Dan could still see Hailey, knees propped on the back of the bus seat, clutching her gut, her plump cheeks pink with laughter.
“You’re totally Calvin,” she said.
“How do you figure? I never get into trouble ever.”
“Not like that. I mean, you’re like wise beyond your years or something.”
And he had the very not-wise-beyond-his-years reaction of: I think I’ll probably marry Hailey when I grow up.
His own character in Mrs. Bingham’s Ohio history class was General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, the man President Washington tasked with avenging a debacle, in which the U.S. Army lost 623 soldiers trying to capture Ohio from the Indian tribes. It was the worst loss the United States would suffer against any Indian force in its history and also a worse loss of life than any battle during the entire Revolutionary War, which he always thought said a lot about how nations go about remembering themselves. Wayne led an army of 3,500 back into Ohio.
“Little Turtle was the only war chief who saw the writing on the wall,” Mrs. Bingham told them on the day she recounted the Battle of Fallen Timbers. She picked up a book from her desk. She took her eyeglasses, which hung from a beaded strap around her neck, and rather than hooking them around her ears, held them in front of the page the way you would a magnifying glass. “Little Turtle told the other war chiefs, ‘The trail has been long and bloody; it has no end. The pale faces come from where the sun rises, and they are many. They are like the leaves of the trees. When the frost comes they fall and are blown away. But when the sunshine comes again they come back more plentiful than ever before.’ ” She snapped the book shut and let the eyeglasses dangle.
He tried to make a goofy face at Hailey, but she didn’t return it. She hadn’t come to his house that week or sat by him on the bus. A few days later, he saw pen-knifed into the rubbery green plastic of the bus seat in front of him DE + HK inside an angular heart. Scratched there by some enterprising wit.
“Everyone can tell you like her,” Lisa told him as they walked home together. “Just some advice: Don’t be so all over her.”
He knew Lisa didn’t say that to be cruel. He’d been eating her mom’s cookies, drinking their Capri Suns, and wondering about her beautiful friend for as long as he could remember. Lisa was both his buffer and his conduit to the popular kids; she looked out for him. Nevertheless, Dan protested: he wasn’t “all over” Hailey. They were just friends. They liked hanging out. But he knew that wasn’t true. Hailey didn’t like him that way, and now she had to put in her distance.
That night he went home and read about “Mad” Anthony Wayne. The encounter took place in a portion of northern Ohio near present-day Toledo, an eerie slice of forest called The Wilderness. A recent storm had felled hundreds of trees, and Wayne’s army charged under, over, and through the timbers. The retreating Indians fell back to Fort Miamis, but the British spurned them (some might say “betrayed”) and they had to keep running. They had no choice but to sue for peace. The Wyandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Miami, Potawatomi, Chippewa, and all the other mighty tribes of the Ohio territory ceded nearly all their land in exchange for goods. Beginning with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, war would become mostly bribery. Whites would always view their boundaries with the Indians as a temporary arrangement until the moment they needed more land. In this fashion, the borders of Ohio were born, but the battle would continue over the course of the coming century. All the way to the glory of the Pacific.
From the exit, he followed State Route 229 past the endless bisecting county roads, the small towns cluttered into plots of two-story buildings, gas stations, volunteer fire departments, Jean’s Ice Cream, Buddy’s Tavern, Gary’s Grocery, long spans of telephone wire, pickup trucks of every make and model carrying their loads. From the east, he passed the sweeping gloss of Jericho Lake with its ink-smudge homes on the other side. The sun drew down over the straggler clouds, vestiges of some long-dissipated low-pressure system now drifting lazily in a sea of dark cream. The rest of the drive was as familiar as finding his way through his childhood home in the dark, the way you know every corner, every doorway, how to angle your body around the dining room table.
And then there was what had changed. Zanesville Road, once nothing but fields, had vanished under pavement and parking lot. Gas stations, pet stores, tanning salons, Pizza Hut, AutoZone, Ruby Tuesday, Staples, Dairy Queen, Discount Tire, and finally a new crop of prefab homes, each one a clone of some original vinyl-sided patient zero. This was the strip that scotched away New Canaan’s downtown, relocating all business, all jobs, to this stretch of off-the-rack strip mall, even as year by year the same gutted quality befell Zanesville Road.
Turning down Rainrock, he passed the old bus stop, the Klines’ dark house, and pulled into his uneven slab of driveway beneath the basketball hoop, rusted and genuflecting over the concrete, where he and Hailey had waged countless H-O-R-S-E wars. He crawled from the stale odor of his car, stretched his limbs, felt them crackle. Dusk had settled to a purple velvet over the top of the nearby woods. His home sat almost completely unchanged: one story of white linoleum siding, rust-red shutters, and a basement level that grew out of the hill like a corn-fed rear end. The hoop looked worse than ever with pieces of the backboard chewed away, the rim bleeding rust all over the top of the net. The scars of Dan and his sisters could be seen on the scuffed and dented garage door, the quaint driveway lamp that had not one pane of glass left and the jagged root of a broken bulb still protruding from the socket.
Of course their neighbor Mr. Clifton was in his yard, flapping a hose around his flower beds. When he saw Dan pull in, he hastily shut the water off and crossed the lawn to greet him.
“Dan-Dan-Dan-Dan.” He pulled Dan into a bear hug. “Dan, you’re back.”
“I’m back.” He couldn’t help but return a bashful grin at the enormity of Mr. Clifton’s smile.
“Oh man, your parents didn’t tell me you were coming home.”
“Sorta didn’t know myself until a few days ago.”
“You look great!” Hearty slaps on the shoulder. Dan noticed Mr. Clifton studying his right eye. He was too polite to say anything awkward about how good it looked.
The Cliftons had been their neighbors for Dan’s whole life. Their daughter, Kimberly, had been friends with the younger of his two sisters, Heather, and Dan’s occasional babysitter. The hair had retreated to a ring around Mr. Clifton’s skull with one kinky black patch struggling to hold territory on the crown. He’d shaved off his mustache. He’d never known him without it, and his lip looked bald. The wrinkles of his face seemed deeper, his smile still pure white in a pale brown face. Having Mr. Clifton for music class was almost like having one of his own parents. Dan got a C on a quiz once, and he wrote, Dan! I’m sorry! Study!
“How’s Kim and J.D.?” he asked.
Mr. Clifton gave Dan the short version of his kids’ various successes. “Feels like only yesterday your parents were paying Kim six dollars an hour because they thought Heather might push you off the roof. What about you, though? How’s work? How’s life?”
He tried to wrap everything up as concisely as possible: Good job in a civil engineer’s office in Titusville. Basically glorified secretarial work, but still interesting enough. His boss was in charge of developing drilling projects across northern Pennsylvania, poking holes in the Marcellus Shale wherever feasible. Mostly Dan was in the office, but sometimes he followed him to job sites. He was learning a lot about drilling rigs and other gas infrastructure.