MY FORD WAS A SICKLY BROWN COLOR that might have gone well with Theodore Timmerman’s suit. But that was all right, because the poor paint job helped cut down on the price. It was a used 1948 model and only cost me two hundred and fifty dollars. It ran well and gas was cheap, so transportation was no problem at all. I pulled around Mace and drove up the alley between Seventy-first Place and Florence. Fearless was nowhere to be seen as I approached, but when I got to the back of my place he jumped out, opened the passenger’s door, and hopped into the seat like an eel gliding into a resting place between stones.

After a few blocks Fearless said, “It’s nice to be ridin’ again. You know it took me so long to get to your place last night ’cause I had to walk.”

“You don’t even have bus fare?”

“Not right now, Paris. You know the day Kit skipped out was my payday.”

“I can’t believe it. Don’t you have a bank account?”

“What for? I make money and I spend it.”

“But you don’t have anything.”

“I got as much as any other man, more than many.”

If anybody ever wrote a book about our friendship they would have called it The Businessman and the Anarchist. Fearless lived from day to day and here to there. His life in California was the dream that so many others had been shattered by. One night he slept on the beach, snoring by moonlight, and then he’d spend a week lying in some pretty girl’s bed. If he had to work he could swing a twelve-pound hammer all day long. And if work was scarce he’d catch a dozen sand dabs from a borrowed canoe, come over to my house, and trade that succulent entrée for a few nights on my front room sofa.

O’BRIEN’S WAS UP ON COCKBARROW, a few blocks from the train station. The entrance was no wider than a doorway, and the sign could have been for a professional office rather than a bar. But once you got past the short hall you entered a large room built around the remnants of a large brick oven that had once been used to make bread for Martinson’s Bakery in the twenties.