Herb left the repair shop and walked directly to the office of the current president of Babbington Studebaker, Wilbur Haggerty.  The men had taken to calling him “Haggard Bill” because of the visible effects on him of Studebaker’s going to the brink so many times and scrabbling back, but just barely, leaving Haggard Bill Haggerty limp and sweaty, his heart pounding.  Herb gave notice of his intention to retire in two weeks.  The next day, at Hargrove Slide Rules, Lorna simply quit, to the surprise and great relief of Edwin Berwick, now president, who had been wondering how to tell Lorna that in a month the name of the company would change to Hargrove Computational Devices and that within a year they would begin producing electronic calculators.
    They spent the next two weeks stocking the trailer.  Herb had, of course, outfitted the trailer with gadgets of many sorts.  Some were practical, like the two refrigerators.  A larger one held their stores, and a smaller one held things needed every day, like cream for coffee, and food for the day, transferred from the larger.  With careful planning—and Lorna provided the careful planning—there would be no need to open the larger one more than once every other day.  Others were romantic, like the record player. Herb bought and restored a portable windup-record player, not just because it wouldn’t require electricity, but because he and Lorna could carry it away from the trailer, to have “Lake Serenity Serenade” with them if they walked off into a grove of trees to find a pretty spot to eat lunch and field-test any animation ideas that might come to them on the road.
    Toward the end of the two weeks, late enough so that people wouldn’t be able to make a fuss over them, they said their good-byes.  That was that.  They put their furniture and furnishings in storage in the Hapgood Brothers’ warehouse, left the selling of their house to Bert and Ella and told them to keep whatever money it brought them, and left.  They got out of Babbington with shocking speed; at least, it shocked me.  It seemed as if, once they had decided to go, none of what they would have to leave behind mattered to them any longer.  I couldn’t understand how they could sell that house; it was so full of Herb’s gadgets—disappearing bookshelves, clattering dumbwaiters, the cooling system that pumped groundwater through salvaged Studebaker radiators, the weather station on the garage roof, the mailbox on a rope and pulley so that Herb could reel the mail in from the breakfast table.  How could they let all of that go, how could they leave their friends, leave Ella, leave me?  They did, and they made it look easy.  Now, I think that, subconsciously, they were in search of something that they knew they couldn’t get in Babbington.  They would never have put it this way—I doubt that they would ever have even thought to put it this way—but I think it was artistic freedom.
    They followed a zigzag route that took them through a number of small towns that Lorna chose for their names: Candor, New York; Freedom, Independence, and Paradise, Pennsylvania; Leroy and Huber Heights, Ohio; Pershing, Indiana; Piper City and Lovejoy, Illinois; Baring, Amoret, and Peculiar, Missouri; Hope and Paradise, Kansas; Ovid, Loveland, and Model, Colorado; Story and Paradise Valley, Wyoming; Epiphany and Eureka, South Dakota; Twin Bridges and Paradise, Montana; Bliss and Deary, Idaho; Opportunity and Paradise Inn, Washington; Zigzag, Carver, and Sisters, Oregon; Fortuna, Enterprise, Commerce, and Paradise, California; Inspiration and Paradise Valley, Arizona; Loving, New Mexico; Happy and Goodnight, Texas; Plain Dealing, Eros, and Darlington, Louisiana; Castleberry, Alabama; Climax, Georgia; and, finally, Punta Cachazuda, Florida.
    While they were traveling, they wrote little.  All I got was a postcard now and then:

    Breathtaking scenery. Weather VERY HOT. Yesterday caught in blizzard of tumbleweed. Scratches all over Avanti. 
    “Guppa” and “Gumma” 

    Humboldt found that the sunset inspired him to muse.  He looked around him and mused on what was left of his future.  He contemplated the prospect of living the rest of his life right where he was, and he found that he liked it.  He bought a tract of land and built a modest house.  Subsequently, in the evenings, when he sat on his patio and watched the sun go down, he began imagining a town around him, dreamed of wandering streets that didn’t exist, pictured himself greeting people who hadn’t even seen the place yet.  He began buying more land, and he began tinkering with it, improving it, sharpening the distinction between land and water by eliminating the ambiguous marshes, filling here and dredging there, until every bit of Punta Cachazuda was a well-formed island, peninsula, or waterway.  Then, house by house, Humboldt and Bitsy began building the town, extending the roads and sidewalks as they went along, all according to a plan pinned to the wall of their garage.
    The streets of Punta Cachazuda wandered through the town as if they’d been laid out whimsically, but in fact there was a purpose behind their intriguing sinuosity: they divagated to skirt boredom.  The canals and creeks and artificial peninsulas and islands, the twisting streets, the bridges, and the tiny parks made Punta Cachazuda look, especially from the air, like the sort of omnium-gatherum landscape that model railroaders build from papier-mâché.  Indeed, the town had the ragged edge of an unfinished work in papier-mâché: at the limit of development the road and sidewalk petered out, and the wind blew miniature dunes of sugary sand onto the lawn of the last-built house.
    Humboldt relied on word of mouth to sell his town to potential residents, and so he and Bitsy died before they saw much of it populated, but his children, who embraced his vision religiously, eventually saw Punta Cachazuda become what Humboldt and Bitsy had hoped it would be, a small town filled entirely with old people with time on their hands.  The houses were similar but not identical.  They were small cement-block houses, each with a tiny cement patio on its western side, where at sunset Punta Cachazudans sat and watched the maraschino sunsets.  Each house also had something that most Punta Cachazudans had never heard of before they arrived there—a “Florida room,” an incursion of the outdoors into the envelope of the house.  (Imagine that you were to sneak up behind a house with a conventional screened porch and yell, ”Boo!”  Startled, the house would draw a sudden breath and inhale its porch.  Now the porch would be inside the house.  It would be a Florida room.)
    The Bagnell-built house that Herb and Lorna chose was a significant one in the history of Punta Cachazuda.  It was the first one built beyond the limit of the plan that Humboldt Bagnell himself had drawn on a roll of shelf paper and pinned to the wall of his garage.  It was the first house in a new territory, a new beginning in a literal as well as a figurative sense, since the sons and daughters of Humboldt and Bitsy, unable to agree on a layout for the extension of the town, had resorted to tracing the original and taping it to the shelf paper at a point where they could effect an easy anastomosis of the streets, sidewalks, and canals of the old with the replica streets, sidewalks, and canals of the new.
    Because it was the first house of a new era and the first house on a new street, the Bagnells made an event of Herb and Lorna’s purchase, throwing in a set of patio furniture with the house, and (since they were also having a difficult time agreeing on street names) offering Lorna the chance to name the street on which the house stood.  She thought of dozens of possibilities, including Whatsit Way, Piper Pass, Lovers’ Lane, Animation Avenue, and Studebaker Street, but then she had an inspired thought.  “Mr. Bagnell,” she asked Bobo, the oldest of the offspring of Humboldt and Bitsy, “will there ever be a bridge at the end of this street?”
    “No,” said Bobo, with inherited authority.  “Oh, no.  Definitely not.  We Bagnells have everything planned out.  We have drawn the plans for the new section of Punta Cachazuda in the same spirit as our father drew the plans for the original section, and I guarantee you that we’re not going to change them, not a bit.  There will be no bridge at the end of this street.”
    “Well, then,” she said, “I have a name for it.”
    And so, once again, Herb and Lorna were at home on No Bridge Road.  Their house was like the others.  In truth, since it was the first house in the replication of the original section of town, it was exactly like the house that Humboldt Bagnell had built for himself and Bitsy.  From their patio, Herb and Lorna could see, for several days out of most months, through gaps between the other houses, the notable sunsets.
    In Punta Cachazuda, Herb and Lorna wore shorts most of the time.  All of their exposed skin browned.  Lorna began a shell collection.  Herb began buying tools again and built a folding workbench in the garage.  They allowed themselves, gladly, to be drawn into the social life of Punta Cachazuda, and soon their calendar was full of potluck suppers, card parties, shuffleboard and croquet tournaments, surprise birthday celebrations, and galas for each of the traditional holidays of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and most of the European countries.  They fit right in.  You would scarcely have found a reason to distinguish them from the average Punta Cachazudan unless, some night, you had peeked through a gap between the curtains that hung inside the window of their garage, while the average Punta Cachazudan was watching the eleven o’clock news, and had seen them at work on animated erotic sculpture. 
    They never sold any of their work.  They never even showed it to anyone.  It was their secret hobby.  Lorna found shell an intriguing and demanding medium, and she enjoyed combining bits of many types of shell to produce subtle shadings and textures.  Herb found that, freed from the confinements of jewelry, his mechanical imagination was positively rejuvenated, and he whistled while he worked.
    The primary pursuit of most Punta Cachazudans was to discover and employ new methods of killing time.  They passed the hours with games of cards and shuffleboard, shell gathering and fishing, gossiping and arguing, but the most popular way to keep busy was to learn something new.  Punta Cachazudans loved to attend classes and workshops.  A few were taught by instructors from local schools and colleges, but most were taught by other Punta Cachazudans.  Some of the instructors were retired practitioners of the arts they taught.  Others were lifelong amateurs.  A few were just eager, well-meaning frauds.  Because the classes reflected their instructors’ vocations and avocations, they ranged all over the vast savannah of human interest, from celestial navigation to astrology, from watercolor painting to plumbing.  Language classes, of the type geared to teaching foreign clichés and phrases useful for a traveler, were especially popular, and Punta Cachazudans who had taken these classes loved to season their speech with the exotic phrases they had learned, with the result that many a conversation in Punta Cachazuda had a Babelic flavor:
    “Hey, guten Tag, Ray. Comment ça va?”
    “Oh, not too bad.  Pas mal.  Can’t complain.  Es muy caliente, though, nein?”
    “Bozhe moy, you said it!  Sehr warm, sehr warm.”
    “Buon giorno, Ray, George.  Wie geht es Ihnen?”
    “Oh, pas mal, Harry.  Pas mal, gracias a Dios.”
    “Can’t complain, Harry.  How about you?  Kak vy pozhyvaete?”
    “Well—”
    “You keeping busy?  Fuyez-vous les dangers de loisir?”
    “Pretty much.  Thought I might do some fishing this afternoon.  Want to come along?”
    “I don’t know.  I’m kind of pooped.”
    “Oh-ho, out with the lustige Witwe again, Harry?”
    “Well, heh-heh.”
    “You know what they say—a buen bocado, buen grito.
    “Ha, ha, ha.”
    “Cela va sans dire, nein?”
    “Mais, oui. Das versteht sic von selbst all right.”
    Herb took Spanish and Predicting the Weather, and he joined the Green Thumbs and the Poker Hands.  He taught the Hands to play Piper Poker, but none of them cared for it much, and they only agreed to play a few hands of it whenever the club met at Herb’s because they thought he was a nice guy.  Lorna took Backyard Botany and Small-Boat Handling and joined the Shell Gatherers and the Never-a-Cross-Word Puzzlers and organized a group that assembled Comfort Kits for patients in nursing homes and hospitals and for children in foreign lands.
    After a while, Herb posted a notice on the recreation hall bulletin board for a class that he proposed to teach: “Repairing Things Around the Home.”  He had only a few students, most of them women, perhaps because the men felt that they didn’t need to be taught how to repair things around their homes, or perhaps because the men didn’t care to repair things around their homes.  Lorna offered a class on devising and solving logical puzzles.  At the first class quite a few people showed up just to be polite to Lorna, and even more people showed up to find out what the heck this was all about.  Attendance fell off considerably at the second class, many of the students pleading headaches that had set in after the first class.  At the third class, Lorna was left with just one student, Andrea Cogliano, who had developed a genuine passion for brain-racking puzzlers.  Herb tried offering a course in salesmanship, but no one showed up at all, since no one in Punta Cachazuda had anything to sell or any desire to sell anything.  He was more successful with a class called Making Useful Gadgets.  In the second year he deleted “Useful” from the title, and the course became one of the most popular among male Punta Cachazudans, who took to whistling while they worked and—later, of course—formed a number of whistling quartets on the barbershop model, organized concerts, staged whistle-offs, and so on.
    Lorna offered to teach soap-carving and at first attracted only a small number of students, since so many were still wary of Lorna-induced headaches.  Attendance grew and grew, however, when the word got around about Lorna’s talent as a sculptor and teacher and because rumors began to circulate, whispered on the shuffleboard court or at the market, that if the students progressed acceptably Lorna might bring in live models.
    Life in Punta Cachazuda wasn’t bad.  May visited them each year for a couple of weeks, and even she agreed that it was not bad.

    It really wasn’t bad, you know.  I had been going to Florida in the winter for—oh I don’t know how long, but I had always gone to Miami Beach.  It was just where everyone went then.  It was where you had fun.  In the sun.  I never dreamed of going anywhere else, and I certainly didn’t like the sound of this Montezuma place when they first wrote to me about it.  It sounded just deadly.  Well, it was deadly in a way, of course.  There wasn’t anything like a nightclub, or even a bar.  There was a recreation hall.  Really.  But, on the other hand, there was all that gorgeous sand, and those transfixing sunsets.  I couldn’t have lived there, of course, but still it wasn’t bad.

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Herb ’n’Lorna is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $13.00.

You should be able to find Herb ’n’ Lornaat your local bookstore, but you can also order it by phone from:

Bookbound at 1-800-959-7323 
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Libros en Español: Herb ’n’Lorna is also available in Spanish from Ediciones Destino.

Herb ’n’Lorna  is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 

First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

Now available in paperback from Picador USA, a division of St. Martin’s Press.

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.