![]() ![]() Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a long trip many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. ![]() A second after the scratch of his match the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh. He sat up, the mackinaw dropping to his lap, and lit a cigarette. When we came into tunnel country, the flicker and hollow amplification stirred Neil awake. It was the first time I heard a contemporary of mine snore. Nothing happened the car stayed firm in the snow, and Neil slept through the danger, his face turned skyward and his breath struggling in his nose. The radio was singing “Carpets of clover, I’ll lay right at your feet,” and the speedometer said 81. I was passing a Sunoco truck on a high curve when without warning the scraped section gave out and I realized I might skid into the fence, if not over the edge. Farther along, there had been a fresh fall that night, about two inches, and the plows had not yet cleared all the lanes. In the mountains there was snow, a dry dusting like sand that waved back and forth on the road surface. We crossed the Susquehanna on a long smooth bridge below Harrisburg, then began climbing toward the Alleghenies. He hunched under an old mackinaw and leaned his head against the metal of the window frame and soon was asleep. He had never trusted me to drive his father’s car before he had believed my not knowing where the crankshaft or fuel pump was handicapped my competence to steer. Then trees interceded and we were safe in a landscape where no one cared.Īt the entrance to the Turnpike Neil did a strange thing he stopped the car and had me take the wheel. For an instant I genuinely feared he might hail me from the peak of the barn roof. My grandfather would be up, stamping around in the kitchen for my grandmother to make him breakfast, or outside walking to see if any ice had formed on the brook. 22 I could have had a pane of my parents’ bedroom window, and they were dreaming I was in Indiana. The air brightened as we moved along the highway the glowing wall of my home hung above the woods as we rounded the long curve by the Mennonite dairy. The moon-sized clock of a beer billboard said ten after six. ![]() Red dawn light touched the clouds above the black slate roofs as, with a few other cars, we drove through Alton. “There,” the dentist sighed, in a zephyr of candy and cloves. ![]() As he watched, one bird joined another on the topmost twig, and then a third joined these two and the twig became radically crescent, and all three birds flapped off to where his eyes could not follow them. “Now, this might hurt a little.” What a kind thing to say! The sharp prick and the consequent slow, filling ache drove Burton’s eyes up, and he saw the tops of the bare willow trees, the frightened white sky, and the black birds. It was under Burton’s nose and out of focus. When at last the man pivoted, his instrument tilting up, a tension beneath his mustache indicated surprise and perhaps amusement at finding things in such readiness. Burton opened his mouth while the dentist’s back was still turned. A drop of fluid, by some miracle of adhesion, clung trembling to the needle’s tip. #Car headligh unclouder full#Burton’s heart beat like a wasp in a jar as the dentist moved across the room, did unseeable things by the sink, and returned with a full hypodermic. ![]()
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