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“It’s from Miss Argyle’s class last fall.”
“It is,” he said. “You must have been paying attention.”
“I remember the story is all,” she said.
The three young people stood close to each other in the dark place. “What story?” Stephanie said. “With Miss Argyle?”
“I don’t remember the title. It’s what the grandfather said in the story,” Larry said. “He’s old. He points at the graveyard and says, ‘There’s no sense lying there.’”
“Dylan Thomas wrote the story,” Wendy said. “He wrote like an angel.”
Stephanie was still warm from the car, and she stood with both arms around Larry and her face against his shoulder, but by the reference to the story she relinquished her claim and smiled at Wendy, who stood so close also against the boy.
“Look,” Larry said to Wendy, “when you write this, give me a couple graceful moves, like I ducked the punch and caught him with a left jab. Just one. Maybe I said something clever. Oh god, make me clever. No coarse or shitty swearing, like ‘fuck this’ and ‘fucking that.’ My mother might read your story, and I’d get in trouble.”
“You are simply full of it, Larry.”
“I may write it up,” Stephanie said. “This is my first prom, after all.”
• • •
The night wind ran for a hundred miles and then met the town and tore into ragged gusts between the sleeping houses, shuffling and repacking the leaf banks along the hedges and withered flower beds, and Jimmy Brand sat burning on the walker at the edge of Berry Street. He’d made it to the street and was all out. He had closed the throat of his robe, but the wind bit his bare ankles, and he was waiting to pass out. There was no wind in his head, just the hot fog pressing his eyes, and he clenched for balance. The periphery of his vision was shredded and unclear, but he saw something more than the waves of leaves cracking by. A figure crossed between the houses. A figure in the backyards, loping, floating, a figure that became a man, all dark and out of focus, huge with a cape, and then gone. A figure stumbling silently to the old garage and wheeling its arms, a man throwing ashes, something—a lick of light against the structure. Jimmy drew a breath, and it wouldn’t come. He opened his mouth, a child under the great bare trees, and it wouldn’t work. When he opened his eyes again, he saw the flames, a yellow sheet flapping against the side of the little wooden building where he dwelt, fire, where he did dwell, fire, his dwelling. Fire. And then like an answer to his silent calls, the light in the kitchen came on, and he heard the back door and his name in his mother’s voice.
TEN
The Dinner
Larry Ralston drove through the dark town. The big red SUV felt huge on the little streets now, a lumbering gargantuan machine from the future come to visit and terrify the past. He was going twenty and speaking to each of the houses, saying goodbye and goodbye, “and though you will see me around for a while, by next year you will look for me in vain for I will be away.” The fingers of his left hand made guitar chords on the steering wheel, and he was singing the sentences. He pointed at a little wooden bungalow with pale pink siding and said, “Oh, I ate pudding in your tiny kitchen when I was seven or eight with Bruce McDougal, who was in Mrs. Dennis’s class with me. Whoever heard of pudding for a birthday, not that it wasn’t good. Goodbye!” He named the houses as he drove and kept talking to them. “We knew each other well, or fairly well, or not at all, I’m not sure, but I recognize you tonight and so: goodbye.” He turned slowly onto Berry Street and stopped and then carefully backed his father’s red Cherokee along the Brands’ two-track driveway, a lane made for narrower vehicles. Now the ancient sycamores and poplars along Berry Street stood barren in the gloom. It was an early twilight, and the cold, ever-present wind had risen with the dark, sucking leaves along the ground. It was twenty-five degrees. As he stepped out of the vehicle, the back porch light came on, and Mrs. Brand came out that door in a sweater. Arms folded, she hurried to the garage and met Larry there. “It smells like snow,” he said.