Free Decency by Rex Fuller

made him promise not to charge.”
    “Harlan, it seems to me, and I hate to say it, but the direction from Lincoln to Washington has been down hill, and we’re running out of time.”

     

10
     
    A LMOST THREE YEARS AFTER THE ACT.
    Just two lanes of old-fashioned asphalt. Black tar patches on the road snaked crazily toward the car and disappeared. Mesmerizing, if you watched. Corn crops, dry, near harvest ready stalks, the color of sugar cookies, wallpapered both sides of the road. T om, they look pretty good. Why shouldn’t they? This rich flood plain soil tucked into the Platte and Missouri has always fed innumerable creatures. When Lewis and Clark churned up the Missouri two hundred years ago, just twenty miles east of here they saw herds of elk, bison, deer, and antelope, and waterfowl in numbers that they described as uncountable. Now this land feeds people all over the world in uncountable numbers.
    The sun lumbered lower, telling its late afternoon color story. Yellow turned to orange-red. Too soon it shaded to pink-violet.
    October was the best month of the year here. Normally warm, clear, and mild, like today. Just like it was in the days she visited her Grandfather’s farm south of Lincoln. She was here to… what… connect? Identify? Just remember?
    It’s a good time to be going. Why, or where, doesn’t matter. Just to be going. That’s the thing. Being alone. Terrorism. War. “Relief ” is impossible, but not escape.
    The CD of Roy Orbison, started the “ In Dreams ” track.
    Sweet Roy, as Paul McCartney called him, was one of the few voices that go so deep inside you, that it’s you singing, more than hearing him. God made the world for moments like this. Perfect sunlight, perfect song, and on the road. Have to remember this, just this way.
    A kestrel hovered, pin-point intent on its target off the road on the right. It knew where to hover, above the tell-tale blotches of urine it saw in ultraviolet light. When the grass twitched from the vole’s movement, the kestrel dived.
    What would the world look like if we could see in ultraviolet, and in zoom, like the kestrel does? Would we have bothered learning agriculture, if we had known where to hunt and exactly when to pounce? Today we use machines to see in ultraviolet for body fluids. Would we, could we, have invented them?
    The violin burst passage came and went just as quickly as the Kestrel.
    How did Roy think of that? It’s really a country song. Yet, he put in classical violins that are so much a signature of the song that they are all you have to hear to know it’s Roy. Pure art. Thank you, Lord, for giving us that. Tom and I…and all of this, too.
    Tears clouded her view. She blinked and wiped them away.
    Come on. This is great. Don’t burden it with too much. Tom, you would have loved this. I know you don’t mind if I talk to you as though you’re here. You know it’s been so long getting to this point that I can talk to you without…losing it. Almost two years since the…beasts…the newspaper actually called them “ juveniles”… pitched the rock off the overpass…no apparent reason…and you were gone.
    Remember how we used to tell each other how lucky we were to have found each other? How we would relish the secret between us just how crazy happy we were…how it was to be “your woman” and “your man”…?
    The final soaring phrase from Roy, “In-n-n Dre-e-e-eeeams,” filled the car. She turned off the CD player just to let that sound linger in her memory.
    The sign for the next town said, “Weeping Water, 8 miles.”
    Is it still big enough to support a place to eat? With family farms thinning out for decades, these towns that used to hold a few essential businesses might not even muster a café any more.
    As the sky hit pink-violet, Weeping Water rose up into view.
    Looks like there might still be home-style cooking on main street.
    Pickup trucks, nosed to the curb in front of the “Bar and Grill,” identified