“Because I don’t want to be arrested. There are other things I would rather be doing than sitting in a jail cell.”

“You won’t be doing anything until I’m finished with you. And then I’ll put you in jail myself.”

The boy scowled at us, hands on hips. “Are you two guys going to talk all day or are we getting out of here? Come on, let’s go!”

It took five minutes to locate the wire and with a snick of the boy’s fat brown Buck pocketknife, seconds to cut it. Then we were outta there and the door was banging shut behind us. We walked up a small hill, down past a thin creek, looked back, and the library was gone. And so was my uncertainty about where to go.

“Take a right here.”

“May I ask where we’re going?” Every time Floon spoke it came out sounding both pedantic and amused. It was a voice you wanted to hit with a baseball bat.

“To George’s house.”

“Why? We were just there!” For the first time his voice cracked into something annoyed and vaguely human.

The boy poked me in the side. “Who’s George?”

“Junior, I really am grateful to you for helping in the library. But if you’re going to come along now, I don’t want any questions—nothing, not one. There’s too much happening and my head’s jam-packed. Questions from you won’t help. Capice?”

“Yeah. I capice.”

“Good. But I’ll answer you this one time: We’re going to a friend of mine’s house. His name is George and he’s very smart. I want him to help me figure something out. Okay? That’s the whole plan.”

We walked across the familiar backyards and back streets of Crane’s View. A little boy leading two middle-aged men. Sometimes he skipped along smiling to himself, alone in his own world. Watching him, I tried to remember pieces of that world where I’d once lived: Good & Plenty licorice candies, bunkbeds in my bedroom, Early Wynn pitching for the Cleveland Indians, Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, the Beatles singing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” the Three Stooges on TV. I walked on, remembering the delicious trivia that had filled those days. Some of it came back but so much was gone. That part made me very sad. I wished there would have been time to sit down with the boy and ask him to tell me about his life, my life. Then I could have known it again in detail and carried that knowledge with me for as much time as I had left.

Sometimes the boy looked confused because the town he’d known forty years ago was not the same as today’s. Houses he knew were not where they were supposed to be. Houses were not supposed to be where they were. The layout looked different. Who were all these strangers? No one knows a small town like the kids living there. They live on the streets, memorize the residents, the cars, and what’s in the store windows. In the summer when school is out they have little else to do. Stay home bored or be out and around in the town. So they stand by their bikes and watch as cars get put up on the rack for a lube job at the gas station, or people moving in and out of the houses. Kids can tell you about a new member of the community before anyone else can. How many children do they have, what kind of dog, the color of their furniture, and if the husband yells at the wife.

Crane’s View was Little Fran’s town while at the same time this town wasn’t. But the changes he must have seen everywhere didn’t appear to bother him much. When puzzled he would only stop, look back at me, and wait for instructions. Keeping Floon a few steps in front, I mainly watched the boy and found myself continually smiling. I liked his willingness to accept changes of scenery; anything different from his own world seemed okay. The expression on his face said he was open to it all. “McCabe?” Floon turned to look at me. I gave him a shove. “Keep moving, asshole.” “I am moving. Why do you think we’ve been sent back here?” “I know why I’ve been sent back, Caz. You’re here by mistake. You’re a fucking blemish.”

“How do you know?” “The aliens told me.” “That’s very helpful.” “Glad to be of service.”

We walked on, the boy still a ways in front of us. “Hey, Caz, how do you row a boat across a wooden sea?” “I couldn’t care less. Cute little arcane questions don’t interest me.”

“With a spoon.”

Both of us looked at the boy. “A spoon?”

“Yes, because there’s no such thing as a wooden sea. So if there was then it’d be a crazy thing, which means you’d have to use something crazy to row across it, like a spoon. Or maybe it’s not a wooden sea, but a wooden C, like in the letter? See?” He grew a wicked grin. “Which one of ‘em do you mean?”

“Christ, I didn’t even think of that.”

Floon looked from one version of me to the other and back again. “Didn’t consider what?”

“That it might be a C and not a sea.”

Floon frowned. “I take it back, McCabe—maybe he is your son. There’s a real family resemblance in the recondite way you two think.”

“Recondite. You sure know your vocabulary, Caz. Wasn’t that word on our last spelling bee?”

The boy fell into step next to me. He skipped a few steps and then to my real surprise, took my hand in his. I didn’t know what to say. It felt strange but sweet too. Holding hands with yourself, forty years apart.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I knew the answer but wanted to hear him say it anyway. Wanted to hear him living inside that dream again as I had for many of my boyhood years.

He actually puffed out his chest a bit before answering. “I wanna be an actor. I wanna act in monster movies. Maybe be the guy inside the monster suit.”

“Oh yeah? Do you know The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad? That’s my favorite movie.”

He dropped my hand and jumped aside. “Mine too, mine too! That’s the greatest movie in the world. The Cyclops in it is my favorite. I made one just like it out of clay in my art class.” He put both hands up and curling them into three-clawed paws, roared Cyclops-style. “That part where Sinbad sticks the torch in his eye and burns it out so he’s blind and he stumbles back and falls off the cliff? Do you remember that?”

I nodded in complete understanding. “How could I forget? It’s the best.” How many times had I watched that scene both when I was his age and sitting with my buddies in the fourth row of the Embassy Theater, and then after my thoughtful wife gave me a copy of the video for Christmas a few years ago? Whenever she was angry with me, Magda would call me “Sekourah,” who was the villain in the film.

The short rest of the way to George’s house we talked about the movies we loved and our favorite scenes in them. It was nice to be able to agree on absolutely everything. Floon got fed up and disgustedly asked if we would please change the subject? In happy unison we said “No!” and kept talking.

“What kind of car is that?”

Parked in front of George’s house was a very futuristic looking four-wheel-drive vehicle. I’d seen it advertised on TV—an Isuzu, some kind of Isuzu. Everything about it was more round and aerodynamic than those weekend-warrior standbys. It looked like the kind of too-cool car you see in music videos on MTV.

Floon spoke before I had a chance to answer the boy’s question. “It’s an Isuzu Vehicross. A marvelous car. Two hundred fifteen horsepower, torque-on-demand four-wheel-drive. I owned one exactly like it when I was a young man. The first new car I ever bought.” He sounded so smitten with the car that I half expected to see little hearts come rising off his head like lovebirds in a Disney film.

“It’s really ugly if you ask me. Looks like a big silver frog. Can you drive it in the water? It looks like one of those cars in a James Bond movie that you can drive off the road into the water.”

Floon looked positively miffed at what I thought was the kid’s fair assessment. “No you can’t drive it into the water, for God’s sake. But you can go off road with it, although sometimes that’s dangerous because there is an awful blind spot in the back. That’s what caused my accident.”