| McGrath had been driving three days, I-80 all the way from Indiana into the breadbasket of an ugly blizzard that gave him something to think about. One day to Council Bluffs, one more to Cheyenne, and now sluicing in the wake of a Redball Express rig somewhere west of Laramie. He had caught the truck on a sweeping climb east of Elk Mountain and decided to tuck in behind. Now, even with chains, he wouldn't be able to get around; the north lane had drifted in to wall him off. |
| McGrath checked the gauges. It seemed prudent, but he knew that probing invited bad luck, his attention wiring the Volvo into the socket of his uneasiness. Skip, a philosopher-mechanic in Bloomington who worked only on Peugeots and Saabs, had debugged the electrical system as a favor to a friend. More precisely, Skip had promised only to induce the bugs to migrate into redundant circuitry where, left undisturbed, they might remain. Skip was of the opinion that Volvo built a good marine diesel and that their electrical systems had been designed by a German engineer who subscribed to Gurdjieffian electrokinetics and had never forgiven the Swedes their neutrality in World War II. Skip had spent three days drinking akvavit and reading Schopenhauer in preparation for the job. |
| The Volvo belonged to McGrath's wife, who now belonged to someone else. They had bought it from a colleague in the English Department at Bowling Green to which McGrath also no longer belonged. He was driving to San Francisco, to the MLA Convention, for an interview with Jenijoy LaBelle-Vonnegut, Fielding, Margaret Mitchell?-about a one-year replacement position at Long Beach State. |
| The Redball's logo was right in his face, and McGrath dropped into second as they squared off with another hill. McGrath had figured wrong. A Brown Ph.D., six years of carving up his dissertation into articles, servicing the department, tight with a couple of senior professors and cordially suppressing his gag reflex with most of the rest. Even that last year when suddenly, inexplicably, it all hung in the balance, sending |
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