my ribs. “I told you it was kicks. Everybody’s kicks, man!” We carried Diamond all the way to Rocky Mount, North Carolina. My sister was no longer there; she had just moved to Ozone Park with my mother before I left. Here we were back on the long bleak street with the railroad track running down the middle and the sad sullen southerners loping in front of hardware stores and five and tens. Diamond said “I see you people need a little money to continue your journey. You wait for me and I’ll go hustle up a few dollars at a Jewish home and I’ll go along with you as far as Alabama.” Neal was all for it. Suddenly I remembered that Alan Temko had relatives in Rocky Mount, Jewish relatives, jewelers in the town. I told Diamond to find and hit the Temko jewelery store. His eyes lit up. He rushed off. Neal was all beside himself with happiness; he and I rushed off to buy bread and cheese spread for a lunch in the car. Louanne and Al waited in the car. We spent two hours in Rocky Mount waiting for Herbert Diamond to show up; he was hustling for his bread somewhere in town but we couldn’t see him. The sun began to grow red and late. It occurred to us Diamond would never show up. “What happened to him? Maybe Temko’s relatives took him in; maybe he’s sitting there right in front of the fireplace right now telling about his adventures with crazy people in the Hudson.” We remembered the time Temko had thrown us out of the party in Denver, the night of the nurses and the night I’d lost my key. We rolled all over the car laughing. Diamond never showed up so we roared out of Rocky Mount---“Now you see Jack, God does exist, because we keep getting hung up with this town, no matter what we try to do, and you’ll notice the strange biblical name of it, and that strange biblical character who made us stop here once more, and all things tied together all over like rain connecting everybody the world over by chain touch…” Neal rattled on like this; he was overjoyed and exuberant. He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there. Off we roared south. We picked up another hitch hiker. This was a sad young kid who said he had an aunt who owned a grocery store in Dunn, North Carolina, right outside Fayetteville. “When we get there I can bum a