Michael Malone - Weebly

of standing so many feet to the front or rear or side of
him been blown away and burned away into death. He
was angry at the government for making him a piece of
that superfluity spent and discarded. Henry took a
cigarette from his pants pocket and lit it without pausing
in the rhythm of his march.
Tracy Canopy, returning to Dingley Falls from the
train station (where, with the brave smile of a mother
sending a daughter off to the Peace Corps in a jungle
someplace she couldn't pronounce, she had said goodbye
to Beanie), slowed her car when she saw the
hitchhiker, his arm patiently raised. Six years earlier, in
New Haven, Mrs. Canopy had been robbed of her
purse at knifepoint by a young hitchhiker, who had then
gratuitously hit her in the face with his fist.
Afterwards she had promised her friends never
again to pick up a stranger, even if he lay moaning in a
ditch beside the road, for muggers were known to play
such ploys upon the innocent. The problem was you
couldn't tell who anyone was from their clothes
anymore: this young man with his boots and funny pants
could be a state surveyor, or a hippie with a sack full of