Free Fearless by Rafael Yglesias Page A

checking out. They had an impression of his credit card anyway.
    The car rental was a glass room set by itself in the middle of the mall’s parking lot. The agent, a skinny red-haired girl, probably a high school student doing a summer job, asked him: “Is something going on at the airport? My boyfriend drove by and shouted that he heard a plane had crashed.”
    “I don’t know,” Max said, wishing to make sure his business was transacted without conversation.
    Unfortunately she got a phone call while writing up Max’s agreement form. “No shit,” she said to the receiver and then apologized for her obscenity with a look. “A jet’s crashed at the airport,” she explained. “No. A customer,” she said to the phone. “Oh my God,” she gasped, hearing a horrific detail. Her pen was idle. The paperwork lay half-done underneath.
    “I’m in a hurry,” Max said softly.
    She ignored him. She had paled at another ghastly item. Her face went slack. “Really? I’m never getting on a plane. I swear to—”
    Max knocked on the counter, rapping it hard until she looked at him. “Fill out the form and call him back. I’m in a hurry.”
    She stared at him, in dumb outrage.
    “Please,” he said.
    “Yeah…” she drawled sarcastically to the phone. “Story of my life. I’ll call you back.” She put the point of her pen on the form and demanded angrily: “You want insurance?”
    The question reverberated for him. He couldn’t answer right away.
    “I thought you said you were in a hurry. You want insurance?”
    Max smiled. “No,” he said. There were tears in his eyes even though his mouth was spread wide in a goofy grin.
    “That means you’re responsible for any damage to the car.”
    Everything seemed to be chock-full of ironies. “I’m responsible,” Max said and he let out a laugh. It sounded loud and a little deranged.
    “Okay,” she said and now hurried, obviously leery of him.
    He took what she had available, which was a small white Ford, not glamorous or fun to drive. He was thrilled to control it, however.
    He studied the map the redhead had included in the envelope containing his rental agreement. He understood it with ease. That was unlike him. Usually maps blurred into incomprehensibility, service roads melting into freeways, turnpikes becoming rivers, huge urban centers disappearing; and what he could decipher inspired little confidence: he worried that what he thought he understood would inevitably turn out to be wrong in the greater reality of the road. It was embarrassing, he thought, for an architect to have so much trouble reading a blueprint of the earth’s surface design.
    Not this time. He found the interstate just where the map said it would be and he got on. His heart soared at the sight of the almost empty road. He put the air-conditioning on high, was pleased to discover that the previous renter had tuned the radio to a rock station, and flattened the gas pedal, delighted by a novelty: the speedometer readout was in digital numbers. He watched the old numbers blip off, the new numbers blip on, seventy, eighty, higher and higher, until he was driving into strange territory going faster than he had ever gone before.

THE
GOOD
SAMARITAN

    6
    Max saw that death was everywhere, had been everywhere all along, only he hadn’t seen it as death. On the highway he passed four cemeteries and a car being towed from an accident that was probably fatal. He noticed the stains of several recently killed animals on the pavement; and there was the corpse of one, lying gray and squashed, on the road’s shoulder.
    He laughed when, after driving east for a little more than two hours, he saw this sign: WELCOME TO PITTSBURGH . He had gone to college at Carnegie-Mellon and at age seventeen the same words, maybe even the same sign, had always made him laugh, especially because Carnegie-Mellon’s location was the best argument against enrollment. “Pittsburgh is the asshole of the United States,”