There was no denying Morton’s Christian kindness, no arguing with flapjacks and syrup and whipped butter, and he’d told his story with impressive conviction, but the story couldn’t begin to withstand objective scrutiny. In Peru, Clem had worked alongside men with all manner of superstitions. There was a crucifix in the Cuéllars’ hut, and he’d seen Felipe cross himself outside the church and the cemetery in Tres Fuentes. But those had been simple working folk. Morton was an educated American, by his own account the top seller in his territory, the owner of a Buick built on scientifically verified principles. Stranger yet, the other adults in Clem’s own family, his mother and his father and now Becky, modern people of high intelligence, spoke of God as though the word referred to something real. Being the nonbeliever among believers was even lonelier than being the gringo in Tres Fuentes. A gringo was different only on the surface and could look for common ground. Science and delusion had no ground in common.
Morton would have taken him all the way to New Prospect if he hadn’t been collecting his daughter in Aurora at ten o’clock. He dropped Clem at the train station and gave him a five-dollar bill. Leaning across to the glove compartment, he produced a card densely printed with devotional matter.
“You’ve been incredibly generous,” Clem said, taking the card. On the front side was a halftone Jesus, on the obverse a halftone Paradise.
“I hope you have a blessed Easter with your family.”
Alone on the train platform, Clem dropped the card in a trash can. While he was at it, he ditched his filthy knit shoulder bag and the filthy clothes in it, keeping only his passport. Today was the day his own new life was starting. An inbound train was waiting with open doors.
That he recognized New Prospect and had a claim to it, knew every building and street name, seemed as remarkable as his command of English. He could have called his parents from the road, to let them know he was coming, but the discomforts of hitchhiking were best survived by not looking ahead, and his parents weren’t the reason he’d left Tres Fuentes anyway.
The air on Pirsig Avenue was heavy with spring, its smell unlike anything in Peru. In the window of Aeolian Records were sun-damaged jazz and symphonic albums, seemingly untouched since he’d last been in town. Inside the store, under the owner’s untrusting eye, two long-haired boys were flipping through the Rock bins. Clem went around to the alley behind the store. At the bottom of the stairs to the second-floor apartment, he hesitated. He remembered similarly hesitating on the landing below Sharon’s room in the hippie house.
Tacked to the apartment door, at the top of the stairs, was a file card on which someone, surely Becky, had written Tanner and Becky Evans ornately, in cursive, and drawn little flowers to either side. Eyes filling, Clem knocked on the door. He couldn’t remember Becky ever playing house as a girl. In Indiana, where he’d had her all to himself, she’d followed him wherever he went. He’d taught her to throw a baseball, taught her to watch it into the glove （his glove, their only glove） when he threw it back. She’d chased him with a dried-out piece of dog crap, screaming, “Petrified poo! Petrified poo!” And the gleeful savagery of the tortures she’d devised for a toy rabbit that had fallen out of favor, the giggling wickedness with which she’d enumerated its transgressions: since when had that girl wanted to play house?
He knocked again. Nobody home.
Overcome, all at once, by the miles he’d traveled, he returned to the street. He’d wanted to see Becky before he saw his parents, to make clear that she was the reason he’d come home, but all he could think of now was his bed at the parsonage. The day was warm, the sun near the zenith. A nap on a real bed would be delicious. Already half asleep, he bent his steps homeward past the bookstore, the drugstore, the insurance broker.
He was jolted awake when he came to Treble Clef. Behind the front window, Tanner Evans was showing an electric guitar to a middle-aged customer, someone’s mother. Clem stopped on the sidewalk uncertainly. Tanner glanced at him and returned his attention to the woman. Then he looked again, eyes widening, and came running out of the store. “What the hell?”
“I’m back,” Clem said.
“I’m thinking, do I know this person?”
Tanner, for his part, seemed perfectly unchanged. Perhaps would always be unchanged. He spread his arms, as he’d done so readily in Crossroads, and Clem stepped in for the embrace.
“This is fantastic,” Tanner said. “Becky will be so happy.”