Such is the prerogative of fiction novelists, they get to shape the characters in the way they like, but his drawing of them deprived Highway of believability. Emmett and Billy hop a train hobo style in order to get the car back, and thus begins a story that takes place over 10 adventure-filled days.īack to Girls and the “pawn shop,” Towles writes Emmett, Duchess and Woolly as though their work-camp misfortune was all the doing of others. Duchess ultimately “borrows” Emmett’s Studebaker, only for him and Woolly to head east.
His and Duchess's intent is to get the money, divide it up, and then get on with their lives.Įmmett has no interest in what his former barrack mates have cooked up, but novels wouldn’t be novels if everything went as planned. Woolly comes from a prominent and well-to-do family, and there’s $150,000 in the safe at the family’s “camp” up in the Adirondacks. Duchess and Woolly have other plans, plans that include bringing Emmett and Billy (the fourth musketeer as it were) east with them. They were serving time at Salina with Emmett, and they’d climbed into Warden Williams’s trunk ahead of him driving Emmett home. They’re all set to go, only for Duchess and Woolly to turn up. The punch wasn’t a killer, but the freak way in which the punch’s recipient landed resulted in him dying, and the rather innocent and good Emmett being sent to Salina. Two years before, he turned around to punch a Morgen local who was taunting him endlessly about his failed father. Indeed, he can’t realistically stay in Nebraska because of what brought him to Salina in the first place. Emmett will buy one house, rehab it only to sell it at a profit, then buy two houses with an eye on fixing both only to sell one while living in the other.Īs Emmett’s neighbor Sally Ransom puts it about Emmett late in the novel, he acts like smiles are a “precious resource.” Emmett is a serious, moral person albeit one with a past that’s not all of his own making. He and Billy will go either to California or Texas in order to start a new life. He also has $3,000 that his father secretly left him that will fund a move out of Morgen.
Emmett’s plan is to pack Billy and very few belongings into a Studebaker he’d purchased with the proceeds from his work as a carpenter’s apprentice before Salina.
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