Jack ducked under the chain and went to the shed. The door was padlocked shut, but he saw that the earth had eroded under one side of the small outbuilding. It was the work of a minute to remove his pack, wriggle under the shed's side, and then pull the pack in after him. The lock on the door actually made him feel safer.
He looked around and saw that he was in with some very old tools - this place hadn't been used in a long time, apparently, and that suited Jack just fine. He stripped to the skin, not liking the feel of his clammy, muddy clothes. He felt the coin Captain Farren had given him in one of his pants pockets, resting there like a giant amid his little bit of more ordinary change. Jack took it out and saw that Farren's coin, with the Queen's head on one side and the winged lion on the other - had become a 1921 silver dollar. He looked fixedly at the profile of Lady Liberty on the cartwheel for some time, and then slipped it back into the pocket of his jeans.
He rooted out fresh clothes, thinking he would put the dirty ones in his pack in the morning - they would be dry then - and perhaps clean them along the way, maybe in a Laundromat, maybe just in a handy stream.
While searching for socks, his hand encountered something slim and hard. Jack pulled it out and saw it was his toothbrush. At once, images of home and safety and rationality - all the things a toothbrush could represent - rose up and overwhelmed him. There was no way that he could beat these emotions down or turn them aside this time. A toothbrush was a thing meant to be seen in a well-lighted bathroom, a thing to be used with cotton pajamas on the body and warm slippers on the feet. It was nothing to come upon in the bottom of your knapsack in a cold, dark toolshed on the edge of a gravel-pit in a deserted rural town whose name you did not even know.
Loneliness raged through him; his realization of his outcast status was now complete. Jack began to cry. He did not weep hysterically or shriek as people do when they mask rage with tears; he cried in the steady sobs of one who has discovered just how alone he is, and is apt to remain for a long time yet. He cried because all safety and reason seemed to have departed from the world. Loneliness was here, a reality; but in this situation, insanity was also too much of a possibility.
Jack fell asleep before the sobs had entirely run their course. He slept curled around his pack, na**d except for clean underpants and socks. The tears had cut clean courses down his dirty cheeks, and he held his toothbrush loosely in one hand.
CHAPTER 8 The Oatley Tunnel
1
Six days later, Jack had climbed nearly all the way out of his despair. By the end of his first days on the road, he seemed to himself to have grown from childhood right through adolescence into adulthood - into competence. It was true that he had not returned to the Territories since he had awakened on the western bank of the river, but he could rationalize that, and the slower travelling it involved, by telling himself that he was saving Speedy's juice for when he really needed it.
And anyhow, hadn't Speedy told him to travel mainly on the roads in this world? Just following orders, pal.
When the sun was up and the cars whirled by him thirty, forty miles west and his stomach was full, the Territories seemed unbelievably distant and dreamlike: they were like a movie he was beginning to forget, a temporary fantasy. Sometimes, when Jack leaned back into the passenger seat of some schoolteacher's car and answered the usual questions about the Story, he actually did forget. The Territories left him, and he was again - or nearly so - the boy he had been at the start of the summer.
Especially on the big state highways, when a ride dropped him off near the exit ramp, he usually saw the next car pulling off to the side ten or fifteen minutes after he stuck his thumb into the air. Now he was somewhere near Batavia, way over in the western part of New York State, walking backward down the breakdown lane of I-90, his thumb out again, working his way toward Buffalo - after Buffalo, he would start to swing south. It was a matter, Jack thought, of working out the best way to accomplish something and then just doing it. Rand McNally and the Story had gotten him this far; all he needed was enough luck to find a driver going all the way to Chicago or Denver (or Los Angeles, if we're going to daydream about luck, Jacky-baby), and he could be on his way home again before the middle of October.