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immediately, even before he was fully awake, who it must be. Just a hunch. He had been thinking about her.
    "Dear Benny," Rachel said, "I've called every bus station in the country." He could hear a party on in the background. New Year's night. Where he was there was only an old clock to tell the time. And a dozen homeless, slouched on wooden bench, trying to sleep. Waiting for a long-haul bus run neither by Greyhound nor Trailways. He watched them and let her talk. She was saying, "Come home." The only one he would allow to tell him this except for an internal voice he would rather disown as prodigal than listen to.
    "You know -" he tried to say.
    "I'll send you bus fare."
    She would.
    A hollow, twanging sound dragged across the floor toward him. Dewey Gland, morose and all bones, trailed his guitar behind him. Profane interrupted her gently. "Here is my friend Dewey Gland," he said, almost whispering. "He would like to sing you a little song."
    Dewey sang her the old Depression song, Wanderin'. Eels in the ocean, eels in the sea, a redheaded woman made a fool of me. . .
    Rachel's hair was red, veined with premature gray, so long she could take it in back with one hand, lift it above her head and let it fall forward over her long eyes. Which for a girl 4'10" in stocking feet is a ridiculous gesture; or should be.
    He felt that invisible, umbilical string tug at his midsection. He thought of long fingers, through which, maybe, he might catch sight of the blue sky, once in a while.
    And it looks like I'm never going to cease.
    "She wants you," Dewey said. The girl at the Information desk was frowning. Big-boned, motley complexion: girl from out of town somewhere, whose eyes dreamed of grinning Buick grilles, Friday night shuffleboard at some roadhouse.
    "I want you," Rachel said. He moved his chin across the mouthpiece, making grating sounds with a three-day growth. He thought that all the way up north, along a 500-mile length of underground phone cable, there must be earthworms, blind trollfolk, listening in. Trolls know a lot of magic: could they change words, do vocal imitations? "Will you just drift, then," she said. Behind her he heard somebody barfing and those who watched laughing, hysterically. Jazz on the record player.
    He wanted to say, God, the things we want. He said: "How is the party."
    "It's over at Raoul's," she said. Raoul, Slab, and Melvin being part of a crowd of disaffected which someone had labeled The Whole Sick Crew. They lived half their time in a bar on the lower West Side called the Rusty Spoon. He thought of the Sailor's Grave and could not see much difference.
    "Benny." She had never cried, never that he could remember. It worried him. But she might be faking. "Ciao," she said. That phony, Greenwich Village way to avoid saying good-bye. He hung up.
    "There's a nice fight on," Dewey Gland said, sullen and redeyed. "Old Ploy is so juiced he went and bit a Marine on the ass."
    If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir.
    Profane and Paola left for New York that night. Dewey Gland went back to the ship and Profane never saw him again. Pig had taken off on the Harley, destination unknown. On the Greyhound were one young couple who would, come sleep for the other passengers, make it in a rear seat; one pencil-sharpener salesman who had seen every territory in the country and could give you interesting information on any city, no matter which one you happened to be heading for; and four infants, each with an incompetent mother, scattered at strategic locations throughout the bus, who babbled, cooed, vomited, practiced self-asphyxia, drooled. At least one managed to be screaming all through the twelve-hour trip.
    About the time they hit Maryland, Profane decided to get it over with.