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up the climb north to Mansfield. It had snowed in the night, and the shivery landscape glowed in the high light before the Ozark dawn. Before the turnoff to Almartha, I watched a ten-point buck and three does race below a line of cedars, the snow kicking up like puffs of fog behind their white tails. Going west from Mansfield took me through the rolling hills of Amish country. Along #60, a four-lane divided highway, black horse-drawn buggies were driven by bearded men in black wearing wide-brimmed, round hats. I passed through Springfield and on up #13 and across the backwater of the Harry S. Truman Dam to Clinton. #7 took me to Harrisonville. #71 put me on #435, which brought me on into the jarring cityscape of sooty Kansas City.
    The snow on the highway had been melted by pounding semis long before I got to Springfield, but there were drifts of dirty white along the road most of the way north. Up from Springfield and Humansville, there’s a stretch of gas stations and a little spot called Amy Jane’s Café at Collins, Missouri. Amy Jane’s sign says HOME COOKIN & HOMEMADE PIES . With a gut rumble, I wheeled my brother’s ’64 Chevy pickup right on into Amy Jane’s parking lot. Inside, I was greeted like folks. There was a billboard high on the wall with a day-glo handwritten pie menu. It offered sixteen flavors, everything from coconut cream to blueberry. I had two pieces of lemon with my coffee, which was country good. Most of the customers were good ol’ boys and their buds. There were truckers and families as well. Everybody ate pie.
    Pie and radio is how, in my family, we entertained ourselves during the Great Depression. Even after World War II, when not everybody had TV sets. Picking up crumbs with my fork, I sat there thinking back. I do that more and more. I’ve started to miss people I’ve never missed before, to return to scenes from my childhood that are as fresh as if I was standing there again.
    After taking the wrong exit twice in Kansas City, I got to the casino at three-thirty in the afternoon. At the front desk they told me the weigh-in had been at noon and that Hoolie’s fight would go off at eleven the following night. From fight guys, I also learned that Big Willie Little had been three pounds overweight and had to take them off in the steam room. Three pounds is a ton to a featherweight. It sounded good for Hoolie.
    After leaving off my gear in the room, I went to the buffet, where, among other things, they prepared fresh Chinese food. I hadn’t had good Chinese food since L.A. In Springfield and Branson and on down in Mountain Home, Arkansas, it was hog slop. The stuff in the casino was first-rate, and I stuffed myself. I wouldn’t eat anything else that day. When I finished, I went straight up to Hoolie’s room and asked for my thousand. He was playing dominoes with Policarpo Villa, a scumbag trainer living in Los Angeles who’ll put a green kid in way over his head and then dump him for losing. By destroying the careers of his own boys, he helps other managers build a record for their fighters, and that’s how he also picks up a couple of hundred under the table each time he sells a boy out. He sports a mandarin mustache that he grows down over his mouth to hide his bad teeth, and he wears a white Stetson indoors and out. It turned out that Policarpo was Hoolie’s new trainer as well as his new manager. That saves Hoolie the 10 percent he’d have had to pay Ike, because a manager/trainer only gets 33 percent of the purse. Ike gets zip.
    When Hoolie didn’t answer me about my dough and instead kept right on playing dominoes, I started tipping his pieces over so Policarpo could see his numbers.
    “Hey! whatchoo doin, man? I was kickin his ass!”
    “We got a deal, or not?”
    “I’m playin dominoes, I’m thinkin, man, I got ten bucks ridin!”
    “You got my money.”
    “I was gonna pay you out of my trainin expenses, ese, but I had to pay more for sparrin partners back here than