“If you wouldn’t do all those exercises on an empty stomach you could have something to eat in the morning,” I said.

“Shit.”

“Sure is a pretty day.”

“Sure is good bread.”

“Sure is.”

I washed the dishes from the night before. Carlotta wrote down her parents’ address in Palo Alto so we could stop by for the surfboard. Rennel burped around his last Tums.

“Oh. I almost forgot.” He went out to the car and came back with a new red paperback book.

“I brought this for you to read. Ishi. It’s about the last wild Indian. They found him wandering around California in the 1910s. He’d been up in the hills all his life and never seen a road or a white man or a telegraph pole. He was the last of a tribe that had been starved out.”

He handed the book to Sam. Carlotta looked hungrily over Sam’s shoulder as he turned the pages.

“Pictures!” she exclaimed. “What a fine-looking man!”

“Yeah. Look at his chest,” Rennel said. “They took him to the Natural History Museum and taught him how to use a toilet and stuff. He died a while later of tuberculosis.”

The pictures showed a broad muscular man with a flat bewildered face. He was naked except for a strip of hide between his legs. A wiry man in a mustache and a tight-waisted coat, a style of the early 1900s, stood smiling beside him. The curator of the museum. There were pictures of Ishi with a bow and arrow, crouched beside a bush in demonstration. Ishi building a fire with two rocks and a pile of grass. Ishi spearing fish. In each picture the little man in the tight suit stood nearby, smiling. The last picture was of Ishi in a tight suit. His hair was short and a bowler hat was perched high on his head. He looked pained.

“He lived in the museum after they found him?”

“Yeah. There wasn’t a reservation for him. His tribe had been thought extinct for years. There weren’t even any other Indians who could speak his language.”

Sam’s eyes glowed. Carlotta reached over his arm to turn the pages.

“What a good book. I’ll read this right away.”

The goddamn baby