Free Saving the Queen by William F. Buckley Page B

on the train from Southampton, in the chaotic weeks at the end of his fifteenth year.
    When the letter from his mother arrived he was at Camp Blakey, in Maine. He opened it eagerly, in the presence of his tent mates, and read. His eyes blurred so that he couldn’t see, not even his two silent companions, but when his vision returned, he streaked out—by the Old School-house, along the shore of the lake, past the dozen tidy canoes, into the forest, whose shadows slightly slowed him down, but never to a walk—the whole two miles to the main highway where, breathless, he stopped, sticking up his thumb with that supernal confidence of the young that he would not, by that Providence he had grown up with on such companionable terms, be kept waiting, which he wasn’t. The farmer who picked him up took him as far as Bath. Then, in minutes, he was on a truck headed for Boston. The driver stopped for gas and food and asked Black if he was going to eat anything, and. Black said no, he wasn’t hungry. He was very hungry, and he had no money in his pocket, only the letter, lodged permanently in his memory, word for word, after that one reading. The driver returned with two sandwiches, ate one slowly as he drove, and told the boy to toss the second one out at the next garbage can, because one had satisfied him after all. Black said that although he wasn’t hungry, maybe he would eat it himself rather than waste it, and the driver said suit yourself. The driver asked Black no questions about himself, but volunteered copious details about his own humdrum life, confessing that he rather hoped the United States would get into the war, since he was still young enough to join the army or preferably the navy in the event of a general draft, and would like to see something of the world besides the run from Portland to Boston before he got any older, and, frankly, he didn’t think his wife would mind it all that much if he went away for a while. Black woke from his trance at this and sternly discoursed on the illogic and immorality of the United States getting involved in a European war, recapitulating with considerable skill, analytical and mimetic, the phrases and paragraphs he had so often heard his father so earnestly intone. The driver retreated, leaving the impression that his desire for war was at most a velleity and turned to other matters. Black listened, and commented as necessary, dozed off, wondering, detachedly, how he would get from Boston to New York—to his aunt’s house—before dying of hunger.
    He arrived in the late afternoon, the beneficiary of random highway philanthropies including a plate of frenchfried potatoes from the Howard Johnson waitress who, when he had sat down after his driver dropped him to go north to Hartford, and asked, at the counter, for a glass of water, said he was cute, which, suddenly, he realized selfconsciously, he probably was, wearing trim white shorts, and a T-shirt marked CAMP BLAKEY , and white socks and tennis shoes, a rope belt and a watch with an Indian bead band he had sewn himself. At 5’7” and 120 pounds he was growing fast, but not in those mutant leaps and bounds that leave the mid-adolescent looking like a gazelle. His hair was a dark blond, with the same yellow-white strains that even now came out on the least touch of the sun. Though his lips were normally set, he was quick to smile, a charming and precocious smile, somehow wise and amused, and he smiled when the waitress, varying very little from the basic gambit of the truck driver, said there were excess potatoes, that a dumb cook had prepared too many. But after eating only a few, suddenly his stomach was narcotized by his mind’s return to the letter, and he walked quickly to the men’s room and wept silently in the toilet compartment, wedging his weight against the door because there was no lock. When he regained control, he left through the back way, and resumed hitchhiking,