"Leg shot," Gino said proudly. Sally Daffodil smiled patiently. Joe looked a bit restless.
"Are you a model?" Patrick asked.
"Was," Cree said and led Sally away. Parker put on a Dixieland album. Vassar? Gino was a Dartmouth graduate. Joe Burke was doing carpentry work but had dropped out of Hamilton College. He and Gino were writers of some kind. Patrick felt that he had stumbled into an alternative world; the more educated you were, the less money you made, or something. He didn't understand this world. It attracted him and put him off. It was free in a way that seemed good. But it was threatening, somehow. There was something overripe about it. He went outside and had a non-alternative hamburger, served to him by the older boy. The smell of meat cooking on the grill was delicious. Smoke rose, drawing Patrick's eyes up the dark green mountain to the ridge line, an hour's walk above them.
"So, how do you like our fair town?" Hildy asked.
"Very fair it is," Patrick said. "Good burger!"
"Plenty more where that came from." Patrick heard a trace of Europe in her voice.
"Are you from Woodstock?"
"I was born in the Netherlands," she said. "We came over not long after the war."
"I used to live in Germany," Patrick said. "Very different."
"Ja," Hildy said and yelled at Alden, the youngest, to get away from the road. She turned back to Patrick.