney works for the government first, to learn the enemy. If you haven't worked for the IRS, you can't function very well in tax law; you can't believe what you're dealing with."
I felt myself going pale, as he went on.
"Unless IRS thinks you're going to skip the country, it doesn't answer letters, it doesn't return telephone calls, we can't get through for months at a time. Nobody there wants to be responsible for dealing with a matter of this kind, this amount. A mistake, and they're criticized in the press: 'You evict little old ladies from their shacks, but you let Richard Bach get off with time payments'!"
"Then why don't they seize, right now? Take everything I've got?"
"That could be a mistake, too: 'Richard Bach offered to pay in full if you'd let him, but you seized, and his property wasn't worth half of what you could have gotten. . . .'
Don't you see? How much better no decision than a wrong decision?
"That's why we've gone through so many agents," he said. "Every new agent throws the hot potato in the air, hoping for a transfer or a still newer agent to come along before they have to catch the thing and deal with it."
"But certainly at the top," said Leslie, "the area director, if we went to him. . . ?"
Marquart nodded. "I used to work with him. I called him first thing, finally got through. He says no exceptions, you have to move through the ranks in an orderly fashion. He says we have to deal with the agent who's assigned, and then with the next one, and the next."
Leslie attacked the problem like a chess-position. "They won't accept his offer, yet he can't pay a million dollars at once. If they seize, he can't work. If they won't decide, he still can't work, because they might seize tomorrow and the work is lost. If he can't work, he can't earn the money to pay them the rest. We've been in limbo for almost a year, now! Does this drag on till the end of the world?"
For the first time in the meeting, the attorney brightened. "In a way, time is on Richard's side. If his case drags on for three years with no resolution, he'll be eligible to dissolve the debt in bankruptcy."
I felt as if we were having tea with the Mad Hatter. "But if I go broke, they won't get paid! Don't they know that?"
"Of course they do. But I think they want to wait the time, I think they want you to go bankrupt."
"WHY?" I said. "What kind of insane . . . they'd get a million dollars if they'd let me make the payments."
He looked at me sadly. "You keep forgetting, Richard. If you go bankrupt it will not be an IRS decision, it will be
your decision-there will be no blame for the government! No one has to take responsibility. No one can be criticized. The debt will be legally discharged. Till then, it's not all bad. Unless they make a decision on your case, you're free to spend the money. Why don't you take a world tour, stay in the finest hotels, give me a call once in a while from Paris, Rome, Tokyo?"
"Three years?" said Leslie. "Bankruptcy?" She looked to me, pity for us both in her eyes, and then resolve. "No! That is not going to happen! We are going to settle this!" Her eyes blazed. "Famous or not, up the ante and try another offer. Make this one so good they can't turn it down. And for God's sake, find somebody there with the guts to take it!"
Marquart sighed that it was not a matter of offers, but he agreed to try.
An accountant was called in, other lawyers for consultation. More columns marched through calculators, more papers shushed across the desk, plans proposed and plans trashed, new appointments set for tomorrow as we searched for an offer so risk-free that the government couldn't turn it down.
I stared out the window into the sky as they worked. Like the pilot of a crippled plane, I was certain of the crash but not frightened of it. We'd walk away from it; we'd start over. It would be a relief to have it done.
"Remember the Mojave Rattlesnake?" Leslie said, after the meeting adjourned and we rode the elevator to the parking lot.
"Sure. Croandelphilis scootamorphulus. No known antidote to the venom," I said. "Of course I remember. One brave snake, she is."
"Makes you realize, after days like this trying to deal with
those slugs in the IRS, how good it is to sit in the desert and deal with a real honest straightforward rattlesnake!"
We flew back to Nevada exhausted, arrived at last in the desert to find the trailer ransacked: door pried open, bookshelves cleared, drawers emptied; everything we had left in our little house-on-wheels was gone.
thirty-eight
LESLIE WAS stunned. She went through the place looking for the friendly tools we had lived with, her dear companions, as though they would suddenly appear in their places. Books, clothes, wooden kitchen-spoons that meant home to her, even her hairbrushes: gone.
"No problem, wook," I soothed. "They're only things, we lost. As long as the IRS won't make up its mind, there's plenty of money to spend. One trip into town and we've bought it all back."
She barely heard, looking up from the empty desk drawer. "Richard, they even took our ball of string. ..."
I was desperate to cheer her. "And we thought we were the last string-savers in the world! Think how happy we've made someone ... a whole ball of string, they got! And burnt wooden spoons! And plates with chips in them!"
"Our plates didn't have chips in them," she said. "We bought those plates together, don't you remember?"
"Well, we'll buy some more plates. How about we get some nice orange and yellow pottery ones, this time? And bigger cups than we had. We can go wild in the bookstore, and we'll need new clothes. ..."
"It's not the things, Richie, it's the meaning of the things. Doesn't it hurt you that strangers broke into our home and took meanings out of our life?"
"It hurts only if we let it," I said. "There's not much we can do about it now; it's happened and it's done and the sooner we move past it the better. If it'd help to feel bad about it, I'd feel bad. What'll help will be to get our minds off it and buy some new things and put some time between us and today. So they take the whole trailer, so what? It's us that matters, isn't it? Better us together in a desert and happy than us apart in palaces full of plates and string!"
She dried a tear. "Oh, you're right," she said. "But I think I'm changing. I used to say if someone broke into my house, they could steal whatever they wanted, I'd never take a chance harming someone to protect my property, or myself. But this is it. I've been robbed three times before, and we've been robbed today, and I've just decided that I have had all the robbing I'm going to have. If we're going to live in the wilderness, it's not fair for you to be the only one to protect us. I'm going to do my part. I'm going to buy a gun!"
Two days later, there was one less fear in her life. All of a sudden she who couldn't stand the sight of a gun now loaded firearms with the ease of a Desert Rat on patrol.
She practiced diligently, hour after hour; the desert sounded like the last battle for El Alamein. I threw tin cans
into the sagebrush and she
hit the things once out of five with a .357 Magnum, revolver, then three of five, then four of five.
While she loaded the Winchester rifle I set a row of empty shell-casings in the sand for targets, then stood back and watched while she aimed and squeezed the trigger. Now gunfire barely blinked her eye, her targets disappeared one after another, left to right, in sharp-hiss booms and brass-glittering sprays of lead and sand.
It was hard for me to understand what had happened to her because of that robbery.
"Do you mean," I said, "that if someone broke into the trailer, you would ..."
"Somebody breaks in wherever I am, they're going to be sorry! If they don't want to get shot, robbing us is the wrong business to get into!" She laughed at the expression on my face. "Don't look at me that way! You say the same thing, you know you do."
"I do not! I say it different."
"How do you say it?"
"I say it's not possible for anybody to die. 'Thou Shall Not Kill' isn't a commandment, it's a promise: Thou couldn't kill if thee tried, because life is indestructible. But thou're free to believe in dying, if thou insisteth.
"If we try to rob the house of somebody waiting for us with a loaded gun," I said, "why, we're telling that person that we're tired of the belief of life on this belief of a planet, we're asking her to do us the favor of shifting our consciousness from this level to a different one, courtesy of a bullet in self-defense. That's how I say it. Isn't it true, don't you think?"
She laughed, levered a fresh cartridge into the chamber of
her rifle. "I don't know which of us is more cold-blooded, Richard, you or me."
With that she held her breath, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. In the desert, another casing screamed and disappeared.
After the robbery, and the generator failure, and the water failure, after the refrigerator broke down and the gas-line to the stove cracked, filling the trailer with explosive gas, there came the dust-devil.
Dust-devils are baby tornadoes in the desert. They wander around in summertime, sniff a sand-dune here, a bunch of sagebrush there, send them a thousand feet into the sky . . . dust-devils can go wherever they feel like going and do whatever they want to do.
With the generator running again, Leslie finished cleaning the trailer, put down the vacuum cleaner, glanced out the window. "Wookie, come see the huge dust-devil!"
I unfolded from under the water-heater, which was refusing to heat water. "My, that is a big one!"
"Hand me the camera, please, I want a picture."
"Camera was stolen," I said. "Sorry."
"The little new camera, on the bottom shelf. Quick, before it's gone!"
I handed her the camera and she snapped a picture from the trailer window. "It's getting bigger!"
"Not really bigger," I said. "It seems bigger, because it's getting closer."
"Is it going to hit us?"
"Leslie, the odds against that dust-devil, which has got the entire Nevada desert to move around in, the odds
against that dust-devil hitting this tiny trailer parked in the middle of nowhere are on the order of several hundred thousand to one. ..."
Then the world shook, the sun went out, our awning ripped its struts from the ground and exploded thrashing on the roof, the door burst open, windows howled. Sand, powdered dirt like a mine-collapse, billowed down our hallway. Curtains stood straight out inside the room, the house rocked, set to fly. It was familiar, a plane-crash without the view.
Then the sun blinked on, the howling stopped, the awning fell in a ragged heap, strewn on the side of the trailer.
". . . make that," I gasped, "that the chances ... of hitting us ... are on the order ... of two to one in favor!"
Leslie was not amused. "I just finished cleaning, finished dusting, this whole place!" If she could have gotten her hands around the neck of that tornado, she would have taught it about thrashings.
As it was, the devil had a full ten seconds to work on the trailer, so it stuffed forty pounds of sand through the screens and windows and doors. That much earth in so few square feet-we could plant potatoes on the kitchen counters.
"Wookie," she said hopelessly, "do you ever get the feeling that we are not meant to live here? That it is time for us to move on?"
I put down the wrench I had clutched through the storm, my heart filled with warm agreement. "I was just about to ask you the same thing. I'm so tired of living in a little box on wheels! It's been more than a year! Can we stop? Can we find a house, a real house somewhere that isn't made of plastic?"
She looked at me strangely. "Do I hear Richard Bach talking about settling down, a permanent place?"
"Yes."
She cleared a spot in the sand on the chair and sat quietly.
"No," she said. "I don't want to put my heart into getting a house and fixing it up and then stop in the middle of it if you decide you're restless and the experiment didn't work. If you're still convinced the boredom will get us, sooner or later, we're not ready for a house, are we?"
I thought about it. "I don't know."
Leslie thought we were finding inner horizons, frontiers of the mind; she knew we were on our way to discovering pleasures that neither she nor I could find alone. Was she right, or merely hopeful?
We've been married more than a year, ceremony or not. Do I still bow to the old fears? Did I sell my biplane and go searching for a soulmate to learn how to be afraid? Have I not been changed by what we've done together, have I learned nothing?
She sat without moving, thinking her own thoughts.
I remembered the days in Florida, when I had looked at my life and it was dead in the river-lots of money and airplanes and women, zero progress living. Now there's not nearly so much money, and before long there may be none. The airplanes are most of them sold. There's been one woman, only one. And my life is moving swift as a racing-boat, so much I've changed and grown with her.
Each other's company our sole education and entertainment, our life together had grown like summer clouds. Ask a woman and a man sailing their boat over oceans, aren't you bored? how do you pass the time? They smile. Not enough hours in the year to do what needs be done!
Same for us. Delighted we had been, laughed sometimes till we could not stand, scared now and then, tender, desperate, joyous, discovering, passionate . . . but not one second bored.
What a story that would make! How many men and women go through the same rivers, menaced by the same sharp cliches, the same jagged dangers that had threatened us! If that idea stands up, I thought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How Richard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when we set off searching for a soulmate who doesn't exist, and find her?
" 'I don't know' isn't right, wook," I said after a while. "I do know. I want us to get a house where we can be still and quiet and alone together for a long time."
She turned to me once more. "Are you talking about commitment?"
"Yes."
She left her chair, sat down with me in the inch of desert settled on our floor, kissed me softly.
After a long time, she spoke. "Any particular place in mind?"
I nodded. "Unless you feel strongly otherwise, wook, I'd hope we might find a place with a lot more water and a lot less sand."
thirty-nine
M. T TOOK three months' soaking in a torrent of real-estate catalogs, maps and out-of-town newspapers; it took weeks of flying, looking down from the Meyers for the perfect place to live, towns with names like Sweet Home and Happy Camp and Rhododendron. But the day came at last when the trailer windows that had framed sagebrush and rocks and a seared crust of desert now looked out on flower-spangled spring-color meadows, steep green forests, a river of water.
The Little Applegate Valley, Oregon. From the top of our hill we could see twenty miles around, and scarcely another house in sight. Houses there were, hidden by trees and slopes, but here we felt alone and blessed quiet; here we would build our home.
A little ho
me, first; one room with loft, while the IRS negotiations continued. Later, with the problem solved,
we'd build our permanent house alongside and call the little one a guesthouse.
The Revenue Service growled to itself, trying to unravel my new offer, while months slid into years. It was an offer a child might make, nothing denied. I felt like a visitor in a foreign country, unfamiliar with the money. I owed a bill, didn't know how to pay, so held out everything I owned and asked IRS to take whatever it wanted.
My offer passed to the desk of yet another agent in Los Angeles, who asked for a current financial statement. He got one. We heard nothing for months. The case was transferred. The new agent asked for an updated financial statement. She got one. More months passed. Another agent, another financial statement. Agents went by like leaves of a calendar, turning.
In the trailer, Leslie looked up sadly from the latest request for a new financial statement. I heard the same little voice that I had heard long-distance in Madrid, two and a half years before. "Oh, Richie, if only I had known you before you got into this mess! It wouldn't have happened. . . ."
"We met as early as we could have met," I said. "Earlier than that, you know it-I would have destroyed you or run away from you or you wouldn't have had the patience, you would have walked out on me, with good reason. It never would have worked; I had to learn my way through that mess. I'd never do it again, but I'm not that person anymore."
"Thank the Maker," she said. "Well, I'm here now. If we survive this, I promise you, our future is going to look nothing like your past!"
The clock ticked; the IRS neither noticed nor cared that our lives were stalled.
Bankruptcy, the attorney had said. Perhaps John Mar-quart's bizarre theory was right, after all. Not a pretty ending, I thought, but better than stalemate, better than making these same moves over and over through eternity.
We tried to consider it, but hi the end we couldn't. Bankruptcy. Such a desperate thing to do. Never!
Instead of a tour through Paris and Rome and Tokyo, we began construction at the top of the hill.