The “little something” turned out to be a 1966 Ford Galaxie. It was washed, waxed, and as white as moonlight on snow.

“Oh my God,” I said in a faint voice, and everyone laughed.

“The body was good, but the engine needed some work,” Terry said. “Me n Dad reground the valves, replaced the plugs, stuck in a new battery . . . the works.”

“New tires,” Dad said, pointing to them. “Just blackwalls, but those are not recaps. Do you like it, Son?”

I hugged him. I hugged them both.

“Just promise me and your mother that you’ll never get behind the wheel if you’ve taken a drink. Don’t make us have to look at each other someday and say we gave you something you used to hurt yourself or someone else.”

“I promise,” I said.

Astrid—with whom I would share the last inch or so of a joint when I took her home in my new car—squeezed my arm. “And I’ll make him keep it.”

After driving down to Harry’s Pond twice (I had to make two trips so I could give everyone a ride), history repeated itself. I felt a tug on my hand. It was Claire. She led me into the mudroom just as she had on the day Reverend Jacobs used his Electrical Nerve Stimulator to give Connie back his voice.

“Mom wants another promise from you,” she said, “but she was too embarrassed to ask. So I said I’d do it for her.”

I waited.

“Astrid is a nice girl,” Claire said. “She smokes, I can smell it on her breath, but that doesn’t make her bad. And she’s a girl with good taste. Going with you for three years proves that.”

I waited.

“She’s a smart girl, too. She’s got college ahead of her. So here’s the promise, Jamie: don’t you get her pregnant in the backseat of that car. Can you promise that?”

I almost smiled. If I had, it would have been fifty percent amused and fifty percent pained. For the last two years, Astrid and I had had a code word: recess. It meant mutual masturbation. I had mentioned condoms to her on several occasions after the first time, had even gone so far as to purchase a three-pack of Trojans (one kept in my wallet, the other two secreted behind the baseboard in my bedroom), but she was positive that the first one we tried would either break or leak. So . . . recess.

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” Claire asked.

“No,” I said. “Never mad at you, Claire-Bear.” And I never was. That anger was waiting for the monster she married, and it never abated.

I hugged her and promised I would not get Astrid pregnant. It was a promise I kept, although we got close before that day in the cabin near Skytop.

 • • •

In those years I sometimes dreamed of Charles Jacobs—I’d see him poking his fingers into my pretend mountain to make caves, or preaching the Terrible Sermon with blue fire circling his head like an electric diadem—but he pretty much slipped from my conscious mind until one day in June of 1974. I was eighteen. So was Astrid.

School was out. Chrome Roses had gigs lined up all summer (including a couple in bars, where my parents had given me reluctant written permission to perform), and during the days I’d be working at the Marstellars’ farmstand, as I had the year before. Morton Fuel Oil was doing well, and my parents could afford tuition at the University of Maine, but I was expected to do my share. I had a week before reporting for farmstead duty, though, so Astrid and I had a lot of time together. Sometimes we went to my house; sometimes we were at hers. On a lot of afternoons we cruised the back roads in my Galaxie. We’d find a place to park and then . . . recess.

That afternoon we were in a disused gravel pit on Route 9, swapping a joint of not-very-good local grass back and forth. It was sultry, and stormclouds were forming in the west. Thunder rumbled, and there must have been lightning. I didn’t see it, but static crackled from the dashboard radio speaker, momentarily blotting out “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” a song the Roses played at every show that year.

That was when Reverend Jacobs returned to my mind like a long absent guest, and I started the car. “Snuff that jay,” I said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“Where?”

“A place someone told me about a long time ago. If it’s still there.”

Astrid put the remains of the joint in a Sucrets box and tucked it under the seat. I drove a mile or two down Route 9, then turned west on Goat Mountain Road. Here the trees bulked close on either side, and the last of that day’s hazy sunshine disappeared as the stormclouds rolled in.

“If you’re thinking about the resort, they won’t let us in,” Astrid said. “My folks gave up their membership. They said they had to economize if I’m going to college in Boston.” She wrinkled her nose.

“Not the resort,” I said.

We passed Longmeadow, where the MYF used to have its annual wienie-roast. People were throwing nervous glances at the sky as they gathered up their blankets and coolers and hurried to their cars. The thunder was louder now, loaded wagons rolling across the sky, and I saw a bolt of lightning hit somewhere on the other side of Skytop. I started to feel excited. Beautiful, Charles Jacobs had said that last day. Beautiful and terrifying.

We passed a sign reading GOAT MTN GATEHOUSE 1 MILE PLEASE SHOW MEMBERSHIP CARD.

“Jamie—”

“There’s supposed to be a spur that goes to Skytop,” I said. “Maybe it’s gone, but . . .”

It wasn’t gone, and it was still gravel. I turned into it a little too fast, and the Galaxie’s rear end wagged first one way, then the other.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Astrid said. She didn’t sound frightened to be driving straight toward a summer thunderstorm; she sounded interested and a little excited.

“I hope so, too.”

The grade steepened. The Galaxie’s rear end flirted on the loose gravel from time to time, but mostly it held steady. Two and a half miles beyond the turnoff, the trees pulled back and there was Skytop. Astrid gasped and sat up straight in her seat. I hit the brake and brought my car to a crunching stop.

On our right was an old cabin with a mossy, sagging roof and crashed-out windows. Graffiti, most of it too faded to be legible, danced in tangles across the gray, paintless sides. Ahead and above us was a great bulging forehead of granite. At the summit, just as Jacobs had told me half my life ago, was an iron pole jutting toward the clouds, which were now black and seemingly low enough to touch. To our left, where Astrid was looking, hills and fields and gray-green miles of woods stretched toward the ocean. In that direction the sun was still shining, making the world glow.

“Oh my God, was this here all the time? And you never took me?”

“I never took myself,” I said. “My old minister told me—”

That was as far as I got. A brilliant bolt of lightning came down from the sky. Astrid screamed and put her hands over her head. For a moment—strange, terrible, wonderful—it seemed to me that the air had been replaced by electric oil. I felt the hair all over my body, even the fine ones in my nose and ears, go stiff. Then came the click, as if an invisible giant had snapped his fingers. A second bolt flashed down and hit the iron rod, turning it the same bright blue I had seen dancing around Charles Jacobs’s head in my dreams. I had to shut my eyes to keep from going blind. When I opened them again, the pole was glowing cherry red. Like a horseshoe in a forge, he’d said, and that was just what it was like. Follow-thunder bellowed.

“Do you want to get out of here?” I was shouting. I had to, in order to hear myself over the ringing in my ears.

“No!” she shouted back. “In there!” And pointed at the slumping remains of the cabin.

I thought of telling her we’d be safer in the car—some vaguely remembered adage about how rubber tires could ground you and protect you from lightning—but there had been thousands of storms on Skytop, and the old cabin was still standing. As we ran toward it, hand in hand, I realized there was a good reason for that. The iron rod drew the lightning. At least it had so far.