Midnight Haul Read Online Free PDF

in your neck of the woods—the Midwest. Eastern Illinois University. Very straight school. We were regular outlaws.”
    “It must’ve been a good time to be an outlaw.”
    “Yeah, I keep forgetting. You weren’t there. You were just a kid. Still are.”
    “You’re not that much older than me.”
    “I’m older than you’ll ever be. You didn’t even live through the draft, did you? Jesus.”
    “Neither did you. They weren’t drafting women, the way I heard it.”
    “I lived through it with Patrick. A lot of young women lived through it with their men. Their husbands. Brothers. It wasn’t easy for anybody with that hanging over them.”
    “You were active in the anti-war movement?”
    “Yes. Patrick was. I was. We both were. Carried signs. We were at Chicago. Patrick got his head smashed by a cop. Pig, as we used to say. Six stitches. Back on campus, he was a draft counselor. He was studying pre-law.”
    “So he’s a lawyer now?”
    “No. He shifted over into business and that’s what he got his degree in.” Her voice took on a sad sarcasm. “Currently he’s in the personnel department at Kemco.”
    “Kemco. That’s where Mary Beth was working this summer.”
    “Right. It’s where her father worked. It’s where everybody in this town who isn’t a farmer works. Everybody in the whole area.”
    “Why do I get the feeling you don’t like Kemco much?”
    “I guess that’s because it’s what broke my marriage up.”
    “I see.”
    “No, I doubt if you do. What do you know about Kemco?”
    “They’re big. Not the biggest. But big.”
    “What do you know about Agent Orange?”
    “Defoliant used in Vietnam. Some Vietnam vets exposed to it are now complaining about illnesses. Headaches, nausea, acne, that sort of thing. Lots of media play.”
    “Mary Beth
said
you were a journalism major. You really do know a little bit about what’s going on in the world. Not much, but a little, anyway.”
    “Well why don’t you bring me up to your level of awareness, then? If that’s possible without dropping acid.”
    She flinched. “I said I was into the anti-war movement, way back when. I didn’t say I did dope.”
    “Forget it. Go on.” Crane wondered why dope was a sore point with Boone; but she was talking again…
    “Agent Orange is an herbicide. We dumped forty-four million pounds of it on Vietnam. To kill the plants, so we could see the people better, to kill them, too.”
    “Don’t take this wrong,” Crane said, “but it
was
a war. Killing the enemy is the point in a war.”
    “The point is
that
undeclared war was supposed to be saving a country for democracy. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that one of the ways we saved that country for democracy was to dump poison on it? Poison that killed plants, and animals, and people, and caused miscarriages and raised the infant mortality rates and…”
    “And Kemco made this stuff?”
    “One of the major suppliers, yes. I remember when they came to our campus in the early ’70s, recruiting, and we protested. And nobody protested harder and louder and better than Patrick. Nobody.”
    “Only now he works for them. For Kemco.”
    “Right.”
    “He took the job and you divorced him.”
    “It wasn’t like that.”
    “I’ll tell you what it was like. He told you he’d work from within. Change the system by getting inside the system. That he’d cut his hair and put on a three-piece suit and be quietly subversive.”
    He’d struck another nerve: she got up and walked over to him and looked down at him with a stone face and said, “I didn’t leave him, Crane. He left me. Because I wasn’t the corporate wife. I didn’t adjust to the life-style. I couldn’t entertain his business associates. All I could do was spend my time writing my ‘little articles,’ as he called them, for what remains of the radical underground press.”
    She sat next to him.
    “He bought this house, you know,” she went on, “and filled it with modern furniture.