Freedom [220]
Her children, the reading daughter and the game-playing sons behind her, either didn’t hear this or didn’t mind being a lot of work to her. When she heard that Joey had a small business in Washington, she asked him if he knew about Daniel Jennings. “Dan’s a friend of ours in Morongo Valley,” she said, “who’s done all this research on our taxes. He’s actually gone back and looked at the record of debates in Congress, and you know what he discovered? That there’s no legal basis for the federal income tax.”
“There’s no legal basis for anything, really, when you get right down to it,” Joey said.
“But obviously the federal government doesn’t want you to know that all the money it’s collected for the last hundred years rightfully belongs to us citizens. Dan has a website where ten different history professors say he’s right, there’s no legal basis whatsoever. But nobody in the mainstream media will touch it. Which, don’t you think that’s a little strange? Wouldn’t you think at least one network or one newspaper would want to cover it?”
“I guess there must be some other side to the story,” Joey said.
“But why are we only getting that other side? Doesn’t it seem news-worthy that the federal government owes us taxpayers three hundred trillion dollars? Because that’s the figure Dan came up with, including compound interest. Three hundred trillion dollars.”
“That’s a lot,” he agreed politely. “That would be a million dollars for every person in the country.”
“Exactly. It’s outrageous, don’t you think? How much they owe us.”
He considered pointing out how difficult it would be for the Treasury to refund, say, the money that had been spent on winning World War II, but Ellen didn’t strike him as a person you could argue with, and he was feeling carsick. He could hear Jenna speaking Spanish excellent enough that, having taken it only through high school, he couldn’t catch much beyond her repetition of caballos this and caballos that. Sitting with his eyes closed, in a van full of jerks, he was visited by the thought that the three people he most loved (Connie), liked (Jonathan), and respected (his father) were all at least very unhappy with him, if not, by their own report, sickened by him. He couldn’t free himself of the thought; it was like some kind of conscience reporting for duty. He willed himself not to barf, because wouldn’t barfing now, a mere thirty-six hours after a good barf would have been very useful to him, be the height of irony? He’d imagined that the road to being fully hard, to being bad news, would get steeper and more arduous only gradually, with many compensatory pleasures along the way, and that he would have time to acclimate to each stage of it. But here he was, at the very beginning of the road, already feeling as if he might not have the stomach for it.
Estancia El Triunfo was undeniably paradisiacal, however. Nestled beside a clear-running stream, surrounded by yellow hills rolling up toward a purple ridgeline of sierras, were lushly watered gardens and paddocks and fully modernized stone guesthouses and stables. Joey and Jenna’s room had deliciously needless expanses of cool tiled floor and big windows open to the rushing of the stream below them. He’d feared there would be two beds, but either Jenna had intended to share a king-size with her mother or she’d changed the reservation. He stretched out on the deep-red brocade bedspread, sinking into its thousand-dollar-a-night plushness. But Jenna was already changing into riding clothes and boots. “Félix is going to show me the horses,” she said. “Do you want to come along?”
He didn’t want to, but he knew he’d better do it anyway. Their shit still stinks was the phrase in his head as they approached the fragrant stables. In golden evening light, Félix and a groom were leading out a splendid