The Schernoff Discoveries (9 page)

“She was our car,” Harold said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “She was a good car and she was
our
car. How far did we go?”

I looked away, unable to bear the grief. It was easy to figure. Each section road was a mile long. “If you figure in leaving the driveway and all, we came just eight miles.”

Harold looked back down the road in the direction we’d come from and then he looked at me and so help me God he smiled—wide and open, his teeth white against his smoke-stained face.

“Yes,” he said, “but
what
an eight miles!”

And we started the long walk back to town, into our lives and all that would come to us.

Time moves faster all the time, especially with age, and while Harold and the rest of them seem still young in my mind they are not; they have gone on to larger and fuller lives.

Julie Hansen became a flight attendant, married a pilot, moved to Colorado and, through cosmetic surgery, not having children, and never acknowledging stress, has refused to age. She still looks and acts like a cheerleader.

Chimmer dropped out of school when he was sixteen, rumbled around for a year driving a hot
rod and getting in trouble, and then joined the army. He went into straight infantry, loved it (as might be expected, he was the only person I have known who actually
liked
combat), fought in Vietnam and retired as a master sergeant after thirty years. He lives in California with a wife who bosses him and a small, mean dog with a name that cannot be said in public, a dog he’s trained to chase children from his yard.

Many others I knew then went on to success, more or less. The captain of the football team has bad knees and sells insurance; there are pictures of him as a teenager in his football uniform all over his plywood-paneled office and he makes a point to mention them to every customer.

Marley, the shop teacher who used a birch rod on children, retired to Arizona, where he secretly nurses the hope that they will allow capital punishment in junior high schools.

Wankle, the football coach, went on to never win the region, conference or state. He retired frustrated and angry to a small house outside Las Vegas, where he lives with a wife who spends a great deal of time shopping for things he doesn’t like or want.

As for me, I flunked the ninth grade, took it over, barely made it through high school, joined the army (where I did
not
like infantry), tried a stint at electronic field engineering (as a glorified technician) and then settled into telling stories. I raised dogs, too, remarkable dogs that did not chase children; instead they pulled me on a sled in two Iditarods and completely changed my life in many wonderful ways.

And Harold?

Harold went on to graduate from high school with a 4.0 average (he even mastered gym by using what he termed “a scientific approach” that involved leverage, inertial energy and “mind over body”) and received a full academic scholarship to MIT, from which he graduated with honors. He then got a doctorate and now works in pure research involving physics, the mass of light, time curvature and other things that I cannot understand even when he writes to tell me about it in simple terms. Oh yes, he married and has four children, all of whom were reading novels by the time they were three and playing classical piano before they were able to walk, judging by his letters. His wife? He married the fair Arlene
of the disastrous first kiss. I have not asked nor has he said how their romance got past that first date but one would guess that he used scientific research to figure out that kissing thing.