I could tell you we won’t say a word about what’s happened, not a single word. The gun goes back in its drawer, my father sits with my mother on the couch and gets up to bring her a drink while she reviles me, and him; he rubs her feet when she cries because her back aches. I go to school, go out, go anywhere. I get along, get by, get numb, and it won’t be long before I hurry away from high school and them. I’ll try running away—as I did once to San Francisco, I’ll flee now to Seattle and to Vancouver, to a nameless hotel, $3.50 a night, with a big red neon sign outside my window that hangs the vertical red word RESIDENTIAL above the street, which seems always wet with rain. From my window the harbor shimmers all night, just beyond the rooftops across the street, and I sit in the window frame atop the chilly silver of the radiator and watch the tankers and the cargo ships, trying to imagine what’s next. But I’m not ready, don’t know what to do; it’s my father’s steady supply of tens and twenties that’s sheltered me, a safety net that kept me from living on the streets. I’d come close enough to it, those years, to know what that was like, to know a longhaired kid without a dollar to his name didn’t have a place to turn to.

So I go back home and sign myself up at the university. I don’t tell them I haven’t finished high school and, weirdly, they don’t ask. It’s a big state school, and they’re easy, and by the time they find out it’s a moot point anyway. I find friends in the poetry workshop, and in the loose coalition of hippies and politicos and lost souls who are my peers, in 1970, the great loose flow of us marching downtown to the draft board to end the war, nonviolent principles dissolving as we smash into the army recruiting center and tear it apart: cardboard figures of soldiers, men and women, thrown over our heads, trampled to pieces.

But the train that takes me away from home, finally, is the same train my mother and sister leapt onto: I enter into a wildly mistaken marriage—too young (I am seventeen), too confused (if I act straight will I be straight?)—and somehow wily nonetheless: love’s a means of travel, a window into another life, a world apart from the one I’ve known. If I’m lying to myself, then it’s also true that I’m making my way forward; if I’m living with someone I can’t wholly commit to, then at least she isn’t trying to kill me.