1955 (part one)

A tar blister, black and shiny, bloomed from the wooden crevice of a joint in the short bridge, close to Aran’s right foot. The glisten of sun on the tar caught his eye. Aran shifted his sneaker away. His grandmother would not want the tar in the house. The bridge, lengths of wood as thick as railroad ties and darkened with creosote, joined the rusted bones of an iron trestle that crossed the wider gully of the creek more than the creek itself, spanning the red gouge between a corn field and a pasture.

“Aw, shoot!”

His voice was muffled by the dense quiet. Even his breath was smothered by the sun itself. Everything had changed. Nothing ever stayed the same long enough.

Aran stood at the middle of the bridge, elbows planted on top of the side rail, his palms clasped to each cheek as he stared down into the gully and studied the ruin of his plan.

The last time he had been there, a year and a half before, it was winter and the sand in the bed of the creek had been broadly spread in a clear swath above and behind a natural basket of rocks and several boulders where the water swirled through a narrowing gap. Behind the larger rocks the creek meandered from side to side over this sunken plain between embankments of raw earth so red they appeared artificial. Now the weeds and undergrowth had taken the sides in, enveloping the banks and overhanging the water in most places, leaving few breaches for him to approach.

His Grandfather had told him, “Right there is where you momma used to swim with Jesse and Susie. Dinah too. It was deeper in those days. There was a wood lot to the far side and not so much sand. Your aunt Susie would never keep her clothes on when she was near the water.”

Aran had pictured his mother sitting on the big rock at the middle of the flow and directing her sisters in the same way she had always directed him.

He had been here most of summers of his life, but only that one winter during the second grade. It was the year his father had changed jobs and they had been forced to move from their small house in Westbury, Long Island. With no other home in New York then, his mother had taken them south to stay with her parents on their little farm near Spartanburg. That was a dark year, of grays and browns. This plan was one of only two aims surviving from that time in his mind.

The following summer they did not come. The old car had not been up to the trip, he was told.

But that winter he made his plan over and again for the warmer weather, whenever he had passed this way from school. It was the long way from school. The way to avoid other things. And then, by the time warmer weather did arrive, his father had found a new job and rented an apartment for them back in New York. In the year and half since then, he had continued to dream of this place and what he would do when he got the chance. Last night they had finally arrived at his Grandparent’s farm for the summer once again.

Sunday dinner still filled his stomach, but he had taken two more biscuits in a small sack and stuffed them into his pocket for a snack. A car passed over the bridge close behind him causing scraps of cooler morning air to lap at his bare legs from beneath the bridge, teasing him.

What would he do? Disappointment locked his brain. He had no idea. The sun ran like hot liquid in his short-cut hair as the air continued to thicken around him. He studied the situation with a sense of urgency not visible in the stillness of this place. The creek ran silent and undisturbed in its dark channel.

Tomorrow was the Fourth of July, and there would be fireworks and other things to do. On Tuesday his grandfather had asked Aran to go out with him in the truck. It would be his first chance. He would be his grandpa’s helper then for the rest of the summer, scrambling about in the back of the truck to get this or that for the customers. He had always wanted to do that as well. He had been too young for the job before and he had looked forward to it even more than coming here to the creek to play. And he might not have time to come here again for days.

Aran’s eyes wandered back to his own shadow against the dun brown sand just below. Dragonflies—what his cousins called ‘snake doctors’–floated on the still air, testing the edges of Aran’s shadow on jeweled wings. The drone of insects in the undergrowth blended in a sort of loud silence. The corn stood at attention, soldier like, without a word of rustling leaves, watching him. Waiting for orders. No small breezes pushed at the upper reaches of the scraggle of trees on the pasture side.

“Shoot!” he said again, just to hear his own voice.

At one side, the weedy interlopers closing on both banks of the creek had been cut down from the edge of the pasture to make them less tempting to the white-faced Herefords. Aran could see the shapes of the cattle laying in the shade of larger trees higher on the rise toward the railroad tracks. His original scheme had included less of that side because of the cattle. But they were kept back there from the gully by an electric fence. The weeds beneath that rise were not as intimidating.

There was no good in waiting.

First, he needed a stick. The longer the better. He settled on a discarded length of splintered post left near where it had been replaced in the cattle fence. With this he climbed down toward the creek on the pasture side and began to batter the weeds. Some of these were nearly as tall as himself. The raw smell of shattered stems flavored the air. The quieting of the insects made the sounds of his attack all the more fierce. Within minutes sweat had fastened his shirt to his body. He took his shirt off. Chaff from the weeds attached to his pale skin. By the time he broke through to the dry sand bed bordering the creek he was ready for his first swim.

He pulled his sneakers off without untying them and waded in. The cold of the water straightened his back, but didn’t halt his plunge.

It was more of a baptism. A wallow. The creek was not yet deep enough. There was no width for even a shallow dive. But then, this was the whole point of his plan.

After a moment he sat in the sun at the edge of the sandy bank, with his legs wide in the flow of the gentle current, and reconsidered.

A car passed on the bridge, clapping the boards together enough to stir the cooler air beneath and an invisible edge of this touched him before dissolving, like a ghost. As he imagined a ghost would be. Aran shivered in the heat and stared into the shadows there. Waspy mud daubers had decorated the underside of the metal trusses in crusty nests.

The sun braised his head and back. He shifted his place to a shadow from the bridge and restudied his project once more. He would need to wade into the cluster of rocks at the center and lift them up toward the boulders. This thought of wading suddenly jerked his mind into awareness and he rammed his hand into his pocket. The paper sack there was limp and wet and tore as he removed it. He peeled back a portion and exposed his waterlogged biscuits. The loss felt tragic. He loved his grandmother’s biscuits. His frustration welled from his throat into a loud “Yow…”

The shadow from the bridge suddenly moved. Aran looked up. Even in the blinding glare he could see a smile of white teeth.

The black boy there quickly closed his mouth over his smile, but this raised both eyebrows with the effort to conceal it.

Aran said “Hey.”

The black boy lift one hand from the rail in a partial wave but said nothing.

They stared at each other for half a minute. Aran wondered at the boy’s silence, and then at where he had come from, and then at whether he was terribly hot up there. The boy had no shirt. Aran was sure he wore no shoes, though this was not immediately visible from below. Knobby knees, reddened by a blush of dirt, peeked from beneath khaki shorts.

Aran said, “Watch out for the tar. It won’t come off.”

The boy looked directly down and shifted his body. Aran saw one bare foot lift gingerly. Still the other boy said nothing.

Aran said, “It’s cooler down here. By a little, anyhow.”

The boy said, “I know it,” and nothing more.

Finally, Aran turned away and reset his plan. He could use some help, but there was no asking if the boy had no interest.

Slowly he began to move the rocks, one after the other. At his lower angle, the natural gathering of rocks at the middle was barely visible through the glare off the surface of the water and he was forced to feel the way with his hands, making the grasp of each piece a small adventure. Crawfish scooted at his feet. Snake doctors and mud daubers visited when both his hands were occupied, making him flinch.

Having spent many hours, in the past, fishing in the larger waters at Boyd’s Old Mill and asking his grandfather all the questions he could think of, he knew of no real dangers lurking beneath the surface here. Not even a big catfish. And he believed water moccasins were unlikely in such a small creek. The minnows and other fish were too small. Frogs were the largest beasts he might see. Still, pulling at what he felt the edges for was a mysterious sort of blind exploration with his fingers.

When one rock slipped from his grasp as he raised it, splashing back at him, Aran looked up for a smile but the black boy was gone.

In an hour, with breaks for reconsiderations and imaginings of what it would be like when he was done, he had a solid line of rocks from one side of the narrowest point in the creek to the other. Perhaps six feet. Nine of his own feet as he carefully stepped the distance off placing one foot before the other. He had the mental image of it, with the curving strength of the Hoover Dam, just the way it appeared in a volume of The Book Of Knowledge. Creation of this curve required the shifting of much more sand and many more rocks than a straight line would have taken, but he already felt a great satisfaction in looking at his accomplishment. Even so, his work had hardly affected the flow of water.

It was while admiring this marvelous arc of rocks, and imagining what it soon would be, that he glanced up toward the pasture. In the shade of one small tree at the edge there, he saw the black boy again, sitting. The boy dipped his head in a nod. He was now gripping the rolled end of a small paper sack in one hand.

Aran squinted in the sun. There was no way to know what was in the sack.

Aran said, “Still cooler down here.”

Teeth flashed. Then the boy gave another nod, but sat a moment longer as if snagged by some uncertainty, before rising to move down the slope through the opening Aran had made. He stopped at the bottom to eye Aran across the swath of dry sand. His head tilted to one side, clearly unsure of what he might do next.

They were nearly both the same height. Both were thin all the way to the boney angles of their elbows and knees. With their bodies bare except for their shorts, the difference in their skin color seemed at once both exaggerated and less important. The other boy was more black than brown, and his hair was cut short to his scalp. Aran’s white skin was burned more red than tan by his few chances in the sun since school had ended two weeks before.

Aran stuck a hand out, his arm awkwardly stiff. “My name is Aran.”

The other boy said, “Taylor,” and shook Aran’s hand twice in a definitive manner before pulling the hand away again and spreading his fingers at his side apprehensively. Aran felt the formality of the introduction. This was not a common event. He would often play with kids for hours without ever knowing their names. But this was somehow different. He wasn’t sure why.

Taylor ran his eyes over the area around them in an overstated survey of the situation. Aran looked the territory over again himself for the hundredth time

Taylor said, “What’cho workin’ at?”

Aran shrugged. “Makin’ a dam.”

“For what?”

“Gonna make a swimmin’ hole.”

Taylor frowned. “Why’in’cha go to that pool in Arcadia.”

Aran shrugged. “Cause.”

“Cause why?”

Aran raised his shoulders even higher at that in another shrug. The real answer was not so easy to tell. He said what came to mind.

“My gran’pa says my momma used to swim up over here when she was a girl.”

Taylor tilted his head to the side once more with a short consideration of this. He said, “Who’s your gran’pa?”

“Joe Burke.”

“Your gran’pa ol’ Joe?”

“Yes.”

“I know him.”

Aran was about to say that everyone knew Joe Burke, but held it back as an unnecessary statement of the obvious. Joe Burke peddled fresh produce from the back of his truck all over that side of Spartanburg, from Una to Lyman. Instead, Aran turned to his handiwork.

“I’m gonna build a Hoover dam,” and pointed at the simple arc of stones beneath the water.

“What’s a ‘Hoover’ dam?”

“Like that,” Aran held the tips of his finger together with his palms curved in a demonstration. “It’s bowed. It’s stronger that way.”

Taylor studied the placement of the stones. When his eyes slipped further over to the wad of damp refuse Aran had thrown by the cut path, Taylor held up his sack.

“Wanna biscuit?”

This was a questionable surprise. Aran’s grandmother made the best biscuits on the face of the earth, as everyone knew who knew anything. But Aran had started being hungry as soon has he had discovered his earlier mistake.

There was really no question about it. “Sure.”

Aran could see several biscuits in the bag Taylor held open, and took one. He put it to the test beneath his nose first. The sour smell of the buttermilk pried his mouth open without a hesitation. The biscuit was sweet.

Neither of them had yet moved from the same spot facing each other. Taylor took a biscuit and put half in his mouth at once.

With his mouth full, Aran said, “This is like my gran’ma’s.”

Taylor said, “Then your gran’ma mus make’em like my momma.”

Aran decided not to correct the backward priority. He was happy enough with the result.
He pointed down at his task. “You wanna help me make a dam?”

Taylor smiled, his eyes flaring with another recognition. “My daddy says that. He say,‘You wanna make a damn,’ when he say what he want to do. But he mean the other thing.”

It seemed an odd comment, as if part of some larger thought still fresh on the boy’s mind.

Aran asked, “What’s your daddy do?”

Taylor widened his eyes at the question but he didn’t answer. This flare of the eyes seemed to be a habit. Like Aran’s cousin Danny who shook his head when he meant to say yes. With Taylor the expression seemed to signal that he was unsure of something as much as surprised.

Aran finished his biscuit and bent down on his knees in the sand to cup a drink of water with his hands. As he did this he asked, “Where do you live?”

Taylor half turned his head in the direction. “Over to Una,” paused, and then asked, “About you?”

Aran said, “New York,” as he stood up again.

Taylor’s eyes flared. “My daddy’s in New York.” This was said with a drop in his voice, as if it was an unhappy thought. But that was something they had in common. Aran’s father was still in New York as well, though Aran was certainly happier to be here instead.

He said only, “So’s mine.”

This coincidence of fact hung in the air for a moment before either of them moved again.

Aran waded into the creek, bent low to the water to grasp another rock, and lifted it up to show. “None of’em’s as big as they look from up on the bridge. But they’ll do.” Then he carried it the short distance to the others he had set in line and let it drop to achieve the greatest amount of splash back. This brought a flash of teeth again from Taylor.

“Whyn’t you just throw’em.”

“I can one. But the next gets heavier. They’re lighter under the water but they’re heavy to lift up above.”

Taylor waded in as if challenged, explored the bottom with his hands, coming up with the largest rock he could find, and then lifted it high over his head, hefted it once as if to start a throw, and then purposely fell over backwards. The splash covered Aran.

This started a water fight that lasted at least ten minutes. The noise of their laughter made the cattle stand-up in the field. Winded, they sat in the sun afterward and ate two more biscuits, each bending low for a drink more than once.

Aran commented as he knelt at the edge, “It’s good water. I believe it’s better than my grandpa’s well.”

Taylor nodded. “My momma gets water from that spring up yonder. Same water. She go up the other road an bring a milk bucket. I help her. I pull the wagon.”

Aran asked, “You ever swim here before?”

Taylor shrugged. “No. I come sometime. I sit on that rock there,” he nodded toward the largest of the three boulders in the midst of the creek. “Watch for frogs. There a turtle in here too. Brown as mud. He hidin’ away now, but he there.”

Then the serious work began. They carried the rocks individually, one after the other before Taylor had the idea to cut the distance in half, with each of them taking just one end of the work. Taylor put his face in the water to see the bigger rocks and then grabbed them up and took a step or two and handed them off to Aran who placed them as carefully as he could manage in the slowly rising arc.

Taylor asked, “You live in a house or ‘partment?”

“Apartment. We used to live in a house. Before”

“My daddy live in a ‘partment too.”

“Where.”

“Brook-lyn.”

“That’s near where I live. I live in Queens.”

“His name is Martin.”

Taylor stopped to look for some sign of recognition from Aran.

Aran shrugged. “I don’t know anybody named Martin.” A few rocks later he asked, “You live in a house?”

“Trailer. ‘hind my uncle Elton’s house.”

“What’s your Uncle Elton do?”

“He work at the Beacon. He be one of the fella’s who bring the food to the cars. My daddy did that before he went to New York.”

Aran had eaten at the Beacon Drive-in a hundred times. He might have even seen Taylor’s uncle. Or perhaps his father.

He said, “I like barbeque.”

Taylor looked at him suspiciously. “Everyone like barbeque.”

Aran nodded his agreement.

Taylor asked, “What your daddy do.”

“He’s a salesman. He sell’s stuff.”

“What kin’a stuff?”

“I don’t know. He’s changed his job since he told me last time.”

In another hour they had made enough difference to flood the sand bar where they had been sitting. Aran carried his shirt and sneakers and the spoiled wad of his own biscuits up and snagged them on one of the small trees by the pasture fence. Several of the white-faced Herefords had wandered down to the little shade there and stood silently watching. Looking from above, the spread of water had already created a wide pool, shallow as it was on the sandy side, and the air was now disturbed by the gurgle of the water over their small impediment. It was a happy sight.

Taylor flashed a smile from where he stood at the middle, and straightened tall with one arm out to his side as if presenting the fact, loudly announcing, “Aran Dam,” in his deepest voice.

Aran climbed back down, making his correction on the way. “The Aran-Taylor dam, I think.” He liked that. It had a very official sound to it.

They switched places in the work line then, with Aran pulling rocks out of the creek-bed, his face down into the water just like Taylor had done it. Between times he sat in the depths and floated on his back. Taylor only watched.

Aran said, “Come on and try it.”

Taylor shook his head. “Can’t. Can’t swim.”

This put another halt in their progress.

Aran stood, waist deep. “No foolin’?”

“I’m no fool. I just never did learn how.”

Aran was confused. What should he make of this? Why was Taylor building a swimming hole if he couldn’t swim? Was it because he wanted to learn?

“They have lessons over at the pool in Arcadia. That’s where I learned. I learned to swim two years ago when I was only six years old.”

Taylor said, “That’s good.”

Aran said, “They have instructors. You could learn there yourself.”

Taylor reached his hands forward and wiggled his fingers for another rock. “I don’t reckon so.”

Aran pulled another rock up from the bottom and handed it off. “It only costs a quarter each time.”

Taylor sniffed, already wiggling his fingers again. He repeated his words, “I don’t reckon so.”

Aran frowned and handed off the next.

“I’m sure. I’m sure of it.”

Taylor shook his head. He said, “No. Not for colored folks, it don’t,” and dropped the rock into place with a definitive splash.

This made Aran stand still again. He felt dumb struck by his own stupidity. He had never seen any black people at the pool in previous summers, yet he had never even wondered at the fact, much less asked why.

Taylor stood with his head to the side again, hands hanging with fingers spread.

Aran said, “I’m sorry.”

Taylor shrugged. “It don’t matter.” His eyes went up to the sky. “We ought’a hurry. I be gone soon. I got my chores.”

“On Sunday?”

“Chickens. Chickens sit on Sunday same’s any.”

Aran pulled another rock from the bottom and handed it off. “I’ll be goin’ out with my gran’pa on Tuesday. I’ll be his helper. Maybe he’ll head up by Una.”

“I be up ta Packer’s Tuesday. Peaches’ ripe. I be wif momma pickin’ peaches.”

Aran felt like he was still fighting the previous revelation in his mind. He said, “Gran’pa might want a few bushels of peaches for the truck. Maybe I’ll see you at Packer’s”

“Maybe.”

Aran looked over the incomplete project. “Can you come here next Sunday?”

Taylor’s head went to the side. “I reckon.”
Then he turned and climbed the bank with his empty sack in one hand, stopping to wave only when he reached the top.

Aran said, “I can show you how. I can show you how to swim. I’m a good swimmer.”

Taylor waved again and disappeared in the direction of Una.

The next Sunday Aran brought a shovel. Taylor was not there when Aran arrived at the bridge.

Wading into the shallow pool, Aran removed a dozen rocks at the center of their dam and set them to one side to let the water run through until the sand bank was exposed again. As he waited, he whistled.

The sound of his whistle echoed beneath the bridge and caused him to look through the dark frame of the underside. There he could see almost level across the surface of a broad flat pasture beyond. It was like a picture in a museum, but for a shiver of heat at the green edge of the grass, almost as if electrified by the fence. The steady fuss of insects gave an electric buzz to his thought.

A pickup truck passed on the bridge above. From his place on the sand he could only see the top of the cab and the side gate. It was not his grandfather’s truck in any case.

He shoveled the sand, tossing it back further from the dam to widen the pool. His hand was sore where it gripped the shovel and reminded him of the wire handles on the peach baskets. The holes he made in the sand quickly filled with water. When the metal of the shovel struck a rock he pried it up and threw it on the dam. The repetition of this process soon engrossed him.

Aran had arrived at the creek earlier this time, having contrived to finish his Sunday dinner before anyone else. He had borrowed the shovel from the collection of tools in the small shed at one side of the chicken yard, and exited his grandparent’s farm through the back corn field to avoid being seen or, more importantly, being questioned. This way was in fact the same way he had once come home from school to avoid the direct route down the road that passed in front of his grandparent’s house. But in summer, the unused field at the back was tall with wild raspberry vines and burrs.

Those wild fields were what remained of a separate farm abandoned when the house there had been burned down years before. ‘Johnson’ land, it was called. The stories of that place had all happened long before Aran was even born, during the Depression, and the remains appeared to be that much more ancient because of the kudzu vine that enveloped the ruin in a thick undulating blanket of leaves.

Aran had used the shovel to scythe a narrow way clear to the dirt ruts of the back road close to where the burned farmhouse once stood. Brick supports there, entwined in green, tilted at the sky. He knew they were brick because in the winter they were exposed, and because the fact of how substantial this house once was figured into several of his grandfather’s stories.

Because Aran was already sweating and moved too quickly with anticipation as he approached the back road, he had snagged his bare shins on thorns in several places in his hurry. In his belt he and stuffed the top fold of another paper sack with some of his grandmother’s biscuits as well as half a dozen ripe figs he had quickly plucked from the sagging tree by the shed.

At the creek, the scratches from the thorns burned with his own sweat as he shoveled the sand back at the swimming hole and he waded into the water repeatedly for relief.

His mind continued to wander over incidents of the past week. They had indeed gone to Packer’s for peaches on Tuesday. His grandfather did not need to be asked, announcing his intention at breakfast on Tuesday morning. But Aran had not seen Taylor. The orchard was large, stretching a quarter mile along the Old Greenville Road, and it was busy with pickers. Taylor could have been almost anywhere out of sight and Aran quickly gave up looking.

There were several clusters of activity along the road where trucks waited to be filled and sorting tables were busiest. The peaches were carefully dumped from smaller baskets held on wide straps slung around each pickers neck. The dumped peaches spread into shallow wooden troughs covered with strips of black rubber cut from the inner tubes of tires. Four or five women re-sorted the peaches there into bushels not by size but by the ripeness apparent in their color.

Aran’s grandfather had pulled into a side road at a point he had already chosen for some unspoken reason, and bought a dozen bushels for their small truck right at the sorting table, paying cash to a tall white man in overalls who wore a baseball cap. This man continuously squinted so tightly against the sun that Aran could not believe he saw the money to count.

Nearby, several black men picked up the thin wood and wire bushel baskets which had been sorted, already packed and covered, and lifted them high into a larger truck for someone else. The pickers and the sorters were all black women in broad yellow straw hats. The yellow straw hats bobbed in the bright sun as they moved.

Aran helped his grandfather carry each bushel they had chosen to the truck. He held to the thin wire handle at one side, even as it dug into the soft flesh of his hand, by clinching his teeth. His grandfather carried the other side with far less effort and then climbed up on the bed of the truck and positioned the basket to achieve the most of the limited space. Between each carry Aran waited for his grandfather to return by looking at the faces of the individual women at the sorting tables, watching their eyes scan the flow of peaches, their features darkened further by their hats, and wondered if one of the women might be Taylor’s mother–but he had no intention of asking.

The pooling of the water in his shovel holes dissolved the sand beneath his bare feet, exposing more rocks which he pried out of the sand with the shovel blade, one by one. His project seemed to be increasing in size rather than getting finished. He rested often between shovelfuls, not to judge his efforts but to consider the events of the week.

That week, as they had drifted the back roads in the green truck from one cluster of small houses to the next with his grandfather calling out from the open window, Aran had learned when to move and when to stay put.

“Rosen ears. Peaches. Strawberries. Muskmelons. Maters. Green beans. Turnips.”

At this time of the year, all but the peaches were grown on his grandparent’s five acres. When that crop was thinned, maybe next week or the week after, they would go to Greenville early one morning, to the Farmer’s market, and supplement the supply.

Almost anyone they saw along the way waved familiarly. The sight of a hand rising up without a wave seemed to be the sign. The truck, never moving very fast, slowed to a halt at the side nearest the path to the house, as his grandfather stood on the clutch and shifted the knob on the long gear stick. Once stopped, more people usually came out of the shade from porches and sheds, and for a few minutes, there would be a flurry of activity. The plain metal scale squeaked on the chain as it was loaded by the handful and then unloaded into paper sacks. Aran moved around the nest of baskets inside the bed of the truck and on the raised shelf suspended between the side gates, pulling out what was pointed at, balancing a foot here or there in the slates in the wooden side gate, or holding to a cross bar, but always watching the faces.

His grandfather would pull beans from a basket and hand them out.

“Taste that. Sweet as sugar.”

He pulled the husk down from the browned top of a ‘rosen’ ear. It was just a fat ear of corn–a roasting ear it had once been called in times past when corn was cooked in the fire with the leaves still on. Aran had found it was a term unknown to anyone in New York.

“Look at it,” his grandfather would say. “Full yeller.”

Or he would pluck a strawberry from a pint batch and drop it into an open palm. “Picked on the Fourth of July. Red’ned by the sun. Not nearly soft. Jus’ honey an’ tart.”

This was in fact the same food they ate themselves each day and Aran new exactly what his grandfather was telling them.

They had unloaded most of the peaches into the shade of the pecan tree in the yard on Tuesday morning to make room in the truck for other produce. While Aran and his grandfather wandered the roads, his grandmother would have both stoves hot and the kitchen steamy as she cut and canned as many of the peaches and as she could.

It had been a busy week.

Aran scanned the rail of bridge above him repeatedly with his eyes, hoping to catch sight of Taylor. He was getting hungry again. He imagined he could smell both the biscuits and the figs in the closed paper sack at the bottom of the path.

A cow pulled at the longer grass close to the electric fence, careful to avoid the sting. Aran rested again and watched this with the cold water bathing the scratches on his shins.

Each night he had sat on the porch with his grandfather and listened to stories and thought about the faces he had seen. The stories usually involved some character from the past. Sometimes they were anecdotes about relatives Aran only knew vaguely of. But some stories were about the people they had met that day.

Just the evening before his grandfather had leaned forward with his forearms resting on his knees.

“You saw Miz Presley. She had that leg amputated a year past. Diabetes. She use’ta work over at the mill in Saxon. I knew her husban’. He was no account. Liked ta gamble. Ran off to Columbia and got his self kilt playin’ a game of cards with scoundrels.”

This forthright statement was of a kind usually punctuated with a spit of dark tobacco juice into the hedge. This appeared to be a cautionary tale. Perhaps a warning against playing cards with the wrong people. Perhaps against playing cards at all. His grandmother was a strict Free Will Baptist and did not hold with playing cards or gambling in any way. But then his grandfather was a gossip of an odd sort. He seemed to fixate more on the hazards of their lives, not the relationships of people, especially women with men. Never anything “off color.”

And his grandmother never spoke a word about anyone else except to affirm their better natures or good intentions, or when necessary, to offer a condolence for a loss.

Aran leaned forward on the shovel handle to dig deep. He could not use his bare foot on the back of the rusted metal blade. When metal struck rock he pried the shape up through the sand and tossed it to the growing dam. Tossing it was a confirmation of what he sensed to be his growing strength.

This was like the improving balance he felt as he moved about the back of the truck.

When someone was infirm or bought more from his grandfather than they could carry, Aran was sent back with them to the house with his arms full.

He often gaped at what he saw.

Aran had stood impatiently at Mrs. Presley’s door to allow her to make her way from the side of the truck. Impatient, he had gone ahead to find the shade of her porch, and the two cantaloupes and the bag of tomatoes grew heavier in his arms as he waited there. Her crutch dug deeply at the gravel on the path and she stopped at every step to take a heavy breath, speaking to him each time.

“From New York your gran’pa says. I was in New York one time. With my momma…My Daddy’d done joined the Navy. That was the First War, you understand. He was in the Navy right there. Worked at a shipyard in Brooklyn…We took the train all the way from Spartanburg to visit. Didn’t drive. Not like they do now. My daddy didn’t have a car at that time anyhow…I remember that trip like it was yesterday. Did you know they had dinner on that train? With tablecloths and flowers at each place and silver that shined like gold in that yeller light…I saw it. We didn’t eat any of that, you understand. We brung ‘ars along in a basket. But I saw it…D’you take the train? D’you see all that?”

“No ma’am. My mother drives.”

“Your momma drives. All that way? All the way from New York.”

“Yes.”

“By herself? That would mean your folks have a car. What kind of car would that be?”

“Yes ma’am? An Oldsmobile.”

She shook her head at the news as if it were a sad thing to know. “I know Chad Paget. I knew his mother. He has the Chevrolet dealership, you know.”

She arrived at the porch puffing breath like a small steam engine, mounted the steps one at a time, and stopped next to Aran to consider the contents of his arms.

“I should have bought me some of those green and red peppers. I like those in my rice. When you put that down, would you go back and fetch me some peppers?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Mrs. Presley pulled the screen door open and revealed a front room tight with furniture and collected things. The flowered wallpaper was mostly hidden by pictures cut from magazines and tacked up without frames. Not religious pictures, as Aran often saw, or the faded sepia tone portraits of unhappy relatives, but colorful advertisements of stoves and clothes washers, refrigerators and television sets. Above this, out of his reach, the walls were decorated with whole dried plants strung upside down on white string from nail to nail. An assortment of chairs pressed close to a coal stove to one side and a long table at the other was piled with an array of jars each filled with the crushed remains of some kind of dried plant.

She followed his eyes.

“Herbs. I sell herbs. Social Security isn’t enough, you understand…Does your mother work?”

He nodded. He didn’t think he should say anything about his mother. It might take time and his grandfather was waiting. Besides, the smells in the house were a suffocating mix of cooked food, herbs, and raw sweat.

Mrs. Presley used her bare arm to brush back the jars on the table, making space there, and Aran set down the things he carried.

Mrs. Presley leaned close. Aran saw that she had freckles amidst the hairs on her lip.

“What kind of vacuum cleaner does your mother use?…I’m sure she needs one. I recommend the Electrolux.” She pointed at an advertisement just below a dried sunflower head which had lost many of its seeds on the floor below. She added, “Harold Bennett—just across from Belk’s you know–he will sell her an Electrolux at the very best price if you use my name.”

Aran backed away.

“Gran’pa is waiting on me.”

She frowned at his lack of responsiveness.

“Your gran’pa doesn’t know how to wait. He’s out there sellin’ his goods. But you go on. He might need you. And here, take this quarter and fetch me some peppers.”

The quarter she dropped in his hand was wet with moisture.

Aran pushed his shovel deep and filled it with a solid clot of sand. It occurred to him that instead of tossing it back from his swimming hole he should toss it right on the dam to fill the cracks. This inspired him with a renewed energy.

The fact was that Aran’s mother was gone again. She was off to visit one of his aunts. He could guess which one. None of the others had any money to speak of. He had heard his mother talking on the phone late the night before as he lay in bed. She was trying to borrow money. It was a fact that they had almost run out of gas on Saturday as they were approaching Spartanburg. The needle was on the red when they pulled up at his grandparent’s house. She certainly had no money for a vacuum cleaner.

Aran’s stomach growled. A voiced spoke back.

“I believe you need some peanut. And I haf just that thing.”

Taylor had showed up at last, not much later in fact than he had appeared the previous Sunday. He explained that he had been in Church until noon, and then had to walk his grandmother home and get her what she needed before he could play. In his excitement he said all of this with more words than he had spoken to Aran the entire time before.

They ate the figs and peanuts first as Aran explained his efforts with the shovel.

Taylor slapped a knee with a laugh, “Maybe we ought’a fin’ us a few more to help. The way this plan keep growin’ it almos’ seem like work.”

Aran protested. “No! Just us. That’s all we need.” And then realizing he sounded a bit too adamant, he added, “We’ll have you swimmin’ before you leave today.”

Taylor’s face grew suddenly serious.

“My mamma say, even my daddy cain’t swim.”

Aran shrugged this off as a minor detail. “Then you can teach him.” But he knew this was not a small matter at all.

This is what I remember.

But someone else could say, “I know that place. You’ve got the names all wrong.”

I’d have to tell them that they’re mistaken. In any case, I don’t remember them being there.

They might answer, “The doorway was on the left. That woman was a blonde.”

I’d have to remind them that they were standing at a different angle, and the lighting was not as good.

This all happened before mobsters replaced cowboys at the movies, and long before government Indians and stock market brokers took over the business of gambling. I was a nobody then, the same as I am now, only then I was a nobody with promise. The unsecured credit of my youth opened doors which have since been securely locked. Reflecting on that time now, I am aware of the forgotten order of things. We all tend to place remembered matters in a sequence of importance determined by the lives we are presently living, and too easily forget the values we once held so dear. We judge our past selves by the logic of the present, as if we might have foreseen the unfolding of things we could not possibly have known.

My favorite outside job through college and for some years afterward was the night clerk shift at a hotel, because it left me time to study during the day, or write the things I write, and free of too much supervision. The money never mattered. I always made twice as much waiting tables, but then I’d came home in a sweat and a busted mood, without the heart to set down a noun and verb that agreed to the same sentence.

The best hotel job I ever had was at the old Dartmouth. For a lot of reasons. For one, it was close to the Boston Public Library, and I spent most of my free time there in the reading room. Another was the age of the place. The newer hotels are all about efficiency and cost effective use of space. The grand corridors and wide lobbies of the old Dartmouth still whispered with a pomp of royalty and circumstance. The old hotels were made to be a safe haven for travelers too far from home. The public spaces were lined with small shops offering the necessary services of an age when men wore hats, shoes were shined, and women had to be pleased with gifts before they would succumb to the ardor of lovers. Even in the later days of my time there, the Dartmouth still had the usual airline ticket office, travel agency, Newsstand, florist, barber shop, and a smoke shop that perfumed the north exit enough to be fragrant late into the night, hours after it was closed. It was like working in a self-contained village of a sort. But the main reason I remember the old Dartmouth so well now is because of a few of the people I got to know.

Times change–Nothing remains the same–the sort of wisdom that’s always been free of charge and readily available at any corner. It seems we only listen to the advice we pay for, with blood or money. The more we pay, the harder we listen.

I always tried to listen on the cheap. But then, I guess, I’m easily distracted.

Of course, the old Dartmouth Hotel has changed even more since my time there. More than just another coat of gold paint on the rococo filigree. For one thing, they ripped out the Carousel Room a few years after I left, because the aging mechanism beneath the turning floor overheated and caused a fire. Once, you could sit in a single spot beyond the wheel of the inner floor and watch a lounge act from every possible angle in the space of half an hour as the center of the room drifted by. This was not so kind to the over-ripe acts that often played that venue, but the constant movement made the place seem busy even on slow nights. The piano bar at the middle was usually stocked with women, young and otherwise, each happy to be on revolving display and often attended by anxious middle-aged men. And during those years, on most nights after ten o’clock, anyone entering the main door by the maitre d’ stand might notice the dapper figure of Dom Benedict sitting at his table in the far corner, beyond the drift of the floor. From there he maintained a steady angle on a revolving world that was somehow especially his.

At the time, the Dartmouth was already outdated by the latest standards, a slightly shabby warren of wide halls which suddenly narrowed to make room for the newer conveniences, large rooms with lowered ceiling to hide ductwork and additional piping, and bathrooms with vaulted heights. There were luxurious suites which had been divided into multiple singles, and singles with king-sized beds. Not all the elevators went to every floor. The balcony over the lobby could only be reached from above because the grand staircase had been removed to make room for a breakfast cafe. Elaborate plaster ceiling medallions were truncated by the upper reaches of odd walls installed to create spaces for things already forgotten and now reused for other purposes. Fire regulations dictated exits, but these often lead to hallways and then to other spaces connecting with more hallways. Few were aware, for instance, that the heavy silk and velvet curtain behind Mr. Benedict’s table in the Carousel Room covered a service door, which he used discreetly to come and go. I knew this because I was habitually curious and spent my breaks away from the front desk exploring whatever nooks I could find.

When new, the Dartmouth was the ‘modern’ hotel of an opulent Edwardian age, and the architects had allowed for an elaborate floor plan offering the greatest potential to the whims of that time. Most inner walls were not meant for support. The bones of massive steel girders spanned ten yards at a stride, and in its early days, walls were moved from year to year, like partitions, allowing displays of the latest in automobiles or the hosting of the kind of political conventions which had once made Boston the ‘Hub.’ In my time, all this had declined to the gatherings around school graduations and the annual comings of the Shriners or the Knights of Columbus. Most of the once temporary inner walls had been left in place for decades by then. Still, small doors opened from one space to the next at odd places and on several occasions, upon opening one or another of those, I witnessed things I have not forgotten.

The duties of a night-clerk were proscribed: checking in late-comers, turning away those without reservations who did not appear trustworthy, taking calls directly from rooms when guests needed information or help, ringing the bellmen to hoist bags, delivering ice, passing disputed bills over to the night bookkeeper, watching out for the pimps who were themselves keeping an eye on potential business, and calling the hotel security in times of emergency. All of this might absorb two or three of the eight hours of duty I was salaried for. The rest of the shift was supposed to have been spent with hands folded on the gray and pink of the Italian marble counter, eyes watchful for the wants of needy patrons. I usually spent this quiet time reading paperback novels which I opened out of view on a nook of shelf below the room chart, and kept hidden the rest of the time, splayed beneath the reservation board.

My previous hotel job in Brattleboro, Vermont had required me to make the wake-up calls as well. At the Dartmouth, this chore was handled by a small women named Ellen, whom we seldom actually saw except when she was coming in to work, or leaving, but whose voice was a common thread to us all. The old switchboards, long outmoded and since automated, or by-passed completely by direct dialing, remained in a sort of hulking majesty of Bakelite and brass, their once proud technology massively spanning a narrow room in the basement, just below the front desk. Ellen spent her shift there ensconced before a newer console of small black switches, hardly bigger than an office desk, in one corner of that space where previously four women had once chattered busily as they plugged and unplugged a morass of short copper-tipped cords in their oddly biological game.

Ellen was my source of encyclopedic data and untested depths of trivia. She did the New York Times crossword puzzle each night without reference. Her words were shaped by the generous and motherly concern of a woman who never had the family of her own she had wished for, and by the lush turns of the Santee River in South Carolina where she was born. Ellen was the first to know my name the day I came to work at the Dartmouth, and the last to say goodbye the day I left.

I was not a particularly good night clerk. But I persisted. I can become very absorbed in a good book, and on many occasions I was rudely disturbed by a paying customer who had given me ample opportunity to finish whatever sentence or paragraph I was on. This unfair irritableness on my part was magnified by the inevitable coincidence between a major plot turn in the story and the length of time necessary to satisfy the needs of the hotel guest.

In my own defense, I had fallen into bad habits at the previous hotel where I had learned more in those hours after dark–things I still remember better–than I had from any of the textbook knowledge acquired during the day while stumbling through college. At that previous place I was supposed to ignore certain comings and goings to avoid conflict with the laws of the State of Vermont, which prohibited things like prostitution, or the high stakes poker games held weekly in the Presidential suite. I learned that laws were selectively enforced, and those who made them often broke them. A lowly desk clerk could be called to testify in divorce proceedings or worse, things that I had no wish to be part of. To some degree then, reading on the job was my way of keeping my head down. Dom Benedict had certainly warned me about that more than once.

Dom had strict and simple advice, as free as the street corner variety, but more precise. ‘Keep your nose clean. Keep your hands out of your pockets. Keep your head down.’ He said this on our first meeting, early one morning in the empty main dining room where I was eating my sandwich at a bare service table in the half-dark.

At first, I thought he might be the manager, Mr. Henry, whom I had yet to meet even though he lived in the hotel. Dom didn’t correct my misconception and the next evening I embarrassed myself by assuming the actual Mr. Henry was a guest who had taken a wrong door.

Dom was a tall man, lanky in the way of people who are always at ease. His severe appearance–thin mustache, hair combed straight back, always wearing an expensive dark blue suit–was at odds with that posture. He looked more than a little like Howard Hughes, and that I later learned was not accidental. But Dom never flew in airplanes. He liked trains.

On that first meeting, the glow of only one chandelier at the center of the high ceiling in the dining room added a colorless haze to the darkened elegance. Curving rows of tables were pre-set for the next day, with napkins twisted into flares of white against beige tablecloths and silverware glinting with orderly traces of the diminished light.

Dom had appeared out of nowhere from a back corner as I absent-mindedly gazed over the open space in some reverie or another. His dark figure approached as if intending to speak to me and was something of a shock. This was before I had discovered the narrow passage that separated the Carousel Room from the main dining area. The passage was intended as a kind of buffer against the sounds of the nightclub, but was used as well for extra chairs and assorted furniture.

His first words to me were, “What are you eating?” The low rumble of his voice indicated a serious interest despite the subject matter.

I answered, “A sandwich,” suddenly unable to swallow.

The shadows gave the reaction on his face a look of exaggerated importance concerning this incidental addition to the sum total of human knowledge.

He said, “I could smell the peanut butter from the next room,” as if he found this amusing. “It’s good for you, you know. Almost the only thing I ate until I went into the army.”

I swallowed and added, “And it’s cheap.”

That brought a thoughtful nod. “And it’s cheap. But don’t get it on a table cloth.”

I felt somehow caught in a wrongful act. “Yes, sir. Paul said I could sit in here if I wanted.”

He considered this added morsel of fact as if armies might be called into action for the difference. “If Paul said so, it’s ok,” and then added, “You started this week?”

“Yes sir. Yesterday.”

Mr. Benedict paused thoughtfully again. Looking upward, with the chandelier behind him, I had no knowledge yet of the hard blue in the eyes that studied me.

“You like the place so far?”

An easy question to answer. “I like old hotels. Things are always going on.”

With his left hand he pulled a cigarette from a pack I could not see inside his jacket pocket and with his right hand he lit the end with a square Zippo lighter that appeared as if by a magic trick in his palm. The metallic chirp accented the glint of gold plate.

“That’s true. Something is always going on. But you have to remember to keep your nose clean, keep your hands out of your pockets, and keep your head down.”

“Yes, sir,” I answered

Paul Lazlo, my authority for eating lunch there rather than the dank basement enclosure known as the ‘employee lounge,’ was a thin fellow too, but his ill fitting black uniform gapped in odd places, and his bow tie floated at the bottom of a long neck. Paul was always in a hurry; coming to the front desk twice each night, once from the main dining room after it stopped serving at nine, and then again after the Carousel Room closed its doors at one. As Headwaiter, he was usually loaded with small bills and loose change from tips, and given to fast conversation as he stacked his dollars and quarters in neat piles before our cashier, Francesca. She would exchange it all for tens and twenties, and he would be gone.

I wondered if I had consulted the wrong authority.

“Paul was right about me eating in here, wasn’t he? I know he’s just a waiter–”

Mr. Benedict pulled a chair and an ashtray from the closest table and sat down with the ashtray cradled in the palm of his left hand.

“Whatever Paul says is usually right. Don’t worry about it.”

I offered my excuse nonetheless, “The staff room downstairs has an odd smell.”

He gave the matter a moment of grave consideration before answering.

“Nobody eats in that place. It stinks.”

That seemed definitive. But I was surprised he had bothered to sit down, and still more unsure of myself. Remember, I still thought he was the hotel manager.

Dom began to ask questions, strung one to the next, never seeking explanations for any odd answers I gave. I was assuming that the peculiar shapes and edges of my life were not interesting enough to pursue. Later I came to understand his method of inquiry. He liked puzzles and wanted all the pieces necessary on the table before he started to fit things together.

I had not had a real interview when I applied for the job. I filled out the employment form and offered my references and was told when to report for duty and where to find a uniform, all within an hour. I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that someone had just quit without warning and there was a sudden slot to fill. Now I wrongly guessed that Dom’s inquiries were to make up for that omission.

We talked for too long that first time and I was late getting back to the desk and had to face the scowl of Mr. Wiggin, the night bookkeeper and undesignated authority over all. He had filled in at the front desk during my absence.

The little man spoke with an audible huff to his voice, the shine off his bald head flashing light in eyes still accustomed the darkness of the dining room. Mr. Wiggin was given to short declarative sentences and few idle questions. “I’ve got better things to do.” The one constant with him was his dissatisfactions.

I thought that keeping my hands out of my pockets was related to some perverted pleasure all Catholics feared, and obeyed this rule happily. I never had much of a problem with colds, and never thought a lot about my nose in any case. But the first time I fully understood about keeping my head down was on a hot night in June, a couple of weeks after I had started the job.

I was in the middle of Nevil Shute’s novel, Round the Bend, and was unaware of anything unusual until the cashier’s tray hit the floor on the other side of the half wall partition that separated my space from Francesca’s. The bounce of quarters and dimes on the marble floor was enough to awaken even my already absorbed consciousness to the reality of the moment. Startled, I lunged across the oak divide to see if I could help and saw in intimate detail the sleek lines and sculptured dark metal beauty of a short barreled .45 caliber Colt automatic. I can swear to this day that I actually read the words ‘Patented April 20, 1897’ before I realized what it was. Then I pulled my head back as quickly as it had arrived and just ahead of a concussive wallop that deafened both of my ears to Francesca’s simultaneous soprano scream.

Unfortunately, my glasses had continued in the original direction, weighted like a plumb bob by the heavy glass lenses. I saw little else afterward with less than a blur. I did hear the follow-up curse of the robber, who shot into the air again for no other apparent purpose than to keep other heads down as well, and only knew he had fully retreated by the unmistakable crash of broken glass as it shattered against the floor in the west vestibule when he shot his weapon a third time in frustrated anger as he struggled, his other hand encumbered by his loot, to get that door open during his escape.

Francesca was huddled in the corner of her booth beneath the marble overhang of the counter, and with my reappearance over the divide she shrugged almost nonchalantly with the words, “What are you gonna to do?” which is what she often said–a question I could not answer honestly and thus remained silent. I smiled instead.

This was a stupid reflex. My tongue has always been in conflict with my brain and speaking too quickly was often an embarrassment of stuttering and mangled grammar that safely hid the etymology of my purpose. I had worked to avoid this at all costs ever since the dawn of my adolescence, adapting a quick smile from my father’s number one rule of life. ‘Don’t speak unless you have something to say.’ He would say this quite often, correctly assuming my verbal mutilations to be the result of an untidy mind, or worse. I had long since revised his wisdom to, ‘Don’t speak when you can raise an eyebrow instead, or nod, or best of all, smile, whichever seems appropriate to the occasion.’ My revision of rules is often more wordy than the original.

Francesca took this to be some kind of quiet bravery, while I was marveling at her own apparent calm. Even in that blurred haze, I was aware of her eyes.

Mr. Wiggin, the bookkeeper, poked the slick pink bowl of his head over the half door that closed the cashier’s booth off from the back office.

“What did he get?”

His tinny monotone sliced through whatever it was that joined the air between Francesca’s eyes and my own.

She answered, “Whatever he wanted,” as she reached upward for my hand.

Quarters and dimes gleamed against the darker marble, surrounding Francesca’s bare legs, but all paper bills were missing.

I reported helpfully, “All the cash is gone.”

Her hand was firm, and warm. The sensation of her touch was a greater shock than the explosion of the gun that still rang in my ears. By this time a crowd was gathering from one corner or another. Francesca discovered my glasses in the folds of her dress and handed them up to me as she stood.

She said, “You were very brave.” There was no polite smile given with the words. She seemed completely serious and I was not about to deny her mistake. I searched my repertoire for a response. Smiling would not do, nor a nod. I attempted a skeptical raising of one eyebrow. My mind just then was possessed of that singular joy that the severely myopic feel when they discover that their glasses have not been lost or destroyed. An acute vision of the restored world around me combined with the sensation of her hand, which I reluctantly released when she was standing.

Victor, the night bellmen stood close at the outer edge of the counter and stared at me blank-faced through his own thick lenses. He said nothing. He was as far-sighted as I was near-sighted, and his eyes were magnified into a steady blank surprise. He had obviously moved quickly to the sounds, and one of his hearing aids protruded oddly from the side of his head like a knob.

I said, “I’m okay.” He blinked but did not move. I was not yet capable of giving him a larger explanation of what had happened.

Within minutes two police officers entered from a far door directly opposite to the one where the remains of a glass display glittered across the floor. Ken, the hotel security guard, simultaneously appeared from the basement laundry room where he had heard nothing over the chant of the machines and his on-going flirtations with the housekeeping service staff.

Questions were asked. More questions. I gave my name out twice to different officers and twice again to reporters from the Herald-American and the Globe. I had little to report and said so. My eyes had never focused on the robber’s face, only the gun. Francesca repeatedly confessed that her mind had gone blank with the shock and remembered nothing other than a few broad details. Photographs were taken. An unblinking eye of dark wood had appeared in the cream white trim above and behind me, where layers of paint in different colors were chipped away like gaudy make-up revealing the oak beneath. This was examined, but the bullet not immediately found. From the west vestibule I could hear Greg, the night janitor, pushing broken glass across the floor in front of a wide broom. Throughout this, half a dozen of the women who worked in housekeeping watched in a kind of gallery formation from the north end of the lobby, the monotony of folding towels and sheets thankfully interrupted. Ken thoughtfully reported the known facts before they retreated.

Several guests arrived during the aftermath of the initial commotion, and unaware of the quaking of the earth which had just passed and still shivered inside me, none seemed terribly concerned about much more than finding their rooms and getting to sleep. Late customers were usually like that, and I appreciated them for it.

With an uncanny sense that the hubbub had passed, Ellen called from her narrow room below. Her voice was firm with instruction. “Don’t you ever say ‘no’ to a man with a gun. Do you hear me? Money has no value in the grave. The ground is full of young men who thought they would live forever.”

I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Quiet settled. Except for the chatter of Francesca’s register as she ran a report to establish the extent of the losses, I was temporarily deaf to the usual echoes of distant halls. My ears still rang like they once did after a large firecracker had exploded in my hand when I was a kid. I opened my paperback book again and stared at the page hoping to focus enough to read. My mind kept rewinding a recording of Francesca’s words, ‘You were very brave.’ I had never before heard words like that spoken in my direction. Behind me I caught an occasional louder buzz of voices in the office, as the story of the evening event was told over again in the high pitched tones of Mr. Wiggin.

And then I was caught off guard by the approach of someone else.

“You could have gotten your head down a little sooner.”

Dom Benedict stood a few feet out from the counter, his blue suit nearly black even in the better light of the lobby. I noticed he had one hand tucked into a side pocket of the buttoned jacket–perhaps an infraction of the rules–and thought immediately that I would look foolish if I pocketed one hand in the same manner, even though he looked very European that way.

I smiled and added confirmation. “Yeah.”

He pulled a lone cigarette from his pocket. I wished I could ask for a cigarette just then, but smoking was not allowed on the job. A renewed thought of the gun took the strength from my legs and I sat back down on my stool.

He said, “The slug missed your right eyebrow by the width of a finger. You’ve got powder burns.”

I did. I had not realized what the itching on my forehead was and assumed I had acquired a mosquito bite.

Francesca said, “Let me see,” having heard Mr. Benedict’s words and suddenly leaned across the partition. It was the first time I ever saw Dom Benedict flinch. I turned toward Francesca to see the source of his discomfort and faced a display of her natural endowments that is still vivid in my mind.

I had to close my eyes.

Admittedly, this is not the most intelligent thing for a man to do when a woman of such blessings leans toward you, but it was the best thing for me to do at that moment.

She fingered the skin around my right temple and then ran her hand back through my hair as if to put it in place. I could smell licorice.

I managed a complaint. “It itches a little.”

The sensation of her fingers had interrupted my breathing.

“It feels rough,” she said. “Like you have beard stubble there.”

Dom’s Zippo chirped and with the cigarette caught at the corner of his lips he said, “Burns. They’ll go away unless they’re under the skin. Those you’ll keep. They’ll look like this.”

He undid a gold cuff link, pushed up both the cuff of his jacket and his shirt in one motion and extended the pale under-part of his left fore-arm. It was speckled with a grey-black splatter tattoo.

I said smartly, “How did you get that?” Assuming it would be a war story like those my uncles might tell.

He answered quickly, “Sawed-off shotgun. It itched for weeks,” before pulling the sleeve down again.

One eye was squinted against the smoke from his cigarette, but the blue of the other seemed to study me as he turned the clasp of this cuff link into the starched white cloth and straightened his jacket.

Francesca brushed the tips of her fingers lightly across my skin. “I don’t think this will be as bad as that,” she said.

I was about to object to her assessment, thinking it would make her use her fingers for yet another examination, but Mr. Benedict spoke first.

“No. I don’t think it will.”

I smiled instead.

Mr. Wiggin leaned over the half-door behind Francesca, and seemed to be making an assessment of the now clean floor before I saw that his eyes were a little too high and directed at Francesca’s back side.

He finally spoke, “Francesca, did you finish running your register report?”

The tininess of his voice had reached metallic purity.

Francesca turned and handed him the looping paper tape from the register and he grunted with one last look at the hem of her dress and disappeared again.

We were always supposed to avoid personal conversation at the desk, well aware that any transgression of this rule would be reported by Mr. Wiggin. But conversation with patrons was encouraged, and Dom Benedict was qualified in this regard.

Dom turned to Francesca.

“You’re ok?” His tone suggested that he already knew she was.

“I suppose,” she shrugged. “What are you gonna do?”

Mr. Benedict studied me once more, his face blank as he spoke.

“It was a near thing. The guy was a head-case. That was obvious. Probably coke.”

Francesca nodded and shrugged again.

I answered him with some surprise. “I didn’t see–were you there? You saw it?”

Dom looked me directly in the eye before he answered.

“Did you see me there?”

I said, “No.” A simple fact. I wondered from what corner he had observed the event and understood without bludgeoning my brain that he did not want it known he had seen anything at all. He was not about to be questioned by cops.

He looked at me, shrugging, almost in an imitation of Francesca, and said, “Come over during your break,” and then walked away toward the coffee shop.

I had noticed the gathering of figures in the glass walled enclosure of the closed cafe each night, with the lights turned off so that only the glare from the lobby illuminated the interior. It seemed part of some nightly convention and was not my business. I had questioned it once, early on and was told by Victor, the bellmen, that it was “A prayer service.”

I turned to Francesca and met her eyes immediately and tried to smile, but there was no smile on her broad face.

She said, “Thanks,” her voice just above a whisper and out of Mr. Wiggin’s hearing.

I asked, “For what?” wondering what I might have done.

She looked deeply grim.

“That guy was going to shoot me. I know it. If you hadn’t interrupted him, he would have shot me for dropping the tray. I could see it in his eyes.”

I could see the gun again, so close a smear of oil gave texture to my own reflection in the surface of the metal, and I shook my head with the terrible thought. I liked the look of what I was seeing in Francesca’s eyes just then and I did not want to say anything that might disturb her new awareness of my existence.

For a little more than two weeks we had been working within a few feet of each other. I had tried to make small talk, and been ignored or turned away. But I had admired the full curves of her figure whenever opportunities allowed. She wore the white blouse and black dress required, but her dress had the flair of some subtle pattern and was longer than usual, showing only her ankles. Her blouse billowed in pleats of starched cotton and the embroidery of flowers in white thread. I found out later she had done the needlework herself. It was her hobby.

She appeared to have little patience with small talk, and no interest in the everyday details of hotel life that so easily fascinated me. Her eyes were a few inches below mine and I guessed she was not quite six feet tall in her low heels. The very first night I had estimated that she might be two or three years older than myself, just for the way she carried herself and the confidence she seemed to display when she spoke to customers. Her skin was olive more than tanned, and her hair was nearly black and extremely long. Twice, deep in the quiet of the night, I had watched as she undid her hair until it reached the floor from the stool she used in her booth, brushed it, braided it, and rolled it into a snake-like curl at the back of her head.

In one conversation she admitted to being Sicilian, which I assumed by a turn in her voice was where she was born, and thus not completely Americanized in her ways. Another time she spoke Yiddish to a customer who was paying his bill. Later, I found out that she had been born in New York, but had lived in Palermo for much of her childhood. Her father had been an American soldier from Brooklyn. I did not yet know that she had been married and divorced before I had even graduated from high school.

In a sense, she was my immediate boss, having already worked at the Dartmouth herself for several months. I had quickly deferred questions of hotel policy to her. She had asked me to get her coffee a few times from the closed cafe where Mr. Benedict now stood in the shadows. Several times I made room counts from my board to coordinate with her own records. Most of her shift was spent matching room bills and charges, and few other words were passed between us. Now, I decided it was probably best not to push this better acquaintance too far for the moment and turned back to my book once more. The steady male cadences of Nevil Shute were now dampened by the odd and husky tones of Francesca’s voice repeating “What are you gonna do?” inside my head.

My shift was from 10:30 pm to 6:30 am. At 2am Mr. Wiggin came out from the office with a folder of customer slips and tallied his report at my space against Francesca’s register, a little late on that night, but as he usually did, while I took my break.

I entered the cafe with hesitation. The figure of Mr. Benedict was mostly hidden in the darkness beneath the copper hood over the broad black iron griddle. Greg the janitor, and Ken, the security guard sat together on counter stools closer to the glass window, with plates of half finished food in front of them.

Dom’s voice boomed from the shadows.

“Our young hero has arrived. Eggs? Bacon? Toast?”

I took the comment as a sort of manly sarcasm and tried to focus on his figure before finding the red coal of his cigarette suspended in the dark. Standing uncertainly at the end of the counter, I wondered at what the rules might be here. This could not be an officially sanctioned venue of the hotel management. But just as certainly, I wanted to stay.

I said, “Sure.” There was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a brown bag in my hand and I had planned to buy a can of coke at the machine on the second floor.

The closed cafe was a far more hospitable place to eat than the darkened dining room, but I felt out of place. Since grammar school I had developed a difficulty with being around larger groups of people. One person at a time was fine. Three made me uncomfortable. I think I purposely took jobs which involved dealing with the public just to counter this, but being a night clerk was a poor compromise and the problem had not gotten better in the few years since. It would be fine if I could sit invisibly to the side and watch. I suppose this makes me a voyeur of some kind.

Later I learned that Mr. Benedict did not cook every night. Usually he drank a last cup of coffee and chatted with one person or another as they ate the lunch they had carried in. He often stayed until the baritone resonance of his voice had become nearly inaudible with fatigue and then disappeared without a word. His room on the seventh floor faced out to the west over Copley square so that the morning sun would never wake him. But I came to realize that my first night in the cafe was an occasion. A small celebration. It was for me.

After a moment of adjustment I could see that Mr. Benedict handled the griddle like it was an old job. He spoke to me over his shoulder, the cigarette perched in his mouth, with the glowing end of it jittering in the dark.

He said, “Sit down.”

It was a small enough fraternity. It did not seem that I would be committing myself to any larger association.

And so I did.

Look. I’ll tell you the story. But you have to appreciate the situation first.

You know, I used to say it all the time. People aren’t any better than they have to be. And let’s get this much straight. It’s still true. With most people.

The golden rule was stolen a long time ago and melted down to make pinky rings for crud who like to use other people for sport.

Crud comes in all flavors.

Every guy who gets soft on a gal wants to think she’s better than he is—wants her to be the true thing. But women are no better than men. They have a little less muscle, so they make up for it in other ways.

Your mother was not a saint. She married your father. Isn’t that proof enough? If she hadn’t married him, that would have made her smarter, not better.

This is not cynicism. It’s life.

You are not the center of the universe. You are a speck. Just another zygote that got too big for the womb.

You want to play a name game? Want everything to fall into neat categories? Good. Bad. Better. Best. The universe doesn’t give a damn. You’re just as dead as the next guy when your time comes. So you do what’s right because you know it, not because somebody told you to.

Get that much straight. If you don’t want to be a crud yourself, then stay out of the way. Keep your head down. Don’t advertise. And don’t smile for no reason.

Otherwise, always carry a role of quarters.

I might have to add something to that last bit of philosophy. Tape the role so when your fist hits the other guy’s ribs, the quarters don’t break out all over the street. You won’t have time to pick them up.

And that’s about where I was in my thinking at the time. I had a few years on me to get there.

On that Sunday night I was walking home—at least what I was calling home just then. A room with a sink. The toilet and shower were down the hall. My fist was in my pocket. I had half the role left and used my thumb to push the ragged paper over what remained. I didn’t look back. There was nothing to see that I couldn’t hear.

I shouldn’t have been out in the first place. It was after midnight. There’s no cover on a street that late on a Sunday night. Even most of the crud are home with their warm TVs. The ones who are out are the losers who don’t even have their own TV’s and hang around the bars to watch what they can and maybe get lucky.

The fact is, the night had nothing on how dark I felt. That should have been warning enough.

I’d made a big mistake. I’d met a woman I thought was better than me. Now I was walking home alone on a Sunday night and wondering just how stupid I could be. I’d left her at the YWCA. She said she was staying there. But when I went back to tell her something–when I’d gotten up the nerve to actually say what I was thinking, she wasn’t there. She didn’t even have a reservation. And I was pretty sure she had no family in town because she was just off the bus from Albany.

That was a moment I can remember like it just happened.

Buses aren’t like they used to be. They used to stink, and they still do, and the toilets didn’t work, and they still don’t, but you used to meet some interesting people. I have stories I could tell. I hit the road when I was barely eighteen. Maybe I told you about that before. I hitched and bused from here to California. More than once. But I hadn’t met anybody worth talking to on a bus in years, until I sat down next to this gal in a green shirt and jeans. A ‘slip’ of a girl as my dad might say. She had her shoes off, and was wearing those little white socks that don’t reach your ankles and her jeans were worn white at the knees. She had her arms around her legs and her knees were pulled up under her chin and I thought she was asleep. I thought she was probably still in high school. And–get this—the guy behind me in line as we got on the bus was a bad piece of work I’d seen on the street in Boston before. He didn’t know me. But I knew him. And I figured pretty fast that if he got the chance he’d take the seat beside the girl, so I took it first.

Now this is the set up when you are about to play the fool. You’ve just done something noble–or at least decent under the circumstances. You’ve done the right thing and you’re patting yourself on the back for a good move. You’re distracted by your own hubris. That’s when you get hit up-side of the head.

I turned on the little overhead light and pulled out the paperback I was reading to pick up where I left off.

That’s when she spoke.

“Harry’s a jerk. Why does he want to have anything to do with that women–What’s her name? Jean? Jean’s got nothing to offer him. I quit reading in the third chapter. I couldn’t take it.”

She still had her legs drawn up and she was looking over one knee cap at my book. Like I say, it kind of caught me off guard.

I said, “That’s the story. If you like Harry, you want to see how he survives. I can’t fault him for being a fool–not after looking in the mirror this morning when I shaved.”

She nodded just a little, mostly by rocking her body. You know the way.

I don’t know the numbers on the other rules, but rule number two is that you don’t fool around with girls. Women are difficult enough. Girls are automatic trouble, and no fun because they don’t know enough to make it fun. So I just went back to reading my book. It’s about three and a half hours from Albany to Boston. Part of that’s the stop in Springfield. We weren’t even through Troy before she spoke again. It was almost 8 pm and there was nothing else to look at out the window. That’s what I thought.

She says, “What’s in it for her? He’s got no money. He’s got a drinking problem. He hates himself. She’s only looking for the main chance. The big break. What does she see in him?”

So I told her only what I knew at that point in the story. It was just a guess. “A kindred soul. Somebody who knows the ropes and might offer some small comfort in a cold world.”

She nodded again. I went back to reading.

Then she says, “Why does he stay. Why doesn’t he get out. Florida. California. Someplace warm.”

I shook my head at that. I was thinking that only kids and old people believe they can escape the cold by going south. I said, “You’re still too young to know it yet. But the cold wakes you up. It keeps you awake. Too much can kill you, but that’s true of heat as well. Warm puts your brain to sleep.”

She laughed a little. “Do you really believe that? You don’t do you? You just said it to be saying something. Maybe if Harry wasn’t hanging out in cold places he wouldn’t be looking for comfort in the wrong places.”

This was a wise appraisal.

“Maybe.” I say. “But I’ve been to Florida. I’ve never seen so many walking dead. I’ve been to Southern California. You figure out right away why they think they need cocaine to enjoy the scenery. It’s too warm.”

Now I was being cute. Of course. I was trying to be smart. That’s the hubris again. What I should have said is that if I had any brains worth saving I’d have stayed in La Jolla. It was never better for me than that. But that was then. I couldn’t go back.

She said, “Bull shit.”

So she caught me again.

She put her legs down then. I took advantage of the moment, in what light managed to get over her way. She was thin. But I got the first idea that she might not be a girl anymore.

I defended myself the best I could under the circumstances.

“Yeah. Warm may not be so bad, but it might pass for an excuse when you don’t have anything more intelligent to say. I suppose Harry is a creature of habit. He stays close to home because that’s what he knows and understands best. In a place like California they have other rules.”

Her hair was dyed black. It was short and neat but I wondered what color it had been. She was using something on her eyebrows as well. It made her skin seem pale. One of the eyebrows rose up in an arch.

She says, “Harry has a dog. Isn’t that enough?”

I said, “No.”

She folded her hands in her lap. She asks, “You ever have a dog?”

She looked like a girl again.

I said, “Yes.”

I was going to tell her about dogs but she spoke up first.

“Did he get old?”

I said, “I suppose he’s getting there. He’s in California now. He likes the warm. How about you?”

She took a breath and cleared her throat. “She got old. I miss her.”

Now I was pretty sure again that she was too young to be chatting up, so I lifted my book. Harry was in a predicament. I wanted to know how it came out. But I only got through a dozen pages or so.

We were at the Massachusetts border. She had been looking at me. Or maybe just reading over my shoulder.

She says, “What do you do?”

I actually thought for just a moment that if I ignored her she might take offense and settle back to her own business. But I’m that stupid.

I said, “Whatever’s paying. Mostly I cook. I was just in Albany to back-up in the kitchen at a lawyer’s convention.

She asked, “Are you any good?”

I told her the truth. “No. Just good enough.”

She said, “What would you like to do?”

I told her. “I don’t know. I’ve tried a bunch of things. I worked in Florida a few years ago doing framing work on houses after one of the hurricanes. That was good money but about as boring as anything I’ve ever tried. I just don’t know.”

She nodded at that. “And you’re from Boston?”

I told her, “Yeah. Well. Watertown. Close enough.”

I wanted to ask what school she was in. If nothing else, I wanted to make a point about her age. But she didn’t give me the chance.

She says, “I’ve been a waitress, mostly. One thing you learn about being a waitress is to stay away from the cooks.”

That got a laugh out of me. Its true. But it seemed like some kind of invitation, so I said, “Why is that?”

She says, “You know,” and she raised one eyebrow at me again.

Yeah. I knew. There wasn’t any place I wanted to go with that line of conversation. I said, “Why are you going to Boston?”

She said, “School.”

I said, “Where?”

She said, “No place yet. A friend of mine took night classes at Harvard once. I could never get into Harvard through the front door but it’d be great to say I went to school there without lying.”

So I asked, “Are you from Albany?”

She shakes her head and tells me. “Saratoga Springs. My daddy is a cook at a hotel there.” Then she smiled. “So I know about cooks.”

Now I was in trouble. You see. I was already interested enough to be putting my head up where it might get whacked.

I said, “Is this your first time away?”

She laughed again. “No. I’m twenty three years old. For Christ sake, if you’re still living at home when you’re twenty three you aren’t worth spit.”

So I was hooked. I mean, look. This situation was a no brainer and that’s my territory and I know it well. Her father was a cook. She knew about cooks. And she liked to read. She was old enough to know better. I was like a fish with the hook through my lip.

I said, “What would you like to do?”

She said, “I don’t know. Just like you. I don’t know.”

I put my book away.

I say, “But you’ve done something else than wait on tables, right?”

She sighed, “I’ve worked in a few stores. Sales clerking. I was a bartender for almost a year. That was tough. But I haven’t done much. I haven’t done enough. That’s my problem. Not many options. So I’ve been saving my money. But I’m impatient. I want to get it going.”

I understood that pretty well. I said, “I guess you have more patience than me. I hit the road when I was eighteen.”

She didn’t speak for almost a minute. I kept my mouth shut and waited to see what she might say.

“Where did you go?”

I figure she was asking herself whether she wanted to know anything more about this guy. I suddenly felt lucky. That’s another warning sign. Rule number three maybe. When you start feeling lucky, it’s because you don’t know all the facts.

I said, “Alaska first. I mean, that was the place. Right? The pipe-line was humming. I worked the kitchen on a cruise boat out of Seattle. Then I got a job in Anchorage—in a kitchen–of course. I tried to get a job with one of the oil companies. But by the time I got there, they were laying people off. I hung around awhile. Then I went to California. Got a job driving nails. That was good for awhile. More fresh air. I got a tan. Then things didn’t work out. I tried Florida after that. Now I’m here again.”

She responded to that almost before I finished speaking.

“Ever think about going to school?”

I say, “For what?”

She arches that eye brow at me, but even bigger than before. “To learn something.”

I wasn’t going to back down on a count like that. “You mean to get a certificate to show that I’m a human being. No thanks. I already know that.”

She says, “Don’t you think you have anything to learn?”

This is a subject I talked about often enough even then. I didn’t want to get a rant going.

I say, “Yes. Sure. A lot. I try to learn something every day. But I come from a long line of Irish heretics. I’m not interested in getting anybody’s permission to think. And if I find something I want to know and I can’t get it out of a book, then I’ll go to school. But I haven’t found that yet.”

She sat there for maybe five minutes then without saying a word. I was pretty sure she was going to pick my little speech apart. But she didn’t.

She was looking out the window into the dark or else looking at the reflection of me sitting there looking at her when she spoke again.

“I wish I could feel that way. I just don’t think I’m going to stumble across the right thing all by myself. I figure it can’t hurt to go to school for awhile.”

I think I used to look at it that way too. But I‘d met a girl in California who had her degree already and was working for the Institute of Oceanography. She had brains to spare, but she was as stupid as a hammer. All she really wanted was somebody to take care of her and empty the garbage, so she could be free to have deep thoughts about the survival of the sea otter and the abalone. I read some of her papers. I read the book she helped write. Her name was the fourth one from the top. I told her that her programs were full of crap. All she needed to do is leave the frigging sea otter alone and learn how to cook the abalone. But she wouldn’t.

I figured the little girl next to me on the bus was looking for answers. Another thing I know for sure is that you don’t get answers from people who want to hand them out like candy. You get answers from asking your own questions.

I said, “Going to school might not hurt. But I wonder if they don’t get a hold of your brain and start squeezing it into the shape they want. Look around. Everybody talks the same. If you draw your vowels out in a different way they think you’re stupid. If you point out that Shakespeare didn’t talk the way they do either, they think you’re even more stupid. They all think alike. They even read the same books, if they read at all. They watch television. They listen to crappy music that’s ripped off from older crappy music. They work in little offices doing little things and growing old. I can grow old without the degree.”

She was pretty quick responding to that as well.

“How about money?”

“Yeah. How about the money. That’s a nice trap they have. The harder you work, the more they take.”

It was right then that I get a tap on the shoulder. It was the Piece-of-work who had been behind me in line when I got on the bus. He says, “Keep the chatter down will you. I’m trying to sleep.”

Now I keep my voice down anyway. I’m not a loud talker. Right? But it’s a bus. It’s a public place. I wasn’t talking much above a whisper anyway. And the girl hadn’t been loud either. I was pretty sure that my conversation was bothering this guy for other reasons. Missed opportunities and all that.

So I stand up in the aisle and I tell him, “You may want to talk with me about that when we get off the bus. But right now, you might want to mind your own business.”

He laughs. It’s the kind of snarky laugh of somebody you don’t want in the seat behind you and I got angry in a flash and put my hand in my pocket for the roll of quarters. His eyes got big for just an instant. I realized he thought it might be something more than a roll of quarters. He didn’t answer. He tried for the laugh again. It was a little weak.

I sat down. I said, “Money isn’t worth much if you don’t know how to use it.”

It was kind of a left-over thought, but she looked pretty serious now. I think she was disturbed by what I said to the Piece-of-work behind us.

After a minute she says, “Sometimes it gets pretty thin just trying to get by.”

I thought about that a lot. I saved my money and spent as little as I could.

“I think it’s a matter of priorities.” I told her. “I’m looking to get myself a truck. I have my eye on a three year old Ford with twenty thousand miles on it that a buddy of mine uses to drive out to job sites. My buddy wants a 250 for loads and this is just a little 150, but it’s fine for me. I’ll build a little camper for the back and I can go up to Moosehead when the weather’s good and get a spot in the state park. And I know a place in the Adirondacks where there’s a little deep water lake. You can catch trout on the brook that runs out of there that are the direct relations of ones that were swimming when the Mohawks were still singing songs. I don’t need much.”

She gave this a minute.

Then she says, “Brown’s or Rainbows.”

I said, “Browns. If they were Rainbows it would bring the weekend fishermen like flies. They don’t seem to gather as much for the Browns. But they taste just as good.”

So what does she say? She says, “My Daddy likes to fish.”

Now this is real trouble. Her daddy is a cook. Her daddy likes to fish. It’s like a total set up. And right here I start getting worried. You know something is going to go wrong if you’ve been rooting for the Red Sox for more than a couple of years. There is something I don’t know. I start thinking. She’s married. She’s got a kid. Two kids. She’s a congenital liar like the woman I knew in Florida. I’m telling myself to stay cool. But I don’t listen to myself often enough. Like you’ve said a few times–I have too many rules and forget which ones I should be paying attention to.

I say, “Does your mother like to fish?”

I actually said that.

She laughs. I see that she likes to laugh. She says, “No. Mom sits near the fire and reads. She has an old beach chair she brings along that she likes better than the couch in the living room.”

When she laughs I can see she has good teeth.

Now that’s something a lot of guys won’t mention, but it ought to be one of the rules. Avoid women with bad teeth. It might mean they don’t take care of other stuff. That’s serious business.

I said, “A good chair is hard to find.” I meant it to be funny, but obviously it wasn’t. My mind was still reeling with my worries over what might be the problem with this woman that I couldn’t see.

She said, “Are you married?”

Bam. Like that. Out of the blue. And I told her, “No. Never did.” That’s all that came out.

I was looking for a little wit somewhere in the gray matter between my ears when she says, “How old are you?”

Cripes! But I told her. “32.”

She says right away, “Why aren’t you married. What’s wrong?”

I was backed right up in my seat. She was clearing a lot of trees real fast.

I said, “I made a couple of mistakes. That can use up a lot of time.”

She said, “That’s for sure…California?”

She could see through to that pretty easily. I said, “Yeah. And Florida.”

Now I was working up the courage to be as bold as she’d been. I didn’t want to say anything totally stupid. I just wanted to make sure she knew I was interested. But she spoke first again.

“I was married for two years,” she says. “I married a cook. Naturally. I might as well be blond. You know? He was sweet as pie when he wasn’t drunk.”

OK. My mother used to say, ‘Now you have the can of worms open, are you going to use them to fish or put them in the garden.’ I was never sure exactly how she meant it, but the question seemed to come up a lot in my life. I could see some benefit to both uses.

I wanted to just say, ‘I don’t get drunk,’ But it reminded me a little too much of ‘You can trust me. I’m not like the others.’

So I said, “That’s rough.” Just like in an old movie. ‘That’s rough.’ Does anybody even say that anymore?

We were in Springfield then and as the bus pulled into the station I stood to check on the Piece-of-work. He was sound asleep. Or he wanted to be.

Springfield is a short stop but it’s nice to stretch your legs. The girl stood up too. I could see I had about six inches on her but at least a hundred pounds. We just stood there a moment after some of the other passengers got off. It was pretty close in the aisle, with people standing on both sides of us. For some reason she wasn’t so bold now. She didn’t seem to know what to say.

Generally, I’ve never been at a loss for words. You know that. But I was a little lost then. So I fell back on what got things going in the first place. I said, “Harry has made a lot of mistakes. He’s really just trying to make up for it. I think the girl–Jean–she understands that much, anyway.”

Now this was pretty bold for me. There is no way she didn’t see the reference for what it was.

She took a breath at that. She didn’t look up at me. She just spoke right at the front of my shirt. “Jean’s a loser. She always makes the wrong move. Harry has to see that she’s just making another mistake. Why would he want to be just another one of her mistakes?”

Whoa!

Now, I had known this girl for a little more than an hour. Not much more. And I was like a brown up on the dock, flipping my tail.

So what do I say? I say, “I wouldn’t trade gold for every pound of stupid I owned just four years ago. I earned what I know the hard way. I’m not going back.”

Just like that. Then she looked up at me. She’s got that pair of eyes. Head on they don’t leave you any room at all.

And now, she doesn’t loose a beat. She says, “What kind of dogs do you like?”

I say, “Big ones.”

People were getting on the bus then and we sat down.

She didn’t say a thing for maybe fifteen minutes. I wanted her to speak first then. You know I can talk about me all day long because its so boring even I forget what I’ve already said and I get to repeat myself. I wanted to find out about her. It seemed like the most important topic I could think of.

Finally I said, “You have any brothers?”

Now, why did I ask that? You know why. It tells a lot about a girl if she’s had brothers. She knows a little something more about guys to begin with.

She says, “Three.”

I say, “Older?”

She says, “Two older. The younger one is in the Army. One of the older ones is a cook at another hotel in Saratoga. And one is an electrician. He works in Syracuse.”

“No sisters?”

“No.”

I say, “You’re one of a kind then.” It was lame.

But she laughed. She said, “How about you.”

I told her. “One sister. She works in real estate. Mostly up around Ipswich.”

For some reason that little bit of information caused another great silence. I waited.

She says, “What’s the best place you’ve ever been?”

Now that’s easy to say but then I’d be off talking about myself again. I had to keep that under control.

I said, “On the Cape. First week in August. Twelve years old. How about you?”

She says, “Where on the Cape?”

I said, “Eastham. On the Bay. What about you?”

She brightened a little with the thought. “Quogue. It’s on Long Island. Daddy had a job there every September with a family that lived like Croecus. It was his working vacation. He had to cook for their parties two or three times a week. They paid him twice what he got at the hotel. And we had a cottage all to ourselves on the property. I practically lived on the beach. It was the best.”

But her face lost the smile at the end. I guessed she hadn’t been back in a long time.

I said, “I was hoping to get down to the Cape again this year. I haven’t been in a long time. Twelve years. Maybe more. Have you ever gone back to Quogue?”

“No. That’s over,” she says.

I wondered, “Your dad lost the job there?”

She said, “Yes.”

I say, “Too bad.”

“No,” she says. “It was OK when I was a kid. I didn’t know what else was going on. I was free, and the world was perfect for three weeks every year. But when I got older, I saw what the deal was. It wasn’t pretty.”

I asked, “Why was that?”

“It was the way those people lived,” She said. “They didn’t respect my father. They didn’t respect themselves. He’d bite his tongue and keep his temper. Just for us. Just so we could play on the beach and have a taste of things he couldn’t afford to give us otherwise. It was tough on him. He’d start drinking before the desert was served and he could hardly walk by the time he got back to the cottage. My mother hated it.”

I thought I had a clear enough picture of that.

“I guess I was lucky then. My dad rented a cottage. Two weeks. No strings. Just fun. Dawn to midnight. Non-stop.”

She gave me one of those ‘wistful’ type smiles. “You were lucky.”

But I shook my head at the memory. “I couldn’t afford a two week rental now. It’s not the way it was then. I’m going to get a spot in the campground this year.”

She raised that eyebrow part way at me. “It’s the money. It always comes down to that.”

I shook my head again, but a little harder. “No. The money isn’t good or bad all by itself. It’s what you do with it. Anybody can get by, if they want to. You don’t have to sell your soul.”

She looks at me straight faced. She says, “What if you have kids?”

I tried to be a wise guy. I said, “I’ll stay away from Quogue.”

She comes right back at me. “You want kids?”

Now I figured we were about an hour and a half out. Maybe a couple of minutes more. In my head I hear her asking me ‘How many?’

But I said, “Yeah.”

She says, “How many?”

I looked up at that little light. But the bad part was that I actually knew. I had thought about this once before. In California.

“Three.”

She seemed at little puzzled. “Why three?”

I gave her a look. She was turned around so she could look right at me.

“I don’t know? I can’t remember. It’s just a number I’ve had in my head awhile.”

She asks, “Since California?”

I tell her, “Yes. And what about you.”

She raised both of those eyebrows up in great arches and turned her head a little to the side. “Well! I’ve never had a number in my head. I just thought I’d like to have kids until I couldn’t have them anymore. Something like that…Does that sound crazy?”

I had to tell her, “Yeah.”

She sighed. She says, “Yeah. Well. I guess it does. I’ll have to give it some serious thought.” Then she laughed again. “Right. Well, I think I’ve decided. Three would be just fine.”

I said, “Good.” Just like that.

She says, “Where would you like to live?”

I said, “I don’t know.” I didn’t. I hadn’t thought about that. I had thought about going places, but not where I was going to go from.

She said, “I like North Carolina. I like the mountains. I worked as a bartender there for a year when I left Saratoga Springs. That was after the divorce. I hated the job, but I loved the place. Asheville.”

So I had to ask, “How warm is it.”

She laughed. “It’s fine. It snows in the winter. Cool in the fall and spring. You’d like it.”

I said, “Fine. Something new. Something different.”

She nodded. “Change is good. And you can drive to the beach in two and a half hours. The biggest beach you’ve ever seen.”

I said, “Sounds good.”

Then the conversation stopped again. She was just sort of staring at the back of the seat in front of her. I think she was feeling a little shell shocked. I was. I know that. I wasn’t sure just then how all this had come about. I was going over it in my head, piece by piece, just like I’m doing now. And then a thought occurred to me.

I said, “What’s your name?”

She laughed a little loudly then. She held her hand over her mouth for a minute and closed her eyes. I could see a tear at the corner of one eye.

Then she says, “Ester. What’s yours?”

I told her the whole thing, “John Francis Kiernan.”

She says right away, “J.F.K.”

I said, “Unfortunately.”

She reached her hand over. “Ester Marie Hansen. Glad to meet you.”

I took her hand. I actually didn’t shake it at first. I just held it for a second. I don’t know if I could have shaken it.

Look. You have to realize that this was the first time I actually touched her. I could feel the muscles in my arm go soft. My brain went soft too.

She took her hand back. Her hand was warm and I still felt it after she took it away. She didn’t look happy.

She said, “This is serious.”

I said, “Yeah. I think so.”

She says, “You better be sure.”

I said, “I’m sure. It’s just that my brain has short circuited. I’m not real clear on what’s going on. But it’s serious.”

She sat back. I had maybe five minutes to get my head together. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I could only guess what she was thinking.

Then she says, “My Grandfather came over from Norway in the 1920’s. He got a job in New York. I don’t remember what. Something dirty. Day labor, at first. Then he got a job carrying bricks and mortar. He became a mason. He even worked on the Empire State building for awhile. He lived in a room with four other guys on the Lower East Side. He saved his money. When he thought he had enough—about 1930–he went back to Norway. Just for two weeks. That’s all. He went there looking for a wife. And he found her. In two weeks. And they came back and lived on Staten Island. They had six kids. Right through the Depression. He died when I was a little girl so I never got to know him. And Grandma died just last year. But she told me about it. She said he walked the streets of Bergen for a week just looking. He saw her for the very first time with her mother at the fish market. Then he walked right up and told my great grandmother that he was looking for a wife. Just like that.”

“What did your great grandmother say to that?”

“I don’t know. Grandma never told me. But my great grandmother invited him over for tea. I know that. And my grandmother agreed to marry him the very next day.”

I said, “That’s amazing. They were different back then.”

Ester look at me with both eyebrows up again but this time it was not the same as before.

She says, “Yeah. Different.”

I noticed she can put a nice sarcastic edge on her voice. Yeah. At least her grandparents had thought about it overnight. But I didn’t say that.

I thought about telling her about my uncle John. He’d been married six times. He usually got married less than a month after he met the girl. But I didn’t tell her about John either. I told her about my parents. That’s a harder story to tell. It took a bit.

The bus was at the Boston station about eleven. She had a reservation at the YWCA, she said, so we just walked over to Berkeley Street. She had two bags and I carried one because I just had my knapsack with me.

The most important thing that happened then was that I kissed her. Probably not the best kiss. We had been in a bus for almost three hours and talking. But it was late and there was no place to pick up any gum on the way. And I wasn’t about to leave without kissing her. So I did. Right there on the steps with a night watchman standing three feet away smoking a cigarette. I wrote my name and address on the back of the bus ticket stub. I didn’t have a phone at the time. But I told her I would call her in the morning.

And then I left. I wasn’t really walking. More like flying. Gliding. A little Gene Kelly. I was drunk on the moment. I was totaled.

I got half way home before I stopped. I already knew I was a fool. But I had walked away without saying the most important thing. Maybe because the watchman was standing there. Might have made me self-conscious. I don’t know. But I hadn’t actually said it.

Now, you understand, I’d only said it to three women in my life and one of them is my mother.

I practically ran back to the YWCA. I jumped the steps and stood at front desk and waited for the woman there to finish with some piece of paper she was working on and then she gave me a pretty cold stare.

I asked her if I could call Ester in her room. She asked me for the full name. I told her a second time. Then she told me they had no one by that name staying there. I spelled it out-loud a couple of different ways. The woman asked me when Ester had checked in. I told her about fifteen minutes ago. She gave me another cold stare. She said no one had checked in for the last hour. Then I asked her to check the reservations. She checked. There was no reservation. Then I looked over and saw the night watchman. He was sitting in a chair near the elevators, looking at me. I asked him. He smiled. He let me stand there for maybe a full minute before he told me.

“She went back out the door the minute you were gone.”

So there I was. On the street. The total fool. On a Sunday night.

I walked home again. I tried to walk. I felt numb.

There was a bar there on the way that was open. I decided I needed a drink. At least a beer. I needed something. I needed to think things through. Rule number eight, or ten, or whatever. A bar is not a place to think things through.

And there was the Piece-of-work. He’s with another guy. I didn’t even see him until I sat down at the bar. He taps me on the shoulder.

Funny thing. I knew exactly who it was before I turned around. He had this way of punching his fingers. Not a nice tap.

My hand went into my pocket without even thinking twice.

He says, “You wanted to talk to me outside?”

I said, “Sure.”

The Piece-of-work was a couple of inches shorter than me. But his friend had me eye to eye and maybe twenty pounds more.

The friend held the door. I went out, knowing he was going to hit me from behind, so I went sideways with my back to the building. The big guy barrels right after me and I hit him with everything I had, right in the ribs. He had no breath. He just doubled over right there and sat down. But my quarters shot out all over the side walk.

I figure the Piece-of-work had given the big guy a Benjamin to cut me down to size. He would have gotten his kicks in when I was down. But he looks at me for just an instant. Looks at all the shiny quarters on the ground. And then he dances away, but not like Gene Kelly.

I walked on home. Like I said, there was more dark in my head than there was on the street. And I’m practically there before I notice anything. I see the shadow on the steps. It’s that same shape, with her legs pulled up under her chin and her arms holding tight.

I stopped in my tracks.

She hardly moves. It’s just those great big eyes over the tops of her knees. She says, “Where’d you go? I tried to follow you. But you were gone.”

I didn’t have any words. I just took in about as much air as my lungs would hold.

She still hasn’t moved. I haven’t moved.

I had to take another breath just to speak. I said, “I went back. But you weren’t there.”

She said, “I tried to follow you. I didn’t know the way.”

I say, “But they didn’t have a reservation.”

She says, “Sure, they did!” Then she let go of her legs, and stood up with a real scare on her face. She said, “Oh, Lord. I used my married name. That’s what’s on my license. I never had the chance to get a new one. I had to use my married name.”

I said something smart like, “Oh.”

She says, “I am blond, you know. This is just black out of a bottle. I really am blond. Like a piece of pine wood.”

And I said, “That’s fine with me. Just so long as you like to fish.”

And that’s the story. Don’t let her tell you any different.