Free The Return: A Novel by Michael Gruber Page B

once a Chinese restaurant that, incredibly, made delicious egg rolls from scratch, another with biscuits from heaven. The food gradually became more Mexican-ish as they headed west from San Antonio but never became really Mexican. Marder found that he had a hunger for the food that his wife used to make, the food of her native soil, the place where he was going.
    The country had changed since the last time he’d been through this way. Many of the little country towns, which had seemed prosperous, even smug, back in the seventies when he’d last made this drive, had been hollowed out, their storefronts empty, their economies wasted by out-migration, the collapse of small farming, the big box stores; their civic life was composed largely of the high school football team, the big signs painted on the water tank, the brick walls of the low, sunburned buildings: GO COUGARS ! GO HAWKS ! GO REBELS ! On the dusty streets of towns named for nineteenth-century cattlemen, pioneers, heroes of the Civil War, they now saw few descendants of such people, only little clots of dark-skinned men and signs in Spanish. The Indians were slowly reconquering the land, for the white people had everything but enough children, and the children they did have wanted the life they saw on television, not the life of the small American towns.
    Marder thought of himself as a patriot, but, like many men his age, he was a patriot of a nation that seemed no longer to exist. Modernity had failed, obviously, and now he was going into a country that modernity had failed even more spectacularly; all the bright ideas of the imported religion, of the imported economics, of the imported revolution, of industrialization, of education, of freedom even, had all failed or had been attempted in such a warped fashion that they could not work, could not change the immemorial nature of that land and its people. What remained was the strange country, inexplicable, that he did not understand but that he loved, as he had not understood but had loved his wife.
    The land rose. Marder had left the interstate and was now climbing into the Davis Mountains on a state road. He had forgotten that Texas had mountains, but here they were, damp, cool, verdant, with trickling rocky streams, smelling of pine and sage. They passed through a state park and Marder pulled off the road at an overlook.
    “Nice country,” said Skelly, who was sitting in the passenger seat, unusually, for he typically spent the daylight hours back in the camper, sleeping and doing various bits of business that required the use of his special laptop and his special phone. He also claimed it embarrassed him to watch Marder drive.
    “Wasted on Texas, of course,” he added. He lit another cigarette and held it out the window between drags, which was the acme of consideration for him. The cigarettes came out of a Marlboro pack, but they were unfiltered, hand-rolled, and laced with hash oil.
    “You don’t like Texas?”
    “No. But I don’t like any of the states. To be honest, I’ve never been in North Dakota, so it could be an exception and not full of stupid, fat, arrogant, ignorant, money-grubbing, whining, hypocritical American assholes.”
    “Come on, Skelly, we’re not that bad.”
    “Yes, we are: fat, doped up, and dangerous. Did you see that parody poster? Picture of some nice country like this here and the caption goes, ‘America! It’s more than bombs and fat people.’ Actually, not.”
    “We’ve had this conversation before.”
    “Yes, we have, and you always lose. I’m going for a run. You want to come along, fat boy?”
    “I am height and weight proportional for my age.”
    “You’re soft as cream cheese. And don’t think you’re going to ditch me, ’cause I got the keys.”
    Marder watched the man trot down the road with his usual effortless lope.
    *   *   *
    He recalled now the first time he’d seen it and how much he had hated Skelly then. The three of them—Marder,