c won c o ing around ex sal “We ought to get into San Francisco Saturday
morning.”
“Five days,” Colin said. “Hardly more than six hundred miles a day.” He
sounded disappointed by the pace.
“If you could spell me at the wheel,” Alex said, “we’d do better.
But I wouldn’t want to handle much more than six hundred a day all by
myself.”
“So why didn’t Courtney drive out with us?” Colin asked.
“She’s getting the house ready. She met the movers there, and she’s
arranging for drapes and carpeting-all that stuff.”
“Did you know that when I flew up to Boston to stay with Pauline while
you two were on your honeymoon-that was my first plane ride?”
“I know,” Alex said. Colin had talked about it for two solid days after
he came back.
“I really liked that plane ride.”
“I know.”
Colin frowned. “Why couldn’t we sell this car and fly out to California
with Courtney? ”
“You know the answer to that,” Alex said.
“The car’s only a year old. A new car depreciates the most in its
first year. If you want to get your money out of it, you keep it for
three or four years.”
“You could afford the loss,” Colin said, beginning to beat a quiet but
insistent rhythm on his dungareed knees. “I heard you and Courtney
talking. You’ll be making a fortune in San Francisco.”
Alex held one palm out to dry it in the hushed breath of the
air-conditioning vent on the dashboard. “Thirty-five thousand dollars a
year is not a fortune.”
“I only get a three-dollar allowance,” the boy said.
“True enough,” Alex said. “But I’ve got nineteen years of experience
and training on you.” The tires hummed pleasantly on the pavement.
A huge truck hurtled by on the other side of the road, going in toward
the city. It was the first traffic, besides the van, that they had
seen.
“Thirty-one hundred miles,” Colin said. “That’s just about one-eighth
of the way around the world.”
Alex had to think a minute. “That’s right.”
“If we kept driving and didn’t stop in California, we’d need about forty
days to circumnavigate the earth,” Colin said, holding his hands around
an imaginary globe at which he was staring intently.
Alex remembered when the boy had first learned the word “circumnavigate”
and had been fascinated with the sound and concept of it. For weeks he
did not walk around the room or the block-he “circumnavigated”
everything. “Well, we’d probably need more than forty days,” Alex said.
“I don’t know what kind of driving time I can make on the Pacific
Ocean.”
Colin thought that was funny. “I meant we could do it if there was a
bridge,” he said.
Alex looked at the speedometer and saw that they were only making a
moderate fifty miles an hour, twenty less than he had intended to
maintain on this first leg of the journey. Colin was good company.
Indeed, he was too good. If he kept distracting Alex, they’d need a
month to get across the damn country.
“Forty days,” Colin mused. “That’s half as long as they needed when
Jules Verne wrote about it.”
Though he knew that Colin had been skipped ahead one grade in school and
that his reading ability was still a couple of years in advance of that
of his classmates, Alex was always surprised at the extent of the kid’s
knowledge. “You’ve read Around the World in Eighty Days, have you?”
“Sure,” Colin said. “A long time ago.” He held his hands out in
front of another vent and dried them as he had seen Doyle do.
Though it was a small thing, that gesture made an impression on Doyle.
He, too, had been a skinny, nervous kid whose palms were always damp.
Like Colin, he had been shy with strangers, not much good at sports, an
outcast among his contemporaries. In college he had begun a rigorous
weightlifting program, determined to develop himself into another
Charles Atlas. By the time his chest filled out and his biceps
hardened, he grew bored with weight-lifting and quit bothering with it.
At five-ten and a hundred-sixty pounds, he was no Charles Atlas. But he