BLUESTOWN

When I was fifteen, my father showed up at our high school and stood outside the door of Mr. Margin’s history class wearing his leather jacket, waving a pink piece of paper. It was a September afternoon, sunny but not too hot, the sky bright blue. I had been alternately staring out the window and making eyes at Lucy Westbrook who sat opposite me, and had probably the nicest body in the whole school. Mr. Margin stopped lecturing (the subject was, I think, slavery) and went to the door, then gestured for me to step out into the hall with him.

“You’re excused Spencer,” he said. “It seems you’ve forgotten something.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the prospect of getting out of that stuffy classroom was an unexpected gift.

“Your doctor’s appointment, Spence,” said my dad, pointing to his watch. “We’re late already.” He had this concerned, fatherly expression on his face, and looked at Mr. Margin in commiseration. “I knew he’d forget. He’s known about this for weeks.”

“It’s my experience,” said Mr. Margin, “that given half a chance, these kids will forget anything. Get a move on Spencer—read the next chapter for tomorrow’s class.” He gave me an affectionate smack on the shoulder.

“Kids,” said my dad to him, then led me down the hall. When we got to the front entrance, he looked both ways, then began to run. He took off across the front lawn, past a group of kids sharing a joint, nearly tripping over a girl who was stretched out in the sun. I ran after him, thinking that this time he had finally, truly lost it. When I caught up with him at his car, a ’67 Buick station wagon with a wired-on front bumper, I could see the back was loaded with equipment—all his guitars, an amplifier, and a suitcase. I got in the passenger side as he started up the engine.

“What’s going on?” I asked when I’d caught my breath.

He slipped on a pair of aviator sunglasses. “It’s way too nice a day to hang out in school,” he said.

He loved to break rules—it was one of the things I liked best about him. It was also part of the reason he’d been banished, several years before, from the small ranch house where my mother and I still lived along with Hal, her new husband. My dad, a few gray traces just beginning to appear in the hair that fell over his ears, now inhabited a small apartment downtown, over Angelo’s Pizza and Calzone. I still saw a lot of him, more than my mother would have liked. He was only supposed to get me one day a week, but I’d go over to his place after school and hang around listening to albums, or playing cards. Since his work, when he had any, was at night, he was home afternoons. He liked to talk about the old days, when rock and roll was still counterculture and not just something else to show on TV. We’d sit on his secondhand sofa bed, albums and cassette tapes strewn over the floor, the smell of pizza wafting up through the floorboards, and he’d tell me how he was never really cut out to be a family man. Possessions and responsibilities made him nervous, even things like his stereo and television. Even so, whenever he did get some money, he’d spend it on a new toy—a phase-shifter or a compressor, or maybe a graphic EQ—and together we’d spend hours fooling with the knobs and buttons.

He played me albums, everything from Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins to Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman. Guitar, he said, was the only instrument on which you could really play the blues. I was familiar with all sorts of obscure, Chicago-based players, most of them named Milton or Melvin. I fully believed I knew what it meant to have the blues. In school I covered my notebooks with drawings of guitars and amps. My prize possession was a Muddy Waters T-shirt he brought me back from New York once, and which I wore so often my mother had to swipe it from my room just to get it washed. With my friends I smoked cigarettes and kept my hands plunged deep into my pockets, nodding in time to an imaginary beat. What I liked above all things was the tortured sound of a guitar string, bent almost to the point of breaking.

I asked about all the equipment, and he explained that he had an audition in Montreal for a gig with a new band that had backing, a recording contract—everything but the right guitarist. This seemed major—there was an intensity on his face that I couldn’t remember seeing. When I asked him how they happened to come up with his name, he just smiled and said “a friend of a friend.” My dad had a lot of friends.

He made a living as a guitarist, more or less. It always seemed he was on the verge of success when something would happen. My mother said he brought it on himself, but as far as I could see, he just ran into a lot of bad luck. For a while he’d pinned his hopes on a local woman named Maddie Kelso—an emaciated redhead with an enormous, whiskey-steeped voice. He worked with her for about a year, but she got born again and moved to Wisconsin. Another time he left his car unlocked and all his instruments were stolen, so for months he had to borrow equipment. But he stayed optimistic, full of plans, and even my mom, on the uncomfortable occasion when she would run into him at the supermarket or the drugstore, found it hard to be angry with him. She didn’t like us spending time together and said he was a bad role model, but he could always do something dumb, like wiggle his eyebrows at her, or juggle a couple of avocados, and at least get a laugh.

We went to the Dairy Queen and had black-and-white milk shakes. It was where the greasers hung out, and the parking lot was full of them: slicked-back hair, big combs sticking out of the back pockets of their polyester pants. They leaned against jacked-up cars, smoked cigarettes, ignored the girlfriends who lounged next to them, all hair spray and lip gloss, car radios blaring. With his leather jacket, worn-out jeans, and shades, my dad was easily the coolest-looking person there. I liked the way we could just hang out together on the hood of the Buick, feeling the hot metal under our legs, sipping a cold shake.

“Jimi,” he said. It was something we’d done since I was little—calling each other by the names of dead guitarists. I got to be Jimi, and he was Duane, after Duane Allman, who was definitely the closest thing to a hero in his life. Nobody’d ever played slide like Duane, or ever would.

“They sent me expense money,” he said.

“Great,” I said. “That means they’re serious.”

He shrugged. “I guess. The way I see it, if I drive up, it costs me next to nothing and I pocket the difference. What do you say? Feel like a road trip?”

I could think of nothing I felt like more. An image of the two of us cruising north through New England flashed through my mind like the trailer for a sixties road movie. But, I pointed out, my mother was going to be a problem.

He lowered his voice. “We won’t tell her—we’ll just leave a note saying you’re with me, and when we get back, I’ll take all the heat.”

A note from him wasn’t going to get me out of anything, but I wanted to go, so I convinced myself it was a workable plan. After all, it would just be a couple of days.

“It feels a little like running away from home,” I said, enjoying the idea. A friend of mine, Nicky Dormer, had run away from home for four days the year before, and afterward he’d seemed to me years older.

“Jimi, my man,” he answered, massaging my shoulders. “It is impossible to run away from home with your own father.”

My mom was still at work. We drove by the house and I ran upstairs to get a toothbrush while he stood in the kitchen penciling a quick note in his own, peculiarly recognizable handwriting—an angular sort of chicken scratch. When I came back down he was still laboring over it. It was odd seeing him there, back in the house for the first time in years. He looked uncomfortable, out of place. I looked at what he wrote, but it wasn’t until we were in the car and heading out of town that I asked him about it.

“Hey, Duane,” I said, “How come you put down that we were going to Virginia?”

“Just a precaution,” he said. “In case she decides to call the cops, it’ll buy us some time.”

          

As soon as we were on the road, he slipped in a cassette of the Allman Brothers doing “Statesboro Blues,” and I kicked my feet up on the dashboard. The music almost seemed to be powering the car. I’d seen pictures from back when I was only about three or four, when my dad practically was Duane Allman. He wore his hair all the way down his back and had the same muttonchop sideburns. The day after Duane died on his motorcycle, my dad managed to get into an accident on his. He broke a leg and an arm, but he also got an out-of-court settlement that was enough to buy our house, as well as a good PA system and a couple of guitars. He was twenty-five years old, a high school graduate with a wife, a kid, and his own place. Things started to happen. Weird people would come over in the middle of the night to hang out, and in the morning there’d be spilled beer and cigarette burns in the carpet. My mom and he would fight, then he’d disappear for a couple of days at a time. Afterward he’d always try to make up for it by doing something real normal, like mowing the lawn, or taking the three of us out to the movies.

Finally, she just told him to move. I was nine. “Buddy,” he said to me, “I’m not going anywhere.” He wrote his new phone number on the inside of a book of matches and put it in my hand.

          

We stopped for gas at a turnpike service station and he pulled out his wallet. It was stuffed with bills, more money than I’d ever seen him with at one time. He removed a ten and gave it to me. “Candy bars,” he said, solemnly.

I got change and pushed quarters into the machine until I had extracted four Snickers, our favorite. Then, on impulse, I also bought a pair of cheap amber-tinted sunglasses that were aviators like his. They were small on me and rode high on the bridge of my nose. They cost six dollars and were probably worth about forty-nine cents, but I bought them anyway. When I got back to the car he lifted them off and bent the flimsy frame across the middle, just slightly, then put them back on me.

“That’s it,” he said. “Now you’re cooking.”

          

As we drove, we talked about Canada. Neither of us had ever been, so we made a list of things it was famous for.

“Canadian bacon,” I offered.

“Salmon,” he said.

“The Expos.”

“Draft dodgers.”

“Niagara Falls.”

“That’s in America.”

“Only part of it. The other part is Canadian.”

He looked over at me. “Who figured that out?”

“It makes sense. It’s a natural divider. That’s how they always divide up countries. States too.” When he didn’t say anything, I fell silent for a little while, thinking about how things divided. How did they know exactly where Canada stopped and America began? It was all just water—there couldn’t be any clear line like on a map. I thought about me and my dad—I was halfway to thirty, and he was halfway to seventy. I always had an idea that when I turned eighteen I would experience some obvious transformation into adulthood, but now that I was getting closer, I wondered. The twenty years that separated me from my dad suddenly seemed like nothing at all, if you looked at the whole picture.

          

We crossed the Vermont border around sunset and stopped for burgers at a place with two enormous trucks parked outside. It was a classic roadside diner, but somehow not quite real—everything in it was brand-new, though styled to look mid-fifties. It was someone’s idea of what a diner should have looked like—lots of chrome and mirrors and a big, colorful jukebox. I put a quarter in and selected two songs.

“If they like you, does that mean you’ll have to move to Canada?” I asked, coming back to the table.

“Could be,” he said. “I don’t know. It all depends.”

I pictured his apartment over the pizzeria and tried to imagine someone else living there, but it just didn’t seem a real possibility. “I’d miss you,” I said. “Where would I hang out?”

He tapped the tabletop with his fork. “Well, let’s not count our chickens. They may not want me at all. I’m getting kind of old for this line of work.”

“How can you say that? Look at the Stones. Look at . . .” I tried to think of someone else. “B. B. King. He’s still going, and he must be about sixty.”

He yawned. His eyes were red from all the driving, and he looked tired. “I don’t know,” he said. “The way I see it, this may be my last shot. If it isn’t happening, I may just try to get into something respectable.”

“Like Hal?” Hal was in insurance, and we had a fair amount of fun at his expense. Both of us thought insurance was about the most boring thing you could possibly do, and that by marrying Hal my mother had not so much found a mate as taken out a policy. Actually though, I kind of liked him. He never tried to be my father, he was just Hal. He left me alone when I didn’t want to be bothered, and he was an incredible cook.

“Exactly. How do you think I’d look in a suit and tie?” He picked up his glasses and pointed them at me, businesslike. “Let’s talk coverage,” he said in his best salesman’s voice. “You tell me you play in a band? Fine. Say one day you get up there on stage, put a hand on your guitar, the other on the microphone. And let’s just say that system isn’t properly grounded. In one blue flash you get zapped right into the next state. What about your wife? Your kids? Who takes care of them? The musicians’ union? You say you’re not in the union? Well, I have a little policy designed just for you. We call it the Guitar Player’s Friend—it provides all-purpose coverage for you and your loved ones, and it’s issued by the Chuck Berry Mutual Accident and Life Insurance Company, a name you’ve known and trusted for years. Believe me, you won’t want to plug in without it.”

The waitress interrupted him with our food. I waved a french fry. “Brilliant,” I said. “You could be rich.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said modestly. “I’d like to think I’ll be able to leave you something someday.” He sipped his coffee. “If you had all the money you could ever want, what would you do?”

I chewed and thought. “I don’t know, I guess I’d buy about ten guitars, a small recording studio, and some video equipment.”

He nodded. “And live where?”

“Hawaii maybe. The Swiss Alps.”

“Good choices,” he said. “A little romantic, but you’re supposed to be romantic at fifteen.”

“So? What would you do?” I asked.

“I believe,” he said, “I’d do exactly what I’m doing right now.”

          

He was tired and didn’t feel like driving much more, so we started looking around for a place to stay. Since we were in Vermont, he said, we ought to find one of those quaint country inns where you slept under thick goose down comforters and they served you up a big New England style breakfast in the morning. We must have spent an hour driving around trying to find one. Eventually we settled on a motor court called Traveller’s Rest, with a blinking neon sign of a sheep jumping over the name. The parking lot was empty, and my dad kept shaking his head over the fact that the one time he actually wanted to spend some money he couldn’t find a way to do it, but I was happy. This was much more the kind of place I’d imagined crashing for the night, and as for the rest of that stuff, it wasn’t really cold enough for a down comforter, and I was never much on breakfasts.

Our room was hooked up with cable television, and I immediately found an old movie that looked good, a British vampire flick with lots of gore and women nearly tumbling out of their bodices. My dad spent ten minutes going back and forth to the car bringing in all his guitars. It seemed a little odd to me that he’d bothered to take every single one of them along, but I didn’t say anything. This was a very big audition for him, and I figured he needed the extra confidence. He took a pint bottle of Chivas Regal out of his bag, went into the bathroom, and returned with two tissue-wrapped glasses. I’d never had Chivas, but I remembered reading on an album cover that it was John Lee Hooker’s favorite drink. I squinched over to make room for him on the bed, then took the glass he handed me. He turned the sound on the television down.

“Your mother called me last week,” he said, after a moment. “Says you’re messing up in school.”

“That’s not true,” I told him. “Just one class. I’m getting B’s in everything else. Anyhow, why should she call you?”

“She wants us to stop hanging around together so much, at least till your grades pick up.”

We almost never talked about school, except in the most general way, and having him speak to me like this—father to son, when we were now hundreds of miles from home—seemed a kind of betrayal.

“That’s stupid,” I said.

He nodded.

“I hope that’s what you told her.”

“I didn’t tell her anything,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you first.”

I was suddenly angry at my mother for trying to interfere so blatantly with my life, and behind my back, too. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had been thinking about calling her, just to let her know I was all right, but now I felt like letting her stew a little.

“You know,” he said, lying back on the bed and crossing his legs, “she’s probably right. I’m thirty-five, still kicking around the same town I grew up in, still trying to land a steady gig. Being with me isn’t going to help you become CEO of General Motors.”

“Come on,” I said. “You’re my dad.” I sipped at my drink, which made my eyes water.

“OK,” he said, studying me. “I just wanted to make sure.”

A question occurred that I was almost afraid to ask. “Could she do something? Something legal I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a possibility.” He got up and went into the bathroom to pee.

I made a promise to myself that regardless of what happened, things would continue on between us the way they always had. It was hard to imagine my mother actually doing something so drastic, but taking off without her permission had already given me a sense of power. Things could be any way I wanted them to be, I thought. What were they going to do, put me under armed guard?

“How long do you think we’ll stay in Montreal?” I asked when he came back.

He looked through the blinds out at the parking lot. “Not long. A couple of days, tops.” Then he slapped a hand down on my leg. “What do you say we head out and see if there’s any nightlife around here?”

I jumped up and turned off the set.

          

We drove around until we found a little roadside place called Mother’s that had pickup trucks parked outside and a flashing red Miller sign in the window. There were maybe twenty-five people inside, not counting the band—five bored-looking guys in checked shirts playing sleepy country tunes. The guitar player didn’t look much older than me, in spite of an attempted mustache. When we walked in I immediately sensed hostility, but I just followed my dad. He walked to the bar, took a seat, ordered us drinks, and helped himself to a handful of peanuts from a bowl they had out. I reached in and grabbed a couple too. The bartender pursed his lips and considered me for a moment, then shrugged and uncapped us two longneck bottles of Bud.

“Never order anything fancy in a strange bar,” said my dad, tipping back his bottle. “The first thing people notice about you in a place like this is what you’re drinking.”

I nodded. We sat for a while, just swigging beer. Then I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I got back he was in a conversation with a fat guy he introduced as Al. Al worked as a mechanic, he said. He had huge, grease-blackened hands.

“This your kid?” asked Al.

My dad smiled proudly and I stood there feeling like a prize hog. I wished I were still back in the motel room watching television.

“I got a kid,” said Al. I waited for him to say something else, but for Al, the statement was a complete thought, and he just turned and faced the bar.

The band shuddered to a halt and went on break, and my dad ordered a round of shots for them, digging into his stuffed wallet and tossing a twenty onto the bar. Then he left me and Al sitting together, went over and got talking to the guitarist and bass player. I thought about all the bars in our town where he’d played. He was always in trouble with the club owners for showing up late, or mixing up dates, but he could smooth-talk them and manage to get hired again regardless. His ability in this respect was legendary. One time he got himself booked into two different places with different bands on the same night, and rather than cancel, did half of one gig, then drove to the other and finished up the night there, using me as an excuse. “You came down with a convenient case of the mumps,” he explained the next day. “I could never have made it without you.” For two days after that, I walked around faking a cough and trying to look weak, just in case someone should want to check out his story.

Al wasn’t much of a talker, so I drank at my beer and tried to pretend that hanging around in a bar was the most natural thing in the world for me. I counted the bottles of liquor lined up next to the cash register.

“Jimi,” said my dad, coming over and poking me in the side. “We’re going to sit in next set. What do you say?”

I looked into his eyes to see if he was kidding. I played a little guitar, but not very well, and never in front of people. The prospect terrified me, and I could see he was serious. “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll watch.”

“Come on, we’ll do some blues.” He smiled encouragingly.

“I can’t,” I said. “Really.”

“Sure you can,” he told me.

I felt something close to panic, but at the same time it didn’t seem that I had any choice. They had an extra guitar on stage for me, and the band’s guitarist handed his over to my dad. When he did that he gave me a little smile that made the few dark hairs spread out on his upper lip. I took it as a sign of encouragement and plugged in. My dad called out “Red House,” a Hendrix tune he knew I knew, and started playing. I tried to follow along, but after a few seconds I realized something was off.

My guitar was tuned a peculiar way. The chords I formed were one disaster after another. My dad kept giving me furious looks, as if I was deliberately screwing around. Everything I played came out wrong. He leaned over and shouted something to me that I could not hear above the music. I could see the band’s guitarist leaning against the bar, laughing. I did the only thing I could think of—I stopped playing. Or rather, I pretended to play, damping the strings with my left hand so that no sound came out. My dad shook his head, turned away, and began to sing.

He played particularly well. Toward the end he picked up an empty Budweiser bottle and ran it along the strings for a slide, while I mimed along, numb, waiting for it to be over. We got hoots of approval and applause, but I barely heard them in my rush to get off.

The band’s guitarist said something to me as he took the instrument out of my hands. I jumped down, ignoring the amusement in his eyes, and went and stood next to a shuffleboard table while my dad talked to some of the locals—bearded men in checked wool jackets who clapped him on the back and offered to buy him drinks. Finally he came over to me.

“Let’s go,” I said.

It was cold in the parking lot, the air smelling of pine, the muted sounds of the bar mixing with the swell and hush of the wind in the trees. My dad walked me to the car and unlocked it.

“It was in open tuning,” he said, finally. “Set up for slide.”

“Yeah?” I said. “How was I supposed to know that?”

“You know about open tuning. All you had to do was think.”

“I couldn’t think!” I practically shouted. “Nothing sounded right and I didn’t know what to do!”

“So what?” he said. “You just quit? You can’t let yourself get beat like that.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, what do you call it?” He was glaring at me, and I could see that he was really upset about this, more so even than I was.

“I didn’t quit,” I said quietly. “I stayed up there with you.”

          

We drove in a silence that I was afraid to break; the longer it went on the more permanent it felt. He wouldn’t look at me. He was speeding, too, I noticed, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Then, about a mile from our motel we got pulled over by the cops.

As the officer shined his flashlight into our faces, I thought about the note we’d left. If my mother really had reported us to the police, this was probably it. I wondered what, if anything, they could do to him. I suspected he could get in a lot of trouble. Mostly though, I was worried he might not get to the audition, and that it would somehow be my fault. I sat frozen in anticipation, the cold night air flowing against my face from the open window, hoping as hard as I could for nothing bad to happen.

“Been doing a little drinking tonight?” asked the policeman as he examined my dad’s license.

“Yes sir,” he said. “Two beers. But I’m sober.”

The cop pointed his flashlight in my face. “Who’s that?”

“My son.”

“Is that right?” He turned the light away from me and back at my dad. “Taking a little vacation are you?”

“You might say that.”

“OK, out of the car.”

I had to sit for ten minutes while they ran him through a series of tasks to determine whether he was drunk. It was hard to watch. He walked a straight line four times, and counted backward from fifty twice. All the while, another cop sat behind us, just a silhouette under the flashing blue light, speaking into his radio. They were checking on us. They didn’t believe he was my father.

Finally, they wrote out a ticket and let us go. Just like that. This seemed incredible luck to me, and as soon as we were back under way, I let out a little whoop.

“Man,” I said. “That was close.”

But he still wasn’t talking. In fact, he wouldn’t even look at me. I wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, to just forget it, but I couldn’t. He didn’t say anything at all until we got back to the motel. He put out a hand and tugged at the top of my head, then ran it down the back of my neck.

“You could use a haircut,” he said.

          

When I woke the next morning, he was in the bathroom, shaving. I went and leaned against the door, watching him slide the razor carefully along the contours of his throat. He put a finger on his nose and pushed it comically to one side to get at his upper lip, turned and made a face at me. I liked seeing him shave. Getting my toothbrush, I fought him for sink space. When he pushed back, I pushed harder, then scooped water out of the sink and splashed him. He dropped the razor, picked up the can of shaving cream and advanced toward me, his face spotted with islands of foam. I ran, but he cornered me by the television and emptied half the can onto my head before I managed to wrestle it out of his hands. We stood there for a while, the two of us covered in shaving cream, laughing. Then he took the can from my hands, flipped it once in the air and went back into the bathroom.

We reloaded the car and checked out. He paid cash for the room and asked the guy at the desk where we could get a good breakfast. He recommended a place about three miles away that turned out to be one of those country-style inns we’d been hoping to find the night before, and had in fact driven right past. We were both starved, and my dad told me to order a dream breakfast—anything I thought I could possibly eat. I had four eggs, home fries, sausages, waffles, toast, orange juice, and coffee. He had steak and eggs with fried onions. The waitress looked a little hassled bringing out all that food—there was barely room for the plates—but we got a kick out of being so extravagant, and we tipped her heavily when we were through. After all, it wasn’t our money.

We hit the road about eleven, windows open, tape deck turned up full. We sang along with some old Traffic and Santana, and I beat out rhythms by banging one hand on the glove compartment and the other against the roof of the car. It was a perfect day to be driving, and north seemed the only direction possible. The Buick’s big engine hummed powerfully in front of us, and even the air tasted like Canada—cool and fresh and full of promise.

“Hey,” I said to him. “What do you say after Montreal we just keep on going? We could set a record. First station wagon to reach the North Pole.”

“Bad idea,” he said, adjusting his glasses with his forefinger.

“Why?”

“Because. Too much competition. The North Pole is swarming with guitarists already.”

I kept quiet.

He closed his eyes for a moment. “They’ve got this little town up there. It’s jointly owned by all the major record companies.”

“Not a very pleasant place to live,” I said.

“That’s the whole point, it’s a miserable place to live.” He reached over and turned the stereo down. “Bluestown,” he said. “Most of the greats are up there, on salary, just biding their time. Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, Elmore James. All of them hanging out, drinking, jamming and trying to keep warm.”

I forced a laugh, but I wondered. Sometimes he seemed to have no notion of how old I was. Or even that I was there at all. “So what you’re saying is that they’re actually still alive?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Where do you think they keep getting those ‘newly discovered’ tapes from? The blues wasn’t selling, so they figured this would be a good way to stir up interest. And let me tell you something, a couple of years from now the world is going to be in for one hell of a surprise. Because they’re coming back, all of them.”

“Return of the Killer Guitarists,” I said in my best coming-attractions voice. “When is this going to happen?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? When we’re ready for them, I guess. When everyone has had enough of the crap they play on the radio.”

“Bluestown.” I flipped through the road atlas. “You know, it’s not here on the map.”

“It’s there. Trust me. You just go to Chicago, then head due north.”

“But,” I pointed out, “the North Pole is due north of everywhere, not just Chicago.”

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t argue with your father.”

          

I nodded off for a while, imagining a town built entirely of ice, with fur-bundled shapes walking up and down the streets carrying guitar cases. I kept thinking, How do I know these people are who they say they are if I can’t see their faces? Then we got off the highway and I woke up. We were a little south of St. Johnsbury. My dad said he wanted to take a few minutes and look at a typical New England town. The place was called Denton, and it was truly quaint: tree-lined streets, big old houses with well-kept yards, two neat, white-steepled churches, only a couple of blocks apart. It was one of those picture postcards of a town, and I thought it probably didn’t look any different now than it had fifty years ago. I couldn’t imagine what people there did for a living, but everyone we saw looked reasonably well off. We drove up and down its few streets, looking at the houses, and just enjoying the simplicity of the place. In the center of town, he pulled over by the bus station and put the car in neutral.

“How about a couple of candy bars before we get going?” he said.

I was still stuffed from breakfast, and I couldn’t imagine that he was actually hungry again, but I said sure and hopped out of the car. He stuck his hand out the window with a five dollar bill in it. I took the money and went inside.

It was a tiny bus station, just a window, a bench, and two vending machines. The guy at the window was out of singles, and I waited while he counted the whole five out in quarters, nickels and dimes. Then I bought two Snickers bars. With them in my hand, I stepped back out into the bright sunlight.

He was already gone. I could see the tailgate of the station wagon bouncing away from me down the street in the distance. I stood there watching him go, thinking that any moment now he would turn around and come back. It had to be a joke. But he kept going until the car disappeared over a crest.

I stared after him down the street. I was standing alone in the middle of a tiny Vermont town with two chocolate bars in my hand and no idea what to do next. Then I stuck my hand in my jacket pocket and felt the wad of money. He had slipped it there somehow without my noticing, and when I took it out I counted nearly seven hundred dollars, most of it in fifties and twenties. I sat down right where I was on the curb.

It took a little while to collect myself. I walked up and down the main street of Denton, Vermont, looking into shop windows, kicking at loose stones on the street. I opened one of the candy bars and took a bite, but dropped the rest of it in a trash can. I took out the roll of money again, fanned through it. This time, a small slip of yellow paper fell out from between two of the fifties. Picking it up, I saw that it was a withdrawal slip for just over nine hundred dollars from my father’s bank, and on it in a teller’s handwriting were the words Account Closed.

I stood for a while feeling the sun on my face, looking up at a solid blue sky that extended, unbroken, right up to the Canadian border and beyond. There was no audition. There had only been, for a brief while, an idea about the two of us starting over again someplace else, and maybe this time getting it right. I thought I understood what it felt like to look at your own future and see nothing but disappointment and failure stretching out like an endless series of clouds. The thing was, if he’d asked, I would have kept going. Taking all the change I had in my pockets, I began feeding the parking meters of downtown Denton, Vermont, pumping each one hard until it would take no more, then moving on to the next. After a while, when I ran out of coins, I stepped back into the dark little bus station and paid for a one-way ticket home.