I was twelve the summer my friendship with Jeff Reilly ended. I had been kept behind at the end of sixth grade that year for reasons I was told had to do more with emotional maturity, rather than academic readiness. The fact that I had the whole summer ahead of me to enjoy lessened only a little the sting of not advancing with my classmates in the fall.

Jeff was in junior high school. He and I had been friends since I was eight, when my father got a job at the dye works in Glen Haven and we moved to Susquehanna Avenue. Jeff lived two doors up the street in a small, frame house unique from its neighbors for its gray indistinguishability. It was set back from the street, shaded by a tall maple in the front and another in the back. A cinder block garage stood separately behind. There we planned our expeditions into the mountains and woods behind our house and his.

Jeff knew the paths through the mountains. He taught my younger brother Steve and I where to look under rocks for ant eggs and salamanders, where to find fossils, and how to catch frogs and tadpoles in the pond behind the school. He showed us the fallen-down witch's house in the hollow between two ridges and rescued me when I stepped in a nest of yellow jackets inside.

Jeff had the idea to create a zoo in his parents' garage where we could display the specimens brought back from our expeditions. The menagerie included a horned toad, a box turtle, several minnows taken from the spring behind Galitzky's house and displayed in a glass mason jar, a small frog which had not quite finished transforming itself from a tadpole, a chameleon which changed color nicely when you put it on your finger, in a cage with leaves and twigs, a spotted salamander which we had found on one of our excursions, and which shared a plastic dish tub with the frog, and finally my cat Speedy, a gray-and-white striped tabby who reclined in a cardboard box regarding the whole business with a mixture of feline condescension and disdain.

We charged our parents, friends and neighbors ten cents a person to attend and be edified by the wonders of nature presented for their pleasure and amazement.

In preparation for the exhibition Jeff assigned Steve and me the task of sweeping out his parents' garage. We dabbed the floor with anemic swipes that left most of the debris behind. Jeff took the broom from my hands.

"Do it like this," he said, not unkindly. Steve and I watched him go vigorously over the same area we had just finished with short, even strokes. Jeff handed me the broom, and I repeated my effort.

"That's it," Jeff pronounced, regarding my modified efforts with an appraising eye. "Now you try, Steve", he said, taking the broom from me and handing it to my brother, who proceeded to dab enthusiastically at a patch of concrete next to where I had just swept. "Good enough!" Jeff finally exclaimed. "Let's take a break."

We lounged in the shade under the maple tree. Jeff went into the house to ask his mother to mix some lemonade for us. Mrs Reilly was a housewife, an appellation applied in those days without irony or condescension. She was a nice lady, and made a point of asking how I was when I came over, and how our mother was getting along with my new sister, who had been born the previous fall. Jeff's mother seemed to regard her son's exploits with bemused tolerance, as if she was never quite sure what he was up to, but admired his ambition. Jeff came back out with the lemonade and we drank the tart, sweet liquid from the icy glasses covered with droplets of dew while we contemplated our next adventure.

In the tyranny that parents practice upon their children, my mother and father decided it would be good for my self-confidence if my brother and I took swimming lessons at the YMCA that summer toward getting our Junior Life Saving certificates. Each morning Steve and I awoke to my father standing in his baggy underwear flipping the light switch on and off.

"Up and at 'em," my father said.

"Yeah, yeah," we replied from the recesses of our consciousness. "Five more minutes," and pulled the sheets over our heads.

But the sun was not to be denied, and the birds continued their echoing song, oblivious to our desire for sleep. And my father was determined that if he were up, the rest of the house must be up, too, and so continued his exhortations in a less jocular tone.

"Let's go, drones!"

Steve and I rose and greeted the day, if reluctantly, and got dressed. It was still only seven-thirty when we got downstairs. My father had finished his breakfast, and read the paper while we ate. Sunshine poured into the kitchen through the window that faced the backyard, making a frame of light on the table. The spruce trees halfway up to the yard behind our house cast long, oblique shadows, and the mountains beyond still lay in purplish haze.

After Dad left for work, Steve and I rode our bikes down our newly blacktopped driveway onto Susquehanna Avenue. We rolled effortlessly beneath the maple trees that lined the street, past Sam's gas station and up the short rise past the Children's' Home, where we had to pedal.

We swept down the steep hill past the college, balancing our rolled-up swimsuits on the handlebars; flying with the air in our faces and hair and raising goose bumps on the flesh of our bare arms, till we came to a stop at the intersection and waited for the light or, if the light were green, barreled headlong past the college dormitories and tennis courts, pumping furiously to maintain the speed and thrill of moving fast. We bumped across the railroad tracks, past the dentist's office where I'd had a reluctant molar extracted that spring, and then gently down Water Street beside the river, a muddy green ribbon to our left. There we passed small private docks along the bank -- Glen Haven's more affluent families' piece of the Riviera.

Glen Haven was the Dewitt county seat. The courthouse stood in provincial grandeur at the center of town, opposite the obligatory artillery piece (in this case a World War II howitzer). It's hard to imagine what threat would come from the small, deserted island in the middle of the river, which is where the howitzer was aimed. In its early history, the town's founders had built a blockhouse named Fort Reed as protection against the natives that the settlers had so vigorously displaced. But that threat seemed to have subsided. The fort had been turned into a restaurant and museum, replete with gory dioramas of Indian scalpings and tomahawkings painted on the walls for the patrons' dining enjoyment.

Diagonally across from the courthouse stood the YMCA, a modern, tan brick building. Behind the Y was what passed for a beach, and beyond that the river. Steve claimed he saw turds floating in the Susquehanna during our swimming lessons, making their way like half-submerged submarines headed south through the center of Pennsylvania toward the Chesapeake Bay. But I'm sure he was exaggerating.

The river turned brown and stank with fertilizer from the fields when it rained, and you wondered what might lurk beneath the surface, ready to grab you by the feet and pull you under, or just be content with taking a few toes. There were "holes" in the river bottom, and the newspaper reported occasionally that someone would step in one of them and drown.

The rest of the time the river ran clear due to the acid leached from the coal mines above Renovo, which stung our eyes and made it difficult for much of anything to live comfortably in the water, save a few catfish.

Steve and I parked our bikes in the rack at the side of the YMCA and entered the locker room to change. Our grudging acceptance of the swimming lessons turned into dismay, followed by a sense of foreboding, when we discovered the class was held outside in the unexpurgated waters of the river, rather than in the Y's heated, chlorinated, indoor pool. But my parents were not open to a reappraisal of their plan. They wanted us out of the house, and sending us to stand up to our ass in freezing, polluted water was their idea of a good way to do it.

We emerged goose-bumped and shivering into the gray morning air. The girls came out from their separate door, arms crossed over their chests also shivering and goose-pimpled in the clammy, mist-filled atmosphere. There were ten of us -- four girls and six boys. Like us, the girls were eleven or twelve years old and on the edge of puberty.

None of them had breasts to speak of yet (I know, because I looked) except for one plump, olive-skinned girl who floated pneumatically and amazingly when she got in the water. The instructor was a college kid who had gotten the job for the summer. He lined us up and explained the morning's activities.

The river was deserted. Thin tendrils of vapor hung above its surface. Sulfurous river mud squished between our toes as we waded out into the cold, murky water to begin the lesson.

  Steve and I returned to Jeff's house after swimming one summer afternoon late in June. We found him in his parents' back yard languidly throwing a tennis ball against the garage.

"They're putting up a new house behind Galitzky's. We need to check it out," he said.

Jeff led us through the mountains along the trail to the cliff above the new housing development going up. Dump trucks and backhoes worked gouging out foundations below. Jeff surveyed the scene silently, like Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, which we had read in Mrs. Stone's class that spring. Suddenly, he pointed to an undisturbed patch of tall grass, brush and small trees next to the construction site.

"What a great place for a fort!" he said excitedly. We scrambled down the steep slope using a rope we kept tied to a small tree for that purpose and crossed the dirt road into the woods. While diesel engines and truck gears wheezed and groaned nearby, Jeff led us stealthily like Cooper's Indians thorough the scratching, cutting briars, then down a slope into the cool, hushed shadows beneath the trees.

For the next two weeks Steve and I went over to Jeff's house after swimming every afternoon, and the three of us went into the mountains to work on the grass fort. Stonemasons or carpenters constructing an ancient cathedral did not work harder or share their leader's vision more keenly.

We might have been building the Sistine Chapel or some similar monument of human achievement as he directed us to crush down the waist-high weeds from the edge of the woods and whack aside the lacerating briars with sticks to make hidden passageways and individual dens we could crawl into without being seen. I had touched poison ivy the year before with no ill effects and boldly declared my immunity. Jeff appointed me, in shorts, to stomp back and forth on the three-leaved invaders.

We labored diligently and surreptitiously next to the new houses going up to create a private enclave far from the civilizing influences of our parents. While trucks and bulldozers clanked and rattled, digging up the ground a few yards away, we lay serene in our secret spaces, chewing on blades of grass and looking up at the blue sky,

A fundamental principle of the whole enterprise was secrecy. Steve and I didn't tell our parents where we disappeared to each day. What good was having a place in which to hide away from the cares and woes of childhood if everyone knew where you were? One afternoon as we were getting ready to go out after lunch again, we passed my father on the sofa in the darkened living room. He usually took a nap before returning to work, with the newspaper draped across his stomach. This time he was not asleep, however. He opened one eye.

"Come here," he intoned. It was hard to tell when my father was angry and when he was just being himself. Steve and I entered the living room and stopped out of range just short of the sofa. My father was a big man, but he could move quickly. I searched my memory for some transgression I might have committed, but I couldn't think of one. My father looked up at us, a frown set firmly on his face.

"What have you two been doing around here?" he asked.

We stared dumbly.

"Your mother says you haven't helped out around the house much at all, lately," he said.

We did not know how to explain that our destiny, the focus of our energies lay out there beyond.

My father sat up and pointed a meaty finger at us. His hands were calloused and rough, the nails cracked and stained yellow with nicotine.

The skin crawled on the back of my neck, and the pit of my stomach fell into my crotch. When Steve and I misbehaved -- wrestling or jumping on our beds and telling jokes at night instead of sleeping quietly-- my father came up the stairs like a freight train and burst into our room ready to grab the first one of us within reach.

"Listen, you drones, just because you're home for the summer doesn't mean you can do whatever you like all day! You understand? I want the grass cut today. It looks overcast, so get it before it rains," he said. "And the garage needs cleaning. Get it done by the time I get home this evening. You hear me?"

"Yes," my brother and I answered, nodding our heads up and down like bobble dolls.

"Yes what?"

"Yes, sir."

"And see what your mother needs done."

Steve and I spent the afternoon mowing the lawn and cleaning up the garage. We worked hurriedly, taking turns in the summer heat pushing the lawn mower through the swampy back yard, and then retreating together to the cool darkness of the garage to hang up tools and bicycle parts on the pegboard on one wall. We gathered up the trash and old newspapers to be thrown away, and finally swept and hosed down the concrete floor; sending waves of dirty water down the driveway. By five o'clock the grass lay severed in neat rows in the front and back yards. The garage floor gleamed after the scrubbing we had given it -- giving off a satisfying smell of gasoline and automobile tires mixed with Spic 'n Span.

As my father's tan station wagon pulled into our driveway at five-fifteen, Steve and I escaped up the path that ran behind Galitzky's house. The path ran through pine trees, green and so dense we had to push our way through their branches to get to the separate path Jeff and my brother and I had cleared just a week previously when we hacked and trampled the undergrowth.

We burst out again on the other side where the pines gave way to taller maples and black cherry trees. A fine rain had started and mist dripped down through the leaves above onto their bare lower trunks. We did not go to the grass fort. Instead, we continued along the trail above the cliff and then slid down on our butts, raising red dust from beneath the wet, dark shale. We looked for fossils on the cliff, lifting up the rocks and walking warily. Jeff told us copperheads sometimes sunned themselves there or lurked in the shadows among the rocks.

The sun shone till nine, bathing the sky in a brassy light. Steve and I returned to our house as dusk fell. The air turned cool and damp. Stars emerged against the dark blue sky. Steve went inside while I stayed out in the yard, looking through the picture window in our family room. My father lay inside on the sofa watching TV. My mother sat in her rocking chair reading a magazine. Suddenly, and at the same time, I felt a warm glow and a pang that amounted almost to homesickness. What was this? I wasn't sure.

It seemed as if suddenly I could apprehend both the value and the inevitable loss of all that was important to me. A few moments before I had been caught up thoughts of my own vain, childhood pursuits. Now I looked upon my parents and began to realize what it must mean to become an adult.

I went inside, the thought echoing in my head that I must enjoy my present life, for soon other more serious cares would intrude. Then, just as quickly, it was gone.

"'Lo, Son!" My father greeted me from the sofa. He held out his hand as a peace offering. I took it, feeling the warm, calloused flesh of his palm against my own.

The summer progressed. The swimming class at the Y ended without mishap or tragedy. Poison ivy rashes appeared on my shins and ankles, lasting several weeks. Steve and I spent time at the grass fort with Jeff.

Steve and I engaged in the daily rituals that still afforded us the pleasures of childhood. We rode our bikes. We played tennis in the cracked asphalt public courts across the street. We collected pop bottles from the sidewalks and the side of the road for the deposit. Sometimes Jeff accompanied us. The three of us stopped at Sam's gas station, and he jovially gave us money in exchange. He watched even more jovially as we stood before the glass case in the little store off the garage, contemplating the choices before us. The ring of air hammers, the whine of impact wrenches and smell of oil filled the air.

Jeff hung back or perhaps purchased a single item, being content to save his money. Steve and I spent all ours, mesmerized by Milk Duds, Junior Mints (my usual favorite), Life Savers, Mounds, Clark Bars, 5th Avenues, Reeses' Peanut Butter Cups, Milky Way and Snickers; Black Cows, Almond Joys, Three Musketeers, Wacky Bubblegum Cards, Rollo, Chunky, Starburst Chews and Junior Mints. There was also ice cream (Klondikes and Nutty Buddies) and cellophane-wrapped cupcakes, pies and brownies, which I also favored.

Jeff's parents weren't poor, but they weren't affluent either. I was aware of the difference between his family and ours whenever we went up the stairs, past the faded and peeling wallpaper and down the hallway to his room.

I was reminded by the fact that his family ate dinner at five-thirty, while we had ours at six-fifteen; by the fact that my family had bought a new Dodge the previous fall, while Jeff's father drove the same Ford to his job as he had the year before, and the four years before that. The difference was not something we talked about much, but both of us realized it. Perhaps it accounted for the friendliness I felt at his house when I spent time there, which was often (usually involved in activities that Jeff chose).

The rare visits he made to our house occurred with a certain air of awkward deference. I was free to be myself at Jeff's house in a way that I was not at my own. I see this now as a recurring pattern in my friendships, and my few successful romantic attachments, which often involved at attraction to the family as much as the individual.

I sought acceptance and acknowledgment of my value and self-worth. Jeff served the role that an older brother would have. We spent that summer working on the grass fort, exploring the mountains, capturing salamanders and ant's eggs and frogs and minnows, engaging in the rites and passages of boyhood -- and so it was hard suddenly to face the realization, as summer ended and fall approached, that where he was going I could not follow.

Jeff and I sat in his kitchen one afternoon toward the end of August drinking milk and eating chocolate chip cookies his mother had just baked.

"The ships at sea, may they never be!" he said raising his glass and clinking it against mine.

"Here's mud in your eye," I offered, not being able to think of anything else. I ate another cookie, biting through the warm crust into a semi-liquid chocolate chip and tasting the slightly bitter sweetness. I scratched absent-mindedly at the fading lesions on my legs.

"Over the teeth, over the gums; look out stomach, here it comes," Jeff continued, taking a big gulp of milk.

"Do you like seafood?" I asked, suddenly inspired. I opened my mouth to show the gluey, half-chewed cookie. "See. Food."

Milk squirted out Jeff's nose and down the front of his shirt as he snorted in laughter. It poured down his shirt and onto the table, a white gusher.

After making us clean up the mess, Jeff's mother retreated to the cellar to do laundry. The two of us to listened to records in his living room.

The mellifluously nonsensical lyrics rose while we sang along:

followed by...

Jeff paused with his lips drawn back on the last 'En-er-y.

"Let's go up to the attic," he said, carelessly yanking the needle off the record.

I followed him up the stairs past the peeling, yellowed wallpaper and down the dimly lit hallway.

"Hold it," Jeff said, pausing by the door to his room. "I got to take a grunt."

I looked around his room while he continued talking to me from the bathroom. My gaze moved among his possessions: the microscope he had showed my how to use, the Lionel Train set up on the floor; a dead wasp floating in a jar of alcohol on the shelf above his bed, next to a perfectly-constructed model rocket that I coveted. When we launched it on its maiden voyage that spring in the park across the street, it had landed in a tree. I, with my fear of heights, watched Jeff climb up through the branches -- going literally out on a limb (which bent and swayed menacingly under his weight) to retrieve it.

The toilet flushed and Jeff's voice reached me, growing louder as he approached down the hallway. We went upstairs and sat in his attic. Black construction-paper bats still clung to the ceiling from our funhouse the previous Halloween. Jeff's HO road-race set beckoned from the corner. We raced cars and talked about plans for the fall: perhaps an overnight camping trip, or building a raft in which to travel on the river, or constructing a tree house in the fifty-foot oak at the base of the mountain.

I returned home well past suppertime. The spruce trees cast long shadows as I emerged from the wildness behind our back yard. My father lay snoring on the sofa. My mother was finishing the dishes. The sound of her voice singing a favorite song she had heard on the radio, happily off-key, reached my ears, along with the clattering of plates, knives and glasses as she loaded the dishwasher. I followed her voice to the kitchen to see what I could scrounge for myself to eat.

"Hi, honey," she said to me, smiling in that motherly way that drives twelve-year-old boys crazy. "We were starting to worry about you."

I mumbled something about cutting through the woods. "What's there to eat?" I added by way of salutation.

She frowned slightly. "You can fix yourself a sandwich, if you like. I just put the roast in the refrigerator."

"Thanks."

My mother left the kitchen, I assembled the constituent parts of my sandwich: bread, mayonnaise, roast beef (only partly cooled), margarine, lettuce from the vegetable bin. I sat down at the kitchen table to eat it and savor the quiet of the house, the chug of the dishwasher and the murmur of the television -- which remained on, since to switch it off would have disturbed my father's sleep. All of this produced in me a sense of comfort -- a shiver of warmth and affection as I contemplated my position within my family as the eldest son and heir.

The clock ticked on the wall. A dog barked somewhere. A breeze wafted through the open kitchen window. I was suddenly glad to be in familiar surroundings again after a day spent exploring the foreign, if more interesting, world outside.

'I am happy,' I said to myself.

My father came into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed, his graying hair awry. His shirttail hung out to one side.

"Hi," I offered hopefully. My father grunted. He went to the refrigerator, opened the door, and began pawing through the contents. I masticated quietly, watching him warily.

"Missed you at dinner," he said from behind the refrigerator door.

"I was over at Jeff's."

"Next time how about letting us know where you are. Your mother was worried."

"Yeah. Sorry, I took a walk through the mountains."

"Mm." My father closed the refrigerator door and constructed a sandwich for himself, breathing heavily as he piled tomatoes on top of cheese on top of roast beef on top of bread. I couldn't tell if he was really pissed off, or if it were just the wheezing he usually did when he was tired. He smoked and was overweight. He lumbered back to the living room, leaving me in peace as before.

School started. Repeating sixth grade turned out to be not so bad, especially when I found out two boys I knew, Jason and Mark, had been held back with me. The three of us decided to make the best of it. Owing to our older status, our new teacher, Mr. Wright, gave us a lot of latitude. We took full advantage, doing "research" at the library and hanging out in the student grill at the nearby teachers' college.

Steve and I continued to visit the grass fort after school for old time's sake. When we stopped at Jeff's house two weeks after school began to ask if he wanted to go with us, however, he wasn't interested.

"I've got some other stuff to do," was all he said.

"That's alright," Mrs. Reilly said as she saw us coming back down the stairs with disappointment showing on our faces, "You two boys go ahead and have a good time. Don't worry about Jeff. It's been an adjustment for him going to ninth grade - making new friends and all. I think he just wants to spend some time by himself right now."

I couldn't understand why spending time by himself couldn't just as well be done with us in the mountains or at the grass fort, but Steve and I went ourselves. We fell into the familiar, yet perennially new rhythm that began each September. After the hot, dusty walk home after school, we changed our clothes and went to Sam's and bought a Nutty Buddy, a fruit pie or some similar delicacy, and repaired to the mountains.

The grass at the fort had changed from a lush green to faded tan and brown. Hawthorne trees hung low with their burden of still-green fruit. The final crescendo of growth and life began, even as the mornings grew chilly with the coming of fall.

Steve and I savored every drop; lying on our backs staring up at the clouds in a cerulean sky, our stomachs full of empty calories and our ears filled with the sound of bees flying lazily among the clover and wild roses. Our brains hummed with the possibilities that childhood mercifully allows; the frustrations and anxieties of the day magically wiped clean.

Steve and I were playing tennis after supper at the courts across the street a few days later. I recognized Jeff with two other older boys ordering ice cream at the Bucktail Dari Deelite near the park. As I started to wave, a roar suddenly broke the stillness of early evening.

A green Pontiac Firebird peeled out from the road beside the courts, fishtailed down Susquehanna Avenue, and pulled just as suddenly into the Dari Deelite parking lot. The tennis ball that Steve had just hit zoomed past me and plopped into the chain-link fence with a crash. The car had my rapt attention. For the past week I had been thinking obsessively about buying a green Firebird HO racing car for the road race set that Steve and I owned -- and to race on the track that Jeff had set up in his attic.

The driver's side door of the car opened and a girl got out. She was about eighteen or nineteen, with long blond hair. She wore a halter-top and beads. Her companion got out of the other side. Both girls walked toward the Dari Deelite, chatting with their heads drawn close together, pretending not to notice the attention their arrival had elicited. Jeff and his friends watched intently, their focus drawn not so much on the means of conveyance as upon what it had delivered.

The blond girl walked up to the window and gave her order, standing with one hand on her hip with practiced insouciance.

One of Jeff's companions -- a boy in jeans and a t-shirt, wearing a cap with Caterpillar written across it and chewing snuff, made a comment to the girls that I couldn't hear. The two girls paused in their conversation, staring at the three boys standing behind them, then returned to whatever subject they were discussing. Their own ice cream came. The girls paid and crossed the parking lot with frigid imperiousness, got into the Firebird, and drove away with another screech of tires and smoke.

I returned to trading tennis balls with Steve: step, THWOCK, pause; step, THWOCK, pause -- falling into the steady rhythm of hitting the fluorescent yellow, fuzzy, rubber-cement scented sphere back and forth. It was a soothing motion I enjoyed.

We began doing this as the girls drove by -- hoping to demonstrate our worth in some vague and ultimately pointless way to the gods of vanity. I heard Jeff and his friends approach along the strip of grass that ran between the courts and the street. Since he had originally taught Steve and me to play tennis several years ago when we had first become friends, I decided to exert whatever skill I had to demonstrate to him the success of his efforts. I suddenly began playing with abandon, making shot after shot, full of confidence.

As Jeff and his friends walked by I waved. He looked up briefly, barely acknowledging my presence, and continued to talk to the boy in the Caterpillar cap beside him. They both began laughing.

Just then Steve hit another shot that flew past, banging into the fence behind me.

"Come on, Fatbutt!" he cried. "You going to play or not?"

Stung, for a moment I considered calling after Jeff. Then I thought, they must be laughing about me.

I picked up the ball. "Yeah," I said to Steve. I sliced a half-hearted serve into his half of the court. We played for another half an hour, practicing volleys back and forth across the net, then walked back across the street to our house.

The next day I decided to cut through the woods on the way home from school. Although it was the end of September, the afternoon was warm. I was sweating by the time I got to the top of the hill and passed beneath the cool shadows of the trees. A few leaves had fallen already, littering the path with green and gold. The air had a brilliant clarity to it. Sunlight streamed down through the branches, illuminating dust motes that danced.

I took my time, enjoying the last remnants of summer and anticipating the crisp fall weather. I felt happy. Jason, whose father taught at the college, had lent me The Lord of the Rings. I was looking forward to reading it over the weekend. Books were talismans that provided pleasure and contentment and soothed the confusion and anxiety I increasingly felt. They afforded me a sense of being connected to the world and to people from a safe distance.

I decided to stop by the grass fort. Steve and I hadn't been there since the week before, when we had gone to escape one of my father's bad moods. I crossed Lusk Run Road above Sam's and walked along the dirt road that ran below the cliff. I entered the woods thorough the scratching, cutting briars, then down a slope into the cool, hushed shadows beneath the trees.

I heard the usual sounds of construction. When I passed the crabapple tree, where the pines ended, I turned and saw that the fort was gone. The brush and dry grass had been cleared, and a caterpillar tractor was digging a trench in the ground.

I headed through the trees and across the yards toward Jeff's house. I knocked on the screen at the back door. His mother answered and asked what Steve and I had been up to, lately. In response to my question, she said, "Go on upstairs. Jeff's in the attic."

I thanked her and went up the stairs past the faded wallpaper to the second floor then through Jeff's room and up the narrow stairs to the attic. The heavy counterweighted door was open. Jeff sat at the far end playing the used electric guitar he had bought with pop bottle money and money he had received for his fifteenth birthday. He was picking out 'Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter' without the amplifier on. The strings made a thin and tinny sound.

"Guess what?" I said, trying to sound casual. "They knocked down the fort."

"I know," he said, nodding. "I was over there yesterday." He kept strumming the guitar with an iridescent blue pick.

Neither of us said anything. His HO road race layout was set up in the corner on the threadbare rug. The transformer was on. I saw he'd gotten a new car: a white Mako Shark.

"You can run it if you want," he said to me.

I ran the car myself for a while, until it jumped the slot.

"I was thinking of going up to the mountains."

Jeff didn't reply. He was looking out the tiny attic window. It hardly seemed like he was in the room with me. I looked at the quilt in the middle of the floor we had used for a mat when Jeff was teaching us judo holds from a book the previous spring; the black construction-paper bats we had taped to the ceiling.

"I'll see you around," I said.

He looked at me suddenly: the Jeff Reilly who had caught salamanders and collected ants from under rocks with us; had showed us the witch's house in the mountains and decided we should build the grass fort.

"Okay," he said. "Hey, do you want to play my guitar."

"Sure," I answered.

He put the guitar on my lap and showed me how to play a few notes; stretching my fingers on the frets as I held the smooth, lacquered wood.

"My parents won't let me turn the amp on when they're in the house," he told me, "or you could hear how it really sounds."

I thanked him and went back down the stairs. I said goodbye to Jeff's mother in the kitchen, went out through the screen door, and headed for the mountains by myself.

I took the path to the ridge, where we had found fossils earlier in the summer. Halfway up I stopped and looked back over the top of our house.

The Susquehanna River flowed blue in the distance, sparkling in the sunlight. I continued up the path, taking off my shirt because of the heat. I walked past the houses at the top and found the path again on the other side of the road.

In the clay that had been dug and piled there lay exposed pieces of blue-gray slate and orange- colored shale. I walked over the rocks, kicking them with my sneaker and bending down to examine one or two more closely, turning them in my hands. There was the usual leaf- impressions, cross-sections of crinoids and tiny shells. One piece caught my eye. It had a curved and patterned surface, barely exposed. I picked it up and tapped the edge against another rock until the layers split. Underneath was the small, perfect fossil of a trilobite.

I put it in my pocket and started home.

Copyright © 2003 Charles Lanigan
All rights reserved

About the Author

Charles Lanigan grew up on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania. He has taught business communication and writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State, and Carnegie-Mellon University. He has a BA from Allegheny College and an MA from the University of Pittsburgh, and teaches and consults on knowledge sharing and collaboration.

He recently completed writing an historical novel set in Pennsylvania during the 1830s. He was a long-time participant in the Squirrel Hill Writers' Group in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife, Jeannine, and attended the Chenango Valley Writers' Conference in June of 2003.

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