The Fool's Run

to Chicago together, if I take this job, do me a favor?”
    “Yes?”
    “Don’t talk to me about art, okay?”
    Her face froze up. Offended, she looked down at her watch and said, “An hour and a half. Please be prompt.”
    She started stiffly across the sandbar toward the willows, but loosened up after a few feet, and even gave it a little extra effort, knowing I’d watch. Which I did. At the base of the levee she stopped to put on her shoes, glanced back, and nimbly climbed the bank.
    I keep a pair of 8 x 50 binoculars in the boat, so I can get a closer look at landscape structures. When she disappeared over the levee, I got the glasses and jogged after her. A car door slammed as I scrambled up the levee and put the glasses on her car’s license plate. It was a Minnesota tag, probably a rental. Back at the boat, I wrote the number on the cash envelope with a nice vibrant black made of alizarin crimson and hooker’s green.
    Then I went off to call Robert Duchamps, pronounced Doosham, and usually called Bobby.

Chapter 2
    T HE CAT, A tiger-striped tom, had moved in a few months after I bought the apartment. He was waiting now on the back of the living room couch, gazing out the window toward the river. He was doing the same thing one day when a pigeon, one of the big blue and white numbers, smacked headlong into the glass. He came off the couch like a bullet and hid under the kitchen sink for the rest of the day. He hasn’t trusted a pigeon since.
    “I’m going out of town,” I told him. “I’ll leave the flap open. Emily will feed you.” He looked at me, yawned, and turned back to the window.
    Emily Anderson lives in the apartment below mine. She’s seventy years old and a damn good painter. Most Wednesday nights we hire a model and drink beer and draw and argue. I walked down the stairs and knocked on her door. When she answered, I told her about the trip. She agreed to take care of the cat.
    “Though you ought to pay me for taking care of the smelly thing.”
    “Jesus Christ, you drink enough of my beer to float a battleship,” I said.
    “Yeah, and make sure there’s a six-pack in the fridge,” she said as she shut her door. We get along famously.
    I live in a sprawling apartment in the northeast corner of a converted red-brick warehouse, four floors up. The painting studio is on the north side, under a lot of glass. There’s also a study, a small living room that looks east toward the rail-yards and river, a tiny kitchen with a dining bar, and one bedroom.
    Most of my time is spent in the studio or the study, which is dominated by three walls of books and a bunch of personal computers. There’s an IBM-AT that’s been collecting dust lately, one of the IBM PS/2s, a Mac II, and my favorite, a full-bore Amiga 2000. A Lee Data dumb terminal is stuffed under a book table next to an early vintage Mac. A few old-timers from Commodore, Radio Shack, and Apple sit in boxes in a corner with power cords wrapped around their disk drives. I work on the big machines when I need money, but prefer the small ones. Power to the people.
    I turned on the Amiga, loaded a communications program, and typed in Bobby Duchamps’s phone number in East St. Louis.
    Bobby lives in the phone wires. We met one night in the late seventies, by accident, deep inside the General Motors design computers. We had a nice chat, and he gave me a number in Chicago. The number didn’t exist as an independent phone line, but it triggered an intercept. Bobby was a phone phreak before he started hacking.
    Bobby specializes in databases. He’s deep into Arpanet and Milnet and BNeT and a half dozen other international and intercontinental data networks. He knows the credit company computers like the back of his hand. If you need something from a phone-wired database, chances are he can get it.
    Other than that, I didn’t know much about him. I was down in New Orleans once and hadn’t hooked up my portable, and he called me on a voice line. He sounded like one of those soft-spoken Delta blacks, in his teens or twenties. He had a speech impediment, and hinted that he had a physical problem. Cerebral palsy, something like that.
    Since then I’ve called him at half a dozen different numbers in the biggest metro areas east of the Mississippi. I don’t know whether he actually moved or somehow changed area codes. You can get him personally, twenty-four hours a day, if you know how.
    The East St. Louis number rang without an answer. I