He read detective magazines while he waited for her to return from her cleaning chores at the jail. He still wasn’t able to pin her down about her age or background or anything, though he found out from the wire-haired aunt that her parents were dead and she lived most of the time at a fruit stand out on the highway. They spent another night in the pick-up, but Hank was becoming uneasy. He told the girl he had to leave at dawn, be back later, okay? She smiled and told him that it had been very fine, and when he kicked his motorcycle to noisy life in the gray plains dawn she stood on the hood of the pick-up and waved as he pulled a great plume of white dust down the road out of sight. Up through Denver, over the Rabbit Ears into Wyoming, where an icy wind cut his face so raw that he had to have a doctor in Rock Springs prescribe an ointment ...down to Utah and another fight, this time in the City of the Saints ...along the Snake River caddis flies hatched and died against his goggles . . . into Oregon. As he came down out of the twisting Santiam Pass into the green explosion of the Willamette Valley he realized that he had almost completed a circle. West, west, sailing out of San Francisco west and after two years landing on the Eastern Seaboard, where his ancestors had first set foot. He’d traveled in a straight line and completed a circle. He roared down out of the Coast Range and passed the old house across the river without even slowing. He was eager to see some of the good old woodsmen around town. Men with style and grit. He entered the Snag triumphantly, bringing his boots down hard. “Sonofabitch if this place isn’t got as much riffraff in it as the day I left. Hey there, Teddy.” “Why hello, Mr. Stamper,” Teddy said politely. The other men smiled and waved casually. “Let’s have us a bottle, Teddyboy. A whole bottle...let’s see. Make her Jim Beam, by God!” He leaned his elbows on the bar and beamed at the patrons sitting with lunch pails on the tables beside their beers. “Mr. Stamper . . .” Teddy began timidly. “How you been, Floyd? Gettin’ fat? Mel . . . Les. Come on over here an’ let’s section up this bottle we—Teddy, you snake.” “Mr. Stamper, it’s against the law to sell a bottle over the counter in Oregon. You must’ve forgot.” “I didn’t forget, Teddy, but I’m home from the wars! I want to bust loose a little. What d’ya say, boys?” The jukebox whirred. Evenwrite glanced at his watch, stood up, and stretched. “What do you say we raincheck that bottle till Saturday night, Hank. It’s goin’ on suppertime.” “Mr. Stamper, I can’t sell . . .” “Same with me, Hank,” Les said. “Good to see you though.” “And the rest of you niggers?” Hank addressed the others good-naturedly. “You got other irons in the fire, too, I suppose. Okay, it’s more for me. Teddy ...?” “Mr. Stamper, I can’t sell . . .” “Okay, okay. We’ll all raincheck it. See you birds later. I think I’ll drive around for a look at the town.” They called farewells, his old friends with style and grit and other irons in the fire, and he left, wondering what had come over them. They acted tired, scared, asleep. Outside he noticed how dull the mountains looked and wondered if the whole world had gone to seed while he was off fighting to save it. He drove on past the bay, past the commercial docks where blunt gray motors squatted in boats saying “buddha buddha buddha” while the fishermen tossed gleaming salmon into community coffins, past the clam flats and the gull-infested dump out the road through the dunes to the beach. He passed the heaps of driftwood and finally stopped at the foam’s edge to wait, stopped with the cycle propped between his legs in the hard wet sand to actually wait for something to happen, for some mystic revelation to explode in his mind making all things clear forever, holding his breath like a sorcerer just finished with all the steps necessary to some world-shaking spell. He was the first of the Stampers to complete the full circle west. He waited. And the gulls cried, and the sand fleas swarmed over drowned surf birds, and the waves cracked against the earth with the methodic regularity of a clock ticking. Hank laughed out loud and stomped the starter bar with his instep. “Okeedoke,” he said, laughing and stomping again. “Okeedoke, okeedoke, okeedoke . . .” He returned then, with sand still in his pants cuffs and zinc ointment still on his nose, to the old wooden warren across that waiting river. And found the old man still on the levee, with hammer and nail and number nine cable, working still to make the river wait a little longer. “I come home,” he let the old man know, and walked on up the path. To the rattling woods for a few months with the smoke and wind and rain, to the mill for a few more, thinking that indoor work might settle an immigrant heart, that the zinc ointment of indoor air might salve his windburned hide—for a while even managed to convince himself that he liked the quarterbacking task of sitting that sawyer’s seat and handling all those controlling levers and buttons that made the big machines hump and run—then back again to the woods at the first crack of spring. But that sky ...! How could a sky so full of blue feel so empty? He worked those summer woods the hardest he had worked since training for the state wrestling championship his senior year at Wakonda High, but at the end of this season, when he was rock-hard and trained to a razor’s edge, there were no tournaments to enter, no opponents to pin, no medals to win. “I’m going off again,” he let the old man know in the fall. “There’s somebody I got to see.” “What the bleedin’ hell you talkin’ about, right here at the peak of cuttin’? What the boogin’ devil you talkin’, somebody you got to see why?” He grinned at the puffing red face. “Why? Well, I got to see this somebody, Henry, to see if I’m that Somebody. I won’t be gone more’n a couple weeks. I’ll straighten things around good before I take off.” He left the old man fuming and cursing on the levee and walked to the house, and after two days going over the books with Janice and through the woods with Joe Ben packed a small bag and caught a train East, wearing tight new shoes and a stiff new flannel one-button roll. There was no watermelon fair waiting for him that fall, but the............