Mohawk

least in this case the driver was pretty, in a dingy sort of way. Her white sweater had the bluish tint that came from washing it in the same load as a pair of jeans. The girl’s complexion was smooth, but it also had this suggestion of unhealthy gray, though her features were full and soft, her hair not quite so blonde as it had first appeared. She was barefoot.
    At Rose Avenue she turned left off the highwaytoward downtown. “We’ll take the scenic route,” the girl said, “so you can see how much things’ve changed. They got a Kentucky Fried Chicken in next to the bank.”
    “Really?” Randall said, not sure he believed her. A Kentucky Fried Chicken in Mohawk. Imagine.
    On lower Main were several vacant stores, including what once was a small grocery owned by the father of one of Randall’s classmates. One of his sort-of friends. He had neither seen nor corresponded with anyone from high school since leaving Mohawk. Still, he was sorry to see the small grocery closed. “So, how’s college?” the girl said.
    “What makes you think I’m at one?”
    “The hair,” his companion said matter-of-factly.
    “It just grows,” he told her. “Whether you pay tuition or not.”
    “I don’t see what the point is. Of college, I mean.” She said it as if she really wanted to know what he thought the point might be.
    Randall didn’t have a handy explanation, though he liked studying. It was nice to sit around and read books without people thinking you were peculiar. You could even call it work, if you wanted to, and nobody there bothered to disagree. Randall himself had done real work and knew the difference, and he suspected that a lot of other people did too. But as complicities went, this one was harmless enough. Certainly more harmless than the one that sent people halfway around the world to kill or be killed in the name of national defense. He wondered what his grandfather would’ve thought of having a draft dodger for a grandson. Very soon, that’s what Randall would officially become. For all he knew, he was one already. Since dropping out at the beginningof the spring semester, he hadn’t made himself all that easy to locate. No doubt his mother had been collecting plenty of official documents bearing his name. That was partly the reason for his return. He had to try and explain to his mother. If Mather Grouse were still alive, Randall would’ve tried to explain to him, too. He doubted his grandfather would’ve understood, any more than he would have understood the hair and the stubble. Randall smiled at the thought of his grandfather, picturing Mather Grouse as he always did, shoveling the sidewalk or cutting the grass or weeding the small strip of garden in back of the house or stirring paint with a stick, patiently, the oil swirling gently toward the vortex in the center of the can until the mixture was smooth as velvet.
    “Go to war,” his grandfather would have advised him. “You will not have to kill. They will know what to do with you and the killing you object to will fall to someone else who probably will not object. You will learn about them and about yourself. You will not like what you learn, but better to learn it anyway.”
    “Spring break, or what?” the girl said.
    They were stopped beneath the traffic light at the Four Corners. The girl had told the truth. Halfway up the block a large red-and-white bucket rotated next to the dome of the Mohawk Bank and Trust.
    “I guess I’m pretty nosy, huh?”
    “Just medium nosy.”
    “I know who you are, even.”
    Randall doubted that. The last time he looked at himself in a mirror, it was all he could do to recognize himself. And he’d never seen this girl before.
    “You’re Randall Younger,” she said when the light changed. “When I was a sophomore and you were asenior, I had the biggest crush in the world on you.”
    Randall was surprised. “You should’ve said something.”
    “You got any money?” she said, pulling into Kentucky Fried Chicken.
    “You should have caught me earlier this morning. I was loaded. I gave it all to a needy man in Fonda.”
    “My treat, then.”
    Randall was hungry, but he didn’t like the idea of letting a strange girl pay for his food. There was a remote possibility that his grandfather would’ve learned to accept the draft evasion, but sponging a meal off a teenage girl whose car had a see-through floor was harder to justify. “It’s only ten-thirty,” Randall objected.
    “The best