Rumney Common

Dickinson

THE ARRIVAL

NEW ENGLAND IN AUGUST

Bi-plane, granite foundations, the Purple Democrat…

A sliver of shadow, a slant of light.

UNITED STATES SECRET Service agent Jack Lydon cranes his head out the open cockpit of an old Stearman bi-plane and stares wide-eyed into a brilliant morning sun. The air feels moist and cool against his face, the sky some brightly painted wash of guy wires and steel. He opens his mouth to hollow out the air, to suck life from the blue, to imagine distance from what brought him here. He tries to gather strength in the momentum, to focus on his flight charts and compass for bearing, to calculate reference. All he feels is weight, the pressure of sink as if he’s sitting at the bottom of a lake, spring fed and cold, the water a prison; its power both brutal and demure.

The old plane’s engine coughs, and Jack recovers long enough to remember his place. He looks down through the popcorn clouds to find his shadow drifting over glacier-rounded hills as New Hampshire rolls aimlessly north toward a jagged horizon. Rivers with Indian names like Pemigewasset and Merrimac and Winnesquam wander off in no particular direction only to stall and pool in valleys lined by granite cliffs faded grey. Birch forests spill out of talus slopes and cascade down into a lumpy quilt of Dartmouth green and logger burn, second cut hay dotted with heifers and calves. Villages appear between ridgelines, outposts amidst nature those Protestant steeples and sagging barns and freshly mowed lawns. It’s a stunning day, even better than the brochure.

If Jack does see beauty in this awakening, he ignores it. America’s agent of federal justice cocks his head into the wind, draws a deep breath and screams.

Again.

He screams so loudly, his voice breaks raw, wild with pain, bruised, rabid, a biting rage of frustration and loss. He clenches his fists, pushes into the restraint of his harness and heaves until his ribs ache. He feels empty of aim, some tight boil just before lancing, a catechism of loss, fevered and confused, a pox raging in ways he can neither contain nor comprehend. He sucks another lungful of wind and sky, then he yells and yells again, great gasps and howls until the breath leaves him and his mind clears long enough to recognize another voice.

Above the wind.

His daughter.

Hey, dad! What a day, huh?

Jack squeezes his eyes shut, then slams them open, stretches them wide, as wide as they will go. He tries to decide if this is a nightmare, fights to remember himself.

Look at that! she yells, bouncing up and down in the seat ahead of him. She raises her hands above her head, a child on a roller coaster; a treble echo to her dad’s gutted howl. She is giddy with youth and joy.

It’s so cool! Look at that!

Jack follows her outstretched finger down into a wilderness of Lady Slippers and spruce, but all he can see is their shadow, moving like grainy frames in a slow rolling trance. He imagines himself a plot written into this imagining, the story of a sinner who, through distance, hopes to play stranger to himself, morphing and hiding, a prowl over the earth, some soil-stained visitor faded old but branded new.

We’re almost there!

Jack hears her excitement and fights to form comment.

You’re doing great, Queenie! he calls back, finally. Doing great!

Jack has always loved to fly, to hang here in this drowsy ether, high above expectation, alone with the rattle of the plane’s rotary-piston engine and the sky. Flying offers him solace, a chance to forget a job that started all those years ago in violence only to plunge deeper and deeper into a world decent people should never know.

During fifteen years in law enforcement – eight with the New York Police Department and now seven with the Feds – Jack has been beaten, shot, stabbed and promoted. He’s killed a man in the line of duty, solved a dozen murders, saved a president and been demoted. At 36, an age when most men are still trying to shine light into their careers, Jack Lydon jokes that he’s lived more darkness than an Irish poet.

How you feeling, Queenie? You wanna take us in?

Despite her youth, Erin shows all the signs of becoming an excellent pilot. She’d held level flight by the age of ten, soloed at 12, earned her single engine license just this summer. She’s going to be tall like her father; another year and she won’t even need blocks to reach the pedals.

Heck yeah! she yells back. Are you kidding?

Jack tries to shake extraneous thoughts from his head and concentrate on navigation. It has been a beautiful flight up from their home outside Beltsville, Maryland, a two-day excursion charmed with clear weather and light tailing winds. He and Erin lifted off just before noon on Saturday, stopped for the night outside Providence, then followed I-93 North, opting to space out the six-hour jaunt and thoroughly enjoy the first uninterrupted time they’d had together in months.

I wake up mornings in a fever sweat,

This hunter’s rage pinned against me

He inhales through his nose, trying to lose himself in the old airplane smells: cracked leather, oiled canvas and exhaust. He presses his arms out to the sides and lets his hands move as rudders, dancing up and down in the rushing wind as children do from the back seat of a car. He thinks he should feel safe up here in this weightless cocoon, no longer bound by the gravity of darker souls. But he doesn’t feel safe. Not anymore.

Coroner’s meat and baubles torn from a bitch’s throat;

Vengeance, black bile and spoiled Will…

Jack tries to focus on the textures of the day, the pride he feels in his daughter’s skills, the week ahead. But try as he might, nothing frees him from the words, written words now spoken, words gangrenous with hate, words that echo louder than the wind or the Stearman’s drone, louder than the sirens that followed the attack on the President or the screams of a terrified crowd or the gunshots that almost killed him. These words rise to consume him, gnarled and faceless and raw, a migraine without the pain, gutless formless haunt – something clawing in his head, something rank and angry and shrill.

Words.

Jack knows each of them by heart, every slash of punctuation, every syllable, every part of speech. He hears them when he tucks his kids into bed at night, when other people’s lips move, when breath heaves in and out of his lungs on the long, punishing runs he takes as part of his therapy. He knows them when he sleeps and when he’s awake, in a crowd and trapped, alone, in the tar-black abyss from which they coo.

The tin-voice strangers, all cackle-prone and hot,

Horned fingers, torn nails, a bitter breath this grip;

His doctors call it vestigial fixation of dissociative psychogenic amnesia, a complication brought on by traumatic memory loss. It’s a common defense mechanism, they tell him, a circuit breaker of sorts developed by the human brain to protect itself against experiences too painful to bear. In this case, one memory has disguised itself as another; a post-traumatic transfer of pain.

Indianapolis.

Memorial Day.

A Monday, twelve weeks ago.

It had been an 08:00 to 18:00 shift with a widely advertised and well-organized political rally followed by an in-car appearance at the parade; a flag run in a campaign year. The President of the United States. Pool footage. Simple in and out.

As shift leader, Jack had taken up a walking position arm’s length from the POTUS-side door, one of six close-protection agents flanking the Beast. Despite his game face, Jack knew that his crew was little more than window dressing designed to ward off idiots bursting out of the crowd for Instagram pics. The advance teams had already done most of the heavy lifting, and despite the well-publicized nature of the appearance, this was going to be an easy day in a fly-over state. Nothing but friendlies.

Until the limousine stopped. The motorcade with it.

Jack remembers events that followed in montage: a darkening well of silence, scuffed shoes, blue sky, gold blazer buttons, too much coffee, the smell of insect repellent, sweat dripping down the back of his neck.

The President emerges from the Beast, arms above his head, waiving in tall-man strides as Jack’s detail swarms around him, steps into an ocean of threat. Hands. Green eyes, a wrinkled forehead, a granddaughter crying, black-face Daytona, young lovers, bald head, fat, hippy, tanned, trophy wife, trophy in a window. Americans trying to rub up against History. Hands.

Jack remembers a voice erupting with contingency commands. His own. Movements, a scrimmage-line audible to close-quarter formation, a haggle of radio traffic. Voices from an earpiece, voices from the crowd, voices from experience. He dives in beside the President so close he can smell the man’s breakfast, hear the crinkle of starch in his shirt. He feels the press of flesh, five souls deep.

Hands.

Securing the most powerful man on earth is a carefully choreographed routine of procedures and protocols, but presidents are politicians and politicians are slaves to ego. Ego compels men to have sex with interns, to solicit bribes, to dye their hair young and make statements disguised as questions. And sometimes it makes them get out of heavily armored limousines and walk smiling into crowds of voters who celebrate Memorial Day as a sacred guarantee of their right to bear arms.

But Jack has no time for judgments; his job is to make it all work. He levers himself between POTUS and the crowd. Skin on skin. The intimacy of burden. Blurred color, a Sousa march, children’s faces and shadows among glint, bright shiny voices, car horns echoing off brick and the texture of light wool suits, wedding rings and watches, dirty fingernails and shine.

Gunshots.

Out of nowhere. A small-bore pistol ringing out among the applause.

Pop… pop… pop. Just like that, just pop, pop, pop…

Contact. Pain. The howl. The ache of confusion. Elbows and blue steel and the smoke in his eyes. The loss of strength, the pressure and burn where bullets have pounded his chest and torn open his thigh. The smell of fucked up breath. A failing.

The events of that morning now visit Jack in moods; body rushes, lapses of cognition, anxiety and an overwhelming sense of loss. His life feels scrambled, a neuro-chemical substitution cypher that his mind cannot seem to solve. He feels like he is sitting in some cave of corners, a blind man guessing at shades of black.

But Jack remembers some things. He recalls staring up on his way down as the gunman slips from his grasp, fades back into the crowd. He feels the pavement, hot and pebbled, bouncing against his knees as he fights to focus through a murky filter, under water trying to rise up toward light. He sees a face but cannot make it human, fights for purchase – clinging desperately to the man and to consciousness, to duty.

There’s a vague swirl over Jack’s skin. No hope of forgiveness. And then thirty-eight seconds of darkness. A matte-black hole in his life. Conscious thought erased.

This is so great, Dad!

Erin whistles with her fingers.

Don’t you love it?

Jack has done as he was told in the weeks since the attack, cooperated with the team of government psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists paraded in to help. He had Googled their suggestions of a preliminary diagnosis as he tried to make sense of his symptoms. He participated in weekly EMDR sessions, suffered through sensory deprivation, had undergone regression hypnosis, endured acupuncture and neurofeedback exercises. He had given up Bourbon only to replace it with pills: Xanax, Tramadol, Razadyne, Namenda, Adderall, Ativan. He adopted a high protein diet infused with ginkgo biloba and Omega 3. Ubiquitol. Prevagen. Exercise. Nap. Time off. Time back on. Time off, again.

He’d done everything they’ve asked, except regain his memory. Despite all their DSM jargon, therapy and thinly veiled frustration, Jack knows just one thing: he is the only man on Earth who can identify the would-be assassin that sunny Tuesday in Indianapolis, and try as he might, all he can summon is a mottled blur of flesh and eighteen lines of verse.

I know you the way wounds know suffering, the clot

Pricked just before healing, when the blood thickens hard,

We should be about five miles out, Erin announces. The flight chart strapped to her thigh shows NH Route 25 branching west off I-93 toward a tiny New England hamlet called Rumney and she has already plotted their approach.

Jack nods, then points down the left wing toward a dark blue glimmer of water surrounded by forest.

That must be Stinson Lake!

The whole scene looks timeless and still in the warming sun – a blue-green idyll, empty of human trace except for a handful of cabins crowded around an inlet at the northeast corner and a single canoe that has drifted out near the middle. Its clean lines and belly spars remind Jack of the old wooden craft he’d learned to paddle in summer camp as a boy.

See that? Jack calls out. Had one just like it when I was your age. Old Town.

Nobody in it, Erin observes, checking her instruments. Not even a paddle.

She throttles back the engine and eases the nose down steeply enough that they both feel lightness in their stomachs. Jack remembers the first time he felt that sensation, flying with his own father almost 30 years earlier from Teterboro to their summer house in the Berkshires.

Remorse and stagnant dread, nothing so still or hollow

As the timeless question all men ask:

Watch your RPMs, Jack yells above the wind. The engine sounds confident and smooth beneath its bright red cowling, but there is no harm in coaching. That’s what fathers do.

The airframe comes right about thirty degrees in a slow, arcing turn that Jack knows he couldn’t have performed any better.

What pretty things will young pals swallow?

What deaf-mute taunt of innocence will they pass?

Jack feels the tail start to crab and they bounce in a cross wind. He trusts Erin but keeps his feet perched over the pedals, his right hand ready to grasp the stick just in case. He watches her scan for the runway, nothing more than a grass strip and a windsock. But Jack is not ready to land.

Hey Queenie! he calls out. Rare spontaneity. The village must be just over that ridge. Want to take us around for a look?

Erin doesn’t bother trying to yell back. She simply throttles up, dips the left wing and steers the plane down a winding two-lane macadam: Quincy Bog Road.

The village comes into view almost in abstract, a swath of New England charm nearly hidden along the banks of the Baker River. A half dozen clapboard houses surround a postcard common with a white bell tower at one end and an old stone horse trough at the other. The common boasts a covered bandstand with a flagpole and a large Victorian fountain right there in the middle. Blue spruce and scarlet maples lend the streets a chaste, uncomplicated beauty.

Despite Rumney’s sleepy allure, Jack looks down into this community through the prism of his profession. He is conditioned to doubt, to scour, to strategize and anticipate and plan. Here he sees gingerbread gables in terms of sniper vantage, treed glens as ambush sites, flower beds as places to hide IEDs. He scouts parked cars as potential roadblocks, country lanes in terms of egress, water as obstacle, townsfolk as killers in wait; he looks clinically for communication infrastructure, power transmission lines, medical centers, streetlights, boundaries and topographies and signs.

Who knows you when the darkness comes?

When lust and violence breed pooled to torments rage?

That must be the house, over there, Jack decides. He’s seen the Facebook photos, scoured Google earth. The one with the barn. And that must be the swimming hole over there!

Erin banks steeply enough to afford full view of Stinson Creek as it meanders down the east side of town. At one point the creek cascades into a wide eddy and forms a natural pool complete with sunning rocks and a mossy stone slide.

It’s beautiful! she yells, continuing her turn back toward a white, three-story New England farmstead on the common’s northern waist. The house boasts a sun porch facing west, a breakfast porch to the east and one of those long New England ells that rambles out to a three-stall carriage house. The 7,000 square-foot compound sits grandly atop two acres of sloping lawn, a crab apple orchard and a wind break of tamarack and fir. There is a playhouse, a red-clay tennis court and a swing set. Quiet in summer. Victorian. Pristine. Staid.

Jack traces their shadow across the buildings and lawns, uses it as a marker to plot his survey. Rumney, New Hampshire is a colonial village built around a one-acre common, rectilinear and oriented East Southeast along a line he marks at 189 degrees magnetic with a declination of three. The common is surrounded by seven two and three-story clapboard-sided houses, a church, a red brick library, some sort of two-story dereliction, and a village store. Stinson Lake Road runs South to the pond over which they had just flown; North to a town hall near Route 10. Quincy Bog Road runs East somewhere into the surrounding hills and West to the airport. A handful of side streets weave together with no obvious exit, the creek more or less bisects the town, and the whole package lies neatly tucked in a valley shrouded by hills. If ever Jack has surveyed a simpler, wholly contained and less threatening geography, he cannot name it.

Okay, Queenie, he calls out, let’s get this thing on the ground before your mom… But the stranger’s voice shouts him down.

Who comes for the purple Democrat?

What face will you long to see?

He shakes his head, trying to focus on Erin’s descent, but still they come - the words of a would-be assassin, the lunatic Jack prevented from killing the most powerful man on earth.

I got this, Dad!

Erin pushes forward on the stick and they descend, crabbing awkwardly until she compensates for ground effect, brings the nose up, hangs in the air just long enough to trust her alignment, then settles front wheels first onto a closely groomed runway of fescue and rye. She leans the plane back onto its tail spring, taxies to a rope tie down and sets her brakes.

Nice landing, Queenie, Jack nods. Couldn’t have done better myself.

He’s trying to quiet the voice in his head. But this is an angry rabble that for months has grown loud enough to drown out the accolades of a proud nation. Loud enough to obscure the thanks he received from the president himself. Dark words on a sunny day. Crippling. Relentless. Depraved.

But I’ll have to let those questions be…

Jack waits patiently until Erin kills the engine and everything settles; propeller, toggles, levers, pedals, hair. His daughter folds her charts, collects her gear and unbuckles her harness as he watches. He breathes the earth air deeply into his lungs and holds it, the soil and its grasses, its color, its seed. His watch reads 09:42.

But I’ll have to let those questions be,

‘Cuz all I’ve got is hell in me.

Let it go, Jack, the Secret Service veteran mumbles to himself as he pulls his overnight bag from the fuselage and climbs down off the wing.

He needs this vacation. He needs it bad.

PART ONE

IN WHICH JACK LEARNS HUMILITY

CHAPTER 1

SUNDAY - 9:48 A.M.

Tupperware, pink terrycloth sweatpants, Fox News Sunday…

HONEY, I’M HOME!

David Alan Stye walked into a bright, neatly kept kitchen and dropped his Sunday Times on the counter. He lived in a quiet home at the end of a country hobble, one of those Jimmy Carter-era gambrels built modestly, all aluminum siding, wrought iron and brick. A mailbox stood at the end of the driveway, a black plastic tube with a broken flag. The address read 2337 Hapsburg Lane.

I know you can hear me! he called out.

The handsome, well-proportioned man placed his car keys on a hook by the door, started a pot of coffee and moved to the refrigerator. Inside he found glass shelves glistened antiseptically clean beneath perfectly ordered stacks of Tupperware and condiments. Each vapor-sealed container had been labeled with Magic Marker on masking tape and arranged according to contents. Roasts, steaks and specialty cuts filled the top two shelves; pre-made casseroles and leftovers stood layered beneath them. He kept fruit on the counter, canned goods in the pantry, spices on a Lazy Susan. Spick and span. Always so.

OK, be like that, he smiled. She’d know he was home soon enough.

The man of the house considered his choices before selecting a pork loin, which he had marinated, cooked and carved the previous afternoon. Within minutes, he’d built a nice sandwich on rye with tomato, provolone and horseradish. He placed it on a piece of blue fiesta ware and cleaned up with a paper towel, all motions counterclockwise and firm.

9:52 a.m., he reminded himself. The Sunday morning talk shows would be on in eight minutes, still focused on the president, the attempt on his life and the endless speculation it had inspired. Like so many Americans, the man of the house had come to obsess over details of the attack, the drama of investigation, the media spectacle, what the cops knew and when they knew it, who they suspected, what they feared would happen next.

Stye, a 33-year old community college graduate with wavy blond hair, straight teeth and perfectly groomed nails, folded the soiled paper towel and deposited it in the trash can beneath the sink, then he picked up his sandwich and walked out of the kitchen. Warm sunlight filtered in through the windows, filling the house with pine bough shadows and birdsong and day. The place smelled of cleaning solvents and age.

Maggot? he called out. Maggot!

Stye crossed the dining room, walked through a formal parlor full of overstuffed furniture and bric-a-brac, then into the main room which took up the entire front of the house. Double bay windows looked out into a nicely landscaped yard. One wall presented a fireplace surrounded by built-in bookshelves crowded with esoterica, rare books, first editions both poetry and prose. The opposite wall showed a good quality still-life in oil that he had bought on layaway from an antique store in town. There was an entertainment center with a smart TV and a round Victorian table topped with bell jar and his father’s watch. His mother had decorated in dark-grained Broyhill with good quality smalls and macramé tea cozies. It was a time capsule, a tribute to working class austerity that hadn’t changed in nearly 40 years.

Come on now, sweetheart, he said, I made you some lunch!

Stye reached down with his free hand and jabbed a remote at the television. It was already tuned to Fox News, the only channel he ever really watched. The pretty blond host smiled up at him from her anchor chair and pretended not to read a bunch of stuff she already knew. Martha Something.

After a moment, Stye turned away from the television and stepped toward a cut-back staircase that led up to three bedrooms and a bath. Downstairs, of course, was the cellar. Cellars were important in this part of the country. It got cold during the winter; people needed someplace to put up their provisions, the coal.

He climbed the steps rhythmically, nodding his head at side thoughts, then turned left down the hallway and stopped at a closed door. The old house creaked a bit under his weight, but noise meant nothing here. The slope-shouldered residence sat back from the road, shielded from its neighbors by four acres of tangle brush and elm.

I’ll bet you’ve been thinking about me, haven’t you, he asked, his voice singsong, now, almost whimsical.

He paused a moment to consider his nicely polished shoes in the rich shag carpet, then he tapped three times, just for effect. He reached with his free hand, turned the knob. And then Stye entered.

The room was dark. Muddy with fear. Full. It smelled of bobolinks and human waste; fresh cut Gallica roses mixed with offal. The rich, complex bouquet repulsed and fascinated him at the same time; beauty salted with a tincture of failing breath. The scent of abandonment. He felt its throb.

Stye waited in the doorway for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He heard a whimper, a moan, then the unmistakable sound of arms trying to pull free of knots. His stomach fluttered. He felt her in his knees.

Aw, you have missed me, haven’t you?

The man of the house flicked the light switch and paused to catch his breath. The room held little furniture: a twin bed, a dresser, a bean bag in the corner. Yellow. He had fastened thick curtains over the windows, papered the walls a rusty red and laid plastic drop clothes on the floor.

His eyes fell to a stainless examination table that he had found at a municipal auction and atop it, to a child. He had placed her there a week ago. The girl yanked at the ligature as he moved closer, barely pubescent flesh folded parochially upon itself, suffocating slowly beneath a mechanism of angle and weight. She lay stretched, tethered, askew - her petite frame balanced on shoulder blades, arms pulled flat behind, thighs tight to the chest, ankles yanked well behind the head. A yoga of despair.

Stye had placed a microphone close to her face, arranged small infrared cameras in the room’s upper corners, tiny circles of light. All perspectives.

I’ve brought you something.

The frail, cachectic wisp of a slave huddled into herself, panting in short, tortured suck, writhing in horror now that she sensed him at the door. The girl was fourteen, according to her Facebook page, wore pink terrycloth sweatpants with nothing above the waist. It had been four full days since he’d fed her. She was almost skinny enough.

You got something for me?

The man of the house moved closer, placed the sandwich plate at the corner of the examination table and pushed it toward her mouth. Maggot tried to scream, but the lack of breath reduced any utterance to distinctly feminine grunts and a falsetto wheeze.

He squatted slowly down beside his captive until he was looking right into her eyes, close enough to smell the acid in her tears. It wasn’t the pain that he relished as much as the control, the mastery over another human being, its thoughts, its movements, its desperate yet illusive attempts to deny him.

That’s what the people who chased him would never understand. This wasn’t about torture; it was about love; not the infliction of pain but the kindness in being able to make it go away.

Jack and Erin walked from the Stearman to a rental Hertz had left for them in the lot. Rumney airport was that only in name; a bacon strip of grass with a windsock, a one-room building and six or seven prop planes of varying vintage and description. Jack noticed an old Piper, two hang gliders, a Citabria tow plane and a rare Pilatus missing its engine. The place had the feeling of a private club, a spot for hobbyists to drink coffee and touch wings and talk about air.

Damn Queenie, smell that? Jack asked as they walked toward the rental. He sucked in the morning, theatrically, through his nose.

Smell what? Erin asked. She waited for her dad to retrieve the key from the gas cap and click open the locks, then she threw her flight bag in the back seat.

I don’t know… nature? Freedom? Youth?

You’re so weird.

Jack laughed, then climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. He pulled his Glock out of his waistband, reached across the seat and tossed it into the glove box. Erin barely noticed.

Smells like summer camp, when I was ten.

Erin fiddled with her phone, gave it a shake.

A big lake in the Adirondacks. Old canoes. Campfires. Wet wool. Jack adjusted the mirrors, then craned his neck, gathering the views. I still love the smell of wet wool.

Ew, she grimaced.

Flying up to camp with your grandfather. The lake, the swimming hole, wind in the trees, the excitement of getting away. This brings it all back.

Erin waived her phone at him, accusingly. There’s no reception here. Not one bar.

You’re welcome.

Jack fastened his belt, shifted into gear and pulled out of the lot in a spray of gravel. He rolled down his window as they drove and considered the view. What moments ago had been a simple line on his navigation charts now took on an almost mystical beauty. Cows grazed in pastures still fresh with dew; cloud shadows wandered between patches of Indian paintbrush and lilac, fiddler ferns and wild forsythia. Brilliant morning sun glimmered and danced through stands of white birch and red maple and elm and beech and fir.

Well I guess this is hopeless, Erin grumbled. She dropped her phone in a cup holder and reached for an old-school map the rental company had left on the dash.

I mean the whole world depends upon GPS, but why would a Lydon need it, right? She spread the broad page across her knees, traced some blue line with her finger and tapped it a couple times. Looks like the house is about two miles straight up this road.

See? You figured it out. Jack smiled. You’re one helluva navigator.

Helluva pilot. Erin smiled back. And could you please hurry up, I gotta pee.

Jack chuckled and pressed down on the accelerator; she wasn’t the only one suffering from motel Sanka and three hours of bumpy air.

So, what do you think? he asked after a minute. For the first time in months, he felt some kind of momentum.

About what? she shrugged. The trees? Cows? More trees. More cows. Oh look… more trees.

She turned on the radio and started running through channels, but there was nothing except haze.

I guess it’s just gonna be banjo music.

Banjo music?

Come on, dad… this over-stylized pastiche of rural Americana. Maple syrup, Farmer’s Almanac, L.L. Bean, Jeffrey Lent, Ernest Hebert, Willem Lange, John Harrigan, Daniel Webster and the Great Stone Face…

Hey, hey! he interrupted. For chrissakes, Queenie… you and your details. Give it a break – we’re on vacation.

You asked!

Yeah, well chill out for a minute, ok? You’re gonna be too busy milking cows and sowing the fields to worry about banjo music and… pastiche.

Actually, one would reap fields this time of year, dad.

Queenie…

Sowing is what you do in the Spring. Even public schools teach that. In the fifth grade.

Jack shook his head as the road spilled out of the woods into a sweeping left turn. He pulled the steering wheel back and forth, pressed a little harder on the gas, diving the car into this tossed ribbon of macadam. The sport in it relaxed him.

Whoohoo! he shouted. Come on, this is awesome!

Dad… She shook her head like any thirteen-year-old. I think you’re losing it.

Yeah, well this looks like as good a place as any. From what your mother said, we’re going to be on our own out here. No TV. No phones. No Internet. Gonna chop wood for heat, eat what we can kill, wash our clothes in the creek.

Like you would know which end of the axe to hold.

Jack laughed out loud, as the wheels chirped and they rounded a corner. He pressed harder as they dove into a straightaway and shot up over the crest of a short rise.

Dammit! he muttered, too late to do any good.

There, 100 feet in front of him, sat a police car, its driver running radar. The code bar flashed before Jack could tap his brakes.

I want you to know that this is all your fault, he barked.

Me? Why? Because you didn’t know reaping from sowing?

Jack waved a frail apology at the cop as he swerved to miss him, then