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Goodbye.
And away poured Ms. M. R. Snake, rippling smooth to disappear in the sage.
" 'Bye!" called Leslie, and waved, almost sadly.
I released the brake, backed the truck to the trailer again, disembarked my dear passenger and her snake-books.
"What do you think?" I said. "Did we imagine everything she said? Think she could have been a passing spirit, took the form of a snake for an hour to find what control we had over our fear, to kill or not to kill? An angel in a snake costume, there in the road, checking up on us?"
"I'm not going to say no," said Leslie, "but in case not,, from now on let's make a lot of noise when we come out of the trailer so we don't surprise her, OK?"
thirty-seven
'RANGE OUR thought, and the world around us changes. Arizona in summer turned a little on the warm side for us, it was time for a different view. Better something northward, cooler? How about Nevada, take the trailer and the sailplane to Nevada?
It was cooler, sure enough. Instead of 115 degrees outside, it was 110. Instead of small mountains on the horizon, big ones.
The generator failed, in the trailer . . . three days of constant troubleshooting, tinkering, and it ran again. Soon as the generator was fixed, the water-pumps failed. Luckily the prospect of living waterless in the middle of a million acres of sand and cattle-bones helped us rebuild the pumps with a pocketknife and cardboard.
Back from a sixty-mile drive for water and mail, she stood in the kitchen and read aloud the letter from Los Angeles.
Living in the wilderness, our senses had changed. Megalopolis had grown so unreal that it was difficult for us to imagine it still there, people still living in cities. The letter reminded us.
"Dear Richard: I am sorry that I must tell you that the Internal Revenue Service has rejected your offer, and it is demanding payment of the one million dollars at once. As you know, it has a lien on all of your property and has legal right to seize whenever it wishes. I suggest we meet at the earliest possible time. Sincerely, John Marquart."
&
nbsp; "Why did they reject the offer?" I said. "I offered to pay them in full!"
"There's a misunderstanding somewhere," Leslie said. "We'd better go find out what it is."
We drove across the desert to a gas-station pay-phone, set a meeting for nine the next morning, threw some clothes in the Meyers, blazed high-speed crosscountry, landed in Los Angeles by sundown.
"The offer is not the problem," said Marquart, next morning. "The problem is, you're famous."
"What? The problem is what?"
"This will be hard for you to believe, and I've never heard it before, myself. The IRS now has a policy not to accept Offers in Compromise from famous people."
"What . . . makes them think I'm famous?"
He swiveled his chair. "I asked that, too. The agent told me he went down the corridor outside his office, asked people at random if they had heard of Richard Bach. More of them had, than hadn't."
Total silence in the room. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
- "Let me get this straight," Leslie said at last. "The Internal Revenue Service; won't accept Richard's offer; because people in some hallway; have heard of him. Are you serious?"
The attorney spread his hands, helpless to change what had happened. "They'll accept a single payment in full. They won't accept a payout over time from a famous person."
"If he were Barry Businessman they'd accept the offer," she said, "but since he's Richard Bach they won't?"
"That's right," he said.
"But that's discrimination!"
"You could charge that, in court. You'd probably win. It would take about ten years."
"Come on! Who's this guy's boss?" I said. "There has got to be somebody there . . ."
