forgotten. Smoke from boreholes drifted through the winter air. One road was completely closed off by sawhorses and police tape; a gaping fissure erupted in its midst.
My novel, The Planets, had a wicked glee in its heart, which is no surprise given the fact that I’d written it during the first year of my marriage, a time when I was just about as happy as I’d ever been in my life. But it also had a fundamental melancholy at its core, and in this I saw no contradiction. I think my work as a writer would always be doomed by the way the comic and the horrific were juxtaposed. The New Yorker had said that I was “wacky,” but I never felt that way. “You know, your problem,” my friend Richard Russo would say some years later, “is that you think it is realism.”
Maybe that was my problem, my inability to separate the tragic from the absurd—but then the condition that I’d been carrying around in my heart since childhood almost guaranteed that I’d see the world in those terms. For the moment, I’d convinced myself that the battle was done, my cosmic dilemma at last resolved by the all-encompassing love of the woman I had married. The fact that I still, on occasion, woke up in the middle of the night hearing a soft, insistent voice whispering, You are still not you, did not deter me from my optimism or my hope. But this voice did make it clear—had I chosen to pay it any attention—that the ground on which my joy rested was no more firm than the earth of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a fire ignited decades ago still burned, a little hotter each year.
We walked up into the Odd Fellows graveyard with the dog, Deedie and I. It was twilight, and snow was gently falling. On every side of us were the graves of Centralians, many of them surely men and women who had spent the majority of their lives belowground.
Lucy growled softly, and the hair on her back rose up and her tail pointed out straight. We followed her gaze. There on the other side of the graveyard was a large man in a long gray coat. He was moving toward us in slow, lurching steps. His hands were clenched in fists.
“Jim,” said Deedie, grabbing my elbow. “What is that?”
The dog growled again.
I wanted to tell her something like It’s just some guy. But it wasn’t just some guy. To this day I don’t know what it was we saw, although the figure was reminiscent of something out of a horror film. The tattered man staggered toward us, his face hidden by a woolen cap and scarf. The scarf blew around in the cruel winter wind.
Deedie and I looked at each other, and then without saying anything further, we turned around swiftly and began to walk out of the cemetery and back toward our car. I looked back as we walked down the hill. The man was still coming.
We got ourselves into the Prelude, and we took off down the road. The lurching man came out of the cemetery gates and stood in the road behind us and raised his arms, as if trying to cast a spell.
Lucy was still growling as we drove off.
“Well,” Deedie said. “That was fun.”
We drove north through coal country. Our plan was to pull into the first Howard Johnson’s that we saw, but the night grew darker and we saw no signs of life. I’m sure that we just took a wrong turn—or a series of them—but to us it seemed as if the mine fire that had begun beneath Centralia had now spread throughout my home state, leaving nothing but this one dark road. I watched as the needle on the gas tank slowly leaned toward empty. The snow came down.
A voice in my heart whispered, How much longer do you intend to remain content?
At last a neon sign flickered out of the night. There, surrounded by a healthy population of automobiles, was a tavern and a small motel. It didn’t take long for us to see, however, that this was not the Four Seasons. I would have estimated their total number of seasons as one at best. The main attraction here seemed to be the bar, in which huge dudes in leather played pool while a band performed country music in what sounded like two different keys, a half-step apart. When we asked the woman behind the bar