d." Morgan nodded and they walked out to the truck.
"Take care of yourself," Joe said. "Hang in there."

"Good luck," Morgan said.

Joe drove down the mountain in the rain. When he reached Route 212, he
turned towards Phoenicia. His old high school district covered a
thousand square miles; half an hour later as he crossed its western
boundary, he felt a twinge of nostalgia and relief. It was like
graduating again; his mind was free to drift forward.

At tech school in the Air Force, he used to spend Friday and Saturday
nights in the BX with a guy named Shannon. The BX was always jammed
with G.I.'s drinking cheap beer and eating French fries. One man tried
to keep up with the empties and the dirty dishes. He was bald, slow
moving, friendly, and particular. His cart was organized to hold as
much as possible on each trip. It seemed like the original dead end
job, but he did it well, never flustered, taking pride in his cart and
the tables that were clean for moments. He told Joe once that he was
saving money to buy tools so that he could help in his friend's garage.

As Joe drove, the rain and fog lifted, revealing lonely bays and wooded
hillsides. Route 30 curved endlessly along the banks of the Pepacton
Reservoir. Joe had the highest entrance score they'd ever recorded in
that Air Force tech school. Sergeant Quimby told him, reading it,
unbelieving. Joe was an athlete, a most likely to succeed guy; yet
there he was every weekend in the BX with Shannon, fascinated by the
aging bus boy loading his cart. And Shannon? He was from Ten Mile
Creek, south of Pittsburgh; what had happened to him? Joe decided to
cut through Cat Hollow and over to Roscoe on Route 17. He followed 17
west, taking his time, enjoying the October colors. He had lunch in
Hancock and stayed overnight in a motel outside Painted Post.

The next afternoon he was in Ten Mile Creek, coal country. A black hill
in the distance, the highest point around, turned out to be a slag
pile. Containers suspended from cable were hauled up the pile, tipped
over, and returned upside down. The top of a silo, last sign of a
buried barn, waited a few feet above a spreading shoulder of slag. The
air was gritty and had a sulfurous tang.

He stopped outside an American Legion hall and walked into a dimly lit
bar. In one corner a fat man sat upright before a video poker machine.
Only his right hand moved as he inserted quarters, one after another.
Joe sat at the bar, three s