I CALLED HIM OLD MAN because he'd messed himself up so bad on drugs, both mentally and physically, that he'd come to look like a very old man. That, and the fact that he reminded me of my dad.
So far as I knew, Lester still lived in the secluded, backwoods cabin he and I had shared during our heyday in the sixties. It was near the foothills of the Blue Mountains, about fifteen miles southwest of a little town called La Grande.
Lester and I, well, we went way back. Baby boomers both, Lester was now forty to my thirty-nine. While I was sitting around on campus smoking grass and bitching about the war, poor Lester was fighting it. Dodging bullets. That was before he got into it, back when he was no different from any other cocky kid. He wasn't there long enough to see much, but he saw some.
