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to get back on the highway.”
    “Clever,” Ben said approvingly. “I like to know such things. Other people’s tricks of the trade, the shortcuts and gimmicks they live by, that’s always interesting to me. Cops wear clip-on neckties so they won’t be strangled in fights. Did you know that?”
    “No.”
    “That’s an interesting thing, isn’t it?”
    “Cops aren’t my bag.”
    “You’re not into cops.”
    “No.”
    “There’s where you make your mistake. A boy your age. You should be into everything.”
    “I got time.”
    “Sure. I’m in franchises. I have about a dozen now. But I’ve had more and I’ve had less. I’m like a producer with several shows running on Broadway at the same time. My businesses take me from place to place. My home is these United States.”
    “You’ve got Idaho plates.”
    “I buy my machines in Boise. I get a new one every year. You think we need the air conditioning?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I’ll set the thermostat for seventy.” Ben thought the boy was laughing. “What’s funny?”
    “Nothing. I was thinking. A drifter in swell threads and a late-model car.”
    “What about you?”
    “I don’t have the threads and I ain’t got the car.”
    “Otherwise we’re the same,” Ben said.
    “I haven’t got a dozen businesses.”
    “I’ll give you a job. I’ll make you the manager of my Baskin-Robbins in Kansas City.”
    “Sure you will.”
    “Sure I will.”
    “My mom said never take ice cream from strangers,” the kid said. He tried to pass it off as a joke but I could see he was uneasy. Probably he thought I was a fairy. I understand. An aging guy in a Cadillac, a breakfast buyer. Only the knowledge that he could take me kept him from telling me to stop and let him out. He made moves in his mind. He was thinking he could push in the cigar lighter and burn me if I tried something. He was thinking karate chop, the advantage of surprise. Break my arm with the armrest, he was thinking. Get me with his backpack that he held in his lap, that when he wore it in the city where I picked him up it made him look like an astronaut. Actually a kid like this, probably on spring vacation, going to see his girlfriend in South Bend, Indiana, or toying with the idea of dropping out maybe, what good to me was he? Every day I try to be ordinary, routine as the next guy. I drop my diction like an accompanist. Sing, sing your key, I’ll pick you up. But the kid? His assumptions soured the air and I turned on the radio.
    “You’re not Baskin-Robbins material,” I told him and could almost smell his relief as I ignored him. And I did what I always do when I’m with healthy good-looking people. I saw myself from his viewpoint, saw my gnashing jaws, a thing I do when I drive and which dentists have pointed out to me, saw my ugly Indian-nickel features, my long coarse sideburns, my pot which seems larger than it is because I have no ass. I felt his physical smugness and could have shot holes in his Frisbee.
    “What’s with you? You into meditation?” Ben asked.
    “Meditation?”
    “It’s twenty-five miles since we spoke.”
    “I was listening to the music.”
    I turned the radio off and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. “I’ve got to pee,” I said and pulled the keys from the ignition. That was to make him think I was afraid of him and set him at his ease. Even so he could have misinterpreted me, thought the pee a stratagem to get him to pee and thus expose himself to me. I went deeper into the woods than necessary, almost hiding. When I got back he was gone. I drove off. He was hitching about two hundred yards up the road. He spotted me and made to go off into the woods. That made me mad and I stopped. I opened the door and signaled him closer. He looked miserable, shamefaced, but he stood his ground.
    “Hey, you,” I said.
    “I ain’t riding with you.”
    “Never mind you ain’t riding with me. You haven’t thanked me for the ride you already rode