Phases of Gravity

Part Two Glen Oak

Forty-two years after he had moved away, thirty years after he had last visited, sixteen years after his week of fame walking on the moon, Richard Baedecker was invited to come back to his hometown. He was to be guest of honor during the Old Settlers Weekend and Parade. August 8 was to be declared Richard M. Baedecker Day in Glen Oak, Illinois.

Baedecker's middle initial was not M. His middle name was Edgar. Nor did he consider the small village in Illinois his hometown. When he did think of his childhood home, which was seldom, he usually remembered the small apartment on Kildare Street in Chicago where his family spent the years before and after the war. Baedecker had lived in Glen Oak for less than three years from late 1942 to May of 1945. His mother's family had owned land there for many years, and when Baedecker's father had gone back into the Marine Corps to serve three years as an instructor at Camp Pendleton, the seven-year-old Richard Baedecker and his two sisters found themselves inexplicably whisked from their comfortable apartment in Chicago to a drafty old rental house in Glen Oak. For Baedecker, memories of those times were as hazy and out of context as the thought of the manic paper and scrap-metal drives that had seemed to occupy his weekends and summers during their entire interlude there. Despite the fact that his parents were buried just outside of Glen Oak, he had not visited or thought of the town in a long, long time.

Baedecker received the invitation in late May, shortly before embarking on a month-long business trip that would take him to three continents. He filed the letter and would have forgotten it if he had not mentioned it to Cole Prescott, vice president of the aerospace corporation for which he worked.

'Hell, Dick, why don't you go? It'll be good PR for the firm.'

'You're joking,' said Baedecker. They were in a bar on Lindbergh Boulevard, near their offices in suburban St. Louis. 'When I lived in that little Podunk town during the war, it had a sign that said POPULATION 850 — SPEED ELECTRICALLY TIMED. I doubt if it's grown much since then. Probably gone down in population, if anything. Not many people there would be interested in buying MD-GSS avionics.'

'They buy stock, don't they?' asked Prescott and lifted a handful of salted nuts to his mouth.

'Livestock,' said Baedecker.

'Where the hell is this Glen Oak, anyway?' asked Prescott.

It had been years since Baedecker had heard anyone say the town's name. It sounded strange to him. 'About 180 miles from here as the provincial crow flies,' he said. 'Stuck somewhere between Peoria and Moline.'

'Shit, it's just up the road. You owe it to them, Dick.'

'Too busy,' Baedecker said and motioned to the bartender for a third Scotch. 'Be catching up after the Bombay and Frankfurt conferences.'

'Hey,' said Prescott. He turned back from watching a waitress bend over to serve a young couple at a nearby table. 'Isn't the ninth of August the beginning of that airline confab at the Hyatt in Chicago? Turner got you to go to that, didn't he?'

'No, Wally did. Seretti's going to be there from Rockwell and we're going to talk about the Air Bus modification deal with Borman.'

'So!' said Prescott.

'So what?'

'So you'll be going that way anyway, pal. Do your patriotic duty, Dick. I'll have Teresa tell ‘em you're coming.'

'We'll see,' said Baedecker.

Baedecker flew into Peoria on the afternoon of Friday, August 7. The Ozark DC-9 barely had time to climb to eight thousand feet and find the meandering path of the Illinois River before they were descending. The airport was so small and so empty that Baedecker thought fleetingly of the asphalt runway at the edge of the Indian jungle where he had landed a few weeks earlier at Khajuraho. Then he was down the ramp, across the hot tarmac, and was being urgently hailed by a heavy, florid-faced man he had never seen before.

Baedecker groaned inwardly. He had planned to rent a car, spend the night in Peoria, and drive out to Glen Oak in the morning. He had hoped to stop by the cemetery on his way.

'Mr. Baedecker! Mr. Baedecker! Jesus, welcome, welcome. We're really glad to see ya.' The man was alone. Baedecker had to drop his old black flight bag as the stranger grabbed his right hand and elbow in a two-handed greeting. 'I'm really sorry we couldn't get up a better reception, but we didn't know ‘til Marge got a call this morning that you were comin' in today.'

'That's all right,' said Baedecker. He retrieved his hand and added needlessly, 'I'm Richard Baedecker.'

'Oh, yeah, Jesus. I'm Bill Ackroyd. Mayor Seaton would've been here, but she's got the Old Settlers' Jaycees Fish Fry to take care of tonight.'

'Glen Oak has a woman mayor?' Baedecker resettled his garment bag on his shoulder and brushed away a trickle of sweat on his cheek. Heat waves rose around them and turned distant walls of foliage and the half-glimpsed parking lot into shimmering mirages. The humidity was as bad as St. Louis's. Baedecker looked at the big man next to him. Bill Ackroyd was in his late forties or early fifties. He was sagging to fat and had already perspired through the back of his JC Penney shirt. His hair was combed forward to hide an encroaching baldness. He looks like me, thought Baedecker and felt a blossom of anger unfold in his chest. Ackroyd grinned and Baedecker smiled back.

Baedecker followed him through the tiny terminal to the curved drive where Ackroyd had parked his car in a space reserved for the handicapped. The man kept up an amiable stream of small talk that mixed with the heat to produce a not-unpleasant nausea in Baedecker. Ackroyd drove a Bonneville. The engine had been left running, air-conditioning blasting to cool the interior to an unhealthy chill. Baedecker sank into the velvet cushions with a sigh while the other man set his luggage in the trunk.

'I can't tell you what this means to all of us,' said Ackroyd as he settled himself. 'The whole town's excited. It's the biggest thing that's happened to Glen Oak since Jesse James's gang came through and camped at Hartley's Pond.' Ackroyd laughed and shifted the car into gear. His hands were so large that they made the steering wheel and gearshift look like toys. Baedecker imagined that Ackroyd came from the kind of Midwestern stock that had used such huge, blunt hands to string up outlaws.

'I didn't know that the James gang ever went through Glen Oak,' said Baedecker.

'Probably didn't,' said Ackroyd and laughed his big, unself-conscious laugh. 'That makes you the most exciting thing ever to happen to us.' Peoria looked like it had been abandoned or bombed. Or both. Storefronts held dust and dead flies. Grass grew up in cracks in the highway and weeds flourished in the untended medians. Old buildings sagged against one another and the few new structures sat like overscaled druid altars amid razed blocks of rubble.

'My God,' muttered Baedecker, 'I don't remember the city looking like this.' Actually Baedecker hardly remembered Peoria at all. Once a year his mother had taken them to town to watch the Thanksgiving Day parade so they could wave at Santa Claus. Baedecker had been too old for Santa Claus, but he would sit with his younger sisters on the stone lions near the courthouse and dutifully wave. One year Santa had arrived in a jeep with the four elves dressed in the uniforms of the different services. Baedecker remembered that the lawn of the city square had risen in a gentle arc to the elaborate stone gingerbread of the courthouse. He would play at being shot and roll down the grassy incline until his mother yelled at him to stop. He noticed now that the square — he thought that it was the same block — had been turned into a fussily landscaped sunken park near a glass box of a city-county building.

'Reagan's recession,' said Ackroyd. 'Carter's recession before him. Goddamn Russians.'

'Russians?' Baedecker half expected to hear a torrent of John Birch propaganda. He thought he remembered reading that George Wallace had carried Peoria County in the 1968 primary. In 1968 Baedecker had been spending sixty hours a week in a simulator as part of the support team for Apollo 8. The year had held no meaning for him except in terms of the project deadlines. He had emerged from his cocoon in January of 1969 to find Bobby Kennedy dead, Martin Luther King dead, LBJ a memory, and Richard M. Nixon president. In Baedecker's office in St. Louis, on the wall above the liquor cabinet, between two honorary degrees from colleges he had never visited, there was a photograph of Nixon shaking his hand in a Rose Garden ceremony. Baedecker and the other two astronauts looked tense and ill at ease in the picture. Nixon was grinning, his upper teeth white and exposed, his left hand on Baedecker's elbow in the same salesman's grip Ackroyd had used at the airport.

'Not really their fault,' grunted Ackroyd. 'Caterpillar's fault for dependin' so much on selling to ‘em. When Carter pulled the plug on heavy equipment exports after Afghanistan or whatever the hell it was, it all went downhill. Caterpillar, GE, even Pabst. Everybody was getting laid off for a while. It's better now.'

'Oh,' said Baedecker. His head hurt. He still felt the motion of the plane as it had banked in over the river. If he couldn't fly an aircraft this day, he wished that he at least could have driven a car to work the cramps out of arms and legs that ached to control something. He closed his eyes.

'You wanta go the quick way or the long way?' asked the big man at the wheel.

'The long way,' Baedecker said without opening his eyes. 'Always the long way.' Ackroyd obediently took the next exit off I-74 and descended into the Euclidean geometries of cornfields and county roads.

Baedecker may have dozed for a few minutes. He opened his eyes as the car stopped at a crossroads. Green signs gave direction and distance to Princeville, Galesburg, Elmwood, and Kewanee. There was no mention of Glen Oak. Ackroyd swung the car left. The road was a corridor between curtains of corn. Dark seams of tar and asphalt patched the road and provided a rhythmic undertone to the air-conditioner. The slight vibration had a hypnotic, equestrian quality to it.

'Into the heart of the heart of the country,' said Baedecker. 'Hmmm?'

Baedecker sat up, surprised he had spoken aloud. 'A phrase a writer — William Gass, I think — used to describe this part of the country. I remember it sometimes when I think about Glen Oak.'

'Oh.' Ackroyd shifted uncomfortably. Baedecker realized with a start that he had made the man nervous. Ackroyd had assumed that they were two men, two solid men, and the mention of a writer did not fit. Baedecker smiled as he thought about the seminars the various services had given their test pilots prior to the first NASA interviews for the Mercury program. If you put your hands on your hips, make sure your thumbs are toward the back. Had Deke told him about that or had he read about it in Tom Wolfe's book?

Ackroyd had been talking about his real estate agency before Baedecker had interrupted. Now he cleared his throat and make a cupping gesture with his right hand. 'I imagine you've met a lot of important people, huh, Mr. Baedecker?'

'Richard,' Baedecker said quickly. 'You're Bill, right?'

'Yeah. No relation to that guy on the old Saturday Night Live reruns. Lot of people ask me that.'

'No,' said Baedecker. He had never seen the program.

'So who was the most important, you think?'

'What's that?' asked Baedecker, but there was no way to steer the conversation a different direction.

'Most important person you ever met?'

Baedecker forced some life into his own voice. He was suddenly very, very tired. It occurred to him that he should have driven his own car from St. Louis. The stopover in Glen Oak would not have been much out of his way, and he could have left when he wished. Baedecker could not remember the last time he had driven anywhere except from his town house to the office and back. Travel had become an endless series of airhops. With a slight shock he realized that Joan, his ex-wife, had never been to St. Louis, to Chicago, to the Midwest. Their life together in Fort Lauderdale, San Diego, Houston, Cocoa Beach, the five bad months in Boston, had been near the coast, all in places where the continent clearly ended. He was suddenly curious about what Joan's impressions of this great expanse of fields, farmhouses, and heat haze would be. 'The Shah of Iran,' he said. 'At least he was the most impressive. The court show they put on there, the protocol, and the sheer sense of power he and his retinue conveyed, they put even the White House and Buckingham Palace to shame. Little good it did him.'

'Yeah,' said Ackroyd. 'Say, I met Joe Namath once. I was at an Amway convention in Cincinnati. Don't have time for it since I got involved in the Pine Meadows deal but used to do real well at it. Thirteen hundred one month and that was without really working at it. Joe, he was there for another thing, but he knew a guy who was real good friends with Merle Weaver. So Joe, he told all of us to call him that, he spent the whole two days with us. Went down to the combat zone with us and everything. I mean, he had commitments, but every time he could, he and Merle's friend would go out to dinner with us and pick up a round of drinks and all. A nicer guy you wouldn't want to meet.' Baedecker was surprised to realize that he recognized his surroundings. He knew that around the next curve in the road there would appear a dairy with a floral clock in the center of the driveway. The dairy came into sight. There was no clock, but the parking lot looked newly paved. The purple-shingled house to the left of the road was the one his mother used to refer to as the old stagecoach stop. He saw the sagging second-floor porch and was sure it was the same building. The sudden superimposition of forgotten memories over reality was disturbing to Baedecker, a sense of déjà vu that did not dissipate. He looked straight ahead and knew that it would be only a long sweep of curve and then another mile before Glen Oak would declare itself as a fringe of trees and a single, green water tower visible above the cornfields.

'You ever meet Joe Namath?' asked Ackroyd.

'No, I never have,' said Baedecker. On a clear day, from thirty-five thousand feet in a 747, Illinois would be a verdant patchwork of rectangles. Baedecker knew that the right angle ruled the Midwest in the same way that the sinuous, senseless curves of erosion ruled the Southwest where he had done most of his flying. From two hundred nautical miles up, the Midwest had been a smudge of green and brown hues glimpsed between white cloud masses. From the moon it had been nothing at all. Baedecker had never even thought to look for the United States during his forty-six hours on the moon.

'Just a real nice guy. Not stuck-up like some famous people you meet, you know? Damn shame about his knee.' The water tower was different. A tall, white, metal structure had replaced the old green one. It burned in the rich, slanting rays of the late-summer evening sun. Baedecker felt a curious emotion seize him somewhere between the heart and throat. It was not nostalgia or some resurrected form of homesickness. Baedecker realized that the scalding wave of feeling flowing through him was simple awe at an unexpected confrontation with beauty. He had felt the same surprised pain as a child in the Chicago Art Institute one rainy afternoon while standing in front of a Degas oil of a young ballerina carrying an armful of oranges. He had experienced the same sharp slice of emotion upon seeing his son Scott, purple, bruised, slick, and squawking, a few seconds after his birth. Baedecker had no idea why he felt this now, but invisible thumbs pressed at the hollow of his throat, and there was a burning behind his eyes.

'Bet you don't recognize the old place,' said Ackroyd. 'How long's it been since you been back, Dick?' Glen Oak appeared as a skirmish line of trees, resolved itself into a huddle of white homes, and widened to fill the windshield. The road curved again past a Sunoco station, past an old brick home, which Baedecker remembered his mother saying had once been a way station on the underground railroad, and past a white sign that read GLEN OAK — POP. 1275 — SPEED ELECTRICALLY TIMED.

'Nineteen fifty-six,' said Baedecker. 'No, 1957. My mother's funeral. She died the year after my father.'

'They're buried out in the Calvary Cemetery,' said Ackroyd as if he were sharing a new fact.

'Yes.'

'Would you like to go out there now? Before it gets dark? I wouldn't mind waiting.'

'No.' Baedecker glanced quickly to his left, horrified at the idea of visiting his parents' graves while Bill Ackroyd sat waiting in his idling Bonneville. 'No, thanks, I'm tired. I'd like to check into the motel. Is the one on the north side of town still called the Day's End Inn?' Ackroyd chuckled and slapped the steering wheel. 'Jesus, that old road-house? No, sir, they tore that place down in ‘62, year after Jackie and I moved here from Lafayette. Nope, the nearest other place is the Motel Six over on I-74 off the Elmwood exit.'

'That will be fine,' said Baedecker.

'Aw, naw,' said Ackroyd and turned a stricken face to Baedecker. 'I mean, we'd planned on you staying with us, Dick. I mean, we've got plenty of room, and I okayed it with Marge Seaton and the council. The Motel Six's way the hell gone, twenty minutes by the hardroad.' The hardroad. That was what everyone in Glen Oak had called the paved highway that doubled as the main street. It had been four decades since he had heard the phrase. Baedecker shook his head and looked out the window as they moved slowly down that main street. Glen Oak's business section was two and a half blocks long. The sidewalks were raised strips of concrete three tiers high. The storefronts were dark, and the diagonal parking places were empty except for a few pickup trucks in front of a tavern near the park. Baedecker tried to fit the images of these tired, flat-fronted buildings into the template of his memory, but there was little conjunction, only a vague sense of structures missing like gaps in a once-familiar smile.

'Jackie kept some supper warm, but we could go out to Old Settlers and get in on the fish fry if you'd like.'

'I'm pretty tired,' said Baedecker.

'Good enough,' said Ackroyd. 'We'll take care of all the formalities tomorrow, then. Marge'd be pretty busy tonight anyway, what with the raffle and all. Terry, my boy Terry, he's been dying to meet you. He's a real hero to you . . . I mean, shit, you know what I mean. Terry's real excited about space and everything. It was Terry that did a school report on you last year and remembered you'd lived here for a while. To tell you the truth, that's what gave me the idea of you being guest of honor at Old Settlers. Terry was so interested in this being your hometown and all. ‘Course Marge and the others would have loved the idea anyway but, you know, it would mean an awful lot to Terry if you could spend the two nights with us.' Even at the crawling pace at which they were moving, they had already traveled the length of Glen Oak's main street. Ackroyd turned right and slowed to a stop near the old Catholic church. It was a part of town Baedecker had rarely walked in as a boy because Chuck Compton, the school bully, had lived there. It was the only part of town he had come to when he had returned for his parents' funerals.

'It really wouldn't put us out,' said Ackroyd. 'We'd be real honored to have you, and the Motel Six's probably full with truckers this late on a Friday.' Baedecker looked at the brown church. He remembered it as being much larger. He felt a strange lassitude descend over him. The summer heat, the long weeks of traveling, the disappointment of seeing his son at the Poona ashram, all conspired to reduce him to this state of sad passivity. Baedecker recognized the feeling from his first months in the Marine Corps in the summer of 1951. From there and from the first weeks after Joan had left him.

'I wouldn't want to be any trouble,' he said.

Ackroyd grinned his relief and gripped Baedecker's upper arm for a second. 'Shoot, no trouble. Jackie's looking forward to meeting you, and Terry'll never forget having a real-life astronaut visit.' The car moved ahead slowly through alternate streaks of cream-rich evening light and stripes of dark tree-shadow.

The bats were out when Baedecker went for a walk an hour later. Their choppy, half-seen flits of movement sliced pieces from the dull dome of evening sky. The sun was gone but the day clung to light the same way that Baedecker, as a boy on such an August evening, had clung to the last sweet weeks of summer vacation. It took Baedecker only a few minutes to walk to the old part of town, to his part of town. He was pleased to be outside and alone.

Ackroyd lived in a development of twenty-or-so ranch houses on the northeast corner of town where Baedecker remembered only fields and a stream where muskrats could be caught. Ackroyd's house was of a pseudo-Spanish design with a boat and trailer in the garage and an RV in the driveway. Inside, the rooms were filled with heavy, Ethan Allen furniture. Ackroyd's wife, Jackie, had closely permed curls, laugh wrinkles around her eyes, and a pleasant overbite, which made her appear to be constantly smiling. She was some years younger than her husband. Their only child, Terry, a pale boy who looked to be thirteen or fourteen, was as thin and quiet as his father was stout and hearty.

'Say hello to Mr. Baedecker, Terry. Go on, tell him how much you've been looking forward to this.' The boy was propelled forward by a shove of Ackroyd's huge palm.

Baedecker bent over but still could not find the boy's gaze, and his open hand felt only the briefest touch of moist fingers. Terry's brown hair grew longest in front and dropped over his eyes like a visor. The boy mumbled something.

'Nice to meet you,' said Baedecker.

'Terry,' said his mother, 'go on now. Show Mr. Baedecker his guest room. Then show him your room. I'm sure Mr. Baedecker will be very interested.' She smiled at Baedecker and he thought of early photos of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The boy turned and led the way down the stairs, taking them two at a time. The guest room was in the basement. The bed looked comfortable, and there was an attached bathroom. The boy's room was across a carpeted expanse of open area, which might have been planned as a recreation room.

'I guess Mom wanted you to see this,' muttered Terry and flicked on a dim light in his room. Baedecker looked in, blinked, and stepped in farther to look again.

There was a single bed, neatly made, a small desk, a minicomponent stereo, and three dark walls with shelves, posters, a few books, models, all the usual paraphernalia of an adolescent boy. But the fourth wall was different.

It was an Apollo 8 photograph, one of the Earthrise pictures taken from the external camera's high-speed series on the first and third lunar orbits. The picture had once captured the imagination of the world but had been so overused during the intervening years that Baedecker no longer took any notice of it. But here it was different. The photo had been enlarged to make a super-graphic, floor-to-ceiling wallpaper stretching the width of the room. The earth was a bold blue and white, the sky black, the foreground a dull gray. It was as if the boy's basement room opened onto the lunar surface. The dark walls and dim track lighting added to the illusion.

'Mom's idea,' mumbled the boy. He tapped nervously at a stack of tape cassettes on his desk. 'I think she got it on sale.'

'Did you make the models?' asked Baedecker. Shelves were filled with gray plastic dreadnoughts from Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica. Two large space shuttles hung from dark thread in a corner.

The boy made a motion with shoulders and hand, an abbreviated half shrug that reminded Baedecker of his son Scott when he had struck out in a Little League game.

'Dad helped.'

'Are you interested in space, Terry?'

'Yeah.' The boy hesitated and looked up at Baedecker. In his dark eyes there was a brief panic of summoned courage. 'I mean, I useta be. You know, when I was younger. I mean, I still like it and all, but that's sort of kid stuff, you know? What I'd really like to be is, well, like a lead guitarist in a group like Twisted Sister.' He stopped talking and looked steadily at Baedecker.

Baedecker could not stop a wide grin. He touched the boy's shoulder briefly, firmly. 'Good. Good. Let's go upstairs, shall we?'

The streets were dark except for occasional streetlights and the blue flicker of televisions through windows. Baedecker breathed in the scent of freshly cut grass and unseen fields. The stars were hesitant to appear. Except for an occasional car passing on the hardroad a block west, the only noise was the muted but excited gabble of the hidden televisions. Baedecker remembered the sound of console radios through some of these same screen doors and windows. He thought that the radio voices had held more authority and depth.

Glen Oak had never had many oak trees, but in the forties it had been resplendent with giant elms, incredibly massive trees arcing their heavy limbs in a latticework of branches which turned even the widest side street into a tunnel of dappled light and shadow. The elms were Glen Oak. Even a ten-year-old boy had realized that as he rode his bike toward the town on a summer evening, pedaling furiously toward the oasis of trees and Saturday dinner.

Now most of the elms were gone. Baedecker assumed that various epidemics of disease had claimed them. The wide streets were open to the sky. There was still a proliferation of smaller trees. Given the slightest breeze, leaves danced in front of streetlights and threw shadows across the sidewalk. Large old homes set far back from the sidewalks still had their upper stories guarded by gently rustling foliage. But the giant elms of Baedecker's childhood were gone. He wondered if people returning to former homes in small towns all over the nation had noticed this loss. Like the smell of burning leaves in the autumn, it was something that gnawed at his generation by its absence.

The bats danced and dodged against a violet sky. A few stars had come out. Baedecker crossed into a schoolyard, which occupied an entire block. The tall, old elementary school, its shuttered belfry the home for the ancestors of many of this night's crop of bats, had long since been torn down and replaced by a cluster of brick-and-glass boxes huddled at the base of a larger brick-and-glass box, which filled much of the square block. Baedecker guessed that the larger structure was the gymnasium for the consolidated school. There had been no elementary school gym in his day; when they needed one, they walked the two blocks to the high school. Baedecker remembered the old school as being the centerpiece of acres of grass, half a dozen baseball diamonds, and two playground areas — one for the small children and another boasting the high, three-humped slide for the upper grades. All of this had been guarded by the sentinel-silent line of tall trees along the perimeter of the block. Now the low buildings and monstrous gymnasium claimed most of the space. There were no trees. The playgrounds had been reduced to a strip of asphalt and a wooden, stockadelike structure built in a square of sand. Baedecker walked over and sat on a lower level of the thing. It made him think of a poorly designed gallows.

He could see his old home across the street. Even in the fading twilight he could tell that little had been done to change it. Light spilled from the bay windows on both floors. There was siding now where once there had been old clapboard. A garage and asphalt drive had been added where the gravel driveway had once curved around to the backyard. Baedecker guessed that the barn was no longer behind the house. Near the front walk a tall birch grew where none had been before. For a moment Baedecker searched his memory, trying in vain to remember a sapling there. Then he realized that it could have been planted after he had moved away and the tree still would be forty years old.

Baedecker felt no nostalgia, only a slight vertigo of wonder that such an alien shell of stone and board in such an alien part of the world could once have been home to a boy who felt himself the center of creation. A light went on in a second-story room. Baedecker could almost see his old wallpaper in which clipper ships were locked in endlessly repeating squares of rope, each corner complicated by impossible nautical knots. He remembered lying awake during nights of fever, trying again and again to mentally untie those knots. He also remembered the hanging light bulb and cord, the yellow coffin of a closet in one corner, and the huge Rand McNally world map on the wall by the door where the earnest boy had nightly moved colored pins from one unpronounceable Pacific island to another.

Baedecker shook his head, rose, and walked north, away from the school and house. Full night had come, but the stars were hidden by low clouds. Baedecker did not look up again.

'Hey, Dick, how was it? See the old places?' called Ackroyd as Baedecker crossed the yard to the man's home. The couple were sitting in a small, screened porch between the house and garage.

'Yes. It's cooling off very nicely, isn't it?'

'See anybody you knew?'

'The streets were pretty empty,' said Baedecker. 'I could see the lights of Old Settlers — at least I presume it was Old Settlers — out southeast of the high school. Sounded like everyone was out there.' For Baedecker as a boy, the Old Settlers carnival weekend had been three days that marked the very heart of summer while simultaneously being the last joyous event before the sickening countdown to the resumption of school. Old Settlers had meant the recognition of entropy.

'Oh, heck, yeah,' said Ackroyd. 'It'll be going strong tonight with the Jaycees barbecue and all. There's still plenty of time to run out there if you want. The American Legion tent serves beer till eleven.'

'No, thanks, Bill. Actually I am pretty tired. Thought I might turn in. Say good night to Terry for me, would you?' Ackroyd led the way inside and turned on the light above the stairs. 'Actually, Terry's gone over to his friend Donnie Peterson's. They've been spending Old Settlers Weekend together since they were in kindergarten.' Mrs. Ackroyd bustled around making sure that Baedecker had extra blankets even though the night was warm. The guest room had a comfortably familiar motel room smell to it. Mrs. Ackroyd smiled at him, softly closed the door, and Baedecker was alone.

The room was almost pitch-black except for the glow of his digital travel alarm-calculator. Baedecker lay back and stared into the darkness. When the softly glowing digits read 2:32, he rose and went out into the empty, carpeted room. There was no sound from the upper stories. Someone had left a light on over the short stairway in case Baedecker wanted to find his way to the kitchen. Instead, Baedecker crossed to the boy's room, hesitated a second outside the half-opened door, and then stepped inside. The light from the stairway dimly illuminated the pockmarked lunar surface and the blue-and-white rising crescent of earth. Baedecker stood there a minute and was turning to go when something caught his eye. He closed the door and sat down on Terry's bed. For a minute there was no light at all and Baedecker was blind. Then he became aware of a hundred softly glowing sparks on the walls and ceiling. The stars were coming out. The boy — Baedecker felt sure it was the boy — had speckled the room with dots of phosphorescent paint. The half globe of the earth began to glow with a milky radiance, which illuminated the lunar highlands and crater rims. Baedecker had never seen a lunar night from the surface — no Apollo astronaut had — but he sat on the boy's tightly made bed until the stars burned into his eyes and he thought yes, yes.

After a while Baedecker rose, crossed silently to his own room, and slept.

Richard M. Baedecker Day dawned warm and clear. The street outside Ackroyd's home hissed to the sound of Saturday traffic. The sky was so blue that cornstalks in the fields visible beyond the new houses seemed brittle with light.

Baedecker had two breakfasts. The first was with Ackroyd and his wife in their spacious kitchen. The second was with the mayor and city council at a long table in the Parkside Café. Marjorie Seaton struck Baedecker as a small-town version of Chicago's ex-mayor, Jane Byrne. He wasn't sure where the resemblance lay — Seaton's face was as broad and reddened by weather as Byrne's was narrow and pale. Marge Seaton had an open, hearty laugh that bore no similarity to what he remembered of Byrne's tight-lipped chuckles. But there was something about the eyes of both women that made Baedecker think of Apache squaws waiting for the male prisoners to be pegged out for their pleasure.

'The whole town's excited about you being here, Dick,' Seaton said and beamed at him. 'I should say the entire county. We're going to get folks from as far away as Galesburg today.'

'I'm looking forward to meeting them,' said Baedecker. He toyed with his hash browns. Next to him, Ackroyd was mopping up runny eggs with a piece of toast. The waitress, a small, bleak-faced woman named Minnie, returned every other moment to refill their coffee cups as if she had distilled the entire definition of hostess down to the dogged completion of that single act.

'Do you have an agenda . . . a schedule?' asked Baedecker. 'Some sort of outline for the day?'

'Oh, yeah,' said a thin man in a green polyester suit. He had been introduced as Kyle Gibbons or Gibson. 'Here you go.' He pulled out a folded sheet of mimeograph paper and smoothed it down in front of Baedecker.

'Thanks.'

9:00 — COUNCIL MTG. — Pksd. (Astronaut?)

10:00 — HDBL. TNMT. — (AM. LEG. BALL)

11:30 — PARADE FORMS UP (W. 5)

12:00 — OLD SETTLERS PARADE

1:00 — J.G.C. WEENIE ROAST AND SHOOTOFF (Sh. Meehan)

1:30 — SFTBL. TNMT.

2:30 — VLT. FIRE DPT. WATERFIGHTS

5:00 — OPTIMISTS' BARBECUE

6:00 — UP WITH PEOPLE HOUR (Camp. Cr. Singers)

7:00 — RAFFLE DRAWING (M. Seaton — H. Sch. Gym)

7:30 — STARS OF TOMORROW (H. Sch. Gym)

8:00 — ASTRONAUT'S SPEECH (H. Sch. Gym)

10:00 — J.G.C. FIREWORKS

Baedecker looked up. 'Speech?'

Marge Seaton sipped coffee and smiled at him. 'Anything you say'd be just fine, Dick. Don't go to any trouble about it. We'd all like to hear you talk about space or what it was like to walk on the moon or something. Just keep it to twenty minutes or so, okay?' Baedecker nodded and listened through the open windows as a listless morning breeze moved a few leaves against each other. Some children entered and loudly demanded soft drinks at the counter. Minnie ignored them and hurried over to refill everyone's coffee cups.

The discussion at the table turned to city council matters and Baedecker excused himself. Outside, the midmorning heat was already reflecting up from the sidewalks and beginning to soften the asphalt of the highway. Baedecker blinked and tugged his aviator sunglasses out of his shirt pocket. He was wearing the white linen safari shirt, tan cotton slacks, and desert boots he had worn in Calcutta a few weeks earlier. He found it hard to believe that this world of scalded blue sky, flat white storefronts, and empty highway could coexist with the monsoon mud, endless slums, and crowded insanity of India.

The city park was much smaller than he remembered. In Baedecker's mind the bandstand had been an elaborate Victorian gazebo, but all that stood there now was a flat-topped slab of concrete raised on cinder blocks. He doubted if the gazebo had ever existed.

On Saturday evenings during Baedecker's two summers there, some rich resident of Glen Oak — he had no idea who it had been — had shown free movies in this park, projecting them onto three sheets nailed high on the side of the Parkside Café. Baedecker remembered watching the Movietone Newsreels, cartoons where no lesser personages than Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck sold war bonds, and such film classics as Fly by Night, Saps at Sea, Broadway Limited, and Once Upon a Honeymoon. Baedecker could close his eyes and almost recapture the flickering images, the faces of the farm families sitting on benches, blankets, and new-mown grass, the sounds of children running through the bushes near the bandstand and climbing trees, and at least once, memorably, the silent flashes of heat lightning rippling above trees and storefronts, coming closer, the heavy branches of the elms dancing to the breeze fleeing before the coming storm. Baedecker could remember the sweetness of that breeze, coming as it did across so many miles of ripening fields. Baedecker could remember the first real crash of lightning, which, in an uncanny instant of suspended time before everyone ran for shelter, froze people, cars, benches, grass, buildings, and Baedecker himself in a stroboscopic flash of light that briefly made all the world a single frozen frame in an unwatched film.

Baedecker cleared his throat, spit, and walked over to a small boulder on a stone pedestal. Three bronze plaques listed the names of men from Glen Oak who had fought in conflicts ranging from the War with Mexico through Vietnam. Stars designated those who had died during their service. Eight had died during the Civil War, three in World War II, and none in Vietnam. Baedecker glanced at fourteen names listed under Korea, but his name was not among them. He recognized none of the others even though he must have gone to school with some of them. The Vietnam plaque was hardly weathered and only a third filled in. There was room for more wars.

Across the street a farm family had poured out of a pickup truck and were staring into the window of Helmann's Variety Store. Baedecker remembered the place as Jensen's Dry Goods, a long, dark building where fans turned slowly fifteen feet above dusty wood floors. The family was excited, pointing and laughing. More people began filling the sidewalks. Somewhere nearby but out of sight, a band started playing, stopped abruptly, and began again only to halt in mid-cymbal crash.

Baedecker sat down on a park bench. His shoulders ached with the weight of things. He closed his eyes again and tried to summon the often-retrieved sensation of bouncing across a glaring, pockmarked plain, the light throwing a corona around Dave's white suit and PLS pack, gravity a lessened foe, each movement as fluid and effortless as moving tiptoe across the bottom of a sunlit lagoon.

The lightness did not come. Baedecker opened his eyes and squinted at the polarized clarity of things.

The Old Settlers Parade moved out fifteen minutes behind schedule. The consolidated high school's marching band led the way, followed by several rows of unidentified horsemen, then came five homemade floats representing chapters of the FFA, 4-H, Boy Scouts (Creve Coeur Council), the county historical society, and the Jubilee Gun Club. Following the floats came the junior high school band consisting of nine youngsters, then an American Legion contingent on foot, and then Baedecker. He rode in a twenty-year-old white Mustang convertible. Mayor Seaton sat to his right, Mr. Gibbons or Gibson to his left, and Bill Ackroyd rode up front next to the teenaged driver. Ackroyd insisted that the three in back sit up on the trunk with their feet on the red vinyl upholstery. Banners on the sides of the Mustang proclaimed

RICHARD M. BAEDECKER — GLEN OAK'S ENVOY TO THE MOON. Beneath the lettering there were Magic-Markered representations of his crew's mission patch. The sun behind the symbolic command-module-with-sails looked like one of the egg yolks Ackroyd had mopped up with such vigor that morning.

The parade flowed out of west Fifth Street by the park and marched proudly down Main Street. Sheriff Meehan's green-and-white Plymouth cleared the way. People lined the high, three-leveled sidewalks that seemed designed for viewing parades. Small American flags were in evidence and Baedecker noticed that a banner had been hung between two light poles above the street: GLEN OAK CELEBRATES RICHARD M. BAEDECKER DAY — OLD SETTLERS PARADE — JUBILEE GUN CLUB SHOOTOFF SAT., AUG. 8.

The high school band turned left on Second Street and took another left by the schoolyard just a block east. Children playing on the wooden gallows-structure waved and shouted. One boy made a pistol of his hand and began firing. Without hesitation, Baedecker pointed his finger and fired back. The boy clutched at his chest, rolled his eyes back in his head, and did a complete somersault off a beam to land on his back in the sandbox six feet below.

They turned right on Fifth Street only a block from where they had started and went east. Baedecker noticed a small white building to his right, which he was sure had once been the library. He remembered the hot attic-smell of the little room on a summer day and the slight frown on the lady-librarian's face when he would check out John Carter, Mars for the eighth or tenth or fifteenth time.

Fifth Street was wide enough to carry the parade and still allow two lanes of traffic to move by on their left. There was no traffic. Baedecker again felt the absence of the great elms, especially now that the sun was beating down on the crowned expanse of pavement. Small Chinese elms grew near the grassy drainage ditches, but they seemed out of scale in comparison to the absurdly wide street, long lawns, and large homes. People sat on porches and lawn chairs and waved. Children and dogs ran alongside the horses and dodged back and forth ahead of the band's color guard. Behind Baedecker's Mustang, an informal procession of bicycles, children pulling wagons, and a few gaily bedecked riding lawn mowers added another fifty feet of tail to the parade.

The sheriff's car turned right on Catton Street. They passed the school-yard again. In front of Baedecker's old home a shirtless man with his belly hanging down over his shorts was mowing the yard. He glanced up as the parade went by and flicked a two-fingered salute at Baedecker's Mustang. Three very old people sat on the shaded porch where Baedecker had once played pirate or held off wave after wave of Japanese banzai attacks.

Two blocks past Baedecker's old home the parade passed the high school and confronted a wall of corn. The band wheeled left onto a county road and led the procession around the high school to acres of open field where the Old Settlers fairground had been erected. Beyond the parking lot were half a dozen large tents, twice that many booths, and a spattering of carnival rides sitting motionless in the midday sun. The high, brown grass of the field had been trampled and littered by the crowds of the night before. Farther north were the baseball diamonds, already occupied by brightly uniformed players and surrounded by cheering crowds. Even farther north, almost back to where the backyard of Baedecker's house had abutted the fields, clusters of fire engines created red-and-green angles on the grass.

The bands stopped playing and the parade dissolved. The fairground area was almost deserted and few people watched as band members and horses milled around in confusion. Baedecker remained seated for a moment.

'Well,' said Mayor Seaton, 'that was a lot of fun, wasn't it?'

Baedecker nodded and glanced up. The car metal and upholstery were very hot. The sun was almost at its zenith. Near the horizon and just visible in the cloudless sky was the faint disk of a three-quarters moon.

'Dickie!'

Baedecker looked up from the table where he was drinking beer with the others. The woman who stood there was heavy and middle-aged with short blond hair. She wore a print blouse and stretch pants that were approaching the designer's maximum expansion limits. Baedecker did not recognize her. The light in the American Legion tent was dim, softened to a buttered sepia. The warm air smelled of canvas. Baedecker stood up.

'Dickie!' repeated the woman and stepped forward to take his free hand in both of hers. 'How are you?'

'Fine,' said Baedecker. 'How are you?'

'Oh, just great, just great. You look wonderful, Dickie, but what happened to all of your hair? I remember when you had this big head of red hair.' Baedecker smiled and unconsciously ran a hand over his scalp. The men he had been talking with turned back to their beers.

The woman brought her hands up to her mouth and tittered. 'Oh, my, you don't remember me, do you?'

'I'm terrible with names,' confessed Baedecker.

'I thought you'd remember Sandy,' said the woman and aimed a playful slap at Baedecker's wrist. 'Sandy Serrel. We used to be best friends. Remember, Donna Lou Hewford and I used to hang around you and Mickey Farrell and Kevin Gordon and Jimmy Haines all the time during fourth and fifth grades.'

'Of course,' said Baedecker and shook her hand again. He had no recollection of her whatsoever. 'How are you, Sandy?'

'Dickie, this here is my husband, Arthur. Arthur, this here is my old boyfriend who went to the moon.' Baedecker shook hands with a rail-thin man in a Taylor Funeral Home softball uniform. The man was covered with a film of dirt through which red wrinkles were visible at the neck, face, and wrists.

'Bet you never thought I'd get married,' said Sandy Serrel. 'At least to anyone else, huh?' Baedecker returned the woman's smile. One of her front teeth was broken.

'C'mon. Next game's starting,' said her husband.

The big woman grabbed Baedecker's hand and arm again in a tight grip. 'We have to go, Dickie. It was real good seein' you again. You gotta come over later tonight and I'll show you off to Shirley and the twins. Just remember, I was praying to Jesus all during that moonwalk thing of yours. If it wasn't for all us folks prayin', Jesus never woulda let you boys all come home safe.'

'I'll remember,' said Baedecker. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she was leaving with her thin husband and Baedecker was left with a scraped sensation on his cheek and a lingering odor of dirty towels.

He sat down and ordered another round of beers.

'Arthur does mostly odd jobs out to the cemetery,' said Phil Dixon, one of the council members.

'He's Stinky Serrel's third husband,' said Bill Ackroyd. 'Doesn't look to be the last one.'

'Stinky Serrel!' said Baedecker and brought his cup down on the table. 'Jesus.' His single memory of Stinky Serrel, other than of an unwanted presence following his buddies and him down the street, was of a time in fifth grade when she had walked up to him on the playground one lunchtime when someone had ridden by on a palomino.

'I don't know how you guys do that,' she had said and pointed at the stallion. 'Do what?' he'd asked.

'Walk around with a cock banging between your legs,' she had said softly into his ear. Baedecker remembered his shock at that, stepping back, blushing, being angry that he had blushed.

'Stinky Serrel,' said Baedecker. 'Good God.' He drank down the rest of his beer and waved at the man in the legion cap for more.

There were no flowers but the two graves were well tended. Baedecker shifted his weight and removed his sunglasses. The gray granite headstones were identical except for the inscriptions:

CHARLES S. BAEDECKER 1893–1956,

KATHLEEN E. BAEDECKER 1900–1957.

The cemetery was quiet. It was shielded by tall cornfields to the north and by woods on the other three sides. Ravines dropped away to unseen creeks to the east and west. Baedecker remembered hunting in the wooded hills to the south during one of his father's furloughs in the rainy spring of ‘43 or ‘44. Baedecker had carried the loaded over-and-under shotgun and .22 for hours but had refused to shoot at a squirrel. It had been during his brief pacifist phase. Baedecker's father had been disgusted but had said nothing, merely handing over the stained canvas sack half-filled with dead squirrels for the boy to carry.

Baedecker dropped to one knee and pulled tendrils of grass away from the sides of his mother's headstone. He put his sunglasses back on. He thought of the body that lay a few feet beneath the rich, black Illinois soil — the arms that had enfolded him when he came, crying, home from kindergarten after the fights, the hands that had held his during nights of terror when he had awakened not knowing where or who he was, crying out, then hearing the soft tread of his mother's slippers in the hallway, the soft touch of her hands in the terrifying dark. Salvation. Sanity.

Baedecker rose, turned abruptly, and left the cemetery. Phil Dixon had been pleased to drop him off there on his way to his farm for supper. Baedecker had told him that he would walk the one and three-quarters miles back to town.

He slipped the black iron bar into the latch of the gate and glanced back at the cemetery. Insects hummed in the grass. Somewhere beyond the trees a cow lowed plaintively. Even from the road, Baedecker could make out the empty rectangles of grass near his parents' graves where space had been set aside for his two sisters and him.

A pickup truck roared up the hill from the east and slid to a stop near Baedecker in a cloud of dust and gravel. A sandy-haired man with a wind-reddened face leaned out from the driver's side. 'You're Richard Baedecker, aren't you?' A younger man sat next to him. A gun rack behind their heads held two rifles.

'Yes.'

'I thought it was you. Read about you coming in the Princeville Chronicle-Dispatch. Me and Galen here are headed into Glen Oak for the Optimists' barbecue. We're going to stop at the Lone Tree for a few cold ones first. I don't see no car. Want a ride?'

'Yes,' said Baedecker. He removed his sunglasses, folded them carefully, and set them in the pocket of his shirt. 'Yeah, I sure do.' According to Baedecker's driver, the Lone Tree Tavern had once sat a quarter of a mile to the southwest, just across the intersection of gravel roads and county lines. The lone tree, a tall oak, was still there. When Peoria County went dry in the 1930s, Lone Tree had packed itself up and moved into Jubilee County to spend the next forty-five years at the edge of the woods on the top of the second hill west of Calvary Cemetery. The hills were steep, the road was narrow, and Baedecker could remember his mother telling of more than a few patrons of the Lone Tree roaring up to the crest of the cemetery hill only to find another car coming in the other direction. Gas rationing and the shortage of young men had reduced the carnage somewhat during the war. Baedecker's father had gone out to the Lone Tree to drink when he was home on leave. Baedecker remembered drinking a Nesbitt's Orange in the same cool darkness where he now found himself ordering a shot of Irish whiskey and a beer. He glanced down at the broken tiles of the floor as if the small gunny-sack of squirrels might still be there.

'You don't remember me, do you?' asked the driver. He had introduced himself in the truck as Carl Foster.

Baedecker drank the whiskey and stared at the red face and transparent blue eyes in front of him. 'No,' he said.

'Don't blame you,' said the farmer with a grin. 'You and me went to fourth grade together, but I was held back a year when you and Jimmy and the rest went on to fifth.'

'Carl Foster,' repeated Baedecker. He reached out and took the other man's hand. 'Carl Foster. Yes, of course, you sat in front of Kevin and behind what's-her-name, the girl with the bangs and . . . mmm . . .'

'Big tits,' said Carl, returning Baedecker's handshake. 'At least for fourth grade. Yeah. Donna Lou Baylor. She married Tom Hewford. Say, this here's my son-in-law, Galen.'

'Galen,' said Baedecker and shook the younger man's hand. 'Jesus, we were in Scouts together, weren't we, Carl?'

'Old Man Meehan was scoutmaster,' said the farmer. 'He was always telling us that a good Scout'd make a good soldier. He gave me a goddamned merit badge for aircraft identification. I used to sit up in the fuckin' hayloft until two A.M. with my silhouette cards, watchin' the skies. Don't know what I would've done if I'd spotted the Luftwaffe coming in to kayo Peoria . . . we didn't get a phone until ‘48.'

'Carl Foster,' said Baedecker. He gestured to the bartender for another round.

Later, when the shadows were growing long, they went out back to urinate and shoot rats.

'Galen,' said Foster, 'get the twenty-two from the truck.'

They stood on the edge of the ravine and relieved themselves onto five decades of accumulated junk. Rusted bed springs, old washing machines, thousands of tin cans, and the oxidizing corpse of a ‘38 Hudson filled the bottom of the dump. More recent relics crawled up the hundred feet of shadowy hillside to mix with actual garbage. Foster zipped up and took the proffered rifle from his son-in-law.

'Don't see any rats,' said Baedecker. He set down an empty shot glass and pulled the tab on another beer.

'Gotta stir the little fuckers up,' said Foster and fired a shot into an already well-riddled washtub sixty feet down the slope. There was a scurry of dark shapes. The farmer pumped another cartridge into the chamber and fired again. Something leaped into the air and squealed. Foster handed the rifle to Baedecker.

'Thanks,' said Baedecker. He took careful aim at a shadow beneath a Philco console radio and fired. Nothing stirred.

Foster had lit a cigarette, and it dangled from his lip as he spoke. 'Seems to me like I read somewhere that you were in the Marines.' He squeezed off a shot at a cereal box halfway down the hill. There was a shrill cry and black shapes ran across garbage.

'Long time ago,' said Baedecker. 'Korea. Got to fly with the Navy for a while.' The rifle had almost no recoil.

'Never served, myself,' said Foster. The cigarette bobbed. 'Hernia. Wouldn't take me. You ever have to shoot at a man?' Baedecker paused with the can of beer half-raised. He set it down as Foster handed the rifle back to him.

'Don't have to answer,' said the farmer. 'None of my goddamned business.' Baedecker squinted along the sight and fired. There was the flat slap of the .22 and a thud as an old scrub board tumbled over. 'You couldn't see much from the cockpit of those old Panthers,' said Baedecker. 'Drop your ordnance. Go home. It wasn't much more personal in my three confirmed air-to-air kills. I saw the pilots bail out of two of them. On the last one my visor was cracked and spattered with oil so I didn't see much of anything. The gun cameras did-n't show anybody getting out. But that's not what you mean. Not quite the same as shooting at a man.' Baedecker pumped the .22 and handed it to Foster.

'Guess not,' he said and fired quickly. A rat leaped straight into the air and fell back writhing.

Baedecker tossed his empty beer can into the ravine. He accepted the rifle from Foster and held it at port arms. Baedecker's voice was a thick monotone. 'I did almost shoot someone here in Glen Oak, though.'

'No shit? Who?'

'Chuck Compton. Remember him?'

'That fucker. Yeah. How could you forget a fifteen-year-old still stuck in sixth grade? Smoked Pall Malls in the john. Compton was one mean son of a bitch.'

'Yes,' said Baedecker. 'I didn't pay any attention to him until I got into sixth grade. Then he decided he was going to beat the shit out of me every other day. Used to wait for me after school. That sort of thing. I tried to buy him off by giving him quarters, giving him stuff from my lunch — Hershey bars when I had them, even by slipping him answers for geography tests and so forth. He took the stuff, but it didn't help. Compton didn't want things from me. He just got a kick out of hurting people.'

'What happened?'

'My mother told me to stand up to him. She said that all bullies were cowards that if you stood up to them, they'd back off. Thanks, Galen.' Baedecker accepted the fresh beer and took a long swallow. 'So I called him out one Friday and I stood up to him. He broke my nose in two places, knocked out a permanent tooth, and damned near kicked my ribs to splinters. In front of the other kids.'

'Yeah, that's Compton.'

'So I thought about it for a week or so,' said Baedecker. 'Then one Saturday morning I saw him on the playground across the street from where I lived. I went upstairs and got my over-and-under out of my mom's closet.'

'You had your own gun?' asked Foster.

'My father gave it to me on my eighth birthday,' said Baedecker. 'Four-ten-gauge shotgun on the bottom. Single-shot twenty-two on top.'

'A Savage,' said Foster. 'My brother used to own one.' He threw the stub of his cigarette away. 'So what happened?'

'I waited for Compton to get close enough,' said Baedecker. 'First I took the screen off the window in my mother's bedroom and waited for him to cross the street. He couldn't see me behind the lace curtains. I loaded both barrels but figured I'd use the four-ten. Figured I couldn't miss at ten yards. He was that close.'

'A four-ten would give you a nice pattern at that range,' said Foster.

'I loaded it with number-six quail shot,' said Baedecker. 'Jesus.'

'Yes. I wanted Compton's guts spilling out on the ground like with the rabbit my father'd shot with number-six pellets a couple of months earlier. I remember how calm I was as I was sighting down the barrel at Compton's face. I lowered the sights to his belt because I always pulled a little high and to the left. I remember trying to think of any reason why I should let the son of a bitch keep living. I honestly couldn't think of one. I squeezed the trigger the way my father had taught me — holding my breath but not tense, squeezing very slow and easy rather than jerking it. I pulled it. The goddamn safety was on. I clicked it down to free the four-ten pin and had to take aim again because Compton had moved a few feet. He stopped to say something to a neighbor girl who was playing hopscotch, and I aimed at his lower back. He was only about seven or eight feet farther away.'

'Then what?' asked Foster. He lit a new cigarette.

'Then my mother called me for lunch,' said Baedecker. 'I unloaded both barrels and put the gun away. I stayed out of Compton's way as best I could for the next few weeks. He got tired of hitting me after a while. We moved the next May.'

'Huh,' said Foster and took a swig of beer. 'Chuck Compton always was an asshole.'

'Whatever happened to him?' asked Baedecker and set his beer carefully on the ground. He raised the .22 and took aim down the ravine.

'Married Sharon Cahill over in Princeville,' said Foster. 'Got born again. Was real religious for a while. He was working for the State Highway in ‘66 when he fell off his mowin' tractor and his own blades ran over him. Lived a week or so before pneumonia got him.'

'Hmmm,' said Baedecker and squeezed the trigger. A scurrying shape kicked sideways and squealed in pain. Baedecker returned the rifle to port arms and pumped it three times to make sure the chamber was empty. He handed it over. 'I've got to get back,' he said. 'I have a speech to make at eight.'

'Fuckin' A,' said Carl Foster and handed the weapon to Galen.

'Are you sure you wouldn't like some coffee?' Bill Ackroyd asked nervously. 'I'm sure,' said Baedecker. He stood in front of the hall mirror in Ackroyd's home and tried for the second time to knot his tie.

'How about something to eat?'

'Had a big breakfast,' said Baedecker. 'Two of them.'

'Jackie'll heat up some of the roast.'

'No time,' said Baedecker. 'It's almost eight.' They hurried out the door. The twilight bathed the cornfields and Ackroyd's RV in a Maxfield Parish glow. Ackroyd backed the Bonneville out and they roared into town.

Old Settlers was ablaze with lights. The canvas of the big tents seeped light, yellow bulbs were strung between the gaming booths, the softball diamond was bathed in arc-lamp brilliance, and the carnival rides were outlined in colored bulbs. Baedecker suddenly recalled an August night when Jimmy Haines had been sleeping over. It had been the night before Old Settlers. Sometime after midnight the two boys had awakened as if responding to a whispered summons, dressed silently, gone over the wire fence at the back of the property, and pushed through the high grass of the fields behind the high school until they were close enough to hear the soft curses and commands of the carny men assembling the rides. Suddenly the lights of the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round had blinked on, brilliant constellations against the black Midwestern night. Baedecker and his best friend had stood motionless, paralyzed with the wonder of it.

Baedecker remembered standing on the moon, shielding his already-shielded visor with a gloved hand and searching the black sky for a single star. There were none. Only the white glare of the cratered surface and the light from the inconsequential crescent that was the earth had pierced the gold-tinted visor.

Ackroyd parked behind a police car, and the two men joined the crowd filing into the high school gymnasium. Baedecker immediately recognized the wood and varnish smell of the place. He had dribbled basketballs where the folding chairs were set in even rows. The platform that he was ascending had been the stage for his sixth-grade operetta. He had been cast as Billy the Orphan who, in the final act, was revealed to be the Christ child come again to check on a family's charity. Baedecker's father had written from Camp Pendleton to say that it had been the most colossal case of miscasting in the history of the theater.

He sat with Ackroyd on gray metal chairs as Mayor Seaton quieted the crowd. Baedecker estimated that there were three to four hundred people filling the chairs and wooden bleachers. More people milled in the open doorways at the back. The sound of the merry-go-round music came in clearly on the humid air.

'. . . of the Apollo Program. Our voyager to the moon. One of America's true heroes and Glen Oak's very own son . . . Richard M. Baedecker!' Applause filled the gym and momentarily drowned out the midway's music. As Baedecker rose to his feet, Bill Ackroyd gave him a pat on the back that almost sent him to his knees. He recovered, shook the mayor's hand, and faced the crowd.

'Thank you, Mayor Seaton and members of the city council. I'm happy to be back in Glen Oak tonight.' There was another round of applause and in the few seconds before he resumed speaking Baedecker realized that he was quite drunk. He had no idea what he would say next.

Baedecker had learned how to lessen his fear of audiences by slightly unfocusing his eyes when he spoke. Crowds became less formidable when they blurred into a colorful sea of faces. But this night he did not do this. Baedecker looked earnestly at the crowd. He saw Stinky Serrel in the second row waving at him with little motions of her hand below her chin. Her husband, still in his softball uniform, was dozing in the chair next to her. Phil Dixon and his family sat three rows farther back. Jackie Ackroyd sat on the aisle of the front row. Next to her, Terry was kneeling on a chair with his back to Baedecker, talking loudly to an older boy. He could not see Carl Foster or Galen, but he sensed that they were there. In the seconds of silence after the applause died away, Baedecker felt a sudden rush of affection for everyone in the crowd.

'The exploration of space has been rewarding to scientists in terms of its payoff in pure knowledge and exciting to engineers because of the technological challenge it has posed,' Baedecker heard himself begin, 'but many people do not know how tremendously rewarding it has been for the average American in terms of spin-offs, which have improved the quality of all of our lives.' Baedecker relaxed as he spoke. He had gotten through the original five-month NASA public relations tour after the mission only by memorizing half a dozen set speeches. What he was starting into now — although updated by him — was the NASA-written piece that he always thought of as his Teflon Speech.

'. . . not only those wondrous materials and alloys, but as a result of the NASA-sponsored advances in electronics we can enjoy the benefits of such things as pocket calculators, home computers, and relatively inexpensive video cassette recorders.'

Sweet Jesus, thought Baedecker, we mounted the greatest collective effort of labor and imagination since the pharaohs built the pyramids so we can sit home and watch Debbie Does Dallas on our VCRs.

Baedecker paused, coughed once, and resumed. 'Communication satellites some of which were launched by the space shuttle tie our world together in a web of telecommunications. When Dave and I walked on the moon sixteen years ago, we brought along a new, lightweight video camera, which was the prototype for many of today's home video units. When Dave and I drove the Lunar Rover six miles and looked down into a canyon which no human eye had ever been able to see clearly before, our explorations were broadcast live across two hundred forty thousand miles of space.'

And were rejected by the networks because they would have interrupted their daytime programming, thought Baedecker. The Apollo Program died young because it had poor production values and a banal script. After Apollo 11 everything looked like reruns. We could-n't compete with Days of Our Lives.

'. . . at that time no one could have foreseen all of the spin-offs created by the project. Our goal was to explore the universe and expand the frontiers of knowledge. Our effect was to create a technological revolution, which, in turn, led to the spin-offs, which have changed the life of the average American consumer.'

Joan spinning off from a marriage that had been an illusion for years. Scott spinning off to India, dedicating his life to finding eternal verities in a culture that can't master flush toilets.

'When Dave, Tom, and I flew Discovery to the moon, the average business computer cost twelve thousand dollars,' said Baedecker. 'Today, thanks to the spin-offs of our space program, a home computer costing twelve hundred dollars can do the same job. And do it better.'

Dave Muldorff spinning off to become a congressman from Oregon. Baedecker remembered a white figure moving lightly across the lunar plain, his suit radiant in a corona of sunlight, leaving footprints in the dust that would be fresh when he and Baedecker would be dust, America not even a memory, the human race forgotten. Fund-raising rallies. Dave, whose NASA career was cut short by the unpardonable sin of bringing a Frisbee to the surface of the moon and not being repentant.

'. . . and hospitals today can use this kind of device to monitor a patient's vital signs . . .'

Tom Gavin spinning off to his new fundamentalist realities. If God spoke to you while you were up there alone in the command module, Tom, why didn't you tell Dave and me during the flight back? Or mention it during debriefing? Why wait all those years to announce it on the PTL Club?

'. . . the thermal tiles and other materials developed for the shuttle will have hundreds of unforeseen uses in commercial and daily life. Other possibilities . . .'

The Challenger exploding, pieces spinning off toward the waiting sea. The orange hell-glow of burning hypergolics. Fragments falling, falling.

'. . . benefits might include . . .'

Baedecker's wife and son spinning off to other lives, other realities.

'. . . might include such things . . .'

Richard E. Baedecker spinning off . . .

'. . . such things as . . .'

Spinning off to . . .

'. . . such things as . . .'

To what?

Baedecker stopped speaking.

A group of farmers who had been laughing at unheard jokes in the back of the gym stopped talking in the sudden silence and turned toward the stage. The boy, Terry Ackroyd, still kneeling on his chair, stopped talking to his friend and turned his head toward Baedecker.

Baedecker gripped the sides of the podium tightly to keep from falling. The large room pitched and yawed in his vision. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead and lower back. Baedecker's nerves prickled in his neck.

'You all saw the shuttle explode,' Baedecker said thickly. 'Again and again on videotape. It was like a recurrent dream, wasn't it? A nightmare we couldn't shake.' Baedecker was amazed to hear these words. He had no idea what he would say next.

'I was there with NASA when the STS . . . the shuttle system . . . was being designed,' he said. 'Every step of the way there was a compromise because of money . . . or politics . . . or bureaucracy . . . or sheer corporate stupidity. We killed those seven people as surely as if we had put guns to their heads.' The faces turned toward Baedecker were as translucent as water, as unsteady as candle flames.

'But that's the way evolution works!' cried Baedecker, his mouth too close to the microphone. 'The stack . . . the orbiter and external tank and SRBS and everything, looks so beautiful, so advanced, so technologically perfect . . . but it's like us, an evolutionary compromise. Right next to the miracle of the heart or the wonder of the eye, there's some artifact of stupidity like the vermiform appendix just waiting to kill us.' Baedecker swayed slightly and stared at his audience. He was not getting his point across, and it was suddenly very important that he do so.

The silence expanded. The sounds of Old Settlers receded. One person near the back of the gym coughed and the noise echoed like cannonshot. Baedecker could no longer focus on faces. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and clung to the podium.

'What happened to the fish?'

He opened his eyes. 'What happened to the fish?' he asked again urgently and raised his voice. 'The lungfish. Those first ones to crawl out of the sea. What happened to them?' The silence of the crowd shifted in tone. A tension filled the room. Somewhere outside a girl on one of the rides screamed in mock terror. The cry faded and the audience inside waited.

'They left prints in the mud and then what?' asked Baedecker. His voice sounded very strange even to him. He tried to clear his throat and then he spoke again. 'The first ones. I know they probably just gasped on the beach for a while and then went back to the ocean. When they died, their bones joined all the others in the ooze. I know that. I don't mean that.' Baedecker half turned toward Ackroyd and the others as if asking for help and then looked back at the crowd. He lowered his head a moment but quickly lifted it to stare at faces. He recognized no one. His eyes would not focus properly. He was afraid that his own face was wet with tears but he could do nothing about that.

'Did they dream?' asked Baedecker. He waited but there was no answer. 'You understand, they'd seen the stars,' said Baedecker. 'Even while they were lying there on the beach, gasping for breath, wanting only to go back to the sea, they had seen the stars.

Baedecker cleared his throat again. 'What I want to know is . . . before they died before their bones joined the rest . . . did they dream? I mean, of course they dreamed, but were they different? The dreams. What I'm trying to say ' He halted.

'I think . . .' began Baedecker and stopped again. His hand banged against the microphone as he turned quickly. 'Thank you for the homecoming today,' said Baedecker but his head was turned away, the microphone was askew, and no one heard him.

A little before three A.M., Baedecker was quietly and thoroughly sick. He was thankful for the bathroom off the guest bedroom. Afterward he brushed his teeth, rinsed his mouth out, and crossed the basement to Terry's empty room.

The Ackroyds had turned in hours earlier. The house was silent. Baedecker closed the door to block any hint of light and waited for the stars to come out.

They did. One by one they emerged from the darkness. There were at least several hundred of them. The sunlit hemisphere of the earth, three diameters above the lunar peaks, also had been swabbed with phosphorescent paint. The moon's surface glowed in a gentle bath of reflected earthlight. The stars burned. Craters threw impenetrable shadows. The silence was absolute.

Baedecker lay back on the boy's bed, careful not to muss the spread. He thought about the coming day. After he got to Chicago and registered, he would look up Borman and Seretti. With any luck they could get together that night for an informal dinner where they could kick around the Air Bus deal before the convention really got under way.

After dinner, Baedecker would call Cole Prescott at his home in St. Louis. He would tell Prescott that he was resigning and work out the details of the quickest transition possible. Baedecker wanted to be out of St. Louis by early September. By Labor Day if he could.

Then what? Baedecker raised his eyes to the earth shining in a star-deepened sky. The swirls of cloud masses were brilliant. He would trade in his four-year-old Chrysler Le Baron for a sports car. A Corvette. No, something as sleek and powerful as a Corvette but with a real gearbox. Something fast and fun to drive. Baedecker grinned at the profound simplicity of it all.

Then what? More stars were becoming visible as his eyes adapted. The boy must have worked for hours, thought Baedecker and stared at the ceiling, seeing distant galaxies resolving themselves in great, glowing strands of stars. He would head west. It had been many years since Baedecker had driven across the continent. He would visit Dave out in Salem, spend some time with Tom Gavin in Colorado.

Then what? Baedecker raised his wrist and let it lie on his forehead. There were voices in his ears, but the background interference made them unintelligible. Baedecker thought of gray headstones in the grass and of dark forms scurrying between the rusted springs of a ‘38 Hudson. He thought of sunlight striking Glen Oak's water tower and the terrible beauty of his newborn son. He thought of darkness. He thought of the lights of the Ferris wheel turning soundlessly in the night.

Later, when Baedecker closed his eyes and slept, the stars continued to burn.