When we got back to our neighborhood, my dad dropped the sisters off in their driveway and sped away before they got to their door. I asked if he should tell their parents what had happened, but my dad just mumbled something like, “They don’t speak English that well,” and “They’re from a communist-bloc country, they’re used to things like that.” I pondered that statement for years, and every time I heard something about a communist country, I imagined unhappy girls with erratically lopped off tufts of hair.

By twilight I was close to Rapid City and had I been in a car I would have driven on to the city center, but I had already walked twenty miles and there was an ominously steep hill looming ahead of me, so I ended my day outside the city limits at the Happy Holiday Motel. I expected at any moment to see Pamela step out of a car behind me but she never did. I was foolishly optimistic that she had finally given up and gone home. I was wrong.

Chapter Five

C H A P T E R

Five

Last night I dreamt I was kissing McKale.

As I pressed my lips against hers I was

filled with the most exquisite joy. Then

my joy turned to horror when I realized

that I wasn’t kissing her, but giving

her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

I woke the next morning wondering what Pamela wanted to say. If she had come to apologize, she was too late for that. The person she needed to apologize to was already gone.

After breakfast, I stretched my legs and back, then donned my pack and started walking.

I don’t like days that start with large hills; the same was figuratively true when I ran an advertising agency. In less than two hours, Rapid City loomed ahead of me.

Rapid City reminded me a lot of Spokane. Since it was the first city of any real size I’d walked through since Cody, Wyoming, I decided to bypass the truck route and walk through town. No doubt inspired by Mount Rushmore’s presidential fervor, there was a bronze statue on every street corner depicting a U.S. president engaged in some activity demonstrative of their term in office.

I didn’t recognize many of them. Actually, most of them. This wasn’t surprising. I mean, could anyone alive today pick James K. Polk from a police lineup or recognize Rutherford B. Hayes if they bumped into him in an elevator? Or what about William Henry Harrison, our shortest-lived president, who died just thirty-two days into office? I wondered what his statue looked like—a man in bed?