From Visions of Garleyville

Welcome to Connecticut

"So what the hell was so important that it couldn't wait until tomorrow?" Pauly asked, sliding into the passenger side of Hank's Dodge Dart, testing the back of the seat for fear it might fall down again, the way I heard it had that time when he, Hank and Rob had picked up that hitch hiker on the way to Nova Scotia -- now, three summers ago.

Hank had that odd gleam in his eyes, the one I never completely trusted, the one that always spelled trouble for us when we worked in the Paterson Theater together. He hadn't even told me his plans, but told me to sit in the back seat and let him do all the talking.

Hank had heard news from someone, but he wouldn't say who, just that Pauly would be surprised.

"I want to go for a ride," Hank said, his voice, too, echoing some devious plot.

"A ride? Now?" Pauly said, glancing over his shoulder at the house, a handful of his younger sisters sitting on the porch, giggling at him the way they always did when we came around, mocking him over his collection of hippie friends.

Life, he told me a few days earlier, was hell now that he had moved back with his family.

"The sooner I get out the less crazy I'll be," he said.

But as usual, Pauly was broke. His job had come to nought, and he had broken up with Jane over the arguments his lack of employment had inspired, she choosing to take off for California to visit her sister as an easy excuse to be rid of him. He was so broke, he even sold his blue Volkswagen, leaving Hank as he sole means of transportation.

"You don't think my old man's going to drive me around, do you?" Pauly told me.

But Pauly liked to pick his own rides, not have them sprung on him, something I warned Hank about, but to little avail.

"You told me over the phone that we were going for coffee," Pauly said, glancing over his shoulder at me as if he expected me to give away the plot, knowing that if anyone knew, I would, since Hank and I were so close. I could only shrug, something that seemed to infuriate Pauly. "What exactly is going on here?" he demanded.

"We are going for coffee," Hank said, and winked at me in the rearview mirror, as if knew what he knew when I didn't.

"Coffee where?" Pauly said, his voice now thick with suspicion.

"It's a surprise," Hank said. "I have a surprise."

Pauly moaned. "I don't like surprises, Hank, especially when they come from you."

"You'll like this surprise, Pauly," Hank said. "I guarantee it."

"Which makes me more concerned. I don't have time for your bullshit, Hank. I don't mind getting coffee with you, but I have things to do, and I don't want to take any of your Magical Mystery tours today. The last one took us to the Canadian border, and would have wound us back up in Nova Scotia if I hadn't made you turn around."

"But you liked that trip," Hank said. "You wouldn't have seen that land if we hadn't gone."

"Land we have yet to find money to buy," Pauly said sourly. "You were supposed to dig up a downpayment from your old man."

"I know, I know," Hank said, his nicotine-stained fingers gripping the steering wheel tighter. "I'm as pissed about that as you are. But we'll find the money some way to buy Garleyville."

"I mean it, Hank," Pauly said, glaring across at the crooked toothed grin. "I've got to see my great aunt tonight. She's in town from England, a rare trip to see all the family members before she dies. I don't want to see her. I don't even like her. But if I expect to be in her will, I have to see her. So no joy, rides. Get my drift?

"Even if I promise we'll be back in time?" Hank asked.

"You're always full of empty promises," Pauly said. "Just drive us for coffee and let it go with that."

"But what about my surprise?"

"Save it."

"I can't," Hank said. "We have to go today or we can't go again for a while."

"Go where?"

"I can't tell you, that's part of the surprise. But I promise to have you back to meet your aunt. In fact, I'll even drive you wherever you need to be when we do get back."

Pauly contemplated this. It was clear from his side ways glance at Hank that Pauly had been calculating such a request all along, but had not known how to broach it.

"You can't screw this one up, Hank," he said. "My aunt's going England next weekend and she's got a host of people she has to see before she goes. This is my one shot at her."

"I'll have you there in time," Hank promised. "But you have to come with me. You have to."

Hank's plea was so acute, it moved me, too, though Pauly seemed a little more resistant.

"You have to be back in time, Hank," he said again, pronouncing each word so slowly that the sentence sounded like a threat.

"I promise."

"All right, do it," Pauly said. "Just as long as we get coffee along the way."

Hank grinned and engaged the gears, backing the car out the gravel drive to the street, beeping his horn at Pauly's giggling sisters on the porch, who wiggled their fingers at us.

Pauly glanced back at me, his puzzled gaze asking again for details I could not give him. I knew how caught up Hank was on search for land. Over the previous three summers he had dragged us north on numerous occasions, passionately pursuing that plot of land that would serve our needs. Even Pauly approved of the search, though the name "Garleyville," was Hank's. But Pauly avoided the word "Commune," and refused to allow Hank to use it.

"If we find land," he told us, "There would have to be enough space for each of us to have a corner of our own. I won't have none of that shared shit. We all know where that kind of stuff ends up."

But it was always Hank who came up with the various locations, seeing some advertisement in the Village Voice or the New York Times which we "just had to" pursue," and he would pull up in his Dart, demanding we climb in before someone else gets it. It was as if he feared that he we didn't get the land soon, we never would.

That trip north to Nova Scotia in 1971 had opened his eyes, he and Rob and Pauly driving through miles and miles of nothing but trees. He had never seen so many trees before, and couldn't believe people hadn't paved over everything yet, believing that as the years went on and the car-mad people of the cities looked to find new homes, these places would vanish under newly built highways, and he, Hank Sterns, vowed to set up a place bulldozers wouldn't ruin, and highways wouldn't criss-cross. Even on that trip, Hank began to take less traveled routes, even over the protests of the other two who claimed they only had two weeks vacation to make it to Nova Scotia and back, and they didn't see taking a route that took them through China.

Hank drove on roads Pauly complained were just "not on the maps," until one of those roads led them to the top of a mountain, where the sky itself parted before them, showing them the tips of the trees and now they stretched all the way (apparently) to the ends of the earth, each of those three staring at it, shocked by the lack of a city, as if these three had become the sole proprietors of the earth, responsible for it, told by some invisible spirit there to guard and keep it from harm. Hank, in some fit of madness, took the keys from the ignition and threw them as far as his weak arm could, fortunately sending them into a field instead of the intended skyline of trees, and then, he dragged out a small gong he had bought in a souvenir and began to bang it.

Pauly denied most of the awe later, claiming he was over weary and wouldn't have felt nearly so light headed if the air hadn't been so thin.

And yet, he described it to me once when he was being less cynical.

"I was cursing him to no end," Pauly told me later. "I was telling him I would throw him off the mountain if we didn't find the keys, and him, just banging away as if he hadn't heard a word I said, as if he heard and it mattered so little, I could have been pissing against a tree for all he cared. And then, just like that, I looked over the end, and saw all the fields and trees and valleys, with the ocean beyond them all, and I was struck by this idea that maybe we shouldn't be hanging around in New Jersey anymore, that maybe we all needed to get away before New Jersey turned into a parking lot for New York and we all choked to death on the fumes. Why couldn't we get us some land somewhere, put up a few places to live, work the land, and maybe do the stuff we do, Hank doing whatever it is he does with himself, me, doing my art and maybe music, you doing your poetry, living like people, seeing each other when we wanted, talking to each other when we got bored? Why couldn't we find a place?"

This was the reason Pauly put up with Hank's searching, willing to sit through hours of driving with the hope of escaping his family's mildewed basement and the encroaching life style of closed condo communities at the moment edging in on formerly wooded land in our old stomping ground, the woods in West Paterson gone now to hundreds of ugly luxury housing units, the hill behind West's Diner lost to some glittering glass obscenity people said contained a waterfall.

I wanted land, too. Of the three of us, I had traveled furthest and seen the most, watching the world vanish under tons of asphalt and concrete, cities edging out over the landscape like unmeltable glaziers. I also lived in a rooming house where twenty people shared two showers, with lines for each forming morning and night like a premonition of what the world would look like it we waited and let it catch up with us, and I had taken each of the trips in search of land, hoping to be considered for a piece of the prize once Hank and Pauly found what they were looking for.

But this trip seemed different than those, with Hank's gaze glinting in a different, more devious way I could not explain. He just looked at me in the rear view mirror and winked, pulling the car onto the road that took us north.

Although tall pines still towered along both sides of this road, signs of its development showed everywhere, real estate signs, sold signs, signs for futures services such as drive cleaning and restaurants, signs claiming various particular parcels as "the future home of.." some outrageously silly name like Woody Estates or Hillcrest Grove, where over time the bulldozers would wipe out all sign of wood and tear down the hill to build flat-roofed condominiums for people with fancy cars and the self-centered belief they were important.

I kept thinking how much had changed over the previous few years, how we has hippies (a term Pauly denies) had tried so hard to imitate native American Indians, living with the land, pup tents and camp fires, and a sense of peace, now vanishing with the trees, building instead the European sense of community in which each man had his castle. As we drove, and the trees swayed around us, the highway cutting a swath through their trunks following some former Indian trail that had turned to road after George Washington's retreat, historic signs claiming he slept in this house and that house nearly as numerous as the real estate signs.

At one point, the road dipped and the flow of a narrow river ran to our left, dividing the high way from the houses beyond, every side road first crossing a small bridge, the trees and undergrowth thick along the watery shores. No buildings showed on either side of the highway for a time, except some grand institutions as the Oakland Diner where Hank and Pauly spent hours over coffee discussing the nearing end of the world. Passing this now, stirred Pauly back to life, he turned and stared at Hank again.

"I though you said we were going for coffee?" he said.

"We are," Hank said, but stared straight, both hands tight around the steering wheel.

"Shouldn't we have turned back there?"

"No," Hank said, in a very soft voice.

"All right!" Pauly said. "That's it! Turn the car around. I'm not going to roam around in the woods with you today, Hank, searching for your visions of Garleyville. I already told you, I have to be somewhere tonight."

"We're not going to look at land," Hank said.

Pauly's brows rose. I'm sure mine did, too.

"But this is the way you always take," Pauly said.

"I know," Hank admitted. "But it's not land we're after this time."

"Then what is it?"

"I can't tell you until we get there, it's a surprise."

"I don't like surprises, Hank," Pauly snarled. "Especially when they make me late for dinner."

"This one you'll like," Hank said.

"Yeah, like I'm going to trust you," Pauly said. "We're going back."

"We can't," Hank whined. "I promised I'd bring you."

This time Pauly's brows stayed up as he stared more intently at Hank. "Promised who?"

"It's a surprise."

"Don't give me that crap, Hank!" Pauly snapped. "If you don't come out with it now, I'll murder you and drive us back trailing your dead body behind the car."

Hank glanced over, his gaze searching Pauly's face in a test of resolve, and, finally, seeing that Pauly meant to return, Hank sighed.

"We're going to see Christine," Hank said.

"Christine?" Pauly said. "You mean Christine in Connecticut?"

Hank grinned. "I knew you'd be surprised!"

"Surprised? I'm speechless!" Pauly shouted. "Are you fucking crazy? Her father'll shoot me if I show up there?"

"But she said you should come, that it was safe for you to come now."

"Christine called you to tell you this?"

"Yes."

"Then why didn't she call me?"

"I don't know."

"I do," Pauly said. "She was lying. She just got it in her head that she wanted to see me and knew that if she called me to tell me to come, I wouldn't go and I wouldn't believe it was safe to. But you, you're an idiot enough to fall for any lie any girl tells, and the bigger the lie the more you fall for it. Turn the car around. We're going back."

"I don't want to turn the car around," Hank said.

"Don't give me a hard time, Hank," Pauly said. "I don't want to have to get physical."

"I'm not turning the car around, Pauly," Hank said. "She made me promise I would bring you north to see her and that's what I'm going to do."

"You would kidnap me just because of a promise."

"It wouldn't be kidnapping," Hank said. "You know you want to see her as much as I do."

"Maybe I do want to see her," Pauly admitted with a grumble. "But that doesn't mean I want to die young doing it. Her father promised to shoot me on sight if I showed up anywhere he was."

"He didn't mean it," Hank said.

"He certainly did."

"Then, he's cooled down over the years."

"Not him. Not where his daughter is concerned," Pauly said, his hands shaking as he lit a cigarette.

"But Christine says it's safe to come, that her parents went away for the weekend."

"She always said stuff like that," Pauly said. "Every time she got the hots for me, she would call me up and tell me to come over, and every time I asked her if her parents were gone, she said yes. They never were, or they weren't gone as long as she said they would be gone, and there we would be in the middle of some hot embrace and Dad walked in. One look and he was running for his gun cabinet."

I had heard the stories, too, how the parents in the town became more and more concerned about Pauly's presence, his influence of their children. The police prowled the park trying to break up the crowds who had gathered to hear him speak, warning kids that if they didn't disperse they would all go off to jail, and how nobody listened, and how the police complained to the mayor and the mayor called each and every family member to raise his concern about a possible riots, none of these foolish white people understanding anything about their kids, how no one intended to create any trouble for anyone, only wanting to be left alone. But with riots going on in Newark and Paterson, and protests on every campus, all those over-thirty scared people could think of was trouble, and how much like trouble Pauly seemed, so popular, so arrogant, so carefree.

And Christine one of those sweet little girls who could not keep her affections silent, moaning and groaning over Pauly day and night, and at 16, too vulnerable for her father to ignore, he pleading with the police to arrest Pauly and put him in jail before something ugly happened, and when no one could bust Pauly on anything more than his sitting in Calico Kitchen for a few too many hours, that man took things into his own hands and moved his family where he believed Pauly could not get at them, at his daughter.

"It could be different this time," Hank said.

"It's not. It has all the signs."

"But it might me."

"Just turn the car around, Hank. Or let me out where I can get a bus back."

"No."

"You'll have to stop sometime," Pauly said. "Even if it's just for a traffic light, and then I'll get out any way. Then, you'll have to explain to Christine why I didn't come."

"I won't stop," Hank said, his gaze taking on that all-too-familiar glow I'd seen during my own conflicts with him, a glow saying he had made up his mind to do this and could carry it on until someone forced him to stop or he finished.

Pauly, apparently catching a sense of Hank's renewed determination, changed tact, easing closer to Hank on the seat, his thin fingers touching Hank's shoulder in a gesture of friendship.

"Look, Hank, let's be reasonable about this," Pauly said. "Connecticut is two hours away, and I already told you I have to have dinner with a dying aunt."

"You said she was old, you didn't say she was dying."

"She's 87 years old. Anybody that old is dying."

"So?"

"So you promised you'd get me back in time to meet her. How can we do that and still go to Connecticut."

"I can get you back in time," Hank said.

"But its two hours there and two hours back, and that's not counting the time we spend visiting with her once we get there," Pauly said, his voice growing thin and shrill.

"So?"

"So we'll never make it back in time, even if you don't get lost -- and you always do, and even if you go faster than the speed limit, which you never do."

"We'll be back in time."

"From Connecticut? I don't think so!" Pauly said, losing whatever composure he had had. "You didn't make it back from Nova Scotia on time, and we had two weeks then."

"That wasn't my fault."

"It never is."

"I got lost."

"Like I said."

"Ask Kenny, he'll tell you. Can't we be back in time, Kenny?" Hank asked, his gaze searching out mine in the rear view mirror.

I did some mental calculations. "We could," I said.

"See!" Hank said. "Didn't I tell you."

"He said we could, not that we would," Pauly said.

"We'll make it," Hank promised, then gripped the wheel more tightly as his mouth fell into a straight, determined line, he squinted at the road through his thick lens's glasses as if staring at the distant horizon would make it come that much faster.

Pauly started to say something, but stopped, he clearly having seen this expression before, from other trips north, from the trip to Nova Scotia in particular, when Hank had made up his mind to go to a dance club, while Pauly and Rob had said "absolutely not," Hank wearing this very expression as he drove off, leaving Pauly and Rob at a cheap, rundown motel in God knew where without more than enough cash for the room and a soda, and without any entertainment, not even commercial TV, Hank taking the female motel clerk with him.

Pauly sank a little lower in the seat and began to fume. He mumbled something I couldn't catch and apparently neither did Hank. But both of us knew he would be miserable for the whole trip, there and back.

Hank, not to be outdone, turned his head, squinting suspiciously at Pauly.

"I don't know why you're so caught up on having dinner with your aunt," Hank said.

"I already told you," Pauly said, gruffly. "She'll be going back to England to die."

"But you were never much of a family man," Hank said. "I seem to recall the time you didn't go to your uncle's wake, said you have to study the stars or something."

"I had a headache," Pauly said coolly.

"But you didn't go. What exactly makes this aunt more important than that uncle."

Pauly mumbled something.

"I didn't hear you," Hank said.

"I said I'm in her fucking will!" Pauly yelled. "Now are you happy?"

The silence that followed swallowed the echoes of Pauly's screeching voice, and the rumble of the tires on the highway erased even that, leaving no space for Pauly to insist on turning around, as if his pressing the point at that moment would make us think less of him, would make him seem more mercenary than normal, one of the many grave robbers we all knew from family funerals.

Perhaps to fill up the emptiness, Pauly flicked on the radio and spun the tuner until he came upon a Beatles tune, and spun it again when the Beatles ended until he found the Rolling Stones, after which, he spun again and again, coming up with Motown hits and other hits we had all listened to religiously when younger. And Pauly, who had sung many of these same songs with his band, Eric Lemon, began to sing again, and we, less talented perhaps, but more enthused, began to fill in with harmonies, me beating out rhythm on the back of his seat, as he beat on rhythm on the dash board, and Hank beat out rhythm on the steering wheel, and we, and the car, rock and rolled our way up Route 202 in New Jersey following signs that led us inevitably towards the New York Thruway.

We had come this way on each of our previous trips north in search of land; Hank, Pauly and Rob had come this way during their trip to Nova Scotia, a yellow brick road that was not made of brick or colored yellow, but has its own amazing appeal, Route 202 leaving us off at that point in the state where the malls ended and lower Catskill mountain spread her foothills before us like a lover waiting to embrace us, her invitation so impossible to refuse we plunged into her without thought, without talk of turning around, without worry over whose great aunt might die before we got back.

My uncle, Harry, lived in these hills, a hermit turned hillbilly, who hated the hippies with whom he had to share the landscape, cursing their communes as if directed here by a Soviet plot. I also knew many of the hippies who had fled The Lower East Side in Manhattan to avoid the flood of heroin then surging through the streets. Signs of hippie life showed everywhere, with small posters stapled to poles and trees advertising crafts fairs and gift shops, some so primitive they revealed just how desperate the hippies had become, selling out to every tourist driving north.

When we finally reached the New York boarder where Route 202 met Route 17, and both met the New York Thruway, hundreds of cars appeared on every side of us, vans full of kids and camping gear, station wagons full of kids and beach chairs, pickup trucks traveling with rifles for some great hunting season to the far north, volts wagons, dodges, even datzuns from Japan, rolling in one large wave of heated metal towards the same space, following signs that announced distant destinations as if an airport: Albany, Buffalo, Boston.

"Keep your eye out for land," Hank told me as he drove. "You might see a for sale sign somewhere."

Paul stirred uncomfortably in his seat, the signs clearly bringing us to the point of no return. He started to say something, then stopped after glancing at Hank's determined face. He sighed, sagged in the seat again, and leaned his head against the window.

As the mountains passed, I studied the back of the heads of my two companions, each nodding to the beat of the music on the radio. I kept wondering where we would be in twenty or thirty years, or whether or not we would still be friends when we were sixty four. Hank had visions of us sitting on a porch somewhere, trading rock albums for rocking chairs, each grumbling over a long history of slights for which we didn't think we had yet extracted our revenge. But I could not imagine either of them with grey hair and wrinkles, and hoped we would never grow so old as to look the way my Uncles already did at 40.

I also felt at a loss around these two men, each having already established some dream they wanted to pursue. Pauly had gone to art school, and though he dropped out -- much in the way John Lennon had a decade earlier -- he still actively painted and drew, giving away his art work as gifts for birthdays and other holidays, always telling people the pen and ink items would be valuable some day.

Hank -- despite our poor showing as a trio -- was a fine singer, someone with such a strong voice once that teachers in his high school predicted he would emerge as the next Sinatra. He had done a gig at the Club Bizarre in 1969, following in the footsteps of Beat poets and writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and lately sang in various bars in New Jersey accompanying a rag time band.

But me, I floated in the limbo of not knowing what to do with my life, having no more idea about such things as a career than I did in 8th grade in St. Brendan’s when I rejected priesthood as an option. Even singing now along the highway as we passed the oil-stained parking lot of the large truck stop I sang only half-heartedly, my voice weak compared to theirs, though like them, I had succored on the same songs, Beatles and Rolling Stoned until near blind.

The sign passed welcoming us to New York. Hank honked the horn to the beat of the music, and a few freaks in a dented green Voltwagon waved at us and beeped back, apparently listening to the same radio station and thus to the same song. Then, we were officially on the New York Thruway, the road beneath smoothed out, wheels ceasing their irritating rumble New Jersey always created with its potholes. Pauly, too, seemed to relax a little, his shoulders taking on less of a hitch as he leaned back for the long ride. The mountain tops rose around us, huge walls of green covered stone, and we, weaving along chosen the pre-chosen route as if a boat on a large, winding river, with tributaries -- the other less highways -- weaving away from us on either side.

Then, Hank turned off, steering the car down towards old Route 17, a two-lane much narrower road much closer to the valley's bottom.

"What the hell are you doing?" Pauly asked, sitting up in the seat again as the shadow of the Thruway Bridge passed over us as we slid deeper into the green.

"Going to Connecticut," Hank said, tenor of his voice not quite able to sound innocent.

"You mean by the way of China," Pauly snapped. "This is the slow way north and you know it."

"It's the scenic route," Hank said.

"Scenic or not I'll add hours to the trip," Pauly said. "I told you, I want to be back in New Jersey in time to see my Great Aunt."

"But I want to see the trees," Hank whined, drawing a pained look from Pauly who seemed to have heard this particular phrase before.

"You saw the trees when we went to Nova Scotia," Pauly growled, "And you nearly dumped us in on them when we came off the mountain."

"I didn't mean that," Hank said.

"You never do," Pauly said. "But you always managed to make a mess of things. Turn around. We're taking the Thruway."

"I want to see the trees," Hank said, more firmly this time.

"But there isn't time," Pauly said. "You have to make up your mind, do you want to see the trees or Christine. We can't have both."

"I want both."

"Damn it, Hank! Be reasonable. I don't want to drive all the way there and back on these goddamn narrow roads, stopping for every goddamn light, afraid to go one mile over the speed limit because the local sheriff might nab us."

"We can take the Thruway back," Hank offered.

"Isn't that generous," Pauly said, glaring at Hank, and then over his shoulder at me. "I'm going to miss out on seeing my Great Aunt and getting named in her will, but we'll take the Thruway back. We'll get goddamn lost like we did last time, and you know it."

"That was Rob, not me. Rob was supposed to read the map. Kenny can read the map this time," Hank suggested.

Pauly glared at me. "You can read a map?"

"I used to read them all the time in the boy scouts," I said.

"They threw you out of the boy scouts," Pauly said.

"That was for drinking, not for messing up on map reading."

"All right," Pauly said, yanking open the glove compartment door, then after routing through it for a while, came out with the map. He tossed it at me. "Keep him on the roads to Connecticut. I don't want to wind up in Nebraska if I nod off."

Hank grinned at me in the rearview mirror, I glared at him, then unfolded the map, laying it across my lap as we traveled north. Around us, the trees rose like a majestic hall, stones rippling down the hills on either side, with an occasional waterfall. To our right, the river ran, white tipped and violent, rushing from the hills to some unknown destination in the south, where the boring landscape of New Jersey tamed it, where the grim canyons of factories spewed out poison in which to pollute it, turning its color from blue to green to brown then black.

We drove, and I watched the names of the towns pass, signs welcoming us, signs telling goodbye and to come back soon, signs hinting of places to either side which we would never see, and more than once I was tempted to tell Hank to turn towards one when he asked if we were traveling the right way, just so I could see what was there, knowing that although we saw trees on the route we took, we could see many more if we took a route through one of those places, where farm houses and barns cropped up on either side, and the vast expanse of the lower Catskills grew before us in a way we wouldn't catch staying on the main roads. If land was to be had, it would be in such a place.

And I had visions of Garleyville in my head, how it should look, how it should feel, how I would feel being there, and I knew just around one corner from where were at any given moment, I would feel as if I had come home.

If Hank or Pauly noticed any of this, they showed no sign, doing their best to keep to their harmonies as the radio gave us tune after familiar tune, Rolling Stone and Beatling us until we were nearly blind. And somewhere in the middle of all that, morning changed to afternoon, and the tunes smoothed out into vague background music. The landscape began its seductions, drawing me in with its sweetness, as if a voice were whispering in my hear telling me it was alright to rest, that I had come North less to seek Christine or land, than to seek some kind of peace, and that if I only closed my eyes all would be well again.

Was there something wrong that needed to be cured? All seemed nearly perfect to me, I was young, free, and without debt. I thought I needed nothing, and then, slowly, still attempting to compare the landscape's reality to the reality of the map, I closed my eyes.

A bump in the road jerked me awake.

I thought only a few minutes had passed, but the angle of light said otherwise, showing that early afternoon had slipped precariously into late afternoon.

Pauly, who had also apparently fallen asleep, woke with the same bump and came to the same realization of passing time, staring around at the sides of the road, squinting a little to make out our location among the trees -- which looked thicker, and less like those we had seen before, looking indeed like those I had wished to have seen, as if Hank had turned off from Route 17 onto one of those other, more exciting, yet even slower routes through farm lands and woods.

"Where the hell are we?" Pauly asked.

"I'm not sure," Hank said, still staring straight ahead, though crinkles around his eyes showed a bit of tension.

"What the fuck do you mean you don't know?" Pauly exploded. "You drove us here. Weren't you paying attention to what you were doing?"

"I was paying attention to you two snoring, and struggling to keep myself awake. And since both of you were asleep, I couldn't very well ask either of you to look at the map to see that I was making the right turn."

Pauly glared over his shoulder at me. "You fell asleep?"

I nodded.

Pauly turned back to Hank, letting out a long sigh, one which clearly said he'd been through all this before.

"So did you take the right turn, Hank?"

"I don't know," Hank said. "I haven't seen any highway signs in a long time, at least none with any names I recognize."

Pauly looked to me again. "Well? Tell him where he is," he said.

I glanced down at the map whose folds had worn thin from previous adventures north, wiping out whole cities at the creases. It was dark enough now for me to need the overhead light to see the details, and Hank flipped it on as we drove. I looked at the map and then up at the road, catching the names on the tops of several stores, odd grey buildings that were out of the 1920s, not the 1970s, with names like Glen's Crossing instead of Woodstock or Kingston.

"Do you know what highway we're on?" I asked Hank.

"The last sign I saw said Route 44."

I studied the map for a moment, but shook my head, causing an infuriated grunt from Pauly, who snatched the map out of my hand.

"Let me look at that," he said.

Pauly glanced at the map, then at the road, and after a moment, frowned when dual fours showed on a weathered sign along the side.

"Route 44?" he said, then studied the map again, searching it diligently, but for a long time without success, until finally, he glanced up sharply. "That's fifty fucking miles in the wrong direction?"

Hank let out a long, relieved sigh. "Fifty miles? Is that all?," he said. "I thought it felt more like a hundred."

"I'm not joking," Pauly growled.

"Neither I am," Hank said. "It's all confusing out here."

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided you wanted to see some trees," Pauly said. "How much gas do we have?"

Hank glanced down at the dash board. "We could use some."

"Which means what?"

"Which means we should stop at the next gas station we see," Hank said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror as if he needed my help.

"How much, Hank?" Pauly asked.

"Hey, don't worry," Hank said. "There's always a little extra at the bottom of the tank."

"The meter," Pauly growled. "What does the meter say?"

"Well, if you must know," Hank said, sounding offended. "It's on E."

"My God!" Paul moaned, glancing out at the landscape, at the hills of which showed the slanting sun in a magnificent show of dying light. This was the kind of place we had dreamed of moving to, with visions of Garleyville, a land large enough and wild enough where we could feel as if we had our own little nation, separate from the rest of the world, and one large enough where we could co-inhabit without getting into each others hair. But it was a stark land of trees and rocks and tumbling brooks, not a place in which we were likely to find a gas station around the next curve.

"Stop the car!" Pauly howled.

"What for?"

"Just stop, then we'll talk."

Hank pulled the car over to the shoulder, the tires popping on the gravel as it slowed. Finally, when the car halted, Pauly consulted the map again, squinting out at the mileage marker a few yards ahead of us.

"There's town not far away," he said. "But we have to turn off this road."

"Pauly," I said, "I don't think that's a good idea."

"What do you know?" Pauly barked. "If you hadn't fallen asleep, none of this would have happened."

"I know something about this part of the state," I said. "Locals don't particularly like hippies, after Woodstock had them wandering across their farms."

"Look, for one thing, we're not hippies and for another, we're looking for directions, not a place to party."

"I don't think people around here will know the difference."

"Let's not argue about it. We need gas and we need it fast, and if the map shows a town within an easy ride of here, we've got no choice."

"But if we run out of gas along the way, the state trooper is less likely to find us," Hank said.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Pauly barked. "This is a side road, and if a state trooper comes along this road, it's once a month. And I'll be damned if I'm going to sit still for a month waiting for that to happen."

"But...." Hank protested.

"Drive the car, Hank," Pauly snapped. "Let me do the thinking."

"But..."

"Just do what I said."

Hank glanced at me in the rear view mirror at me. I shrugged and he engaged the gears again, following Pauly's instructions.

A lone light showed ahead of us on the road, glowing slightly blue and clearly out of place here among the trees and the corn stalks, and the cropping of rocks that signified a one-time turbulent world of glaziers and prehistoric events, each stone a dinosaur glaring out at us from the dark, each tree hiding some primitive man ready to leap upon the car and beat the hood in with a club.

"There!" Pauly said. "Turn there."

The light illuminated the intersection, although it was the crossing of two insignificant lines, each road seeming to go nowhere. A dilapidated building of grey wood, a shabby roof, sat on one corner, sagging, weeds up around its brick foundation.

Hank made the turn onto an even narrower road, now made dark by a canopy of trees overhanging it. We seemed to roll through a tunnel, and I have expected to come out the other side and find myself in Manhattan, skyscrapers rising along either side. But the tunnel did not end, and we saw no buildings of any sort after we left the wreck on the corner where we turned.

"We really need to find a phone," Pauly mumbled. "Or a house even. Anyone we can beg to call for road service."

But did road service even exist out here, I wondered? Wasn't that the original point of seeking land in this part of the country, to find a place where civilization stopped and real life could begin, where young, urban professionals could not live because the place was too far for them to commute, and too rural to support their excessive life styles?

"It looks bad, Pauly," Hank said. "Maybe we should turn back."

"Back to what?" Pauly demanded. "The map shows nothing for miles the other way."

"But I don't see anything this way either."

"The map says there's a village nearby."

"The map could be wrong," I said. "Many of the maps were made back when Northern New Jersey and Southern New York had iron mines. Some of the towns they showed long ago ceased to exist."

"Don't tell me that!" Pauly yelped. "I don't need to hear that!"

Then, just when the trees seemed like they would go on forever, they came to an end, and the land fell, and to either side, farms showed, and down at the bottom of the small valley, buildings appeared, as grey and hazy as the building we had passed at the turn off, yet with one building, at least, showing signs of life, as a plume of thin smoke rose from its chimney.

"Thank God!" Pauly moaned, as the car rolled down towards the village.

But Village was the wrong word. If it had any stores, we didn't see them. If it had a town hall or a church, those escaped our notice as well. In the end, we pulled up in front of the building out of which the smoke rose, a tiny house sitting beside a huge grey barn, whose walls were as fragile as the sagging house we had seen earlier, though we could hear the moans of the cows from inside it, and the clank of metal, and the sigh of air passing through its upper floor.

Hank turned off the engine, and the clicks of the cooling metal joined the sounds of the farm.

"Well?" Hank asked. "What now?"

Pauly stared out at the village, and the smoke rising from the building in front of which we had stopped.

"It's that mountain thing all over again," I thought, remembering the look on Pauly's face when he described that moment during the trip to Nova Scotia when Hank threw the car keys out into the field, and the three of them step out into the silence -- not even a jet flying over head, as if by coming to the top of the mountain then or into a valley now we had stepped through time into a place we weren't supposed to be in, so eerie that my arms suddenly grew think with goose pimples.

"What we do is we get out and we knock on the door, asking for information about a gas station," Pauly said. "Does that sound too difficult to you?"

"What if they don't have a gas station in town?" Hank asked.

"They got to have a gas station. How else would anybody drive?"

"It might not be open," I suggested, drawing Pauly's wrathful stare at me.

"Then, we make them open it," he snapped. "Now which one of you two clowns is going to go and find out?"

Hank looked at me in the rear view mirror, and I looked at him. Neither one of us made a move to open the door.

"Why don't you go?" Hank asked Pauly.

"Because I didn't get us into this mess," Pauly said. "You two did."

"Me?" I howled. "I wasn't driving."

"No, you were sleeping when you should have been looking at the map," Pauly said. "So get out and find us some gas before I get peeved and have to throw you out bodily."

Paul's tone left no room for argument so I shoved open the door and climbed out, twilight air swirling around me as I stepped onto the gravel.

The air smell of pine and turf and dung, though no pine trees or cows stood near to the building ... not that the single dim light above the building's door illuminated more than a few feet either way.

Pauly reached over and tooted on the horn, partly to hurry me, partly no doubt to call the attention of someone inside. I headed towards the light, and the door, but saw no bell, so I knocked. The wood so loose the door rattled, and this rattling echoed inside. No one, however, seemed to hear horn or my knock. I turned back to the car and shrugged. Pauly rolled down the window.

"Knock again," he said.

So I did, and still no one answered.

I went back to the car and leaned against the fender, fishing a cigarette from my shirt pocket.

"So what do we do now?" I asked.

Pauly stared straight out through the windshield, and then frowned. "Look at that glow," he said.

"What glow?"

"There," he said and pointed.

I squinted, and so -- I noticed when I looked at Pauly again -- did Hank.

"What do you think it is?" I asked.

"Only one thing that makes a glow like that," he said. "Get in the car."

"But what about gas?"

"If I'm right, we'll have all the gasoline we want," Pauly said.

I got in. Hank started the car again, and pulled it back onto the road, driving down the road, the glow growing brighter as we climbed a slight hill, and then, came through yet another stand of trees to find ourselves looking down on a -- shopping mall.

*********************

"We're going home, Hank, and that's final," Pauly announced, once the gas station attendant had capped off the tank and taken Hank's money.

"But what about Christine? I promised you would come."

"What about my Great Aunt?" Pauly barked back. "I was supposed to have dinner with her, an hour ago."

"Then it doesn't matter if you go back, does it?"

"We're going back to New Jersey, Hank," Pauly said again, more firmly, folding his arms across his chest the way he always did when he meant an argument was over.

Hank shrugged, put the car into gear, then drove it out onto the road, turning -- as only I seemed to notice -- in the exact opposite direction Pauly intended, Hank glancing at me in the rear view mirror, pleading with me to keep silent.

I sighed, gripped the now utterly wrinkled map and stared off to the side as the shopping mall faded and we slipped back into the country, following signs that said: "Connecticut."

Some time later, Pauly stirred. He might have noticed a sign or a decrease in the number of buildings, farms now giving way to mostly woods. He frowned, glanced at Hank, then turned around to look at me.

"Where are we?" he asked. "And when do we get back to New Jersey."

"We're somewhere near the Connecticut border from what I've been able to read from the map," I said.

"Connecticut?" Pauly said, eyebrows arching up over the frames of his wire rimmed glasses. "Did you say we're still headed for Connecticut?"

"It would seem that way," I said.

"HANK! YOU BASTARD!" Pauly roared. "Turn this fucking car around right now."

"I don't want to."

"Nobody asked you what you want," Pauly said. "I'm telling you to turn around."

Hank shook his head. "I promised Christine, I would bring you and that's what I'm going to do."

Pauly glared at me, as if blaming me for Hank intransigence. "Talk to him," Pauly said.

"And tell him what?" I asked. "He's in a mood. Nobody can talk him out of a mood once he's in it."

"I promised Christine, I would bring him," Hank said.

"Why, Goddamn it!" Pauly said. "What is so important that she has to see me now."

"It was in the letter," Hank said.

"So tell me already," Pauly demanded.

"I can't."

Pauly snorted and sat back so hard on his seat I thought he would break it the way on the trip north to Nova Scotia, folding his arms across his chest, his face taunt with rage, but his eyes shifting from side to side as if trying to figure out a plan of escape.

Then, suddenly, the trees parted and the car rolled up onto a bridge, high arched cables on either side, while between, the wide Hudson River flowed, banks thick with trees with the dark water glittering with the lights from small docks and luxury boats moving along up and down beneath us. The world seemed totally different, the way it did sometimes when on a cloudy day the sky parted and the sun burst through, beams highlighting some special place just ahead of us, only now, the twinkle of the lights and the rumble of the wheels over the bridge seemed to signal something else, a change of some sort that none of us could explain then or later, as if we were traveling out of time, from one part of our lives to another, without the ability to ever return to what we had been before.

We had become witness to a place that had inspired soldiers and painters and polities, and rolled over water native Americans had once claimed as holy, the darkness hiding the full power of that mountains on either side, though we could feel their enormity despite the darkness, pressing down on us with their importance, giving us and our mission some sense of importance only Hank had previously understood. And oddly enough, when we reached the other side, Pauly sighed.

"Okay," he mumbled, coughing slightly as if unable to clear something from his throat. "We're going to Connecticut. At least, let me make a phone call home so I can explain things to my great aunt."

Hank only nodded, he clearly so moved by the bridge and its sights, he could not speak.

*******************************

According to the return address on the envelop (which was all Hank would give us of Christine's letter), she lived in a place called "Little Town," which proved to be just over the river and just off the highway we were on.

It looked just like the town where we had first tried to stop for gas with the same grouping of grey-wooded buildings and the same smell of turf and dung, with stands of pines now dark and stark against glow of some distant city, Albany or Kingston, our headlights highlighting the thick layers of moss on their trunks as we passed.

"There's a gas station," Pauly said. "You'd better pull in."

"But we got gas," Hank complained, as he glanced down at the meter which showed three quarters of a tank still remaining.

"I know we got gas," Pauly snarled. "We're not looking for gas now, we're looking for directions. I know little towns like these. They don't have street signs and some of the roads are high up in the hills where no one would think to look for them unless they knew where they were to start with."

So Hank pulled in, but not to the pumps. A rather sleepy looking character peered over at us from near the door, he sitting back on a wooden chair which leaned against the building, all but his glittering eyes hidden by the brim of his hillbilly style hat.

He made no move to come to us, so Pauly told me to get out and talk to him.

"Why me?" I said. "I got out the last time."

"Then you have practice," Pauly said and shoved the envelop into my hands. "Just find out where it is, and don't stop to gossip."

Gossip, however, was the last thing on my mind. I was more worried about getting shot, especially with the continuing and steady stare the man gave me as I walked across the gravel from the car.

"Howdy," he said, but in a voice that sounded more like a warning.

"I'm looking for a street," I said, naming the street while holding out the envelop so that he could see it.

He did not even glance at the envelop, chewing something -- that from the brown stain at the corner of his mouth looked to be tobacco. He chewed, then spat to one side, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and shrugged.

"You're not far from it," he said. "There was a fire up in that neck of the woods a while back, wiped out a whole lot of trees. Now some rich folks are up there, built some fancy houses. Is that the folks you've come to see?"

"I guess so," I said, never thinking of Christine or any of Pauly's friends as rich, though in the back of my mind I must have questioned Christine's father's ability to pick up and move as easily as he had just in an effort to escape Pauly.

Then, the man gave me a string of turns to take, half of which I got, the rest of which I thought I had, but wanted to get away from his stare so much that I pretended I had it all and thanked him repeatedly as I retreated to the car.

"Well?" Pauly asked when I was safely in the back seat.

"We take the next left," I told him, feeling much better when Hank pulled the car back onto the road.

We took the next left and then got immediately lost in the winding hills above the highway, the glow of the lights visible all the time over the tops of eloquent houses that had taken the place of trees on the mountainside, their lawns disguised by darkness except for where the walkway lamps spilled their radiance onto the green. All three of us stared as we passed the long driveways and the eloquent houses as if none could believe that Christine -- our Christine -- could ever live in a place such as these, despite her father's wealth, allowing develops to rape what might otherwise have been a perfect landscape.

"So what do we do now, bright boy?" Pauly asked Hank when it became clear that we could not figure out what street we were on let alone the particular house Christine occupied.

"We could go back to the gas station and call her," Hank suggested.

"Sure, and get her father on the phone, giving him time to find his shotgun."

"I told you her parents are gone for the weekend."

"Hey!" I yelped. "I saw a street sign."

Hank slammed on the breaks, then threw the gear into reverse, burning rubber to make it back to the place where one street connected the one we were on.

"Is it the street we want?" Hank asked, as I peered out at the sign, trying to compare it to the name encrypted in Christine's eloquent handwriting.

"Yes," I said, sighing with relief, vaguely fearing that we would wander here forever, running out of gas in this greater wasteland of wealth, BMWs and Mercedes passing us as we starved.

So Hank turned the car onto that street, and we moved down it much more slowly, staring out at the illuminated posts for the numbers on the houses, counting down each rich residence until we came to the one we wanted, at which point we stopped.

The house differed from the others not in size or wealth, but in ambience, a heavy mood hanging over it with the limbs of the huge pines with only a door or window peering out, spying the road suspiciously for some long-expected invasion. Even with the lights on, the grey mansion seemed dark and distant, without the welcoming glow of path lights many of the other houses enjoyed. I knew we would find no welcome mat on the doorstep when we made our way to the door.

"I don't like the look of that path," Pauly said. "Too many places her father could ambush us. We might as well just drive the car right up to the house, and let him shoot at us there."

"I'm telling you, the parents aren't home," Hank said.

"I know, which makes me even more suspicious."

"Are you saying I would lie to you?"

"Of course, you'd lie to me. But in this matter, it’s Christine who I think is lying."

"Well we can't just sit here like this in this neighborhood," I said. "Someone is bound to call the police."

Hank sat up and stared at me in the rear view mirror. "I don't want trouble," he said. "I'm pulling in."

*********

Pauly rang the bell.

We had no more business standing before that huge door than we did walking into Tiffanies in New York, we in jeans and t-shirts and slightly ragged jackets, more muggers than guests to anyone who studied us from a distance.

And though Hank had dragged us here, he looked least comfortable, shifting from one foot to the other like a child wanting to go home or to the toilet, staring around at the darkness, and then up at the house, as if unable to make up his mind as to which he feared most.

Close up, the house seemed an even greater mystery than it had from the street, even though we now stood inside its sphere of trees and shrubbery, and could make out every facet of its front, from the tall ornamental windows hung with miles of lace, to the columns that gave it a sense of a Southern plantation mansion moved in whole to the North. Lights shone inside, giving us a hazy vision of the dark oak furniture not part of the environment surrounding Christine when she and her folks lived back in Little Falls.

"Now that we've come to it," Hank mumbled, "maybe this isn't such a good idea after all..."

"Oh, no," Pauly said, grabbing the meat of Hank's arm as Hank took a staggering step back off the front porch towards the driveway and the car. "You got us here, you're going to see it to the end."

"But what if her parents are home?" Hank protested. "And what if he does have a shotgun? You remember what he said when he moved out of Little Falls, don't you, how he vowed that if he ever saw you again, he would murder you for certain?"

"I remember it quite well, though I don't think it was justified," Pauly said, keeping his grip on Hank's arm, although Hank still tried to move towards the car. "I wouldn't have done anything to his daughter."

But Hank shook his head. "You don't ever mean to do anything, it just happens. People just gravitate to you."

The way the Apostles did to Christ, Pauly even mocking our religious beliefs by calling himself that, yanking open a phone booth door in my case to tell say: "I'm Jesus Christ and I've come to hear your confession."

And me, staring up at him, with all my catholic upbringing in an uproar inside of me, as if no one was ever meant to say such things aloud, and me, fearing that the building would suddenly suffer a bolt of lightning because Pauly had.

But I was not the first Apostle, Garrick was, years earlier when both kids lived on the border of Paterson, both going to local schools, Pauly coming upon Garrick playing with his tanks and soldiers in the dirt near the river, and Garrick looking up, suddenly was struck by something in Pauly's voice and manner that made him give up his soldiers and tanks and follow him, wandering the rest of the day among the stones in the graveyard, and something in Pauly's voice had allowed Garrick to give Pauly his brand new radio and his full collection of Hardy Boy books, although probably knowing he would see neither again.

I do not know the order in which they came next, one apostle after another, until we were all part of his flock, but I know that Hank and I came last, and in the middle somewhere, Christine served as his Mary Maglian, among the many girls who then had designs on him but could not entrap him, plotting over and over until her father caught her at which point she blamed Pauly for the whole thing. And now, standing in front of that big door, as if I could see right through it and through her, I knew this was yet one more plot, and one into which Hank and I had involuntarily fallen, helping her to entrap Pauly by dragging him here against his will, Hank and I no better than Judas times two, betraying the man we both thought of as teacher, guru, Christ.

And if I saw it, why hadn't Pauly?

Perhaps he was less wise than I thought, and I studied him for a moment, imagining him then and him now, seeing him sweep through the streets of Little Falls like a prophet, pausing before the tank to take in a joint, before marching on to the diner, and then up the street to Alf's house or rob's, trailing behind him the host of people aching to get closer to him, with Christine among these, never really close to him as we were, always resenting us for that fact. I let out a low gasp which Pauly did catch.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked.

Did I dare tell him what I thought? I decided not.

"Nothing," I said. "I just bit my tongue."

I tried to think back again, to see it all in this new light, trying to image Christine's face as it floated behind us, seeing her slip into the Alf's car even when she was not particularly invited, even when a ride with us meant that she would miss yet another curfew, and knowing that each missed curfew was yet one more mark against Pauly, of which Pauly knew little, her father keeping track of every offence as if Pauly was solely to blame, when it was his own devious daughter making it seem that way.

And then, to her delight, Pauly did take notice of her, looking over one day at her face as if he couldn't recall it or how it had come to be so close, and how no one else seemed to find that face out of place. And then, the last straw came for her father when Pauly and Christine vanished for three days, not down the Floss in a rowboat, but out to Stokes State Forest in Alf's car, and that's when her father decided to move.

But that was years ago, when she was still a girl, and I could not imagine what she looked like now that she had become a woman, and shouldn't she have found more womanly pursuits than pursing Pauly like this, plotting as if she had not aged a day, as if time had ceased to move on for her here in Connecticut as it had for us back in New Jersey, and the lack of time giving her unimaginable time to develop a plan that would bring him into her arms once and for all, just as it had now, fate dumping us on her doorstep for her to snatch into the house like three foolish, alley cats.

And then, there she stood, stunningly disappointed in her over simplicity, having grown slightly plump in the years in-between our last seeing her, but more than that, growing into landscape as if she had turned to stone or salt, so utterly middle class I might have mistaken her for any one of the hundreds of housewives I'd seen each week jockeying for space at the checkout in the supermarket, her hair lacking only the curlers and her eyes the blue-tinted eye shadow. Instead, her eyes had a pink glow to match her lips, her finger nails and her dress.

"Pauly!" she yelped and leaped at him, her arms encircling his neck like a lasso before he could make even a move towards escape.

Even then, he staggered back, with this albatross around him, glancing at both of us as if for help.

"Ah, ... Hello, Christine," he said. "It's been a while."

"I should say it has," Christine said, drawing back from Pauly to look him over better, shaking her head as if she couldn't believe what she saw, even though she had arranged to the last detail his arrival. "And if I hadn't written to your buddy, Hank, you wouldn't have ever come and seen me, would you?"

"I don't think your father wanted me to," Pauly said.

"And since when have you ever listened to my father," Christine said, grabbing Pauly by the hand and leading him across the threshold, leaving me and Hank behind, leaving the door open as if she naturally expected us to follow, me and Hank glancing at each other, both now aware of the trap, both now committed to making sure we did not leave Pauly a victim to it. Hank went next and I followed, closing the door behind me.

*************************

Pauly insisted on a tour of the house, and Christine complied, thinking he admired the larger living arrangements when all he really wanted was to make sure her parents were indeed away, studying every corner for signs of occupation, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the big man wasn't sneaking up on him with a club or a shotgun.

The house, for all its vastness and number of rooms, did not strike me as better than the Little Falls house they had moved out of to come here, only larger, each room from the old world stretched out and increased in number without any other substantial change in status. Her father still had the same Seaside Heights bric-a-brac, the same bowling trophies, the same collection of National Geographic Magazines and Readers Digest condensed books. In fact, only parts of the house actually seemed in use, certain rooms stuffed with signs of life while other rooms seemed underutilized, beds made up for no one in the spare bedrooms, sitting rooms installed with chairs in which no one sat. The kitchen, living room, and path to the garage seemed the most used, with a clear impression in the rug of people coming to and fro, never deviating from the single path.

Indeed, some of the furniture in the living room had come from Little Falls, including a huge, clearly worn-out arm chair which Christine had once labeled as her father's favorite, patched and repatched to keep the stuffing in.

"It's it an amazing place?" Christine asked when we had marched back down from the attic, after visiting all four floors, finished basement to attic, and once more stood in the living room which but for its size could have been the living room in which Pauly had stood so many years earlier in Little Falls.

"It is," Pauly said. "Who lives in the rest of the house?"

Christine frowned. "I don't understand?"

"Who gets to use all the other rooms?"

"We use them," Christine said, sounding just a little hurt.

"Not often," Pauly mumbled, and glanced around. "This place is big enough for all of us to live in without ever having to worry about anyone seeing anyone else unless by accident."

"You could come up and stay on weekends if you wanted," Christine suggested.

"Sure, and what would your father say, I mean after he pulled the trigger."

"You have him all wrong," Christine said.

"Oh? You mean his death threats were aimed at some other Paul Garley?"

"He doesn't hate you any more," Christine assured Pauly. "I was young, he was being protective. That's all over now."

Pauly eyed her with clear skepticism, but then seemed to shake off some chill that had struck him.

"Okay, some I'm here," he said. "What was the big emergency that you have Hank hijack me against my better judgment."

"We need to talk," Christine said.

"So talk."

She glanced at us, and then at Pauly again. "Alone," she said. "Up in my bedroom."

Pauly let out a long sigh. He glanced at us, too, but giving a look of the resigned, as if he could already predict at least some of what would happen behind closed doors and was helpless to stop the inevitable.

"Hey," Hank protested. "What are we going to do?"

"You can read from my father's library," Christine said, pointing to the pile of condensed books and picture magazines on one of the tables. "Or you can play some table games."

One of the shelves had a number of boxes that included all the classics such as Sorry, Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble. Hank reached for the box of Monopoly, I stopped him.

"We're not getting into that craziness up here," I said, recalling the marathon sessions we played when he was laid up a few years earlier, game after game played with him losing every one.

"What about Scrabble?" Hank asked.

I agreed, and then turned to find Pauly and Christine had slipped away.

Hours passed, and Hank insisted we play the game again and again, each time losing despite his using a dictionary.

"What do you think they're doing?" I asked, growing nervous though I didn't know why. Perhaps the darkness and the lateness made me crave for home.

Hank looked up and grinned at me over the board of lettered tiles. "What do you think?"

"This long?" I asked.

Hank shrugged.

And then, I heard it, a distant sound I might not have heard if the hour had been earlier or we closer to the highway or even if the walls had been constructed less cheaply: the slamming of a car door.

"What was that?" I asked.

"What was what?" Hank asked, absorbed in trying to find a word in the dictionary that matched the letters he had.

"I heard a car in the driveway."

"It was probably one of the neighbors," Hank said, running his nicotine-stained finger along the list of words until he came to the one he wanted.

"The neighbors are too far away. This was closer than that."

But Hank paid little attention to me as he placed his tiles, following the spelling he had taken from the book. I got up and wandered towards the front window, peering out. But the trees blocked my view of the driveway and I could only barely see something white there. Hank's car was brown. I went to the front door next, and peered out through the window to one side of it, and saw, parked next to Hank's in the driveway, a large white Lincoln with Christine's father and mother standing beside it, both staring at Hank's car and it's New Jersey license plates.

Both of us heard the hurried steps of the man and woman as they made their way towards the house via the walkway, and heard the jingle of their keys as they prepared to unlock the front door behind which we stood.

"What do we do?" Hank asked, in a quavering voice.

"Someone has to go warn Pauly," I said.

"Disturb him?" Hank said with a shuddered. "I'd rather face Mr. Haslin's shotgun."

"Fine," I said, turning away from the door as the man himself began to fit the proper key into the lock on the other side. "I'll go tell Pauly, you stay here and try to keep Mr. Haslin from getting his shotgun."

I practically ran back to the living room -- passed the couches and the coffee table over which Hank and I had hung over the last few hours, the sprawl of letter tiles like a road map there, now with only one obvious destination, and that spelled out as D-O-O-M.

I turned right onto the stairway, an imitation stand up Grandfather clock to one side, a tiny, finished-basement style bar to the other. I glanced at the time, and then at the bottles, which I had a moment to get a drink.

Christine's tour earlier had given me a clue as to what part of the house I would find her room, but I didn't remember which door exactly behind which it lay, and opened several before I found Pauly and Christine.

Both were sitting up naked on the bed. Both cried out at my sudden intrusion. Both started to curse me when I told them Christine's father had arrived.

"WHAT?" Pauly shouted and -- forgetting his nakedness -- leaped from the bed.

"Hank's trying to hold him off at the door," I said. "You two have maybe three minutes for him to kill Hank and work his way up here. So the two of you had better get dressed."

Then, I turned and left and made my way back down the long hall to the stairs, and down the stairs, hearing Hank's voice ahead of me and the deeper, clearly upset voice of Christine's father, a voice that roared through the house like cannon fire.

"Where is he?" the large man was saying again when finally I came back into the front hall to find the frail Hank barring the way of the bear who claimed fatherhood of Christine.

I had forgotten just how large a man Christine's father was, one of the local linebackers in Passaic Valley High School's historic championship year, now bulging at the belt from a good life business had brought him since, all of him quivering, all of him gathering energy for a dash passed Hank to find Pauly elsewhere in the house, the quivering growing worse when he caught sight of me.

"You here, too?" the man roared. "That means that son of a bitch is here as well. Get out of my way! I'll have his hide if he's hurt my girl."

The man thrust Hank aside as he might have pushed open the gate of a fence, Hank moved without moving, the man pressing through the hallway door into the next room in which I stood guard.

I was larger, but not large, but the man seemed to crouch down before me, the way he must have crouched before linemen in high school games, building up steam to roll over me.

"I'm all right, Daddy," Christine said, her voice twittering from behind me, having the effect on her father of a time out whistle. The man straightened and peered passed me at his daughter. Christine, I thought, looked ruffled but undamaged, her lipstick slightly askew from a hasty application, her hair run through with a comb, but with no real design. Even her clothing had that same ruffled look, clearly showing signs of being shed and recollected.

Her father took note of every bit of this, his nostrils flaring out with increased rage as he snorted and snorted again.

"Where is he?" the man growled.

"Daddy, please, let's not cause trouble. I invited Pauly here and I don't want you to hurt him."

"Where is he?" her father said again, more firmly, yet with a flat inflection that said he would keep on asking the same question until she or we gave him the answer he wanted.

"I'm right here," Pauly said, stepping out of the shadows behind Christine, looking nearly as ruffled as she.

"I vowed to myself I would kill you if I ever caught you in my house," Christine's father said. "I tried to get the other fathers back in Little Falls to do it with me, telling them something needed to be done before you got out of hand. But the chicken shits refused, saying we would get in trouble. Trouble? They didn't know what trouble meant! But I did. You're dangerous, and you need to be stopped. And I'm just man enough to do it."

The man took a step towards Pauly, but Christine pushed herself in-between.

"Daddy, please, let's talk."

"The time for talk is passed," the man said. "Get out of my way. I don't want to hurt you. In fact, I've spent most of my life trying to keep you from getting hurt. That's why we're here. That's why I need to kill this son of a bitch before he makes up his mind to come back."

"DADDY!" Christine said. "We are going to talk. Now. In the den."

Her father hesitated, his leg half through the motion of a second step, he caught between the desire to kill and the need to obey his daughter's urgent request. His daughter won out. He stepped back, still glaring at Pauly as Christine took the large man's arm and led him away.

"You boys want something to drink?" Christine's mother asked after the storm had passed. Hank looked ready to nod his head, but Pauly glared him into silence. The mother passed on into some other part of the house.

"We've got to get out of here," Pauly said. "Go warm up the car, Hank, while Kenny and I straighten up in here. I don't want that asshole claiming we left a mess."

Hank vanished, but Pauly made no move to pick up the scrabble game or put back the dictionary Hank had used. He only stared towards the den into which Christine and her father had vanished.

"She's grown into more of a woman than I ever expected," he said softly, with a very clear note of regret. "I hate to run out on her like this."

"If we don't, you may not live to meet up with her again," I said.

Pauly nodded, and then sighed, as Hank reappeared.

"He's got the car blocked in," Hank announced.

******************

We waited like men condemned to death. Pauly paced the whole length of the room. Hank flicked through pages of the dictionary, pretending to continue the game of Scrabble, but without making a move to place his tiles, constantly looking up combinations of his letters, most of which came up as various terms for death.

"We can walk," Pauly suggested.

"New Jersey is a long way away," I said.

"And I'm not going to leave my car," Hank asked.

"I didn't mean all the way back to New Jersey," Pauly said. "I meant back to the highway and to the gas station, where we might call the police and have them come back with us to get the car."

"He'll give us back the car," I said, drawing a sharp look from Pauly.

"How do you know?"

"From the way he looked at us."

"He looked like he wanted to kill us."

"He's scared, Pauly," I said.

"Of what? Us?"

"Of what we represent."

Pauly let out a long sigh. "You're not going to start philosophizing are you? I hate when you do that."

"I'm just trying to make sense of things," I said.

"And you've concluded he fears us or some symbolic us?"

"He's afraid to lose everything he's worked for, I think."

"How is he going to do that? We're not burglars. We didn't break in here. And if anything, he's the one with the guns."

"But we can steal his daughter's affection," I said. "And our generation can steal his way of life. He's seen the TV reports of riots in Newark and Detroit. He's seen the protestors rioting on campus. He's heard all the anti-war talk and how it's now a bad thing to work for a living."

"But that's a lot of hippie crap. Most of its over with now," Pauly protested, "And I didn't believe it even when it was relevant."

"He doesn't know that. He sees us as coming here to ruin him, just as he saw us trying to ruin him when he was back in Little Falls. It is any wonder he wants to shoot us?"

Pauly stared at me for a long time, studying my face, shaking his head as if he didn't want to believe any of it, although his eyes said he did. Finally, he slammed his hand down on the coffee table, scattering Hank's scrabble tiles and half of those we had both already placed on the board.

"That's it!" Pauly said. "I'm out of here."

But just as he turned to go, Christine appeared, her face red and her cheeks still moist with signs of tears.

"He says you have to leave," she said.

"We would have, but he's blocked our car in," Pauly said. "If he wanted us to leave so bad, why did he do that?"

"Because he thought you were thieves when he first came."

"So what's stopping him from moving it now?"

"He wants you to promise you won't take me with you."

"Take you? Us?" Pauly said, clearly dumbfounded. "That's crazy."

"No, it isn't," Christine said. "I want to go with you."

"What?" Pauly exploded. "What the hell would we do with you?"

Christine lowered her gaze, her eyes swelling with clear liquid again. "I thought when you came you..."

"It's been years, Christine," Pauly said. "You can't still think you're in love with me."

"I don't think it; I am."

Pauly moaned. "For Christ's sake," he said, but to no one in particular.

"If you didn't want to take me away, why did you come?" Christine asked.

"Because I got shanghaied by these two idiots!" Pauly shouted, and jabbed his forefinger in our direction. "You wrote a letter and Hank took it to heart. But I didn't. I wanted to go see my Great Aunt before she died, and would have it I could have gotten myself out of the car in time."

Christine looked hurt, but stuck her chin out.

"I want to go with you anyway," she said. "Even if you don't love me."

Pauly looked green, looking as he might on a ride that moved too fast for him too soon after supper.

"Look, Christine," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder, his long fingers gentle squeezing. "I know you have feelings for me. But we are different people now, older. We can't be playing the same games we played when we were kid. You wanted to use me against your father when you lived in Little Falls, and I think you're still trying to use me against him. I'm not sure what happened between you two this time, but I won't get into the middle of it. You're old enough to strike out on your own if you want to leave her."

"Without any money?" Christine said, pushing Pauly's hand off her shoulder.

"You think I have money?" Pauly laughed.

"No," Christine said. "But at least with you I know I'd have the satisfaction of my father suffering as much as I am."

"So you did have an argument with him?"

"Of course, I did," Christine snapped. "You know me too well for me to pull anything over on you. The old bastard said he didn't like the way I was living my life and spending his money, and suggested I stopped seeing so many boys and partying so much, and when I wouldn't, he cut me off, and told me I would have to move out of his house unless I lived by his rules."

"And so you thought of me," Pauly said sourly. "How kind. Hank," he called, "Tell the old bugger we're leaving."

***********

"Slow down, Pauly," Hank pleaded as the mileage posts smeared so that none of us could read them.

Pauly made no acknowledgement that he had heard, though he glanced once into the rearview mirror, looking passed me and towards the dark highway behind us, his gaze suggesting rage over what we had left behind.

"SLOW DOWN, PAULY!" Hank said again, more firmly, glancing over his shoulder at me for moral support.

Pauly blinked, looked at me in the mirror, then at Hank.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"I said you're going too fast for the road."

"I am not."

"You are, and if you won't slow down, then pull over and let me drive. I don't want my car wrecked or myself killed just because you're in such a hurry."

"I'm driving," Pauly said, and made no effort to slow down.

"Pauly! That's a red light!"

Pauly did not slow.

"STOP, PAULY, STOP!" Hank and I cried together.

Pauly glanced up, then slammed on the brakes, the whole car twirling around once, twice, thrice before coming to a halt, facing almost in the right direction again. Beyond the bumper, cross traffic surged ahead, passing over the spot where we would have been had the breaks caught a moment later.

None of us moved. Pauly stared into the darkness. Hank, with shaking hands, struggled to light a cigarette.

"Give me one," Pauly said.

Hank complied. Both sucked on their cigarettes for a long time in silence until Pauly chuckled.

"I bet you thought we wouldn't stop in time," Pauly said.

"I thought we were dead," Hank said.

"Yes," Pauly said, sucking in smoke, breathing it out with a sigh. "But the closer you get, the better it is."

"The better what is?"

"Life," Pauly said, then engaged the gears as the light changed again, humming under his breath as he drove us home.

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