Eighteen
Breakfast was grits and eggs. We ate in silence for a while. Then my mother said Melinda had sent a nice photo of her little boy.
"What do you mean, little boy?" I asked.
"We wrote you about it," she said.
"I didn't even know she was married."
"Oh, yes," Dad said. "We wrote you about that, too. That happened not long after you started working at the hospital. Who was it she married, Betty?"
"The name was Miller, I think."
"That would be Cyril Miller," I said, feeling my throat constrict. He'd been Melinda's boyfriend in high school. He'd attended Tabor College where he was president of the local Campus Crusade for Christ.
"That was the name, I think," said my mother, looking at my dad. He looked at me with sympathy, holding his knife and fork in his fists like a little kid.
"We shouldn't have told Jim about that," he said with gentle conviction. "Melinda was his sweetheart."
"They don't call it that anymore, Dad."
"What do they call it then?"
"I hate to tell you," I said.
"Main squeeze," said my mother. "That's what I saw on t.v."
"That's in bad taste," he said, forking some eggs into his mouth.
"That's what I thought," she said, shaking her head from side to side. "It makes love sound like adultery." She saw an ant on the kitchen counter and brushed it into her cupped left hand.
"There's a tooth in my egg," he said, reaching into his mouth. Sure enough, he extracted a small piece of his own tooth.
"You better see a dentist," Mother said as she went to the back door to safely return the ant to nature.
"I haven't seen a dentist in eight years," he said proudly, "not since I bought these shoes." He lifted one of his shoes to where we could see it, beyond the edge of the table. It was the black tie pair I'd worn in junior high school. They'd gone out of style, and he'd adopted them.
"Snazzy," I said.
"Haven't even had to resole them," he declared. "Had to replace the laces, though." He put the tooth, which was jagged and yellow, carefully at the edge of his plate.
"Be careful you don't eat that, Richard," said my mother, scowling at the table. "Here, let me see that. I know what to do." Mom picked up the tooth and got out a glass and filled it with milk and put the tooth in it. "I read about this in the paper a long time ago. We'll keep it in the milk until you go to the dentist. Maybe he can salvage it for you or use it for some other poor fellow."
"Imagine that," he said, "a person eating his own teeth -- that's age for you." He laughed at his own joke. Then he tested the other teeth with a finger to see if they were about to collapse.
I finished breakfast and looked out of the window. It was a beautiful day and there was nothing to do. I went to the closet in my parents' room which smelled of lavender, mothballs, and talcum powder and pushed aside the three suits Dad had inherited from a friend of his, a train engineer who had worn them only on Sundays for about thirty years. Dad hadn't bought his own clothes, except maybe for underwear and socks, for years. He waited for hand-me-downs from the dead, and he had no squeamish self-consciousness about the symbolism. I secretly admired him for these practical economies. Sometimes when water was running from a tap, I would nearly panic at the sight of it.
The .22 rifle was still standing in the rear corner of the closet. I picked it up by the barrel, found an old box of shells on the shelf, and went into the yard. There was a slope near the barn I could fire into. I grabbed a couple of empty soup cans from the garage that dad was going to eventually use to keep nails or bolts in and walked across the field. It was recently plowed and soft, and my feet sank into the carpet of it.
I made me think of a local man named Barnhart, who had been out walking on his property one day and found a canvas bag of money that had fallen from the sky. There had been a skyjacking attempt, but the criminal had lost his grip in parachuting. The newspaper said he'd landed three miles away and hitchhiked all the way to York, Nebraska before the police picked him up. He was a high school teacher from Nebraska, and it was his first crime. All his neighbors were shocked. He had not only been a good citizen; he was also afraid of heights.
Barnhart carried the money back to his living room and spilled it onto the floor. He and wife sat beside it in the easy chairs, watched Oklahoma University play the Texas Longhorns in football, thought and prayed about what to do. The next morning, in spite of the debts he had on the farm, he turned it all in to the Plevna sheriff. There wasn't a dime of reward, and within a year his marriage of forty years broke up, one of his children got divorced, and another was arrested for holding up a grocery store. Barnhart walked back to the spot where he'd found the money and shot himself in the mouth with a starter's pistol he borrowed from the high school track coach. There was no bullet, but the wad of air from the shot pressed into his brain, and he fell down dead. He had a real handgun in a kitchen drawer for years, next to a measuring tape, refrigerator bulbs, and a wide assortment of broken tools. No one knows why he didn't use that; probably forgot the handgun was even there, I suppose. I do know it took three days to find the body and the track coach quit coaching, increased his drinking, and then quit teaching and moved to Topeka.
The thought of Adam Barnhart was strong in my mind because I used to help him bale hay when I was about thirteen. He had thick red hair and a square jaw. I was scared to death of him because he looked like he'd just stepped from a fire. He would work you in a hot barn until you nearly passed out. Then, to give you a rest, he would make you turn over bales in the field, to shake the dew out of them.
I set the soup cans on the slope, walked about twenty steps away, and loaded the single-shot rifle with a .22 long. It took me five shots to put a hole in the one on the right, but I was firing and reloading as fast as I could. Each time I pulled the bolt, the small brass shell would fly out of its housing and land at my feet. Pretty soon the ground around me was littered with shells. The box of cartridges was nearly empty. I had three left, so I went down on one knee in a rifleman's position, steadied the gun, and squeezed off a round, like soldiers did on television. The shot made a small, hollow sound and the can on the left tipped backward at an angle. I did the same to the can on the right but missed. Then I stood, loaded the final shell, aimed a high-arching shot in the direction of town, and pulled the trigger. Since a .22 long travels only a mile or so, there was no danger. The bullet would come down harmlessly in a field. It was something Terry used to do for the hell of it, and in this way I honored him.
I walked back up the hill, opened the trunk of the car, and
tossed the gun inside, where it looked like a toy. That was where
it remained when I left the next day.
It wasn't too hard to find where Cyril and Melinda Miller lived. Cyril was always a very organized person, so you could count on finding him. According to Melinda, he'd made a brilliant discovery in economics when he was in college. It had something to do with the fact that the more you earned, the more you tended to spend. It sounded obvious enough to me, but he had the statistics to back it up, and professors and foundations were certainly impressed. He'd been promised and excellent job, Melinda had once said, at a Milwaukee brokerage house. It took about sixteen hours to get to Wisconsin.
The phone book said they lived on Atlantis Circle. The guy at the gas station said that was in a new development out by the mall. He said the word "mall" with exaggerated pride, and I looked at his face to see if he was kidding.
Atlantis Circle was situated in Oceanic Estates, which used to be a cornfield. They'd put in a few trees, but they were so scrawny it looked like somebody brew them with a pencil. There was man-made lake at the center of the development to give a nautical flavor. A few ducks stood on the bulldozed banks of the lake, staring at the homely water.
Taking the winding access road, I passed the entrance to Pacific Shores, a part of the development where the houses were smaller and had only a single window at the center of the each. This was the low-rent district. A mangled tricycle was inexplicably located, with sculptural perfection, near the entrance sign. Under the words "Pacific Shores", a winking red-mouthed dolphin was depicted.
Next was La Mer Charmante. The French name revealed the higher station of this community. There were three or four designs to the houses, instead of one as in Pacific Shores. The sign contained a tasteful, near-abstract drawing of waves, and a green arrow with a small tennis racket next to it pointed down the road.
Atlantis Circle was the best of the lot. The houses were mostly classic white-frame structures of varying design that were blown up to epic proportions. They would have looked charming in a New England setting, tucked behind some pines, but her the cottage effect made one uneasy, as it the structure concealed a munitions plant instead of a well-to-do young family.
The Millers lived at 207. A huge lawn separated the house and the lake. There was no car in the drive, and all three garage doors were closed, so you couldn't tell if anyone was home. A lamp could be seen in the window, but wasn't on. An American eagle emblem decorated the lintel, and the doorbell, which gave off pale light, was situated at the center of a marble Liberty Bell.
The white door hushed open: there was Melinda, standing partly in the dark. On her arm was an overwhelmed, suspicious infant about a year old, eyes red from crying. Melinda was pretty but looked a little worn. When she saw who it was, a look of vast irritation came over her face.
"This had to happen sooner or later," she said, holding open the storm door. "Come on in."
"Where's Cyril?" I said, in what I hoped was a neutral tone.
"He's at work," she said, disappearing through a doorway with the baby. "Make yourself at home."
I sat in a chair with a red, white, and blue diamond pattern. A few rooms away, Melinda could be heard talking to the child with reasonable moderation, as if it were an adult. "You must go to sleep now," she said. "Mother had many things to do at the time. It is ten in the morning. Now is the time for napping, and later in the time for recreation."
I couldn't believe my ears. She never used to talk that way, as if she were reading from a script. It then occurred to me that she was reading from a script, a child-development book of some kind.
Melinda came back down the hall and leaned against the wall where on the mantel was her trumpet used as a decoration. She looked a little Lauren Bacallish with a little Ethel Mertz thrown in. "What do you want? she said, squinting at me through hair.
"Just happened to be in the neighborhood," I replied.
"Yeah? Well, if you want to go to bed, you can forget it," she said.
I held up my hands as if she were holding a weapon.
"That was quite a speech you gave the baby," I said. "Where did you get it, Dr. Spock?"
"Cyril wrote that out. He says we have to deal with Michael on a contractual basis. We make these agreements, then we live up to them."
"Does the kid have a lawyer?" I asked. "You have to watch out for the fine print these days."
"You are a riot," she said, pretending to gag on her finger. This gesture had always endeared her to me. She had a way of mixing crudeness and refinement that made her seem smart and sexy.
She went over to the shiny blue couch and sat clinging to one of the arms. Her hair a little longer than in the old days dropped over her eye again, and she brushed it back with a hand full of expensive-looking jewelry.
"Married life seems to suit you," I observed.
"It's all right," she said. How about you? Got any girl friends?"
I held up ten fingers twice, and there was silence, like the Simon and Garfunkel song, "Dangling Conversation," she liked so much.
"Michael was conceived after the marriage," she volunteered.
"That's nice. I was worried."
"I thought you might think it was yours," she said coyly.
"Mine?"
"I just thought you might think that."
"Well, I don't think that, but thanks," I said with childish sarcasm. There was meanness in the room. If it didn't vanish, we would soon be making love.
"This is a nice house," I said, trying to change the subject.
"It's only temporary," she said, collapsing back on the couch. "Cyril got another promotion at work, and we're moving into a larger place."
"What'd he do, come up with another theory?"
"Sort of. He figured out that as people get older, they tend to save more money. It makes a big difference in the way you sell bonds so they gave him a raise and a bonus. He's a vice-president now, in charge of futuristics."
"Sounds impressive. What is it?"
"You know, the future. Like who's going to die when, and who's going to be born in what year."
"Then he's God," I offered. "You have married God."
"They have a computer list on just about everybody in the country. We could go down there right now and look us up," she said with pride.
"You're saying Cyril Miller can tell me when I'm going to die?"
"Give or take three months," she said.
"Have you checked on your own life expectancy?" I asked.
"Cyril has checked on all of us," she said matter-of-factly,
"but he won't tell me what it is."
"That's manly of him," I said.
"Always good to plan ahead," she said, getting up to pick up the tarnished trumpet off the mantel and then putting it back down where it was.
"How about Michael? Has he checked on that, too?"
"Sure, why not?"
"So he knows when his son is going to die?"
"Give or take three months," she said.
"That's amazing," I said.
"Listen," she said with sudden enthusiasm, "you want to watch some television? There's 'Love, American Style' and 'The Price is Right.'" Her eyes searched the top of her head, as if mentally flipping through TV Guide.
"No thanks," I said.
"How are things at the hospital?" she asked.
"Oh, great," I said, "just great."
"I don't like the smell of hospitals," she said.
"You get used to it after a while. I suppose you get used to just about anything" I said looking around the low-ceiling living room.
"Not me," she insisted, "I don't even like to drive by them."
"I'm sorry the way it worked out, Melinda."
She abruptly got up from the sofa and walked away from the mantel and looked out the vertical blinds to look out at her lawn. "Don't talk about that, Holder. That was then. We were different. This is now."
"I guess so."
"What did you really come for?" she asked.
"I probably wanted to see if you were doing better without me."
"And . . .?"
"It looks like you are," I said.
Little Michael appeared at the end of the hallway, holding a teddy bear and a water pistol that looked like a German luger. He had apparently climbed out of the crib. He stared at us with curiosity while sucking on the end of the barrel.
"For God's sake," said Melinda. "Don't you ever sleep?"
"I've got to be going now." I stood up and moved toward the door.
"It's been real," she said, following me to the door.
"Right."
"Oh, you know what?" she said as I stepped out the door into the recently remodeled sunlight of Atlantis Circle.
"What?"
"Cyril did look you up on the computer."
"And you can't wait to tell me, right?"
"Put it this way," she said. "It's not what you were hoping for, but it's not all that bad, either." She winked at me and tossed her hair, one hand on her hip like Annie Oakley. It was something she used to do when we dated, and a twinge of regret went through me. I wanted to go back and kiss her good-bye, but I was frozen in my tracks. Desire and inertia were sliding into each other like two bodies of water.
"Thanks for the information," I said, opening the
door of the car and waving good-bye. Michael appeared beside his
mother, still holding the bear and water pistol. He looked
sternly in my direction and followed me with his eyes as I backed
down the drive.
The money was still in the glove compartments. I stopped by the front sign of Oceanic Estates, took it out of the envelope and counted it again. Mostly tens and twenties, it impressed me with its bulk. I pulled out a ten and put it into my shirt pocket.
About twenty miles down Route 94, headed south, I pulled into a Sinclair station with a busted-up statue of Dino the Dinosaur standing outside. A mean-looking attendant with a thin black beard came over the window. He wore the official white-and-green uniform, with a Dino patch over his pocket that said "Killer." The uniform was incredibly dirty, and his hands were darker and shinier than dirt ever was.
"What do you want?" he said, as if he knew me.
"Do you have phone here?" I asked.
"In there," he replied, gesturing toward the station.
I got out of the car and he followed me into the building. The phone was next to a calendar from the Ridged Tool Company. The Ridged Tool girl was sitting in a chair with a wrench between her legs.
"You got change for a ten?" I asked, handing him the bill from my pocket. "For the phone."
"Wait a minute," he said, and disappeared with the money through a door to the service area. "D-i-v-o-r-c-e" by Tammy Wynette ended on the dirty white radio and "Okie from Muskogee," the Merle Haggard number, began. A minute later, he returned with a fat man whose hair was the color of dust.
"Whatchu want this money for?" he asked, snapping the bill and holding it up to the fluorescent light.
"Have to make some long-distance calls," I said.
"Where to?" he said looking down from the light to squint at me.
"That's my business," I said firmly.
He stopped squinting, sighed. "OK, Steve," he said, handing the bill to Killer. "Give him the money."
Killer looked disappointed but gave me the change, after counting it twice at the register. There was a five-dollar bill and the rest in quarters and dimes.
The phone rang eight times. Barbara answered.
"Guess who?"
"You jerk," she replied. "Where've you been?"
"Parts unknown."
"You made us all crazy," she said. "We thought maybe you were dead or something. Your nutty roommates didn't know where you were, so we checked the morgue again."
"I'm in Wisconsin," I said. "It's only like a morgue."
"Guess what?" she said with professional interest. "We saw a body that looked a lot like you, only it was bald."
"I'm glad you could share this with me."
"Ed thought for a minute it was you, because of the nose and lips." She laughed nervously at this, then she said, "Romona cried, if you can believe it."
I did believe it.
"When are you coming back?" Barbara asked.
"I guess I won't be," I said.
"Why not? You have only a few weeks to go."
"Didn't you hear? Janush fired me because of Cane and Graven."
"People have been asking about you," she said, as if she hadn't heard what I said. I could hear scatching, as if she were combing her hair near the phone.
"What do you mean, people?"
"People from the administration. Bolger and Cane came by a couple of times, asking questions about your roommates and how you lived. Janush said there was a man from the FBI or something, wearing a gray suit, and he had this folder on you."
"FBI!" I nearly screamed. "Why the FBI?" Killer heard this and grinned malevolently as he leaned against the wall.
"Cane said they had your college grades and asked if anyone knew what 'Peace Studies' meant."
"I got a B in that," I said. "I had problems with conflict resolution theory."
"It's a course, you mean?"
"Sure, you read Tolstoy and things like that."
"That was some weird college. The FBI said they thought it was some sort of Communist place, where they gave you credit for not fighting."
"It's a pacifist college, Barbara. You know, religious."
"Cane said you were probably a member of a Communist drug ring. You planned to steal morphine and sell it to crazed hippies."
"That's ridiculous. Does the FBI think that?"
"Not really," she said. "They just think you're AWOL. There was some talk of issuing a warrant."
"I've only been gone a couple of days."
"You know what I think?" she said. "I think you should come back right now and settle things. Then they'll just forget about it."
"It doesn't matter," I said. "Anyway, I'm not coming back."
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Who knows?" I said. "It's a big country."
"But. . ." Her voice was in confusion.
"Love you," I said.
"You stupid idiot!" she shouted, but it was muffled as I hung up the phone.
Killer eyed me all the way out of the station. I got into the car, swung it around toward the freeway and started driving. Either direction would do, I figured, but west seemed a good way to go, under clouds shaped like Viking ships and cowboy hats, crisply outlined on this beautiful day. West would take me places I hadn't thought of going. My head was incredibly clear. My body felt so light, I thought my molecules would scatter, like towns on a map.
Route 94 rolled smoothly under my feet. It was easy to blur my eyes a little and imagine the road moving instead of the car. It was a frictionless ribbon that transferred me from one state of mind to another. When I was a kid driving with my parents to church, there was always a stretch of road where the morning sunlight would project the car's shadow against the elevated bank of grass. I could see the outlines of both and car and its occupants -- father, mother, and children. As the car moved higher and lower on the rolling road, the shadow would change its shape and size, like a flag, I would wave my hand, to interfere with this magic and to confirm it.
Route 94 led to I-80, and by six 0'clock that evening I was already west of East Moline, eating a sandwich and having a cup of coffee at one of those off-ramp gas stations. The coffee helped, and I did the Nova's limit into Iowa. The Mississippi River was astonishingly wide, as if an entire city might float down it. I thought about Huckleberry and all the characters he met in that book. A lot of kids were mad that Huck leaves for the Indian territory at the end, never to be heard from again. He couldn't stand the way things were and I guess I understand now.
As night came on, semitrailers swept around me, their many lights shining. To pass the time, I listened to the radio, especially the wonderfully corny country stations. "Tiger by the Tail" by Buck Owens played every twenty minutes on one station, and as it dimmed I picked up another that carried a replay, from the previous winter, of an important local high school basketball game. It sounded like it was being played inside a shoebox, but I could follow most of the action, and I was sorry when this station also faded -- I'd started to favor the Redfield Indians over the Panora Huskers. As the announcer's voice became obscured behind static, it seemed to pass into history, drifting through summer and time. In high school, I'd been on the basketball teams, but the war had made that kind of competition seem unimportant. Nevertheless, the blare of the timer's horn, announcing the end of a quarter or the substitution of a player, made me shiver with painful nostalgia. I imagined a raw-boned farm boy with a blond flattop haircut going up for a jump shot. The ball rose into the lights and descended toward the rim, as his father, tanned below the hat line, rose to his feet in expectation.
My legs were stiff from driving, and I had a headache from listening to the dull drone of the engine through the floor board. But I kept on driving, until I was sleepily leaning at a forty-five-degree angle, both hands on the wheel. The car drifted onto the shoulder, and the rush of dirt and gravel suddenly woke me up. I took the next exit. Half a mile down the road, there was an abandoned farmhouse that had turned gray in years of weather. I pulled the car around back, where it couldn't be seen from the road. It was hard to sleep at first. I was too tall, so I opened the car door to make room for my legs. Sounds seemed to come from the house, as if the families that had lived there were gathering to admonish me. At six A.M., I woke up with dew all over my feet and sat up quickly, as if someone were watching me. It was nothing, but my nerves were jumping as I started the car, which turned over poorly in the morning dampness. Pulling out of the yard, I saw a blur of white in the window of the window of the house that might have been a face; but it was only a flap of ruined wallpaper.
Back on I-80, I kept looking in the rearview mirror, as if I were being followed, even when the road was empty. Scenes from old crime movies like White Heat kept appearing in my head -- an endless stream of police cars racing from a garage, grim cops at the wheel. The lips of the dispatcher clearly pronounced "Nebraska" as I fled in the wake of my own fantasy. All the anxiety of the last few days -- and the enormity of what I was doing -- flooded over me. Laboring toward Grand Island and Cheyenne, I was lost in America, and even the landscape of the plains was foreign. The sky and trees met at awkward angles. Space was dizzy with its own size. I was homesick for Kansas, with its tall wheat fields and barns leaning toward each other. Here I was the missing piece in every puzzle. There were thousands of places, invisible from the freeway, where I didn't belong. The interstate itself was the only safe place, since travelers at least shared the idea of a destination. Not that I knew mine. I was free to go in any direction, but the possibility of pure aimlessness panicked me, and I kept the care pointed straight ahead.
The Nova had never had an oil change, at least by me, and it ran more sluggishly than ever. It had so little power, I might have been driving on Saturn. I had to nearly floor the pedal to keep the needle at 50 mph. In Canada, I imagined, a Chevy Sting Ray was tooling from Moose Jaw to Swift Current at a comfortable 100 miles an hour, and the driver had a French surname. It was a country were no one drove north, since few roads ever led there. They went east and west, like cracks in ice. But Canada wasn't a direction for me, and scenery passed so slowly, I might have snatched it off some wall. It seemed I was spreading in every direction rather than traveling forward.
I daydreamed fretfully. Wearing a cap and gown, I was standing again on the lawn of the college, in a line of a hundred other graduates. The sun was bright, the grass vivid. I was amazed. It had never sunk in that I would actually leave college someday, that in roughly two hour I wouldn't be allowed to stay. After the ceremony, Melinda held my arm while my father took our picture, aiming the camera, as he always had, mainly at our feet. His photos came out strangely, with people cropped out of the shot or standing with missing heads. But this one turned out well. Beaming confusion and satisfaction, Melinda and I looked very much in love, while all around us the future teachers and insurance agents of America were posing for their parents. She stayed at our house near Plevna that night, and sneaked out to the car, making love in the front seat. The moon reflected off the Nova;s hood. Melinda was beautiful and wild, straddling my lap and arching back. We were already passing through each other, and didn't know it yet. In the morning, my mother discovered us sleeping in the same bed and backed out of the room without saying a word, then or later.
Crossing an overpass for a local road named simply "X," I thought of Romona telling off Cane every day of her life; saw her on the roller board, winking at Gus just home from World War II. Then I remembered the gangster's wife, scheduled for surgery, who stood outside her room, petting the poodle the hospital let her keep, while a half-dozen hoods stood around nonchalantly. I remembered Ed's "new" car, a 1959 Chevy Impala with fuzzy dice, plastic Jesus, and naked-lady deodorant strips. One night, after drinking a bunch of old-fashioneds at a bar, he'd driven me down Lake Shore Drive at five miles an hour, exactly his kind of crazy. I remembered piles of linen, empty rooms, and Barbara pulling my mouth toward hers. I was dancing again in a negro neighborhood, where one of the station clerks lived. Her husband played jazz so loud it could have held back dam water, and he walked around with joints on a plate instead of hors d'oeuvres, singing "What a Swell Party This Is." I told him they looked like shrouded corpses, and he squinted at my eyes, as if there were someone else inside. I was going to miss all of them. Already they were in sepia-tone, slowly disappearing.
In Winnemucca, Nevada, I bought four brand-new tires because Buddy, an attendant at the Fli-Hi station, said I wouldn't make it across the desert without them. It cost $160 for the steel radials, the only kind Buddy stocked. I paid from the envelope. While he changed the tires, I had a Kayo soda, the chalky taste of which lingered to the California border. The state trooper at the agricultural check point, between Verdi and Truckee, asked to look in the trunk for out-of-state fruits and vegetables and found the .22 rifle. I'd forgotten it was there, or I would have thrown it out before Reno. My name and address were taken, a phone call was made, and the trooper gave me a Mount Rushmore look, but that was all. I was so relieved that three miles down the road I pulled over and, both shaking hands on the barrel, flung the rifle over the embankment and into a gully of pines.
I'd never been to California. The steep tree-covered hills surprised me: they looked so perfect, like an entrance to paradise. It was here that I would live underground or be arrested -- whatever fate had in store -- but real life was in Kansas, as removed as the contents of a time capsule. My mother would go on tending her garden, and when frost seized the plants each fall, she would fold into herself, private almost to the loss of speech. My grandmother would lie in her bed, so sensitive she could feel the light on her skin. Day after day, she would ask my father "Where's Holder?" and listen for some hint in his voice, but he couldn't tell her. Maybe be wouldn't even know. When she died, I would probably be in prison.
It was evening by the time I pulled off I-80 at Berkeley, taking University Avenue up the hill to Shattuck. On the corner was an apartment hotel with a metal security door that belonged in San Quentin. A number of street people stood near it, smoking and looking dangerous. Something about their outcast stance made me uneasy, a mood that was confirmed with a dazed young man ran down the street backward, circling the intersection and stopping traffic in all four directions. Down the street, a homeless hippie couple were camped out in front of Lincoln Bank, their belongings in a shopping cart. They had wrapped themselves together in a brown blanket too warm for the weather. She was smiling out at the street. He was shaking his head with eyes closed, as if singing.
In first gear, the car made it to the top of the Berkeley hills, from which I could see the lights of ships and bridges out on the bay. I imagined that the freighters leaving the Pacific were carrying rifles and grenades painted a dull green. When they arrived in Vietnam, tanks of green metal would be unloaded, floating on motor oil and American optimism through the jungle. Inside one, a twenty-year-old sergeant was fumbling with headgear that made him look like a praying mantis. His tank was headed for an ambush, and soon he would be on fire, writhing inside the metal housing like the smoke he was becoming. I thought of Terry lying on the ground in pieces, his head twisted sideways like a crazy pillow. Now Terry was at home, and I was somewhere else.
I fell asleep in the front seat, on a quiet residential street. At five in the morning, I woke up more wrinkled and dirty than I think I'd ever been. The car's windows were covered with my breath, and I wiped the inside of the windshield with my sleeve. When the car wouldn't start, I put it in neutral and pushed on the doorjamb with my shoulder until the weary Nova lumbered downhill. I leaped in, swerved left onto a major downhill street, and popped the clutch with the ignition on. It worked, but an hour or so later, in the town of the Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco on Highway 1, the car died altogether. It was where I planned to go, but not where I planned to be stranded. I pushed the old heap into the parking lot at the beach and squared it up in a parking space. For good measure, I left the keys dangling from the driver's door, where anyone could see them. If someone wanted the car, that was fine with me. All my belongings could be carried, and I concentrated my attention to that end, slogging in heavy sand to the beach. I carefully arranged my things on the dry part of the beach near the tide line and buried the envelope were I could find it later. Looking at the mist-covered hills leading back to San Francisco, I took off my clothing, including my underwear. Even though it was July, the ripest part of summer, the breeze from the water was chilly, so I moved quickly into even more frigid water. At first it took away my breath. Seaweed clung to my arms; but then the swimming got easier. I extended my arms toward an invisible point to the west, and I felt stronger and cleaner, stroke by stroke, a breath at a time.