The Bunny Boot Journey

By Jim Hunter

He crossed paths with, and connected to other human beings in ways not imagined possible: the driver expecting angels, non-teaching teachers, prostitutes, beach combers, grave diggers, jet pilots, college professor dropouts, Callie’s letter never delivered, the Hells Angel Old Lady, the jade picker, the pink-clogged British Professor of literature striding a remote Mexican beach, the stitch-giving Carmel Bar cocktail waitress, the death defying Mexican bus drivers, a single testicle artist, an escaped prisoner fleeing Mexican Federales, the Los Angeles gay couple, the Canadian youths asked to take a horse in trade for sex with their women, a Humboldt County logger-drug dealer spinning and dancing into the wet Eureka night, forehead sweating, and many more not listed here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Dec 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781698710259

Jim Hunter

Jim Hunter arrived in Alaska in 1955 as a seventeenyear-old Air Force private watching Russian jets on radar screens taunt the United States. He met and dealt with most of the characters in this book, which is the sequel to Mike, Charley & Wolf. Following discharge he earned a degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State College. In 1976 Chronicle Books published his widely acclaimed guide to Mexico’s Baja Peninsula: OFFBEAT BAJA. Jim and his wife, Marilyn Mount of New Jersey, a retired School Counselor, divide their year between homes in Tucson, AZ and Fairbanks, AK.

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Copyright 2021 Jim Hunter.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1024-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1026-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1025-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021923128

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover, Two Street Blues Illustrated

By Rob Goldberg

Goldberg Art Studio

PO Box 1154 Haines, AK 99827 USA

Used with the artist’s permission.

Trafford rev. 11/19/2021

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North America & international

toll-free: 844-688-6899 (USA & Canada)

fax: [phone]

Contents

Preface 1976

Today’s Preface

1970 World Census

Chapter 1 Big Sur

Marti Jones

Chapter 2 San Jose

Beacher Warlock

Chapter 3 Big Sur

Jet Planes & John Steinbeck

Chapter 4 True Cross

Poodles, Angels & Gardeners

Chapter 5 Mudville

Gretta Ensign & Doby Redmon

Chapter 6 San Francisco

Larry Shire & Janet Collins

Chapter 7 LA

Janet Collins, William Rostert & Farloux

Chapter 8 LA

Chuck Sagnowski

Chapter 9 San Diego

Wild Bill’s Bar & Frenchy

Chapter 10 El Rosario

Beacher Warlock & Steve Mastin

Chapter 11 La Paz

The Canadians & Steve Mastin

Chapter 12 Mazeet

The Women & The Men

Chapter 13 December Bay

Cochero Estupendo, Beacher & Steve

Chapter 14 Mexico City

Dead Cadets & David Fitzhugh

Chapter 15 Mexico City

Juan Duarte & Erhard Pohsin

Chapter 16 Crossing Back

Francisco Vargas y Vega/Sam Garcia

Chapter 17 Alaska

Georgiana & A. Miguel Rodriquez

Epilogue

Dedication To

Steve Mastin of Santa Rosa CA.

lately of a Berkeley, CA hot dog stand. In his beautiful heart he was a patient Socrates, a Mother Theresa, and a Gandhi too. We miss you, Steve.

Preface 1976

The first week was no piece of cake. Sleeping in Big Sur forests hundreds of feet from the highway, hitchhiking, riding busses and knocking doors unexpectedly, is not routine. As the journey continued, I crossed paths with, and connected to other human beings in ways I could not have imagined, as you will read inside.

I typed each night as precisely as possible, on a blue portable typewriter, what each day happened. I’d sold my daytime business; magazine assignments had ended. I was thirty-seven years old. I boarded a jet plane out of Alaska in early 1975 planning to return in twelve months.

…the only records we have of the way in which we live, are those which men like Theodore Dreiser and Jack London had the unkillable gall to face up to, and then write down firsthand.

Nelson Algren in the San Francisco Chronicle 4 April 1975.

Today’s Preface

Now I’m forty-five years older. There’s a marked difference between what I’d do today, and what I did then. My wife Marilyn says I need to explain why I chose the path I did down through California. It’s the magnetic attraction our hometowns hold for each of us. I wish I’d been born in Alaska, but I was born in the Port City of Stockton, just in from San Francisco Bay.

That said, what strikes me most today about the events which follow, is the innocence with which we Americans in the sixties and seventies had thoughts and expressed them, hitch-hiked without fear, and saw the future as something wonderful yet to happen. Climate change was, if on the radar at all, a tiny blip. Politics happened without the threat of Civil War; pandemics were from other centuries. One might say we were innocents.

Tucson, Arizona

19 November 2021

1970 World Census

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Big Sur

Marti Jones

Hitchhiking at night south out of San Francisco my first ride asked, Why are you dressed like that?

Sixty below in Fairbanks.

I was too hot in my old Air Force parka, with its great, gray wolf ruff, which was making my neck sweat, and my over-sized white bunny boots, apparently unknown in this odd place south of Canada called America.

It was good to be seated in a warm blue Chevy heading south on El Camino Real, backpack and portable typewriter in the back seat after flying from Alaska to San Francisco, with the San Bruno Mountains flashing by on the right; a narrowing San Francisco Bay on the left.

The driver was upset, even frowning at me. The way I was dressed concerned him. He asked again; I answered again.

Eight hours ago, I was in Alaska, I told him, explaining my parka.

At ten PM he eased his rental car into an already asleep Monterey, which was closed-up tighter than a drum top. He needed to find his motel, and I needed shelter. As I thanked him sincerely for picking me up, his door shut, hiding a tired smile. We each waved.

Salt smelling rain fell hard, but blinking a block away, like a wonderful oasis, was a DENNY’S open 24 hours sign; my pack, typewriter and I finding our way into it clumsily through swinging glass doors. An empty booth became a thirty-minute home. Relishing its warmth and hot soup, I pulled out a wrinkled piece of notepaper with the name of a cocktail waitress, and the Big Sur bar where she worked.

The stretch toward Big Sur between Monterey and Carmel follows the same twisting route used by Junipero Serra in seventeen seventy, when he founded Carmel Mission, when California belonged to Spain. I wondered about the little Padre. I could hear the Pacific Ocean pounding steadily in time with my own plodding. Did he also?

I wondered if anything beyond faith drove the tiny Franciscan to cross oceans, deserts, seas, and hills; and walk bent and tirelessly eight hundred challenging miles north from Baja up into Carmel? Stars blinked, then disappeared. Light rain made me wet.

Moving slowly that first night on California Highway One, I expected police or Highway Patrol to stop and ask who I was; what I was doing, as I put one bunny-booted foot in front of the other.

My father’s nineteen-thirties gray fedora was on my head and worked well to keep rain off my neck. Drops hit my face, but my hands were not cold! Warm air, I was thinking. Can air be warm? Can you believe it!

I found Marti Jones, the name given me by mutual friends, at her hole-in-the-wall bar in Big Sur where she said to me, Some people are trying to kill me.

She was blonde; almost my height; thin, tanned brown, with long hair, which from California surfing had become almost white. Her eyes were too small for the rest of her face, but intensely bright. They were a burning green; always on.

I soon learned for Marti there is no off switch.

Balancing four tap beers on a round tray, destined for other customers, she stopped by my tiny table, leaned against the old adobe wall next to me, then came closer to my ear, and whispered, You know Hunter, you look like a real jerk in those Little Abner boots.

I agreed. I watched her keep moving in her short, tight brown leather skirt, nice modest white blouse with a small leather vest, arty necklace and maybe no earrings. Her walk was business-like, not sexy at all. Marti did what she had to, and that was it. She seemed in that smoky place in 1975 to be preceded by a cloud of planetary energy. She moved with confidence. But to me her walk and body language spoke too of a nagging sadness, coupled with a huge amount of self-control.

From the first moment I saw Marti Jones there in Big Sur, until I never saw her again, she did not seem a creature of this Earth. Rather like the mystic girl in Green Mansions. Or maybe she was too much of this Earth, at least of its surf and beaches. She brought me a second beer.

Tell me more about these people who want to kill you.

This time she stayed by my table holding her beer tray high with her left hand, looked at me as she bent down slightly with her eyes a few inches from my own, green like mine, and said not frantically or loudly but very firmly Oh Christ Hunter-----My life is so fucked up.

She straightened and looked around the bar as if fearing someone had heard her. Then continued:

See, three days ago I threw a tray of beers on a group of wise guys, and my old man-----he’s back in Georgia seeing his Mayflower Princess-----and I’m stuck here charged with assault and battery! Shit Hunter, she finished bitterly I might end up in jail!

A few minutes passed and Marti was back and said, They want revenge, satisfaction you know. These crazy Big Sur types.

Yes

Changing abruptly, she grinned in a spectacular way and said, The Watergate Earthquake is upon us Hunter!

I… But she stopped me with a finger to her lips.

She wanted to know how old I was, and announced she’d just turned thirty. She asked why, if I had long brown hair, my beard was red? She looked away from me and around the room, as if she were the mayor of it.

I started to speak.

You wear glasses. How bad are your eyes?

Why didn’t I try contact lenses? She wore them. Surfing was tough you know when you are half-blind like she was. Oh, the wipeouts. Marti leaped like a trapeze artist from one subject to the other mid-sentence.

Those poor Watergate guys. I bet they got diarrhea of the nose. So, our friends thought we should meet?

I sipped and nodded.

The circular cosmos has ships passing in the night. My gypsy friend here in Sur is a fortuneteller and she said you would come. And that I would run off with you to Mexico, but I won’t.

Okay, I said.

She was cleaning the table next to mine.

All men are the same, Marti grunted out, putting real effort into her rag pumping circles.

Full of shit, she added.

She brought me a beer on the house. And said, You know what they called me Hunter? A total cunt! How do you like that? Her green eyes twinkled devilishly. Oh well. I guess that’s better than being called Half-a-cunt."

Look, I offered somehow feeling left out I have friends in Alaska who would be glad to put you up if you really want to get out of California.

She shook her long hair, now in a different light, blonde, back over the leather outfit she was wearing and gave flight north to Alaska some thought, then said I don’t know…I do need to get away…to be somewhere out of this shit.

She looked around the bar as if assaying both it and her life, shrugged an elbow at the world and looked back at me saying Sometimes I just feel so used.

She wiped my tabletop with her cloth, but it was a weak effort.

After a pause she straightened up and asked me philosophically You know what my old man back in Georgia said when I told him those guys were going to get me?

She looked around to see if any of them were there. I did too. Fear is catching. Was she expecting them? Would Little Abner die his first night on the road in his jerky looking bunny boots in a Big Sur dive? Never having slept on the beach.

He said to me: ‘Has anything specific happened?’ Can you beat that? She rolled her eyes.

You’ll have something specific when they clonk you, though I felt bad saying it because I knew what her old man meant but I knew what she meant too.

Right! I know! I know!

Marti threw down her towel, almost dropping her tray. I know, she repeated it, as if to drive away the obvious.

How badly did you hurt them?

She thought about it looking upward to concentrate.

I got one of them with the edge of the tray, she said fingering the tray she had He’s the one that’s really mad. Twenty stitches in his scalp.

Well do you have to stay around here? Do you have to keep this job?

This job can do what you know what.

Pause on my part.

When Marti got off work, we walked in ocean fog to a small cabin that went with the job. She said she’d worked fifteen hours that day; first inside a Highway One gift store that also sold groceries, and then the late shift at the bar.

Hunter I’m really feeling like absolute Hell! I really do need to be somewhere else.

Can you go somewhere else in Big Sur?

I’m thinking I might just throw all my old man’s stuff into the ocean tonight. All his clothes. Everything.

I slept, as we had agreed on entering the cabin, on the plank floor in my sleeping bag on top my blue pad, with her big cat purring near me, and at four a.m. Marti was up nervously frying six eggs: simultaneously building a joint. I talked to her from my sleeping bag, still on my back. After a few minutes, while she finished cooking, I rolled out and joined her at their small table.

I looked over at her, across the small table. On the clock behind her the hands clicked with sudden movement to five a.m. Through the window behind her I could see more ocean fog crawling up the steep mountains as if alive.

Did our friends tell you I was a loose woman?

No.

Then why are you here? Are you looking for a girl or something? Do you love your daughter? Did you love your wife when you married her? How long after you married her did you keep loving her?

I could not answer. I was stunned and could only blurt out a weak I can see you’re checking up on marriage yourself. But I didn’t come down here lusting to screw you, Marti. It’s a different kind of journey.

Okay Hunter.

And you, I said. You’re a lot different than I imagined you’d be.

How’s that? she asked.

You’re a very uptight person. You seem to thrive on crises. I doubt you will ever mellow. You talk like a machine gun. I think you want a lot of things that living this way will never get you.

What way?

Two jobs, neither paying much. Working in a bar at night; on your feet all day.

Maybe you think so. But I don’t like being poor. And I want a place of my own to live in.

I felt bad condemning her. You don’t look thirty, I told her truthfully.

I am.

Silence.

I was wrong. Marti went on to successes I have not put here but were national and spectacular. Professionally and personally.

While she was showering, I wrote a note thanking her for everything, rearranged my pack, stuffed my sleeping bag down into it tightly, and left her cabin knowing it was time to hitch north; search for Steinbeck.

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My ride north to Salinas dropped me at 9 West Gabilan Street where THE YOUTH FOR TRUTH FELLOWSHIP was singing loudly, moaning out religious songs which swept up and down the street like curling winds, as if they had the original cross there in Salinas on their backs. It was impressive. I stood still, adjusting my backpack, getting ready for life.

The loud singing came from the gray, rock building my right elbow rubbed against. Across the street to the left a large red sign advertised:

I wondered how far away John Steinbeck had lived. From which window in his Salinas home had John watched the Coast Range Mountains and dreamed of writing The Red Pony.

Never found it, so decided to hitch north to San Jose and seek my old High School friend Beacher Warlock. In ten minutes, a driver slowed and motioned for me to jump into the back of his pick-up truck loaded with bales of hay. With blowing wind, rushing autos and bits of hay I went the hundred miles to San Jose. Once there I caught a bus to Beacher’s neighborhood.

Hey, the bus driver shouted to help me. Anybody know where Washington Street is?

I do, came from the back of the bus.

I made my way to the helpful person at the extreme back of the bus. He inventoried my pack and asked, You ever get into Desolation Valley?

I know where it is, but never packed into it; by Lake Tahoe right?

We were swaying as the bus moved, turned, stopped, and started again, each of us holding on to nearby chrome poles. I was still brushing hay out of my hair and off my clothing.

Well Desolation Valley is really something to see, he lectured seriously. Places up there you hike in the snow and one wrong step you’re done for good. You die.

Must be some place.

I was still tired from the long flight, almost no sleep, and the long ride from Salinas to San Jose. The swaying bus seemed like a cradle, a warm womb.

I used to have a long beard like yours, he said.

Really.

I had to cut it off. I’ve worked in the same store in San Jose for twenty-five years and the folks there expect me to act a certain way.

My new friend glanced briefly around the bus, then to the darkness going by us outside; then turned his dark-eyed, sad gaze back to me as if he were a tired fortuneteller. He waited for me to comment. When I didn’t, he sighed and said, But let me tell you, when I get my six weeks off this year, I’m going to let my beard grow!

With that forceful pronouncement his eyes changed. He sat up straighter, something like a man on a merry-go-round, but stationary.

I’m hiking back into Desolation Valley with a back-pack just like the one you have there!

He reached by me and touched my leaning backpack with his free hand as if it were a magic talisman; had some special power, or was a symbol of it, and needed touching.

And in six weeks I will be looking just like you! Crummy! he grinned happily.

For sure, I smiled back. We could have been toothpaste ads. The San Jose City Lines bus swayed so much it was more like a boat than a vehicle.

I’d forgotten how complicated, and sometimes how beautiful busses could be, wayward or not.

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San Jose

Beacher Warlock

Since we’d last seen each other Beacher Warlock had married and divorced three times, resulting in three children. I remembered the two of us graduating from Stockton High School a year apart; him resolved to become a science teacher, and myself a forest ranger.

After many years Beacher did finally, acquire his degree but never taught. He stepped away mid-education into a part-time job, so he could work and go to school at the same time-----it would be for a year or two. Instead, he remained over twenty years as a Psychiatric Technician employed by the State of California, first at Stockton State Hospital, and later at the San Jose and Sonoma State Hospitals for the insane.

A woman answered the phone cautiously.

Hello? her voice inquired.

Hello, I answered her slowly too; asking in what I hoped was a friendly way, Is Beacher Warlock there?

May I say who is calling please?

Tell him Jim Hunter, I tried again as politely as possible, for when in Rome.

Beacher and I spoke excitedly. Ten years we each repeated several times. Ten years. He knew the shopping center, and the debris-ridden phone booth I was in.

He is dark and tall, two inches over six feet; lanky, athletic and a good part French. With his triangular face he looks like the movie actor Jack Palance, but his dark brown eyes betray anything but Hollywood, rather a simultaneous mischievousness and expired dedication, like an overdue Library book the library doesn’t want back.

Nearly an hour later, there came a tap-tap-tap on the glass next to me in the fast-food outlet he’d said to wait in. I saw Beacher’s big grinning face, and in front of it outside the window the middle finger of his right hand pointing at me. I leaped out of my seat leaving the backpack inside and a few feet from where he’d been standing, we banged into each other hard. His red down jacket over a blue, plaid wool shirt was old and stained, and as he approached me, he tried to walk in the leather moccasins he wore, as if he were an old and respected Apache Indian.

It’s been so long. He was holding my shoulders and standing back staring at me.

It goes fast.

I thought I might cry but got by it.

I’m late, he apologized.

I just looked at him not replying; trying to figure out how to tell him I was on a journey where time was less important than it might otherwise be; that something unspeakably horrible had happened in Alaska; that while I was still bound by those September events, I was happy to see a friend to whom I could speak without repercussion. I said none of that because Beacher was explaining in detail his late arrival.

Mary wouldn’t let me use her car, so I had to bring this wreck, he said embarrassed, pointing at an old purple Dodge station wagon; a big, long thing that Sixties families had driven in old TV episodes. It was a wreck. I wondered what Beacher’s real situation was. He looked good personally, but…

She says I would wreck her car, he offered.

Once seated in the Dodge we scuttled out of the Jack in The Box parking lot like a crab going sideways. Out on The Kings Highway the front end of the dying car wobbled to the point I thought the wheels might come off.

As we turned a corner the left rear door flew open. All this time Beacher was having a hard time making the car go straight, as the steering seemed not to respond. At many stoplights there was some question as to whether we might be able to halt before the white cross walks, or not.

None of this seemed odd or unnatural to Beacher. Not far into the drive he said, This girl I am with now isn’t much. Then a second apology, You might not like her.

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This San Jose Beacher was not the one I’d grown up with.

I was remembering trying to keep up with him in the mountains backpacking as he went easily over the divides, down the hills, and back up again rarely breathing hard, singing loudly and off key Oh What A Beautiful Morning.

Oh, what the hell he snapped in San Jose, catching my baffled look. C’mon let’s get our first Coors together. He aimed the now smoking, as well as wobbling Dodge into a liquor store parking lot. We split the price of six half-quarts.

As he maneuvered the coughing car, not to their apartment, but toward Sunnyvale’s darker neighborhood streets he cursed the complaining brakes; began a high-speed drive during which he moved with practiced efficiency on and off various freeways like a hunter weaving in and out of trees in a forest he knew well.

My second night on the road saw more tiny shopping centers than I thought could exist. Nor could I tell without the sun or the moon where on planet Earth we precisely were.

I readjusted myself on the big front seat and asked Beacher as friends do, So where are you then amigo, with all of it? Job, love, life, kids? Where?

Well, he said without resentment last week I quit my new job. Today I’m dead flat broke.

He glanced my way with a silly grin, then said I used my last hundred dollars to buy this heap and it’s falling apart so fast I’ll probably get nailed for littering before we get to Mary’s.

Beacher for Christ’s sake?

He went on as if I hadn’t spoken.

Twelve months ago, I quit my job at the state hospital and took out my retirement money and spent it all. I just got my third divorce finalized last month and last summer I got my first ever college degree of any kind. But Jim, for the first time in my life this year I feel like complete shit, like I have no hope at all. Nothing means anything to me anymore. Nothing.

Where had the high school letterman; football-end gone? Where had the young man of seventeen with so many dreams disappeared to; and his young first wife and their dreams? Was everyone in America in the late seventies going down hill?

Listen Jim there is one thing you should know. He offered after I didn’t answer, When you sent me a letter saying you were coming; writing a book about it, well write whatever you want. Make me out to be the biggest fucker in the world. I don’t care.

Still stunned I asked, Where are your kids?

Steven is in Chico with my brother Lee’s first wife. He’s sixteen now and two inches taller than me; six-four, broad shouldered and blonde like his mom; Robbie’s in Santa Clara living with her girl friend’s family. She’s fourteen now.

And Beth? Where is little Beth?

She’s in Stockton with her mother.

You have any other kids?

Some say so.

When did you and Linda split up?

Eleven months ago.

Beacher paused after saying that, looked around almost like a Monk in a Monastery with the Barbarians coming with swords in hand over the nearest hill, before getting his eyes back on the night streets. It seemed he might pray, and then did not.

The tires were so bald they made little sound on the asphalt; other drivers looked over at us as if we were out of place. I had a sense of Beacher quitting, which was not like him.

When did you marry Kathy?

Kathy! Why the Hell do you ask me that stupid question?

He struck the steering wheel. Pounded it. Started to look at me but turned back to drive carefully and watch traffic, eyes narrowed; turned into a quieter neighborhood. An orange cat ran out from our left and directly in front of the Dodge. Beacher swerved the rolling wreck expertly, as if still on some high school football field, missed the cat. Beer spilled.

I picked my next words carefully and said, Beacher I’m trying to get your life in order in my head. Since I saw you last.

Both his arms went stiff, like iron rails against the steering wheel. He forced himself to take a deep breath, turned to me and cried out painfully Christ Jim! That was nineteen fifty-seven. I was seventeen. No. She was seventeen and I was eighteen then or nineteen, and all of you guys had left in fifty-four! You guys left me and ran off to the Air Force. All of you; everyone I knew.

"That’s when Steven and Robbie were born? During those Four years we were gone.

Right.

How long were you and Kathy together?

Five years…I think.

We had gone through a small neighborhood and now the speed of the Dodge was picking up. Maybe Beacher had taken a strange shortcut? Back on the freeway we began to pass other autos. We were going too fast. Get off the pedal I was about to say, but Beacher spoke in a near whisper before I could order him to slow down.

What he said I will never know, but we had to slow for an exit.

We made our way down a long wide street with a middle strip planted with tall trees.

Kathy went to bed with another guy, I said, finally remembering it. And you got the divorce and the kids?

Fuck you, Jim.

And added, But Hell the judge never knew it, but I was screwing around on her too. I wasn’t satisfied at home. What did she expect?

Best not to answer any more. I slouched down during the last block and just listened.

"After Kathy, I married Kellie. She’s been as much a mother to Steven and Robbie as anyone.

She was the baby-sitter, right?

Right.

How old were your kids then?

Five and six.

How long did you and Kellie stay married?

Four years. Something like that I think.

And you were going out with other women all that time?

Yeah. Kellie was another one that didn’t like to screw.

Why did you break-up?

We could both see it coming. It just wasn’t going to work.

After Beth was born?

Yeah, that’s right.

And then you married Linda?

No. I lived with the second Linda for three years before we got married and right after we did get married, she asked me to get a vasectomy and I did. I did it for her. And six months after I get myself cut for her; she divorces me! She cut me mentally and physically, and I felt it all right. I still feel it.

Why the vasectomy?

She didn’t want children and I didn’t think it was right for her to get cut. Someday she might want children, but I knew sure as Hell I didn’t need anymore.

We arrived at Mary’s rented apartment and parked in back where his moving wreck would be out of sight. Mary was seated on her sofa with shoes off and legs tucked under. She was involved in a fast conversation, her telephone tucked into her ear. The chatter was like a tennis volley, with her best friend Laura. Each of them expressed surprise to the other that we were there instead of in some bar.

On the phone with Mary was Laura, recently divorced, from Boston, who had met Mary where they both worked. Laura had two sons aged fourteen and fifteen and hoped at some vague point to remarry.

They’d been discussing what the future might hold for them, as to men. Laura had made Mary laugh by saying she wasn’t going to jump anywhere soon even though it was winter, and her two boys were still in tennis shoes.

Never be able to do that in Boston in the winter, she’d said hanging up. So, things are already better for me in San Jose.

Mary’s features were thin and narrow, her eyes a blue so soft it went to gray, her appearance reminding me, for she was tall and not at all heavy, of one of my early English teachers. She had brown, wavy hair; a persevering, patient sadness and was also divorced. Her husband had been a military policeman but was now a shoe salesman in Mississippi. Their six-year-old son was in his custody, for reasons I would learn later.

We three, while sharing parts of our lives, finished off Mary’s last bottle of wine, and at four a.m. when we