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later, Larry. I’m going to stop and see Wendy.” It was what Wade said every night they went out. He’d run twenty minutes and then detour to his girlfriend’s house. Wendy was in their class. Tonight Larry had crossed the river alone, smelling the rich clay before the reflection of the water appeared, and he dropped onto the new bike path, which drifted toward the park.
    â€œI think I’ll stop and see her too,” Larry said, running in the middle of the unnamed road that marked the south edge of town. “For you are not worthy to touch her fair hand. Her little finger. Oh you could touch her little finger, say, if she were wearing protective gloves and you were giving her back a book that you’d borrowed, not that you’d borrow a book, unless it was just full of pictures . . .” And with a start Larry suddenly passed a couple walking their Irish wolfhound, a dog he and everyone else knew very well, Shamrock, known as Rocky, the largest dog in the county, four feet tall, but he didn’t know the dog’s owners except that they were the Drapers and they were older than his parents, and he had scared them by approaching at a run, a young man apparently yelling at someone. The large gray dog and the two people stood still while he drifted by, his long silent strides giving him just a chance to whisper a hoarse “Hello,” in such a different tone than he’d been talking that it stilled them even more.
    He took a dozen more long running steps and thought to turn and call back “Sorry,” but they were lost in the dark now, and he was glowing with all his power, and he turned and loped through the weedy vacant lots between the little houses of old town and the highway department equipment sheds, and he said, “I’m sure your dog understood that I was making perfect sense.”
    There was a pleasure in the running now, and he took the ditch at the field’s edge in a stride and continued the long miles beside the airport. He ran the packed ditch bank alongside the two-lane highway and drifted effortlessly by the lit edifice, a four-gate airport with a dozen flights a day, and here in the open world the wind bumped him once and twice, smelling of rain somewhere out in the prairie night. “Come on wind,” he said. “Let’s go.”
    He came to the end of the dark rocky lane, which years before had been a real road, when two bars and the Trail’s End Motel lit that far edge of town, enough neon to beckon some and warn others. Now the two bars were unmarked ashy heaps and one garish chimney, and the Trail’s End stood mostly burned, squalid and gothic and ruined, its sixty-foot sign showing stars through the letters. There was a single car cocked in the glass-littered parking lot, utterly out of place. “Citizens,” Larry said at the empty building shell, “sleep tight.” And as he spoke, he was startled as a head appeared in the glass of the automobile, which wasn’t a derelict at all but some kind of Audi, a face and then two hands, and then gone in the dark again. It was across the street, and he knew that he would know who was in that car with whom. The car was familiar, and he looked back again, but the headlights beamed, blinding him to further revelations, and the car, seemingly silently, turned a gentle turn through all the tiny fragments of broken glass and swept onto the abandoned street, two massive two-tone taillights receding into the night. “Or not!” he called to the vanished car.
    There had never been a person running through this place, night or day, going back to forever. In the fifties the Trail’s End had been a nifty motel waiting for the town to grow out to it, and it was even featured in a famous postcard on which it stood as a gateway for the village behind it, an emblem of the modern world, and then it slid for thirty years and had been empty almost twenty. Headlights