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Ping.
When Billy came out, Dan nodded to his wrapped footlong. “Save that a couple of minutes. As
long as we’re in Boulder, there’s something I want to check out.”
Five minutes later, they were on Arapahoe Street. Two blocks from the seedy little bar-and-café
district, he told Billy to pull over. “Go on and chow that chicken. I won’t be long.”
Dan got out of the truck and stood on the cracked sidewalk, looking at a slumped three-story
building with a sign in the window reading EFFICIENCY APTS GOOD STUDENT VALUE. The
lawn was balding. Weeds grew up through the cracks in the sidewalk. He had doubted that this place
would still be here, had believed that Arapahoe would now be a street of condos populated by well-todo
slackers who drank lattes from Starbucks, checked their Facebook pages half a dozen times a day,
and Twittered like mad bastards. But here it was, and looking—so far as he could tell—exactly as it
had back in the day.
Billy joined him, sandwich in one hand. “We’ve still got seventy-five miles ahead of us, Danno.
Best we get our asses up the pass.”
“Right,” Dan said, then went on looking at the building with the peeling green paint. Once a little
boy had lived here; once he had sat on the very piece of curbing where Billy Freeman now stood
munching his chicken footlong. A little boy waiting for his daddy to come home from his job
interview at the Overlook Hotel. He had a balsa glider, that little boy, but the wing was busted. It
was okay, though. When his daddy came home, he would fix it with tape and glue. Then maybe they
would fly it together. His daddy had been a scary man, and how that little boy had loved him.
Dan said, “I lived here with my mother and father before we moved up to the Overlook. Not much,
is it?”
Billy shrugged. “I seen worse.”
In his wandering years, Dan had, too. Deenie’s apartment in Wilmington, for instance.
He pointed left. “There were a bunch of bars down that way. One was called the Broken Drum.
Looks like urban renewal missed this side of town, so maybe it’s still there. When my father and I
walked past it, he’d always stop and look in the window, and I could feel how thirsty he was to go
inside. So thirsty it made me thirsty. I drank a lot of years to quench that thirst, but it never really
goes away. My dad knew that, even then.”
“But you loved him, I guess.”
“I did.” Still looking at that shambling, rundown apartment house. Not much, but Dan couldn’t
help wondering how different their lives might have been if they had stayed there. If the Overlook had
not ensnared them. “He was good and bad and I loved both sides of him. God help me, I guess I still
do.”
“You and most kids,” Billy said. “You love your folks and hope for the best. What else can you do?
Come on, Dan. If we’re gonna do this, we have to go.”
Half an hour later, Boulder was behind them and they were climbing into the Rockies.