“Nosir,” he said. “My family’s had enough of this fair. I’m goin home.” He started off, then turned back. “Has he done it before, mister? Has he knocked other ones for a loop the way he knocked my Cathy?”

Something happened, I thought. Something, something, something.

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Like you’d say, even if he did. You bein his agent and all.”

Then he went away, head lowered, not looking back.

 • • •

In the Bounder, Jacobs had changed his blood-spotted shirt and had a dishtowel filled with ice on his fattening lower lip. He listened while I told him what Morse had told me, then said, “Tie my tie for me again, will you? We’re already late.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to fix her up. The way you fixed me up. With the headphones.”

He gave me a look that was perilously close to contempt. “Do you think Daddy Dearest would let me within a mile of her? Besides, what’s wrong with her . . . her compulsion . . . will wear off on its own. She’ll be fine, and any lawyer worth his salt will be able to convince the judge that she wasn’t herself. She’ll get off with a slap on the wrist.”

“None of this is exactly new to you, is it?”

He shrugged, still looking in my direction but no longer quite meeting my eyes. “There have been aftereffects from time to time, yes, although nothing quite so spectacular as Miss Morse’s attempted smash-and-grab.”

“You’re self-teaching, aren’t you? All your customers are actually guinea pigs. They just don’t know it. I was a guinea pig.”

“Are you better now, or not?”

“Yes.” Except for the occasional early-morning stab-a-thon, that was.

“Then please tie my tie.”

I almost didn’t. I was angry with him—on top of everything else, he’d snuck out the back way and yelled for security—but I owed him. He had saved my life, which was good. I was now living a straight life, and that was even better.

So I tied his tie. We did the show. In fact, we did six of them. The crowd aaaahhhed when the close-of-fair fireworks went off, but never so loud as they did when Dan the Lightning Portraits Man worked his magic. And as each girl stared dreamily up at herself on the backdrop while I switched between A minor and E, I wondered which among them would discover that she had lost a little piece of her mind.

 • • •

An envelope sticking under my door. Déjà vu all over again, Yogi would have said. Only this time I hadn’t peed in my bed, my surgically mended leg didn’t ache, I wasn’t coming down with the flu, and I wasn’t jitter-jiving with the need to score. I bent, picked it up, and tore it open.

My fifth business wasn’t one for gooey goodbyes, I’ll give him that. The envelope contained an Amtrak ticket envelope with a sheet of notepaper paper-clipped to it. Written there were a name and an address in the town of Nederland, Colorado. Below, Jacobs had scrawled three sentences. This man will give you a job, if you want it. He owes me. Thanks for tying my tie. CDJ.

I opened the Amtrak envelope and found a one-way ticket on the Mountain Express from Tulsa to Denver. I looked at it for a long time, thinking that maybe I could turn it in and get a cash refund. Or use it and make the musicians’ exchange in Denver my first stop. Only it would take awhile to get that groove-thing going again. My fingers had gone soft and my chops were rusty. There was also the dope thing to consider. When you’re on the road, dope is everywhere. The magic wore off the Portraits in Lightning after two years or so, Jacobs had said. How did I know it wouldn’t be the same with cures for addiction? How could I know, when he didn’t know himself?

That afternoon I took a cab to the auto body shop he’d rented in West Tulsa. It was abandoned and bare to the walls. There wasn’t so much as a single snip of wire on the grease-darkened floor.

Something happened to me here, I thought. The question was whether or not I’d put on those modified headphones again, given the chance to do it over. I decided I would, and in some fashion I didn’t quite understand, that helped me make up my mind about the ticket. I used it, and when I got to Denver, I took the bus to Nederland, high up on the Western Slope of the Rockies. There I met Hugh Yates, and began my life for the third time.

VII

A Homecoming. Wolfjaw Ranch. God Heals Like Lightning. Deaf in Detroit. Prismatics.

My father died in 2003, having outlived his wife and two of his five children. Claire Morton Overton wasn’t yet thirty when her estranged husband took her life. Both my mother and my eldest brother died at the age of fifty-one.

Question: Death, where is thy sting?

Answer: Every-fucking-where.

I went home to Harlow for Dad’s memorial service. Most of the roads were paved now, not just ours and Route 9. There was a housing development where we used to go swimming, and a Big Apple convenience store half a mile from Shiloh Church. Yet the town was in many essential ways the same. Our church still stood just down the road from Myra Harrington’s house (although Me-Maw herself had gone to that great party line in the sky), and the tire swing still hung from the tree in our backyard. I suppose Terry’s children had used it, although they’d all be too old for such things now; the rope was frayed and dark with age.

Maybe I’ll replace that, I thought . . . but why? For whom? Not my children, certainly, for I had none, and this place was no longer my place.

The only car in the driveway was a battered ’51 Ford. It looked like the original Road Rocket, but of course that was impossible—Duane Robichaud had wrecked Road Rocket I at Castle Rock Speedway in the first lap of its only race. Yet there was the Delco Batteries sticker on the trunk, and the number 19 on the side, in paint as red as blood. A crow came down and roosted on the hood. I remembered how our dad had taught all us kids to poke the sign of the evil eye at crows (Nothing in it, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure, he said), and I thought: I don’t like this. Something is wrong here.

I could understand Con not having arrived, Hawaii was a lot farther away than Colorado, but where was Terry? He and his wife, Annabelle, still lived here. And what about the Bowies? The Clukeys? The Paquettes? The DeWitts? What about the crew from Morton Fuel Oil? Dad had been getting up there, but surely he hadn’t outlived all of the home folks.

I parked, got out of my car, and saw it was no longer the Ford Focus I’d driven off the Hertz lot in Portland. It was the ’66 Galaxie my father and brother had given me for my seventeenth birthday. On the passenger seat was the set of hardbound Kenneth Roberts novels my mother had given me: Oliver Wiswell and Arundel and all the rest.

This is a dream, I thought. It’s one I’ve had before.

There was no relief in the realization, only increased dread.

A crow landed on the roof of the house I’d grown up in. Another alighted on the branch supporting the tire swing, the one with all the bark rubbed off so it stuck out like a bone.

I didn’t want to go in the house, because I knew what I’d find there. My feet carried me forward, nonetheless. I mounted the steps, and although Terry had sent me a photo of the rebuilt porch eight years before (or maybe it was ten), the same old board, second from the top, gave out the same old ill-tempered squawk when I stepped on it.

They were waiting for me in the dining room. Not the whole family; just the dead ones. My mother was little more than a mummy, as she had been as she lay dying during that cold February. My father was pale and wizened, much as he’d appeared in the Christmas card photo Terry had sent me not long before his final heart attack. Andy was corpulent—my skinny brother had put on a great deal of meat in middle age—but his hypertensive flush had faded to the waxy pallor of the grave. Claire was the worst. Her crazed ex-husband hadn’t been content just to kill her; she’d had the temerity to leave him, and only complete obliteration would do. He shot her in the face three times, the last two as she lay dead on her classroom floor, before putting a bullet in his own brain.