Wax to his flattop.
He could smell the sausage frying and the pancakes turning golden-brown as he thumped down the stairs. Mom was in the kitchen, all business in her apron and housedress, already serving up his plate. Gary sat down at the table and chugged his orange juice.
“Your father gets back from Washington tomorrow after church,” Mom reminded him. “He’ll expect to see that lawn all raked clean.”
“I’ll get the front finished.” Gary poured Karo syrup over each pancake in the stack.
“You said you’d do it all.”
“But, Mom! The leaves are still falling down. It’s only under those maples where they really need raking.” Gary bolted a link of sausage.
“Chew your food,” Mom nagged.
But it was a beautiful October morning, with the air cool and crisp, and the sky cloudless blue. His stomach comfortably full, Gary attacked the golden leaves, sweeping them up in swirling bunches with the rattling leaf-rake. Blackie, his aged white mutt, swayed over to a warm spot in the sun to oversee his work. She soon grew bored and fell asleep.
He started at the base of the pink marble front of the house, pulling leaves from under the shrubs and rolling them in windrows beneath the tall sugar maples and then onto the curb. Traffic was light this morning on Cedar Lane, and cars’ occasional whizzing passage sent spirals of leaves briefly skyward from the pile. It was going faster than Gary had expected it to, and he might have time to start on the rest of the yard before lunch.
“There’s really no point in this, Blackie,” he told his dog. “There’s just a lot more to come down.”
Blackie thumped her tail in sympathy, and he paused to pat her head. He wondered how many years she had left in her, hoped it wouldn’t happen until after he left for college.
Gary applied matches to the long row of leaves at the curbside. In a few minutes the pile was well ablaze, and the sweet smell of burning leaves filled the October day Gary crossed to the front of the house and hooked up the garden hose to the faucet at the base of the wall, just in case. Already he’d worked up a good sweat, and he paused to drink from the rush of water.
Standing there before the pink marble wall, hose to his mouth, Gary suddenly looked up into the blue sky.
Of course, he never really saw the flash.
There are no cedars now on Cedar Lane, only rows of shattered and blackened stumps. No leaves to rake, only a sodden mush of dead ash. No blue October skies, only the dead gray of a long nuclear winter.
Although the house is only a memory preserved in charcoal, a section of the marble front wall still stands, and fused into the pink stone is the black silhouette of a teenaged boy, looking confidently upward.
The gray wind blows fitfully across the dead wasteland, and the burned-out skeleton of the house on Cedar Lane still mourns the loss of those who loved it and those whom it loved.
Sleep well, Gary Larkin, and dream your dreams. Dream of all the men you might have become, dream of the world that might have been, dream of all the people who might have lived—had there never been that October day in 1962.
In life I could not spare you. In death I will shelter your soul and your dreams for as long as my wall shall stand.
What we see,
And what we seem,
Are but a dream,
A dream within a dream.
— From the Peter Weir film of
Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Kind Men Like
“She was better than Betty Page,” said Steinman. “We used to call her Better Page!”
He laughed mechanically at his own tired joke, then started to choke on his beer. Steinman coughed and spluttered, foam oozing down his white-goateed chin. Chelsea Gayle reached across the table and patted him urgently on his back.
“Thanks, miss. It’s these cigarettes.” Morrie Steinman dabbed at his face with a bar napkin, blinking his rheumy eyes. He gulped another mouthful of beer and continued: “Of course, that always made her mad. Kristi Lane didn’t like to be compared to any other model—didn’t matter if you told her she was ten times better. Kristi’d just pout her lips that way she’d do and tell you in a voice that’d freeze Scotch in your mouth that there was no one like her.”
“And there wasn’t,” Chelsea agreed. “How long did you work with her?”
“Let’s see.” Steinman finished his beer