“Oh, yes?”

He nodded. “Of course,” he added judiciously, “it’s buried under 220 pounds of wobbling fat. Fortunately I don’t mind size in a woman as long as, you know, you don’t have to remove a wall or anything to get her out of the house.” He gave his boot a thoughtful swipe.

“So how did you meet her?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, sitting forward keenly, as if this was a story worth telling, “she asked me to come and look at her panties.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“They’d got caught in the washing machine agitator,” he explained.

“And was she wearing them at the time? You said she wasn’t real smart.”

“No, she was washing them and the elastic got stuck in the spindle thing and she asked me to come and help extract them. Big panties,” he added thoughtfully, and fell into a brief reverie at the memory of it, then continued:. “I got ’em out, but they were shredded all to hell, so I said, kind of droll like, ‘Well, miss, I sure hope you’ve got another pair, because these are shredded all to hell.’”

“Oh, Stephen, the wit.”

“It’ll do for Waynesboro, believe me. And she said-now here’s the thing, my grubby, hog-humping friend- shesaid, ‘Well, wouldn’t you like to know, honey.’” He made his eyebrows bounce. “I’m meeting her at seven outside the fire station.”

“What, she keeps her spare underpants there?”

He gave me an exasperated look. “No, it’s just a place to meet. We’re going to Pappa John’s Pizza for dinner. And then, with any luck, we’ll do what you’ve been doing all day. Only I won’t have to climb a fence and lure her with alfalfa. Well, I hope not anyway. Hey, look at this,” he said, and reached down to a paper bag at his feet. He brought out a pair of pink female underwear that could fairly be called capacious. “I thought I’d give them to her. As a kind of joke, you understand.”

“In a restaurant? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Discreetly, you know.”

I held up the underpants with outstretched arms. They really were quite arrestingly jumbo-sized. “If she doesn’t like them, you can always use them as a ground sheet. Are these-I have to ask-are these this big as part of the joke or-”

“Oh, she’s a big woman,” Katz said, and bounced his eyebrows again happily. He put the pants neatly, reverently back in the bag. “Big woman.”

So I dined alone at a place called the Coffee Mill Restaurant. It felt a little odd to be without Katz after so many days of constant companionship, but agreeable as well, for the same reason. I was eating a steak dinner, my book propped against a sugar shaker, entirely content, when I glanced up to find Katz stalking towards me across the restaurant, looking alarmed and furtive.

“Thank God I found you,” he said, and took a seat opposite me in the booth. He was sweating freely. “There’s some guy looking for me.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Beulah’s husband.”

“Beulah has a husband?”

“I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her and here we are both in the same town.”

This was all going too fast for me. “I don’t understand. What happened?”

“I was standing outside the fire station, you know, like we’d agreed, and a red pickup truck screeches to a stop and this guy gets out looking real angry and saying he’s Beulah’s old man and he wants to talk to me.”

“So what did you do?”

“I ran. What do you think?”

“And he didn’t catch you?”

“He weighed about 600 pounds. He wasn’t exactly the sprinting type. More the shoot-your-balls-off type. He’s been cruising around for a half hour looking for me. I’ve been running through backyards and crashing into clotheslines and all kinds of shit. I ended up with some other guy chasing me because he thought I was a prowler. What the hell am I supposed to do now, Bryson?”

“OK, first you stop talking to fat ladies in laundromats.”

“Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.”

“Then I go out of here, see if the coast is clear, and give you a signal from the window.”

“Yeah? And then?”

“Then you walk very briskly back to the motel, with your hands over your balls, and hope this guy doesn’t spot you.”

He was quiet a moment. “That’s it? That’s your best plan? That’s your very best plan?”

“Have you got a better one?”

“No, but I didn’t go to college for four years.”

“Stephen, I didn’t study how to save your ass in Waynesboro. I majored in political science. If your problem was to do with proportional representation in Switzerland, I might be able to help you.”

He sighed and sat back heavily with his arms crossed, bleakly considering his position and how he’d got himself into this fix. “You don’t let me talk to any women again, of any size, at least until we get out of the Confederacy. These guys have all got guns down here. You promise?”

“Oh, it’s a promise.”

He sat in edgy silence while I finished my dinner, swiveling his head to check out all the windows, expecting to see a fat, angry face pressed against the glass. When I had finished and paid the bill, we went to the door.

“I could be dead in a minute,” he said grimly, then clutched my forearm. “Look, if I get shot, do me a favor. Call my brother and tell him there’s $10,000 buried in a coffee can under his front lawn.”

“You buried $10,000 under your brother’s front lawn?”

“No, of course not, but he’s a little prick and it would serve him right. Let’s go.”

I stepped outside and the street was clear-completely empty of traffic. Waynesboro was at home, in front of the TV. I gave him a nod. His head came out, looked cautiously left and right, and he tore off down the street at a rate that was, all things considered, astounding. It took me two or three minutes to stroll to the motel. I didn’t see anyone. At the motel, I knocked on his door.

Instantly a preposterously deep, authoritative voice said, “Who is it?”

I sighed. “Bubba T. Flubba. I wanna talk to yew, boy.”

“Bryson, don’t fuck around. I can see you through the peephole.”

“Then why are you asking who it is?”

“Practicing.”

I waited a minute. “Are you going to let me in?”

“Can’t. I got a chest of drawers in front of the door.”

“Are you serious?”

“Go to your room and I’ll call you.”

My room was next door, but the phone was already ringing when I got there. Katz wanted every detail of my walk home, and had elaborate plans for his defense involving a heavy ceramic lamp base and, ultimately, escape out the back window. My role was to create a diversion, ideally by setting the man’s truck alight, then running in a contrary direction. Twice more in the night, once just after midnight, he called me to tell me that he had seen a red pickup truck cruising the streets. In the morning, he refused to go out for breakfast, so I went to the supermarket for groceries and brought us both a bag of food from Hardees. He wouldn’t leave the room until the cab was waiting by the motel office with the motor running. It was four miles back to the trail. He looked out the back window the whole way.

The cab dropped us at Rockfish Gap, southern gateway to Shenandoah National Park, our last long stretch of hiking before we ended part one of our big adventure. We had allotted six and a half weeks for this initial foray and now it was nearly over. I was ready for a vacation-we both were, goodness knows-and I longed to see my family, beyond my power to convey. Even so, I was looking forward to what I hoped would be a climactic amble. Shenandoah National Park-101 miles from top to bottom-is famously beautiful, and I was eager to see it at last. We had, after all, walked a long way to get here.

At Rockfish Gap there is a tollbooth manned by rangers where motorists have to pay an entrance fee and thru-hikers have to acquire a backcountry hiking permit. The permit doesn’t cost anything (one of the noblest traditions of the Appalachian Trail is that every inch of it is free) but you have to complete a lengthy form giving your personal details, your itinerary through the park, and where you plan to camp each night, which is a little ridiculous because you haven’t seen the terrain and don’t know what kind of mileage you might achieve. Appended to the form were the usual copious regulations and warnings of severe fines and immediate banishment for doing, well, pretty much anything. I filled out the form the best I could and handed it in at the window to a lady ranger.