...
The guy pulling over ahead of the cab stand seems harmless enough: well-dressed, 40's-something, black dude; what's not to like? It's been a long nervous first-day hitchhiking and though I don't intend to get much beyond the city tonight, I really could use a place to relax ... or even better, sleep. So I accept his ride. Turns out he's a lounge-lizard keyboard player just gettin' off his regular gig at the Columbus Sheraton Hotel bar. But hell I'm not gonna hold that against him. Cuz it's like 3 am and I'm relatively happy (except for being wet). Look, ma — I'm counting my blessings: one, I made it all the way downstate; two, I didn't once get stopped by the cops; and three, now this dude, "Calvin, man. Friends call me Cal", has plucked me off a drizzly downtown street in his warm, dry Fleetwood sayin' I can stay with him and it'll be totally cool 'til tomorrow noon.

Yeah, cool for Calvin ; the guy practically jumps my bones the minute we hit his crib. And, confidentially, dear reader, it goes way further than I want it to. Not like I gotta take that big thing up my ass or anything, but I do wind up havin' to listen to him play "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" on the electric piano. ...
It's not until the shock of a night-chill returns me to the threshold of awareness that I even realize I've been away ... if only for minutes. Even so, that makes it the longest run of pure peace I've had in 96 hours. What mechanism makes it possible for the mind to unload four days of stress to a greasy smudge above a letter "E" in a smashed-up fuel gauge?, I wonder. And if it hadn't've been the odd conspiracy of the Chevy's red-metal dashboard and Gordon's not saying another word, would something else have come along this night to give me quiet retreat?

Quiet? Well, not anymore. The lord of the manor's busy cutting down some pretty tall pines, making me realize just how close I am to joining him. In fact, only the prize of one last glance through the windshield stops me from inching my tired ass the rest of the way down into the cool vinyl berth. It's a woman's outline on the Moore's back porch. Well, not actually on the porch; rather, more precisely the sillouhette stands still as a portrait behind a canvas of tattered screening stretched to three sides of a warped and pealing wood frame hung before a dim doorway. And though I wouldn't be able to recognize any of the family even in the light of day, my instincts — the same ones which last Thursday in Cleveland persuaded me that I couldn't be caught stealing — are now asking me to bet what's left of the farm that she's the very woman honored in Bic-blue on Gordon's upper arm. Forget the 3-to-1 odds against, sleep's not letting me anywhere near the two-dollar window.

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