In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff

“If Sunshine acts cute just smack him in the face. It’s the only thing he understands. I got him from a cop.” She rolled up her denimjacket and propped it under her head. “Wake me up,” she said, “if you see anything interesting or unusual.”
    The sun came up, a milky presence at Glen’s right shoulder, whitening the fog but not breaking through it. Glen began to notice a rushing sound like water falling hard on pavement and realized that the road had filled up with cars. Their headlights were bleached and wan. All the drivers, including Glen, changed lanes constantly.
    Glen put on “Exodus” by Ferrante and Teicher, Martin’s favorite. Martin had seen the movie four times. He thought it was the greatest movie ever made because it showed what you could do if you had the will. Once in a while Martin would sit in the living room by himself with a bottle of whiskey and get falling-down drunk. When he was halfway there he would yell Glen’s name until Glen came downstairs and sat with him. Then Martin would lecture him on various subjects. He often repeated himself, and one of his favorite topics was the Jewish people, which was what he called the Jews who died in the camps. He made a distinction between them and the Israelis. This was part of his theory.
    According to Martin the Jewish people had done the Israelis a favor by dying out; if they had lived they would have weakened the gene pool and the Israelis would not have had the strength or the will to take all that land away from the Arabs and keep it.
    One night he asked whether Glen had noticed anything that he, Martin, had in common with the Israelis. Glen admitted that he had missed the connection. The Israelis had been in exile for a long time, Martin said; he himself, while in the Navy, had visited over thirty ports of call and lived at different times in seven of the United States before coming home to Seattle. The Israelis had taken a barren land and made it fruitful; Martin had taken over a failing company and made it turn a profit again. The Israelis defeated all their enemies and Martin was annihilating his competition. The key, Martin said, was in the corporate genepool. You had to keep cleaning out the deadwood and bringing in new blood. Martin named the deadwood who would soon be cleaned out, and Glen was surprised; he had supposed a few of the people to be, like himself, new blood.
    The fog held. The ocean spray gave it a sheen, a pearly color. Big drops of water rolled up the windshield, speckling the gray light inside the car. Glen saw that Bonnie was not a girl but a woman. She had wrinkles across her brow and in the corners of her mouth and eyes, and the streaks in her hair were real streaks—not one of these fashions as he’d first thought. In the light her skin showed its age like a coat of dust. She was old, not old old, but old: older than him. Glen felt himself relax, and realized that for a moment there he had been interested in her. He squinted into the fog and drove on with the sensation of falling through a cloud. Behind Glen the dog stirred and yelped in his dreams.
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    Bonnie woke up outside Olympia. “I’m hungry,” she said, “let’s score some pancakes.”
    Glen stopped at a Denny’s. While the waitress went for their food Bonnie told Glen about a girl friend of hers, not the one in Seattle but another one, who had known the original Denny. Denny, according to her girl friend, was muy weird. He had made a proposition. He would set Bonnie’s girl friend up with a place of her own, a car, clothes, the works; he wanted only one thing in return. “Guess what,” Bonnie said.
    â€œI give up,” Glen said.
    â€œAll right,” Bonnie said, “you’d never guess it anyway.” The proposition, she explained, had this price tag: her girl friend had to invite different men over for dinner, one man at a time, at least three days a week.