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Maybe Gil’s daughters would think he was enjoying being single too much, or maybe he’d end up inspiring them. Whatever the case, Gil had decided to do whatever he felt like doing for a while, and that meant buying a motorcycle. For a couple of months, he’d looked longingly at a bike in the showroom window of a Ford dealer that he often drove by. A couple of days ago, he stopped and bought it. It was a beautiful blue BMW touring bike with all the bells and whistles, and it only had about two thousand miles on it. It had been over thirty years since he last owned a motorcycle.
He packed for a couple of nights and headed toward Greenfield. While riding his motorcycle, Gil felt excitement combined with unbridled joy. He was a careful rider, no longer captivated by the adolescent need for speed. After riding slowly and steadily across the metal-grate bridge over the Hudson River, he rolled through the countryside of eastern New York, inundated by intoxicating bursts of perfume coming from flowering plants. In Vermont, he took the bypass road around Bennington, then he headed up into the Green Mountains. The air got a little cooler as he gained altitude, but after reaching the summit, he descended into hot and humid air. He loved feeling closer to nature.
At the bottom of the mountains, the water in the Deerfield River wasn’t low like it usually was in summer. There had been quite a lot of rain over the past few weeks. He cruised by Dot’s Restaurant in Wilmington, where his family had experienced many great breakfasts when the kids were young. He headed down winding Route 100 into Jacksonville and then turned south toward Massachusetts. After passing through “downtown” Colrain, he was happy to find the bumpy back road into Greenfield open. It suffered some kind of damage every winter, and getting repair money often took a couple of years. That day, it was newly paved and smooth.
In Greenfield, Gil pulled into the parking lot at Denny’s Pantry. As he took off his helmet and jacket in his hometown, he felt nostalgic but also plagued by the shadow of depression he unjustly acquired while growing up there. As a child, he felt that his life was excruciatingly boring, and it seemed like forever until he could finally move out and go to college. He assumed millions of teenage kids everywhere in the world felt that way. Taking a seat at a small table outside under a tent, he ordered a tuna melt sandwich and looked around to see if he recognized anyone. He didn’t.
After lunch, he rode up to Poet’s Seat Tower, a red sandstone structure with a beautiful view overlooking the town and surrounding countryside. According to the brass plaque, the tower was built in the early 1900s in honor of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, a gifted local poet of some renown during the mid-1800s. He realized that he’d never read any of Tuckerman’s poems, so he made a mental note to google Tuckerman. Gil stowed his helmet and jacket in the top box on his bike, then climbed up the tower stairs.
The 360-degree view was a little hazy but still beautiful. He picked out his old neighborhood and other familiar sites, but the town’s huge leafy trees limited what he could see. He remembered climbing up the cliff face with his childhood friends. There were two climbable clefts in the cliff below the tower called the lemon squeeze and the orange squeeze. He wondered who had named those clefts.
When he’d had enough of reminiscing, he set out to find the cave of his nightmares. All he could remember was that it lay on the side of the mountain opposite the town, which headed down to the western bank of the Connecticut River. He walked slowly down the hill, trying to avoid losing his footing on the loose rocks, leaves, and sticks. For the past couple of years, he sometimes experienced this strange feeling that his mind wasn’t always fully synchronized with his body. He was less confident in his balance, and sometimes he even momentarily lost track of where he was and where he was headed. Gil hoped these weren’t early signs of dementia. If he did get injured, though, at least he could call for help on his cell phone. He didn’t have that safety measure when he was up there as a child.
He got most of the way down and could see the river through the trees, but there was no sign of rocky areas that could hide a cave. The river was a grayish-brown color, which was much better than the bright metallic green of his childhood. The upstream factories that polluted the water had long since been closed. He trudged back uphill at an angle toward the north, and he eventually encountered some promising rock formations. Still no caves. He headed back toward his bike, having decided to get some help.
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He backed his bike into one of the angled parking spots on Main Street. The parking meter only accepted coins, so he popped into a store to get change for a dollar. He put some quarters in the parking meter and took a walk. Wilson’s department store, the hub of downtown for his entire childhood, had recently gone out of business and sat empty. Plenty of other little shops and restaurants had kept the town surviving with some optimism, but all of these businesses were different from the ones that Gil knew growing up. His family moved away soon after he started college, and he hadn’t been back more than a few times.
He got back on his bike and rode through his old neighborhood. Not much had changed. Lots of well-kept, modest houses with trees all around. His elementary school buildings had been repurposed. His high school had been expanded, but it still had the institutional look of a school building. He rode out to the country club, parked, and put on his mask. At the club restaurant, one of the servers brought him to a table on the veranda, where he sat down and de-masked. His table overlooked the golf course, which appeared to be in peak condition. A few groups of golfers were on the course playing the game, all dressed in shorts and polo shirts.
Micky strode in. Gil hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, but he recognized him right away. Same guy, with more weight and less hair. Micky was wearing a dark-gray suit, medium-blue shirt, and no necktie. He looked around, and Gil gave him a wave. “Gil!” Micky said when he noticed and gave his old friend an elbow bump. He took off his jacket and draped it over an adjacent chair before removing his mask and sitting down. “It’s great to see you after all these years. What have you been up to? I remember that you’re an engineer of some sort.”
“Well, now I’m a retired engineer. I worked on designing and building manufacturing-line robots in Saratoga Springs. I just retired a couple of weeks ago, so now I’m trying to decide whether to be a geezer or a curmudgeon.” Micky laughed. “How about you? Are you still lawyering?”
“Yeah. For a long time, I was partner in a corporate law firm in Springfield, but a few years back I decided to slow down, so I hung out my shingle in Greenfield as a general-purpose lawyer. I’ve mostly been doing family law, but I have some small-business work too.”
Our server introduced herself as Justy and took their drink orders: beer for Micky and lemonade for Gil.
Suddenly, a booming voice from right behind Gil said, “Ah, the illustrious Gil Novak, one of the many who reached escape velocity to seek planets beyond our lovely hometown. Hi, Mick.”
It was Eddie Locke, the smiling, bear-like man who Gil had seen at most of his high school reunions. “Hi, Eddie,” said Gil. “How are you doing?”
Looking incredulous, he said, “This can’t be a coincidence. Have you come to surreptitiously observe the annual mud dance?”
Gil gave him the look. “I’ll bite. What is the annual mud dance?”
“I’m shocked that you, with your ancient ties to Greenfield, are not familiar with this most sacred of rituals. It is, of course, when a multitude of substantial, yet scantily clad, post-virginal girls wade into the mud-laden shallows of the Green River, up around the bend. They rhythmically waggle their arm waddles in hopes of ensuring a bountiful kielbasa harvest, while simultaneously keeping their toddlers from drowning.”
Both Micky and Gil tried to play it cool, but they burst out laughing. Gil looked at Eddie with wonder, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Yeah, I’m up for that. Who wouldn’t want to see scantily clad, substantial girls mucking around? I must admit, Eddie, that you haven’t changed a bit since high school. You still have a flair for creative prose.”
“Well, a big part of my job is helping to prepare the Massachusetts state budget, which, I must admit, is quite fanciful.”
“Would you like to join us for dinner?” Gil asked.
“Well I’d love to, but I have to pass. I’ll shortly be meeting my lovely young friend. She requires consoling after being judged too petite for this year’s mud dance. Have a great evening, gentlemen!”
Micky shook off the spectacle that was Eddie and asked, “So what’s this mysterious thing you’re researching? You were kind of cryptic over the phone.”
As Gil was about to answer, Justy appeared with their drinks and took their dinner orders: salmon napolitano for Gil and chicken piccata for Micky. Gil asked, “Do you remember our Wrist Rocket slingshots?”
Micky looked at him quizzically, then laughed. “Sure! Remember when Larry took yours and launched a marble through the plate-glass window of McDonald’s?”
Gil laughed. “I didn’t remember that until you said it. In Larry’s defense, though, it was completely unintentional. He just shot blindly into the air over the roof of the Carlson’s house. It was a stupid thing to do, but we did a lot of stupid things back then. Anyway, do you remember climbing up Poet’s Seat with those slingshots and hiking down toward the river? We stumbled upon some hippies in a cave.”
Micky scrunched his nose and said, “Yeah, I kinda do remember that. We just sort of spied on ’em for a few minutes and snuck away.”
“Well, I never told you this, but I went back the next day to spy on them some more.” Gil went on to explain what he thought he remembered about that whole incident, including being shot at. Gil also told Micky about his struggle with insomnia and his hypnosis treatment.
Micky sat back in his chair. “Wow, that sounds like more of a fantasy than the kielbasa mud dance! So what are you trying to do?”
“I don’t really know. It seems like if I make more sense of what I saw back then, my nightmares might go away. I went up to Poet’s Seat this afternoon and looked around, but I couldn’t find the cave.”
Micky said, “Do you remember Bear’s Den?”
“Sure, but—”
“I know, that cave is different and in a different area. I just wanted to make sure you knew that. Do you know the brick DPW shed on the road up to the tower? I’m not sure, but that cave might be down the mountain toward the river from that building.”
Gil said, “Yeah, I remember that little brick building. I’ll go up again tomorrow and take a look.” Gil looked across the veranda and saw Eddie eating an appetizer with his pretty girlfriend. “I think Eddie’s young lady is really about the same age as we are, but I would agree that she may be too petite for the mud dance.”