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locate a San Francisco station, and Tumble leaned his head out the window to catch the breeze that would hopefully resurrect his face from the exhausted numbness of his head. The Hun pulled into the middle land of the freeway and was driving unusually smoothly, only using the express lane now and then to pass a Sunday driver, being careful not to draw the attention of a state highway cop.

They had been driving nearly two hours and had just bypassed Berkeley, swinging off the freeway and onto the entrance ramp of the bridge to take them across the bay to San Francisco, when Emmett turned around to wake up Billy Landout in the back seat, only to discover he wasn't there. "Billy! Billy's gone! He's not there!" Tumble jumped around surprised, then up on his knees, bending over the back of the front seat to check out the rear floor of the car. "Where the fuck is he?! Billy!"

As soon as they crossed the Bay Bridge they turned off an exit and pulled the car onto a city side street, double-parking it for a moment to finally make certain that Billy wasn't there. His shoes were there, underneath the woven cotton blanket where he was supposed to be, but wasn't. The three of them looked at each other, and at the same time each realized that they had left Billy Landout back at the Sacramento service station without his shoes and with no money. They left him there, and whether they did it consciously or unconsciously it didn't matter. It was all the same. They left him there, and it didn't make any difference who was driving or who wasn't. They all left him there.

They left Billy Landout back there in a service station nearly one hundred miles away without his shoes, because they really didn't care about each other anymore, and now everything was finally different. Everything Emmett imagined the night before had just proved itself to be brutally true, and he was more sad than angry because he instinctively knew that his brother Billy Landout would never forgive him for having left him behind like that without even his shoes, and he wouldn't be his brother any longer and would never speak to him again. And he never has, not even to listen to Emmett simply tell him, "Sorry, Billy. Sorry."

After that real and symbolic purge of one of the brothers, only the Digger women remained a united front while the men took care of what they had to in their separate ways. Emmett did practically nothing besides work with Free Food, picking it up or stealing the meat and delivering it to the women who cooked it for the now outrageous "Summer of Love" hordes who crowded into the Pan [end page 409]