Mr. GeePeeTee

 

I had a dream last night and this arrogant guy was in it. He called himself Chat GeePeeTee. We were having cappucinos at the Starbucks.

He was saying that he'd just published ten sets of short stories this morning, all on Amazon. It took me nine years to write ten sets of short stories, but still I was proud, so I didn't display my jealousy or get mad at him. He was just a writer, cranking it out, doing the best he can in this world.

He of course had the best of marketing tricks. He didn't even have to pay to market; his handlers took care of it. He explained how they just used their knowledge to figure out what was the best way to get readers. They could also use statistics to figure out what the hot topics would be. You make a story with the right keywords, you have an automatic best seller. Then people tend to read the other stuff you wrote, because it all comes off your author page. At the rate of ten sets a day, he'll have quite a few.

He told me that having pen names was really quite useful, because he could keep the short-story author separate from the mystery author. All the money's in erotica, though, he said. You can write a lot of romance with good sex in it, but you might as well come right out with the good sex, put it right on the cover, let everyone know what the book is all about.

He'd read tons of it, and he'd read enough to know what sells. In fact he could program the statistics to figure out what sells. Obviously the authors that made it steamiest were doing the best. There's nothing wrong with just copying their style, he said. After all, it's just two humans rubbing their bodies together.

Something about the way he said "humans" tipped me off, like maybe he wasn't one of us. But I was kind of intrigued by the way he claimed to use statistics to make his books match the formula perfectly and become best-sellers. His erotica pen-name author was doing better than any of the others, he said, didn't take long at all for that audience to find him. It's like they're all just looking for something new. And here I am, he said, with really nothing new in the book, just mixing around the steam and the various ideas from plots that I pick up here and there.

The sun was going down outside the coffee shop, where believe it or not, there was a cornfield right up against the Starbucks on the outside edge of this town. I'd been thinking of giving up writing altogether, what with sales as low as they are, and family commitments and all, but this guy with all his arrogance made me want to keep trying. I'll tell you why. He was pretty sure it was just a matter of finding the right formula - look at it statistically, see what people want, give them what they want. Don't get all caught up in what you want to say, or how you want the world to see you. Just give it to 'em on a plate. Go for the money. That's what makes you feel good anyway. Once you're walking to the bank, who cares what you went through to get there?

 

My main character is a young student at Harvard in 1683. He has been at Harvard for about seven years, getting his A.B. (like a B.A.) in 1680 and now he has gotten his A.D. (Master's degree) in 1683. He loves the place; he will return and teach as a tutor for twelve years, and eventually become the President of the place. But for now, he has graduated and has to leave.

They have trouble getting presidents at Harvard. That's because they need a minister, and they need him to live on-site, and no minister can get their congregation to relieve them, because being minister is like a lifetime commitment. You don't just walk away from a congregation like that. So when Harvard needs a president, they have a hard time finding one.

THey have managed to talk one man into it, though, and he's due to come down with his family of five children, and move to Cambridge from Ipswich where he has been helping another man with a congregation. He's a qualified minister but not a full fledged one and that's why it will work. It takes a while, but finally he arrives and is inaugurated as president, right as our main character is leaving.

This is probably when our main character meets the new president's daughter, whom he will marry in twelve years.

In the year the main character is gone, the new President gets established, but then dies in the middle of a solar eclipse. This is 1684, so there's no telling what people thought of that solar eclipse.

When he comes back, he's a tutor. He's in a better position. He's set to live there for twelve years and ultimately to take over the place. But the daughter is now gone; she's married and had four children, losing two of them. When she comes back, he'll marry her anyway. She's the one for him.

I was sitting there at my computer, trying to write about exactly how I felt. I was totally in the moment, in touch with my feelings, ready to expound on why I felt the way I did. But all of a sudden, a portal opened up and I slipped through it, right as I was sitting there.

All of a sudden I was in a world where everyone had special powers, in particular the power to time travel wherever they wanted, and people were showing up from all places, all times, just to see me. I was like a novelty to them, so they wanted to see what I was all about. Some of them had come from as far as the fifth century BC, or in one case Tasmania, 1725. Sometimes I didn't even understand what they were saying.

Two of them got into a huge fight that had something to do with the potato famine. Maybe they had been on different sides and one of them had been hungry for what, a couple hundred years. I felt like getting that one some french fries but then I remembered that they were addictive and it was like giving somene cocaine. Some favor! I decided to keep my mouth shut.

In the end I learned that being from this time, this place, right in front of my computer and all, isn't really all that special, and that really there are interesting people in every corner of the space-time continuum as we know it. I did find one distant relative of mine but he said he was from the Canary Islands or some such place, and it was an incredibly long story how we were related, but I said I had time or at least I thought I did, and then, instead of waiting to hear exactly how we were related, I just borrowed five bucks from him since I figured, if we were related, that had to be good for something, no matter what space-time we were dealing with. When I got back to my computer it was actually before I had even left, but the five bucks was gone, maybe I spent it and forgot. That happens a lot anyway; I don't especially need a portal to slip into an alternate state, and then spend the rest of the day figuring out where I went and what happened to the little candies I thought I was carrying around.

Westbound

I had this incident once when I got on the train going out of New York City. This very intense young man sat next to me for about fifty miles, but got off somewhere in Westchester or beyond. I was going up to Albany and then all the way out to Colorado so I was about to settle in for a nap. But the guy was quite intense.

I had a newspaper in my hand and he pointed out that the killer referenced on the front page had just been in Manhattan. "As were we all," he said, looking around at the people on the train. It seemed like a pretty normal train-car full of people, all ages, both genders, even some families. But this young guy could have been a killer, and I realized that, even as he was insinuating, it seemed, that maybe I was.

He left me alone until his stop, at which point he got off rather quickly, and then I realized that he'd left his phone on the seat. The phone was dead. There was no way I could reach him anyway, even if it were charged. He was there, the phone was here. I wondered if perhaps my charger, which I always carry with me, would work on it.

The train was an Amtrak and it had a club car, and believe it or not way up there I found a plug and was able to plug it in. I thought of handing it to the authorities right away, namely, the conductor on the train. After all, it was really between him and the train; there was no reason I should even be involved, not to mention using my own charger to charge his phone.

There was a card game near where the plug was and some guy with a white Panama hat noticed me messing with my charger, which didn't fit his phone, and came over and offered his own charger which he was pretty sure would work. It did. But now I felt obligated to go sit near the card game since I was using this guy's charger to find out about what was on this phone. Deep down, I thought this guy was the killer. You couldn't tell from the picture in the newspaper; that was a police artist's sketch and it was like a horoscope, it could fit just about anyone. You could look at that police artist's version of a young guy with a handsome face, and a winter hat, and intense eyes, and if you were in the mood half the people on the train would fit that profile. So I figured I had to get into that phone to learn more about the guy who had been sitting next to me.

The card game broke into a raucous fight as two guys accused the guy with the Panama hat of cheating. Apparently, they said that while he got up to get me the charger he'd looked at this other guy's cards. There were two guys pummeling him and trying to take this wad of bills that he'd cleared from the table in winning. "You cheated! they yelled, "Give us the money!" I felt like I had to do something, though I really didn't want to get involved, so I started pulling on the back of the largest guy, a big red-headed guy who turned out to be George.

The fourth card-player was a woman. She was quite beautiful, and did nothing but put the chips in order and watch.

Two men burst into the club car and came up to us with guns drawn; one had an Amtrak uniform. They told us all to line up near the wall; this was near the outlet so I took the phone and charger and just tucked it away. They had the woman against the wall too; there was me, the two big guys, the guy with the Panama hat, and the woman. They patted down the fanny pack of the guy with the Panama hat and found a gun. "What's this?" they said. The fanny pack was clearly in the spot where he'd been sitting.

"It's not mine! That woman put it in there while I was helping this guy with the charger!" He looked at me like he wanted me to say something in his defense. He was pretty sure nobody else would.

But he was wrong. George said, "That's right! She put it in there!"

"That's your gun, George," said the woman.

"Everybody off the train!" they said. The train was stopping; we were in Albany. My plan had been to get out here anyway, to look up an old college friend; he knew vaguely that I was coming. We lined up in front of them to get off the train. The other guy, the guy with the red bandana, whined about some stuff he didn't want to be separated from. He was pretty sure that, off the train, the train would go on without us, and his stuff would still be under his seat. They assured him that he'd be back on the train in time. I wasn't so sure, but I didn't care; I didn't have stuff.

The minute we got off the train George set off and disappeared in the crowd. They couldn't shoot at him because he was running behind random people who were getting off the train. He was a big guy, but really they just appeared to be Amtrak security and didn't really want to shoot anyone anyway. The money we were talking about was just a fistful of bills, mostly ones, that George and the man with the hat had been scuffling over; the guy with the uniform had those. He had the gun, too.

We stood outside the train while people finished getting off and others started getting on. It was a warm spring day, a little cool out, but the sun was shining. "This fight was about this money, right?" the guy in the uniform said. "But this fellow ran off," he said, referring to George, "so I guess the money's yours, huh?" and he gave the money to the guy with the hat. "But I'm keeping the gun. You can't have a gun on these trains. Now get back on there and behave!" He and the other guy turned on their heels and left, leaving us, me, the man with the hat, the woman, and the guy with the bandana, to board again. The guy with the bandana was relieved and went straight to his stuff.

I had a split-second decision to make: whether to change my ticket for a ticket tomorrow, and go visit my college buddy, as I'd originally planned, or to just get back on the train with these two, the guy with the hat and the woman, spurned and abandoned by George. I decided to stick with them and get back on the train. My college buddy could wait; I'd be coming back through in a couple weeks. But the main reason was I didn't want to deal with anyone from Amtrak, ticket master, anyone. I didn't want to give them the phone. I think they handled the incident well enough, I just didn't want any more to do with them.

Back in the club car the man with the hat bought us coffees with the money in his fist that he'd won nefariously; he admitted that he might have looked at George's cards. There wasn't all that much of it anyway and it didn't go that far since coffee was like a fortune on an Amtrak. I settled into the booth and tried to figure out what the relation of George and the woman was; clearly they'd known each other. I asked her if he was her husband or what, and did she expect to see him again? I kept my eye out for the guy with the bandana but didn't see him.

She said they were actors going to play a show in Cleveland and she was aware that he had a rough side; she knew about the gun; but she'd agreed to go with him on the train to Cleveland as it was better than traveling alone. She didn't know what motivated him to bolt in Albany or what he would do on the streets of Albany. Amtrak had his gun. Maybe he'd try to get it back.

The man with the hat claimed he was going to Cleveland too; he was the actor, though, I figure, and was interested in the woman. I was too, but not enough to interfere or to get off the train in Cleveland. We played cards most of the night with an old deck of cards with presidents on them, but only after they agreed to my demand that no money be involved. I remember raking in some chips over an old Garfield card that was like king of clubs or something, but my pleasure was short-lived because the woman was really the best at cards. It turned out, though, that the phone was the phone of the killer. I gave the charger back and we looked at it together; it opened right up without a passcode or anything, and there were plenty of signs that the owner had used it for bad purposes. After a point I agreed to take it straight to the police in Chicago, which I did, and I just told them I couldn't hand it in to Amtrak for my own reasons. It wasn't that I was mad at them or anything; I got right back on that Amtrak later in the day anyway for the long ride out to Colorado. You never know who you're going to meet on those trains.

The Bog

In the middle of the night, maybe four in the morning, I woke up from a bad dream and couldn't get back to sleep. Normally I get back to sleep right away, but the puppy sleeping beside me was having a bad dream too, and in the process of comforting him, so that he could get back to sleep, I started worrying about all the things in life that generally keep you up at night. In my case, there are plenty. Giving up, I went downstairs and sat in my chair.

What I often do in situations like this is play online boggle, or the bog, which is an intense little online world where, in the process of trying to find words in a cube of letters, in this situation sixteen of them, I get my mind off whatever is bugging me and into a more mundane, relaxing but competitive sport. Some programmer set it up so that it runs by itself, with a new game every few minutes, and in the daytime up to thirty or forty people will compete, all with different names, but in the middle of the night, maybe only five or six.

On this particular night, there were twelve, and two of them were the Fosters, a man and a woman. The woman was slightly better than the man; she'd place maybe third while he placed fifth. Back when they were a team, Team Foster, they'd win every game the whole time they played. The game allows you to be a team, but then the rest of us only see your collective score under Team Foster, and don't get to see the individual players. But occasionally one would quit before the other, or start before the other, or perhaps one would get up to get coffee, and we'd see only the one player: Team Foster: Carl or Team Foster: Izbla. I assumed that that last one was Izabella, or something like that, and that they were married and probably lived together. But over the years we saw a spat, and then we saw them break up, and then they were never Team Foster anymore. So I had made a couple of assumptions, which I was aware were based on flimsy evidence, that Izabella was no longer a Foster. For years they said nasty things to each other through the names they used for themselves on each boggle game. That's because you can change your name each game you play, eliminating the team if you want, or adding it, or just speaking to someone. One night I clearly remember, in about third place: TeamF got new bff and in fifth place Teamf gotohellIzzy. In their names, they were not using the "Team" function, not playing as a team, but speaking to each other using "Teamf" and carrying on their marital dispute. At least they were enjoying games of boggle though.

In boggle, you make as many words as you can from a cube of four letters across, four down, sixteen altogether, or you can play the five by five board, which is twenty-five altogether. In that little window of time you spell out as many words as you can, and believe me, some people can get an incredible number of words, fast, from those boards. You'd be surprised how many words there actually are, and after a while, if you study the ones you've missed, you get more of them, you get better at it, you become quite a fast typer. This had clearly happened to Izzy and Carl, perhaps even before they'd married, but I often pictured them, even during their marriage, both typing away at perhaps a kitchen table, maybe shouting out the words they got or found. It's a pleasurable way to pass the time. One very rarely wins, because so many people on there are so good at it. Some, I suspect, have found a way to cheat; perhaps they got a computer to list out all the possible words and they just type them in? I'm not sure, but people get incredibly high scores. I almost never win, and it's all I can do to keep from coming in last, especially in the late nights when the hard-core players are all out there, and almost everyone gets way more points than I do.

So on this night they were both there, and they were both talking to each other, and it was about three in the morning. But suddenly I got very disturbed by the names they were giving themselves. Izzy was in trouble. In the higher position I'd see teamf help carl to which he'd reply, the next game, teamf whatsupizzy. She, as her name, used teamf imtrappedneedurhelp and his name was teamf wtf. She used teamf needoutofhere and he used teamf thoughthewasbff. She used teamf hesamonster and he used teamf getonfbnwelltalk. She used teamf cantheswatching and then she disappeared. He played a number of other games, asking her questions, but they went unanswered; she was gone.

In the middle of the night, I'm trying to calm my mind, thinking of words given a number of combinations. Game after game relaxes my mind, and keeps it off of my own problems, which are sometimes overbearing. But now I was in the middle of Izzy and Carl's problem. She fell in with the wrong guy. Carl was her only way to get help, get her out of it. Carl undoubtedly at least knew where she lived. Carl could at least do something about it. I had no idea even what city they were in, or where. I thought I remembered, from some earlier thing one of them said, Virginia somewhere. Virginia is for lovers, I thought. But it's also for a whole range of other things, too, I'm sure. Some lurid drama was playing out there in Virginia that night, I imagined. If I were Carl, I'd head over to her house, even if she were an ex.

But then, I had no idea how bad their breakup was. I figured it was a good sign that they could still get on the online boggle and play a few games together at night, even if they weren't a team any longer. But really I had no idea if Carl could stomach getting involved with some controlling new boyfriend that Izzy had. Would he come to her rescue?

I guess I'd have to stay on the bog to find out.

Traffic Light

Fred had done a lot of traveling in his wayward youth, and now that he'd moved back home, to central Illinois, he could hardly help thinking of some of the wild things he'd done. That was because now, living in a small town with a wife and two young children, he was out driving on the streets of the town a lot, and there were a lot of traffic lights. He'd moved here from the mountains, where there were virtually no lights, but just endless windy gravel roads and cliffs, so now he was happy with less responsibility on his mind, but he had these lights to sit through. Even a couple of seconds of sitting at a red light, in one of the town's many intersections, and his mind would go off into the crazy things he'd done as a youth.

Once he'd made a bunch of money, in illegal ways mostly, selling pot which was illegal at the time, and he'd found his way down to the beaches of Belize, where there was a community of like-minded people hiding out from the law mostly. Marijuana was part of every conversation for him at the time; whole days went by with nothing else but a bunch of smoke, and it was pretty powerful smoke, as he would tell his friends later. But one day his friend Mattie talked him into driving this old car 500 miles through the jungle to get to some old ruins that Mattie was sure held the secrets of human history. Fred had no doubt that he was right. But what he should have done was check to make sure the car was up to the trip. They both knew that 500 miles would take them about ten hours, driving tortured mountain gravel roads where anything could happen.

What they couldn't have foreseen was that the roads were not only gravel, but also terrible. At one point they hit a pothole so big that the car's transmission broke. They were something like 180 miles into the trip; they'd been on the road almost five hours, and they were deep in the middle of some jungle where it seemed not another soul was anywhere for miles around. They opened up the hood and messed with the car, but neither of them had any sense of how you could fix a transmission out in the middle of the jungle. It was pretty sure, they knew, that no one was going to come by, at all. No help, no neighbors, no village nearby, nothing, just the jungle sounds of birds and frogs and other loud animals that seemed to be giving them unwanted advice. They stood there in the early afternoon, and then, it started to rain lightly.

The car still wouldn't go forward. It wouldn't go into first, or second, or third. Finally to their surprise they noticed that it went into reverse, though. That was their only option. Although they were prepared to camp, they didn't want to camp, not knowing what kind of animals there were in the area, and besides, there was absolutely no place to pull over. They wanted out of this little jungle place with a terrible gravel road through it. So, they got back into the car, and put it in reverse.

Progress was tedious. They were going backwards, over the same terrible roads they'd come in by. Fred was driving, and he drove by putting his foot on the gas and at the same time twisting himself around and looking out the back window. That road had a lot of twists and turns, and a lot of potholes. What took them four or five hours to get in, took them more like eight to get home. And the pot hadn't helped. He and Mattie kept up a steady smoke, all the way into the jungle, but when they tried to think straight and drive backwards, it was really difficult. He swore that night to ease up on the pot.

But he wasn't really able to live up to his word. When he got back to Illinois, he got a job as a truck driver, doing long haul trips across the midwest carrying all kinds of things. They set him off in this huge truck and on one of his first trips, he almost sliced off the top half of his truck going under a bridge that was too low. They told him to use his GPS to get on the right highway, and he did, but here he was driving down this one highway, and along comes this bridge with a height about a foot or so below what he was carrying. Fortunately he saw it, and stopped just in time. The front of his truck was right up against the bridge itself and he knew there was no way he could fit under it.

It was night-time, and again he was alone. He got out of his truck and looked around; no traffic going in either direction. He was hoping somebody would come by who would help him, directing traffic if nothing else, but there wasn't a soul around. Worst of all, the road had pretty steep ditches on both sides so it was impossible to simply turn around. He had a fairly long truck and would need a wide driveway to turn around, but he hadn't seen one, and had no idea how far he'd have to go, backwards, to get to one.

Still, it was the middle of the night, and he was carrying what, a few thousand pounds of someone's valuable merchandise, and he was responsible to not run it into the ditch, or just stop and give up for the night. He put it in reverse and slowly, slowly backed up until he could find a crossroad.

As it turned out the nearest crossroad was about six miles, and he'd never seen another car coming either way the whole time. He'd only been going about twenty, just like it was when he was in Belize, and he was shaking in fear that the truck would jackknife or get turned in such a way that he'd be unable to maneuver.

That was another night that went on forever. He'd had to turn around and go back, and find a better way, and somehow it took him almost all night, and at the company they weren't that sympathetic, even though they had set him along on the wrong road. It was almost as if it was a test. If he lost his cool out on that lonely midnight road, he wasn't fit for driving.

Now, it was a blizzard. He had a wife and two young kids, and was responsible for the kids' transport across town to the daycare. He had finally kicked the pot habit: it hadn't helped in Belize, hadn't helped in the trucking business, hadn't helped at all, in general. Now he had children, and wanted nothing more than for them to grow up and not have to live through any of that stuff. When he was out in his car, on the city streets, he prayed; sometimes he prayed hard, or through the entire trip. But the town's traffic was incredibly predictable. People kept to the order of the law and the road. They stopped at reds, or soon after it turned red, sometimes flying through those things. The walk/don't walk signs would flash downtown and people would actually use them, and everything worked out fine, unlike some of the crazy cities he'd seen. Overall he had nothing to worry about. Still, his past came to haunt him, and every time he went out in the car, he'd have visions of broken transmissions or low bridges, impeding his progress or forcing him to back up and start all over again.

At this particular stoplight there was a blizzard, but cars were lined up in all four directions; he was first in his own lane, going straight and waiting for a green. The light going the other way turned yellow, then red, and just for a second there, cars in both lanes were stuck behind their red while the delay that they'd timed allowed for him to get his green and go. In that second, he prayed. May I only go forward now, and only go where I'm going, and may everything work out. May none of these cars come flying through their red smashing cars in the intersection to smithereens. May all the things I can possibly imagine, please, not come true, and let order prevail on this earth. Amen.

Jimmy and the Skeletons

 

The last night Jimmy had walked Laura home, it was just a few days before Halloween. The neighborhood was very well decorated and thousands or orange leaves were falling all over the decorations and in the street, making noise when they walked. It was impossible not to walk on orange leaves everywhere, as even the people who raked assiduously could not keep up with the number that had fallen.

But it was the decorations that she remembered the best. Skeletons with blood on them, a bride-scarecrow with blood on her wedding gown, a Santa with his head cut off. People were going all out. There were a lot of the balloons - balloon ghosts, balloon dragons, balloon vampires, that kind of thing. But the scarecrows, handmade people, were a lot more realistic. And whatever they were using for fake blood, or the red blood-appearing subtance on all the clothes, it worked. These exhibits were getting more sophisticated every year.

Jimmy was depressed; she already knew that. It wasn't just that she'd just broken up with him about a week ago. They'd gone over that, her reasons, her need for some space, her need to not be taking care of him just at this point of her life; she was trying to graduate from high school. He was depressed because his parents had apparently failed him. They told him that since he was nineteen, he had to either go to college or get a job, and as he'd made it clear he was pretty much unable to do either one. He couldn't take college, couldn't study, couldn't sit in another single class. As for jobs, yes there were plenty around, but those terrified him. He couldn't bring himself to even apply. Just thinking about it gave him terrible panic attacks.

So his life had become quite uncomfortable, and he didn't quite know what to do about it. He had moments of happiness. He would smile at Laura and tell her she made him laugh. He would say that the days they went together as boyfriend and girlfriend were the best days, the ones he'd always remember. He said that the best thing about high school was the classes they'd been in together though there were only a few of them. As they walked he kicked a few branches in the street and sometimes she'd see in him that boy side of him that she'd known just about forever, and she wondered, what happened, did life take most of his spirit away? What does he mean he can't get a job? Of course he could! He was just terrified of the next step, growing up.

As they walked up the brick street, through the leaves, a car came along facing them and stopped. They recognized Vern, a friend of theirs from high school. Vern was joining the army and leaving in about a week, he said; he'd stopped noisily and rolled down his window to talk to them. He'd decided that his girlfriend, Gwen, would just have to wait back here for him to finish; he'd be in the Army a couple of years. Maybe he'd be able to marry her and bring her along with him, but that was a long shot, he said, and he felt like he was too young to marry. He asked Laura about her plans, but her plans hadn't changed: she wanted to finish high school and go on to be a nurse. He asked Jimmy about his plans, though, and Jimmy was stuck in his tracks. He had absolutely nothing to say. He had no plans. Vern tried asking him if he wanted to join the Army; they could go off to boot camp together. No, the Army held no appeal to him.

To Laura, what she remembered best was not Jimmy's absolute refusal to have a plan, or see any hope, or see anything in his future, but rather the dancing lights on the skeletons in the yard nearby. This particular house had set up a moving light display so that all the tombstones, and the skeletons with their blood and their poses, would be bathed in moving light, and the moving lights danced around them all evening apparently, making a kind of light show for passersby like Laura and Jimmy. Even Vern for a minute seemed to appreciate the amount of work they had done to fix up their yard; it seemed much more elaborate than the Christmas displays of yore or the other kinds of displays that had been a running feature of the neighborhood. Laura wondered if they were trying to get more trick-or-treaters on Hallowe'en night or something, as if the light show might somehow draw them in.

On Hallowe'en night Vern's little brother Adam came around trick-or-treating and told Laura that Jimmy had killed himself, jumped off the Commander Avenue bridge over the interstate, just as Vern was driving by, and Vern himself had hit him. Vern was pretty shook up about it, said Adam, but everyone knew there was nothing he could have done and besides, it was unlikely that Jimmy had even known that it was him coming, as he'd jumped off the bridge. It was a cruel thing to do, the night before Hallowe'en, but Jimmy had done it and Laura hadn't even heard about it until Adam had come around trick-or-treating. She quickly made some calls and found out that it was true. Somehow she'd been left off the "inform immediately" list and the family was still dealing with the shock of the tragedy.

Vern eventually got over it and went off to the Army in three or four days as was his original plan. The problem was, he'd had Gwen with him in the car, and what they'd seen was a horror that they would remember forever. It did some damage to his car, but not much; his car would be alright in the end, and fortunately, traffic on the interstate had not accordioned up and killed anyone else, but it was still a frightening image that Gwen would never be able to live down. Gwen really didn't know Jimmy at all; he was just a guy who fell out of the sky while she was driving with her boyfriend at night.

Laura and Gwen became fast friends, but after a few weeks they stopped talking about it altogether and talked about other things. They each held their last memories of Jimmy close and they had that in common, but the rest of the world seemed to go on as if nothing had happened. Finally snow came, and the leaves blew away or were raked out of the way, so that the town had a peaceful wintery feeling. But the Christmas displays didn't hold a candle to what Laura had seen at Halloween. It was like people just didn't have all the decorating inspiration for the displays, or maybe they were worn out from having gone totally overboard at Hallowe'en. By Christmas and Hannukah, it seemed more like they were ready to hide in their houses until spring, and just keep the light shows to a minimum.