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By Root 381 0

to get gone and so I left with no goodbyes. Not that I kept it a secret on purpose, but my mom happened to be visiting a lady down the street when I received word and what I thought was, ‘I’ve got to get free! Got to go, can’t stay here no more.’ Only they arrested me in California for running a stolen automobile. Well, I didn’t draw a sentence or nothing. It was all cleared up. But things were a little complicated on account of past troubles I’d had, and time I got home it was some months later and Oliver’d gone to Florida. I asked his neighbors. ‘Why, him and his mother packed up some weeks ago and moved to Perth, Florida, where it’s less crime she says and a better class of people, and the sun shines so steady there they give you your newspaper free on any day it rains.’ And sure enough, that Christmas and every Christmas after I would get a card from O.J., Florida-type, Santa Claus riding a surfboard, angels picking grapefruit. ‘Merry Christmas, Jake, I hope you’re well.’ And I would put some effort into answering, though let me tell you I’m not what you’d call a letter writer. Talk about all I was doing and all, spend quite some time on it. But the only thing he ever sent was those Christmas cards. Only Christmas cards. Made me feel like he was in jail, you know? Just that one card a year, maybe censored; surprised if she didn’t check my letters for hacksaws and razor blades. Well, I blame myself, really. I never should have left him with his mom like that. Why didn’t I drop around his house before I run, ask him to come on along? But I was just so anxious to get going, you see. Just so desperate to leave.”

We watched a stream of cars flow past us, colorless in the twilight, packed with wan, exhausted faces straining southward.

“The trouble is,” said Jake, “when people are thinking ill of you you just have this urge to get out, you know? You say, now if I could just gather myself together again. If I could just start my life over somehow.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“I really believe,” he told me, “that any time you see someone running, it’s their old, faulty self they’re running from. Or other people’s notion of their faulty self. But I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Then he stood up, took a few steps onto the grass, and leaned toward the door of the office. “She’s gone,” he said.

“Who’s there now?” Mindy asked.

“Nobody, looks like.”

He stood waiting, with his back to us. Mindy set her skirt out all around her. “Notice he hasn’t even mentioned supper,” she told me. “Thoughtless? And I got low blood sugar.”

“Hot dog! Here comes some other guy,” said Jake. “We can ask him. Let’s go, ladies.”

We rose disjointedly and followed him. Up the walk, up the steps, across the creaky porch. Through the orange glow of the overhead light—bugproof, supposedly, but that didn’t stop a whole herd of brown moths from puttering about near my hair.

Though it wasn’t fully dark outside yet, we had to blink when we stepped in the door. Yellow lamps lit the room, glaring off the cracked linoleum. Behind a counter cluttered with ashtrays, magazines, and sightseeing brochures, a lanky, sand-colored man with floppy blond hair stood rubber-stamping envelopes. He didn’t look up when we came in. He kept his head bent, his bony hand pacing steadily between envelopes and stamp pad as if he took real pleasure in the rhythm. “Be with you in a minute,” was all he said, in a deep, cracked voice that seemed younger than he did.

“Well, I’m hunting Oliver Jamison,” said Jake. “You know him?”

Then the man stopped working and looked up. His eyes were not so much blue as transparent, but they darkened while I watched. “Why, Jake,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You don’t recognize me.”

“Oliver?”

Neither of them seemed happy to meet. Jake had a stunned, uncertain expression; Oliver looked concerned. He said, “You shouldn’t be around here, Jake.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you know the cops are hunting you?”

Mindy clapped a hand to her mouth. From somewhere to the rear, a woman called, “Who is it, Ollie?”

“No one, Ma.”

He set down his stamp and came around the counter.