The Corrections

pointed a pistol at Gitanas’s bloody forehead and Gitanas raised his hands to concede that the captain had a point.
    Chip’s sphincter had meanwhile dilated nearly to the degree of unconditional surrender. It seemed very important to contain himself, however, and so he stood in his socks and underwear and pressed his butt cheeks together as well as he could with his shaking hands. Pressed and pressed and fought the spasms manually. He didn’t care how ridiculous this looked.
    The “police” were finding much to steal from the luggage. Chip’s bag was emptied on the snowy ground and his belongings picked through. He and Gitanas looked on while the “police” shredded the Stomper’s upholstery, tore up its floor, and located Gitanas’s reserves of cash and cigarettes.
    “What exactly is the pretext here?” Chip said, still shivering violently but winning the really important battle.
    “We’re accused of smuggling currency and tobacco,” Gitanas said.
    “And who’s accusing us?”
    “I’m afraid they’re what they seem to be,” Gitanas said. “In other words, national police in ski masks. There’s kind of a Mardi Gras atmosphere in the country tonight. Kind of an anything-goes type of spirit.”
    It was 1 a.m. when the “police” finally roared away in their Jeeps. Chip and Gitanas and Jonas and Aidaris were left with frozen feet, a smashed-up Stomper, wet clothes, and demolished luggage.
    On the plus side, Chip thought, I didn’t shit myself.
    He still had his passport and the $2,000 that the “police” had failed to locate in his T-shirt pocket. He also had gym shoes, some loose-fitting jeans, his good tweed sport coat, and his favorite sweater, all of which he hurried to put on.
    “This pretty much ends my career as a criminal warlord,” Gitanas commented. “I have no further ambitions in that direction.”
    Using cigarette lighters, Jonas and Aidaris were inspecting the Stomper’s undercarriage. Aidaris delivered the verdict in English for Chip’s benefit: “ Truck fucked up .”
    Gitanas offered to walk with Chip to the border crossing on the road to Sejny, fifteen kilometers to the west, but Chip was painfully aware that if his friends hadn’t circled back to the airport they would probably be safe now with their relatives in Ignalina, their vehicle and their cash reserves intact.
    “Eh,” Gitanas said with a shrug. “We might have got shot on the road to Ignalina. Maybe you saved our life.”
    “Truck fucked up,” Aidaris repeated with spite and delight.
    “So I’ll see you in New York,” Chip said.
    Gitanas sat down on a seventeen-inch computer monitor with a stove-in screen. He carefully felt his bloody forehead. “Yeah, right. New York.”
    “You can stay in my apartment.”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    “Let’s just do it,” Chip said somewhat desperately.
    “I’m a Lithuanian,” Gitanas said.
    Chip felt more hurt, more disappointed and abandoned, than the situation called for. However, he contained himself. He accepted a road map, a cigarette lighter, an apple, and the Lithuanians’ sincere good wishes and set off in the darkness.
    Once he was alone, he felt better. The longer he walked, the more he appreciated the comfort of his jeans and gym shoes as hiking gear, relative to his boots and leather pants. His tread was lighter, his stride freer; he was tempted to start skipping down the road. How pleasant to be out walking in these gym shoes!
    But this was not his great revelation. His great revelationcame when he was a few kilometers from the Polish border. He was straining to hear whether any of the homicidal farm dogs in the surrounding darkness might be unleashed, he had his. arms outstretched, he was feeling more than a little ridiculous, when he remembered Gitanas’s remark: tragedy rewritten as a farce . All of a sudden he understood why nobody, including himself, had ever liked his screenplay: he’d written a thriller where he should have written farce.
    Faint morning twilight was overtaking him. In New York he’d honed and polished the first thirty pages of “The Academy Purple” until his memory of them was nearly eidetic, and now, as the Baltic sky brightened, he bore down with a mental red pencil on his mental reconstruction of these pages, made a little trim here, added emphasis or hyperbole there, and in his mind the scenes became what they’d wanted to be all along: ridiculous. The tragic bill QUAINTENCE became a comic fool.
    Chip