Free Hush Money by Peter Israel

than to say that he’d bought it like that from a guy. In fact he didn’t answer anything more than was necessary until we got onto Karen, or rather onto him and Karen. I had the impression he had other things on his mind, but probably it was that subjects that didn’t have to do with him personally didn’t hold his attention.
    We walked down to where the cove ended in a scraggle of rocks, and there were long brown necklaces of kelp bashing into the rocks and drifting out again. I sat on a boulder and he sort of hunkered, doodling in the sand with a stick while he talked. Because once he got started he talked, and he talked.
    I won’t try to put it all down. In the first place he was dead serious about it, which I couldn’t be. And in the second, you’ve already read it in a dozen novels, seen it in a dozen drive-ins. All you have to do is put on a used Simon & Garfunkel record and you’ll get the picture.
    It was the old on-the-road story, re-enacted for the 88,000th time in living color. The Great American Myth to some, the Great American Disillusion to more, but that doesn’t keep thousands of kids from dreaming the dream and trying to live it. All you have to do is get out on the highway anywhere in the West to see it: kids with packs on their backs and thumbs in the air, kids carrying signs, kids riding Yamahas, kids in vans and old heaps which you’d swear couldn’t make it to the next town, and sometimes don’t. It’s like an itch in the pants, an army on the move, and no matter that there’s no place to go, in the summer they’re thicker than the trees up at Big Sur, all of them coming back from someplace and headed someplace else.
    Karen and Ford had done it in a certain style. It was his van and her money, and they slept in motels more than in the van. They made it as far east as St. Louis, Missouri, and as far north as Wyoming, where an old lady took a shine to them and they stayed a week in her motel somewhere near Cheyenne. And they turned her on, he said, and they fucked in the snow on a bed of pine needles one day when Karen was flying on acid. In between they amused themselves ripping off supermarkets, and once in Nebraska they’d knocked over a gas station.
    All he said specifically of Karen was that she was a good fuck, but not like you or I would say it. More the way he might have said a good surfer, a good skier, in other words an appreciation of her talent. And still, in a funny way, I got a lot sharper picture of her from him than anyone else I’d talked to, a different one too: of a wild little prickteaser of a bitch, skinny as a rail and running at the nose in the cold wind, her hair chopped off like a boy’s, with a mean streak and an inheritance she could never spend her way through and a yen for something, what she didn’t know and probably never would, only that her daddy’s money wouldn’t buy it.
    Maybe all I mean to say is that once I’d known a Karen too.
    All in all they were on the road together a little over a month. She’d kept a journal, he said. I asked him what had happened to it. He said he didn’t know, but either he did or he had one hell of a memory for the names of places, people. But how come it had blown, I asked him, had the money tree run out of apples? No, he said, and his eyes went a little tight. It turned out, putting together what he said with what I learned later, that somewhere around the metropolis of Winnemucca, Nevada, they’d taken up with a family. A real one, as it happened, and godfearing, running all the way from the baby to the head man, in a caravan of station wagons with all their stuff in the back, and the head man was a big son of a bitch in a beard and suspenders who was leading his people to the promised land of the state of Washington. And when they split, Karen went with them. Only when the University opened in the fall, she was back.
    Maybe a shrinker would