Venus Drive by Sam Lipsyte Read Free Book Online Page A

wait. We are waiting and we wait.
    Some days, Martin and me, we shoot the shotgun over the landlord’s roof. Some days we get in the truck, go four-by-four on the pond road when it ices, skitch it. Every day we cut the trees where they grow thick on the ridge. Martin cuts them and I haul the wood to the road. The landlord says to cut what we need for heat. The forest, it comes with the rent. But we always cut more for barricades, for bonfire fuel.
    The barricades are for the revolution, the bonfire fuel for bonfires, which the landlord forbids, that fucking kulak.
    We like to skitch and we like to loaf, but we can only do it until Martin’s wife Lucy comes home. Then we have to look busy. Lucy says the revolution, for revolutionists, is twenty-four-seven, but most days Lucy goes off in her blood-technician whites. Me and Martin, we drive out for a snack.
    â€œDoing hillbilly shit is a good stress reliever,” says Martin.
    â€œLook at Trotsky and his opera,” I say, “I mean Bronstein. Look at Bronstein.”
    We are watching our pie cool at White Power Pizza. White Power Pizza is also called Hank’s, after Hank Krull, the owner, but if I say to Martin, after a long day of kulak-roof-buckshot-lofting, or pond-road skitching, or pond-ice sliding, “Hey, let’s go to Hank’s,” he has no idea what I might mean, but if I say “White Power Pizza,” we are four-by-four with all due speed.
    We are watching our pie cool and feeling the coolness of glances from Hank and his White Power Pizza men. They are boys, really, fallen from football glory, with iron crosses on their floury arms, tiny tears inked under their eyes. Every pseudo-hillbilly in a fabric-softener-softened shirt knows the meaning of this cooling glance. It’s the one that comes before the knuckle-dusters, the brickbats, the blackjacks, or those funny circle blades for slicing pies.
    â€œWhat the hell are you looking at?” says Hank.
    â€œJust watching a pro at work,” Martin says.
    â€œThe key is to keep the ovens clean. They had a problem with that in Poland.”
    Hank winks, shoots us a little Nuremberg number with the flat of his hand.
    Every revolutionist is a student of the odds, says Lucy, or maybe Bronstein said it first. It’s a truth every Bronstein better heed.
    We abandon our perfect pie, hurry out to the truck. We drive back up the pond road, past the landlord’s house. You can see her through the window with her sons, small and sandy-headed darlings, sitting like a family yuletide greeting while she reads to them from one of those big-assed animal toddler books, the kind where hippos lecture on democracy.
    â€œFucking kulak!” I scream, my voice lost to wind.
    Brothers and sisters, we are compound-bound.
    Â 
    The compound is our little house off the forest road. I love our little house, the graveyard beside it, the woods all around. I love to stagger out and piss in graveyard snow. I stare up at the moonpie moon, or dream of the little girls buried at the treeline under crooked stones. They died of typhus in the age of Millard Fillmore, my favorite president from that special time when I had to memorize those ruffle-throated men. Maybe our house is haunted, but it only makes me love it more, the whine and shudder of floorboard and strut. It’s all grained up with ghostliness. I love the iron hook I carry for the hauling of the wood that Martin cuts. It is hooked in my coat for readiness.
    I love to play with the little minds of the sandy sons when they come over, curious.
    Also, I love Tina, in my sleeping bag, up in the attic room. Good, sweet Tina with so much to give to the world and giving it to me, sleepytime hummers and wake-ups, too.
    But don’t get me wrong. Most of all I love the revolution. Maybe I’m just tired of the wait.
    The landlord thinks we are communists. We are not communists. What could a kulak, with her damn hippos, know? Communists?