“Sshhh,” he said. We crept forward. Scrap growled quietly. My friend parted the long grass with his hands. In the valley below us was the house where he’d lived a long time ago, back when he first got married. Somewhere down there were the ruins of some old beehives.
“I wonder who lives there now,” Zero said. “Some strangers, maybe?”
Scrap grabbed the cuff of my pants and tugged on it. “Rrrrr,” said Scrap.
We pulled back and let the weeds obscure the house where Zero had once lived. We walked back up the path a little bit, and there before us was the big flat rock. I remembered this from a long time ago.
“Okay,” said Zero, and he took the cookie tin from me and opened it up and dumped the ashes on the rock. They were very white. There wasn’t much dog in them.
“We used to play a lot of stick up here,” said my friend, and his voice caught. “Him and me.” We sat down on the rock and watched the wind blow the ashes.
Then I got out the Autoharp. Once it had belonged to Link, but I’d “borrowed” it over Christmas break during my senior year at Wesleyan, and it had never made it back to him. I put picks on my fingers and my thumb, and I started to play.
From this valley they say you are leaving.
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile.
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened our pathways a while.
Scrap listened to all of this with a fairly tolerant expression, given his apparent contempt for us.
“Come on,” said Zero, and I put the Autoharp back in the suitcase and we walked back down the mountain, Scrap nipping at our heels. Zero held the cookie tin, now empty, in one hand.
“Yap,” said Scrap.
“You know,” I said to Zero, “maybe Scrap here needs a home.”
“What?” he said with an air of incredulity.
“Yap,” noted Scrap.
“Maybe there’s a reason he’s appeared to us, and come along with us on this journey. Maybe all he needs is a little love.”
Zero stopped in his tracks, looked at me hard, looked down at Scrap. I wondered whether he was remembering many years before, when he had been led by a young red-haired punk out to the loading dock of Fifield’s Big M and found a big stupid dog licking blood off the floor of a walk-in refrigerator.
“You,” said my friend, “are out of your mind.”
We carried on our way, Zero out front, me in the rear, Scrap between us. It occurred to me, as we descended from the place of Alex’s last end, that if Zero did adopt this Scrap, it wouldn’t be more than a couple of years before ownership of Scrap would pass to me. How long would it be before Scrap had to be “sent to a farm”? How much time would pass before the beings that had to be sent to a farm were Zero and myself?
If you think about it that way, I guess everybody’s got a farm waiting.
We came down off the mountain. There was our car, parked at the end of the fire road. Zero opened the door to his vehicle, and we looked around for our spirit guide.
But Scrap had disappeared.
“Well,” said Zero, “I guess he felt his work was done.”
We didn’t say anything as we drove back into town. Zero went down Greenmont Street, took a left into the parking lot of Fifield’s Big M. Across the street was the hippie house he’d lived in so long ago and the big park behind that. We got out of the car, walked around the back to the loading dock. After all this time, we were back where we had started.
There was a small Dumpster out back. Zero took the Christmas cookie tin, opened the Dumpster, and gently slipped it in. Then we got back in the car.
“Well,” he said as we turned out onto the road, “I guess that’s that.”
* * *
We left that mountain and went out to dinner in Syracuse at a restaurant owned by a man named Patrick. He was the brother of Colleen, the woman who’d seen the Virgin Mary. I didn’t know Patrick all that well. I knew that he’d been sick with cancer and that now, for a little while anyhow, he was better.
Once, though, he’d been on hand during one of those trips to the seashore, back in the 1980s when we were all so young and lost and full of beans.