Chapter One

Sitting up in the darkness, Walt Gaines, his naked body sheeny with sweat, pushed aside the mosquito netting that canopied his cot and pulled on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and his mud-encrusted Tevas. For a man pushing sixty, Walt, who had played varsity football and lacrosse at Middlebury back in his undergraduate days, looked tough and hardy, and he was: at six-one, two hundred pounds, he still had most of his hair, it was still mostly light brown, rather than gray, and his face, despite the lines etched across it from years of toiling in the sun, was surprisingly youthful. People who didn't know his age, upon meeting him for the first time, often took him to be five or six years younger.

In the cot next to his, Jocelyn, his wife, stirred but didn't awaken. As she breathed, steadily and slowly, her thin nostrils fluted out the faintest nasal snore, a delicate, almost musical rasp, like the buzzing of a far-off bumblebee. A woman whose mind and spirit were perpetually in harmony (unlike her husband, who was ever-restless, a man who, by comparison, would make Odysseus look like a layabout), Jocelyn could sleep through storms, hurricanes, even, her husband firmly believed, the wrath of God.

Thirty years of togetherness behind them, and Walt was still amazed by his life- mate's equanimity. It was a wonderful counterbalance to his own headstrong energy. One of the many reasons they had been a good team. Marriages don't last as long as theirs had without the important gears meshing. As Walt watched her he thought back on their thirty years of togetherness. Thirty years! Jesus. Thirty years ago, the Beatles had barely brok