Free Once We Had a Country by Robert McGill Page A

like Roy Rogers with a beard. When he went out, people stared; it was no wonder that, except for his job, he mostly stayed at home.
    Fletcher was different. He needed to be out among others, even if he didn’t always seem to enjoy it. In fact, sometimes in Boston when she sat with him and a group of his friends at a restaurant, watching him fidget and blush with embarrassment at others’ joking, she wondered if he’d committed himself to such sociability on a self-made dare. Or perhaps he thought that spending time with people, talking politics and ideas, was expected from a young man of his standing.
    She met him on the opening night of
The Go-Between
, when she sat down in the empty seat next to him, a stranger.They were both on their own. Later he teased her about that, said she must have had her eye on him from the start, but in truth there were no other seats. At that point she often went to the cinema alone, needing an escape from the stress of teaching but not wanting to watch television because it reminded her too much of home. As a girl she had never really gone to movies. Now she discovered they weren’t like TV at all. There was no coyness about them; they showed you everything. She had watched
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
. She had seen
Klute
and
Shaft
. She had seen
Carnal Knowledge
and come out amazed that such things were shown in public places.
    After the final credits for
The Go-Between
, Fletcher turned to her and asked what she thought of the film. There was a bashfulness about him that made her decide he wasn’t a creep, so she replied that she’d liked the novel better, though she admired Julie Christie’s performance. When he observed that not too many girls went to the movies Friday night on their own, Maggie told him she wasn’t by herself. He was taking her out for coffee, wasn’t he? It was the most daring thing she’d ever said.
    The first time he invited her back to his apartment, they didn’t make it to the bedroom. Afterward, lying there still naked on the couch, he asked whether it was all right if he turned on the television, because there was a show he wanted to see about the
Pioneer 10
spacecraft that NASA was launching soon. He said it would be the first human-built thing to leave the solar system. Maggie said she didn’t mind and pretended to watch along with him, but her eyes went around the room, taking in the bustof JFK on the bookshelf, the framed poster that showed Earth from space.
    “Hey, look,” said Fletcher after a time, and she glanced back to the TV screen. They were showing the golden plaque the scientists had affixed to the side of the spacecraft, hoping that one day an alien race would learn about humanity from the information engraved there. It had hieroglyphs detailing the composition of hydrogen and the Earth’s location, and then there was a stark, plain image of a man and woman standing a few feet apart. Neither of them wore any clothes. The man’s hand was raised in greeting, and Maggie tried to imagine being so confident in her nakedness that she could wave at someone like that.
    “Maggie, they’re us,” said Fletcher, sounding pleased at the idea. She looked more closely and saw the woman’s hips were as wide as her own, while the long, straight hair was more or less the same. But the man was stockier, more muscular than Fletcher, and he wore no glasses, had no moustache. Although Maggie didn’t say it out loud, the couple wasn’t them at all. It was only her and some man she’d never met.
    One morning not long after their discussion about migrant workers, Maggie looks through the mud room window and sees Fletcher walking back from the orchard with a dark-skinned man in a checkered shirt and an orange woollen cap. Crossing the lawn to meet them, she apprehends that the man’s older than they are, maybe thirty-five, with pockmarked cheeks and short hair touched by grey.
    “Maggie, this is George Ray Ransom,” says Fletcher. “George Ray works a