Another Green World Read Online Free Page B

first time in their lives. “
O beautiful for spacious skies,”
Miss Anderson had sung, and later, “
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen.”
    You couldn't hold that concert today if you wanted to. The Mall was littered along its entire length with tempos, cheap and ugly two-story buildings designed to last for the duration and not one pay period longer, accommodating government agencies that hadn't existed eighteen months ago—the War Refugee Board being a case in point.
    “So,” said the cabbie, “you hear the one about the guy who falls in the Potomac?”
    His English, accent aside, was as good as the next man's. Ingo knew thejoke, which was making the rounds. But Marty said no, apparently unable to cut this off at the pass.
    “Okay, so there's this guy who falls in the Potomac, right? And he's drowning, he's going down for the third time. And this pedestrian crossing the Fourteenth Street Bridge, he looks down and yells, ‘Hey, buddy, where do you live?’ The drowning guy shouts a street number. So right away the pedestrian jumps in a cab. ‘Take me to this address,’ he says. They dash over to the other side of town, and he runs up to the poor guy's apartment and tells the landlord he wants to rent the place. ‘Sorry,’ the landlord tells him. ‘That apartment has just been taken.’ ‘But that's impossible!' says the guy. ‘The fellow who lived here, I just saw him drowning in the Potomac River!’ ‘That's right,' the landlord tells him. ‘But the dame who pushed him off the bridge beat you over here.’ “
    Marty by this time had lapsed into an empty gaze out the window—one of her cloudy moods had come upon her—so it fell to Ingo to offer an adequate chuckle.
    The cabbie explained loudly, “The point being, in this town you cannot find a decent place to live.”
    “Yeah, I get that,” said Ingo.
    “It's the truth, too.”
    The driver—Timo, according to a permit taped on the dash—spun hard left onto Independence, following the Potomac downstream. The scenery was more of the same: tempos, traffic, peanut vendors, newsboys flogging the
Evening Star
, soldiers and sailors and WAVES and WACs who all looked in somewhat of a daze, as if they'd just dropped out of the sky from Kansas. There were cops on horseback and MPs in jeeps, people who looked foreign, people who looked lost, people who didn't look like anything at all. Americans. Such as they were.
    “Okay, then,” Timo muttered, hooking a right onto South Capitol. It might have been a warning: Gird thy loins. The neighborhood here had long been a favorite of Farm Service Bureau photographers, yielding thousands of trite and disheartening shots in which, as a backdrop, you see the gleaming white, neoclassical Rotunda, and in the foreground scenes out of
Uncle Tom's Cabin—
downtrodden darkies in a squalid dooryard, farm animals optional; mothers with empty eyes holding babies who look dead; a tar-paper alley shack bursting with shoeless children—all inevitably captioned, “In the shadow of the Capitol …” Notwithstanding, Ingo thought, that shadows fall on the
north
side. Where the slums aren't so picturesquely dreadful.
    First Street began with tenements and quickly devolved to empty lotsand heavily padlocked warehouses before dead-ending at the riverfront— weed-grown, strewn with beer bottles and those cardboard squares you play the numbers on. Just shy of the embankment, Timo slapped the Nash into neutral and gave them a yellow smile.
    “Twenty-two hundred,” he said cheerfully. “That would be right about here.”
    Ingo cased the block. There was no physical evidence that they had reached their destination or that there was any destination to be reached. A barnlike structure of corrugated steel stood on their right, an unintended hedge of mulberry and bamboo on their left, while straight ahead, maybe thirty paces off, the Anacostia slithered by, flat and dirty and slow. There must be some mistake.
    But Marty was