“FILL me in on it,” I said.
Everest and I sat at a restaurant table with a plateglass window view of the Pacific that was the color of smog toothed with whitecaps. Everest looked like a retired Iowa farmer dressed up in his Sunday best; in fact, he looked like an Iowa farmer who was a Sunday school superintendent on the side. He was the guy holding the pitchfork in Grant Wood’s American Gothic; what you’d expect him to order for lunch would be chicken-fried steak with country gravy; what he had for lunch was consommé and abalone and artichoke hearts.
American Gothic“Well,” he said, “there’d been this Wilbur Forsythe working twenty years with Gunheits. He started in just out of high school, as an office boy. He studied bookkeeping and then accounting through correspondence schools. He got
