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freedom to go where the wind took you and coming back only when you felt like it. No buses, no subways, no school, none of that.
    The day he’d left Park Slope for good was low hung and dark, foggy a little, and the towers had looked like mountains again. He’d stood there looking at them across the East River getting ice along its edges, thinking it might be the last time he’d see those mountains, probably for sure the last he’d see of them from this window. He was going to Minnesota, and he wasn’t certain if there were mountains out there or not, didn’t think so. Lakes, though, that’s what his mother said. She’d told him that a week before, exactly a month to the day after his father had pulled out, leaving Clayton and her alone.
    When Clayton had asked, “Why’d Dad leave us?” his mother replied, “Elmer just felt closed in, I guess.” She’d been all weepy and slumped over when she’d said it.
    Clayton was the youngest of five children, the other four gone and paying their way, and his parents had been old by parent standards when he’d come along, unexpected and unwelcome.
    “We didn’t plan on Clayton,” his mother had said once to a friend of hers and not aware Clayton could hear them talking. “There were things we wanted to do, and they didn’t include another child. My God, four are enough to raise in this world.”
    “Land sakes, yes.” The other woman had nodded in fast agreement, sweeping her hand as if she were brushing away unwanted children. “I should think so. We stopped after three. Nobody needs a caboose these days.”
    His mother had sat him down and told him what was for sure and what had to be done. “Clayton, I’ve found a job at Landowski’s Cleaners over on Fourteenth, but I can’t make enough to take care of us both, Your grandparents out in Ely say it’s all right if you come and live with them for a while. It’s real nice there, lots of lakes and woods, You’ll be happier out of the city. I’ll find a smaller place I can afford and send along a little money if I can.”
    Clayton Price had looked at his mother, blue eyes running toward gray looking straight at her. His father was gone, his mother was sending him away… . “We didn’t plan on Clayton… . There were things we wanted to do.” He’d understood, in a way. She already looked old at fifty-two, as old as his grandparents looked in the photograph on the bureau in her room, and they looked older than Jim Bowie’s grave.
    Clayton may have understood… kind of, why his parents hadn’t wanted him, how he’d screwed up their plans. He may have understood… kind of, but he’d been only ten and a caboose at that, and Ely, Minnesota, had seemed forever out there someplace.
    Margaret Price and her unexpected youngest son had ridden the train to Manhattan. There she’d put Clayton on a bus headed west. November 29, 1952, that’s when it was, and snowing heavy by late afternoon. Margaret Price always remembered afterward how hard it had been snowing when Clayton got into the Greyhound. Army had defeated Navy 7—0 earlier in the day, Ike was going to be the new president, the French Union forces in Vietnam were doing pretty well and looking as if they’d stopped the march of communism right in its tracks.
    The bus had rolled out of the Port Authority Terminal and Margaret Price was waving to Clayton on that day and not able to see him very well behind the steamed-up windows. Clayton Price had eight dollars in his pocket, and Ely, Minnesota, had looked like a long way down the road. He’d wondered again for about the millionth time why his father left when and how he did, just pulling out that way, and that was something nobody ever knew.
    “The bus drivers’ll help you, Clayton, and your grand-folks’ll meet you in Duluth.” His mother had said those words somewhere around twenty times that one afternoon before the Greyhound closed its big door with a sigh and headed for a far place.
    Clayton