Against the Blog: 2-18

Reef Traverse is living an itinerant kind of life with Stray and their son, traveling around, card-sharping, engaging in unlikely get-rich-quick schemes. This, however, is all cover for his anarchist, blowing-stuff-up activities. Stray is none too pleased when she learns of this, although she indicates that she'll stay with him through thick and thin.

He heads up to Denver towards look for Frank, but only narrowly escapes being crushed in an avalanche that, he presumes, was started with the purpose of killing him. So he returns, but he doesn't feel he can stay where he is, so he leaves his lover and child and, disguised as "East Coast nerve case Thrapston Cheesely III" (367), travels around. He takes up for a while with a touring Englishwoman named Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, but in New Orleans, they fight, and that's that. The band in the bar where they're staying is "Dope" Breedlove and his Merry Coons. Reef introduces himself to them during their break, and it turns out--surprise--that they're all involved in anarchist activities of one sort or another. There's an Irish revolutionary named Wolfe Tone O'Ronney, and an explosives guy named Flaco. Wolfe is headed to Mexico; Flaco to the Mediterranean; he convinces Reef to come with him.

Man, I owned this section.