Carmichael's Comet: Wheels of Misfortune

The rusted gate to Sunny Pines trailer park swung open with a sound like a screen door in a prairie wind, and Gus Carmichael guided his pickup through the gap, tires crunching over gravel that had long ago surrendered any pretense of being a proper road. Late afternoon light slanted low across the lot, turning every dented aluminum skirting and faded awning into a study of neglect. Somewhere a dog barked twice, thought better of it, and fell silent. A wind chime fashioned from mismatched bottle caps clinked somewhere overhead, the only music the place seemed to afford.

Gus parked beneath a cottonwood shedding pale, fibrous bark onto a row of mailboxes whose numbers had been scratched rather than printed. Number seventeen. Reginald McGinty, number seventeen. The name on the mailbox had been written in black marker, then partially overwritten with a red one, as though someone had tried to correct a name and given up halfway through. The handwriting looped dramatically, with a tail on the G that could have been a treble clef.

A maroon Cadillac sat on cinder blocks near the trailer's north end, its hood missing, its interior visible from the road and stacked with what appeared to be astronomy magazines, canned goods, and at least one sleeping cat. The Cadillac's paint job had been the subject of someone's ambition in a past life; faded pinstripes in electric blue still wound along the doors beneath a thick crust of road dust. Gus killed the engine and sat for a moment, listening to the tick of the cooling motor and the faint, tinny sound of a television spilling game show applause through a curtained window.

He climbed out, boots hitting the gravel with the soft, certain weight of a man who had spent forty years walking pastures but rarely this kind of ground. The air carried the mixed perfume of fried onions, creosote, and cut grass from the lot next door, where someone had half-mown a lawn shaped like a kidney. Above him, the cottonwood leaves whispered in a language older than the trailer park, older than the road, older than anything Gus had come here to dig up.

He rapped his knuckles on the screen door. No answer. He knocked again, louder this time, the way a man knocks when he has driven forty miles and is not in the mood to be turned away by the silence of an empty step.

The door opened a crack. A single eye regarded him from the gap, magnified behind a thick lens that caught the afternoon sun and threw a coin of white light onto the aluminum siding.

"Gus Carmichael." The voice was high, breathy, and already offended. "Of all the indignities this particular Tuesday could have conjured."

"Reginald."

"Wheels." The eye narrowed. "If we're using names from that part of my life, you will address me by the correct one."

"Wheels, then."

The door closed. Latches clicked. Then, after a pause that had the texture of theater, the door opened again, this time wide enough to reveal a small, narrow-shouldered man in a cardigan the color of weak tea, wool slacks held up by suspenders whose elastic had clearly seen better decades. Reginald McGinty's hair had gone the pale silver of old pennies, swept back from a high forehead and held in place by what appeared to be a liberal application of hair cream and sheer conviction. He wore carpet slippers. In his right hand, he held a pencil with a chewed eraser, and behind him, somewhere deep in the trailer's interior, the game show music swelled and then subsided.

"You have the wrong idea if you think I'm pleased to see you, Gus Carmichael."

"I expect I do."

"You expect correctly."

The interior of the trailer was a museum of a life lived at angles to the world. Star charts papered one wall. Another held a row of framed photographs, most of them black and white, showing men in white helmets standing beside long, low vehicles with too many cylinders and not enough chrome. A bookshelf sagged under the weight of racing almanacs and astronomy journals. The air tasted of boiled hot dogs and the particular staleness of rooms in which the curtains rarely open.

Wheels stepped aside with a flourish, one arm extended as though presenting a stage. "Enter, then. Mind the cat. Mind the magazines. Mind, in general."

Gus ducked through the door. He had to turn sideways to clear a coat rack burdened with what looked like three racing jackets and a fur-collared number that might once have been worn in victory lane. A calico cat regarded him from the sofa with the incurious patience of a creature that had already decided Gus was not food.

"Sit anywhere. Mind the springs." Wheels drifted toward the kitchen, where a single hot dog bobbed in a saucepan of water on a cold burner. "Tea? I have tea. I also have hot dogs, but I suspect you're not here for my hospitality."

"I'm not."

"Then sit. I'll make tea because I need tea, and you can tell me whatever errand has dragged you forty miles into the wrong part of the county."

Gus lowered himself into an armchair whose cushion had compressed into a permanent bowl shape. A spring pressed against his lower back through the upholstery. He let it stay there. "Earl's dead, Wheels."

Wheels paused at the stove. The pencil tapped twice against the handle of the saucepan. "I read it in the paper. I sent flowers."

"You sent a sympathy card with a drawing of a comet on the front."

"The comet seemed appropriate." Wheels turned. His expression had shifted, the theatrical edge softening by a fraction. "Whatever it is you're here for, Gus, I should tell you now. I'm not the man I was. I'm not even half that man. I'm a quarter. I'm a quarter of a quarter, and most of what's left is starlight and indigestion."

"I need help with something Earl left behind."

"Then leave it where he left it. That's what the dead prefer, generally. Their things, where they put them."

Gus reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew a folded envelope, the kind with a string closure, the kind bank tellers used to use for important papers. He set it on the coffee table between them, beside a stack of racing magazines and an empty mustard jar.

Wheels eyed it. "What's that?"

"Earl's records. The ones from the observatory. Whatever he was working on before he died."

"Ah." Wheels resumed his journey to the stove, where he fussed with the kettle. "And what makes you think I know anything about that?"

"Because Earl told me. Twenty years ago, when I was seventeen and he thought I might need a reason to keep my mouth shut. You and he worked together. The comet project. The records. The whole fool thing."

"Fool thing." Wheels repeated the words as though tasting them. "Fool thing. Yes. That's what we called it, isn't it. In front of the men at the diner. Fool thing. Fool thing Earl, with his fool theories and his fool charts." He set two cups on the counter with a delicate clatter. "Tea. Drink it. You'll need it."

"Wheels."

"He was supposed to be a co-author." Wheels turned now, his reedy voice rising into something sharper. "Did you know that? His name was supposed to be on the paper. McGinty and Carmichael. The county's own contribution to the literature. And then he went and committed his little act of cowardice, and the whole project collapsed into a drawer in my filing cabinet, where it has remained for forty years."

Gus set his jaw. "I know about '62."

"Then you know enough to walk back out that door and drive home."

"I know that car hit the wall. I know Frank Whitley died. I know Earl drove that lap."

Wheels lowered himself into the opposite chair, his movements slow, theatrical, the movements of a man who has rehearsed his grief for decades and intends to perform it properly. He arranged his cardigan around himself, one slipper tapping against the other.

"Earl did not merely drive that lap. Earl drove that lap. Eighty-three seconds flat. The fastest lap of his career and the last lap that mattered, because Frank Whitley had his line wrong by six inches and Earl had his line right by the width of a fingernail, and when the two met at turn three, Frank Whitley met the wall and Earl met the infield and the difference between those two meetings is the difference between a man who lives and a man who doesn't."

The tea kettle began to whistle, thin and high. Neither of them moved.

"They found Earl under the car, you know. Not in it. Under it. The medical report said he had crawled out, which is impossible, because the frame had folded like a book. They found him with his hands still on the wheel. As though he had tried to take the steering column with him." Wheels paused. His voice had dropped into a register that did not invite interruption. "They said he was delirious. They said he kept saying a name. Not Frank's. Mine. He kept saying mine."

"Wheels."

"So I will tell you what I told your father the last time I spoke to him, which was a Tuesday in October of that year, in this very park, on that very step, with that very sky above us. I told him that what happened at Wall Bend Speedway was not an accident. I told him Frank Whitley's line had been moved the night before. I told him I had seen a truck at the track, and a man with a wrench, and I told him I would go to the officials and I would tell them what I had seen. And Earl Carmichael looked me in the eye and told me, in his quiet, his farmer's quiet, that if I opened my mouth, the people responsible would ensure I never took another photograph through another telescope for as long as I lived."

The kettle screamed. Wheels rose, crossed to the stove, and lifted it with both hands as though handling something fragile and dangerous.

"And I believed him, Gus. I believed him because Earl Carmichael did not lie to me. Not about anything, not once in the years I knew him, except for that one sentence, and that sentence kept my mouth shut for forty years while Frank Whitley rotted in a box and his wife raised those three girls on her own."

Wheels poured the water. Steam rose between them, veiling his face.

"So whatever errand has brought you to number seventeen, it ends here. You can take Earl's envelope. You can drive home. You can put it in the barn with the rest of his papers and let the barn swallow them like it swallows everything else."

Gus did not reach for the envelope. "Earl kept the records."

"Of course he kept the records. He kept everything. He was a farmer. Farmers hoard."

"He kept the records because he was trying to finish the work."

Wheels set the teapot down hard. The porcelain rang against the counter.

"Finish the work." He laughed, a short, fractured sound. "Finish the work. The work was finished the moment Frank Whitley's car folded at turn three. There is no work. There was a comet and there was a paper and there was a future, and all three of them went into the wall at the same speed as Frank."

"There's a deadline, Wheels. Sixty days. The boys need a thing, and that thing is in those papers."

"Boys." Wheels shook his head. "Boys. Your father's boys. Your boys now, I suppose. And they need a dead man's papers to save whatever it is they think needs saving."

"Sixty days," Gus said again, and this time the number carried the weight of the whole drive.

Wheels lowered himself back into the chair. He lifted his cup with both hands, blew across the surface, and looked at Gus over the rim with the eye of a man taking careful measure.

"Sixty days is a long time to be wrong, Gus Carmichael."

"It's a long time to be right, too."

Wheels drank. The trailer hummed around them, the game show applause swelling and fading, the cat resettling, the wind chime outside offering its thin, arrhythmic comment. Somewhere down the row, a screen door banged shut.

"Tell me about the boys," Wheels said at last. "Tell me about the boys and the deadline and whatever fool thing your father set in motion that you have inherited. And I will listen, Gus. I will listen because Earl Carmichael is dead and the least I owe a dead man is to hear what his son has come to say. But I am not promising you anything. Not a thing. Not one single, solitary thing."

Gus nodded. He reached for his tea.

us drank. The tea was bitter, the way he liked it, strong enough to stand a spoon in. He set the cup down on the coffee table, beside a stack of racing magazines and what looked like a hand-bound almanac. Then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and withdrew a manila envelope, the edges soft with handling, the flap unstuck.

"I brought something," he said.

Wheels's eyes narrowed. "I told you I wasn't promising anything."

"I know what you told me." Gus turned the envelope over in his hands. "I brought it anyway."

The envelope opened with a soft tear. Inside were three photographs, glossy and slightly curled at the corners, the color faded to the particular rose-gold of film from another decade. Gus laid them on the table between them, one at a time, as if dealing cards.

The first showed a race car from the side, low and sleek, painted a deep candy-apple red. The number 13 was on the door in white. The body was curved, almost organic, like something grown rather than built. Behind it, a chain-link fence and a sky the color of a bruise.

"Cambered Comet," Gus said. "1968. The last year my father raced."

Wheels made a small sound in his throat.

The second photograph showed the same car from a low angle, the nose pointed at the camera, the driver's helmet visible inside the roll cage. Behind the car, a fuel truck and a group of men in dark jackets, their faces turned away from the lens.

The third showed the car in flames.

Not burning. Not yet on fire. But the moment before, perhaps, or the moment after. It was hard to tell. The composition was wrong for a racing photo. Too composed. Too deliberate. And in the foreground, barely visible, a man's hand reaching for the edge of the frame as if to pull the car out of the picture entirely.

Wheels's cup stopped halfway to his mouth.

Gus watched him. The trailer hummed. The wind chime outside made its small noise. The cat had retreated to the windowsill and was watching a moth beat itself against the glass.

"There is no wreck," Wheels said quietly.

"There is no wreck," Gus agreed.

Wheels set the cup down with exaggerated care, as if any sudden movement might shatter it, or him. He leaned forward. His hands, Gus noticed, were trembling. Not much. But enough.

"Where did you get these?"

"They were in the safe. The one in the barn that none of us knew the combination to until Dolores figured it out last winter." Gus paused. "My mother had the combination the whole time. She never said."

"Your mother." Wheels's voice had gone very small.

"She gave them to me last month. After the funeral. She said she had been waiting for the right time, and she had decided she was running out of right times."

Wheels looked at the photographs. He looked at them for a long time. His mouth worked. The theatrical manner, the reedy excitement, all of it had drained out of him. What remained was something older and much more tired.

"I took that photograph," he said at last. "The third one. I took it. I remember because I had to borrow Mr. Halloran's camera, and I promised to return it before church the next morning, and I didn't, and Mr. Halloran never spoke to me again."

Gus said nothing.

"I was the crew chief that night." Wheels's voice cracked on the word crew, and he stopped, and he cleared his throat, and he started again. "I was your father's crew chief. I was twenty-three years old. I had never been a crew chief before. I had never been anything before. Your father trusted me because he trusted everyone, which was his first great mistake and probably his last."

The trailer ticked as it cooled in the evening air. The game show had ended and another had begun, the new host's voice pitched higher and faster.

"The sponsor," Wheels said, "was a man named Caldwell. Hollis Caldwell. He had money. He had a lot of money. He wanted a piece of the Comet. Not just sponsorship. He wanted ownership. He wanted to put his name on the side of it, and his name on the driver, and his name on the wins, and his name on the wins that were going to happen because your father was going to win them. He was going to win them all. That car was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, and I have seen a lot of beautiful things because I have spent my life looking up."

Gus's hand rested on the edge of the photograph. The candy-apple paint seemed to glow even in the faded print.

"Caldwell wanted the car," Wheels continued. "Your father wouldn't sell. Wouldn't lease. Wouldn't even let Caldwell's people in the garage. So Caldwell sent a letter. I remember it was on cream-colored paper. I remember it had a watermark."

"What did it say?"

"It said that if the car ever had an accident, Caldwell's insurance would cover it. Full coverage. No questions asked. No deductible. Nothing. And that Caldwell would consider it a personal favor if your father would, in the event of an accident, allow Caldwell's people to be the first on the scene. To, quote, secure the wreckage for transport."

The words landed in the trailer like stones dropped into still water.

"Your father read the letter," Wheels said, "and he handed it to me, and he said, 'If this car ever catches fire, I want you to make sure there is nothing left to secure.' And I didn't know what he meant. Not then. I was twenty-three. I didn't know what any of it meant."

Wheels's hands were shaking more now. He folded them together in his lap, but the shaking went through the fold.

"That night, the car caught fire."

"Not the Comet."

"No. Not the Comet. The Comet was at the shop. Your father had moved it the week before, told everyone it was in the trailer for an engine swap. The car that burned was the spare. The mule. The one we used for testing. It looked just like the Comet from a distance. Same paint. Same numbers. Same shape. Your father had it built that way on purpose."

Gus nodded slowly. He had suspected. He had not known.

"We towed the mule out to the far end of the lot. We rigged the fuel line to drip. We put your father in the passenger seat with a fire extinguisher he wasn't going to use. We called the fire department from a payphone two towns over so the trace would be wrong. And then we waited, and when the tank went up, we drove away in the tow truck, and your father rode with me, and he didn't say a word the whole way back."

Wheels lifted his eyes. They were wet.

"I helped him fake it," Wheels said. "I helped him make it look like the Comet was gone. I helped him lie to Caldwell, and to the insurance, and to the county, and to the racing commission. I helped him, Gus. I was there. I was the crew chief, and I did what he asked me to do, and I have lived with it for forty years, and I have never told a soul."

Gus looked at the man across from him. He saw the tremor in the hands, and the wet in the eyes, and the way the shoulders had drawn up around the ears as if to ward off a blow.

"Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because you showed me the photographs." Wheels laughed, and the laugh was a broken thing. "Because your mother kept them. Because the combination was in her head the whole time. Because I have been waiting forty years for someone to walk through that door and show me a picture of that car and ask me what I see, and now you have done it, and I cannot pretend anymore that I don't know exactly what I see."

The wind chime outside made its small noise. The moth had settled on the windowsill beside the cat. The trailer ticked.

"There's more," Gus said.

Wheels flinched.

"The papers. The ones the boys need. They aren't just racing papers."

Wheels stared at him. The reedy voice had gone very quiet.

"What are they?"

"They're the original engineering drawings for the Comet. Every modification my father ever made. Every test result. Every improvement he never got to try. The mule burned, but the Comet didn't, and when my father moved it that night, he didn't just move the car. He moved everything. All the records. All the notes. He put them in the safe in the barn, and he told my mother the combination, and he told her to give them to me when the time was right."

"What time?"

"The time when somebody needed to finish what he started."

Wheels was silent for a long time. The trailer hummed. The game show host shouted something triumphant that neither of them heard.

"I don't have them," Wheels said at last.

Gus's stomach dropped. "What do you mean you don't have them?"

"I mean I don't have them, Gus. I never had them. Your father kept the originals. He always kept the originals. I had my own copies. I had my own notes. I had a ledger I kept, every entry hand-written, every modification I ever made to that car logged down to the half-thousandth of an inch. I kept them because I knew. I knew even then that someday someone would need them."

"Where are they?"

Wheels looked at the photographs. He looked at the candy-apple red of the Comet, glowing in the faded print. He looked at the flames of the mule, and at the hand reaching into the frame.

"They're in the observatory," he said. "Up on the hill. Behind the secondary mirror housing. There's a false panel I built into the base in 1971. I have been adding to it ever since."

Gus let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.

"There's just one problem," Wheels said.

"Of course there is."

"The hill road washed out in the spring floods. The county hasn't fixed it. The only way up is on foot, and it is three miles, and I am seventy-four years old, and my knees are made of something the doctors have stopped trying to identify."

Gus looked at the man across from him. He looked at the photographs on the table. He looked at the cat on the windowsill, and the moth, and the wind chime, and the sky beyond it.

"Then I'll walk it," he said.

"You'll walk it."

"I'll walk it. You tell me where to go."

Wheels looked at him for a long time. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a small brass key on a leather thong. He held it out.

"The panel lock," he said. "I never showed anyone. Not in forty years. I am showing you now."

Gus took the key. It was warm from the man's chest. It weighed almost nothing.

"Sixty days," Wheels said. "You said sixty days."

"Sixty days."

"Then you had better start walking, Gus Carmichael."

Outside, the wind chime made its small noise, and the moth took flight, and the cat watched it go.

The brass key settled into Gus's palm like a seed. He closed his fingers around it, and the leather thong dangled against his wrist. The metal was warm from Wheels's chest, and it weighed almost nothing, and it was the most valuable thing Gus had ever held.

"I can't let you walk three miles," Gus said.

Wheels blinked. Behind the smudged spectacles, his eyes had the startled look of a man who had not expected to be argued with. "Then how precisely do you propose I get down this hill, young man? I have examined the options. They are limited, and most of them involve gravity winning."

"You come with me."

"Come with you."

"To the ranch. To the Concours. To wherever this goes. You come with me."

Wheels's mouth worked for a moment without producing sound. His fingers worried the edge of the photograph, rubbing the corner the way a man rubs a worry stone. Outside, the moth had returned to the windowsill, and the cat tracked it with the patience of a thing that had all the time in the world and none of the inclination to use it.

"I am not a ranch man," Wheels said finally.

"You don't have to be a ranch man. You just have to be there. You know things. Things nobody else knows. Things my father never told me."

"I know many things. Most of them are useless. A great many of them are about astronomy, which has very little practical application on a farm, or at a Concours, or anywhere else that matters to a man with hay in his boots."

Gus pulled a second chair from the corner, the wooden legs scraping against the floor with a sound like

The wooden legs scraping against the floor with a sound like a long-held note on a fiddle, thin and true. Gus set the chair across from Wheels and sat, and for a moment the two of them looked at each other across the narrow room with nothing between them but the photograph on the table and the smell of dust and old paper.

Then Gus said, "I can put the photograph back in the book. You can put the book back in the satchel. I can put the satchel in the truck. And we can be on the road before the sun touches that ridge."

Wheels opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"You are, I must say, a remarkably persistent young man."

"I learned it from my father."

"That much," Wheels said, "is entirely obvious."

He reached for the photograph. His fingers were still trembling, but he placed Earl Carmichael's face back against the page with a kind of ceremonial care, as though he were laying a man to rest a second time. He closed the cover. He set the book into the satchel and drew the buckle shut with a snap that sounded, in that quiet room, like the closing of a door.

"The cat," Wheels said.

Gus looked. The orange tabby had settled itself on the windowsill in the exact patch of light it had been watching, and it regarded the two of them with the supreme indifference of a creature that had decided the world was beneath its attention.

"She'll be fine," Gus said. "She's been feeding herself in this cabin since before you moved in. She knows where the mice are."

Wheels glanced at the cat. The cat glanced at Wheels. Neither blinked.

"I suppose," Wheels said, "that is the arrangement."

He stood, and Gus saw how small he really was. The coat had hidden most of it. The coat had also hidden the way the man's shoulders curved inward, as though he had been folded for storage and forgotten about. Wheels took the satchel from the table and hung it across his chest with the same ceremonial care he had used to lay down the photograph, and then he stood very still for a moment, the way a man stands when he is about to leave a place he has lived in for a long time and he is not certain, in his bones, that he will see it again.

"It's a short walk down," Gus said. "And the truck has a heater."

"Heaters," Wheels said, "are an invention I have mixed feelings about. They make a man soft. They also, however, prevent him from dying of chill, which I am given to understand is rather inconvenient." He paused. "I am talking too much. I always talk too much when I am frightened."

"Are you frightened?"

"Yes," Wheels said, "I am. But I have decided to be frightened in the truck, where the heater is."

Gus picked up the keys from where they had fallen beside the door. The metal was cold in his palm. He opened the door, and the morning came in all at once: the smell of pine, the sound of a woodpecker somewhere off in the trees, the long blue shadow of the cabin stretching down the hillside like a finger pointing the way.

Wheels stepped out onto the porch. He shaded his eyes with one hand and looked down the slope toward the place where the road curved through the pasture, and beyond the pasture toward the valley, and beyond the valley toward the town of Brookline, and beyond Brookline, somewhere to the east, the airfield where a young man named Marcus Sterling was supposed to be taking his exam in an airplane called Carmichael's Comet.

"It is a long way down," Wheels said.

"It's shorter than the walk up."

"Statistically, I am not certain that is true."

Gus led the way. The path was steep in places, and twice Wheels's foot slipped on the loose shale, and twice Gus reached back without looking and caught him by the elbow, and twice Wheels made a small sound that was not quite a word and not quite a gasp and that Gus decided, out of kindness, to pretend he had not heard.

At the gate, Gus stopped to check the latch. The metal was rusted but held. Beyond it, the truck sat in the thin morning light with the patience of an animal that had learned to wait.

Wheels climbed in without being asked. He set the satchel on his lap and buckled the seatbelt with the deliberate precision of a man performing a sacred rite, and then he looked straight ahead through the windshield and said, in a voice that was almost steady, "I should like to know where we are going, exactly."

"The ranch first. To get Dolores. She'll want to see the photograph, and she'll want to make you breakfast whether you want breakfast or not."

"I see."

"Then we'll see about the Concours."

"The Concours," Wheels repeated, in the tone of a man repeating the name of an illness he has just been diagnosed with.

"It's a fly-in. A gathering. My father used to enter his plane in it. They give awards. There will be pancakes."

"Pancakes," Wheels said.

"My wife's pancakes. With the buttermilk."

Wheels was quiet for a moment. Then he turned, slowly, on the cracked vinyl of the seat, and looked at Gus with an expression that was not quite a smile but that was, at least, no longer a frown.

"I have not," Wheels said, "had a buttermilk pancake in some years."

"Then you're in for a treat."

Gus turned the key. The engine caught on the second try, the old Ford rattling to life with a sound like a man clearing his throat, and the heater, after a moment, began to push a thin stream of warm air against Wheels's knees. Wheels closed his eyes. He did not say anything more, but the lines around his mouth loosened by a degree, and his fingers, for the first time that morning, stopped their worrying at the edge of the photograph through the leather of the satchel.

Gus put the truck in gear.

The road unspooled beneath them, pale and graveled, and the pine trees fell away on either side like the curtains of a stage being drawn back to reveal what had been waiting all along. The valley opened. The town was a smudge of rooftops in the middle distance, and beyond it, just visible if you knew where to look, the long flat shine of the airfield.

"Marcus Sterling," Wheels said, without opening his eyes. "That is the young man who is to fly the plane."

"That's the one."

"His father is the Senator."

"Yes."

"And the Senator disapproves."

"Last I heard."

"Then we are, it would seem, walking into some manner of considerable difficulty."

Gus did not answer right away. He watched the road. He watched a hawk lift off from a fence post and wheel, lazy and certain, into the pale blue of the morning.

"That's about the size of it," he said.

"Well," Wheels said, and opened his eyes, and adjusted his spectacles on his nose with one finger, "I have always believed that considerable difficulty is best met with buttermilk pancakes, and at least one well-documented photograph. I believe we are, between the two of us, in a position to provide both."

The truck crested the rise. Below them the whole valley lay open, and the sun was just clearing the eastern ridge, and the light, falling across the fields and the rooftops and the long ribbon of the river, looked like something a man might spend his whole life trying to remember and never quite get right.

Gus put his foot down on the gas, and the truck rolled forward, and somewhere ahead, in a hangar at the Brookline airfield, a young man named Marcus Sterling was about to discover that the airplane his grandfather had promised him was not, in the end, just an airplane at all.