“Yes. Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, ‘Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?’ In our culture the overwhelming answer to that question is, ‘Hell no!’ Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.”
“What about Saint Francis?”
“Saint Francis relied on the bounty of farmers, not the bounty of God. Even the most fundamental of the fundamentalists plug their ears when Jesus starts talking about birds of the air and lilies of the field. They know damn well he’s just yarning, just making pretty speeches.”
“So you think this is what’s at the root of your revolution. You wanted and still want to have your lives in your own hands.”
“Yes. Absolutely. To me, living any other way is almost inconceivable. I can only think that hunter-gatherers live in a state of utter and unending anxiety over what tomorrow’s going to bring.”
“Yet they don’t. Any anthropologist will tell you that. They are far less anxiety-ridden than you are. They have no jobs to lose. No one can say to them, ‘Show me your money or you don’t get fed, don’t get clothed, don’t get sheltered.’”
“I believe you. Rationally speaking, I believe you. But I’m talking about my feelings, about my conditioning. My conditioning tells me—Mother Culture tells me—that living in the hands of the gods has got to be a never-ending nightmare of terror and anxiety.”
“And this is what your revolution does for you: It puts you beyond the reach of that appalling nightmare. It puts you beyond the reach of the gods.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“So. We have a new pair of names for you. The Takers are those who know good and evil, and the Leavers are …?”
“The Leavers are those who live in the hands of the gods.”
TWELVE
1
Along about three o’clock, the rain stopped and the carnival yawned, stretched, and went back to work separating the rubes from their money. At loose ends once again, I hung around for a while, let myself be separated from a few bucks, and finally had the idea of tracking down Ishmael’s owner. This turned out to be a hard-eyed black man named Art Owens, who was five and a half feet tall and spent more time lifting weights than I do at the typewriter. I told him I was interested in buying his gorilla.
“Is that a fact,” he said, not scornful, not impressed, not interested, not anything.
I told him it was and asked how much it would take.
“Would take about three thousand.”
“I’m not that interested.”
“How interested are you?” Just curious, not seriously interested himself.
“Well, more like a thousand.”
He sneered—just a little, almost politely. For some reason, I liked this guy. He was the type who has a law degree from Harvard stuck away in a drawer somewhere because he never found anything to do with it that appealed to him.
I told him: “This is a very, very old animal, you know. He’s been here since the thirties.”
This got his attention. He asked how I happened to come by that piece of information.
“I know the animal,” I replied briefly, as if I might know thousands more like him.
“Might go twenty-five hundred,” he said.
“Trouble is, I don’t have twenty-five hundred.”
“See, I already got a painter in New Mexico workin’ on a sign for me,” he said. “Paid him two hundred in advance.”
“Uh huh. I could probably raise fifteen hundred.”
“Don’t see how I could go below twenty-two, that’s a fact.”
The fact