There is always a road, a highway, and it runs around a mountain range like this one. Before this century it was probably a path, a horse path the Indians made into the high country for hunting, before the explorers came, the settlers, the ancestors of these people here, then the cowboys. When the Kid finds this road, he will take it to catch a flight to Chicago. How, you ask? The ticket will drop from the sky. Or a train, or maybe he’ll hitchhike to Chicago, where he will level the playing field between himself and all the rest of them. Once in Chicago, any Chicago you like, he will take a cab to the lake. The water will be blue and big. No one should underestimate water of that size. By then he’ll be clean again, with fresh gray pants and a white shirt from a black and wheeled suitcase he will retrieve from the airport’s many circulating rings, each run by its own hidden machine, keeping them spinning. He’ll steal a bag for suitable outfits, though it’ll take several tries to get the right size, the correct cuts to fit his needs, comfortable new shoes that won’t pinch his heels. He’ll drink water from a bottle he’ll find in an ice-filled cooler at a hotdog cart on a sweltering corner, the lake just there across a green expanse. He will sit on grand marble steps between two enormous stone lions. Terrifying is their silent suggestion to these people. These lions are exactly what they want. These people will walk by the lions without looking. They know already. The same people walk by him too. They can’t know who he is yet. He will smile at a girl who will smile back. She will be wearing a skirt that shows her knees and her ankles, too thick even now, so young, the shape of two broken pieces of chalk. He will speak to her anyway. If only she were prettier, he will muse on the cot, if only she were prettier. But no. That’s no way to think. He’s not one of them yet. He is more than them. He is still him and them and her. Anyway, he’s pretty sure. He’s been hoodwinked before, he knows. But the girl with chalk legs will be carrying a bag in her small right hand. She will pass the lion on the way up the steps to the great glass doors. He doesn’t have a ticket. She will stop and say, “You seem exotic,” blushing. Perhaps what charms her is the cowboy hat that he still wears with his airport clothes or the arrowhead on leather around his neck. He would have taken it from an airport shop. The TV was blaring and the shopkeeper wasn’t paying attention.