Venus Drive by Sam Lipsyte Read Free Book Online Page B

Sure, there are some around, the next town over. We saw them once at White Power Pizza, dumber than fence-holes, yacking their excuses for Misters Stalin and Mao. Not us. We say forget it after Bronstein got it. A clusterfuck from then till now. That is our tendency, as Martin says.
    Me, I tend to say, “Let’s get the twelve gauge,” or, “The pond road is totally iced. Let’s ride.”
    Martin tends to need persuading. Martin tends to pour more coffee and talk about Bronstein. He loves the pointy-bearded man so much, he says his born name. Bronstein, Bronstein, Bronstein. Bronstein does Siberia, Bronstein smites the pesky Kronstadt sailors, Bronstein peers through learned spectacles into the dark tomorrow.
    â€œBronstein had Hitler pinned,” says Martin. “He knew what was coming. He figured Stalin out, too. Ergo, ice pick.”
    I can’t help but like the ice pick part. I can see the skullmeat in the garden.
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    There’s a winter’s worth of wood already, but we keep the maul and wedge out front with some scraps to whack at for when Lucy drives up. While we make our preparations, drink down our vodka-and-Gatorades near the scrap-whack part of the yard, the little kulak boys come over. They are miniature soldiers, future sausage casings of the pork apparatus. They sit smug on our stump chairs, as though they own them, which in the world as it is, as opposed to how it could be, they do. I throw a bag of shake and a packet of extra-wides into the lap of the older one.
    â€œIf you can roll it, you can smoke it,” I say.
    â€œI’m ten.”
    â€œHappy birthday,” I say.
    â€œIt’s not my birthday.”
    â€œThen happy nothing,” I say
    â€œEverywhere,” says Martin, lowering the maul to the grass, “there are children younger and fiercer than you, ready to shuck the yoke of oppression.”
    â€œThe yolk is too runny,” says the smaller sandy son.
    â€œThat’s the point, little man,” I say.
    â€œWhat’s the hook for?”
    â€œFor the gruesome necessaries,” I tell him.
    â€œMom says she’s going to evict you.” says the older son to Martin.
    â€œDo you believe the hippos operate under false consciousness?”
    â€œMom said the university kicked you out because you were crazy, and your friend here because he was dumb.”
    â€œDon’t you see the crisis built into late hippo capitalism?” says Martin. “There’s nothing idealistic about it. It’s fucking math.”
    â€œDon’t curse-word me,” says the boy. He hands the shake and papers to his smaller kulak brother.
    â€œTake this to Mom,” he says. The other boy speeds off through trees.
    â€œYou’re in deepies now,” says the older sandy son. “Mom said one more little thing and she was calling Hank Krull.”
    The boy walks the snowholes of his running brother, a mittened form between the bends of birch.
    â€œDeepies,” Martin says. “Don’t tell Lucy. Don’t tell her a thing.”
    Some days we’re up there smoking on the prayer rock off the hill trail, smoking on the big slab facing east. Martin says the local braves used to sit here a few hundred years ago to watch the sun go up, watch the wagons roll by, beseech the Great Spirit to kick Manifest Destiny’s ass.
    â€œBut the only way to win,” says Martin, “is to organize people.”
    â€œWhat people?” I say, wave out to the half-stump woods.
    â€œThey’re coming over tonight.”
    â€œTina, too?” I say.
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    Tina is my lady of the revolution. She was a daughter of Midwest mansions, come to university to study slides of the paintings that hung in her father’s halls.
    Then she took Martin’s elective, “Introduction to Resistance: Semiotic to Semi-automatic,” and he saw in her the makings of a revolutionist. This was just before the graduate-school dean