It was a Friday night in early October. Headlights pulling out of the high school parking lot flooded the darkness of Highway 47 with light. As we started out for home, we wrapped ourselves in our jackets or sweat shirts, the autumn air cool and crisp, still new, still romantic, still a revelation.

Our varsity football team, the Mustangs, had just lost to the Waterford Wolverines, thirteen to six, seriously jeopardizing our chances for a conference championship, but that didn’t seem to matter to any of us in the throng of sophomores and freshmen that had formed and grown during the .game

We’d found each other, like we did at every home game, either in the bleachers or the concession stand or in the crowdof kids walking or hanging out on the asphalt 440 meter track that surrounded the football field. It was the great gathering place for the students who were motivated to attend more by a need for social interaction than an expression of school spirit.  That week, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to the game or not.  It’d been only a week since Paul Morris had died. Then I found out that my little sister was going to have some of her junior high friends over, and that tipped the scale in favor of going. I told my mom I was going, and she set 11:00 as my curfew.

When we started the walk home after the game, our ranks had swelled to eight or nine sophomores and a couple of freshmen, none of us with our driver’s license yet. As we walked, one by one, our ranks would diminish as we came to the houses or corners that belonged to those who lived closest to the school. By the time we walked from the school parking lot past Zimmerman’s Ford dealership and crossed the railroad tracks into the brightness of the streetlights and the storefronts of downtown and entered the Town Fryar, four of us; Wes Collinson, Dan Hansen, Jim Bryant, and myself, remained.  The neon sign at the bank alternated messages about the upcoming Ladies’ Auxiliary Luncheon with the current time and temperature It was 53 degrees Fahrenheit and ten past ten.

The Town Fryar was the local diner, a greasy spoon that for years was the gathering place for the high school kids who would be loyal clientele for a couple of years until they’d graduate from Pepsi and milkshakes to the beer and whiskey of the three taverns on Main Street. Conversations and gossip that began at the game would continue or be rehashed, and jokes and stories about cars and girls and the events of the past week would be told and discussed.

The place was warm and loud with laughter and buzz, and nearly full with mostly juniors and seniors, 11^th and 12 graders, and their dates. The booths were all taken, so we took a table in the front. I sat facing the street. The waitress came and took our orders.  I, like I did every time, ordered the cheese burger basket with onion rings and a strawberry shake. 

We settled in and started talking about the game when I looked out the big window to the other side of Main Street, to the white building with the sign that read “Sterling Brothers funeral hall,” and it occurred to me that Paul was in there, at that very moment, probably laid out on a table with one of the Sterling Brothers doing whatever a Sterling brother does, prepping Paul for his big day tomorrow. I felt the sudden grip of a hand on my right shoulder, squeezing tight, and I noticed that all the other guys had gone silent, their mouths hanging open, looking at me and whoever, whatever, the hand belonged to, and I could see, reflected in the window, the image of Mrs. Palmer, my freshman English teacher from the year before, standing behind me.

Mrs. Palmer and I always had one thing in common – the fall semester of 1972 was our first year at Orchard Depot High school; she fresh out of college, me out of middle school. That was probably the only thing.  She was beautiful, and like just about every other boy in her classroom, English suddenly became my favorite subject.  She had blonde hair she wore in a bun, highlighting her perfect cheekbones.  She was tall and lean, with smooth and creamy skin, and deep blue eyes and soft cheeks. 

“Hello, Tom,” she said.

“Hi, Mrs. Palmer,” I replied, turning around. I recognized our school colors in the red sweater and blue jeans she wore. 

‘How are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m doing okay,’ I replied. She was wearing her hair down, and it fell on and around her shoulders.  She was perfect.

There was a man standing at the cash register.  He looked like a movie star, with short but thick black hair and a Kirk-Douglas-ish chin. He called out, “Ready, Ruthie?” as he stuffed his wallet in the back pocket of his slacks.

“Be right there,” she replied before turning her attention back to me. “If you ever need someone to talk to,” she said, “just stop by my classroom.” Paul and I were students in her vey first class, first period ninth grade English, so she knew how close we were.

“Okay,” I said, then teasingly added, “Ruthie.”

“You’d better watch it, Buster,” she said pointing a finger at me. She glanced to the door, where her husband was standing holding her jacket open for her, when she bent down and gently kissed the top of my head. Her perfume smelled sweet and intimate. Then she was slipping her arms into the jacket, and they left, and the world that had temporarily stopped spinning kicked back into gear.

“Holy, shit!” Wes blurted out, “Makes me wish Paul Morris had been my best friend.”

“Wes!’ Dan said. “Jesus ChIrist”

“What the fuck,.” Jim said “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“What? I only meant …” Wes’s face turned as red as his hair in acknowledgement of the inappropriateness of his remarks. “Sorry, Tom,” he said.

“That’s okay,” I replied, accepting Wes’s apology.  I felt bad about the fact that I’d been kind of sullen all night.  I still hadn’t learned how to process grief, and I had no way to articulate how it felt, especially to these guys, who were just classmates, nowhere near as close to me as the one guy who would have understood what I‘d been feeling since I lost my best friend, that being my best friend since fourth grade, Paul Morris.

The attention paid me by Mrs. Palmer took me away, if only for a moment, from what I’d ben obsessing about all week.  I’d never seen a dead body before, and tomorrow, at the funeral, Paul would be the first. During the brief hours I slept I was visited by vivid nightmares. In the one I can still remember, our little league team had gathered at the grade school field, and we were waiting for Paul to show up before we stated practice. The sky darkened into deepening black, black clouds that the wind blew across the sky until they blotted out the sun and chilled the air.  The wind gusted and blew dead leaves off of the ground and twisted and turned them into a spinning whirlpool rising from the ground in center field.  The gust exhausted and the column of leaves died and fell in a heap on the ground, revealing ankles that rose up to legs and then a uniform, splattered with dried and caked on blood. Paul was there, standing alone in centerfield.  I got a good look at him, his eyes were dull and empty and colorless with dark circles beneath them, his skin pale and gray. “Paul,” l said, and the sky grew darker, black as night, when he turned to me and said, ”Worms.”

The food came, but for some reason, my appetite, which had being growling during the game, waned.  I picked at my order until the others were done.

“‘Are you going to eat that?” Wes asked. Wes was short and pudgy, with a roll of baby fat that extended over his belt. He was well known for his ability to eat, and had already consumed two Fryar dogs and an order of fries before turning his attention to my leftovers.

“No, go ahead,” I said.  Wes enthusiastically scraped the contents of my plate onto his while Jim rolled his eyes in disgust. Jim could always barely tolerate Wes and they appeared to be complete opposites, yet they were always together. The only explanation was that they lived on the same street.  When you’re a young boy, geography plays as prominent a role in determining friends as anything else.

That’s how Paul and I found each other.  In the summer before fourth grade, Paul’s family moved into the ranch style house three ranch style homes down and on the other side of the street from where my family lived, on Vicksburg Avenue on the eastern edge of our town, Orchard Depot, Wisconsin. One bright June day I saw him walking by with the same black and yellow metal carrying case I used for my Hot Wheels collection, and from that point on we were inseparable. We loved sports and rooted for the same teams except in baseball, where we were in that dark period between 1965 and 1969 when Milwaukee lost the Braves and before Bud Selig bought the Seattle Pilots franchise, moved it to Milwaukee and renamed it the Brewers. With the absence of a Milwaukee team to root for, we had to pledge allegiance to someone. Paul chose the Chicago Cubs, the regional favorite at the time, while I chose their bitter rivals and the defending champion St. Lois Cardinals. We settled our differences in countless hours of Strat-O-Matic games played out in my basement. We were little league teammates, and in our last year, when we were twelve, we both made the all-star team, and came one out away from winning the championship series.  When summer ended, we played basketball in our driveways, or football in our back yards. We slept out in tents in the summertime, and explored the neighboring woods and farm fields, watching his Springer Spaniel, Dolly, run windshield wiper patterns through open fields of green and gold until finding and pointing out a pheasant and staying on point until Paul gave her the flush command and she’d kick it up for us to shoot with wooden sticks that served as make-believe Browning shotguns. It was no more real hunting than Strat-o-Matic was real major league baseball, but the poetry of Dolly running and staying on point was as pure and real and beautiful as any Frost or Dickinson.

We exited the Town Friar with the bank telling us it was 10:45.  I had fifteen minutes to make the curfew mom and dad had set for me.   It’d be close, but I figured they’d cut me about five minutes of slack. Dan and I said goodbye to Jim and Wes, who lived on the other side of Main Street, and Dan and I crossed Main Street and headed east towards our homes. Dan lived on Fredrickson Avenue, only about a block from Main Street.  I’d drop him off and finish walking to Vicksburg alone.  I ‘d been dreading those last four blocks without Paul all week, but before we went  there, I had to deal with the Sterling brothers and their stupid funeral hall. 

I had no idea what the Sterling brothers looked like. I imagined they’d look something like Nosferatu, who I’d seen in a silent movie on Channel 11 sometime before. It was more than the knowledge that Paul was in there that creeped me out. I was always creeped out by the place, by the presence of the dead. A few years later I’d learn that the older of the two Sterling brothers had died years before; they didn’t change the name because by that time there were four other Sterling brothers funeral homes scattered through the state, so they couldn’t change the name, it’d become a franchise, like McDonalds, prompting the idea of drive-thru service lanes, one for drop-offs and one for pick-ups, to take root in my brain.  I also wondered when the older Sterling brother died, did the younger one prep him? Did he cut his brother down his back, open him up and pump him full of embalming fluid?.

“You okay?” Dan asked as we walked by the funeral home.

“Yeah,” I replied. “these places have always given me the creeps.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Plus, the fact that Paul’s in there.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Dan said. Dan was tall, taller than me, one of the tallest guys in our class, but he was gangly and still growing into his height. He’d join us in the epic pickup basketball games that frequently materialized in Water Tower park, but he wasn’t very good. He was, none the less, a good guy, well liked and respected by all.

“Are you going tomorrow?’ I asked him as we crossed State Street on 14^th Avenue.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Have you ever been to one before?”

“Yeah, my grandpa’s, He died a couple of years ago. You?”

“I’ve never been to one.”

“They’re okay.  Gets boring after a while.”

“I’ve never seen a dead person before. What’s that like?”

“it’s kind of weird. You have to stand in line to go and look at it when you first get there. The body is laying there in an open coffin, and I was real nervous about it before hand, but once I got up there, it was just my grandpa, and he looked like he was sleeping. It looked like he was sleeping, except you could tell, just by looking at him, that he was never going to wake up again.”

We came to the corner of Fredericksburg Avenue and 14^th street.

“Well, maybe I’ll see you at the funeral tomorrow,” Dan said.

“Yeah, maybe.”

Then Dan was gone. I watched him walk away from the glow of the corner street light until he was consumed by the darkness, and I was reminded that despite the bright glow of the streetlights that lit up 14^th street, it was still night, and I was passing through it, through the secrets and mysteries it concealed. A gust of cold blew in from the north. I turned the collar of my jacket up and started for home. I was alone.  As I walked, I started rehashing the events of the past week in my head.

The previous Saturday morning, I went with my mom to the library.  As we backed out of the driveway, we both noticed the police car with its lights flashing parked in Paul’s driveway. Neither one of us knew why it was there, and we didn’t speculate.

When we got to the library, the librarian, the one named Connie, older, short gray hair, glasses, looked just like a librarian was supposed to look, saw us come in and called mom over to her desk. They started whispering to each other, when my mom suddenly and loudly gasped, putting her hand to her mouth, and I knew something, something bad and big, had happened to Paul, and that was why cops were at his house. It took a while for all the details to weave into a coherent story, but we knew right from the start, from the sketchy and incomplete details Connie gave us was that there was a car accident and that Paul was dead.

It happened a couple of miles out of town, out on county Highway J, where Paul, a passenger in Corey Wilson’s dad’s 1969 Fort LTD, was killed when a 60 year old farmer named Willoughby  ran his Buick through a stop sign and t-boned Paul and Corey, collapsing the frame into the car’s passenger side and crushing Paul.  The farmer was dead, too, while Corey suffered only a broken right hand. The ironic thing was that although Corey had only gotten his license a month before, and that Willoughby had 45 years of a perfect driving record, without even a parking ticket, he was found 100 percent at fault, and that the only thing Paul and Corey were guilty of was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I made my way to the corner of Wilderness Avenue, and 14^th Street, just a block away from Vicksburg Avenue. The city planner who, in the early 1950s, before the post-World War Two boom reached Orchard Depot, when the roads on the east side of State Street were still farm fields, designed the development of the neighborhoods that by 1973 were already ten to fifteen years old, was a big civil war history buff. To pay tribute, he deemed that all of the north / south roads, all of the avenues, would be named after Civil War battles, while the streets would conform to the same numbering system the rest of Orchard Depot used. Vicksburg Avenue ran between thirteenth and fourteenth streets. Our address was 1314 Vicksburg Avenue and Paul’s was 1307 Vicksburg Avenue.

As I walked on, I wondered again, why I hadn’t cried more. Aside from a couple of tears when mom first told me what the librarian told her, that Paul was dead, I hadn’t’ cried all week. Other kids at school openly wept when they found out. I, his best friend for so long, couldn’t bring myself to cry, even though I thought about him constantly, even as the world went on without him. All I could muster was a couple of nightmares and some teen-aged angst about having to see a dead body for the first time.

The truth was that Paul and I were growing apart. It wasn’t any one big thing, nothing that anybody could touch that came between us. We were growing apart because we were growing up, time and experience and fate shaping us, sculpting us into the men we’d later become.  When the summer of 73 began, Paul and I started hanging out, like we did every day of the previous six summers, but for some reason, it was strangely unsatisfying. Fun wasn’t found as easily as it was in summers past, even though we looked for it in all the old familiar places –in our driveways, in the woods and fields, or on our bikes.  We were just beginning to shed off of our childhood skin, and all of those childhood things and places were in the puberty fueled process of being replaced by less innocent pursuits like driver’s licenses, weed, and girls. By mid-July, we were hanging out a couple of times a week, and by the end of August, we hadn’t seen each other for weeks.

Then school stared, and we walked together, and we rebooted our friendship, not to the level it was before, but it was getting stronger again, until Paul got into Corey Wilson’s dad’s car last Saturday morning.  It struck me that the funeral tomorrow would be to mourn the loss of the man Paul will never be as much as it was for the child that he and everybody else once was, that he will always remain.

I finally arrived at the corner of 14^th and Vicksburg. As I walked toward our house, I looked and saw that its windows were dark, and my mom and dad had left the yard light on for me. I smiled. One of my favorite things in the world was coming home to a lit up yard light.  Nothing felt as warm and inviting as its yellow glow, and it represented trust and acceptance, that no matter what time you get home, we’ll be here, home.

I walked up the driveway and entered our house.  I shut the front door behind me.

“Is that you, Tom?” Mom’s voice asked from her darkened room.

“Yes,“ I said, looking at the clock in the kitchen.  It was 11:10. I was ten minutes late.

“I made some brownies if you’re hungry,” Mom said, above dad’s snoring.

Yes! I thought to myself.  I was starving ever since we left the Town Fryar, since I’d let Wes Collinson eat half of my order.  I found the cake pan on the kitchen counter top. Brownies with fudge frosting.  She must have made them for my sister’s party. I was in Heaven.  I poured myself a glass of milk and cut a row of Brownies out of the pan, and when that was gone, I had another glass of milk and a second row.

Finally, with my gut full and my head empty, I went to the front door and locked it and shut the yard light off. I was exhausted. Before I went to bed, I looked through the narrow window in the front door out to Paul’s house. His yard light was on, too and I felt a heaviness in my heart and tears rushing to my eyes. They burst through, I couldn’t contain them. I just stood there, crying uncontrollably. It seemed like I’d never stop and now, nearly fifty years later, on some level, I never have.

(First fiction I’ve written in a long time –it shows)

In his dream, he was walking, alone, through the streets of his childhood home town.  It was late, maybe two A.M., and the inky-blackness of night was interrupted by the electric glow of streetlights, lighting up front yards while leaving back yards dark and formless. It was cloudy enough for neither the moon nor any stars to reveal themselves, and it was quiet enough that he could hear the electronic drone of the streetlights, humming in monotone harmony, while darkness and dread pressed hard on his chest.

The small town and its streets were how he knew them as a much younger man, forty some years earlier, when he was still thin and strong, and when the town still had a personality, an identity, before they, both he and the town, would bloat and swell and fade until they’d become unrecognizable to each other.

As the dream was taking shape, in its beginning, he found himself about three blocks from the house he grew up in. He was walking away from it, each step taking him further away from the place where his Mom and Dad and brother were alive again, where their chests rose and fell as they slept in the silent comfort of home.  He wished, he longed to be there, to be with them again, but he knew he had to do something first. He was unaware of what it was, but he knew it would be revealed to him as soon as he got to the park on the west side of town beneath the town’s water tower.

He approached the red bricks of the big elementary school that in the real world had recently been condemned and torn down but in his dream still stood. The streetlights here didn’t glow, the faint light they gave taken over by the thick darkness, and the steady drone of their hum replaced by the rise and fall of crickets. As he walked past, he could hear a faint murmur of kids, ghosts, rising from the abandoned playground from which empty swing sets and monkey bars rose up from the cracked asphalt against the barren black sky. He stopped walking and listened to the hum of the thousands of children that no longer existed, and he could make out the sound of his own voice as a child, faint and slight, inter-mingled with all of the others.

He walked on, crossing Main Street on the south side of town, where the stores and small businesses gave way to older and elegant homes, with stairways and framed-in front porches. He passed a church, Lutheran, and the memory of a Sunday school session from the age of five years, one of his oldest but most vivid memories, played in his head. He was dressed in his best church clothes, sitting on a bench at a table, where he and several other kids were coloring in a coloring book with multi colored crayons strewn across the table.  On the wall, right above the table, a small, golden colored crucifix hung. His copy of the coloring book was open to a page that said “Jesus Died for Your Sins” above the uncolored image of Jesus on the cross, waiting to be filled in, to be brought to life, the same image that looked down upon him from the cross on the wall, the same image that seemed to be everywhere in the church, the same image that haunted him in the dark at night, before sleep, sometimes after sleep, too. He remembered having no clue as to what a sin was, let alone why anyone would die for anything he happened to have. He looked closely at Jesus’ hands for the nails his brother told him they hammered through to the cross, and he remembered thinking how much that must have hurt.

He looked north, to downtown, a four or five block long section of Main Street, itself just a three mile long section of state highway 45, where all of the storefronts erected to serve the small town stood. A pharmacy, a Ben Franklin hardware store, a locally funded bank, a lumber yard, a diner,  a grocery store and three taverns, so you could get anything you needed, everything you wanted, without leaving the comforting confines of the small town’s borders. Even in the midnight cool, even when deserted and empty, downtown exuded an undeniable warmth and charm. He stood there for a moment, taking it all in, inhaling it, tasting it, sweet and tart on his tongue

He became aware of how tired he’d suddenly become, and that he was only three blocks away from the water tower. A gust of wind blew in from the north and filled his lungs with ice.  He turned his collar up and started walking.

Main Street had always been the dividing line between the more and the less affluent sides of town. The east side was newer and more prosperous than the west. It rose a slight but noticeable level up to and beyond the town limits until it reached the gentle rolling pastures of the big farms that highway eleven winded through on its way to Racine, while the west side descended from Main Street until it reached its deepest depth under the water tower, where it began the slow and steady ascent to the county fair grounds and the industrial park.

As he began walking the dream landscape again, the difference between the two sides of town was heightened and exaggerated. As he entered the west side of Main Street, the descent to the water tower park was steeper, and there were no streetlights, no light at all, except for the faint glow of a flash light that suddenly appeared in his right hand. Even the crickets had grown silent and still, and the only sound piercing the blackness was the amplified sound of his shoes on the sidewalk.  His vision adjusted as best it could to the ever thickening blackness, and he had to use the flashlight and his memories of epic one on one basketball games in the court in the park against his seventh grade friend Danny H to make his way.  Buoyed and brightened by the sudden summertime memories, fifty years suddenly melted away, and he decided that tomorrow, after this thing was over, he’d call Danny up and challenge him to a game. Or maybe Joey M. would be home from his family vacation and they’d get their gloves and bats and balls and play 500 in his back yard.  He felt a smile form on his face, and it felt good. It’d been so long since he’d seen his friends. He missed them terribly, and he found himself thinking about them, conjuring up their images more and more frequently in these days of pandemic and isolation.

He raised his flashlight and in its filtered glow he found the swollen metallic legs of the town’s water tower. They raised up and into the darkness above, but he had no interest in them now. Instead, he turned his light to the court, wishing he had the Spalding basketball his mom and dad had given him for his birthday in 1970.

Then he remembered why he’d come there in the first place.  Using his flashlight, he found the picnic tables, exactly where he remembered they’d be. He started forward and he stopped and took one last moment, and he thought about how he’d wake late tomorrow morning, in his childhood bed in his childhood home in the summer of 1970, the days when he’d earned every minute of sleep in the energy he spent every day, the same energy that fueled his growing body and mind.

Finally, his light settled on the second of the three picnic tables.  On top of it was a small, metallic, and shapeless hump. As he approached the table, as he got close enough, the hand-sized lump revealed itself.

It was a pistol. 

Standing now in front of the table, it was a revolver, and picking it up he saw the safety was off, meaning it was ready to fire, and he finally understood what he was being asked, what choice he’d been given, what deal he’d been offered, and he remembered that his mom and dad and brother and Danny and Joey were all dead, and had been for some time now. If he took his own life, he’d be given access to the happiest time of his life and the people who he’d missed so much for so long. He took the gun in his hand and carefully put the safety back on. He held it for a brief moment before setting it back down on the picnic table. He turned around and rose out of water tower park like Orpheus ascending from Hades, refusing to look back at the west side.

He headed for home but the landscape had changed. Instead of brightly lit streets, he found himself in the dark, miles from his childhood home town and fifty years later.  He was slowly awakening, his wife of 39 years sleeping beside him, with her back to him. He lay there, awake in the dark, thinking   about his life and the unexpected sharp turn it’d taken 15 years prior, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He thought about life and death and his childhood, global pandemics and social distancing. He thought about everything until he became aware of his wife’s sleeping inhales and exhales, her body rising and falling with each breathe. He rolled over and put his arm around her waist, pulling her to him, realizing as he fell asleep that this was the happiest moment of his life.

(A still rough piece of short fiction that came to me yesterday.  The setting and the time are the same as the novel I’ve been working on, but the characters are new.)

It stormed the night before, thunder claps and lightning flashes moving stealthily across the sleeping town. It took only about an hour to pass through, but it was enough to finally break the heat wave that had gripped the town for the first two weeks of August. The cool breeze that blew out of the north was a welcome reprieve from the hot and damp southern winds that pushed daytime temperatures into the nineties, but as welcome as it may have been, it was also cool enough to remind everyone that summer was almost over, and that autumn was on its way.

Autumn and other things were on Bill Michaels’ mind as he sat in the passenger seat, the wind through his open window rolling back his black hair. It was cold enough to cause his girlfriend, Peggy Olsen, sitting alone in the enormous back seat of Jeff Fry’s 1965 Rambler, to complain about how chilly it was and what a mess it was making of her hair.  Without hesitation, Jeff reached down and grabbed the handle and rolled up the drivers’ side front window. Bill didn’t move, his blue eyes fixed on the endless rolling corn and hay fields of county highway F that had been dipped in the golden late afternoon sunlight.

“I’m glad there’s at least one gentleman in this car,” Peg said.

“Don’t get your panties in a bundle,” Bill said. “It’s only for a minute or two.”

Peggy folded her arms and bit her tongue. She wanted to tell Bill what a jerk he’d been lately, but she reminded herself that Bill had a right to be on edge. She thought about how this was the last night she’d have to tiptoe around him, the last night she’d have to suffer his uncharacteristically brooding and short fuse, and then she felt guilty.

Bailey’s Bridge, where the Canadian Pacific railroad line traversed Count Highway F, appeared ahead of them. Jeff slowed the Rambler down and parked under it, on the side of the highway. They got out and Jeff opened up the trunk, and looped his right arm through the three folded up lawn chairs and reached out his right hand and grabbed the case of Old Milwaukee. Peg and Bill both took a bag of groceries. Jeff took the last bag, from the Orchard Depot Ben Franklin hardware store, and lifted it out of the trunk with his left hand.

“What’s in there?” Bill asked.

“Spray paints!” Jeff was pleased with himself. “I’ve got four different colors.  I figured it’s time we immortalized ourselves.”

“Far out,” Peg said, as they started climbing the dirt path from the highway to the top of the bridge. The side of the bridge was covered with graffiti, the largest and freshest addition a psychedelic-ish red, white and blue “Class of 69” that word around town their class president, Tom Robinson, painted the night of their graduation, openly defying the town president, Frank Cornish, and his promised crackdown on “the bastardization of valuable public property” that graffiti represented. As they got to the top of the bridge, Bill thought about Tom Robinson and how “brave” and “daring” everybody said he was, and wondered how much courage it’d take to start college in Madison in the fall compared to how much Vietnam would require from Bill, and he got pissed off again. Robinson would spend his days that autumn fucking coeds, while he’d be in the jungle getting shot at by the Viet Cong. He resented Robinson, and wondered why his number didn’t come up in the lottery, and he thought of Robinson up at the lake with the spectacular Janice Shaffer in her two piece swimsuit while he was left to spend his last night before shipping out to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri at the gravel pit with his idiot best friend and his moody girlfriend. He extended his hand and pulled her up the last step to the railroad tracks, taking note of the jacket she was already wearing.

They walked along the tracks west from the bridge for about a half mile, the same terrain Bill and Jeff knew so well from rabbit hunting. They’d done it so many times in winters past that they’d execute the routine without speaking, the shooter getting high up on the elevated tracks and the pusher taking the wooded brush below and beside the tracks, on the north side of the tracks first, walking through the thickets and stomping on the brush piles while the shooter up above, on the tracks, kept his eyes peeled on the brush in front of the pusher below and his 20 gauge shotgun on the ready for the inevitable rabbit that would feel the pressure and try to escape, running ahead until the shooter got a bead on him and squeezed the trigger. They’d hunt like that, walking west, until they got to the gravel pit, when they‘d switch roles, with the shooter taking the south side and becoming the pusher, and the north side pusher taking the role of the shooter, as they’d make their way east back to Bailey’s Bridge.

“I’m gonna miss rabbit hunting,” Jeff said.

“You can still hunt,” Bill said.

“Not by myself.”

“Then find someone else.”

“Wouldn’t be the same,” Jeff said.

After about a fifteen minute walk, they arrived at the gravel pit.  The sun was sinking in the west.  One of the first times they hunted the tracks, about six years earlier, they “discovered” the gravel pit. Inactive since at least the late fifties, it still carried the scars from the big digger machines that cut and carved and dug holes in the earth to load boxcars that used to take the sand and gravel harvested by the machines to the county municipal building, where it’d be put to use as fill and ice melt. In addition to the cuts and wide holes left in the earth, there were also new hills created in the process of piling once loose rocky soil and sand that over time became attached to the terra firma. The highest of these hills, known as “Gravel Hill” stood about fifty feet above the ground, or just high enough to provide the best view of Orchard Depot short of being in an airplane. Bill and Jeff and Peg climbed to the top of Gravel Hill and opened up their lawn chairs around the fire pit that had been installed at its peak. Jeff and Peg collected fire wood while Bill took some newspaper and a book of matches he’d stuffed in the back pocket of his jeans out and lit the kindling until the flames were strong enough to ignite the bigger logs.

Soon it was dark and chilly out, the fire providing light and warmth as they sat in their lawn chairs next to it, on its east side, drinking warm Old Milwaukee and looking out over the fire to the west, where the yellow and white lights of Orchard Depot stood out against the black horizon, while above a handful of stars tossed up against the clear night sky sparkled and shone. Bill and Jeff told the story about how, when they were in seventh grade, they came out to the gravel pit and found, unearthed by the swipe of an old digger machine that’d scraped a hole in the ground, a rock that glittered and glowed.  Peg had heard the story countless times before, about how they convinced themselves they’d found a deep vein of gold or silver or some other mineral of untold value, and she always loved hearing them get more and more animated as they described the plans they’d made for their harvest and the lengths they went to in order to keep their finding and their subsequent expeditions secret. They finally go up the nerve to approach the middle school science teacher, Mrs. Breck, about their finding and how her examination of the sample they presented to her resulted in her declaring, “what you’ve got there is a sizable chunk of Pyrite.”

“Pyrite.” Bill and Jeff repeated the term in unison. It sounded impressive. “How much do you suppose it’s worth?” Bill finally asked.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said.  “I’ll give you each fifty cents for it.”

“Fifty cents!” Jeff couldn’t hide his disgust. “More like fifty dollars!”

She laughed. “That’d definitely be paying too much,” she said, “too much for fool’s gold.”

“Fool’s gold?”

“That’s right.  Not worth a cent.  But it’d be worth a buck to me to use it in class.”

At this point in the story, Bill and Jeff would always go over the list of things they’d planned on buying with their precious metal, and Peg loved hearing them say, “mini-bike?  Scratch. Snowmobile? Scratch.”  Peg came from a home environment that was dominated by alcohol and divorce and was completely humorless. The concept of self-deprecation was so foreign and new to her that she found it hysterical.

It was times like this, with Peg laughing so hard and loud at such a simple story that convinced Bill he was in love with her. It was the pureness and the genuine joy she felt, and the way her face lit up when she was happy and laughing. At times like this, Bill was certain that she was the prettiest girl in town. The problem was that she was so hesitant to let her guard down that few people had ever seen her like that.

Bill and Peg had been going steady since the previous October, their senior year, when Bill asked her out to the Homecoming dance. They had a class, third hour senior civics, together. Bill, who’d always been painfully shy around girls, found himself seated behind Peg, and every day as he silently stared at the back of her head, at her full reddish-brown hair, he grew more and more enamored with her. Then one day, as she passed a test back to him, he smiled at her and she smiled back. Emboldened by the exchange, he vowed to talk to her the next day, asking her what she thought of the test, and she said that she thought it was really hard, which surprised him, because he found it to be quite easy. But he didn’t let on, instead agreeing with her.

The ice successfully broken, they started talking more and more until Bill finally worked up the nerve to ask her to the Homecoming dance. Once there, they were both able to brush off their initial awkwardness enough to successfully take a couple of slow dances together. At the end of the night, Bill drove Peg home and walked her to her front porch, the glow of the porchlight exposing peeling and faded green paint on the siding as they quickly kissed good night, their lips barely making contact.

The first time they made love, had sex, was three months later, a cold Wednesday night in mid-January, the day Bill received his draft notice. It hadn’t really sunk in yet, that he was going to Vietnam.  Bill used it to his advantage to get what he’d been pestering her for the previous month or so, as he parked his dad’s green Ford LTD on Brown Woods road, a short and uninhabited stretch of gravel north of town off of County Highway G. It was cold as they climbed in the back seat and unsnapped their jeans, the windows quickly frosting over as he thrust himself into her, exploding after only a few rushed strokes, the whole thing over just moments after it’d started. As they were putting their jeans back on, he caught a glimpse of a single tear running down her cheek before she quickly wiped it away with her hand. He felt horrible.

It’d be another month before they tried again, again on Brown Woods Road, again in the back seat of his dad’s LTD. This time was different, though, as they didn’t rush things, taking off their shirts as well as their pants, their bodies lit by the pale and cold moonlight that streamed through the windshield. Bill found her beautiful, her bare breasts and her hips and her waist, but especially her bare upper back, between and under her shoulder blades, her skin milk white and smooth.

By the time they found themselves sitting in the fire light on Gravel Hill on the night before Bill was to head to basic training, they’d had sex eight times.  Bill hated that he knew this. He understood that he was cheapening the experience, cheapening Peg, by keeping a count, but he also knew that he couldn’t help it. He’d always seen and processed the world through numbers, since before he could remember, and he counted and stored everything. Times he and Jeff had gone rabbit hunting:  twenty-six.

At one time, in Junior High, it looked like his proficiency with numbers would be the ticket for Bill to become the first Michaels to attend college.  But although he got good grades in math classes, he remained a poor and unmotivated student in his other academic endeavors.

His senior year, especially the spring semester, after receiving his draft notice, was especially bad. There were many days he didn’t show up to class at all. The school administrators had grown all too familiar with the phenomenon of the unmotivated drafted senior and agreed that compared to going to war on the other side of the world, high school just didn’t seem that important, and adopted an unofficial policy of graduating these individuals regardless of academic achievement.

Bill glanced at his Timex, a graduation gift from his grandparents.   It was shortly after one o’clock. Time was running out.  His folks were taking him to Mitchell Field, in Milwaukee, at six o’clock in time for him to check in and board his 7:30 flight to Saint Louis. He’d told his mom and dad all along that he planned on staying out all night before leaving. He could feel the moments ticking away, and as he reached down for another beer, he realized they were almost gone, too. As he pulled the top off the can of Old Milwaukee, he looked across the fire at Jeff and Peg and felt the same panic that’d been hitting him too frequently lately, that everything was moving too fast and that the very earth itself was about to spin off of its axis.

“I sure wish I was going, too,” Jeff said.

“No you don’t,” Bill replied.

“That’s not true,” Jeff said.  “Just because I can’t go, doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”

“Why on earth would you want to go?” Bill asked.

“Because I, be-be-because I just want to,” Jeff said. He was starting to get agitated.

“That’s the dumb …”

“Bill,” Peg interrupted, “that’s enough.”

“I’m sorry, Jeff.”

“You just think I’m dumb,” Jeff said.

“No I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I really don’t.  You’re my best friend, Jeff. I’m just saying, you don’t want to go to Vietnam.”

“How do you know what I do or don’t want to do? Just because they won’t take me doesn’t mean I don’t want to go.  Just like you – you’re going but you don’t want to.”

“Jeff,” Peg said. “Just calm down. Who wants to go and who doesn’t want to doesn’t matter. This is the last night we have together. That’s what’s important.  I swear, I’m so sick of hearing and thinking about Vietnam.”

Jeff got real quiet. It was getting late, and he was getting tired.

When Jeff was six years old, while chasing an errant basketball into the street, he was hit by a delivery truck in front of his house.  His head bounced off of the pavement, and he suffered a fractured skull.   The incident left him with minor but permanent brain damage, and a lower than average I.Q. and some short term memory loss that was enough to earn him a draft deferment.

Bill knew Jeff since seventh grade and Peg had spent enough time with him that they both understood him.  Most of the time, he was just a little bit slow mentally, not bad, just slightly, so slightly as to be almost unperceivable.  But once he got tired, once fatigue set in, he’d become easily agitated and forgetful, and start slurring his words.  As they looked at him in his chair beside the fire, Bill and Peg knew that in a minute or two he’d be sound asleep, and given an hour’s nap, he’d wake up refreshed and coherent, and he’d be Jeff again.

Once Jeff was asleep, Bill and Peg sat close to one another, forsaking their lawn chairs to sit on the ground next to the fire.  The night was getting cold, and Bill, in his black t-shirt, was struggling to keep warm.

“Still think I was stupid for wearing a jacket?” Peg asked.

“No, I guess not,” Bill replied.  He sat close to her, absorbing her body warmth. He reached his left hand into her jacket and between buttons on her blouse and over her bra covered beast and gently squeezed. She turned her face toward his and they kissed.

“You want to go in the bushes?” Peg asked.

“No, that’d be about the last thing I’d need.  Start basic training with poison ivy all over my ass.”

Peg laughed, and then said, “well, I wouldn’t be comfortable doing it out here in front of Sleeping Beauty.”

“No, neither would I.”  They then agreed that the cold, the poison ivy, and the presence of Jeff were all enough to make sex, last night together or not, a dubious proposition that wasn’t worth pursuing.

“Just keep me warm,” Bill said, as they huddled together. Jeff was snoring loudly from his lawn chair.

Bill cleared his throat, and said, “Peg, I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

Bill nervously poked at the fire with a stick.  “About us,” he said.

“What about us?”  There was apprehension in her voice.

“I was just thinking …” he started. “I was just thinking that if something happens …”

“Now I told you we weren’t going to talk like that.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “Okay. It’s just that I’m going to be gone for so long, and I’ll be so far away, that, if someone else comes along, I don’t want you to feel you have to wait for me.”

It was the truth, at least the partial truth.  He had been thinking about that lately. The complete truth, though, was that part of him was looking forward to getting out of Orchard Depot, and finding new people, instead of the only other two people in town who were as lonely as he was.  He’d been wondering how it came to this, how on the night before he was to ship out he found himself alone on Gravel Hill with the daughter of the town drunk and a brain damaged imbecile.  He wondered what his flaw was, and all he could come up with is that he’d been a math geek with a photographic memory filled with nothing but numbers, because that’d been all he allowed himself to experience, and now he was going to war, to face possible death, without ever having really lived, and having seen so little of the world. He looked at Jeff and Peg, their faces lit by the firelight, and he realized how much he loved them both, and how much he needed to move beyond them.  He saw the tear rolling down Peg’s face and he suspected she knew it, too.

Jeff woke up and saw Bill and Peg sitting by the fire, and said, “How long was I asleep?  You two getting cozy together?”

Peg wiped her face and stood up, saying that she had to go in the brush and pee and that nobody better follow her.

“How you feel, Jeff?” Bill asked.

“I feel like another beer,” Jeff replied. Bill grabbed one of the last Old Milwaukees and tossed it to Jeff.  “What time is it?” Jeff asked.

Bill cocked his wrist so that his watch was lit by the fire. “It’s two thirty,” he replied.

Peg returned from the brush and the three of them sat and finished the beer, talk and laughter coming easily in the pre-dawn darkness.

Finally, at 3:45, they decided to call it a night. They put out the fire and picked up. Jeff held a flashlight in his hand as they prepared to walk east along the tracks to the bridge and Jeff’s Rambler, when Bill stopped and looked west towards town.

“Guys,” he said, “if you don’t mind, I think I’d like to walk home.”

“Are you sure?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah,” Bill replied. “One last long look at things.”

They said their goodbyes, there on the railroad tracks, Bill shaking Jeff’s hand before Jeff pulled him into a big hug, both of them slapping each other on the back. Then it was Peg’s turn, and they kissed and held each other tighter than they ever had before.  Tears were running down both of their faces as they finally let each other go, neither one of them able to think of a single word to say to one another.

Bill stood still on the railroad tracks, facing east, and watched Peg and Jeff walk away until all he could see was the faint and fading glow of Jeff’s flashlight and when he couldn’t see that anymore, he climbed back to the top of Gravel Hill and looked to the west, to the sleeping lights of his hometown, Orchard Depot, Wisconsin. They’d never before shone so vividly, and it was as if he was looking at them from the other side of the world, from the jungles of an unknown place called Vietnam, yet he still could see, as clearly as if they were standing next to him, sparkling and glittering in the yellow streetlight lit haze of memory like rare and precious minerals, his best friend and his first love.

(A short fiction I’ve been noodling around with)

I woke up in the dark coughing, my eyes and throat burning, the blue tarp I’d fallen asleep under having caved in over the bottom half of my sleeping bag. It felt heavy, and I knew instantly what’d happened, where I’d screwed up, and that I had to get out right now.

I pulled my legs up and rolled out of my sleeping bag. I tried to open my eyes, but the best I could manage was narrow slits that presented, out of focus and dim, what I’d already smelled:  thick and cascading smoke. I could hear the wind howling and snow pelting the other side of the tarp. I couldn’t see but I remembered that the opening to my little lean-to was to my right.  I pulled my feet up and swept my hand across to where the opening should have been, where there should have been air, but there was only snow.

It was obvious now, and I felt embarrassed that it hadn’t occurred to me before, that the lean-to I’d fashioned with the tarp wouldn’t be able to bear the weight of the heavy snow coming down that I’d blissfully fallen asleep under.  Not only did it collapse the tarp, but as the drifts accumulated outside it had sealed most of the opening I’d used to vent my campfire.  Had I slept for another five minutes, I’d be dead, choked by smoke and buried by snow.  As it was I couldn’t stop coughing, and I couldn’t open my eyes, but none of that mattered.  I had to get out.

I reached out and grabbed for my boots, from next to the fire, where I remembered I’d set them to dry.  I held them in my left hand and sat up and with my right hand reached for and found the tarp, and followed it until I got to its edge, where the tarp met the snow. My eyes still burned, my vision reduced to a thick and indistinguishable blur. I rolled over, my boots in my hand, and tried to pull the tarp up and roll my body underneath it. All I could feel was the snow against my long underwear and the black hoody I had on over my thermal under shirt.  It was cold and wet.

I rolled out into the snow, outside of the tarp now, in the snow, lying on my side.  I pulled myself up onto my two feet just as the mouthful of the clean and cold air I breathed in met the thick smoke that filled my lungs, and I started coughing again.  I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t breathe, and I became dizzy and light headed and collapsed into the snow.  I laid there until I stopped coughing, until I could breathe again, taking in only shallow gasps of air, my throat burning every time I inhaled.

I finally sat up and tried to open my eyes. They burned, too, and I still couldn’t’ open them any more than a narrow slit, for more than a couple of seconds, after which they’d start burning again and I’d have to close them.  For the brief period of time I could leave them open, through the narrow slits, I couldn’t really see anything, nothing would come in focus, just the blurred white of the ground and the blurred black vertical columns of what I assumed were trees. I slipped my boots on and struggled to my  feet.

I could smell the smoky remains of my campfire, and I knew they were coming from under the collapsed tarp, and I knew my lean-to opened to the east, so I was standing on the east side of the tarp. I turned in the direction the smell of the fire was coming from, and I knew I was facing west. I knew that home, my dad’s farm, was about a mile west through the woods from where I’d camped.  I also knew that once I started west, I’d be walking into the wind and I’d quickly lose the smell of the fire, the only compass I had.  Unable to see, all I’d have to go by was the wind pelting me in the face, and I really didn’t know if it was blowing straight from the west or if it was coming in from the northwest.  It wouldn’t take much to make me drift off track, because the woods were big and swampy. I tried to open my eyes again but they weren’t getting any better, and if anything burned more that the last time I tried. I stood there in the dark, in my thermal shirt and long johns, wet, blind and cold, the snow at my feet getting deeper. A sense of panic started to settle in, a sense that I might die.

Nobody knew I was out here, and I cursed myself for being arrogant enough to think this whole winter camping thing was a good idea. My dad was always reminding me that I was just a kid, just fourteen years old, and that I was “Getting too big for my britches.” But I’d spent many nights sleeping in the woods, and it was one of the things I loved most in the world. The stillness, the purity of the air, the rhythm of crickets, the night sky that would fill up with a million stars, all within my reach, the silver moonlight.  I’d slept out in the woods dozens of times before, always alone, but never in the winter. I knew from the summer and autumn nights I’d sampled that being out in the woods at 2:30, 3:30, or 4:30 A.M. was a completely different experience, that everything looked, smelled and felt different, and I was eager to discover what new worlds winter would bring to the woods in the deep heart of the night.

I started to move, took a step in the direction I’d convinced myself was west, when I heard, in front of me and to the left, the sound of something in the woods, something alive. I stopped and listened and soon I heard it again. It was the sound of a snort, and then I could hear the sound of a hoof pounding the frozen ground, and before I even opened my eyes I knew it was a deer.  I opened my eyes and everything was still a blur, but at the center of the blur I could make out something dark and wet, shimmering in my blurred view.  I blinked my eyes open again and this time I could see the outline of a deer, a doe, against a solid white background. The white background went up above the deer, it was elevated, and I knew it was Musselman’s Ridge.  I adjusted the direction I was facing so I’d be walking directly in a line to where I’d seen the deer. A soon as I took my first step, I heard her snort again, and I heard a branch break as she ran away.

It didn’t take me long, walking with my eyes closed, to reach the steep incline that marled the bottom of Musselman’s Ridge. I tried ascending the angle, but with my eyesight blinded it was difficult, as the side of the ridge was thick with trees and underbrush. I tried to open my eyes, but they still burned. I knew that there was a fire lane cut through the woods that traversed Musselman’s Ridge at a point where the incline was less severe. I was completely disoriented, though, and had no idea where I was in relation to the fire road, and was convinced I didn’t have time to look for it.

As I stumbled trying to get up the hill, colliding with trees and brush, I found at my feet a thick stick, about four feet long.  I picked it up and used it like a blind man uses a cane, swinging it in front of me to find where my next step would fall, then planting it firmly on the ground to help me maintain my balance.  I was creeping along when I swung my stick in front of me only to hear the sound and feel the vibration of it hitting what may as well been a solid wall of trees and brush.  I opened my eyes and I could make out enough detail to tell that I had stumbled smack dab into a thicket, dark and steep and impenetrable. I held my eyes open long enough to look around, and off to my right, I could make out the blur of movement, silent, like a ghost floating on the frozen landscape. I was able to get my eyes open wide enough and long enough to recognize a deer, the same doe I’d seen before, about thirty yards to my right, ascending the ridge without a sound, when I realized it was walking the fire road, the path that would lead me to safety.

I stumbled my way out of the thicket and made it to the fire road.  It was still snowing, but not as hard, and the doe’s tracks were still readable.  I walked up the incline with my walking stick in hand, every now and then opening my eyes and looking down to make sure I was still on the fire road,  still  following the doe’s tracks, until near the top of the ridge where the tracks  veered off  of the path to the right, to the north. I stayed on the fire road.

I made it to the top of Musselman’s Ridge, where the fire road takes a sharp turn to the north and runs for a while along the top of the ridge before turning west again and descending the ridge where the woods grow bigger.  It was the point I knew I’d have to leave the fire road to walk the last stretch home.

At the top of the ridge, the wind slowed down for a moment and the snow stopped. I tried to open my eyes and I was able to widen them enough to see clearly the familiar landmarks of the vista I’d looked out on hundreds of times before. They were all simultaneously familiar and new, the dark woods that abruptly stopped on the flat edge of our cornfield, white and flat and bright, the stems of its cut stalks buried beneath the snow. I saw the fence line that marked the other end of the field, and I could make out the gate that opened into our yard, where our house stood, strong and silent and dark in the night, gray smoke billowing out of the chimney and up into the night sky until it vanished, giving way to millions of stars that hung low against the black ceiling of the night sky. And I could see, off to my right,  the fire lane where it briefly exited the woods before reentering them at the far corner of our cornfield, and standing there, in the fire lane, I could see the doe I’d been following,  made tiny by the distance between us.  She was standing there, looking back at me, and I could clearly see, even though it was too far away, her dark and moist eye, locked in with my eyes, before she turned and stepped into the woods.

Able to see and breathe, my survival now rested on one thing:  staying warm long enough to make it down the ridge, across the cornfield and into the house. My hands were like clubs, I could barely move them, the fingers on my right hand somehow shaped to wrap around and clasp my walking stick.  My face felt swollen, cracked around my cheekbones. My throat was dry and scratchy, and every muscle in my body ached, cold and rigid. The snow had stopped but the wind persisted, blowing raw and cold in my face as I started out down the ridge. I started out slowly, maintaining my balance, taking big steps in the deep snow, when, about halfway down, my right foot caught a stray and dead vine buried beneath the snow and I fell, hard on my side, cushioned by snow, and I slid down the ridge, small twigs of dead underbrush scratching and cutting my face, ripping a hole in the thigh of my long underwear.  I slid down until I was twenty feet from the bottom, coming to rest when my rear end harmlessly met he trunk of an oak tree. I collected myself and took a quick inventory of my scrapes and scratches, then I got up.  I’d lost my walking stick somewhere in the fall. I managed to keep my balance and made it to the bottom of the ridge, where just a narrow stretch of woods heavy with undergrowth separated me from the cornfield.  I walked on, shielded by the trees from the full brunt of the wind.

Then I was out of the woods, into the cornfield, face first against the howling wind.  It blew steady and strong, skimming the top of the snow off of the field and hurling it into my face.  It thundered like a freight train in my ears. Gusts blew so hard as to literally knock me over three times.  Each time I’d struggle to stand back up, my legs cold and raw and stiff and heavy.  It took every ounce of strength I had left just to lift them high enough to keep moving forward.

Eventually, I made it across the field and, just after I passed through the opened gate into our yard, I collapsed in the snow, no more than ten yards from the house. I was unable to move, frozen, as I stared at the house, at the upstairs window to my room, then I started to see things, some real, some not, spinning around in the wind.  I saw the weather vane on the barn, I saw my Science teacher, Mr. Morgan, I saw the blue tarp I’d made my lean-to out of, I saw the doe and her shiny dark eyes. And then I saw my dad.

He was shaking me awake, his hand on my shoulder, saying “Bill, Bill.” The sound of morning songbirds became clear. I opened my eyes and could see bright sunlight streaming through my windows, and I could see my dad, bent over my bed, his face inches from mine.

“Come on, Bill,” he said, “you’ve got to get up. The service starts in about an hour.  Aunt Mary’s made us a big breakfast.”

I could smell the bacon frying, and I could sense that the house was full of unfamiliar people, of guests who’d spent the night.

“Okay,” I mumbled.

“Get yourself in the shower,” he said as he headed for my door. He was holding the door, about to close it behind him.

“Dad?” I said.  He stopped and stood in my doorway.

“Yeah?”

“I already miss her,” I said. It surprised me, because I hadn’t even been thinking about her.

“I know,” he said.  “Me, too. “ He stood there for a minute, neither one of us knowing what to say, when I threw my legs over the side of my bed and sat up.

“Okay, I’m up,” I said. Dad smiled and left, closing my door behind him. Something lying on the table at my bedside caught my eye. I picked it up and looked at it.  It was a photograph, the last photograph, of my mom and dad and I, sitting with her in her hospital bed, all three of us smiling.  Mom’s smile was a little weaker, but her eyes, dark and moist and penetrating, were alive, shimmering and shining.

(This is something I just started noodling with – I have a few stories about these characters milling about in my head – so this might be the beginning  of a novel or a collection of related short stories – time will tell)

Technically, according to any calendar, it was still spring of 1979, and would be for about another week.  But practically, with the last day of school and the graduation ceremony having commenced a week earlier, summer was already well under way, the days long and bright and green, darkness held at bay until after ten o’clock, when the sound of crickets would start reverberating, setting a pulse, a rhythm, to the night.   It was summer all right, even though the night air that blew through the rolled down windows was cold and reminded us that it wasn’t that long ago, only two months, since mid-April, that the ice finally went out on the lakes.

All five of us were there.  We were riding out to Zimmerman Lake in Jimmy’s dad’s AMC Matador, Jimmy driving, me riding shotgun in the front passenger seat, the windows all the way down, the night wind blowing through my thick brown hair, with Jeff, Roger and Tony in the back. Now days, if you’d see that car, you’d say, “what a fucking boat,” but back then, in mid-June of 1979, it didn’t seem so big. It was the time in Wisconsin when the drinking age was eighteen.  Me and Roger and Jimmy were of legal age and had just left the Wagon Wheel, shooting pool and hanging out with the old manure-kickers that were her regulars. We had a few beers and did a few shots, and we were all feeling pretty good at 11:00 when we walked out into the cool night air.  We rode to Jeff’s house, about a block away from the bar, and picked up Jeff and Tony.

It was a confusing time for us.  We’d all been friends since middle school, since seventh grade, and every year, when school got out, we’d celebrate the start of summer vacation by staying out until morning. It started as sleepovers and as we grew older and started driving it evolved into chaperoned camping trips.  By the time summer arrived this year, 1979, we were all old enough that we could do whatever the fuck we wanted.

We’d picked this night, a Thursday, for this year’s celebration, but this year felt different.   We’d just graduated high school, and we were all supposed to be figuring out what we wanted to do with our lives.   This wasn’t the beginning of another summer vacation, this was the beginning of the rest of our lives.   We all knew it, we all felt it, as Jimmy pulled off of Highway 67 onto the long and narrow two dirt tracks road to Zimmerman Lake’s boat launch, the narrow beam of the headlights illuminating the dirt ruts and the over grown brush on each side, until it finally ended in the empty gravel parking lot. We all knew that something, none of us could describe exactly what, maybe it was childhood, maybe it was our friendship, maybe it was just the goddamned seventies, but we all knew that something was ending.

We got out of the car. Jimmy opened the trunk and Tony and I each grabbed a handle at each end of the metal cooler and lifted it out of the trunk and walked it over to the circular arrangement of rocks next to the shore line that was the boat launch’s fire pit. The cooler was filled with ice and beer, cans of PBR, and we each reached in and grabbed one, little chunks of ice sticking to the cans or melting in our hands. The boat launch was lit by a single light on top of a twenty, twenty five foot pole between the eastern edge of the parking lot and the lake, lighting up the pier.  Zimmerman Lake was small and shallow and muddy, known as a place where you could get a lot of pan fish action, little crappies and bluegills, by just dropping a worm and a bobber.  The more serious fishermen preferred chasing the trophy muskies and walleyes that were occasionally pulled out of the flowage, about ten miles from Zimmerman.  We liked it because on the west side, the side of the boat launch, nobody lived there year round, there were just a couple of summer cabins that were unoccupied this early in the season.  We could be as loud as we wanted and drink undetected by the cops, who if they ever had a reason to check out the boat launch we’d see their headlights down the long rutted road into it well before they’d see us.

None of us, not even Tony and Jimmy, who were going to college in the fall, had any fucking idea of what we wanted to do or be.  Jeff and I had just gotten jobs at the window factory on the outskirts of town; we were scheduled to start the following Monday. Roger still walked with a limp from the car accident he was in when he was fourteen. He had the night off from his job behind the cash register at the PDQ.  Come the fall, Tony was going to Eau Claire, Jimmy to Marquette, down in Milwaukee, after they’d finished working for Tony’s dad on his farm for the summer.

“Craig!” Jimmy yelled, and I turned just as the Frisbee was about to hit me in the face. I was able to get a hand up and at least block it just in time, as Jimmy laughed that high pitched hyena laugh of his.   Tony and Jeff had gone into the woods and returned with handfuls of dry sticks; they brought them to Roger who put them in the fire pit along shore, next to the pier.  Soon Roger had a fire going, and Tony and Jeff brought back bigger sticks, logs.  Jimmy pulled two lawn chairs out of the trunk of the Matador.  He handed me one and we walked to the fire, me carrying the lawn chair in my left hand and Jimmy’s Frisbee in my right hand.  We got to the fire and before I unfolded my lawn chair I flipped my right wrist and released the Frisbee in the direction of Tony, who was standing on the edge of the woods, barely in the light.  After I threw it, after I knew Tony wouldn’t have time to react, I yelled “Tony!”  He turned his head just as the Frisbee arrived, hitting him square in the face, prompting Jimmy and I to laugh loudly while Tony muttered “stupid sons of bitches.”

We sat, Jimmy and I in the lawn chairs, the rest on the ground, next to the fire. We talked about and laughed at the same things we’d been talking about and laughing at for the previous six years, which may as well have been forever. In addition to the beer, Jeff had bought some wine, TJ Swann’s or Boone’s Fam, I can’t remember which one, just that it was real cheap shit, and Tony brought a small bottle of Yukon Jack, and we passed the bottles back and forth until they were dead soldiers thrown into the fire.

We talked about where we were going and the choices we’d made. Jimmy asked me again, “Why the fuck aren’t you going to college?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I dunno. Guess I’ve had enough school for a while.”

‘Well, you’re too fucking smart to stick around here,” Jimmy said.

“Maybe I’ll go in a year or two,” I said. “I just want to work and make some money for a while.  Plus, my folks can’t really afford it.”  This part wasn’t really true, as my mom and dad told me they’d swing it if I really wanted to go.  They left it completely up to me, didn’t push me one way or another. They’d grown up during the depression, both poor, and college was never an option, never a realistic thought for either of them, and they’d done fine. They never really talked about it to me, it was never a priority to them, and therefore it wasn’t a priority for me, either.  But now, with Jimmy going off in the fall to Milwaukee and me staying behind in Neil, I thought about it all the time, and I had a nagging suspicion I was going to miss out on something big, something big and important.

“The problem,” Roger started, “is that I have no fucking idea what I want to be when I grow up.”

We all knew that this was true. Roger, or none of us, for that matter, didn’t know what we wanted to do, but we also knew that in Roger’s case this wasn’t the real problem.  The real problem with Roger wasn’t the damage the accident had done to his body, either. It wasn’t even the fact that his mom was dead. The problem we all saw with Roger was his dad, Steve Harris.

Steve Harris was, in the summer of 1979, in his mid-forties.  Thin and tall with fading blonde hair and a pale and blotchy complexion, he was a used car salesman, owner and operator of a lot a block off of main street.  It was cheap and sleazy and unimaginative, exactly like a thousand other lots in a hundred different cities, bordered with pennant shaped triangle flags, the year and model and sometimes the price displayed in gaudy neon-green letters stuck to the inside of the windshield.  The lot was filled with junk, pieces of shit the Ford and Chevy and Chrysler dealers took in on trade ins but didn’t want to be associated with in their own used car lots. Roger helped his dad out whenever he could, washing the cars and sweeping out the office and any other odd jobs that needed to be done.  Sometimes Steve paid Roger, most times he didn’t.

We all knew that Steve was an asshole, even Jeff, who bought a 1972 Chevy Vega from him in his junior year, only to take it home and find a huge puddle of oil in the garage where he’d parked it. It had a cracked block that had been sealed with some kind of silicone sealant that gave out after a few hours.  Jeff’s dad, a former Marine, was furious with Steve and threatened to kick the shit out of him.  They ended up getting lawyers involved and reached a settlement where Jeff and his dad got almost everything they’d paid for the car back, and Steve had to tow the piece of shit back into his garage, until he was finally able to offload it to some junkyard somewhere. The whole deal had no effect on Jeff and Roger being friends.  They both knew their dads, knew what they were and were not.

None of us, even Jeff, for that matter, had a problem with Steve being a douchebag car salesman.  In fact, we all found his antics to be pretty funny, even Roger, and we all loved it when Roger told us the inside baseball stories of rolled back odometers and paint job touch ups. If that were all there was to Steve, if that was his only flaw, we could have laughed him off as one of Neil’s Mayberry-esque characters, like Tom Newton, the proprietor of the barber shop on Main Street who we insisted shared an uncanny resemblance to Floyd on the “Andy Griffith Show” (we all saw it, and it became more vivid and funny when we were rolling doobies and watching reruns in Jimmy’s basement rec room).  But what we couldn’t forgive was the way Steve treated Roger.

Roger’s older brother, Randy, was a star running back in high school who’d graduated in 76.  He was good enough to get a free ride downstate at Whitewater.  Roger’s dad made it to every one of Randy’s games, driving all over the countryside, but had no time for Roger, who’s artificial leg and limp was a constant reminder that not only was Randy perfect and untouched, but of the fact that Delores, the boys’ mother and his wife, was dead, killed in the same car accident that took Roger’s leg.   Between Randy’s scholarship and the legal settlement, Steve could have easily funded Roger’s college tuition, so it wasn’t a matter of cost.  It was neglect, and it was more.  It was meanness, pure and simple, and when Roger wasn’t there, the rest of us would talk about how much we hated Steve, and tell stories of the latest example of Steve being a dick, like the time Laurie Schmidt, Jeff’s hot blonde girlfriend was in the lot with her dad.  Roger was there, with a bucket and a squeegee, well within earshot, washing one of the cars, when Laurie’s dad introduced her as a sophomore in the high school, to which Steve replied, you must know my son, the little gimp with one leg, ‘ol Hopalong I call him.

We couldn’t tell these stories when Roger was present; we’d tried that once, and Roger got real defensive, saying “you don’t know what my dad’s been through.”

“I know what you’ve been through,” I said, “and you don’t deserve to be treated that way.”

“Fuck you,” Roger said, trying to hold back the tears that were pooling behind his eyes, “and mind your own fucking business.”  That was Roger – aside from the good natured teasing about his dad’s sleazy business ethics, Roger never said one negative word about his dad.  In fact, I can’t remember Roger saying anything negative about anybody, and when we’d get going like we frequently did, ripping someone apart, Roger’d get real quiet. He was like that, physically crippled, but in so many other ways, he was the best of us.

At about a quarter to four, we looked around the fire and Tony was gone.  “Where the fuck did Tony go? Jimmy said. “Fuckin’ light weight, he’s probably curled up in the back of the car asleep.”

“He ain’t sleeping,” Jeff said. “Look.”  He was pointing towards the pier.

There, at the end of the pier, Tony was hopping on his bare left foot, taking the sock off of his right foot.  He stood there, unzipping his jeans as Jeff started ba-da-ba-ding the stripper’s song.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Jimmy said.

Tony finished taking off his jeans, then he lifted his t-shirt off over his head, and finally removed his underwear.  “Anybody want to go for a dip with me?”

“You’re crazy,” Jimmy responded.  “That water is freezing, probably 50 degrees.”

“Oh, who’s the little girlie man?”  Then Tony jumped off the pier, making the unmistakable sound of a serious belly flop as he hit the water and then we heard a blood curdling scream.  We didn’t know if he’d hurt himself or was just reacting to the cold water.  “Come on in,” he yelled, “the water’s perfect.”

I was the first to get up, taking my clothes off as I approached the pier.

“Before you get in,” Tony announced, “you have to be birthday suit naked.”

Jeff followed me, and then Jimmy.  By the time Jimmy got to the pier, I’d already dove in. The water was ice cold.  I went under and got my head all wet, experience told me that the faster you exposed your entire being to the cold the faster you got used to it.  I tried touching the bottom, the water at the end of the pier was about six foot deep, so I could barely reach it, but it was cold and mucky, and it felt like it’d swallow you if you put too much weight on it, so I just treaded water. Jeff and Jimmy dove in, screaming at how fucking cold it was.

It didn’t take long to get used to the cold water and once you did, it felt great. We were all laughing, when I looked back to the pier and suddenly felt horrible. It was Roger, standing alone on the pier, fully dressed.  Jeff, who’d had enough to drink that he was even stupider than normal, said, “Come on, Roger.  Don’t be a pussy.  Get naked and get in here.”

“Jeff,” I said, just loud enough so he and none of the others could hear, “Roger can’t.  He can’t swim, remember?”

At one time, five years earlier, Roger always went swimming with us.  He was as good a swimmer as I was, and I was the best swimmer of the bunch.  Then, late in the summer before eighth grade, Roger and his mom were in their Buick LeSabre, on their way to the high school to pick up Roger’s brother, Randy, from football practice when Justin Warwick, a skinny little prick who’d just got his license two days earlier, blew though the stop sign on County Highway A where it intersected with Highway 67and broadsided the LeSabre, killing Roger’s mom instantly and flipping the car over in the ditch on the other side of the road.  The driver’s side had caved in and lacerated Roger’s mom, he could feel her lifeless body pressing down on him, and he became aware of the pain shooting through his right leg. It was bent backward at his knee so that his foot was under him, even with his waist, trapped between the seat and the door, and he became aware of the blood shooting out of his leg, just above his knee, and just before he lost consciousness he remembered seeing that his lower leg was barely attached to his upper leg.  He woke up in the hospital in Rice Lake and it was a week later, he’d been in a coma. In the week that he was unconscious, they’d amputated his right leg, treated the burns on his abdomen, and buried his mom.

“Roger,” Jeff said. “You can come in, can’t you?  Even in the shallow water?”

“Fuck, yeah,” Roger said, and he started undressing, revealing his plastic prosthetic leg and scarred mid-section.  We all broke into applause and shouts of encouragement, impressed by the fact that Roger must have been really wasted, because he’d never do this if sober.   He unsnapped the leg and left it in a pile on the pier with his jeans and shirt, and he hopped off of the pier, hitting the water sideways. Jeff swam toward him, and made sure he was okay.  “Fuck, yeah!” Roger shouted, and there was triumph in his voice.

Once I knew Roger would be fine, I turned around and faced the center of the lake, and started swimming.  It was the first swim of the year, and I became aware of how much I’d missed it, the feeling of gliding over the water, the feeling of my muscles stretched tight and taught, the heaving of my chest with each breath I took.  More than anything, it was the dark, and as I swam further out from the shore, the light in the boat launch parking lot became a tiny dot, and the voices of the others faded until all I could hear was the rhythm of frogs croaking on the shore and my own breathing, and I was alone in the night, the sky black and starless, the water black and deep, until they became one all-encompassing blackness, and I couldn’t tell where the lake ended and the sky began, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if I was gliding on the water or the sky. I’d become a stone, smooth and dark, skimming over the surface of the lake, thrown side-armed and released from the inside of God’s bent index finger. I swam all the way to the center of the lake and stopped, certain that if I’d just close my eyes and tread water there in the middle of the lake, I’d become one with, a part of, the unending blackness, a part of water and sky, the most elemental substances of the universe. I wanted to be held there, suspended in time and space, and I wanted the moment, with me alone in the blackness in the middle of Zimmerman lake, to last forever.

But the moment couldn’t last forever.  Soon I heard the distant cries of “Craig!” and “Tyler!”  The others were looking for me, they probably thought I’d drowned.

“I’m here,” I hollered back, and turned and started swimming back to the guys. By the time I made it back to the pier, there was a faint pink line on the eastern horizon, and I could see the rest of the guys sitting by the fire.  I climbed on top of the pier and, of course, was not surprised to see that my clothes were missing.  I had no choice but to walk up to the fire stark naked. “Okay,” I calmly said, “where are my clothes?”

“Oh, Craig,” Jimmy replied.  “Fancy meeting you here tonight.”  Then, looking me up and down, said “Kind of cold out here tonight, isn’t it?”

The other guys all giggled.

“Step close to the fire, that’ll warm you up,” Jeff said.

“Chestnuts roasting over an open fire,” Jimmy sang and everyone laughed again.

“Ha ha,” I said.  I was starting to get really cold.

“Well,” Jimmy said, motioning to the pile of fabric sitting on the ground next to his lawn chair, “I think it’s about time we make a sacrifice, a little something to appease the fire gods.” He then took the stick he was holding and reached down and lifted my underpants up with it.  ‘What do you say, guys?”

“Burn, burn, burn,” they chanted.

“Well, it’s unanimous,”  Jimmy said, and he lifted the stick and dropped my whitey tighties into the fire, to the wild cheering of the other guys.  Then he took the stick and lifted up my jeans.

“Not my pants, ass wipe.”

Everyone was laughing, Jeff and Tony chanting “do it, do it,” when Roger yelled, “Guys, look,” and pointed towards the road.  A pair of headlights was running down the road to the boat launch.  In the east, the pink line had gotten broader, and morning was breaking.

We moved very quickly, Jimmy giving me my jeans and t-shirt.  I put them on, going commando, while the rest of the guys quickly picked up all the empty cans and bottles and threw them in the trash can. Our first and only thought was it was the police, but as the car got closer, it revealed itself to be an ancient pickup truck, and we could make out the outline of a trailer carrying a boat behind it.  The truck made it into the parking lot and circled around, and we could see there were two old guys in it.  The one on the passenger side didn’t have any teeth.  The driver quickly backed the trailer down the launch next to the pier, and the toothless guy got out.  The boat was a non-descript, gray aluminum fourteen footer with a little Evinrude outboard motor mounted on the back

“Hello, Mr. Weatherwax,” Tony said.

“Tony, how the heck are you,” the toothless man replied.

“Going fishing?” Tony asked

“You bet. Bluegills and Crappies,” he said. ‘What about you?”

“What do you mean?

“You guys going fishing?”

“No, no, we were just having a little get together, celebrating us graduating high school and all.”

“You decided to get together at 5:30 in the morning?”

“Um, no, we were just finishing.  We started last night.”

Mr. Weatherwax shook his head. “Well, that’s you damn goofy kids these days.  Never did make a lot of sense.” With that, old Mr. Weatherwax and his silent partner finished putting their boat in the water and got in, Mr. Weatherwax in the back. He started the little ten horsepower Evinrude.  It cried a high pitched whine and Mr. Weatherwax, his hand on the motor’s rudder, steered the boat to the other side of the lake.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“That was old man Weatherwax.  Owns a farm out by us.  Gotta be about eighty years old now, still works the fields. He just can’t understand why some guys would stay out all night and waste the daylight.”

The sun was all the way up now, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  It was going to be a perfect day, and as close as we were to the summer solstice, it’d last about seventeen hours, the last glow of daylight ending around ten thirty.

Jimmy drove us all home, waking us up one by one as he got to our respective homes.  I was the last to get dropped off, and as I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes, I thought about Mr. Weatherwax and the sin of wasting daylight, and with the sun’s warm glow on my face, I knew what he meant.  But I also knew what Mr. Weatherwax either never knew or had forgotten, and that is how wonderful the night and its chilled and hidden treasures can be.

Ben Williams found himself in the chilly darkness of an unfamiliar city, off of the main drag, the street dimly lit and the buildings mostly darkened warehouses with empty loading docks dotted with fresh puddles. The night air was heavy. He could smell the salty odor of decay and dampness, like it had just finished raining, but that had happened before, before he found himself in the strange city. In the distance he heard a siren ringing, and he knew with an unmistakable certainty that he was being pursued, that he was in danger, but he had no idea why, or who would be after him, or where he was or how he had ended up there.

He thought he heard the sound of footsteps on the pavement behind him, getting closer.  He found the unmarked door to a darkened building and tried opening it; to his surprise it was unlocked.  He stepped inside to an empty theatre.  It was dark except for the yellow floor lights that lit the aisles that sloped down to the stage. The stage was dark and empty, as were all the seats. It struck him that this was the perfect place to get off the street for a while, to get his bearings.  He sat down in a seat in the back row, furthest from the stage, closest to the door he came in through.

He sat there, thinking hard, trying to find clues that would help him determine where he was, how he got there, and who was pursuing him, but nothing came to mind.  At least it was warm in the theatre.  He was wearing a t-shirt that was inadequate outside in the cool night air.

Ten minutes passed and nothing came to him; at the same time, nobody else entered the theatre.  I must have thrown them off track, he thought, I’m safe in here.  Then a single spot light beamed out of the dark and lit a small circle on the stage. An elderly man, wearing an expensive looking suit and a black fedora, stepped out of the dark into its glow. Ben ducked down in his seat and started crawling towards the aisle, afraid that the man on stage would see him, when the man stared speaking.

“Billy didn’t know where he was,” the man said. “But inside the small auditorium he felt safe. Outside the police were looking for him. They’d found the woman’s body, in an alleyway, carved up and bloodied to the point of being unidentifiable.”

Then the entire stage lit up and the man was gone.  It was empty, there was no set, no props, just two empty kitchen chairs on the far right edge of the stage. A man and a woman entered from the left side of the stage, the man about thirty, thin and muscular, wearing a shirt and tie and dress slacks.  The woman was beautiful, with feathered red hair and piercing blue eyes, wearing a sleeveless blue sweater and tight pants that hugged her hourglass figure.

“Thank God that’s over,” the man said.

“It wasn’t so bad,” the woman said. “I actually had fun.”

“Sure, you did. Flirting with the entire faculty.”

“I wasn’t flirting,” she replied, and Ben realized that he was watching the performance of a play.  He was certain the actors couldn’t see him, crouched down low in his seat in the back row.  If they couldn’t see him, then they were playing to what they had to think was an empty theatre.

“You’re just too hung up to have a little fun, to have a good time,” she said. “It was nice getting out of the house for a change.”

Then the man had a huge knife, a machete, in his hands. He raised it high. The woman screamed, and the man brought it down on her shoulder, gashing it deep, blood flowing bright and red from the wound.  The man took the knife and slit the woman’s throat, ripping apart her jugular vein, blood erupting from her neck and spraying all over the stage, all over the man.  She collapsed in a lifeless heap on the floor, but the man didn’t stop, he continued swinging the machete, cutting her up until she was unrecognizable. The lights went down. The amount of blood on the stage was staggering.

And it was all real.  He’d just witnessed, crouched down low in between the last two rows of seats in the auditorium, a brutal murder.

Then the spotlight came on again, and the elderly man in the fedora returned.  He said, “Billy’s really done it now, hasn’t he? Now, let’s enjoy the comedy of Assault and Battery.”

The sound of canned applause echoed through the auditorium as two men, in old gray vaudeville suits and bow ties, entered from stage right and took their places behind two microphone stands.  The first one said, “Hello, I’m Assault.”

“And I’m Battery,” the second man said. The man claiming to be Battery was the same actor who’d murdered the woman. A pool of her blood was visible on the stage behind the pair.

“Say, Battery,” Assault smiled. He was wearing a black top hat that made Ben think of Fred Astaire.

“Yes, Assault?” Battery replied.

“Who was that lady I saw you with last night?”

“That was no lady,” Battery answered, smiling broadly. “That was my no good slut of a wife.”  Canned laughter played through the theatre’s speakers.

“Women,” Assault began. “You can’t live with ‘em …”

“…so you might as well kill ‘em,” Battery inserted with perfect timing. The laugh track played again.

Suddenly Ben felt the presence of someone, some thing, in the seat next to him.  He looked and in the dim light from the stage he could see a man sitting next to him, not moving, stiller than still. He remembered the tiny flashlight he had on the key chain in his pocket, he took it out and shined it in the face of the man next to him. It was the face of a corpse, white and colorless, and he could tell that the theatre, which had been empty just a moment before, was now filled, with every seat except his occupied by a silent and unmoving corpse. They didn’t move as Assault and Battery droned on, the rhythm of their act punctuated by the occasional playing of the laugh track.

Ben ran to the aisle and turned toward the exit when he heard the voice of the old man in the fedora, from the stage, say, “Don’t forget, Billy, the police are outside. It’s not safe for you out there. They’ve found the body and they know you did it.”

“I’m not Billy,” Ben said, turning to face the old man.  He was standing on the stage again, alone in the spotlight.  Assault and Battery were nowhere to be seen.

“Sure you’re not,” the old man smiled.

“And I didn’t kill anybody.”

Then the overhead lights came on, lighting up the entire theatre, momentarily blinding Ben. When his vision recovered he could see the empty stage and the empty seats, and he saw the first police officer enter, his gun drawn and pointed at Ben.

“Freeze,” the office said.

Ben knew that running would be pointless, so he put his arms in the air, and in his mind he saw, he remembered, her in the alleyway in the rain, red and crumpled beneath him, the knife cold and wet in his hand.