27

Chapter 27

The day after the Incident, Bufford abandoned the room he was renting downtown. I helped him sneak his meager furnishings and a bag of potato chips out under cover of moonlight. We narrowly escaped the wrath of his landlord's Rottweiler, Fussy, and didn't at all escape a nasty puncture wound in the foot from a rusty nail. We had been airing out Ineola Sanchez's house for a couple of days and preparing it for his covert habitation. Apparently, and lucky for Bufford, the Sanchez family didn't look too carefully at their annual city property tax statement, because no one ever came by to inspect or repossess the house, which meant that the taxes must have been paid up-to-date. I would be surprised if anyone would bother with evaluating just another house like that in our neighborhood, anyway. Apparently, there are bigger fish to fry down at city hall.

He was completely moved in on Friday and we celebrated this stage of his Master Plan by sitting outside on the lawn chairs with a shared reading from the Cincinnati manuscript that, amidst all the existential hub-bub, I was still laboring through. I was on page 334 of 500 pages. It still reminded us vaguely of Hemingway.