Page 7 of So Far Gone

(celebrity entertainment bleeding into government, cable TV eroding newspapers, information collapsing into a huge Internet-size

black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit, until the literal worst person in America got elected president).

There was inside of Kinnick an emptiness that felt like depression.

Probably no coincidence that this bone-deep sorrow arrived as his relationship with his then-girlfriend, Lucy, was ending, as his newspaper was laying him off, as he lost a career that he’d believed was not only vital for him but also for his community, and, perhaps, naively, for democracy.

No, it was he who had failed, he who couldn’t adjust, he who couldn’t deal with this banal, brutal idiocracy, he who couldn’t admit this was the world now. And so... he’d stepped aside. Moved to the last sliver of land once owned by his wannabe sheep-rancher

grandfather. But once he began withdrawing, erasing himself, he couldn’t stop. Until now, when Kinnick saw that he’d been

living entirely in his own head for a year now, and had inexplicably reached a place where he didn’t even recognize his own

grandchildren.

“?‘I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time,’?” Kinnick finally said to his inquisitive granddaughter.

“?‘To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.’?”

She stared at him.

“I don’t suppose Thoreau’s Walden was on your church’s list of approved titles.”

“I don’t think so,” Leah said.

“No, probably not.” Rhys Kinnick tried his best grandfatherly smile, and he thought again: Oh, Celia. Oh, Bethany. I’m sorry.

“Well then.” Kinnick cleared his throat. “What do you say we go get your wet, prodigy of a brother and get him to his chess

tournament.” He started to walk, but Leah didn’t move.

“I should tell you...” She scrunched up her face. “He plays chess about as well as he jumps over creeks.”

Kinnick smiled. “Well, you know what? I kind of want to see that.”

***

Thanksgiving Day 2016 Kinnick drove away from his daughter’s house with no idea where he might be going.

His right hand throbbed below the ring finger knuckle, where he’d broken one of the small bird bones in the back of his hand punching Shane’s thick head.

He almost wished Shane had punched him back, but for all his bluster, Shane wasn’t really a violent sort.

Kinnick had to give him that. He sped north on I-5, through patches of fog, his cell phone in the passenger seat like a disapproving friend, alternating buzzing and ringing.

He reached over for it and read the text messages as he drove, glancing back and forth from road to screen and back.

Celia’s were of the Just turn around, you made your point variety, Bethany’s more Don’t bother coming back.

He should call Bethany and apologize, call Celia and explain, maybe call his old flame, Lucy, in Spokane, and ask her to talk

him down. This last call was the most appealing, frankly, but Lucy had been clear about ending the affair with Kinnick. ( I don’t want to fucking see you ever again .) God bless Lucy Park and her profane lack of ambivalence. Still, technically, talking on the phone with someone wasn’t seeing them .

But no. If he was going to call anyone, it should be Bethany. That was the right thing to do. She had left two voicemails,

and she was the one he owed an apology to. All he had to do was press her name on the screen, and boom—even speeding away

at eighty miles per hour, technology would put her right here next to him, in his ear, his brilliant baby girl, as clear as

if she were in the car with him. He turned his iPhone over in his hand. Remarkable. Every human connection he had left was

contained inside its miniature electronic circuitry. Kinnick didn’t know a single phone number by memory anymore. They were

all just filaments, bits of data in this device. He could rattle off the exchange numbers of his youth (Walnut-4–9378, Keystone-6–2454...),

but without this $600 Pop-Tart of modern science, he had no way of reaching any other human being, and they had no way of

reaching him.

But more than that! This device knew him better than anyone ever had; it knew his weaknesses ( best happy hour near me ), his tastes (’ 70s soul and R&B ), his worries ( erections after fifty ), his crude, sad desires ( adventurous 40-to-50-something, dates only, not looking for a relationship ), even what socks he preferred ( athletic, white and black ), knew every place he’d ever walked and driven and—

He was surprised to be surprised to see the phone fly out the window. He had been the one to lower the window in the first

place, after all, so it shouldn’t have shocked him, but it was almost as if the act of flipping it out the window had preceded

the idea. A quick glance in his side mirror and he saw his phone cartwheel once on the shoulder and then disappear in the

weeds between lanes.

Go back! The urge was physical, intense, like he’d tossed out a baby, or his last bottle of booze. What if someone needs you? What

if Shane becomes violent back there? What if there’s some emergency with Bethany’s kids? What if Lucy Park changes her mind?

What if the New York Times offers you a job? What if the perfect 40-to-50-something interested only in sex and not in a relationship sends you a text

message? What if you run out of socks?

Of course, he could just get another phone.

“If I do that,” Kinnick muttered to himself, “I’ll be lost forever.”

It was quiet. In his head. Without his phone. Finally.

A sign informed him that the next town was called Riddle. “Well, there you go,” Kinnick said aloud, the first of a million

times he would talk to himself in the next seven years. He decided to let the car choose its course, and removed his hands,

the Audi’s crap-alignment drifting him off the freeway into this skid mark of a little freeway-side town.

On Riddle’s Main Street he found an Irish bar, with a lit neon open sign in the window. Blessed be thy ... Front awning of the building was held up with the kind of posts cowboys might’ve once tied their horses to. After Kinnick

got out of his car, he pretended to tie the old Audi to a post. “Settle down, girl,” he said to the car.

The front door of the Irish bar opened with that pleasing squeal into darkness—a daytime drink always thrilled him, and he

plopped onto the first stool he saw. Shamrocks, beer signs, pool tables—the place was exactly what it should be. Two other

men were at the bar, bent over plastic pie-shaped bowls with draft lagers at their sides.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” said a barmaid, perhaps six months pregnant, a tattoo of roses rising from her cleavage to her neck.

“You, too,” Kinnick said.

She held up a microwavable turkey pot pie. “Only one left, you want it?”

“Sounds like it’s all the rage.”

“Six bucks.”

“A bargain at half the price.”

She took it out of the box and put it in the microwave.

I’ll move up to the old Kinnick homestead , he thought. He’d been trying to decide what to do with the forty acres he’d inherited a decade earlier, when his father

died, Kinnick’s dad having inherited it from his dad. He could fix up the old, vacant cinder block house. Live off the grid. A simpler life. Disappear up there. Yes.

It was possible to disappear from others’ lives, of course—from Lucy’s, from Bethany’s—but he suspected that when he woke up tomorrow,

wherever he was, the person he really wanted to never see again would be staring right back in the mirror.

Maybe don’t get a mirror , he thought, and this made him smile.

“What do you want to drink, smiley?” The bartender pushed the steaming turkey pot pie in front of Kinnick with a fork and

a single paper napkin.

“Seeing as how this is going to be my last one for a while,” he said, “dealer’s choice. What do you like to make?”

She turned to the taps. “Bud. Bud Light...”

“How about a Manhattan.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“It’s just whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters.”

“Of those ingredients, I got the whiskey is all.”

“Then whiskey it is.”

“Beam, Jameson, or Jack?”

“When in Cork—let’s go with the Jameson.”

“Double? Same price as a single before five.”

“Lucky day,” Kinnick said.

The bartender set a double whiskey next to his pot pie.

“Thanks,” Kinnick said, and, looking to make polite conversation, added, “So, when are you due?”

“Do what?” the bartender asked.

“Never mind,” Kinnick said.

And with that, he took a bite of microwaved turkey pot pie, toasted the other bar patrons—“Happy Thanksgiving, gents!”—and

started his life over.

***

Kinnick drove Leah and Asher away from his house in that smelly old car, down a dirt road to a two-lane highway cut between

dense stands of trees, past cattle and sheep ranches, as they wound ten miles back up the twisting Hunters Road to the town

of Springdale. He narrated as he drove, pointing out neighbors: “Brattons used to run a couple hundred head of Hereford till

the old man’s back gave out,” and “That place was a commune for years, but they all eventually moved away.” He explained that

Springdale had been an old logging and mill town, a crossroad, a rail stop, and that his grandfather had bought a small homestead

ranch up here in the late 1940s, back when there were twice as many people in the town. He slowed and turned onto the two-block

Springdale Main Street, which he said had once consisted of a busy lumber railroad siding and a dozen small businesses supporting

it. The railway was gone now and only two storefronts were open: a sad tavern, and a sadder little grocery store, whose prices,

Rhys said, “Aren’t much better than the convenience store up at the Y.”

Asher and Leah made eye contact, curious about this tour they were getting. At first, their grandfather had barely seemed

capable of speech, and now it seemed, a tap had opened, and he couldn’t stop.