Free The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander Page B

everything while Kaddish drove. The front seat covered in blood.
    Pato was laid out in back, his head touching the door. He watched the tops of the telephone poles, measuring the car’s slow progress along the telephone wires and the tops of buildings floating against the sky. He didn’t say a thing.
    “You feel strong enough to drop me at work?” Lillian said. Kaddish, who was happy to be addressed, nearly answered.
    “Sure,” Pato said. “Absolutely.”
    Kaddish’s family ignored him but he was the one steering them along the lush avenues of Buenos Aires and was in this way involved. He loved these avenues, the very widest in the world. Kaddish believed in their greatness as a real and palpable truth. A city built around such avenues always held promise. What couldn’t such streets manage to carry; what wouldn’t be raised up in estimation by lining their sides?
    The traffic slowed and Pato came forward from where he lay, resting his chin on the front seat. There was a roadblock nestled in a crook of the avenue. Three jeeps were parked on each side of the road, closing off the lanes. Columns of flares had been lit. Patches of lava sputtered on the pavement. Because of gawking, because of the way people are, the traffic continued beyond the roadblocks as well.
    Kaddish pressed in the car’s lighter. He’d already gotten a cigarette into his mouth.
    Lillian fought off panic. It was an unlucky morning already. She looked around that front seat and prayed that no one would notice what was left of the blood. She stared out Kaddish’s window and saw a manon the other side of the road being beaten with the butt end of a gun. Two hits and he disappeared down between the cars. The soldiers circled around him.
    This was not Lillian’s first military government. It was not the first roadblock in her life. This one Lillian could tell was a danger, and not only because of the beating. The roadblock soldier has its own personality, and each pack of soldiers, Lillian believed, could be read by its leader. From the last fifteen meters it was already clear. She could tell by the look of the young officer, spread out on the hood of his jeep, his shirt open, and catching the sun on his chest. It was a position that no one with a real enemy would hold, a lazy bullying stance. There was a jumpiness to the soldiers in motion that gave Lillian a very bad feeling about the one they approached.
    “War,” Lillian said. This was addressed to Kaddish, and he nodded and picked a fleck of tobacco off the tip of his tongue.
    It was a war they were in. And this, Lillian felt, was its form of combat. The endless battles of Argentina. And how many of them did they fight against themselves? This is what set loose the panic in her, a reverse progression she’d been caught up in before. First the government declares victory, next comes the fighting, and then—as an afterthought—an enemy is picked up along the way. If a country wants to go on the offensive, always there are takers. Always there is an enemy who will step up to be had.
    “ID,” Kaddish said, holding the wheel from the top so that both arms were in view. He’d heard of a man shot for reaching down to scratch his leg. Lillian opened her purse; Kaddish quickly pulled his wallet and tossed it up on the dash. Lillian held their two ID’s together.
    “Pato,” Kaddish said.
    And Pato said, “At home.”
    “What?” Kaddish said.
    “I didn’t bring my wallet to go vandalizing with you.”
    “Not an excuse,” Kaddish said. “You know the rules of this city. You know there’s no fucking excuse.”
    Lillian fought to keep a tranquil expression on her face.
    Kaddish raised his voice. “What do we do now?”
    Lillian surrendered to a fear that springs from helplessness. She’d felt it from the first glimpse of those jeeps. In Kaddish it welled up with Pato’s irresponsibility and turned right into anger, into a rage that overtakes fathers who only want to protect their