Living After Midnight (1991)

Lee K. Abbott's book, published by Putnam in 1991, pairs his first novella, "Living After Midnight", in which two old college friends team up for a run of small-time holdups, with stories first printed in magazines including The Gettysburg Review and The Kenyon Review. In "Freedom, A Theory of", Walter Seivers Johnston Jr., then a twenty-one-year-old college student, is in an El Paso hotel in August 1968 when a fraternity brother he barely knows, Alton "Buttermilk" Corbett, is arrested down the hall. (Open Library)

Watches

Longines watch: After the police drag Alton out of the hotel, Walter slips into his wrecked room, drinks one of his Coors and finds the television silently showing the Chicago police charging demonstrators at the Democratic convention. At the moment he notices Alton's half-eaten room-service hamburger beside his Longines wristwatch on the dresser, Walter feels himself seize up inside. He takes Alton's overnight bag to the Stanton Street precinct house and arranges his bail. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: and then, at the moment I noticed his half-eaten room-service hamburger, next to his Longines wristwatch on the dresser, and observed a squad of blue-helmeted Chicago police charge willy-nilly into a line of boys and girls, I felt myself seize up inside (Lee K. Abbott, Living After Midnight, scan cataloged as Putnam, 1991, pp. 18 to 19, in "Freedom, A Theory of", where the sentence runs across the page break and the OCR's "poHce" and "arid" are read as police and and; August 1968 is fixed on p. 13; Internet Archive scan OCR)