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jerrygabriel.net Drowned Boy, a novella Epoch, spring 2003 One Afterwards, the three girls exited the gymnasium through the side doors into a night moonless and freezing, two degrees Fahrenheit. People from Moraine and the nearby hamlets of Tripoli and Falls smoked cigarettes and pipes and made their slow way toward trucks parked on the winding, hilly streets surrounding the old and now decrepit high school. The cold air seemed to be somehow denser than mere air, and the voices issuing up and down the block carried no further than arm's reach within it before dissipating into the ether of space and darkness. The girls observed a silence of their own as they walked down along Market and then Midland Avenue. This could have had to do with the game, which Moraine had lost, or the boy's death, either one, and Samantha didn't in truth know which. Both registered to her senses at more or less the same level. Either way, she decided to leave the silence alone, and when they arrived at Amy's house on Walnut, she and Rachel told Amy goodnight, and then the two of them walked another quiet block together, and they too parted, and finally Samantha Longstreth was alone. She hummed a tune she pieced together from an old movie. The song happened to be one famous in the mid-fifties, though she knew nothing beyond the melody-nothing of the starlet who sang it nor of the musical that shared the song's title. She just absent-mindedly hummed as she walked the four more blocks along Clay Street to Vine in the bitter cold, and then up the steep hill home. Later, when she lay in bed with the lights out, she thought for the first time of the drowned boy, Stevie Lowe. It was strange that such an anonymous kid's death could make a gymnasium hush over, could cause strangers to mourn. If Stevie Lowe had lived a full life-if he'd grown to be one of those feed-capped, bib overalled soybean farmers from Tripoli-nobody would have thought more than in a passing way about his death. People would have read about it in the paper maybe and said that it was a shame. But certainly no one would have sobbed publicly the way some had in the gym after Mr. Tuttle made the announcement over the public address at halftime. Because of the alphabetical proximity of their last names, Stevie had sat beside her in countless classes and studyhalls over the years, but when she tried to remember him, she couldn't conjure his face or voice or laugh or anything about him. It was as if he'd not existed to Samantha at all. Though of course he had. Sixteen hours before, he'd probably been sitting next to her in homeroom, though in the attempt to recall even that, her mind met with lethargy, entered a space so dimly lit so as to seem someone else's mind altogether. She gave up on all of it and finally closed her eyes and tried for a long time to sleep, though she rolled around languidly for what might have been hours. When sleep finally did come, it was unrestful, and she sweated through her pajamas and sheets, and woke many times, hot and thirsty. The day after Stevie Lowe died, Samantha woke late, still tired. Since her brother was now at college, it was only Samantha and her parents in the house. Her parents both worked early; her father was a miller at Kohl Mills and her mother a secretary at the county courthouse. They trusted Samantha to get up and go to school on her own and until today. It wasn't an issue; until today, Samantha had had perfect attendance since ninth grade; three and a half years of it. This morning she slept late, though, and when she woke, she moved from room to room slowly, almost cautiously, as if she didn't know what might be lurking in the next room. She ate some eggs and fell asleep again on the couch, watching a morning talk show, the last before the daytime soaps started. She slept through much of the middle part of the day and finally got up around two, when she showered and spread some homework out on the dining room table. It was trigonometry and she did it quickly and easily. Samantha was a good student and math was her best subject. She was sitting at the table when her parents arrived home separately within five minutes of each other. She was reading a politics assignment on bicameral government. The evening rituals began then and she helped her mother prepare dinner while her father brought wood inside for the stove in the living room. They ate dinner quietly, all of them paying marginal attention to the evening news on the television above the fridge. There was no mention of Stevie Lowe on the news this evening as there likely had been the night before. After dinner, her parents watched some evening television, and Samantha occupied herself listening to music in her room. She went to bed that evening having seen only her parents all day. *** The following morning, she was up before anyone, watching a national news show in the basement, the volume almost off. She sat bleary-eyed, hardly able to concentrate on the series of images floating past her, now a heavily-clad correspondent in front of a nighttime Kremlin, now a flood-stricken town in Alabama where people stood on rooftops. "Nine dead in NE Alabama," a caption at the bottom of the screen read. When she heard voices and footsteps stirring above, she quietly left her cereal bowl on the floor and bundled up in an old scarf and orange hunting coat she found in a closet downstairs. She grabbed her bookbag and quietly left the house through the rear sliding-glass door just as her mother had opened the door to call down after all. She descended into the wooded gully beyond the house in the dawn light, her breath billowing largely in front of her. Winter-hardened leaves cracked under her feet, and the noise of two distant dogs barking echoed through the empty trees. *** The Moraine River slowly snaked through the region and skirted the town in an ox-bow curve, nearly circumscribing it. The river's headwaters were in the center of the state, and from there it ran to the southeast into the foothills, seemingly heedless of the rising terrain. Samantha had learned all about the river in an eighth grade geology class, how it had once run in the opposite direction, emptying into the long-ago dead Teays, and then another river geologists called the Mahomet and finally into some prehistoric sea to the south. But then the ice ages came and dammed the Moraine, sending the water spilling back into the hills, where new rivers were formed, and where the reversed water sometimes abandoned entire valleys as it steadfastly adhered to the principle of downhill flow. The idea that a river might change direction had captivated Samantha even at fourteen, when almost nothing did. Though it was more than a mile out of her way to school, she found the spot easily where the boy had drowned. She had swum the river herself here in the summer, where it was deep and there were rocks to jump off of and where huge channel catfish clung to the bottom in the heat. But now it seemed improbable that this spot was the same place, such was the change the seasons brought about. A path came right up to the water's edge, and you could see it continue on the other side of the river on into Reese Park, suggesting that one might just stroll across the water and pick up the path on the other side, as if the river were merely a minor obstruction. Near the path, there was a scrap of particle board attached to a large sycamore with shiny new nails. "Danger: Thin Ice," it read in sloppy orange spray-painted letters. She pulled off a mitten with her teeth, leaned down, and touched the newly frozen ice near the shore. It cracked easily, its whiteness turning dark from the water beneath. When she touched the water, it was cold enough to be ice itself; the difference between ice and not-ice seemed almost arbitrary, though it was of course a matter of scientific fact. She wiped her hand on her jeans and put the mitten back on quickly. On out in the water, there was a clear patch of jaggedness where Stevie had likely thrashed around before the coldness or fear or just plain disbelief had taken hold and sucked the energy from him. Standing, she tried to picture how Stevie had come to the spot and looked across to Reese Park, thinking he could just go on over. She thought she could almost picture the frightened look on Stevie's face-a relief, she realized, that she could remember anything about him-when his foot first gave way and he groped for something solid. He no doubt reached outward toward the fragile ice and deeper water instead of back, toward the cold dirt of shore. She looked up and down the river, the light through the beech trees casting broad, soft shadows on the ice. In the distance, she saw busses crossing the bridge on State 93. Time had gotten away from her. She picked up a football-sized rock with both hands, swung its weight back and forth twice and then slung it as far as she could out onto the ice. It hit, bounced once, rolled some, and then sat motionless, suspended there. "Stevie Lowe," she said. "Little Stevie Lowe." She picked up her bag and climbed the bank and cut across a field toward the high school. The sun rested above the hills now and shone down on Samantha Longstreth as she joined the students migrating up Mulberry, the first street ever built in the town of her birth and her life so far. *** The day Stevie Lowe was to be placed in the ground, people moped about in homeroom and whispered in hushed tones. At the request of the family, only a small number of students-family friends-were given passes to attend the event, but the mood was solemn and mournful still anyway. Perhaps the brief glimpse a death allowed into the fate we all faced shook even the most cynical students. Most students sat in their seats without being told while listening to the morning announcements. A girl toward the back of the sprawling room sobbed quietly. The basketball team would travel to Hanover tomorrow, Mr. Holt said over the P.A.; the wrestlers had a home tournament over the weekend. The lunch today would be baked chicken with carrots and mashed potatoes. That was all. Have a good day. Samantha did briefly look down at the seat next to her where Stevie Lowe had sat. The kid on the other side of Stevie's seat-a boy named Chad-looked at her. He was surreptitiously spitting tobacco juice into a Coke can and his lower lip bulged slightly. "Fuckin A," he said. "Huh?" She looked at him expressionless. He continued to nod, as if she had agreed with him in some way. She had not. When the first period bell rang, Samantha followed the winding stream of bodies out of the cavernous hall, down the bottle-necked aisle that led to the school's main building. Where the hallway emptied into a large locker area, she could hear someone wailing above the quiet. Casting around, she saw that it was Amy, who was being tended to by two other girls. Her moans were loud enough to be heard up and down the entire length of the hallway. She passed the girls with her eyes to the floor. At the end of the wide corridor, she ducked into the girl's bathroom. Inside, some girls stood looking at themselves in the mirror, talking about a television show quietly-apparently one in which a high school boy student died. She entered one of the stalls and locked the door and waited until the late bell rang, then she waited another few minutes before re-entering the empty hall and following a small corridor to the back of the school, to the stadium, and, beyond that, the streets of Moraine. If any teachers saw her, they did not bother to question her; she was a good student, a class officer, first chair clarinet in the jazz band and orchestra. She was not a student any of the teachers worried about. She wandered first toward the center of town, not any too sure of where exactly she intended to go. She went to Hebbing's Shoes and looked at a few pairs of flats. She didn't stay long, though, and once again outside, she avoided the main avenue through town, taking alleys instead. She went to an out-of-the-way clothing shop down near the bolt factory and there she spent most of her weeks' lunch money on a shirt she'd seen a few weeks before. She folded it up and stuck it in her backpack and walked on down Second to Williams Street and entered A&P at the side entrance. She was greeted almost immediately by Nate Holland, who stood close to the door stacking a display of peas. Nate was a year older than Samantha, already graduated. "Hey," he said, a little surprised to see anyone besides older women in the store at that hour. "Hi," she replied. "Skipping school?" "Doctor's appointment," she explained. "Just killing some time." He nodded his head firmly to show that he understood. He held two cans of peas in each hand. She didn't make to say anything else as she might have normally. Though Nate seemed to want to continue to talk, he didn't appear to know how to prolong the conversation, and they stood awkwardly for a moment. "I suppose I should get back to this," he said to avert the awkwardness; he gestured with his head toward the elevated room nearby that was the manager's office, indicating that he was likely being watched and couldn't talk even though he would like to. "Right," she said and began to walk on. When she was a few steps away, though, he thought of something to say. "Hey, Samantha," he said. "Idn't it something about Stevie Lowe?" She looked back. He was wearing corduroys and a western shirt underneath a white, starched apron; everything about this store down to Nate himself, seemed to have been plucked out of history, thought Samantha-the fifties, she guessed, or perhaps even before that. She had the impulse to say something hateful to Nate about the dead boy. She didn't really know Stevie Lowe, she wanted to say. As close as she had sat to him all those years she didn't know him so why should she care anymore about him than those poor people who drowned down South yesterday. Instead, she told him she'd heard at the game. "Man," he said, wearing a peculiar expression that didn't quite seem appropriate to Samantha. "I know," she said, almost coldly, and then she turned and walked on into the store, past the three check-out counters. She was not really hungry, but she picked out a three pack of Slim Jims and a soft drink anyway. Then she remembered the shirt she'd bought and she set the items down on the breakfast cereal shelf and dug around in her pocket to see how much she had left. She came up with a dollar thirty-one. She read the prices on the items: the drink was seventy-nine and the Slim Jims a dollar. What a minute ago had seemed a whimsical treat now seemed necessary for her survival. She quietly unzipped her backpack and placed the items inside. It would have to be all or nothing, she decided. She would never be able to pay for the drink while stealing the Slim Jims or vice versa. She zipped the bag back up and started walking toward the front of the store. She walked around the end of the checkout counters and was heading toward the door when a man's voice came from behind her. "Miss," he said. "Can I have a look inside your bag there?" She passed by Nate Holland then, his back to her, bent over his task as he was. She didn't even turn toward the voice to see what the man looked to her-perhaps she knew him too. Perhaps she knew everybody here. She broke into a sprint for the door and the man yelled behind her, "Stop." And then he said it again, this time a little louder. She heard him yell, "Get her, Nathan!" And she was well outside the door when she heard the man's voice one final time. "Get her, Nathan." She was running now, though she was not sure what had brought her to this point. She followed the alley that ran behind A&P and turned onto a perpendicular alley. Looking back, she saw no one behind her. She crossed a few streets, keeping to the alleys. Some seven or eight blocks from A&P, she stopped to rest in between a garage and a tool shed set about three feet apart. The ground in between them was filled in with crushed golf ball-sized chunks of ceramic pipe from Moraine Clay Products. She leaned back against the tool shed and sat down and ripped open one of the Slim Jims. She pulled out the drink and washed the stringy meat down with it, quickly finishing the bottle. For a long time, she sat there with her eyes closed and listened, at first to herself breathe and then to the things outside herself-church bells chiming from a distant corner of town (it was half past some hour or another), the hum of trucks and cars along State 93. Nearby, she heard the suction of a basement door open and then someone hanging out clothes and the click of every clothespin as it fastened down on a shirt or pair of underwear. After a while, she got up and began walking, the pungent, familiar smell of coal issuing from most of the houses along Second and Garrison Streets. It was oppressive, that smell; it was the smell of winter and she longed for something to take its place; it didn't need to be salt water in the air or something so romantic, just another smell, any other smell. The chill of the morning had worn off some, the temperature mysteriously rising by dint of unforeseeable forces. She took off her coat now and wrapped it around her waist and walked. She'd walked a lot already today-more than she had in months. She had no plan beyond walking, and unconsciously, she gradually arced toward home, passing along the way through parts of Moraine she'd never really been in, at least not on foot, and she noted that they were not appreciably different than the parts she had. Even Samantha was aware that her mind was strangely vacant. Two Nate hadn't really thought much about what he was doing and now here he was, out along Williams Street, nothing but a long sleeve shirt and an apron on. He'd run for some four or five blocks without any real indication of Samantha's direction. Now he stopped and felt the cold in his fingers. He was in front of Colson's Sunoco. Why Samantha Longstreth would steal something from A&P didn't concern Nate. The truth was, just being out here away from work, if just for a short time, made him a little giddy. That was what he was thinking when he was first out there in the January weather. That it was cold and that he was ill-suited for the coldness somehow deepened his giddiness. It was like stealing something himself. He walked on down toward the river and made a large loop through Moraine. He was trying to recall what it was that he had dreamed the previous night. He had the only feeling of it inside, but could not come up with details. All he knew was that he'd woken with a light heart and had been in a better mood than normal. Eventually, he was on a path back to the store. He'd been gone too long, he knew, and he wasn't sure if Mr. McCall was going to believe that he had tracked the girl for so long, but he was beginning to care less about what Mr. McCall believed. Back on Williams, which ran in a nearly straight two mile line from one end of town to the other, he took a long look to the east and was surprised to see Samantha Longstreth crossing Hunter on Carlisle Street, her orange hunting coat unmistakable even at a distance; all but bow season was long since over and not many hunters would be wearing the coats for fashion. He had known Samantha for five or six years. In all that time, he realized he hadn't given her much of a thought. So many people came into your sphere of consciousness and were not drawn into focus. Now, as he watched her disappear behind the theater and the sundry shop, for some reason, he imagined a whole person. He recognized that later this resulted from something in Samantha's eyes that morning, a mystery of some sort. Whatever the reason, he had all at once replaced the superficial picture he'd kept of her, the yearbook facts, and Samantha began to take on nuance in his mind. He gave her a history of his own imagining, placed her on vacation with her family on a trip to Tennessee. With a pleasant kind of jealousy, he imagined her kissing a boy working at an arcade's change desk. He imagined her singing in a church choir. Hark the Herald Angels Sing! was the song, for whatever reason.. Who knew where these ideas came from. He imagined her watching The Shining, unfiltered expressions of fear filling her face. It had been something with the eyes, some hidden message coming to him from deep inside, a thing her eyes could not betray. He thought to run after her, but then did not. He could not say why he did not or why, now, he was out here in the cold; he was freezing now and each block seemed long. At the Y where Hunter Street splintered off from Williams. He ducked into an empty phone booth for a minute. There had been all manner of laundromats and bric'a'brac stores in the triangular building there in Nate's lifetime. Presently, though, it was vacant and through the darkened windows he could make out cardboard boxes strewn about and a couple of naked armless mannequins. He absently picked up the phone while he stood there and he read the dull-witted graffiti scribbled on the booth wall in ballpoint and magic marker. 81 Kicks Ass. Shelia loves Mike. MegaDeath Rocks. "For a long distance call, dial 0 for the operator," read the text below the phone. He dialed "0." It was as easy as that. Soon a man's voice was on the line; Nate told him that he wanted to make a collect call. "The number?" Nate gave the man his brother's number, which he was able to remember despite having called it only two or three times. Soon he heard his older brother on the other end, talking to the operator about the charges. "Go ahead, Sir," the operator said to Nate finally. "Hey Donnie," Nate said. "Nate?" Donnie said groggily. "What's the matter?" Nate recognized almost immediately that his had been a bad idea. Directly on the heals of that recognition, he remembered the three hour time difference. "It's early there, idn't it?" he said. "It's okay," Donnie said. "We're up. We're getting up, anyway. We don't sleep all day." "Nothing's wrong," Nate said. "I don't know. I just thought I'd call." He looked out at the traffic moving along Williams. Clouds cover hung over the valley with seeming obstinacy. "It's cold here," Nate said at last. "Imagine it is, Junior. It's January. That's why they call it winter." "What's it like out there?" Nate asked. "You call about the weather, did you?" "No," Nate said. He thought for a minute. "Stevie Lowe died in the river the other day." "Who?" "Aw, he was Kates Lowe's little brother, wadn't he? Stevie Lowe?" "Shit," Donnie said. "Stevie died?" "He fell into the river down by the park," Nate said. " Through the ice." They seemed to wait for the other to speak for a while. "Shit," Donnie said again. "He couldn't of been more'n fourteen." "He was a senior," Nate said. "Nah." "He was a year behind me." "Goddamnit, Nate. That's the worse news I heard in months." Nate could hear a woman's voice in the background and then Donnie said to her that he was talking to his kid brother. Nate had not met the woman; they had eloped just after Donnie had finished basic training. "I guess I thought you'd want to know," Nate said. "Yeah, but it would be nice to hear from back there with good news on occasion." "Well, sorry, Donnie. Bad news is the only kind we got today." "Yeah," Donnie said. "Alright. Bad news it is I guess." "I should get off here, Donnie," Nate said. "I don't know what got into me? Money doesn't grow on trees." "No," Donnie drawled. "But it's alright. I don't mind you calling me." Then he asked, "You still working at the A&P?" "No," Nate said. "I quit. Been looking around for something else. I think I might go to college maybe." "Now you're cookin' with gas," Donnie said. "You get your butt in gear on that." To his wife, Donnie said, "Yeah, hon, I'd eat a couple scrambled." "I gotta go, Donnie," Nate said. "Wait a second," Donnie said. "Yeah?" "Mom alright?" "Yeah, she's fine," Nate said. "Alright," Donnie said. "Don't be a stranger." *** Nate didn't bother going back inside A&P. Once he'd told his brother that he'd quit, he knew that that was what he needed to do. He pulled onto Williams and then onto Fairfield and drove up the hill, passing the school with its squat stadium and baseball diamond. Some poor gym classes were standing out in the cold, shooting arrows at targets leaned against the steep bank that bordered Warner Avenue. He passed the old mayor's house, a place high on a hill made of the ceramic brick made locally at Moraine Clay since 1888. This date stuck firmly in Nate's head and probably everyone else's because it was emblazoned on billboards and softball T-shirts and restaurant place mats. You couldn't really forget when MCP had come into existence. After Nate's father had retired from the tire plant, he had spent whole mornings at the Allegheny, a diner near the fairgrounds that was connected to an old butcher shop. Nate had always felt comfortable there, and lacking any place to go now, he made his way through the residential areas east of the school and city pool and tennis courts, down to Arlington Avenue where the Allegheny was. The lighting inside was scant, as it had always been, and the décor was inexplicably nautical, despite the five hour drive necessary to get to any water you could put a put a sea-going boat on. Decrepit wooden crate traps housing fake lobsters hung from the ceiling and paintings of schooners banking under ominous skies filled the walls. Three large aquariums sat near the entrance, filled with exotic-looking fish species. Nate sat at his father's booth-once upon a time, people actually avoided sitting there in the event that Arthur Hollland would be stopping in-but the waitresses at the Allegheny had changed probably more than once and no they longer recognized Nate as the teenage son of Arthur Holland; this made Nate feel that the time since then had been something more than just three years. Nate watched as the breakfast crowd slowly thinned. It was getting on to eleven o'clock, and soon there were no other customers besides Nate. The waitress occasionally came back from a hidden coffee station and checked on him, refilled his coffee, took away the dirty plates. She did not seem bothered by his loitering as he sat reading through the two regional papers of the previous day. Generally, Nate scarcely glanced at a paper, but it was enjoyable to stop and look out of himself for a few hours; he spent the many hours of his shifts at the grocery deep in his own mind, running over the same thoughts and ideas and memories, ad infinitum. The events today have drawn him outside of that neurological rut, into more excited territory. The news of Stevie Lowe's death had more or less stopped the town in its tracks, though Nate had so far paid scarce attention to any of it. After scanning the papers from front to back several times, Nate turned now to the news of the death. It resided at the top of page one in both papers. "Boy Drowns in Moraine," read one. "Moraine Youth succumbs in Icy Water," read the other. The accounts were nearly identical. Nate had ignored the articles the first time around just the way he ignored the insurance ads and Dear Abby. Nate didn't care, in truth, about much in the paper. He didn't care anymore about the happenings of the sports world, and certainly not about global politics. Politics, in fact, were out altogether-even the state and local varieties. This didn't leave much beyond crosswords, which he didn't mind, and odd stories from the A.P. wire. Running through the details, he casually noted the boy's address, confirming that the family had not moved since his brother had dated Stevie's sister Kate a few years back. Something clicked then for Nate, for no reason clear to him. Up to this point, he had viewed the behavior of Samantha Longstreth at A&P and the death of Stevie Lowe as unrelated events. He'd had no reason not to. But now it dawned on him that this was perhaps not true at all. There was no good reason to explain it, but it seemed possible now. He recalled the conversion with her about Stevie Lowe, and her walking off halfway through it, and then of course her running out of the store with Mr. McCall yelling after her. He ran through it all in his mind for a while. Finally, he paid for his breakfast and went to his car. He filled it with gas at a station across the street and then headed toward Backbridge Road, where he'd been once with his brother. He wasn't sure what he hoped to find. He didn't really imagine he'd find anything, but he felt compelled to go nonetheless. Three Samantha found the keys to her brother Scotty's car in his room and then dug up some money that she kept in a fat novel-fifty-four dollars in fives and ones -and she left a short note on the counter to assuage any fears that she had slipped off the edge of the earth, thought she knew that note or no note, her parents would be worried by her behavior. It couldn't be helped. Outside, the wretched baby blue Rabbit choked to life. It needed a new muffler system and transmission, she knew, which were at least two reasons shy Scotty wasn't allowed to have it at college. It coughed loudly as she gassed it. She didn't wait for it to warm, pulling onto Vine Street and throwing gravel into the yard. Running a typically long red light, she drove past the factories along the river and crossed over to the other side of the valley. She passed the golf course and a series of summer Scouting camps and then drove on into the hills on a small road she knew from having attended camp herself out there years ago. Samantha found a payphone next to the bathrooms at a new convenience store south of town; an open utility room stacked floor to ceiling with boxed cleaning supplies stood across the small isle. She looked up all of the Lowes in Falls County in the thin area white pages. She found four, two of them with city addresses. Those two were out; there was no question Stevie Lowe came from the country . Among the many indications of this was the fact that Stevie was absent in snowy weather because the buses were not allowed on the hills outside of Moraine in the snow. Of the remaining two Lowes, one was named Harlan, on Backbridge Road, the other Carl, on Swanson Road. Samantha considered calling both to find out which was Stevie's family. She looked around the store. The boy behind the register was watching TV and stealing glances back at her. You didn't call up someone to ask them if their son was dead, she thought. She wrote down the two addresses on her hand with a dirty Bic pen she found lying on a nearby shelf. She'd never heard of either road, and she couldn't imagine where she might get a road map that would list county township roads on it. Even though she recognized the futility in it, she decided to just start driving and looking for the roads. It was haphazard, but it didn't really matter. She wasn't even sure she wanted to find them. On the way out the door, she stopped and asked the boy at the counter if he knew the roads; he hadn't. "Thanks," she said. "No problemo," he told her. On out into the country, she passed a steady stream of roads whose names seemed pulled from some mythical Scottish countryside-Cartwright, Dickson, Lombard, Brodie. Eventually, she came into tracts of Amish farms, people who'd moved into the area in the last decade or two, buying up land here and there, paying, Samantha had heard, with cash. In the fall, these Amish bailed hay like in the old times, creating the pyramidal bundles which stood in the fields drying as in some painting from Europe. Her father was fascinated by the Amish, and would drive the family by the farms sometimes, speaking admiringly of the will of the Amish, of their resolve and commitment to a way of life. This way, Samantha weaved her way out of the Moraine Valley and through the hills, searching out the family of the dead boy. It was a ridiculous pursuit. Had she stopped to really weigh things, she might have found all manner of reasons for turning around, but Samantha was not accustomed to the dissonance she felt and was not able to see outside of it. The clear and sensible world of two days prior had evaporated like quietly spoken words. All of this was something she couldn't really even name except to say that it had to do with Stevie Lowe, and whatever it was, it had driven her into a kind of affectless state, where awareness and concern-even self-consciousness-disintegrated into mere wakefulness. She operated now on something like instinct, which she was not accustomed to doing. Her very navigation banked on there being some innate knowledge inside that she hadn't been aware of before. And maybe this was it: she had believed-and been led to believe-that we were all alike somehow, that in some fundamental way, we were the same. Out there in the hills, she moved through the mid-morning dreariness without any real sense that she belonged here or had commonalities with any living thing. Either she would find something out here or she would not, she figured. Four At the house, Nate parked on the road and just watched the activity for a while-and there was plenty of it. It would be disrespectful to enter the house when all he wanted was to find a girl he craved, a girl he was beginning to think, for lack of a better way of expressing it, that he might be in love with. He looked for any sign of her and he waited. He watched for some time before it began to dawn on him that the funeral was taking place here, now; trucks and cars first filled the long-laned driveway, and then parked in the frozen grass in a haphazard manner. Nate watched several dozen cars pull onto the property before he finally pulled his own car-a Renault he'd gotten cheap from his brother-into the mess of amassing cars and walked the long driveway to the house. He followed an older couple around to a low, sprawling porch which led to a rickety screendoor. He walked in right behind the aging couple, almost as if he were their grandson, come along to mourn Stevie. The couple stopped and took off their coats and hung them on hooks in a large anteroom filled with everything from lawn furniture to an old-style clothes washer, replete with hand-operated wringing pins. Nate left his coat on. Before he knew it, he was standing in a corner near a refrigerator. He gazed around the room. While he knew this to be the Lowe house- the place had implanted itself in his mind from his single previous trip-he couldn't quite fathom the numbers of people here, nor why more seemed to be arriving all the time, all to mourn the young boy. Nate soon found himself speaking to a man who had driven from Huntington, some distance to the south. For reasons Nate quickly lost sight of, the man was talking about atomic energy, about the difference between forging and storing it. As if prompted by a student's questions, he explained to Nate about weapons grade plutonium, the dangers of mining it. There was a large, bearded man moving about the room, precariously carrying a half dozen beers in his untucked shirt, dispensing them without discrimination. He made eye contact with Nate and then extended a bottle toward him. Nate took it, and looked back to the atomic man, who, in something of an aside said, "In my book, if you're old enough to die in some God forsaken jungle, then you're old enough for one of those." Then, seamlessly, the atomic talk continued and it eventually came out that he had recently retired after forty years in an atomic energy plant. When the man looked to Nate for a response or just a new topic Nate's mind clouded over. There was such a din in the place, he was thinking. "My brother's in the Army," he said at last. "Out to the Mojave." The man nodded knowingly, like he too might have spent a grueling season or two in the service of Uncle Sam in some similar barren landscape. "It's a hell of a place," the man said. "Hot." Nate confirmed this with a nod. He knew almost nothing about the place except this very fact. As quickly as he had appeared before Nate, the man vanished-Nate did not even really notice him slipping away into some smoky room-and now Nate was on a second beer, handed to him by the same roving benefactor. Across the room, a phone was ringing loudly-an old black box of a thing that might have once been an outdoor factory phone, such was the volume of its ring. Nate saw a woman answer it as she looked out the kitchen window onto the joyless overcast day. Then he saw Kate Lowe approaching him. "You're Nate," she proclaimed when she stood in front of him at last. She wore a navy dress and a pearl necklace with matching earrings; she was striking. Even if Nate had not known her, his eyes would have fallen on her anyway. "Yes," he told her. "That's right." The mere three years between them had felt like ten and when his brother had dated her; he had always been intimidated by Kate and was now, too. "Donnie's brother," she said. "That's right," he said. "I didn't realize you were close to Stevie," she said. Her hands were clasped in front of her at waist height the way a practiced minister's hands might be. "I've not seen too many kids from the school here." At this she looked around the room quickly as if to double check her facts. He looked at her, in want of something to say. Nothing came. He could only hope that silence was best. She examined him for a long time. "I'm sorry about Stevie," he said, finally unable to handle the silence. She ignored this. "Come here," she said. "I want to show you something." She walked down a hall, past several rooms. The house, a sprawling clapboard place built if not in the last century, then sometime shortly thereafter, seemed to ramble on forever. She led Nate into a blue room where spare light leaked in through closed curtains and only in the vaguest way revealed a made bed and an armchair and a number of various dressers and shelves. She closed the door and then walked over near Nate. He tensed, but did not move. For some reason, his mind had drifted to an airplane ride he'd taken the summer before with a wealthy friend's father. The man kept a six-seater at the small airport in Bremen and took the boys up one afternoon for a tour of the area. He was remembering the jolt you got in such a small machine when it took wing, and then the impossible climb above trees and power lines, against all that seemed natural. "I heard Donnie was out to California," she said. "Barstow," Nate said. "What's he doing all the way out there?" she asked. Nate tried to make out Kate in the partial light. It was tough going. He thought he could see her freckles, but most of her features he constructed from memory. "He's in the army. AIT, I guess this part is called." She rolled her eyes, a little flustered. "I know he's in the stupid army," she said. "When is he going to come home?" The story was beginning to clear up for Nate. Kate did not know that Donnie had gotten married. "I don't know," he told her. "He's wasting his life away," she said. "He's going to wake up some day and see that he's missed everything." Nate shrugged, though he knew she probably couldn't see him. Nothing was too reliable here, he concluded. The dark room was just one more factor adding to this lack of clarity. He was pretty sure, despite the steadiness of her voice, that she was on the verge of tears. In the next instant, though, whatever had led him to believe this evaporated and back was the young, confident, beautiful Kate Lowe; she was a farm girl, but somehow not, a waitress possibly, perhaps even a nursing student. He couldn't say for sure. He didn't know many people from the country too well or what they did after high school besides work on the farm. Whatever it was that people out here did, Kate seemed an exception. She stepped closer to Nate then and lifted her head to him and kissed him on the mouth. She did not touch him otherwise and he did not move away. Her eyes were closed-the first thing that he could see with any certainty-and she seemed to find release in this kiss, gently running her tongue along his. He had known nothing like it. The kiss lasted a long moment. Afterwards, Kate stepped away and looked toward him, again camouflaged by darkness, and then moved, sprite-like, toward the door. "Stevie's body is in the next room," she said. "If you mean to pay your respects." She opened the door then and daylight spilled in and he caught a glimpse of her sliding past the entrance. The door closed behind her and he was alone and only then did it occur to him that he was standing in Stevie's room. He walked to the window and pulled open the curtain a little, revealing on a shelf below it some framed group photos of Stevie: band camp, youth baseball, 4H. Nate had not known that Stevie Lowe had been in 4H, though of course he had been-all these country kids were in 4H and FFA. He also did not remember playing baseball against Stevie, but looking at the photo, he recognized Stevie's team-Kentucky Fried Chicken-and recognized, too, several of the other boys on the team-Chad Holt, Russ Dix, Sherman Brookwater, boys Nate played baseball and basketball with for years-and he was sure he had played against this very team one summer night a lifetime ago, when they were twelve or thirteen. He gradually excavated the night from memory, pulling up first the faces he remembered easily and then some he was surprised to retrieve, and then actual events-a catch he had made of a linedrive, a pop fly he had lost in the lights. He had drawn a walk at least once that night, and he remembered standing behind the backstop as his GE teammate John McCaslin hit a ball farther than he'd ever seen one hit. Playing through the night in his mind, even sounds surfaced-perhaps, he thought, this was merely the generic soundtrack to summer nights of baseball-but he thought he remembered his own father yelling for him to keep his head up after a strike out. Yes, he remembered that, too. It had been a called third strike-the worst of offenses-and he had returned to the dugout with his head lowered like some cartoon strikeout victim, and then his father had yelled from the stands and he had tried to correct the behavior. And then, in the late innings, when coaches cleared their benches because city rules mandated that everyone get to play at least two innings, Stevie Lowe appeared in the KFC batting order and in right center field. Nate could see him now, remembered his tiny figure as he squatted, at his coach's urging, so that his strike zone was impossibly small, completely unattainable for the twelve year-old pitchers to throw to. Stevie walked once late in that game. Who could say why Nate could remember these things now; it was a wonder what one carried around and never found a reason to use, to call up and remember and see again and feel again. Stevie had stood on first base as the next three batters had struck out and GE had won the game. What am I doing here? Nate thought absently. Did he mean to come here and grieve with these people for the loss of their silent son? Maybe he did not yet have that sort of grief in him, or perhaps it was lurking too far inside, buried these years since his father had died and his mother had slipped away into a silent spot next to the turned-off television, where she had begun reading about tulips. Soon, Kate's final words hit Nate. Stevie was there. Stevie was right next door. Five It was already after noon when she finally, by utter chance, found Swanson Road-there must've been another 60 or 70 roads in the county she hadn't driven on or by. She drove Swanson for its length-nearly twelve miles-until, almost at the end, she got to the address of Carl. She pulled to the side of the road and watched the house for a minute. There were chickens out in the yard, otherwise there was nothing moving. She sat for a long while, and then drove on. Almost immediately, Swanson dead-ended into Bridgeback Road. She turned right and the first house was 3343 Bridgeback, Harlan Lowe's address. The other Lowe house was still in plain view, the two families clearly related somehow. Samantha pulled into a crowded driveway and parked behind a Torino. There were hordes of cars there, and people in the yard as well. Samantha did not hesitate. She turned off her car and got out and moved through the yard and into the house without thought or self consciousness. Inside, she entered a kitchen, wall to wall with people, and coffee burned in a Mr. Coffee somewhere. People stood around and talked-uncountable numbers of them. They drank coffee and beer and some other drinks in ancient glassware. Somewhere in a distant room there was banjo music. Samantha wandered from the room to room, perfectly at ease among the strangers. She did once meet a small group of boys she recognized from school, but she did not know them well and they paid no attention to her. She approached a boy who was six or seven years younger than she. "Do you know where the boy's mother is?" she asked him. He looked at her. "Which boy?" "The drowned boy," she said. She couldn't say his name for some reason; it sounded wrong in her head, though "the drowned boy" did too, now that she heard it. "Stevie's mom?" the boy said. "Yes." "That's my mom," he said. "Stevie is my brother." She was shocked by this news, and was snapped out of her protective shell. She looked at him and he seemed to register her shock. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know." "What's your name?" the boy asked. "Samantha," she said. "Samantha," he repeated. And then he bolted, vanishing into the crowd. She looked around the room now, vulnerable here for the first. Six Stevie was in a small room in the center of the house. There were no windows, only a bulbous skylight high overhead that had obviously been added in recent years and which had been poorly installed from the looks of the dark water stains slanting down the pitched ceiling, disappearing where it hit the dirty walls, no doubt continuing on along the joists to the next room. The room was occupied by a handful of solemn women, one of whom Nate took to be Stevie's mother. This woman resided over a homemade casket lined with an intricately-designed quilt. Nate was well into the room before he was able to assess whether it was okay for him to be here at all and now he stood awkwardly as he tried to sort out what to do. Nobody seemed to pay any attention, though, so he approached the casket. He stood close enough to Stevie's corpse to see the creases in his young, lifeless face. Nate's only point of comparison for all of this was, of course, his father's funeral. His father had been made up as he lay in the coffin, wearing the thick powdery dust that gave him a false color. The makeup made him nearly unrecognizable, his face somehow the wrong size and shape, and his mouth unnaturally drawn shut. Stevie's mouth, too, was shut, but by the tilt of his head achieved by three stacked pillows. He wore no makeup, though, and despite the vacuity in his face-an emptiness infinitely more profound than that of a sleeping man-he was recognizable. Nate could see the likeness even to the boy from the photo in the next room. Nate stood over the coffin for what he hoped was a long enough time. His mind wandered. He was not thinking about Stevie now; he had only the night of baseball all those years ago. He remembered his own dead father, whom he had thought little about in all the time he had been dead. A wave of grief swept through him and water came to his eyes. He did not want to be standing there feeling these things in front of people who today had their own grief, and so he turned and crossed the stuffy room toward the door. He ventured to look up at the women as he did so and met the eyes of one of them, perhaps those of an aunt or some more distant relative. For her, as for Kate, Nate had nothing to give, nothing to say. He had very little, all told, and felt spiritually poor in that moment, bereft. It was a terrible tragedy, he might have tried. He said nothing though. The woman soon looked away, perhaps seeing in him that he was no more with her in that room than Stevie himself, and Nate left the way he'd come in, moving back toward the kitchen and the living room where most of the guests had congregated. Seven. Down the hall, Nate stood before Samantha Longstreth, struggling to regain his composure. They were both a little shocked to see the other, a fact that diffused the situation in some way. . "Samantha," he said. The very sound of the word carried meaning for him now. The little boy was back and stood next to Samantha again. Nate immediately recognized him as a blood relation of Stevie Lowe-something in the cheeks and nose. He stood looking at Samantha at first, but then turned toward Nate. Nate was taken aback by the frankness of his gaze. He was probably nine years old. "Do you know what will happen to Stevie?" This was even more shocking than the gaze and Nate hadn't a clue how to understand the question or how to respond. He shook his head. Before the boy could give them the horrifying answer Nate thought was coming, the boy exhaled a maniacal laugh and ran off into the crowd and out of the room. Then Nate and Samantha stood by themselves. Nate searched for words he had driven out here to deliver, but he saw now that he merely wanted to see her; he hadn't nothing to say to her, nothing to pledge or promise. Inside her, Nate recognized trouble, but he was not bothered by that. Trouble did not matter. There would be plenty of trouble in this life-no shortage of it. He thought to tell her what he saw and that it would be okay, but just then a man emerged from the roiling living room then, as if spit out like a lottery ball, and grabbed Nate by the arm gingerly. It was the uniformed Army recruiter who'd been at the house three or four times in the months before Donnie went to Texas for Basic Training. "Mr. Holland," he man said dramatically. "How's things?" He did not seem overly grieved. A full beer dangled from the pinky of his left hand. "I'm okay," Nate said. Nate didn't really know how to address the man, whose name was Seargent Kyle Hanson. "What's the latest from your bro'?" he asked. As the man spoke to Nate, Samantha stepped away-did not really even excuse herself; just stepped back and turned-and moved toward a door. Nate watched her go and thought to grab her or excuse himself but Hanson interrupted his thought, put his hand on Nate's shoulder. Eight Through the next room and into a third, Samantha was looking for her way back to the entrance she'd come in ten minutes before. A man in his thirties noticed her. "You need something, hon?" he asked. He seemed just too young to call her "hon," but there apparently hadn't been a good alternative to his mind. "I was looking for the bathroom," she managed. "That's what I thought," he said. "Second door down this here hallway." He pointed to a dark hall off the old run-down dining room they were in. "Thank you," she said. Inside the bathroom, she locked the door behind her and sat down on the closed toilet. A corrugated window ushered in opaque light. Samantha tried to collect her thoughts. That Nate Holland was there was a mere ripple of disturbance, a minor inconvenience. She scarcely wondered, and really only assumed, about his presence there. It didn't seem likely that he would follow her out there to get back the Slim Jims and Coke, but was there another explanation? There was the chance that he was there to mourn the death; that was a possibility too. Either way, she didn't want to see him; he was only clouding an already cloudy situation. She needed to leave here. If she had come here to see the dead boy, it had been a mistake; she saw that now. She would go out the window, she decided. When she got the window up far enough to see out of it, though, she saw that there were five men standing in the yard nearby, drinking beer from bottles. She closed the window and steeled herself. There was only one other way out. Back in the crowd, she looked toward the floor as she walked. Eventually, she'd have to hit an exit. Houses could not be infinite; another fact of science. She breathed deeply, from the diaphragm, as she'd learned to do in speech class, and she tried to avoid the room where she'd seen Nate. Soon she found herself on the dilapidated back porch. There were men here, too-also drinking beer. Perhaps it was the same men, moved around from the other side of the house. There was no way of telling. She walked through the yard toward her car, down the long driveway. The Rabbit was blocked in by a GMC truck. Samantha stood and looked at the truck for some time and then finally saw where she might be able to nose through two cars and get out through the yard, angling up onto the road through a ditch. She made it through, and then to the road, dragging her car's underside some in the process, tearing up some of the Lowe's yard. But here she was on Backbridge again, southbound, headed toward some great unknown. It was not at all relief she felt to be on the road again, as she'd hoped, but dread in some all-encompassing form, and it seeped in and threatened to overcome her as she drove south for escape, into a landscape she envisioned unwrapping in front of her as if she were sitting still and the land itself were the thing moving. This perception was as unsettling as the rest of it and she accepted it stoically. The place itself bore little resemblance to the earth she knew, but was some netherworld contrived in part by her very brain chemistry, in part by the clouding and warming atmosphere, of weather and geological history, the oppressive sky hovering over the land. It all conspired-inside her and out-to create a moment frozen, a future museum diorama of a teenage girl at the edge of the earth. She had no yardstick by which to measure things, and so she drove south and expected the worst. At Keller and Gallia, she stopped. The car's heater was finally throwing warmth over her legs-at least something she could feel good about. Snow had started to fall and she sat there, calmed a bit for the moment. The fields that lined this valley seemed to stretch relentlessly in the cold. Each row of dirt and dead cornstalk harbored some residual snow from a Christmas storm, and might've glistened under a sun, but there was only dreary cloud-filtered light. The car idled roughly. She put it in gear, and pulled on through the stop sign and fiddled with the radio until she found a pop station from a distant city to the north. A commercial advertised a condominium in Myrtle Beach where the owner of the radio station vacationed-for free, no doubt, in exchange for this very commercial-and before the commercial even ended, the road cut out of the valley and into the hills, and the station faded, almost as if it had been purposefully cut off by some knowing hand. Then, slowly trolling the FM band with one hand and steering with the other, all she could find were a couple country stations. She turned off the radio. At Maine Road, she randomly went left, and then right on Samuels and again on McDaniels. She took another left at a Y onto Old Ashton Road. This last she decided to stay on, but twenty minutes later, when she came into view of the green signs marking the municipality of Ashton, she pulled into a driveway and turned around, and returned the way she'd come. Soon, she came to another road-this one was called Furnace-which she turned left on. She stopped at an old gas station just past this intersection and put in five dollars of gas, which nearly filled the small tank. "Afternoon, sweetheart," the woman behind the counter said when she went in to pay. Time hadn't entered Samantha' consciousness all morning, and now it was apparently past twelve. Nine "Never mind the skirt for a minute here, Holland," Sergeant Hanson was saying. "I ain't heard from Donnie," Nate told him. "Well, if he's in California, he's doing alright. You know what I'm saying?" Nate smiled politely and looked around, wondering where Samantha could have gone. "It's a fuckin shame about Stevie, idn't it?" Hanson said. "Yeah," said Nate. "It is." "He was heading down to Bragg come June," said Hanson. "He wanted to go Airborne." "Uh huh." "I think he had the makings of a real badass between you and me." Hanson drank from his beer. "Stevie was pretty slight," Nate observed, not really wanting to argue about the boy's physical prowess at his funeral, but annoyed somehow that Hanson would suggest these things. "Yeah," Hanson said, "but it's the slight ones, you see. They're the ones who do the real ass-kicking." Nate nodded. He would not take it any further. He had lost her; she could be gone forever now. "Like you," Hanson said. "I bet with a little training, a little strengthening, you could beat some serious ass." "Why would I want to?" Nate asked. "You never know when you need to beat some ass, Nathan. It's Nathan, right?" "Nate." "Nate then. You never know when you might need to open up a can of you know what." "When was the last time you had to beat someone's ass?" Nate asked. "Last night," Hanson said and waited for Nate to respond. When he didn't, Hanson went on. "No," he said. "I'm just messin with you. I don't find myself in much trouble anymore. I'm not as young as I used to be. But let's say I was over in Mogadishu. Bunch of Muslims fucking with me." "Why would you be over there?" Nate said. He was starting to feel a strong need to leave this house. "If I was in the Army, Nathan. If I was over there on a mission and something happened and I was by myself." "But what if you didn't want to be in the Army. Why would you need to beat anyone's ass then?" "I'm just making a point here. There are times and places when it is handy-when it is valuable-to be able to beat ass." "I've not found myself in any of those places or times yet," Nate said. He looked at Hanson. "Look Sergeant Hanson," he said. "I've gotta run." "She's not going anywhere," Hanson said. Like hell, Nate thought. That's exactly what this girl does: she goes. She disappears. "You come visit me down on First Street sometime," Hanson said. "I know it's not the path your brother wants to travel, but the U.S. government will pay for every last penny of your tuition if you want to go to college. I figure you to be the type to want an education?" "I don't know what I want," Nate told him. "Stop down," Hanson said again. "That's what I'm there for. To help out young men like yourself." "Okay," Nate said finally. "I'll stop down after work sometime." "Good," Hanson said. "You do that. You come down and we'll talk about the possibilities, the almost inconceivable things you could do in this world." "Alright," Nate said. "Alright." And he slipped away through a door that led him to a mudroom and then he was on the porch, a little buzzed. It had started to spit snow a little and the big, heavy snow clouds had moved in over the funeral. He found his way to his car down the long drive and saw a quagmire of automobiles; it looked like a junkyard, except that all of these vehicles presumably ran, or at least had in the preceding hours. He saw that while his car wasn't in the absolute worst position, there was no way he would be able to get it out. He returned to the house. Ten The gas station was in a old farm house, decrepit and painted white in the spots where paint still clung to the wood. Inside, the station was dirty from smoke and the woman at the counter smoked even now, cloudy tendrils rising from a Merit 100s plastic ashtray sitting on the counter next to an old-fashioned cash register. On the walls, two deer heads and one jackalope hung. Paul Harvey spoke through a small transistor radio behind the counter, complaining about the arrogance of a western congressman. "Afternoon," Samantha said to the woman. "Gonna snow some, ain't it?" the woman said. Samantha looked behind the woman toward the window and the morning beyond, as if she'd forgotten the outside world entirely in the thirty seconds since she'd left it. "Yeah," she said at last. "Maybe it is a bit." She walked to the drinks station and poured herself a coffee and put in too much sugar and cream, and then walked back over to the counter. "That and the gas is all?" "And these," she said, picking up some powdered donuts from a rack in front of the counter. As the woman figured the sum on a pocket calculator-the antiquarian cash register apparently did not work-Samantha scanned the place for some article of interest to rest her eyes upon for the moment. She found only a large Mickey Mouse clock, broken, or at least unplugged. "That's six-fifty," the woman said. Samantha handed the woman ten dollars. "You visitin some family down this way?" the woman asked. Samantha said nothing, only looked at the woman in something like confusion. "Oh, I just seen that your plates was from up to Moraine County, hon. I'm not keepin' tabs on no one." "Oh," Samantha said. "Doesn't make any difference to me. I'm just out for a drive." She was idly standing now, across the counter from the woman, sipping her coffee. Just then, she looked as if she could have been five years older than she was, holding the cup just so, her hand on the back of her hip. "That's nice," the woman said. "Not the prettiest day for it, but better 'n some." Samantha nodded. Beside the magazines there was a single wooden chair with a knee-high ash-tray sitting next to it. Samantha sat in the chair and opened the donuts and began eating them one at a time. The woman was quiet for the moment, standing over behind the counter smoking. Paul Harvey continued to drone. "You out of school, then?" the woman asked after some time. "Yeah," Samantha said. The woman seemed pensive for a moment. "Yeah," she said, like she was going to explain something, but then did not. Samantha nodded and sipped her coffee. "Well you couldn't hardly of been out for more than a year or two," she said then, as if awoken. "One year," Samantha said, enjoying the lie some now. "Gotta Boyfriend, I bet." "Nah," she said. "I'm taking it all slow. I'm just out seeing my country right now." She had, years ago, heard her father say that to a sheriff's deputy who had picked them up for speeding on some similar backroads. It had seemed to satisfy the deputy, who wondered what had brought them to that remote stretch of road, and seemed to Samantha, furthermore, an answer as good in one situation as many others. "Well," the woman responded proudly. "Good for you, darlin'. I wish I'd done more a that." When she had finished the entire roll of donuts, she stood and found a trash can and threw away both the empty coffee and donut wrapper. "Thank you," she told the woman. "It's good to have some company now and again," the woman told her. "I imagine so out here," Samantha said and smiled. She started for the door, but then felt a terrible sickness rising inside. A stricken look must have crossed her face, because the woman put her cigarette down and took a step toward her, still behind the counter. "What's a matter, hon?" she said. "You all right?" Samantha shook her head and made her way back to the chair she'd been sitting in, and it was all she could do to fall into it. The woman had come around the counter now. "What do you need, hon?" "I don't know," Samantha said. "Just to rest here a minute." A few minutes went by, but the feeling did not fade. She felt dizzy now, and nauseated. "There a bathroom?" she muttered. "Sure," the woman said. She led Samantha back a dark hallway lit by a low watt bulb. She could hear loud music back here-a stereo playing rock and roll, its percussion allied with her illness now, increasing her nausea as they got closer to the source. Now her vision, too, began to fail, and she leaned on the woman almost entirely. "I can't see," she murmured, and was aware of the confusion in her voice; she felt like she couldn't breathe either, but she was still struggling to keep alongside the woman, determined to make it to the bathroom, though it seemed that they'd been on the march to it for some time. She could still hear the woman and the music and their own footsteps on the hardwood, but now could not see at all and she closed her eyes a number of times, as if to clear them, and then finally left them shut as they were doing her no good anyway. They turned down several halls-the music's noise modulating, now louder, now softer-until they finally turned into a room. She knew it was a room and not a hallway because the music was muted by carpet, which she could tell, from her first step on it, was shag. The idea of the shag seized her and she drifted inside the carpet itself, imagining a miniature jungle in which she herself was the size of a tick and the strands of shag fibers a bizarre palmtree-like forest. The woman spoke and called her out of her imaginings. "I'm right here, honey," the woman said, steering her across the room. She led her to the toilet, placing her hand on the top of the closed bowl. Samantha lifted the lid and lowered herself to the floor, and then began to retch-the donut, the coffee, the Rice Crispies, the Slim Jims, all of it. She gagged for some time until she thought she was done, and then she gagged two or three more times, her small body heaving with nothing left to come up. She was dizzy and drained, and still could not see. The woman was running water in the sink then, and she said, "Here," and Samantha lifted her hand in the direction of the voice, and was handed a wet washcloth. "I'm sorry," she told the woman. "Hush now," the woman said kindly. "Now we'll need to get you to a bed, get you rested up a little before you carry on with your tour of the country." Samantha wanted to object, but she couldn't marshal any words. Nor, for that matter, could she see to drive, and recognized the absurdity of arguing with the woman. More than anything she really just longed for the bed of which the woman spoke, and it didn't matter what kind it was, nor how dirty nor how many animals she'd have to share it with. "You done?" the woman said. Samantha nodded. "Take my hand now and come on," the woman said, and she then had Samantha by the arm again and was guiding her out of the room. Samantha felt as lost as if emptied into a nighttime sea as they navigated the strange labyrinth of halls again. The woman eventually ushered her into another room and Samantha heard her turn on a light switch, and then she pulled off Samantha's coat and scarf. "You just lie down here," she said, guiding her still, and Samantha did as she was told, moving slowly as she did so, and when she was supine, the woman pulled off her shoes and draped a blanket over top of her. "I'll be back to check on you in a bit," she said, and then turned the light off and started on her way out of the room and before she was even gone, Samantha had lost consciousness entirely. Eleven Nate was again met with Atomic Energy Man; it was like they gravitated toward one another. The house was deeply enshrouded now in cigarette smoke. It drifted from room to room like fog on wind. "In Rome," the man was saying. "If you were poor and knew you wouldn't be able to afford a funeral, you joined a funeral club. Collegia Funeraticia, they called it. Kind of a toastmasters set-up. You went to these monthly meetings and paid dues, et cetera. And then when you died, you got your funeral paid for and the folks in your funeral club came as the mourners." Nate watched the man speak. Banjo music and escalating voices came from a nearby room. On a wall near them, there was a framed painting of three ships at sea, perhaps the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. "Ain't that something?" the man said. "A fricken funeral club?" Nate nodded, and then asked the man, "Were you related to Stevie?" "Wife is," he said. "She was the boy's great aunt. Previous marriage." Nate nodded again. "You ever meet him?" "I don't think so," he said, but then added. "Well. Maybe. At one of these big picnic affairs down toward Malta on the river." "He played baseball," Nate said. "Oh yeah? I'm not sure I knew that. I didn't, you know, spend a lot of time with this side of the family." Nate nodded. Outside the nearest window, he could see the Lowe family forming a circle in front of an above-the-ground pool. Snow was coming down now lightly. Kate was there, as were an older brother, two other sisters, and the little boy who'd been with Samantha-Stevie's youngest brother. Stevie's parents were there, too, dressed in their solemn black clothes that looked to have been made in some other decade. Seven of them, total. The father, Nate remembered now, was a minister, and he had them all holding hands and was speaking with his head bowed. On beyond them there were myriad outbuildings of every size and shape littering the property, and there were rusting farm implements and a number of abandoned lawn mowers and smaller parts that Nate took in his ignorance of things mechanical for carburetors and alternators and engine blocks. Beyond all of this agricultural and mechanical flotsam, stark winter hills rose all at once out of the valley, like miniature mountains, the trees of which were unthinkably dark against some snow patches that had not melted since the last storm. And there he saw, on a small area of the hillside, the cemetery, not more than twenty-five tombstones clustered together near the tree line. And at the corner of the cemetery was a yellow backhoe and a mound of freshly dug earth. "Life's as cheap as sticks," Atomic Energy Man told Nate now, taking note of the family congregating in the back yard. "With all respect to the dead boy down the hall. A single life isn't worth much." Nate looked at the man. "What is?" "The sweep of history, see. The whole collection of things. Culture. Art. Music. We're nothing by ourselves." Nate thought on this for a moment, but then the man interrupted his thought. "Is it hot in here?" he asked. Nate nodded. It was unbearably hot. So hot that Nate couldn't quite imagine what he was still doing inside. Except that he could not escape; except that he was trapped among the mourners when he didn't at all want to mourn. He excused himself from Atomic Energy Man-now Roman Funeral Man, too, the No Individual Matters Man-and he roamed about the house, past Stevie's bedroom, past Stevie's body, the kitchen, a sewing room, other bedrooms. He moved like an apparition, swimming from room to room in an endless series of loops. He wasn't looking for anything; he was just moving. He lost track of the time eventually and himself. Stevie Lowe was gone now. He would soon disappear into the earth forever-an incomprehensible idea. This morning, Nate had no real questions to speak of. Now his mind was crowded with them, and the movement slowed the questions down somehow. So he moved, from room to room, hall to hall. As he traveled repeatedly through the place, he grew familiar with certain faces; he noted the music's rising volume, the transformation of the slack-jawed people, their complexion turning red, their eyes opening toward one another in wide, focused expressions. He was nearly out of control as he moved and did not notice that he had begun to draw attention to himself, his odd bird-like circling. A woman-a neighbor of the Lowes-watched him cross the floor in the old dining room for the thirtieth or fortieth time and she stared at this conspicuous gray sweat-shirted boy. Had Samantha appeared in front of Nate, he might've noticed her and stopped, but he also might not have. He once saw the face of Kate looking at him from across a long room, but then a man took him by the arm and asked him if he needed to step outside. Nate said that he did, and the two of them exited the house together, where the snow had begun for real, coming down in huge flakes. Nate stepped away from the man, who seemed to guard the door, preventing him from going back inside. There was a group of men and children sitting in lawn chairs out in the cold where he had not long before witnessed the Lowes in their prayer circle. The men were smoking, talking quietly, respectfully, but it felt to Nate like the whole of the house was a tinderbox, everyone ready to lose some sane part of themselves. He remembered the feeling now he he'd had from his father's death-the empty space far inside, an unnamable thing. Looking at death, he thought, one could only with difficulty pretend that living was something other than ongoing absurdity. And anyone who bothered to go looking for the absurdity could find it easily enough; it was there always. With death, though, the absurdity was the first thing you saw; it smacked you in the face if you bothered to look at it. *** At his car, Nate discovered that he was free to go; the two or three cars that had had him pinned in had disappeared. He stood and watched the storm come in, a little giddy inside with possibility; he was thankful to have escaped Stevie Lowe's funeral. That might have ended very badly, he saw now. A family parked beside him and got out of their van. They were dressed in good clothes and the kids-a boy and a girl-wore Oakland Raiders coats, which were soiled thoroughly, presumably from playing touch football in the muddy autumn or sliding down gulley banks. The mother looked at Nate, a sort of half smile. "Heck of a time for a snowstorm," she said. Nate looked warmly toward her. It was a perfect time for a snowstorm, he thought. There had been no more perfect time in his nearly twenty years. He ransacked the glovebox of his car and found a map of the county, which he spread the map out on his hood and leaned over the way a surveyor might. He found his location easily and he surveyed the region nearby, as if he were searching for points of interests. He might just end up anywhere. He decided to aim south, perhaps toward Weston. He had never been there. He started the car and backed out of the driveway and onto the road. The snow was coming on strong now. Twelve When Samantha woke, it was to two unfamiliar women standing over her with a tray of food. Only in the following moments was she able to piece the morning together, remembering it in a tangled logic not at all resembling chronology. She finally placed one of the two women as the clerk at the gas station where she'd stopped. The rest came to her gradually-the sickness, the blindness, the bathroom, the bed. "You diabetic?" the second woman was asking. Though Samantha could not place the age of the first woman, it was clear that this one was older, if not elderly, then on the verge of it. "No," Samantha said. The woman said nothing to this, and busied herself placing the tray on the stand next to Samantha's bed. "Go get her a paper towel, Doreen," she said, and Doreen disappeared and returned a moment later with a white roll of paper towels, and tore off two and set them next to Samantha. "This is some chicken soup and fried baloney," said the older woman, who was obviously in charge. "What time is it?" Samantha asked. "You need to be somewheres?" the older woman asked. "No," Samantha said. "Your folks live up to Moraine County, do they?" "They're dead," Samantha said. "Ah hon," Doreen said. Then to the older woman: "Now you quit badgerin' her. She just needs to eat some and could do without the third degree." Samantha felt like she were going to fall asleep again while the women were there arguing about her. She picked at the sandwich, eating bits of the bread and tasting and then spitting out the meat. She ate a few spoonfuls of the soup. Doreen was now standing at the door, trying to usher the other woman out of the room again. "You holler if you need something," she said. "We're just down the hall." Samantha nodded meekly. The older woman looked back at her with suspicion or maybe scorn, but then the two of them disappeared, leaving the light on so she could see to eat. Samantha slumped back into the bed then and slipped into a dream of the fevered. *** When she woke, she did so with a whispered moan. After some minutes of lying there, she sat up and pulled the curtains back to find a bricked-in window. It could have been two o'clock or nine; she didn't have the first indication either way. She heard voices coming from down the hall, including a man's. She felt sick again. Gingerly she got out of bed and, shivering without the blankets, she found her way to the bathroom. She again voided her stomach. Afterwards, she washed out her mouth and washed her hands and would have examined her face, but there was no mirror. Out in the hall, she heard a door slam and she walked toward the voices, even then listing from some imbalance. She came upon the room where the same two women stood looking out the window. Hearing her, they immediately turned. Samantha could see snow came down out the window in some cartoonish density. A man sat in a high-back chair on the other side of the room, smoking and reading a newspaper. "You look like death warmed over," the older woman said. "That's our traveler, huh?" the man said. Doreen came toward Samantha. "How you feel, hon?" Samantha could only nod that she was okay. She focused on the snow outside and saw, upon closer study, that several figures were moving away from the house. The older woman, whom Samantha could only assume was Doreen's mother or mother-in-law, was looking out the window again. "Dear God," she said. "Them people ought to know better." "What's the matter?" Samantha managed. She was leaning her back against the arched doorway into the room, and Doreen was standing very close to her, as if she might catch her were she to fall. "You need to lie back down," Doreen said. "Been an accident," the older woman said, turning around. "We should call your relatives cause you're not going to be driving in this." "You from Moraine County, are you?" the man said. Samantha nodded. "Up to Moraine or Falls or where?" "Moraine," she said. "How come you're driving around down here in a snowstorm?" She shrugged. "Wasn't a snowstorm when I left." The man stood up and took a couple steps toward her. "You know someone named Stevie Lowe?" he asked. Though she knew this man was insinuating something, she felt unaffected, invulnerable, as if she were watching the scene on a television screen. The dead boy, she thought absently, then she said it, and the man regarded her strangely. "That's right," he said. "The dead boy." "That why you're here, is it? That why you ran off?" She didn't know. Maybe. She shrugged, but said, "No." "It was an accident, says here," he said. "That right?" "If that's what it says," she said, but then it occurred to her for the first time that maybe it hadn't been an accident at all. A boy came in through the front door then and said that the guy driving the cart-the Amish man-was dead, or nearly so. He wasn't moving anyway. He didn't look to be living, he said. "Good lord," the older woman said. Doreen was already on the phone, which hung from a wall near the door. She was explaining to a dispatcher that there'd been a wreck involving a small Toyota truck and an Amish buggy on Furnace Road. "You need to get back to bed," Doreen told her when she got off the phone. Samantha agreed and started to turn to walk back toward her room. "She's got something to do with this," the man said enigmatically. He seemed not quite to himself-high, or just off somehow. "People dying everywhere she goes. I don't want her here." "The boy drowned," Samantha said. "Says so in the paper." "I don't care if he fell out an airplane." Doreen had her by the arm again. "Come on, hon," she whispered. She led Samantha back to the room, but when Doreen disappeared again to go and deal with the accident, Samantha put on her boots and collected her clothes and began moving down the corridor in the direction she imagined the store to be in. It took some doing, but she eventually came out on the store. She passed a man at the main counter. "Hello, there," the man said, like he wanted to say more and was just waiting for the go-ahead. "Hi," she responded blankly, and then pulled on her hat and gloves and without looking back at the man, she opened the door, which jingled a belt of Christmas bells loudly, and then she stepped outside and let the door slam behind her. *** Here was a dreamscape of snow and muted noise and faulty vision. As if the snow were not enough, it was dusk now, and the world seemed to have changed wholesale. Not only was the gas station from earlier that day now beyond recognition, it seemed as if she'd stumbled into an entirely different country. Gone were the ubiquitous hills that framed everything, with their pine and oak and maple forests. Gone, too, was the lonely road that snaked through the place and the sky above it. There was only a dull, noiseless gray. After some scrutinizing, she thought she could see objects-figures of some sort-in the distance, in the direction of the road, but she could neither make out what the objects were nor discern if they were moving. She walked around the lot until she found her car parked along with two others and a truck, next to the store. Somebody had moved it away from the pump. It sat under maybe ten inches of snow. She sat on the cold plastic seat and found the keys in the ignition. It came to life instantly and seemed to run smoother, the muffler muted now by the snow. She found the ice scraper under some trash in the back, and got out to dust off all the snow. Someone-it could only have been Doreen-was yelling at her from the direction of the door. Her words, though, died in the space between the two of them and Samantha slammed the door and put the car in gear. Near the exit to the road, she could see the outline of the wreck, the figures standing around, the motionless carcasses of the truck and buggy. She turned right, away from them and opposite the direction she had come from that morning, and gassed her car hard enough so that she fish-tailed a little. She pushed it hard through the snow down Furnace Road, its engine growling against the task, its front wheels bow-like over the river of white. A plow had gone through once, a very long time before, and only for that could the car move at all. Snow drifts towered against the fenced-banks on either side, though there was easily four inches or so still down on the road. She drove this way for some time and soon the snowfall subsided and a half moon emerged from behind some clouds to the west, its light neither bright nor gloomy. The sickness had not lifted, despite the afternoon of rest, and Samantha felt a low-level pain in her abdomen that she leaned in to and did her best to ignore. She passed dozens of farms, a great many of them Amish, all recognizable by their spartan buildings. At the head of the lanes to these, there were large, roughly-hewn mailboxes. The houses themselves generally had dim candle light glowing from some window or another. For the longest time, the road did not stray from this broad valley whose name was unknown to Samantha. She might as easily have been driving along some comparable valley in the Steppes of Mongolia. On the radio now was news of heavy snow and there were litanies of closings and cancellations and postponements. Chanceyville's schools. A VFW-DAV dance in Chesterton. A 4-H program on rug design in Folsom Summit. All area varsity and JV sports. The list was endless and was repeated when it had been gone through so as to further the sense of its infinity. She drove through miles of alternating forests and rugged, houseless rangeland, as many as fifteen or twenty. She passed a sign for Weston that was antiquated and rusted-almost homemade-looking, the kind of sign no longer posted anywhere. It said the distant town was either 25 or 28 miles away; it was hard to tell in the light. Later, she saw a sign that read Leaving Parson County, Entering Hendricks County. She knew these county names from a seventh grade Ohio history test in which she'd had to memorize all eighty-eight, but that was the extent of her knowledge of them. She entered Hendricks County's freshly plowed roads with a jolt, as a plane landing roughly. The cleared road immediately acted to accelerate the Rabbit, and before she could consider how to respond, she had braked hard and frozen the wheels up and the car slid recklessly on the thin layer of snow. She swung the wheel in wild, sweeping motions, and was able to navigate the thin corridor between the snow banks this way, but the car swam repeatedly until the balding tires unexpectedly gripped a patch of asphalt and there was the loud static of rubber on wet rock followed by a loud snap. She stopped-or, more accurately, was stopped. The steering wheel sat frozen and unresponsive. She feared the worse, and when she got out, she saw that it was so. The left front wheel had snapped off and was lying on its side as if a pillow for the front axle. The car sat almost perfectly in the middle of the road. No, she whispered. She surveyed the country around her. Not a light shone in any direction other than that from an occasional jet thirty-thousand feet overhead. She was on a small knoll and could see how the land dropped off below her, forming a long, empty pasture, and beyond that, a creek probably, and then a tree line, which climbed out of the bottomlands up a large ridge that seemed to go on indefinitely up and down the road. She found a flashlight under the passenger seat and shone it on the broken wheel, as if there were something to miss in a tire that had completely snapped off. The snow crunched loudly under her boots, and it seemed that perhaps the clouds had been somehow insulating the country, for now that they were gone, she felt cold, and a whip of wind blew down from the north as if to affirm this notion. Back in the car, she sat down and let out a sigh. She turned the overhead light on then turned it off. She started the car back up and turned on the heater and felt its warm air through her pants again. What do you do? she wondered. She tried to remember the road that she had passed over, where things had been-farms, houses, roads. How far a walk could it be? Her mind was blank. She had not really registered anything since waking other than that man's face who was questioning her at the station. Just then, it was as if she'd never been anywhere but here. She looked at the blue dash clock. It was 8:05. No FM stations came in. She spanned the dial a couple times-not even a crackle of loud static. Switching to AM, she was able to find one clear channel broadcast from God knew where, on which a sporting event was playing. She didn't care. It was fine, whatever it was, and sitting back in the seat, she didn't know for the longest time what it was until someone scored a goal and she understood that it was hockey and that it was broadcast out of an American or Canadian city far off to the west. She imagined the place, a city probably, with beautiful mountains surrounding it. Whoever it was on the radio, where ever it was, she listened to it and was soothed by the voices of these announcers. "Clark moves across the midline, passes to MacArthur. He's matched up by Antoine Holly, the rookie out of Michigan Tech. Holly bumps MacArthur…" It didn't at all matter what they said. They might have been speaking Athabascan. The less she understood, somehow, the better. And this is the way she fell into sleep again, the broken-down Rabbit idling, the radio noise gradually fading into a staccato nothingness in her mind. *** When she woke, the car was out of gas, the radio silent. The clock, which ran to the battery, read 10:18. Samantha was consumed with thirst. She got out of the car and picked up a pile of snow with her mitten and ate it. It stung the spots where she had fillings, and yielded little water anyway. She had the heavy-headed sensation of someone who has slept either too much or too little. The temperature had dropped significantly and the fresh snow swept across the road in places and formed high drifts up against the banks. She surveyed the clearing below her where a stream surely ran, and then got into the car and dug around in the trash behind the front seat until she found an empty Yankee Burger soda cup. It was crushed, but she unfolded it and it seemed like it might still hold water. She tucked her pants into her boots, and retightened her boot strings, and then she scaled the barbed-wire fence, positioning her feet as close as possible to the flimsy pine posts where the wire was stapled. In the pasture on the other side, there were no cattle nor anything else living that she could discern, not counting a handful of crows, which perched on some nearby trees and seemed impervious to the worst conditions that could be drummed up. She began post-holing down the hill toward the dark tree line; the snow reached to just below her knees. The work was slow-going, but she made progress, and soon she was on flat ground. She came to a large tree that lay on its side, the top of which sat just above the snow. She crawled over top of the tree, not because she had to, but because it was in her path now, and it seemed less energy to climb it than go around. Soon, she came to a cutbank and could see the creek below her. She fought her way through a grove of multiflora rose and then slid down the bank to the channel. She dug around in the snow until she found a large, pointy rock to employ as a tool and she sought out a likely spot to dig. She cleared snow off the top of the creek with her hands and when she had reached the ice, she began chipping at it with the rock. She was desperate to get to the water, spearing ferociously, and could almost feel it running beneath her. This noise reverberated loudly up and down the channel. When she finally broke all the way through the ice, she found only an air-pocket underneath. She abandoned the spot and scooted out toward the creek's center and repeated the process. She was aware that there was some danger in this, but didn't see another way around it; she had never been so thirsty. The cold that would soon descend upon her could not compete with this thirst. After just three jabs, she heard the hollow gurgle she sought, and could see that the creek was not at all deep. She cleared away enough ice to get a cup into the stream, where it slowly filled. She lifted it to her mouth and drank deep gulps of the sandy water. When she finished, she filled it twice more, and drank those too. She was panting now, sitting on her knees in the snow. It was dead quiet. For a brief moment, alone in the creekbed, she felt a strange order to all that had happened. She recognized, too, the irony of her being in a creekbed at all. If it were questions she'd been asking-or had wanted to ask-she was out of them now. She might even have been prepared to accept some truths-that rivers flowed in one direction only, say, or that a boy's death mattered, always. But as quickly as these things came to her, her mind whirled against them still, a wind itself. The only truth she could come back to was the cold's indifference, which was beginning to seep into her for the first time since waking. Weather did not have rationale or compassion or reason. It was rooted in the randomness of things we understood in incomplete theories-the tilt of the earth's axis and its whimsical, wobbly spin, the flux of its electro-magnetic field, the activity of the sun. This was nothing to take heart in. She knew that the cold could easily pull the life from her. It had happened millions of times over millions of years-to people, to wooly mammoths, to trees. There was nothing unique about such a death. Four times in the last billion years, ice had crawled down the northern hemisphere and swallowed everything, had taken the life from nearly everything in its path. And so how was it, knowing this, that one could mourn a single lost life-the life of a Stevie Lowe? The life of a Samantha Longstreth? Thirteen The snow did not stop Nate or even give him pause. In his near delusional state, he disappeared off the map, emptied himself into some snowy netherworld. Time had long since fallen away. He had no real way of knowing where he was anymore and in truth he didn't care. He drove for some time this way-who could say how long or in what direction exactly? He sped along Kent Road at nearly a hundred miles per hour. Out here, the long valleys-the vestigial fingers of glaciers that had seeped into the hills and then retreated millennia ago-were a mile wide and even in the snow, he could see the road and the stream, dual serpents, inching through the empty landscape, huge banks of gray firmament above. It all invited him in and he entered with abandon, his father all the while slipping back to him somehow, the deferred grief slowly bleeding into him, so that now he could almost imagine his father sitting next to him, directing him. Take this road, not that. His father knew these roads, had taught Nate to drive on roads like these-perhaps this very road. As he drove, he thought for a moment that he might never see Moraine again. He had no death wish, but if he died there on Kent Road, headlong into a small bridge or a confused cow, it wouldn't have been the worst time and place to come to an end. *** At a gas station, he filled his tank. The man at the register was shifty; you could see that he was a little unstable. Nate laid down money for the gas. "A hell of a day," he said to Nate. Nate nodded, assuming the man was talking about the snow, which had piled up to more than a foot here. "Been two deaths so far. I expect there's more to come." "Two deaths?" Nate said. "Toyota half-ton killed an Amish right out front of the store there earlier." The man gestured toward outside, where someone was tooling around on a riding lawnmower, plowing the area around the two pumps. "The truck's driver die, too?" "No. He was fine. The other was this boy up to Moraine County." "Oh," Nate said. That. He could feel something taken out of him, a big something. "You from town?" the man asked. "Town?" "Sheridan Springs," the man said. "No." "Where from, then? You must have livestock or something out this way to be here tonight." "Passing through," Nate said. "Heading south." "No kinda night to be passing through here." Nate nodded, backed away from the counter. "You're heading down Furnace, are you then?" "That way," Nate said, pointing. "Is that Furnace?" "Furnace," the man said. "Welton. That's the direction. That's south. You're in for a night of it." Nate said nothing back. "Yeah," the man said. "I imagine the papers'll be full of death tomorrow or the next day. More than just these two. Two is nothing." Nate took his change and moved toward the door. He had seen his share of death for a day; he wanted no more of this man's prophecy-especially if it was about him. Furnace road traveled almost due south. A clear sky revealed the shape of the place: it was empty and beautiful and, when he got out of the car once to pee alongside of the road, he felt the bitter cold of the place. It was otherworldly that cold. Nate was still very far away from really knowing what he was doing out here tonight when he saw a decrepit sign for Weston. He stopped and looked at it. Weston, 28 Miles, it read. He went to his car and dug around for a small toolbox he kept. He pulled out some wrenches and tried two or three until he found the right one, and he unscrewed the sign from its metal post. He pulled it down and leaned it against the rear quarter panel of his car. A souvenir, he thought. His father had surely once read that very sign. This was a good enough reason. He put it in the back seat and drove on. Southward, always southward, like it was some panacea for the pain inside. He passed only a few houses out there, and not much in the way of towns or outposts. The first sign of life he'd seen in over an hour was a car in the middle of the road with the door open. He stopped to see what was the matter.