Write me a Letter

chickens and unpeeled potatoes and an onion or two in foil and then tuck them in a corner of the hot asphalt so they’d be good and juicy by lunchtime. Where does he pick up stuff like that? I bet he’d even know what they did with all those billy goats.
    Onward, ever onward... passing miles and passing thoughts... and then there was Fats, was one of the passing thoughts. Fats, to whom I owed one, you may recall. I could rat to the Mob about him. I could ditto to the cops. I could sic Used Car Mike on him. I could devise some appropriate trickery of my own. Or maybe I should just let sleeping curs lie, as long as he left Will’s family alone. I didn’t want him really mad at me, after all, he might start thinking, he might even conceivably get someone to gain access for him to Air France passenger lists, and then where would I be. How long did they keep those things in the computer, anyway? I knew passenger lists were entered daily, covering such subjects as name, sex, destination in seven different categories, starting point, fare paid, and method of payment and so on, but probably not even Benjamin knew how regularly they were expunged from the system. What I thought I would do was to merely drop Fats a polite note in which I would suggest that (a) it was Zit-Face who made off with the sixty-two five, not Will, and (b) Zit-Face had also held out on Fats when he reported on the almost penniless state of my wallet.
    Onward. Finally we turned off the main road, cruised past a trailer park, then into the town of our destination, Locke. Locke is not your average small Californian town, kids, replete with gas stations, fast-food joints, dogs, and teenagers. Locke is made of wood, firstly, and Chinese, secondly. All Chinese, with one or two exceptions. We parked behind the town’s one hotel, the one we had been directed to, a semiderelict-looking all-wooden monstrosity; even the fire escapes were wood. We alit, then strolled along a (wooden) sidewalk past a short row of (wooden) homes and storefronts. A sign along the way informed us that the town had been built in 1912 to house levee workers and that it had once had a population of 1,500 plus a real live theater. We peeked in the windows of Yuen Chong’s General Store; one or two of the items of foodstuffs looked almost edible. An old Chinese gent half dozing in the sun on a stairway gazed at us briefly as we passed, then went back to stroking his long gray goatee. We turned a corner and passed a shop called Locke Ness—get it? We noticed the Dai Loy Museum was closed. The whole town, with its false wooden frontages and Asian extras, was so cinematic I kept expecting Bruce Lee to suddenly leap out and scream bizarre noises. Which was not the reason I was nervous, by the way. I was nervous because I was already nervous. Was there such a thing as a Nazi Chinaman? Benny, where are you?
    We walked back to the hotel via Locke’s number two street; two was about all there were. There were two people in the cavernous lobby when we entered—a youngish Asian fellow in a spotless white T-shirt at the reception desk, and some nature lover, complete with hiking boots, sun hat, knee-length mosquito-proof shorts, and long woolen socks, who was sprawled in a bamboo chair in the corner looking at a map through a magnifying glass, a well-stuffed orange knapsack at his feet out of which unidentifiable rods of metal jutted, much like those chopsticks from Momma’s bun. His face was bright red with sunburn, or maybe embarrassment, and his windbreaker sleeves were almost covered with sewn-on badges saying ”Greenpeace,” ”Sierra Club,” ”Save the Whales,” ”Bike for Health,” ”The Audubon Society,” ”No to Nukes,” ”Dolphins Are People Too,” and God knows what else. Repressing a shudder, I turned back to the desk clerk, who neatly folded up and then put away his Chinese-language newspaper before attending to our needs. Which he did, it is perhaps unnecessary to add, in perfect American, and with extreme politeness. I booked us two single rooms, for one night, in my name; he refused either a deposit or a look at my plastic. He insisted on carrying Uncle Theo’s small bag up to the first floor, where our rooms were, opened them up for us, and then refused a tip. My room was small but clean and moderately comfortable. Once me and Uncle Theo were downstairs again, our host informed us that, in case we were hungry, there were two restaurants in town but only one,