Impossible Things Read Online Free Page B

though there couldn’t possibly be space for that many dishesin the tiny RV. The inside was even smaller than I had thought it would be, low enough that I had to duck and so narrow I had to hold the Nikon close to my body to keep from hitting the lens on the passenger seat. It felt like an oven inside, and it was only nine o’clock in the morning.
    I set the eisenstadt down on the kitchen counter, making sure its concealed lens was facing out. If it would work anywhere, it would be here. There was basically nowhere for Mrs. Ambler to go that she could get out of range. There was nowhere I could go either, and sorry, Ramirez, there are just some things a live photographer can do better than a preprogrammed one, like stay out of the picture.
    “This is the galley,” Mrs. Ambler said, folding her dishtowel and hanging it from a plastic ring on the cupboard below the sink with the cross-stitch design showing. It wasn’t a rooster after all. It was a poodle wearing a sunbonnet and carrying a basket. “Shop on Wednesday,” the motto underneath said.
    “As you can see, we have a double sink with a hand-pump faucet. The refrigerator is LP-electric and holds four cubic feet. Back here is the dinette area. The table folds up into the rear wall, and we have our bed. And this is our bathroom.”
    She was as bad as her husband. “How long have you had the Winnebago?” I said to stop the spiel. Sometimes, if you can get people talking about something besides what they intended to talk about, you can disarm them into something like a natural expression.
    “Nineteen years,” she said, lifting up the lid of the chemical toilet. “We bought it in 1992. I didn’t want to buy it—I didn’t like the idea of selling our house and going gallivanting off like a couple of hippies, but Jake went ahead and bought it, and now I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The shower operates on a forty-gallon pressurized water system.” She stood back so I could get a picture ofthe shower stall, so narrow you wouldn’t have to worry about dropping the soap. I dutifully took some vidcam footage.
    “You live here full-time then?” I said, trying not to let my voice convey how impossible that prospect sounded. Ramirez had said they were from Minnesota. I had assumed they had a house there and only went on the road for part of the year.
    “Jake says the great outdoors is our home,” she said. I gave up trying to get a picture of her and snapped a few high-quality detail stills for the papers: the “Pilot” sign taped on the dashboard in front of the driver’s seat, the crocheted granny-square afghan on the uncomfortable-looking couch, a row of salt and pepper shakers in the back windows—Indian children, black Scottie dogs, ears of corn.
    “Sometimes we live on the open prairies and sometimes on the seashore,” she said. She went over to the sink and hand-pumped a scant two cups of water into a little pan and set it on the two-burner stove. She took down two turquoise Melmac cups and flowered saucers and a jar of freeze-dried and spooned a little into the cups. “Last year we were in the Colorado Rockies. We can have a house on a lake or in the desert, and when we get tired of it, we just move on. Oh, my, the things we’ve seen.”
    I didn’t believe her. Colorado had been one of the first states to ban recreational vehicles, even before the gas crunch and the multiways. It had banned them on the passes first and then shut them out of the national forests, and by the time I left, they weren’t even allowed on the interstates.
    Ramirez had said RVs were banned outright in forty-seven states. New Mexico was one, Utah had heavy restricks, and daytime travel was forbidden in all the western states. Whatever they’d seen, and it sure wasn’t Colorado, they had seen it in the dark or on some unpatrolled multiway, going like sixty to outrun the cameras.Not exactly the footloose and fancy-free life they tried to paint.
    The water boiled. Mrs.