Hook continued drinking, trying not to overhear any more of their conversation. Instead, he invited in the thought, the line of speculation, that had been circling around his mind like a hawk ever since the chief first brought him the news: What exactly were his chances? What was the likelihood that the body the Santa Barbara sheriff’s police had was not Chris’s but that of some other youth who had found or stolen his wallet? The last letter Hook had received from the boy had come from Taos, where Chris had spent a few days in some sort of commune, at the invitation of a friend of a friend who knew somebody—something like that. And he had been hitchhiking the whole time, all the way from Illinois over a month ago, so of course he had to have run into a lot of hippies by now, a lot of oddballs and bums and just plain thieves. One of them could have stolen his wallet. It was not beyond the realm of possibility. And perhaps the victim in this “fall” reported by Chief Janson, had been so crushed or mangled that he was unrecognizable, and the police might have had nothing to go on but Chris’s wallet and identification papers. So, yes, there was a chance the boy was still alive—the slenderest of chances.

Once again he tried consciously to think about something else. A young mother with two well-dressed preschool children, a boy and a girl, had taken the table next to his own. While the mother ordered a whiskey sour for herself and Cokes for them, the two children stood there between the tables staring at Hook. He thought of blowing smoke on them but settled for turning away, fixing his attention on a Japan Air Lines 747 jet loading on the ramp outside. The craft was unbelievably immense, a silver robot Gulliver being swarmed over by a Lilliputian ground crew, all busily tending to its vast needs and appetites. There was that to think about, to ponder in awe. But instead Hook found himself contemplating the black irony of the whole tragedy, that it should have happened in Santa Barbara of all places, for the town had figured crucially in his own youth, and in fact was one of the few places besides his farm where he had been truly and consciously happy.

Just after the Armistice in 1945 he had gotten a ten-day leave from Long Beach, enough time to have flown back to Chicago to spend a week with his parents in their newly rented house in Evanston, but it had seemed like so far to go for so little. His father, who had fled home and farm at seventeen, operated under the apparent conviction that he had been sent to earth by God to infiltrate the marketing departments of various consumer goods manufacturers and find out which of their top executives and ass-licking underlings were not performing their jobs properly—that is, as he would have performed them—so that he might bring this failing to their attention before being asked to move on to other mission fields, as he invariably was. And like all prophets, his father suffered for his beliefs, but he was not at all loath to share that suffering with others, especially Hook’s mother, who over the years had been so consistently exposed to his attitude of aggrieved bitterness that in time it had become her life-style too. Together, they were like Victorian Methodist missionaries sweltering among the Hottentots, and consistently outraged that their charges wore so little clothing. So Hook had not bothered to tell them about his leave, and instead had taken the train up to Santa Barbara to swim and lie in the sand and be alone. He was nineteen and still a virgin, having failed to make it with, first, a whore, then with a gross ever-grinning Mexican girl his Navy buddies had fixed him up with in the hope of saving him from such an ignoble state of purity. But after that second failure they were no longer buddies so much as quiet mates who treated him with quiet scorn. So he went to Santa Barbara, alone.