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looked and felt like the real thing. No reason to think it wasn’t.
    Eddie smiled. He’d heard of people lighting cigarettes with hundred-dollar bills, but never smoking the money itself. El Rojo, Angel Cruz, whatever the hell his name was, had told him to smoke the cigarette later, on the outside. Kind of sentimental, but maybe it was a Latino thing. Save it for later, El Rojo had told him: after you get laid for me . Then Eddie remembered the woman in the red convertible and stopped smiling.

Outside: Day 2

4
    E ddie, with Prof’s cardboard mailing tube in his hand and $105.05 in his pocket, stepped down onto the bus-station platform in his old hometown. The wind tore through his khaki windbreaker and green short-sleeved shirt. Snow was blowing, but not in the form of flakes: they were too small, too hard, too gray.
    Eddie had forgotten that wind. It made him think again of shrimp boats on the Gulf, and getting back on the bus. This, after all, was the town he had always wanted to get out of, wasn’t it? The door of the bus jerked shut behind him.
    Eddie went into the station, thinking, I’ll sit in here where it’s warm, order a sandwich and coffee, eat all by myself: luxury. But the station was not as he recalled: the coffee shop, newsstand, drugstore, were all gone. Time changes everything, as El Rojo had said. There was nothing inside but vending machines, a ticket counter with no one behind it, and a stubble-faced man mopping the floor.
    Eddie examined the vending machines. Coffee cost sixty-five cents. He had the hundred-dollar bill, a five, and a nickel. “Got change for a five-dollar bill?” he called to the man. Maybe he should have just said, “Got change for a five?” Was that more natural? He needed a phrase book.
    Not looking up, the man replied, “Change machine makes change.” He spoke with the accent of the town, of the whole river valley, a sound Eddie hadn’t consciously associated with his childhood until that moment. It didn’t warm him.
    Eddie found the changer at the end of the row of vending machines. “Insert one or five dollar bill,” read the instructions. “This way up.” He took out the five and was about to stick it inthe slot when he noticed that someone had written in lipstick on the wall, “Does not work you assholes.” He didn’t chance it.
    Eddie went outside. He remembered that wind but didn’t remember it bothering him like this. Had he been weakened by fifteen years spent indoors? Or was it just his shaven skull that gave the wind its bite?
    Hunched inside the khaki windbreaker, Eddie walked down Main Street. Downtown had been decaying when he left. Now it had decayed more. Shop windows were dusty, the goods in them yellowed, nothing had been painted in years. He moved on toward Weisner’s Department Store, maybe to buy a hat, at least to have a sandwich at the U-shaped lunch counter. But Weisner’s, with that U-shaped lunch counter, faded hardwood floors, scrawny-necked clerks in jackets and ties, was gone; just an empty lot, covered in crusty brown snow, littered with broken glass and windblown scraps.
    Eddie turned onto River. A dog came trotting his way, a little spotted mongrel with pointed ears. Eddie remembered he liked dogs and made a clicking sound, hoping to draw it closer, maybe within patting distance. The dog heard the sound and without changing speed cut across the street. Eddie noticed the bone sticking out of its mouth; maybe the dog thought he was after it.
    He walked onto the bridge and started across the river toward New Town. The river was frozen over, except for a narrow band in the middle where water ran black and fast. As Eddie watched, a mattress-size slab of ice broke loose from the New Town bank, spun slowly into the stream, picked up speed, came surging closer, vanished under the bridge. Eddie crossed to the other side and watched the ice slab bob down the river, past the limits of the town to where the woods began, and out of