All he heard was a busy signal. The FBI would be flying into Moab within hours armed with arrest warrants and automatic shotguns. He dialed the operator, tied a bandana over his mouth and said that he wished to place a collect call. By and by the Mellon telephone began to ring. Presently he heard the drawling voice of Mother Mellon:

Ah yes…?

Collect call from Robert Redford for Claire Mullins, the operator said, will you accept?

The name is Mellon. Not Mullins.

For Claire Mellon. Will you accept?

From whom, please?

From Robert Redford.

I’m afraid we don’t know any Mr. Redford.

The actor, Henry burst in, Robert Redford the noted film actor. It’s about Miss Mellon’s audition. We have some good news for her. She—

Will you accept the call, please? the operator repeated.

No, said Mrs. Mellon. Decidedly not.

Henry brooded over his beer. He found a dime in his pocket and called Bliss Quickly. Later, near midnight, he drove the thirty miles of sand and stone, flushing nighthawks from the road, that led to his lonely hut among the erect and impotent phalli of the hoodoo desert.

He lit his Aladdin lamp and began a letter. “Dear darling Claire,” he wrote, “If I cannot see you again I will surely die….”

SURELY DIE? What a redundancy is death. He wrote that he would come to visit in early October, at the end of his working season at the park. She wrote back, after a time, that she was leaving for New England in early September. To a town called Northampton, Mass. To a school named Smith, entering as a junior. Why? Because of its proximity to Boston, she said, and the world of music. She wished Henry the best of everything (except herself) and hoped that he would continue to “drop her a line” now and then when the “mood took him.” She planned to spend the following summer at Tanglewood. Good-bye. Claire.

He patrolled his back roads and walked his foot trails. He searched for lost little boys, helped fear-frozen rock climbers down from cliffs and shepherded fat bull snakes and faded pygmy rattlesnakes out of the garbage dump. He listened to his old battery-powered Hallicrafter radio late at night, receiving strange signals from Quebec, Ciudad Juárez, Radio Havana, Lubbock, Texas, and a police station in Ethel, Oregon. Where the town-limit signs read ENTERING ETHEL.

Well then, he considered, if she was going to be that way he’d make a dash for Denver on his next two days off. Only 350 miles from Moab—an easy seven-hour drive. If his pickup would run. Since it was down he’d take the Greyhound, catch the eastbound at 10:00 P.M., arrive in Denver at 8:00 A.M., walk to Claire’s house, spend the day and evening with her, catch the 2:00 A.M. bus back to Junction, be home by suppertime. Simplicity enclosing felicitas. Embracing claritas. He hoped. He concluded, after further consideration, that his reentry into Denver had best be stealthy, unannounced. The surprise visit entailed severe risks but the more formal and courteous approach lent itself to a formal and courteous rejection. On one pretext or another she could make herself unavailable. The pattern was becoming plain, even to a fool as blinded by desire as Lightcap. As the moth is drawn to the candle he was determined to plunge into pain, to drown his anxiety, misery and uncertainty in despair. It seemed a reasonable, commonsensical solution.