Iceland Spar, Chapter Seven: Looks like them Traverse Boys Got Themselves in a Whole Heap of Trouble!

Here we get our first extended look at Reef and Frank. Frank is a student in "mine school." Is that a real thing? Of course it's a real thing on some level, but it seems like the kind of thing that your managerial-type mine personnel would be doing. Is Frank trying to be upwardly mobile? I don't have a totally clear understanding, but there will be plenty of time to think about that later. Right now, you get all you need to differentiate between the two brothers: Frank is conscientiously doing his mine schoolwork, when Reef drags him off to Nevada to help him sort out his romantic entanglements. It's easy to see how Frank will end up wandering the US looking for Webb's killer while Reef is fucking his way through Europe.

The said romantic entanglement is with his girlfriend, Estrella "Stray" Briggs, who has found herself pregnant (she will later give birth to a son, Jesse, who Will later show up as Jess Traverse, the aged labor-activism patriarch in Vineland), with whom he's argued. There are also parallel entanglements, Stray's roommate Sage also having various ex-beaux, one of whom, a little guy called Cooper with a guitar and motorcycle, feels like he has to be either a veiled historical figure or at least a reference to somebody else. Hard to say.

Frank himself is just sort of hanging around, having chats with women to whom he clearly feels some attraction, though he's less demonstrative than his brother. Stray is described appearing in his room, where "he tried to make out, against the daylight flowing in off the plain, what he could of her face veiled in its own penumbra" (205). Against the day! And specifically equating day with light, at that. Nice.

At the end of the chapter, the Traverses are contacted by telephone (a new, possibly magical technology--more invisible rays, and like that?) by Jimmy Drop, giving the news that Deuce is taking their pa somewhere (not clear whether he's dead yet; if he is, it's certainly the case that nobody knows it). So it's off to Jeshimon, which is apparently a spooky place that people don't like to mention. The two of them head Utah-wards, and split up at the town nearest Jeshimon, Mortalidad, and ya don't need to speak Spanish to figure that one out.

What will happen next?!? Seriously, I don't remember. But I look forward to reminding myself.

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