“You’ll be killed!” she shrieked, and clawed at me for a while, but I shushed and sweet-talked her back into her bed, fighting a rising headache all the while, and let myself out into the stairwell. The street, one of those numbered ones, was as still as a stage set, but, stepping out firmly in my cowboy boots, I headed toward what I figured was west—you get a sense of direction, growing up in the morning shadow of the Blue Ridge—and, sure enough, I soon caught a peek of the Capitol dome in the distance, white as an egg in an eggcup. A couple of tattered colored gentlemen stumbled toward me from a boarded-up doorway, but I gave them both a dollar and a hearty God bless and strode on. If a man can’t walk around in his own country without fear, what business has he selling freedom to the Russians?

Bud Nevins got me and my banjos—a fine old Gibson mother-of-pearl-trimmed Mastertone and an S. S. Stewart backup whose thumb string always sounded a little punky—into Moscow and put us all to bed in a spare room of the big apartment he and Libby and three children occupied in the cement warehouse where the Russians stashed free-world diplomatic staff. Mrs. Nevins was a long-haired strawberry blonde beginning to acquire that tight, worried expression the wives of professors and government officials get, from being saddled with their husbands’ careers. You get those pecking-order blues. The bygone Soviet summer hadn’t done much to refresh her freckles, and a bitter white winter lay ahead. This was late September, shirtless apple-picking time back home. The bed they put me in, the puff smelled old-fashionedly of flake soap, the way my mother’s laundry used to when I’d help her carry the wicker basket heavy with wet wash out to the clothesline. Ma and I were never closer than around wet wash.

As he put me to bed Nevins said there was something already come for me in the diplomatic pouch. An envelope lay on my pillow, addressed to me care of the embassy APO number in a scrunched-up hand in black ballpoint. Inside was a long letter from Imogene, recounting her sorrowful feelings after I left, guessing I was still alive because my death in her neighborhood hadn’t been in the papers and she had caught on the radio a plug for an appearance of mine in St. Louis. She recalled some sexual details I wasn’t sure needed to be set down on paper, and promised undying love. I just skimmed the second page. Her words weren’t easy to read, like the individual letters wanted to double back on themselves, and I was dog-tired from those thousands of miles I had travelled to reach the dark side of the moon.