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notice that some entries are dated, others not. I don’t exactly remember the reason for these inconsistencies, but my guess is that especially during our brief time among the bronco Apaches in the Sierra Madre, I had no idea what the date was, and as we lived in an alternate reality there, it hardly seemed to matter.
    Other than that, the following story is true—not as it is remembered sixty-seven years later through the gauze of time and memory, and related by an old man who might wish to aggrandize himself before his death, but exactly as it happened to a seventeen-year-old boy named Ned Giles in that long-ago year 1932.

 
     
    NOTEBOOK I:
     
     
    Leaving Home
     
     

     

 
     
    5 JANUARY, 1932
     
     
    Chicago, Illinois
     
     
    Tomorrow morning I leave Chicago, and so tonight I begin a brand-new notebook to record my trip. All the others, the dozens that I’ve kept since I was a little kid, I’ve decided to leave behind here, along with my old life. A new notebook for a new life. It’s bound to be a grand adventure, and maybe someday my children and grandchildren will want to read about it. Maybe when I’m an old man, sitting on the front porch in my rocking chair, I’ll want to read about it myself. I’m excited about going, but I have to admit that I’m a little scared, too. I have butterflies in my stomach tonight and I can’t sleep anyway, so I think I’ll just begin by telling how it is that I came to be leaving home in the first place.
     
    I have been living alone in our house since the deaths of my parents over three months ago. It wasn’t until a week or so ago that anyone even noticed that I was alone here. I think people are a bit distracted; everyone has troubles enough of their own and what’s one orphan kid compared to all the folks who have lost their homes and are living out on the street?
    My mother died in Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital last fall. She’d been sick for over a year with the cancer. I didn’t really know it at the time, but my father was already under a great deal of pressure with his business. Pop was the first Studebaker dealer in Chicago, but I guess people haven’t been buying too many automobiles the past couple of years, and he got himself in a good deal of financial trouble. The last thing my mother said to me before she died was, “Take care of your father, Neddy, he’ll be lost without me.”
    We buried my mother in the Oak Park cemetery on a cold, blustery October morning. All I really remember now about the service was the mourners all bundled up in winter overcoats, and the yellow leaves swirling on the wind. Ten days later my father put a gun in his mouth in the bathroom of our house and blew the back of his head out. I found him there when I got home from classes, sitting slumped over on the toilet. He left an envelope with my name on it propped up on the bathroom shelf. Inside there was a copy of his insurance policy and the keys and title to his new Commander Eight Roadster. There was a short note in the envelope explaining that I would be better off with the car and the money, and that he wished he could have left me more.
I’m sorry, son,
Pop said in his note,
but I just can’t go on without your dear mother. You’ve always been a good boy. I know you love taking pictures. Why don’t you buy yourself a good camera. Good luck, Ned. Love, Pop.
That was it. Pop’s final advice to me.
“Why don’t you buy yourself a good camera.”
    I guess I sound pretty cold about it, don’t I? I loved my parents but I haven’t been able to cry for them yet. I guess when Mom died, I was too busy worrying about Pop. He was in pretty rough shape, drinking too much scotch and crying himself to sleep every night. But I never thought he was going to kill himself. And to tell the truth, I’m just so damn mad at him for it. What kind of father leaves his only child alone like that? I loved my father but I realize that he was a weak man. I think he had a