Page 6 of So Far Gone

concentration. “Oh, those are... It’s just... That’s not...” He shifted his weight nervously. “That’s kind of a work

in progress. Or”—he chuckled a little at himself—“a work in nonprogress.”

Leah set the notebook down and picked up an old hardcover book near it, whose dust jacket read: The Ethics of Ambiguity , Simone de Beauvoir. “Is this good? Simone...”

“De Beauvoir . Yes, it’s very good.”

“ Boovwah .” Leah repeated it the way Rhys had pronounced it. She liked the cover, the title, and Simone de Beauvoir stripped across four banana-Popsicle panels, between them, a small black-and-white photo of a serious-looking woman in profile.

(Perhaps she would put her picture on her own books one day.) Leah opened the book, and read a little bit, but it seemed even

more technical than her grandfather’s notebook, so she closed it. “Do you have the Wraith of the Kingdom series?”

“Probably not.”

“I like to read whole series. If there’s just one book, it makes me sad when it’s over.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“How about Valerie Godwin? Do you have her books?”

“Is Valerie Godwin alive?”

“Yes. She writes about young people who are called to do special tasks by a council of elven elders.”

“Hmm... I don’t think I have that one.” Rhys gestured toward the packed shelves and tables. “These books are mostly by

dead authors. Of course, they weren’t dead when they wrote them.”

“We used to have your book at home,” Asher said, looking up from the fire.

“I wasn’t dead when I wrote mine, either,” Kinnick said. And then he noted the boy’s tense. “Wait, did you say you used to have my book? What happened to it??”

“Shane got rid of most of our books,” Leah said. “Just before we moved.”

“Your mother let him get rid of my book?”

Leah set Simone de Beauvoir back on the stack. “There was a committee at our new church, and they sent out a list of approved

and recommended titles,” she said. “We got rid of some books then. And when we moved, we just didn’t have room for a lot of

our other books. I think that’s when we got rid of yours.”

His one book, From River to Rimrock , had taken him twelve years to write.

It was a series of essays about environmental degradation in the Inland Northwest in the twentieth century.

Published by a university press, he’d written it as a gentle call for small-scale local change, but maybe it had been too gentle, too small, too local.

He’d worked on it during weekends and holidays, and its publication had been—briefly—his proudest professional moment.

He did a few readings around the Northwest, and at a couple of colleges.

But the thing sold all of eight hundred copies and promptly went out of print.

He wondered how many even still existed.

He used to imagine that, when the last copy of his book was gone, Kinnick would be gone, too, wiped from the earth. This felt

like a relief at times. The world had no use for him, or for his curious little book (and, more than likely, would have even

less use for the unwieldy second book he was writing, should he ever finish it). It was a kind of delusional self-centeredness,

connecting his failure as a writer to the culture’s growing rejection of science, philosophy, and reason, of basic common

sense. But, of course, when he was moping around, thinking about his slim foothold in the publishing world, he didn’t consider

that his daughter and his grandchildren would surely outlive his little book, that Leah and Asher might be around longer,

than, say, his research on the decline of native trout populations in Inland Northwest streams, or the shortage of huckleberries

in the once-purple Selkirk Mountains.

Right, he thought. We live only as long as someone remembers us. Only as long as someone cares.

A shiver went through him then, the same wave of ruefulness and contrition he’d felt before, standing on the porch, staring

at these kids whom he hadn’t recognized at first, finding out that his daughter had run away, that his ex-wife was dead: What have I done? His eyes welled, and his voice cracked when he spoke: “I’m gonna go check on the car.” The kids looked up from the fire.

Did they hear that break in his voice? “Make sure it starts,” he added, “so we can get to that chess tournament on time.”

Kinnick started for the door. He’d used the old ’59 Ford flatbed for a while, but it gave up the ghost six months ago, so he was back to using his car to get supplies.

He’d tried to start the car two days ago and found the battery dead, so he’d dragged an extension cord down and connected a charger to the car battery posts.

Rhys went outside, buttoning his chore coat as he stepped off the back porch, to where a two-track driveway curled around the house and down into two wooden doors cut into the hillside and the concrete foundation below his floor.

He unlocked the padlock and swung the short doors open, revealing a five-foot-high crawl space where his old lime-green car was parked in the half-basement garage that he’d shoveled out and fortified with cinder blocks.

“What is that?”

Kinnick turned and saw Leah looking down on him, over the bank of the driveway.

“That?” Rhys turned to the car. “Is a 1978 Audi 100 GLS,” Rhys said. “Arguably, the low point in a long, proud tradition of

German automotive excellence.”

“Is it a hybrid?”

“It is, actually—half car, half garbage. Carbage.” Kinnick could feel the give-and-take of spoken language coming back to

him, filling his chest, like he’d come up from diving and was breathing again. And Leah—so smart, so observant, she reminded

him of Bethany at that age—was already a fine conversational foil. “Has almost three hundred thousand miles on it.”

“Is that good?”

“Not for the car it isn’t.” Kinnick bent down and edged into the dark crawl space.

He unhooked the charger from the battery and set it on a cluttered shelf.

He opened the car door—the light went on, that was good—slipped into the driver’s seat, closed his eyes, and turned the key.

It shuddered and clunked—those metal-on-metal sounds did not bode well—and then, it caught!

It sounded like a handful of wrenches in a dryer, but after a belch of green-black smoke—unmitigated success!

As the car warmed up, Kinnick cleared magazines and books off the backseat, throwing them into a pile among the other piles

of magazines and books in the small, dirt-floored crawl space.

He emerged from his little Hobbit garage and stood up straight. “See that? First try.”

“Why did you drop out?”

Kinnick looked up at his granddaughter, gazing over the edge of the sunken driveway. “Is that what your mom said? That I dropped

out?” How had he not recognized this girl on the porch? She was her mother at thirteen, the age when Bethany and he were the closest. Before the trouble. Same insistent, dark, almond-shaped

eyes. Same long brown hair. Same direct way of speaking.

“Yes. Mom said you dropped out.”

“Well.” It was funny she would use that phrase. By the time Bethany was a senior in high school, Kinnick worried constantly

about her quitting school. The fear of every parent: having your kid drop out. Bethany was a strong candidate, too: she’d

found her way to drugs—pot, mostly—harder stuff later on. And she’d always had problems with authority, watching teachers

and principals (and parents) for any sign that they were hypocrites, which, being human beings, of course they were. As Celia

always said, their daughter was “allergic to conformity.” But, even with her parents beginning to talk about divorce, and

Bethany in full sullen weed-smoking seventeen-year-old slackery, she had not dropped out. In fact, she’d finished high school, and then college and now, look—it was her father who was the dropout. He

wondered if Bethany saw the irony, too.

“At the time, it didn’t feel like I was dropping out,” Kinnick told Leah.

“It felt more like I was... stepping aside.” Did that explain it?

Should he say more than that? He was so rusty at communication.

Yes, he thought, he should probably say more.

“It certainly wasn’t about your mom. Or your grandma.

Or Shane. And it sure wasn’t about you and Asher.

I hope you know that. And I hope Beth—I hope your mom knows that.

It was about me. I felt like the world was drifting in one direction and I was going the other way. ”

And still his granddaughter stared. How to explain self-exile? Part of it had been the fight with Shane. And Bethany’s reaction. It symbolized the dark, sour turn the whole country had taken. As a journalist,

as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes.

But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an

unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country.

Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.

But, if he was being honest, it wasn’t those people, his fellow Americans, many of whom had probably always been as distracted

or as scared or as cynical as they revealed themselves to be by electing a ridiculous racist con man. No, they weren’t really the problem. Most of them probably just wanted lower taxes, or liked bad television, or, like Shane, had fallen

into the fake-Christian faux-conservative Nationalist cesspool; or maybe they were just burned-out and believed that corruption

had rotted everything, that one party was as bad as the next; or maybe they really did long for some nonexistent past.

Whatever their motivation, for Kinnick, it was all just part of a long sad cultural slide that he’d had the misfortune of witnessing firsthand