'Just like Phil Ochs,' Ron Cummings had said to Gardener as they sat near the back of the bus on the first day of the tour. He said it with a nervous bad-boy-at-the-back-of-the-classroom giggle. 'But then, Bill Claughtsworth always was a derivative son of a bitch.'

Patricia McCardle had gotten twelve reading dates and fairly good advances on a deal which, when stripped of all the high-flown rhetoric, boiled down to six poets for the price of one. Following Claughtsworth's suicide, she found herself with three days to find a publishing poet in a season when most publishing poets were booked solid ('Or on permanent vacation like Silly Billy Claughtsworth,' Cummings said, laughing rather uneasily).

Few if any of the booked groups would balk at paying the stipulated fee just because the Caravan happened to be short one poet – to do such a thing would be in rawther shitty taste, particularly when one considered the reason the Caravan was a poet short. All the same, it put Caravan, Inc. in a position of contractual default, at least technically, and Patricia McCardle was not a woman to brook loopholes.

After trying four poets, each more minor-leaguer than the last, and with less than thirty-six hours before the first reading, she had finally called Jim Gardener.

'Are you still drinking, Jimmy?' she asked bluntly. Jimmy – he hated that. Most people called him Jim. Jim was all right. No one called him Gard except himself … and Bobbi Anderson.

'Drinking a little,' he said. 'Not bingeing at all.'

'I'm dubious,' she said coldly.

'You always have been, Patty,' he replied, knowing she hated that even more than he did Jimmy – her Puritan blood screamed against it. 'Were you asking because you just happened to be short a quart, or did you have a more pressing reason?'