It was night now. Gene watched as Francois knelt over the fire, slow cooking a tin of beans and slabs of bacon, singing to himself. They'd walked for almost two days, north along the interstate at first, and then up into the hillsides where the din of automobile traffic gave way to the cloistered silence of the woods.
We'll eat good tonight, Francois kept saying over and over. Real good, he said, one knee planted in the pale grass of the forest floor.
Yesterday evening, Gene could still see the lights of the city in the eastern sky. Now thirty miles further west, night was true. They camped along the edge of a clearing at the peak of a hillside where a brief meadow gave way to pines. There the burrough of Queens felt like a thing of the past. A dreamlike recollection of storefronts and liquor stores and people. On Gene's last night in the city, they threw a party for him, his acquaintances, at The Cedar. He never showed up, walking instead to the pier, alone, where merchant ships floated undisturbed in the darkness. He watched the crafts bob and part the water methodically, the ripples like radio waves.
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