ADAM

"You can drop me right there by that sign, man," Adam told the taxi driver.

The taxi stopped at a spot on the old highway 500 yards beyond the truck stop drive and a like distance from the ramp to the northbound interstate. Adam reached around for his wallet and pulled out a twenty. The driver waved it away.

"You don't owe me nuthin."

"Hey, come on, man, take your fare."

"Uh-uh, no way. Merry Christmas."

"Don't you have kids to feed?"

"Yeah, I got three little guys, but the oldest one's like you, can't walk. I wish I could take you where you're going."

"Long way, man. I'll be OK."

"Damn, you're gutsy. Like my little guy. Five years old and ain't nuthin he thinks he can't do on them damn crutches."

The driver popped the trunk as Adam opened the door and slid to the edge of the seat, crutches in hand. He stood, fitted them to his forearms, shut the door and walked around to the trunk, the knotted left leg of his baggy jeans swinging rhythmically beneath his stump. He extracted his sizable backpack and hefted it into place. Before shutting the trunk, so the driver wouldn't leave, he crutched up to the driver's window and tapped on it. When the driver lowered it Adam extended his hand and shook with the driver, saying, "Thanks, man. Merry Christmas."

"Nuthin, man. Have a good life." Adam walked on back, shut the trunk, and the taxi was on its way.

It was 7:00 p.m., long since dark. Adam positioned himself by the roadway, set his backpack on the ground and pulled out the folded cardboard sign with its lime green Day-Glo foot-high lettering, "WASHINGTON DC." It was his fifth time around on this trip, through undergraduate and into grad school. The first cured him of feeling guilty about the kindness of strangers, despite the functional left leg bound up inside his jeans. It was what he did, it was what he was.

This trip was his Christmas present to himself each year. God knows there was nothing worth speaking of coming from anywhere else. His housemates and others who knew him in his university life were used to the gimp phase of his year. At the November onset of chilly weather he would start crutching around in the month or so before Christmas break because his habitual slight limp had morphed into pain in his left hip. He would explain it as the aftereffect of a long-term childhood condition, without going into detail. Adam never even hinted at its nature, but the orthopedically knowledgeable might have decided it was Perthes disease, that would someday require a hip replacement but that he was too young yet. Only Adam knew that the condition had never existed.

Nor would anyone have suspected what he was shaping himself up for each year. After his housemates had left for their family homes at Christmas break, Adam would strap on the broad leather band with the pocket that secured his foot snugly to his thigh, tie the leg of his baggy blue jeans and pull it over the fake stump, call a cab and head out on his dream trip. Two or three days of hitched rides would get him to northern Virginia, where he would get the trucker - it was always lonely truckers who picked him up - to drop him near a Washington Metro rail stop. There he would call Uncle Ziggy to retrieve him at the New Carrollton terminal in Maryland. From there they would drive the fifty miles east, across the Chesapeake Bay, to Ziggy's place in the woods where Adam would spend whatever time remained before Christmas Eve, when the pair would show up at the nearby family home on the potato farm, as if nothing unusual had transpired.

Adam's family had a vague notion that Ziggy picked Adam up in Washington or Baltimore each year, from a plane or maybe a bus. They had no idea how Adam was paying his bills or his fare home, nor did anyone seem to care about the limp he had developed. Truth was, there wasn't a lot of room to care. Adam was the first of thirteen kids born in twenty years on a farm that barely fed them. His father was an independent-minded cuss who often boasted in his cups, which were many, that he had fathered half the alphabet: Adam, Bertha, Carl, Daniel, Edward and his twin Frederick (Eddie and Freddie), Gertrude, Helga, Ivan, Jonathan, Katharine, Luke, and Maria. From the start Adam was different, living in a lonely mathematical world no one in his very verbal family understood. He never came into his own until he got the university scholarship to study in Texas.