HE DREAMT a day, and got lost, drove eight hours north, and then he crossed the border to Indiana. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there, but he felt good, anyway, the blunder like a gift.

The highway was iced and ran flat through cornfields and the air smelled of cow, damp earth and old leaves. He stopped for gas, and an old man handed him a glossed brochure, and he took it, and then he got in the car and studied it. He took the state highway ten miles to Fairmount, and then he drove through the old downtown, and houses turned into shops that sold pictures of the dead actor born there, and a record store kept a picture of him in the window, and then there was a diner named for him, and then the house of his birth. Terry went past the city limits, followed a map on the brochure. He stood at the grave, and his hands went red, and then he got back into the car and followed the pamphlet some more to the house of the actor’s grandparents. The actor was a boy there. Terry stopped the car in the drive and cut the engine. The house was white and peeling, and the cold wind pushed through the bare trees on both sides. Terry got out of the car and went up to the front end and sat on the hood. He crossed his legs at the ankles, cocked his boots in the dirt.

Terry saw the dead actor at a walk in the yard, near the pump well, and the shotgun barrel down and rested a bent forearm, and his large round eyeglasses down at the bridge of his nose. He wore an old thick wool sweater, three buttons at the neck. He wore straight blue canvas pants and a fat brown leather belt. The pants were pulled high on his waist. He stopped front of the yard and looked serious on a dove. He put the shotgun up and sighted it, and then let the barrel drop back. He got a cigarette, no filter, put a match at his heel and struck it. He stayed on the bird awhile, and then he walked off behind the house, and he did not come back. An hour the sun went.