"No," Nadine answered, "I don't think he is."
Larry woke up sometime in the night and propped himself up on one elbow. Nadine was only a vaguely female shape wrapped up in three blankets a quarter of the way around the dead fire. Directly across from Larry was Joe. He was also under several blankets, but his head stuck out. His thumb was corked securely in his mouth. His legs were drawn up and between them was the body of the Gibson twelve-string. His free hand was wrapped loosely around the guitar's neck. Larry stared at him, fascinated. He had taken the boy's knife and thrown it away; the boy had adopted the guitar. Fine. Let him have it. You couldn't stab anybody to death with a guitar, although, Larry supposed, it would make a pretty fair blunt instrument. He dropped off to sleep again.
When he woke up the next morning, Joe was sitting on a rock with the guitar on his lap and his bare feet in the run of the surf, playing "Sally's Fresno Blues." He had gotten better. Nadine woke up twenty minutes later, and smiled at him radiantly. It occurred to Larry that she was a lovely woman, and a snatch of song occurred to him, something by Chuck Berry: Nadine, honey is that you?
Aloud, he said: "Let's see what we've got for breakfast."
He built up the fire and the three of them sat close to it, working the nightchill out of their bones. Nadine made oatmeal with powdered milk and they drank strong tea brewed in a can, hobo fashion. Joe ate with the Gibson across his lap. And twice Larry found himself smiling at the boy and thinking you couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.
They cycled south on US 1. Joe rode his bike straight down the white line, sometimes ranging as far as a mile ahead. Once they caught up to him placidly walking his bike along the verge of the road and eating blackberries in an amusing way - he would toss each berry into the air, unerringly catching them in his mouth as they came down. An hour after that, they found him seated on a historic Revolutionary War marker and playing "Jim Dandy" on the guitar.
Just before eleven o'clock they came to a bizarre roadblock at the town line of a place called Ogunquit. Three bright orange town dump trucks were driven across the road, blocking it from shoulder to shoulder. Sprawled in the back of one of the dump-bins was the crow-picked body of what had once been a man. The last ten days of solid heat had done their work. Where the body was not clothed, a fever of maggots boiled.
Nadine turned away. "Where's Joe?" she asked.
"I don't know. Somewhere up ahead."
"I wish he hadn't seen that. Do you think he did?"
"Probably," Larry said. He had been thinking that, for a main artery, Route 1 had been awfully deserted ever since they left Wells, with no more than two dozen stalled cars along the way. Now he understood why. They had blocked the road. There would probably be hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars stacked up on the far side of this town. He knew how she felt about Joe. It would have been good to spare the boy this.
"Why did they block the road?" she asked him. "Why would they do that?"
"They must have tried to quarantine their town. I imagine we'll find another roadblock on the other end."
"Are there other bodies?"
Larry put his bike on its stand and looked. "Three," he said.
"All right. I'm not going to look at them."
He nodded. They wheeled their bikes past the trucks and then rode on. The highway had turned close to the sea again and it was cooler. Summer cottages were jammed together in long and sordid rows. People took their vacations in those tenements? Larry wondered. Why not just go to Harlem and let your kids play under the hydrant spray?