Free IN & OZ: A Novel by Steve Tomasula

he took pleasure in how easy it was to be with her here in the narrow lane of the tollbooth. How easy it was to talk to her, to understand her, the constraints of the tollbooth transaction keeping their conversation from bleeding all over into topics with no bounds, or the messy groping about that troubled Mechanic in most other conversations where you could never really tell what was truly being said, or what the other person really wanted.
    . . .forty-four, forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. She paused, looking up to him, and he understood that she wanted him to take the first half of the toll. When he did, their hands touched.
    . . .fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three. . . .
    If only all of life could be so clear! As she continued to count, he wracked his brain for a way to stretch the moment. What
did
men and women talk about, anyway!
    . . .seventy-nine, eighty, eighty-one. . . .
    Politics! “I—I—I’m sorry about the vote,” he stammered.
    The dismissive shrug he received in reply froze his heart. Leading up to the referendum on limiting billboard space, the campaign had grown more intense with each side pushing the envelope of billboarding while language did what language always does, and some of the anti-billboard-istas began to appreciate writing on pages that were twenty-feet high. To these poor fallible men and women who had never had an audience other than themselves, Photographer had explained, the thousands of motorists who streamed by and read their words—their words!—was intoxicating beyond bearability. In secret, they had begun to work against the limitation of billboards. A form of censorship. Some of the pro-billboard-ists, on the other hand, began to loath the increasing difficulty they had in cutting through the “poetic static,” as they called it, with the poetry of their products. Secretly, they began to work to limit the number of billboards. That is, some anti became defacto-pro and some pro became defacto-anti-billboarders, and in the end voters decided by referendum to freeze the number of billboards at their new, elevated level, which half of the pro-billboarders took as defeat, and half of the anti-billboarders took as defeat, and half of the pro-billboarders took as victory, and half of the anti-billboarders took as victory, though it was impossible to tell which half was which.
    Had he insulted her? “I mean—I’m glad!” he blurted. Why had he stepped outside of the easy give-and-take of the tollbooth!
    Again she only shrugged, exactly as before, and finished counting out pennies from her fish purse.
    “I mean—I mean, I’d like to see some of your poetry one day.”
    She paused, giving him a wry?—or maybe it was a condescending smile.
    “I mean your sculpture?”
    Her head cocked like a dog hearing an odd squeal.
    “I mean your dirt.”
    She placed the second fifty coins in his hand. Their hands touched again, hers lingering this time. Or was it just his imagination?—the moment seemed to stop during which every detail was so vivid it made him ache: her chewed fingernails, the sweet stink of her sweat, the whiteness of the balls of her knuckles made even more pure by the dirt in their creases that he knew from the engine grime under his own fingernails would never come clean. Not so long as she kept dirt as her medium. . . .
    The driver of the next car honked impatiently.
    Then her sinewy hands were taking up the grips of her handlebars. But she nodded as she rotated a pedal into position, a serene expression coming over her face to let him know that someday she’d show him some.
    “Well goodbye,” he said.
    She smiled back, then pushed off, as happily as if the vote had never happened. A moment later he saw her legs kick out from each side of her bike as she allowed the gravity of the hill to speed her along, coasting, the wind whipping her shirttail as the bicycle picked up speed, her arms suddenly shooting up into a