The first time it happens, Luke is outside bouncing a ball against the brick wall at Mrs. Greevy's house. He is ten. His mother has just died and now he goes to Mrs. Greevy's down the street after school until his father comes home from work. It is during the first few days of this new arrangement that Luke is standing on the broken concrete in front of the garage, bouncing the ball – a small pink one that some other child had discarded. He throws the ball against the brick, smeared with the rubber from bouncing balls of other children, and has the odd sensation that the ball has not bounced back. The wall has disappeared, but he has stayed in the exact same spot, feet rooted to the ground, only now he is looking from the eyes of a different boy. Lars.

His hand is dangling in front of him, sore from movement, not from throwing a ball, but from pulling weeds out of the long garden rows on the north end of a field. Lars is at the end of a row of pumpkins, and there are many more to go before sunset. He hears a movement from the woods – near the stream. Luke inside of Lars smells the air, the meat being smoked somewhere, the grass and dirt being broken apart, wet leaves in the stream – the absence of the dusky smells of car exhaust, pesticides, and chemicals.

First looking back at the house where his mother is hanging the washing to dry, Lars moves slowly to the vines at the edge of the treeline. It is also his job to keep the weeds from infringing upon the fields, and he sees that he must beat them back again, they are creeping towards the garden. The low plants rustle, a small animal is near. Lars reaches into his back pocket for a slingshot and a rock. He uses this to chase the animals from the garden. There is a sturdy tree with a good crook in it. Lars lifts himself and scratches his knee on the hard bark, blood springing to the surface like he'd been scratched by pins. The knees of his pants always frayed, were patched by his mother, and then frayed again. The material wore itself thin from when he kneeled in the damp dirt in the garden, or by the stream. He gets up to the crook of the tree and throws his leg around, holds still and waits.

Luke comes out of this past, and again the wall is in front of him, the ball bounces back and hits him in the eye, and he holds his eye, sitting on the ground, dazed not by the ball in the eye – though that does hurt – but by the lingering smell in his nose of the pumpkins and the tree, the feel of the bark on his hands, the knowledge of the history of worn cloth at the knees. He examines his own knee now, feeling a fading twinge of pain, but the skin is smooth, uncleaved.

Luke does not tell anyone about this. His rapid disengagement with his own world is accepted as a consequence of the recent loss of his mother. In a sense, it's true, since he has begun to go through the motions of his own life only waiting for transportation to the other. If only for another glimpse. A better understanding. Remembering that the first contact with Lars was caused by an action, Luke begins to pace, to run, to climb. He feels he must find his way back to Lars. His sweat soaks through his tee-shirts. Luke spoons through mouthfuls of his cereal in the morning quickly, getting up for more milk, more juice. He opens up windows and doors for no reason, hoping it will be the trigger to go back to Lars again. His own bleak life does not interest him. His mother's death has left the rooms of his house empty, quiet. It is getting cold. Luke and his father sit together on the couch in the evenings eating dinner, watching television. They rarely speak.

One night his father breaks down in his bedroom, pushing the quilts around Luke tightly to stop his legs from their fidgeting movements. His father cries into the pillow with his arms around Luke.

“I can't lose you, too,” he says. And Luke realizes that he has been losing himself. He tries to forget Lars and remain sedentary over the next few weeks. This, of course, is when it happens again.

It has gotten to be winter, and the drifts of snow rise on either side of the stone path. Luke's breath puffs into the air. He is opening the back gate of the yard. His father has asked him to get a screwdriver from the shed to tighten a cabinet hinge. It is evening, and the sun is setting in a milky sky. The gate opens, and suddenly the feeling of the cold metal on his fingers is replaced by wood, creaking in front of Lars, and the house behind Luke has dropped away into bright white fields and open sky, dark blue now, though the sun still sets. He is looking at what was the shed, but is now the small house that Lars's family lives in. Icicles, bigger than any that Luke has ever seen, run down from the side of the house and attach themselves to the ground, like bars of a jail cell. The snow is in rounded drifts.

Lars sees his mother in the kerosene lamp light through the glass windowpane. She is peering out as he is peering in, and he knows that she will be angry and relieved at once because it is getting dark and he should have been home from school much, much earlier. He won't tell her that he was ice fishing in the river, because he isn't allowed to do that, and besides, he didn't catch anything. He opens the door and the baby wails on the floor in the corner, banging a large spoon against the thick wall of the house. His sister has her head bent over biscuits that she is scraping off the flat pan and piling on a plate. The smells bring a wave of hunger to Lars's stomach.

“I won't even ask where you've been. Wash up now and help me set the table,” his mother says. Her dark eyes glow, and there are beads of sweat all over her face. A chicken stew is on the stove, flames licking the bottom of the pot. She has killed one of the hens, which means his father isn't back yet with any game, that he has been away a week now with no word. Luke feels a tightness in Lars's chest. Lars goes out back to the water pump, in a small cold room at the back of the house. He shivers while quickly pushing the lever up and down and uses a rag to wash around the back of his neck, his arms up to his elbows. The water feels colder than the snow did.

Luke bursts back into the present, feels a disorienting sensation as he moves from the darkness of the pre-electric past to the glaring outdoor spotlight that has been switched on over the porch. His head throbs, and he holds his hands over his eyes. They are shaking a little, and the memory of dirt dripping off Lars's skin under the water comes back at him. He goes back into the house.

“Dad,” Luke says, “Do you know about the people who lived here before us?” His father looks at him in confusion.

“Where's the screwdriver?” he says. He is holding the cabinet door up, screw in hand.

“Oh. Be right back.” Luke says, and he runs out the back door again, hesitating slightly at the back gate, but this time nothing happens. When he brings the screwdriver in his father seems to have forgotten the question. The months go by and the fresh wound of his mother's death layer over, but Luke still welcomes, as an adventurer, the forays into Lars's life.

	*		*		*		*		*

One day at school, Aaron Benton, a boy a few years older, stops Luke in the boys bathroom of the gym locker room and pushes him into a stall. He sits him on the toilet, where Luke cowers, smelling musky traces of bodily excretions, seeing where the layers of paint have peeled away from the walls of the stall, leaving the rusty metal exposed. The air is thick and humid. He thinks that he might be punched or kicked, as sometimes happens, so he keeps his thin arms in a defensive pose. He is small for his age. His father still buys him clothes from the children's section of stores, so that his wardrobe is the vacuous colors of younger childhood.

“Look,” Aaron says. “I'm just telling you this for your own good. Why don't you just wake up and look around every once in awhile, so everybody stops teasing you.”

“What?” Luke says, wondering if this is some kind of joke. He has never been taken into a bathroom stall for advice.

“I have to do a good deed to talk about in my bible class, so you're it.” Aaron says. He is not usually one of the ones who beats Luke up, but he laughs about it with everyone else later. He is the president of student council.

“I'm it?” Luke says, blinking.

“Yeah,” Aaron says. He puts his palm on the top of Luke's head, holding the front of his hair in the grip that, somehow, doesn't hurt. Luke's scalp tingles. His face feels hot. “You're excused,” Aaron says. He opens the door of the bathroom stall and Luke trips out, the scraps of toilet paper and paper towels scatter in his path. He walks into the gym and then out a side door on to the athletic courts, and as sometimes happens, it becomes a grassy field in front of him, and he is with Lars. Wildflowers cover the field. The hills are uneven bumps, barring the sight of the growing town, or any man-made structure, with the exception of an old red windmill that creaks in the wind. The paint is chipped off, leaving it less red and mostly the dark wood that it was made from. Lars is nestled down in the good smelling grass, and he is with a girl. He has plucked two wildflowers and placed them in the pocket of her dress. She is sleeping, her face to the sky, and he leans on his arms to cast a shadow over her eyes. They open.

“How long have I been sleeping?” Ingrid says. She sits up quickly and rubs her head. She looks at the sky.

“Not too long,” he says. Their schoolbooks are in the grass beside them. He stares at her in the sun, then takes her face in his hands and kisses her. She turns red, and runs off. He is left with a sweet taste on his lips, and his eyes closed.

Luke opens his eyes, and the basketball team runs out on to the track for their laps and exercises, pulsing with their life and activity, as he stands motionless, trying to keep the memory of the kiss with him, trying to hold on to it somehow, as the others push and pull at one another. He feels that sweat has pooled under his arms. He feels for the first time that he has experienced something with Lars that he should not have. Luke senses the lingering feelings of Lars's blood circulating, reaching for Ingrid, concentrating so hard on her face, her hair, her hands. His scalp still prickles from Aaron. This time, instead of Lars's life filling his own, it has made him feel devoid. The connection to others around him is absent. Still walking though, he pushes this uneasiness away, remembering only the feel of lips on lips.

	
		*		*		*		*		*

“What can I do for you, son?” one man says, without looking up. Lars doesn't know which one even spoke.

“I'm inquiring about the cargo transport work,” Lars says. His voice comes out high and soft. He takes off his hat.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen, sir,” Lars says.

“Do you have your own wagon?”

“One of my father's I can use.”

“Come back tomorrow morning, early, with your wagon, and we'll get you set up,” the man says. Lars can see now that it's a man with a mustache, off to the side. He walks forward to shake the man's hand, and the man looks him in the eye. When Lars walks back out of the building, Luke comes out of the past.

Luke is standing in front of the supermarket, wondering what it is that Lars will transport, and where and how far he will go. The next few months pass without him finding Lars again. He applies to college at a small private school only a few hours away – within the reaches of Lars – and receives a letter of acceptance. On the day he receives his letter, his father just looks up at him across the dinner table – leftover meatloaf heated in the microwave.

“You'd better figure out how you're going to pay for school, Luke.” Luke thinks of missing a summer with Lars and Ingrid, feels them slipping away from him. He has learned to enjoy, to crave, their intimacy. He doesn't feel the shame of voyeurism any longer. It has faded into a lust for private moments. He gets a summer job collecting tolls at the interstate highway, where he puts in lots of time. Luke listens to the radio inside of his booth, and thinks of Lars, wondering if he is off exploring his world with the transport job. The thought crosses Luke's mind late one night on the highway that Lars might not return. And when he goes to college he'll be away too. He might never see Lars again. The feeling leaves him cold in the August heat, the headlights of an approaching truck lighting his skin white.

		*		*		*		*		*

One day in the fall Luke is sitting in the shade of a boulder, leaning back against the smooth sloping rock, reading passages of poetry from a volume of Tennyson. He makes notes carefully in the margin with pencil. When the sun creeps around the edge of the boulder, Luke stands to find a place that will provide more shade. When he stands, he sees another student asleep against the other side of the boulder, a notebook and books spread around him. Luke turns, begins to gather his things into his backpack. When he straightens up, the other boy has opened his eyes.

“Hey. You don't have to go,” he says.

“Oh. No. I was just,” Luke begins.

“I'm Benny,” he says. He holds out his hand. It is bronzed from the sun. Benny's brown hair has gold glints.

“I'm Luke.” A cloud crosses the sun. “What are you reading?” The book has pictures of animals on the outside.

“It's for an ecology class,” Benny says. He smiles, leans back, and pushes his body up in a springing motion, now fully awake. “Have you ever seen the quarry? It's nearby. You're a freshman, right?”

Benny leads with a fast gait, and questions peppered with comments about the animals that live in the woods here, that he comes out to study and collect data from his badger marking project. They arrive at an old quarry, where vines hang down over the edges of rippled rock.

“Does everyone know about this place?” Luke asks, though he's not sure who ‘everyone' is. He wonders if it was there in Lars's time.

“Not sure,” Benny says, he is approaching a vine covered wall, he tugs on one, then puts his foot into a groove. “I wonder if it's been climbed before.” Benny proceeds to make his way up the wall, fast, nimbly. Luke watches with awe, and he finds himself grabbing a vine, struggling with his grip, arms straining under his own weight. “Lean into the wall, use your legs,” Benny shouts down from the top. Luke proceeds slowly, but comes out over the top onto the sun dappled grass, and he is smiling and sweating. Benny takes his hand and pumps it into the air.

    
		*		*		*		*		*	

“I'll have to meet you there, though,” Benny says. “I have a field trip out at a creek down county.” Luke agrees, hoping he won't get lost on the backroads.

Luke drives to the club early in the evening, and he stops along the way in the bathroom of an out of the way gas station. The bathroom has an institutional feel to it, and the attendant smirks at him as he parks his car over by the side of the building. It's an old car, one that his father told him not to buy, but it's been running fine. It's getting to be dusk, and the haze over the fields is as thick as pea soup: the mixture of dust, bugs, and sunlight.

In the bathroom, Luke pulls his belt taut in a swift jerk that brings back the muscle memory of adjusting the saddle strap on his horse. With excitement, Luke can smell the fresh dirt from the past drifting up his nostrils, the lather that has spread from the horse's mouth to her neck. He smells Lars's sweat mingling with his horse's. The heat from the animal rises with the heat from the hard, baked, ground. He sees the tall grass being pushed down by the wind on a riverbank as the horse drinks and Lars stretches his sore bones, sore from a half-day's ride, sore knowing there is still a half-day more to get to town before night.

It has been almost a year since Luke has seen anything of Lars's life, and his heart swells with joy. The colors and smells of Lars's moment by the river fade to sepia as Luke comes back to himself in the gas station bathroom. He must wait, and stay here, and then he will find him again. Luke fits two fingers into his waistband and adjusts his leather belt. In a hurry, he looks into the cracked mirror of the bathroom and smoothes the cowlick on the back of his head. He goes outside and stands in the parking lot waiting, but then he realizes that Lars and his horse will move on, the only question is to where. Luke sits in his car with his head down on his arms. Tears come to his eyes. When he looks up for a minute, as if scanning the horizon for Lars's horse, he notices the leering stare of the gas station employee. He turns his car on and slowly pulls out onto the main road. He drives around in circles for awhile, until it starts to get dark and the deserted roads look bleak. Luke pulls off the road for a minute, and then thinks of Benny, and turns the car to head for the club, his breath heaving, catching, in his chest.

		*		*		*		*		*

The club is bouncing and throbbing. The music, the people screaming out to the band, screaming to each other. In the back, the bartenders lean far over the bar to get the orders and send out the waiters, all slight black-clad groomed young men, with tall glasses of bright colored drinks in balanced trays over their heads: the amber scotches, the light green gin and tonics, a yellow screwdriver, flamingo cosmos. Everything in the shadows of the platform where the band is playing is dark, but the ambient light over the bar makes the room glow. Luke hangs back there, shy of the music's discordance, and thinking of Lars. It is hot. The sweat is dripping from the people who are closest to the stage. He looks into the blue eyes of the nearest bartender. He can't think of a drink that he'll be able to shout cleanly over the music.

“Beer,” he says. He knows he can't be heard, but the word will look unmistakable.

“What kind?” shouts the bartender. He has a sparkling sapphire stone piercing above his eyebrow. Luke points to what's on tap. The closest beer is chosen. He leans against the bar and takes a sip, and the taste of it this time transports him back to the other time. The change is almost imperceptible because he is in a saloon this time, in this town that was the destination of that same day's ride. Lars walks into the saloon, attracted to the tinkling music of the piano and the coolness that was emanating from the dark, airy, room. Eager for the company after being alone all day. A staircase leads upstairs where there are rooms to let, and the ceiling is high because of a balcony that winds around the upper floor. He'd only had the warm canteen water that day, and he pulls out his handkerchief from under his hat to wipe the sweat off his face.

Lars pushes his way to the front of the crowded bar area, two men are deep in conversation about some property for sale outside of town. When they aren't speaking, their jaw muscles work around the tobacco. The whole place smells of the dust, smoke, and beer.

“What'll it be?” the bartender says after Lars's raised arm gets his attention. Lars points to a keg. He gets his mouth around the cool beer and raises it up and tips it back.

In Luke's time, Benny puts his arm on Luke's shoulder, and he is back, suddenly, in the club, feeling the vibrations of the music. He wonders about the horse, the day, the journey. His arms are trembling with the impatience and frustration of being pulled away.

“Hey,” Benny says. He wears a beige collared shirt and blue corduroy pants. Luke is still disoriented, still sad from being pulled away. His mind is swimming towards the surface, towards Lars, and back again to Benny. He realizes he is holding his breath, trying to hold the moments of the other time inside.

“Hi,” he says. The music takes a turn for the violent, and Luke can't hear what Benny is saying, he leans in, smelling the mingling scents of Benny's drink – something melon and cold, and his aftershave. He realizes that right now, he wants to be here with Benny, not with Lars.

“Did you find this place ok?” Benny is saying.

“Yeah,” Luke says. “I found it just fine.” Luke feels again the sensation that he has stepped into Lars's footsteps, that he will momentarily be in the saloon again, back with Lars, and he does something that he has never done before. He steps aside, quickly and decisively. He concentrates on Benny's face. The feeling passes. Benny is still beside him. Luke looks at Benny and tries to smile, but he's churning inside, feeling Lars's footsteps slip away. His smile fades a little.

“What's wrong, man?” Benny says. He grabs Luke's shoulder. “You sick?” Luke shakes his head and when he looks down, the floor is spinning. An uncomfortable heat rises in his chest.

“No. I sort of lost a friend,” Luke tries to explain, for the first time coming close to telling even the outside of this experience to someone.

“Today?” Benny's eyebrows narrow, and an uneven crease folds into his forehead.

“Yeah. He just had to go on with his life, and I have to go on with mine.” Luke realizes that this is cryptic, but it's the best he can do. Benny accepts it, nods his head.

“Okay then. Let's go up there and listen to some music.” He takes Luke's hand and pulls him through the ground, undulating to the sounds around them. Luke begins to pulse along with the others, finds the front of the crowd, and pushes his body against the ones around him, synchronizing himself.