to work, both of us using the same old clunker car in shifts—And Evelyn always maintaining that she and I were really made for each other but her Karma was to serve Cody in this particular lifetime, which I really believe and I believe she loves him, too, but she’d say “I’ll get you, Jack, in another lifetime. . . And you'll be very happy”—“What?” I’d yell to joke, “me running up the eternal halls of Karma tryina get away from you hey?”—“It’ll take you eternities to get rid of me,” she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her—I wanta be chased for eternity till I catch her.
“Ah Jack” she says putting her arm around me on the beach, “it’s nice to see you again, Oh I wish we could be quiet again and just have our suppers of homemade pizza all together and watch T.V. together, you have so many friends and responsibilities now it’s sad, and you get sick drinking and everything, why dont you just come stay with us awhile and rest”—“I will”—But Ron Blake is redhot for Evelyn and keeps coming over to dance with seaweeds and impress her, he’s even asked me to ask Cody to let him spend some time alone with Evelyn, Cody’s said “Go ahead man.”
Having run out of liquor in fact Ron does get his opportunity to be alone with Evelyn as Cody and me and the kids in one car, and McLear and family in the other start for Monterey to stock up for the night and also more cigarettes—Evelyn and Ron light a bonfire on the beach to wait for us—As we’re driving along little Timmy says to Paw “We shoulda brought Mommy with us, her pants got wet in the beach”—“By now they oughta be steamin,” says Cody matter-of-factly in another one of his fantastic puns as he lockwallops that awful narrow dirt canyon road like a getaway car in the mountains in a movie, we leave poor McLear miles back—When Cody comes to a narrow tight curve with all our death staring us in the face down that hole he just swerves the curve saying “The way to drive in the mountains is, boy, no fiddlin around, these roads dont
