The Last Chairlift

26. THE GETAWAY DRIVER

I was still a student at Exeter when Nora told me I had to see The Wrong Car. She and Em saw it somewhere—at a noir festival, Nora said. Nora didn’t like gangster movies any better than I did, but she shared Susan Barlow’s opinion that the getaway driver was really handsome—small, but handsome. “I think he looks a lot like our Elliot,” Mrs. Barlow had said.

“Well, he’s not that small, darling,” Mr. Barlow had replied.

“He’s that handsome,” Susan Barlow had insisted.

“He’s handsome, all right,” Nora said to me, while Em did weird things with her eyes. Em was batting her eyelashes and pointing to my eyes; then she stood so close to me that I could feel her eyelashes flutter against my cheek. “This little actor, Paul Goode, is a dead ringer for you, kiddo,” Nora told me. “He doesn’t look a lot like the snowshoer.”

Em’s pantomime was pretty clear. “The getaway driver has my eyes?” I asked her. Em nodded, her hands on an imaginary steering wheel, driving purposely into an ambush.

“It’s not only that your mother thinks this actor looks like you,” I reported to the snowshoer. “Nora and Em think he looks like me.”

Elliot sighed. “If my parents are extolling Paul Goode’s noirishness, I’ll bet he’s awful,” the little English teacher said, “but if the film is being shown at noir festivals, it’ll show up around here.” Mr. Barlow was betting it would come to Cambridge—to the Brattle Theatre, an art-house cinema he knew from his familiarity with Harvard Square—but The Wrong Car came to the Franklin in Durham in 1960, four years after its lackluster theatrical release. Virtually no one had seen the film, save Nora and Em and the little Barlows. As for Susan Barlow’s prediction—that we were destined to see more of Paul Goode—it hadn’t happened. Not yet.

Careerwise, it didn’t bode well for Paul Goode that he was thirty when almost no one noticed him as the getaway driver in The Wrong Car. One winter night, my next-to-last year at Exeter, I drove to Durham, with the snowshoer riding shotgun beside me. In the backseat, my uncles were horsing around. In 1962, Elliot and I would see Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player—a great noir film, melodramatic and funny (and not)—but Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were already laughing in anticipation of how funny The Wrong Car was going to be. It wasn’t. Not even Martin and Johan laughed. It was a bloodbath, a very repetitious one, but the getaway driver surprised us. No one thought Paul Goode looked much like the snowshoer. Yes, the actor was small and handsome, and although he was thirty, he looked twenty. Truly, he looked barely eighteen. For most of the film he wore an unflattering duckbill cap, a newsboy cap. His dark eyes were hard to see under that rounded flatcap, the brim at eyebrow level. The cap was a soiled herringbone pattern. Its eternal griminess suggested that the little driver slept under his getaway car.

What is noir about The Wrong Car, and about Paul Goode’s taciturn but smiling performance, is that the getaway car never gets away—only the driver escapes, to drive again. The car is a death trap, if this little guy is driving it. The third or fourth doomed getaway car made Uncle Martin question us in the Franklin. “Is the getaway driver a ghost?” he whispered.

“An Angel of Death!” Uncle Johan loudly exclaimed, frightening the moviegoers seated around us.

An über-noir touch, late in the movie, is a bimbo along for the ride—a moll, we would call her. One of the gangsters has a girlfriend, but whose girlfriend is she? As the gangsters pile into the getaway car, there’s no seat for the moll.

“Hey, what about me?” she asks.

“You gotta sit on someone’s lap,” one of the gangsters tells her.

“Not his lap,” a different gangster says to her, pointing to the little driver. “He’s gotta drive.”

“No, thanks,” the moll says, walking away. Before she goes, she takes a long look at the smiling driver.

“Who’s the broad?” one of the gangsters asks, as the car pulls away—to all their deaths, except for the getaway driver.

“Just some broad,” we hear a gangster say. This is a voice-over, during a long shot of the car driving into a hail of gunfire.

For the last not-a-getaway scene, the same broad shows up again. This time, there’s a seat for her—the passenger seat, right next to the smiling little driver. The moll recognizes him, of course; she somewhat aggressively takes his flatcap off, just to be sure. It’s the first time we can see how handsome he is—his dark-brown hair, his dark-brown eyes, the shy innocence of his boyish smile, which is beginning to betray his deadly sarcasm. I definitely had his eyes.

“It’s you again!” the moll tells the driver. She gets out of the car, keeping his cap, which she puts on her head. “I ain’t ridin’ with him,” she tells the three gangsters squeezed into the backseat of the death car. “You’re dead meat, you know,” the broad tells them, but this is über-noir in overkill—we know.

On the drive back from Durham, my uncles went on and on about the symbolism of the getaway driver; they were struggling to express what it means that he always gets away. The little driver is working for a rival mob, or he’s a cop, or he’s not real—these were among my uncles’ bold interpretations.

“He’s too pretty to be a guy!” Uncle Johan exclaimed.

“His eyes are your eyes,” the snowshoer told me.

“What about his smile?” I asked Elliot.

“His smile is very noir,” the little English teacher said.

“I like how the getaway driver hooks up with the broad at the end!” Uncle Martin called out from the backseat.

“It’s like those two planned the whole thing!” Uncle Johan shouted.

I glanced at the snowshoer—only for a second, because I was driving—just long enough to see he was smiling. There was nothing noir about Mr. Barlow’s smile.

At the end of The Wrong Car, the getaway driver is drinking a beer at a bar when the moll comes in. She’s still wearing his flatcap.

“How’d it go, cutie pie?” she asks the little driver, cozying up to him on the nearest barstool.

“You know how it went,” the driver tells her in his deadpan way. “Please take off that cap.” The broad puts the duckbill cap on the empty barstool beside her.

“Better?” she asks him, snuggling closer.

“Such an improvement,” the little driver tells her—giving her his shyly innocent, almost childlike smile. When you’re over thirty and you smile like a kid, there is something noir about it.

I knew that smile. I knew who Paul Goode looked like, more than he did me or the snowshoer. But I was quiet; I just drove the car. My uncles and Elliot Barlow had not seen my ghosts. They’d not met the snow shoveler in that black-and-white photograph; they’d not seen the Aspen of my dreams, or of my nightmares.

“Paul Goode doesn’t look like a very young George Raft, no matter what my father says,” the little English teacher said.

“Not even if George Raft were really handsome,” I pointed out.

“No matter what my mother says,” Elliot added.

I couldn’t tell them that I thought I’d seen Paul Goode, in documentary black and white, when he was only fourteen and he’d been shoveling snow—when he’d cleared the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Jerome. He was about the age he’d been when he might have met my mom, when he was just some kid who wasn’t shaving—a no-strings-attached kid who couldn’t take his eyes off Little Ray. How could I have told them that? I didn’t know that for a fact, and they’d never seen the young snow shoveler—or so I thought.

In the Franklin, when the houselights came on—after the end credits for The Wrong Car had rolled—I’d told my uncles that Nora and Em thought I looked like the getaway driver.

“You’re not an Angel of Death, Adam,” Uncle Johan had assured me.

“Adam has the same eyes,” Uncle Martin said.

“You look more like your mom, Adam,” Uncle Johan said.

A good-looking woman had overheard us. She was my mom’s age—she’d been in the row behind us, but she was making her way to the aisle alongside us. “Let me see your eyes, Adam,” she said. When I looked at her, she asked me if I could smile. Under the circumstances, I suppose my smile was shy and childlike. I think I was more innocent than most eighteen-year-olds.

The attractive older woman spoke directly to my uncles, but she kept glancing at the snowshoer. “The kid has Paul Goode’s eyes and his smile—he’s going to get in a lot of trouble,” the woman said. “And who are you?” she suddenly asked the snowshoer. Before Elliot could answer her, she said, “You and the kid are definitely related.”

“I’m Adam’s stepfather—we’re not related,” Mr. Barlow told her pleasantly.

The good-looking woman was now annoyed with all of us. “He looks like he could be your father, kid,” she told me, pointing to the little English teacher. She was walking away from us, disappearing into the theater lobby—like a lost noir character from The Wrong Car. She was returning to the movie, I was imagining, when I felt Uncle Martin’s hand on my shoulder.

“Johan’s right—you look more like your mom, Adam,” Uncle Martin said.

In the car, on our way home from Durham, the subject of physical resemblance took an abrupt turn.

“You know who the getaway driver really looks like, don’t you?” Uncle Martin suddenly asked Uncle Johan.

“I was just thinking about him!” Uncle Johan exclaimed. “He looks like that little mountaineer—that Aspen local who was a ski guide at Camp Hale!” Johan declared.

“I’ll never forget that kid,” Uncle Martin said. “It was when the Eighty-seventh returned to Camp Hale, in February ’44—the kid was turning eighteen. He couldn’t wait to be a Tenth Mountain Division man.”

“A very little man!” Uncle Johan yelled from the backseat. “He didn’t look old enough to drive, but he sure could ski! Paulino—I remember him. He ended up in the Eighty-fifth, didn’t he? The getaway driver looks like Paulino! He was Italian, wasn’t he?” Johan asked Martin.

“Paulino is a Spanish name—Spanish or Portuguese,” Martin corrected his brother. “In Colorado, I suspect, Paulino is probably a Mexican name.”

“That kid didn’t look Mexican,” Uncle Johan pointed out.

“No, he didn’t,” Uncle Martin agreed, “but around Aspen, I’m guessing, Paulino would be a Mexican name.”

No, the young snow shoveler didn’t look Mexican, I was thinking, but how could I tell them that I might have seen the little mountaineer they were remembering, or that I might have mistaken the short boy with the tall shovel for a ghost? After all, in black and white, hadn’t the small snow shoveler been in the company of ghosts?

“What was Paulino’s last name?” I asked my uncles, but Uncle Martin was explaining to Johan that “Paulino” was the Spanish or Portuguese form of just plain “Paul.” Was his name only a coincidence? I wondered, but Uncle Johan chose this moment to start talking to the snowshoer and me.

“We were just a couple of old volunteers, recruited by the National Ski Patrol to train the mountain troops—the young ones looked like kids to us,” Johan told us from the backseat. “We already had kids of our own—Nora was eight, Henrik six.”

“Paulino shipped with the Eighty-fifth, didn’t he?” Uncle Martin asked his brother.

“I’m just wondering if you remember Paulino’s last name,” I interjected.

“The Eighty-fifth and the Eighty-seventh embarked together, from Hampton Roads in ’45—bound for Naples,” Uncle Johan told his brother, as I’d heard him say (rather wistfully) before. “Paulino shipped with them.”

“What about Paulino’s last name?” I asked again, to no avail.

“I was forty, Johan thirty-eight,” Uncle Martin said, for no reason. I knew when their wartime thoughts veered off; I knew where their conversation was headed. My uncles started talking to each other as if Elliot and I weren’t in the car.

“The Eighty-seventh’s First Battalion had some casualties on the western slope of Mount Belvedere,” Uncle Johan was saying.

“The Eighty-fifth’s First Battalion attacked Mount Belvedere’s sister peak, Mount Gorgolesco,” Uncle Martin reminded his brother.

“There was action in the Po Valley and the Po River crossing,” Uncle Johan said, as if he’d been there—he hadn’t. But he’d trained young men who had died there—my mom told me.

“Some KIAs and DOWs, all right,” Uncle Martin said.

“What?” I asked them, from the driver’s seat.

“Killed in action,” Uncle Martin explained.

“Died of wounds,” Uncle Johan told me.

“I was just wondering if you knew Paulino’s last name,” I said.

“Johan thought he was Italian!” Uncle Martin exclaimed.

“He wasn’t Mexican, Martin,” Uncle Johan insisted.

In exasperation, I turned on the car radio, where Marty Robbins was singing “El Paso.” My uncles instantly started singing along. They were a couple of old Tenth Mountain Division men, all right. Many of the ski troops they trained went to Italy, but my uncles had gone home—not to war. They were already married men, with children; they’d had the time of their lives at Camp Hale, playing hooky from their families, drinking beer with the boys. It was a wonder my uncles could remember anything from their Tenth Mountain Division days. Paulino’s last name was too much to expect.

In exasperation, I turned off the car radio. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan instantly stopped singing; they couldn’t remember the words to the Marty Robbins song, although they’d just been singing it. That was when the snowshoer started to sing. I’d known him for four years, and I never knew he could sing, or what a pretty voice he had. My uncles and I were so impressed by Mr. Barlow, we didn’t sing along—we just listened to him sing “El Paso.”

I can’t hear that song and not hear the snowshoer’s voice, and not remember that night in the car, when I was driving and I’d just seen Paul Goode as the getaway driver.

A couple of old Tenth Mountain Division men thought Paul Goode looked like an Aspen local they’d encountered as a ski guide—“just some kid,” as my mom remembered him, when he’d been three years younger than the mountaineer my uncles identified as Paulino. No, naturally, Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan didn’t know—or they couldn’t remember—Paulino’s last name. I doubted that my mother knew or remembered the boy’s first name. Little Ray only knew, or she thought she knew, there were no strings attached. You don’t need to have the writer gene to imagine there are always strings attached.

I knew that Molly and my mom hadn’t seen The Wrong Car—not in Manchester, Vermont. Paul Goode’s career was languishing. He hadn’t made another movie—not yet. My mother couldn’t have seen the little actor on the big screen. I would manage to say to Molly that a possible name for my unknown father had surfaced—“maybe two names,” was how I put it.

“How can he have two names?” Molly asked me. “I don’t think Ray remembers his name—not even one name, Kid.”

“If you find a moment, Molly, just ask her if she remembers a kid named Paulino—she might have called him Paul,” I explained. I didn’t say that he had become a movie star, because he hadn’t—not yet.

Almost twenty thousand men served in the Tenth Mountain Division in Italy. Of the three infantry regiments that landed in Naples, almost twenty-five percent became casualties. Paulino Somebody may have been among them. I wondered if I’d seen Paulino among my Aspen ghosts. Or perhaps Paulino had become Paul Goode, because the innocent-looking snow shoveler didn’t look dead.

Everyone said I looked like my mother, and I definitely did. Except for the eyes and the noir smile, I saw little of myself in the shy snow shoveler or in the getaway driver. Okay, the three of us were certifiably small, and I suppose we were somewhat handsome, but it’s no big deal that we all had dark hair and dark eyes. In the area of inherited characteristics, these features aren’t positively identifying. Your relative size, your conventional good looks, your hair and eyes—these things aren’t the same as signatures, or as verifiable as fingerprints, are they? “You look like your mom, kiddo,” Nora had always told me. “Whoever your dad was, you can’t look a lot like him—you’re already a dead ringer for Little Ray.”

Upon seeing The Wrong Car, had Nora changed her mind? She’d said Paul Goode was a dead ringer for me. “I just mean he looks more like you than he looks like the snowshoer—you still look more like your mom, kiddo,” Nora said. This echoed what Uncle Johan and Uncle Martin had told me, and Em was nodding in agreement, but I could tell Em had more to say.

Em held her right hand—her writing hand, like mine—in front of me. I could see her fingers grouped together; Em wanted me to know she was holding an imaginary pen.

“You’re still pissed off at me, aren’t you?” Nora asked her. “I told you, I was going to tell him—I just forgot!”

Em was angrily writing with her imaginary pen on my chest. I could feel her bearing down harder when she was writing near my heart.

Of course I’d told them everything. If I’d learned anything, I’d learned not to keep secrets from Nora and Em. I’d already told them what Little Ray had said about the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off her—he was just some kid who wasn’t shaving. I’d already told them what those old Tenth Mountain Division men had said—how Paul Goode reminded my uncles of a little mountaineer they’d met at Camp Hale, an alleged Aspen local. Ghost or no ghost, I’d told them about my prior sightings of the young snow shoveler, too.

“I’m sorry, Em—I just forgot!” Nora was saying, while Em was acting out an excruciating giving-birth-while-trying-to-write scenario. “What Em is trying to tell you, kiddo, is that Paul Goode has the writer gene,” Nora told me. “I forgot to tell you—he was the screenwriter for The Wrong Car, not just the getaway driver.”

Even the little Barlows, that indefatigable writing team, had missed the screenwriting credit—“it’s not a great gangster movie,” was all John Barlow had said.

“But the guy who plays the driver of the getaway car is really noir—he’s someone special,” Susan Barlow had weighed in.

I suspected the snowshoer would be thrilled to know his parents had missed the screenwriting credit, but I was disheartened, because the writing of The Wrong Car was the worst thing about it. The writing, the snowshoer had said, was the most über-noir thing about it. If my writer gene came from Paul Goode, I was thinking, I would have to fight against the über-noir in myself.

Em and I did a lot of thinking about our writer genes; Em wanted to be a writer, too, and she had no idea where her writing came from. Nora thought we did too much thinking about this. “Why worry about it?” Nora had asked us. “There’s nothing you can do about where your writing comes from!”

But Nora and Em and I agreed about the little English teacher’s expeditions as a woman—it worried us. Nora and Em believed that the snowshoer would have a somewhat easier time living as a woman in a city like New York.

“Holy shit, anywhere but Exeter!” was the way Nora put it. As a girl who’d grown up in a faculty apartment in an all-boys’ dorm, Nora knew how sexual minorities were treated at Exeter.

But Nora and Em and I knew why the snowshoer wasn’t ready to move on from Exeter—he’d told us. Even in the early sixties, Elliot Barlow was advocating for the academy to become a coed school. Until Exeter let in girls, Mr. Barlow wasn’t leaving; he wanted to be there for the boys who got picked on. “Once there are girls around as witnesses, boys will be kinder to other boys,” the snowshoer said. He’d talked to his fellow teachers at several New England all-girls’ schools; the teachers at those schools had told him how mean girls could be to girls. Having boys as witnesses would make the girls behave better, too. That was Elliot’s argument for coeducation: kindness.

“Try being coed in the summer school—see if it works there,” the little English teacher had been saying for years. In 1961, thirteen girls were admitted to the Exeter Summer School—they were day students, not boarders. The next summer, the first girl boarding students were admitted. A majority of the academy faculty supported the change; the summer school had provided convincing evidence of the academic desirability of coeducation and the feasibility of handling a boarding population of boys and girls.

In 1969, the board of trustees took up the matter. As Mr. Barlow had predicted, the principal argument against a coed Exeter was financial: women graduates would earn less than men; women would give less to the school. The snowshoer proposed polling recent Exeter alumni, who were now in college; Mr. Barlow already knew that the Exeter student body wanted a coed school. The only college students who opposed the idea were at Dartmouth. Nora said Dartmouth had a dick-oriented culture. Em’s pantomime is best left to the imagination.

The Exeter board of trustees voted unanimously in favor of coeducation in 1970. The first girl day students were admitted to the regular session in September of that year; the girl boarders would come in 1971. In 1973, the snowshoer resigned from Phillips Exeter Academy, where he’d taught for twenty years. With Nora and Em’s encouragement, Elliot Barlow would move to New York City.

When he’d been asked how the boys would treat the girls at Exeter, the little English teacher had said: “I can only hope they will treat the girls better than they have treated other boys.” It would remain dismaying to Elliot, however, that there’d been no discussion among the trustees at Exeter concerning the possibility of inappropriate behavior by the faculty toward the female students at the school. Even in the early 1960s, when he was asked how the Exeter faculty would treat female students, the snowshoer had sighed. “As everyone knows,” Mr. Barlow had said, “men generally behave very badly with women.” (As the snowshoer had been finding out for himself, around town.)

Long before he left Exeter, the snowshoer made dinner for Nora and Em and me one night in our Amen Hall apartment kitchen. Elliot Barlow was the best cook I knew. Growing up in Europe must have had something to do with it. We’d just eaten his stuffed peppers in marinara sauce.

“Show me the Deuteronomy note,” Nora said. I’d told her and Em what Moses had to say about cross-dressers. I’d been using the note as a bookmark in whatever novel I was reading—not the smartest way to forget the judgmental Moses.

“Oh, boy,” Nora said, after I handed her the note. “I grew up with my mother’s handwriting—she was always giving me Bible notes.”

The snowshoer and I weren’t surprised. We were pretty sure my mom must have used the she or the her word for Elliot around Abigail and Martha.

“We’ve all heard Ray use she or her for you,” Nora told the snowshoer, with Em nodding her head off. It was clear that Nora and Em knew a lot more about men wanting to be women, and women wanting to be men, than Elliot and I did. When I’d told Nora and Em about the snowshoer’s adventures as a woman in the town of Exeter, they weren’t shocked. Like Coach Dearborn, Nora and Em knew there are innumerable men who are assholes. “Not only in New Hampshire,” Nora had said.

Em’s bodily movements, when she was pantomiming her thoughts about gender, were disturbingly similar to her enactments of childbirth and having sex; the graphic nature of her pantomime could be easily misunderstood, but Nora’s deadpan interpretation was quickly forthcoming. “Em says there are almost as many women who are assholes,” Nora reported; then she frowned. “No, there aren’t, Em,” Nora said. Em just shook her head.

Nora could remember a couple of the Bible notes her mother had written to her. There was a verse from one of the epistles of Paul to the Corinthians. “It was basically a list of wrongdoers who will not inherit the kingdom of God,” Nora told us. “Thieves and drunkards were on the list, as were fornicators. Adulterers, homosexuals, and sodomites were definitely listed among the fornicators,” Nora recalled. “And there was a scary one from Revelation about other abominable types, including murderers and the sexually immoral. We were all going to end up in something called ‘the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death’—that fucking part gave me nightmares,” Nora said.

Em had left our kitchen table and was writhing around on the living-room floor. Em had been doing more pantomime workshops—“both taking them and teaching them,” Nora had said. Em’s tortured writhing around was her way of acting out what fire and brimstone in a burning lake can do to you. It was as meaningful an enactment of the second death in Revelation as I’ve ever seen. I knew Em wrote out many of her pantomime movements before she performed them; this was what Nora meant when she said Em choreographed herself.

Nora had seen Em’s Revelation pantomime before, because Nora just kept talking at the kitchen table. “If you ever feel like letting my mother know you’re on to her, I’ll tell you the Bible note you should give to her. I gave her this one, and she stopped writing Bible notes to me,” Nora told me and the snowshoer. “Check out Hebrews 13:2—it’s a really weird one,” Nora said. Elliot went into his bathroom and brought back the Bible that was forever obscured by the L.L.Bean catalog. This made Em stop dying the second death. Em came back to the kitchen table to listen to the little English teacher read Hebrews 13:2—all of us could appreciate how the very idea of it would drive Aunt Abigail bonkers.

The snowshoer solemnly read the verse twice. “ ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ ” We were all at a loss for words. No one could imagine Aunt Abigail entertaining strangers, nor could we imagine Nora’s mom believing that she might be missing out on entertaining angels.

In Em’s impersonation of Aunt Abigail, Nora’s mother appeared to be talking on the phone while giving birth. You would think Em had worked as a midwife, just to see how easily (and often) she imitated childbirth. “Your mother, Nora, is more unawares than most mothers,” Nora told us Em had said, in Em’s inimitable way.

The snowshoer could surprise us at times with a sudden seriousness. “Speaking strictly for me, as a man or as a woman,” Mr. Barlow began, “I am not unawares when I have entertained angels.” Nora and Em and I laughed. “You three have always been angels to me,” the little English teacher said, bursting into tears.

Em, sitting beside Elliot, pushed her chair away from the kitchen table and opened her arms to him. The snowshoer sat in Em’s lap. Em hugged him while he cried. Nora and I just held hands under the table. Nora didn’t have the hand strength of Coach Dearborn, but she had a very strong grip for a girl. You remember the emotional moments—when you think you’ve done the right thing, or all that anyone can do.

What you forget are the more interior details—what may seem like minutiae at the time. Nora and Em knew everything—meaning they knew as much as I knew—but I hadn’t told the snowshoer I was sure I’d seen the little getaway driver before. What would Elliot Barlow be inclined to believe about those black-and-white photographs—those ghosts, if they were ghosts, who were haunting me? Wouldn’t the little English teacher tell me that my runaway imagination had run amuck? I was becoming more sensitive about hurting Elliot’s feelings. He’d been better than a standby father to me; he’d loved me and advised me, as a good father (a real one) should. How did it make the snowshoer feel that I kept thinking about my mystery father, the one who’d done nothing for me?

It was another lie of omission. I hadn’t told Mr. Barlow that Paul Goode looked like the smiling snow shoveler—that boy too young to shave, posing by the snowbank in front of the Hotel Jerome. But you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.

It would soon be 1961. I would soon be on my way to Pittsburgh, and then, soon after, be on my way back. For a time, my focus was the snowshoer’s safety—though loneliness (my own, included) would be my more abiding subject, as a writer.

Coach Dearborn promised me he would keep an eye on the “Police Report.” Not only when I was away in Pittsburgh, but whenever I was out of town, the coach kept me informed. There was a lot of drunken driving and a shitload of domestic disputes and animal emergencies. The dangling cats continued for a while. The crafty hangman turned out to be a faculty brat—not quite old enough to be an academy student, but not exactly a townie. The cat killer was a young boy who loved birds, as Mr. Barlow had believed from the beginning.

But there were no further sightings of a small, pretty woman disabling the lustful men and boys of the town of Exeter. Either the artful snowshoer was not venturing out as a woman or the previously sighted little woman was venturing elsewhere.

I thought it sufficed that I’d given Molly a possible name for my unknown father, but I hadn’t told Molly about Paul Goode—I hadn’t even told her about the snow shoveler who looked like Paul Goode. I knew Molly didn’t believe in ghosts—she simply didn’t see them. I thought it sufficed that Molly might whisper the Paulino name, or just plain Paul, in my mom’s ear—to see if Little Ray remembered the name of the kid she’d slept with in Aspen.

I was only beginning to discern the difference between those things I should have seen coming and those things I couldn’t possibly have anticipated. Watching the snowshoer sob in Em’s lap, I was no more ready to understand myself as a work in progress than I would have believed Paul Goode had a future as an actor—not to mention as a writer.

If you’d told me that the little getaway driver had a future, and that I was in it, I would have laughed. I would have sounded like an echo of what the moll says in the last not-a-getaway scene in The Wrong Car—that moment when the broad gets out of the car. “I ain’t ridin’ with him,” she tells the three gangsters squeezed into the backseat of the death car. If you’d told me that Paul Goode would be a big deal in my future, I would have said I wasn’t taking a ride with him.