Chaneysville Incident Read Online Free

the walls of rock that towered on either side of the road. Except for the bus, the Turnpike was empty; four barren lanes, the concrete white like adhesive tape applied to the wounds the machines had slashed into the mountains. The bus moved swiftly, slamming on the downgrades, swaying on the turns. The driver was good and he knew the road; we were ahead of schedule, and long ago we had reached the point where the hills were familiar to me, even with just the moonlight to see by. Not that I needed to see them; I, too, knew the road, could pinpoint my location by the sways and the bumps. I knew that in a minute the driver would downshift and we would crawl up a long hill, and the road would be straight as an arrow from bottom to top, then twist away suddenly to the right. I knew that at the crest, just before the twist, there would be a massive gray boulder with names and dates scrawled on it, a cheap monument to the local consciousness: DAVID LOVES ANNIE ; CLASS OF ’61; MARGO AND DANNY ; BEAT THE BISONS ; DEEP IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT ; SCALP THE WARRIORS ; NIXON THIS TIME. After that the road would twist and turn and rise and fall like a wounded snake for eighteen miles, and then I would be there, or as close as this bus would take me.
    And so I settled myself in my seat and took another pull on my flask and looked out the window at the mountainsides black with pine, and thought about how strange home is: a place to which you belong and which belongs to you even if you do not particularly like it or want it, a place you cannot escape, no matter how far you go or how furiously you run; about how strange it feels to be going back to that place and, even if you do not like it, even if you hate it, to get a tiny flush of excitement when you reach the point where you can look out the window and know, without thinking, where you are; when the bends in the road have meaning, and every hill a name.
    A truck swung around the turn ahead of us, its running lights dancing briefly in the darkness, the sound of its diesel penetrating the bus, audible over the rumble of the bus engine, and I thought of the nights when I would lie in bed, listening to the trucks on the ’pike grinding on the grades, bellowing like disgruntled beasts, and promise myself that someday I would go where they were going: away. Bill had done that too, had lain and listened to the trucks. He had told me—but not until years later—how he had lain there, night after night, chanting softly the names of far-off cities to the eerie accompaniment of the whine of truck tires. I had done the same, in my own way: I would start with the next town to the east or the west along the ’pike and move on, saying the names of the exits one by one, as if I were moving by them. Once I even reached New Jersey before I fell asleep. And I remembered thinking, when Bill told me of his game and I told him of mine, that his was so much better; that he had visited and revisited Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Peking, while I was struggling to get out of the state. Later, I had wondered if it would be that way all our lives, he flying from place to place while I crawled, making local stops. I had watched with some curiosity to see if it would work out that way, and to some extent it had; he flew to Vietnam and never came back, and while I had taken a few leaps, I had ended up in Philadelphia. And now I was coming back, passing little towns, knowing their improbable names—Bloserville, Heberlig, Dry Run, Burnt Cabins, Wells Tannery, Defiance, Claylick, Plum Run, Buffalo Mills, Dott. The bus was an express, nonstop between Philly and Pittsburgh, but I was making local stops.
    The truck vanished behind us, leaving an afterimage on my eyes, and the bus rolled down into a valley and across a bridge. The stream below it was called Brush Creek, and this time of year it would be low. The logs would stick out from the banks and gouge gurgling hollows in the sluggish water. Half a mile