The Drift (2002)
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John Ridley's novel, a Knopf first edition of 2002, is narrated by a man who was once Charles Harmon, a tax lawyer living well in a Los Angeles suburb, and is now a train tramp known on the rails by a racist nickname and kept going by drugs. The man who taught him to survive the rails asks him to find a seventeen-year-old niece, Corina, lost somewhere on the High Line across the Pacific Northwest. (Open Library)
Watches
- Armitron watch
- Stepping off a freight outside Williston, the narrator takes the time from a Lady Armitron day/date watch on an expansion bracelet that he rescued from the bottom of a garbage can in Reno, perfect when he found it except for a crack in a crystal that is really cheap plastic. Wound once a day, it has not let him down in a year and a half, and it stays his clock for the rest of the book: twenty minutes' walk into town (p. 41), 6:20 after a sleepless night (p. 74), ten past three with a four o'clock freight to catch (p. 189). The text names the maker and its ladies' line, and no model.
Source text: The time of my detraining was more or less early afternoon, 1:40 according to the Lady Armitron day/date watch with the expansion bracelet I'd rescued from the bottom of a garbage can in Reno. (John Ridley, The Drift, scan cataloged as Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, p. 40; Internet Archive scan OCR)