“Stop here on your way back to the car and I’ll tell you what I think, what it’ll cost to fix it, and if I think you might as well junk the heap, or what.”

“Thanks a lot.”

The chicken farmer let him out in Reseda, and on the far outskirts of the town Eddie caught a second lift, this time from an expensively dressed heavy man driving a Cadillac. The man had whiskey on his breath and proceeded to unload his troubles on Eddie. He had spent the night with his girl friend, and his wife was going to raise hell. She was getting ready to take the kids and leave, and he was scared to death she wouldn’t even be home when he got there. His father-in-law was threatening to run him down with a shotgun. At the same time he couldn’t leave this other woman alone. She was his former secretary, married to an airline pilot who was gone a lot. She had red hair and weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds and had been a New York model.

Eddie was glad to escape in Studio City.

He caught a bus, using some of the money his mother had given him. It was getting later by now, the sun was high, and he began to worry about Karen. She’d think he wasn’t coming back. He should have telephoned from Reseda.

In downtown L.A. he tried to call the Mosby café in Oxnard, but the operator could find no number listed for it. Eddie recalled distinctly the big black phone on the wall at one end of the counter and told the operator about it, and she suggested that it may have been a pay phone and told him that such phones were not listed under the name of the establishment; there was a separate list for them and it would take a little time to check this. Eddie told her he couldn’t wait and hung up.

By means of several bus transfers he finally reached Uncle Willy’s home. He went up the stairs softly, rapped at the door. Uncle Willy didn’t answer; but presently, from up there, Eddie saw him come out of the rear door of the big house at the front of the lot and throw some bread crumbs on the lawn for the birds.

Eddie went down there. Uncle Willy noticed him and stood by the back door, waiting.

“Is Skip around?”

“Skip?” Uncle Willy looked innocent and wily, his old face with its startling foxy resemblance to Skip turned up to the sky as if expecting something to fly by within his field of vision. “Skip who?”

“Your nephew.” Eddie had never met the uncle before, but the family pattern was too marked to be mistaken. “I’m Eddie. You know.”