Chapter 11: Prime Numbers Rarely Lead to Anything (footnotes omitted)

They let me out on a Tuesday. This was years before cell phones. I had no way of letting Mrs. W know when I was going to get out or of getting in touch with her after I got out. I figured I’d be hanging around for a while as all these incommunications worked their way out and I located a pay phone, but of course I was wrong. She was waiting in a parking space across the street when I was released, although I didn’t see her at first. I walked out onto the corner of Walnut and Sixth, blinking from the bright sunlight and wondering where I could sit down to wait when I saw her waving across the street, in a in a great big Chrysler Imperial.

When I got across the street to her car, sitting beside her on the passenger seat was a luminously attractive young woman, thin and spare, with pale, pale white skin, soot-black shiny hair and deep brown eyes.

“Hey, Mrs. Wertheimer thanks for picking me up,” I said, glad to see her as always.

“No, problem,” she answered. “No problem at all.” After I got in the back seat she said “Henry, this is my niece, Ginny McCoy.” Ginny turned around and offered me her hand, and smiled. She had perfect, improbably white teeth. Mrs. edged her Chrysler into traffic.

“Okay, Henry, we have to decide what to do,” said Mrs. W. “Today is my bridge club, and I need to be there in just a few minutes. What do you need to get done?’

“I guess I need to go back to Hixson,” I answered. “My wallet and my car are still at that bowling alley.” Mrs. W kind of nodded and dealt with traffic.

“Ginny, would you mind if I drive over to Mrs. Pope’s house and then you drive Henry out to Hixson?” she asked.

“Oh, no ma’am. Not at all. What time will you be done with bridge club?”

“About four, but Mrs. Zander can take me home,” she asked.

“Oh, no, no, no. I’ll be back by four. Hixson’s not so far away,” she said. There was a kind of a long pause.

“Henry?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“What you did with the police was wrong,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You misled them and then failed to contest something that should have been contested. Both of those things made the world a worse place.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She was right, and she knew I knew she was right. She didn’t say anything to hammer it home, which I appreciated.

In a few minutes we got to Mrs. W’s friend’s house, and then Ginny took over driving.

“Come on up front,” Ginny said. It would have been awkward to have stayed in back.

She was a very pretty girl.

“This is all kind of weird and far out for me,” she said, laughing a little bit. “Aunt Maggie is extremely protective of me, but she leaves me with this skinny, scrubby guy who just got out of prison. How weird is that? She once wouldn’t let me go out with a baseball player because she didn’t think he would be nice to me. And now she’s let me loose with a guy she told me nothing about except that he makes money playing pool. Strange world.”

“Jail, not prison. If I’d just been released from prison, she wouldn’t have left me alone with you. Who was the baseball player?” I asked.

“Jimmy Quarles,” she answered, “and why not?”

“Yeah, well, she was right,” I said. “He’s not nice.” Jimmy had a nasty temper and once picked a fight with me at the Frosty Mug after I beat him six games straight in eight ball. Silly game. Takes too long, but Jimmy didn’t know nine ball well enough to play it reliably. “And penitentiaries are places where felons go to serve sentences of more than one year. Jails are where people go for lesser sentences for more minor crimes, or while they’re awaiting trial, or haven’t made bail. Its lots easier to end up in jail than in prison, according to my friend and formerly fellow prisoner Sparky, who referred to himself as an ‘experienced criminal defendant.’ Where do you go to school?” I asked.

“G.P.S.,” she said. Girls’ Preparatory School was the high-end private school for rich girls in Chattanooga. “But I just graduated. I start at Vanderbilt in the fall.”

“Good for you,” I said.

“I take it you’re not in school?” she said.

I shrugged, then shook my head. “When I was done with high school, I was ready to do something else, so I just headed out on the road.”

“Yeah. Aunt Maggie says you’re really good at pool.”

“Good enough,” I said. “I practiced a lot when I was a kid.”

“Well, practice always pays off,” she said.

“I don’t know. Maybe if I’d practiced a lot at tennis, I’d be Jimmy Connors now instead of a guy bumming a ride to a bowling alley.”

She laughed. “You know, I play tennis. I practiced a lot. All I did growing up was play tennis and soccer, and it was the best when I got to play both in the same day. Anyway, I haven’t played Jimmy, but I’ve played Charlie Owens and Roscoe Tanner at Manker Patton several times each, and they’ve played Jimmy. I played them in singles and mixed doubles. I’m really pretty good. All-State and junior champion for Tennessee and all that. On one of the mixed doubles games Chrissie Evert was Charlie’s partner. All of them hit it hard. What I learned from those games was that the pros are orders of magnitude better than the rest of us, but those orders of magnitude are expressed in finer and finer layers of detail.”

“Explain?” I asked.

“Roscoe has a wicked fast serve, but if that was all he had, I could play him. But he also has this ridiculous ability to make you think it’s going one place when really it’s going somewhere else, and if you manage to return it, he has this far-out ability to be right where he needs to be to drop a sneaky dead volley wherever it is you aren’t. Charlie can hit a backhand service return while he’s waving at a girl he sees in the stands, or when he’s feeling too lazy to hit a backhand, he’ll just change the racket to his left hand and knock out a forehand. I never knew anybody else who could do that. And he’s not even ranked that high. Chrissie shoots it past me at a hundred miles an hour and if I’m lucky I get my racket in front of it, but where it goes is partly random, because I’m not quick like she is. I can return, but I can’t return well. She doesn’t beat me in straight sets, but she almost always beats me. And she has this two-handed backhand that makes her backhand just as strong as her forehand. There’s no weakness there. Anywhere.”

“But you have beaten her?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” she said. “I’ve beat her, but not when she was trying to win. I’ve beat her in practice matches when she was concentrating on changing her serve, or trying some new topspin shot at every opportunity. If she’s focused on winning, she’ll win every match. I’ll win a few games and even a few sets, but she’ll beat me pretty much every time. Don’t get me wrong. I’m good, and I can play with her and with all of them. But I’ll lose. Or maybe, I’ll never win consistently. It’s never a big thing, and I don’t ever lose by a lot. But they always beat me. The difference between amateur and pro is thin, and it’s made up of very small differences, but it’s insurmountable.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“And you’re a pro.”

“Do you ever notice things going wrong? I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“A shot that always goes the same way when you hit the ball a certain way, that then goes someplace unexpected?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, after thinking a few seconds. “But you know, in tennis, there are more variables than in pool, I think. It’s more like soccer. You never hit the ball from the exact same place in the racket, or to the same place on the court. I think it may be more difficult to reproduce similar circumstances with confidence in tennis than pool. In soccer, you have a curved foot hitting a curved ball, both of which are in notion. Skill allows the player to achieve predictable results, but there are a lot of variables that make precision difficult in ordinary game circumstances. Before you make contact with the ball in pool, everything is still. That never happens under any circs in tennis and only in penalty kicks and that kind of thing in soccer. Maybe you should ask a golfer.”

She probably had a point, but I had never played tennis once in my life, so had no way to know. I also had no idea who he was talking about. I had a sense that letting on that Roscoe and Charlie were complete unknowns to me would be uncool in some terribly important way, so kept it to myself.

She was driving down Hixson Pike, and we were getting close to Hixson Lanes. “You’ll have to tell me how to get there,” she said. “I can get to Hixson, but I don’t know where the bowling alley is.” I agreed to do so and there was a lull in conversation.

“So Aunt Maggie says you’re good at math,” she said, after a few minutes.

“I don’t know. I got good grades. I think it’s because she’s such a good teacher.”

“No, no, no. We were talking while we were waiting for you to get out and she said he used to give you different homework than everybody else.”

“Well, that’s true,” I said.

“Why? You came out before she had a chance to explain.”

“Well, she gave ten homework problems every day. And they weren’t always that hard, especially in Algebra I and Geometry. And then the next day, as she called roll, we were supposed answer with how many of the homework problems we’d done. They were so easy that I never did them ahead of time. I’d just work them out while she called roll,” I said.

“What’s your last name?” she asked. Smart girl.

“Baida,” I said.

“So you answered all of your homework problems by the time she got to the letter ‘B’ in roll call?”

“No. That’s how she caught on. I’d be working on it and writing out my answers when she got to my name and I’d ask her if she could call on me at the end, I was still looking over my answers, and then she’d come back to me at the end, and by that time I could generally have worked out the answers to most of them. For the first few months she let me do it. Then she started saying she wouldn’t pass, I had to tell her how many I’d done when she got to my name.”

“And you couldn’t just tell her you’d done all ten and finish them while she took the rest of the roll?”

I paused to think. “I’m not sure there is any set of circumstances that would warrant lying to Mrs. W,” I said. “It just wouldn’t be right.” Ginny laughed. “You want to turn here,” I said. She did. “So what I’d do is I’d do my homework problems in the last few minutes of my English class, so that I had them ready when I went to the next period. Then one day Ms Bettis asked me what my Algebra book was doing on my desk during English class. That same day, Mrs. W kept me after class and told me she wanted me to actually focus on my homework and learn something from it and so from now on she was going to give me ten special problems.”

“What were they like?” she asked.

“Do you like math?” I asked.

“Oh, for sure,” she said. “Aunt Maggie had me plotting parabolas when I was in fourth grade.”

“Think Fermat’s last theorem, then,” I said. “They were awful. Took hours. I couldn’t play pool on weeknights.” Ginny laughed.

“Aunt Maggie also says she put you up for this math competition,” she said.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I forgot about that. That was fun. And it was nice of Mrs. W to put me up for it.”

“And so how’d that come out?” she asked.

“You know, you have a lot of interest in my academic career,” I said. “especially as your own is undoubtedly more accomplished than mine.” After all, she didn’t just get out of jail. She had recognized the Hixson Lanes and pulled into the parking lot.

I was looking around the parking lot for the Valiant and it just wasn’t there. Damn.

“Aunt Maggie said you won that state math contest and that you were at the top of your graduating class, academically,” she said, or something like that. I was coming to grips with the fact that my car and all my worldly possessions save my wallet and its content were now gone.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Fiddle-sticks, I said.

“Something wrong?”

“My car is gone,” I said. “It had most of my stuff in it.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Suitcase. Clothes. Shoes. A few books.”

“What kind of car is it?” she asked.

“A 1965 Plymouth Valiant. I think it was a ’65, anyway. Not glamorous, but it ran.”

“Maybe it got towed away,” she said.

“That’s the more likely of the two options.”

“And the other option is that it was stolen?”

“Yes. You may think that a 1965 Valiant is an unappealing target for a thief, but he or she may have just needed a ride, and pre-72 cars are easier to hotwire. Now that I think about it, the first car I hotwired may have been a ’65 Plymouth. But Sparky, who I mentioned earlier, occupied the cell across the aisle from me because he’d boosted a ’62 Impala because he wanted the starter motor. He had no use for the rest of the car. So stranger things have happened than the theft of a ’65 Valiant. Unfortunately, whatever happened to it will remain a deep, dark mystery, I’m afraid. If it was towed, I can’t get it out of hock, and if it was stolen, I can’t report it. So it’s just gone.”

“If money’s a problem, I could loan you some,” she said. “I mean, I don’t have a lot, but I could loan you a few hundred bucks, if that would help.”

“Very nice of you, but no, money’s not the problem. The problem is that when I got arrested I told them my name was Leon Trotsky.”

“No, no, you didn’t,” she laughed.

“So I can’t do anything that will show I was lying, or I can be convicted of the felony of treason, according to Mr. Atchling.”

“Fieldey Atchling?” she asked.

“That’s him,” I said. “You know him?”

“Yeah. He’s kind of cute. He wrote my parents’ wills, I think. Strange taste in clothes. And you don’t mean treason, you mean perjury, I’ll bet.”

“Right. Slip of the tongue.” I scanned the parking lot in somber silence.

“So are we done here?” she asked.

“No, I still need to go into the grill and get my wallet,” I answered.

She cocked an eyebrow with a quizzical expression and turned off the engine with the ignition key. “You mentioned this before, but I didn’t realize that wallet and car were separate acquisitions. You are a man of strange habits, Henry Baida, and everything you say leads to more questions. Lead on.”

We opened our respective car doors and got out, and I saw her standing for the first time. Somehow she seemed even more slender, and was shorter than I was expecting. Slender as she was, there was nothing at all skinny about her, and no physical awkwardness of any kind. As we began walking through the dusty grey gravel parking lot at the bowling alley in Hixson, Tennessee, she seemed to kind of drift, the way a mist or a vapor does. I was suddenly very aware of my own awkwardness.

She was wearing snug Levis, a striped, knitted, long-sleeved top and bluish leather low-heeled shoes that were not like the ones the girls wore at City High.

“Nice shoes,” I said.

“Oh, I love shoes,” she said. “These are Ferragamos. Love ‘em.”

It was about three in the afternoon on a nice spring day and I was walking through a parking lot with a pretty girl who was wearing good shoes and it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t in jail any more. The idea that I was free again would have occurred to me earlier had the sentence had been longer or the stay been worse. Still, the thirty days had cost me my car and suitcase. I couldn’t remember what books I’d lost, but there had been some.

Ginny would just look at me every now and then and smile. People who know what Fermat’s Last Theorem is generally aren’t perky smilers.

We got to the double glass front doors of the Hixson Lanes and they parted as in Star Trek or the Kroger. To me, walking into a bowling alley is always a little like going home, but also a little disorienting. No matter how many times I do it, I’m struck by the horizontality and expansiveness of bowling alleys—that’s about as large an uninterrupted enclosed indoor space as you’re going to find outside of domed stadiums , and it always surprises me how big they are once you get inside. I paused at the door, Ginny smiled slightly and quizzically as the glass doors closed behind us. “We want the grill,” I said.

“Right,” she said, then saluted and led the march.

The grill was the same. Ridiculously so. Debbie was behind the bar, Ford and Thomas were in front of it. Thomas was dressed all in black so that he looked like a priest. He was drinking either soda water or a gin and tonic. Ford had a beer and an empty shot glass. They waved as we walked up.

“The prodigal returns,” said Thomas.

“Can we buy you a drink?” Ford asked. “I’m keen to hear about your stay in the county facilities.”

“Not much to tell,” I shrugged. “I caught up with some old friends, made a few new ones. How have things been here?”

They looked at each other for a minute and thought.

“Well, after your fight, Rosie broke up with Willis,” said Thomas, after a few seconds

“Well, then some good came out of it,” I said.

“Oh, Christ, no,” said Ford. “Willis joined Alcoholics Anonymous, only there’s no anonymity to it at all as far as we can tell. He talks about it constantly. He just can’t seem to keep to himself about it. Any time I order a drink he reminds me, kindly and empathetically, that he was once like me, but that alcohol is addictive and that I should embrace the twelve steps. I cannot possibly express how tedious it all is. That’s why we’re here.”

“Excuse me, I’m forgetting myself,” I said. “This is my friend Ginny McCoy. Ginny, this is Ford and that is Thomas, and behind the bar is Debbie, who was dating Donnie last time I was in here. How’s that going?” I asked.

“I ain’t heard from that sumbitch since the night you dropped Willis. And Willis going all preachy on everybody has cut into bidness in no small way. I grew up Babdist and all, but a girl’s got to make a living.”

I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Well, maybe Donnie just went off to college,” I said.

“College? One of them boys? And a pool player to boot? I expect not,” she said. She took an angry drag off of her More.

I was grappling with what to say next and failing. Ginny was looking at the scene in smiling rapt wonder.

Thomas and Ford acted as though they hadn’t heard a word Debbie said, although they had heard my introduction to Ginny. Thomas stood and bowed towards Ginny, and Ford shook her hand. “Charmed,” he said.

“Can I interest you in a beverage of some sort?” asked Ford. “Thomas is having his accustomed club soda with lime wedge and I am drinking any variety of things. What will you have?” Ginny looked at me. “Oh, he doesn’t drink,” said Ford.” One of many marks against his character.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“We watch,” said Thomas.

“They’re right,” I said to Ginny. “I don’t drink.”

“I’ll have a white wine spritzer,” said Ginny.

Debbie nodded. “And you want a glass of water,” she asked me. Well, yes.

“Um, can I ask a question?” Ginny asked of Thomas and Ford, kind of generally.

“Certainly,” they said, in unison.

“You were talking about Willis and how his AA participation has become a nuisance, and then you said that’s why you’re here. I didn’t quite follow.”

“Oh, well, that’s why we’re here at right now,” said Ford. “We can’t come here when Willis can be expected. And nuisance about describes it. We have to leave about 6:30, just before he comes in.”

“So you wouldn’t normally be in a bar at 3:00 on a weekday, you have to do it because you want to avoid Willis?” she asked.

“Exactly,” they both said, nodding.

“What would you be doing?” Ginny asked.

They both kind of shrugged. “You know, this and that,” said Ford. “See, we used to come in here at about 7:00 and have a few drinks and then have something to eat and watch the pool players. But since Willis got all preachy we come in earlier and then go down to the Dew Drop Inn for dinner.”

“Do you then have a few drinks at the Dew Drop Inn?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Ford.

“Do you ever leave before closing time?” I asked.

“Umm, well, sometimes, I suppose,” said Ford. Thomas scowled at his soda water.

“So Willis joining AA has meant your drinking day starts at 3:00 rather than 7:00?” I asked.

“Yes, well, we really hadn’t much choice. He’s such a bore.”

“Actually, to be honest, we generally meet here at 2:00,” said Thomas. There was something vaguely foreign about his accent. Spanish, maybe, but not quite.

“If dinner and drinks and avoiding Willis are what you’re after, why not just start at 7:00 at someplace else?” asked Ginny.

“That would be kind of hard on Debbie, wouldn’t it?” said Ford. “She depends on us, poor thing.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” I said. Debbie scowled at me. Pretty girl with an ancient woman’s glare.

“Plus,” Ford said, “There’s no billiards table at the Dew Drop, and we rather like watching customers play pool.”

“There’s one at the Rancho Bar down the street,” I said.

“Ah, but Thomas cannot eat there,” said Ford. We all looked at him with puzzled expressions, Debbie included.

“I am a vegetarian, mostly, although I eat some seafood,” Thomas said.

“What did you eat here?” Debbie, asked, looking for a menu.

“The tuna salad sandwich and the tuna salad salad are both edible,” he said.

During the previous discussion I’d been looking for the ceiling tile that had a blue chalk mark on it and had found it. “Okay, guys,” I said. “I want you all to either look away or not to worry about what I’m going to do next. All eyes were on me, except for Ford’s, whose gaze strayed to me only when he wasn’t staring at Ginny. I stood on the booth seat underneath the chalk-marked acoustic ceiling tile, lifted up the marked tile, and reached inside. My wallet was right there, no searching required. Ginny applauded.

“You found it,” she said. I looked inside. Everything was still there.

“Might I ask why hour wallet is in the ceiling of the Hixson lanes?” Ford asked.

“Misbegotten expediency,” I said.

“So what is it you guys do for a living?” Ginny asked. Thomas and Ford both made a hand gesture that’s something like a shrug and looked at each other.

“I write for a sort of travel publication,” said Ford. “I got stuck here unexpectedly, but will be moving on soon, I hope.”

“And you, Thomas? Or is it Mr. Thomas?” she asked.

“Saint Thomas,” he said. Ginny laughed.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The apostle.”

“Doubting Thomas?” I asked.

“That’s me.”

“Does this line get you anywhere, as a rule?” I asked

“Not really,” he answered.

“Okay. We need to be going. Ginny has to pick up her aunt at bridge club at 4:00. Debbie, give me the tab, and I’ll pick up for Linus and Charlie Brown here as well.”

“Alas,” said Ford.

“Alack,” said Thomas

“But thank you,” said Ford. I thought he was thanking me for picking up the tab, but then he continued to say “Rarely do we see such a lovely young woman, or one with such admirable shoes.”

I gave Debbie a 25% tip which, given the way Ford had been drinking, was significant.

We made our way back to the car and were underway before Ginny said anything. “So how many cars have you hot-wired?” she asked.

“Well, maybe four or five.” I answered. “Or eight. How do you count it if I hot-wired one car maybe six times?”

“Each time you hot-wire is a separate instance,” she said, after a few seconds of reflection.

“Then maybe twenty or thirty. Fifty max. Maybe 75 max,” I said. She thought.

“What if we change the counting criteria, and we just count the number of cars you’ve hot-wired?” she asked.

“Lots easier,” I said. “Five.”

“Hmm. I can see one, two, or three, but I don’t see five,” she said.

“Five is also a prime number,” I said.

“Yes, very clever of you to notice, far out and all, but I still can’t see a narrative in which you need to hot-wire five cars. So I was thinking you should start at the beginning and tell me about hot-wire number one.”

“Okay, well, I don’t remember exactly what I said, but the first car I hot-wired was a Plymouth Valiant about the same vintage as the one I just lost.”

“How did you come to hot-wire any cars at all?”

“Well, that one was on a Boy Scout campout,” I said.

“What?”

“It was on a Boy Scout campout,” I said.

She was just interested. “I heard,” she answered. “But I was never in Boy Scouts, or even Girl Scouts, so I’m confused. There can’t possibly be a Car Theft merit badge, can there?”

“Cute. Okay. Well, we were out in the country near the Chattahoochee River down in Georgia. All our tents were pitched in this field between a dirt road and the river. For some reason there weren’t any adults around. Not many, anyway. I can’t remember why. When we woke up the next morning, there was this Plymouth Valiant in a ditch about fifty yards from our campsite. We all wandered over to look at it, and then realized there was someone in the back seat. A woman in a silk dress, either asleep or dead, we weren’t sure which. We didn’t know what to do, but eventually our senior patrol leader, an Eagle Scout named Kevin Magid, decided to open the back driver’s side door to see if she was all right. Punching the door button made a noise that woke her up and she sat bolt upright and was confused for a minute and very surprised to see all of us looking in on her. “Where’s Henry?” she asked Kevin. Everybody looked at me. ‘Do you mean me?’ I asked. ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘Henry who was driving last night.’ Nobody said anything. We were all kids, except for Kevin, who was sixteen. Nobody even shrugged. She hauled herself up far enough to look over the front seat and ascertain that there were no car keys in the ignition, which prompted a question. ‘Do any of you boys know where the keys are?’ she asked. Kevin, who was still closer to her than the rest of us, hand still on the back door handle, silently shook his head once and pulled back and stood up. She was pretty but looked very tired. We all kind of backed away from the car as she rubbed her eyes and ran her hands through her hair. She took a minute, then opened the car door and got out and looked at us all. She sort of smiled at us, then said ‘Have a nice day’ and started off down the unpaved road. She was wearing heels, but took them after a few steps and walked in her bare feet shoes in. We all watched her walk off in silence. Then she stopped and looked back. ‘Henry?’ she called out. My heart raced. ‘Yes, ma’am?’ She smiled at me. ‘Would you look in that car one more time and make sure my purse isn’t still there?’ she asked. ‘Yes, ma’am!’ I called back, and bolted for the car. All of the other boys except Kevin did so as well. We looked everywhere, but there was nothing purse-like in the car. I went running after her to report, and the other boys followed. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s no purse in the car. We looked everywhere,’ I said. ‘Oh, well, ‘she said. ‘I expect it will turn up somewhere. Thank you, Henry. And goodbye, boys.’ She walked off down the dirt road, strolling down a country road, not a care in the world, and we all watched her go, in puzzled amazement. It was maybe five miles from where we were back to the paved road, and she wasn’t thirty yards away from us when she started singing.

Ginny interrupted to ask a question. I was expecting “What song was she singing?” and the answer would have been “Amazing Grace” but instead she asked “What kind of shoes was she wearing before she took them off?” and I had to stop and think.

“Heels,” I said.

“I know that. How high?” she asked. Again, I had to stop and think.

“I’d say maybe three inches,” I said.

“Color?”

“I think black. Maybe navy.”

“What was he dress like?” she asked.

“White silk. Knee length. With black polka-dots and black trim,” I answered, confidently.

“And you think it’s possible somebody was wearing navy shoes with that dress?” she asked.

“I take it you think it unlikely,” I said.

She was just pulling up in front of Mrs. Pope’s house, where the bridge club was.

“Boys are so funny,” she answered. “You should go to the door for her. She’ll get a kick out of that.”

When I got back to the car, Ginny was in the back seat. I opened the driver’s side door for Mrs. W and then crossed to the other side. She backed up out of the driveway and we were on our way.

“So what didn’t work out?” she asked. If my and wallet had been where expected, I wouldn’t still be in her car.

“Car was gone,” I said. She nodded.

“But you got your wallet?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Henry, that car wasn’t really worth a lot. Was anything worth much in it?”

“No, ma’am. A few books I was going to send to you. My clothes and shaving kit. Not much,” I answered.”

“So you want to buy a new car?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I’m thinking of trying the trains.”

“Why?” she asked.

“It has to do with Thoreau,” I said.

“The no possessions thing?” she asked.

“Exactly,” said Ginny. Mrs. W looked at her in the rear view mirror, I craned my neck to look at her, and she smiled brightly at me.

“You have no clothes,” said Mrs. W.

“Not other than the ones I’m wearing, no ma’am.”

“And your checkbook was in that car?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, Henry. Let’s take you over to Sears to buy you a change of clothes and a suitcase, then over to the Hamilton National Bank to order some more checks, and then I’ll drop you off at the train station. You okay for money?”

I thought I was just moving into a slightly different chapter in my life as a pool hustler, but in fact it was almost over.

Mrs. W had a way of sifting through problems pretty quickly, though,S and her niece has a very pretty smile.