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a party line: You’d hear voices talking over each other, a man chuckling over a joke, a sound like somebody crying—and then Rowan and Martin would yell “SOCK IT TO ME!” and that woman on the show would get knocked in the head with a giant hammer.
    The closer something is, the louder it sounds; hold a baseball to your nose, it’s big as the earth. It takes time for things to find their distance. We misheard pretty much everything, sang words for years that no one had ever written. We confused the large and the small, what mattered, what didn’t. There’s somethin’ happenin’ here, Stephen Stills sang and we all sang along, a bunch of blind men staring off in a dozen directions, waving our canes like batons.
    Even now I can’t say what it was, exactly, can’t separate the voices from the silence from the noise. “Plastics!” was part of it, and Bonnie and Clyde and “Up against the wall, motherfuckers” and two cats in the yard. Mr. Montourri was part of it, hitching up his office pants by the belt saying, “Yeah, I got a dream—pay off the goddamn mortgage, know what I’m sayin’?” and bell-bottoms and beads and Gina Falconnetti’s nipples rubbing against the fabric of that peasant blouse she liked to wear and we liked her wearing, and I’d be a liar if I said that Gina’s nipples meant less to us than the Tet Offensive. We were sixteen.
    T HAT SPRING, Ray’s dad got him a dog, a brown lab named Wilma, and sometimes after practice I’d walk over to the house and Ray’d be on the porch with little Gene and Wilma would be crapping in the yard and Mr. Cappicciano would have the hood up and he’d wave me over and stand back and wipe the grease off his hands and talk to me like I knew something about cars. I don’t know why. He had a tattoo of an apple with a knife in it on his arm and sometimes he’d get this look like a kid watching his goldfish being flushed down the toilet one by one, but for some reason he liked me.
    “You got sense,” he’d say, tossing the rag and taking the beer off the battery block with two fingers like he didn’t want to get the can dirty. And I’d stand there, apprentice little man that I was, concentrating on something I knew nothing about, pretending I hadn’t heard what he’d said, wasn’t pleased.
    I’d help him with things, hand him stuff. “C’mere, I want to show you somethin’,” he’d say when I came around, “you’ll get a kick out of this.” And he’d stab the cigarette in his mouth, his sleeve rolled high up his veiny arm, and jam his oil-slick hand deep down, his face to the side like an Indian listening to the rails, and loosen the belt. “Come over here—no, here, see that?”
    “Sure,” I’d say.
    “People don’t understand,” he’d say, the cigarette nodding between his lips. “It’s all parts. You got the part, you got the whole thing. See that?”
    “Sure,” I’d say.
    “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.” And he’d grunt pulling his hand out, turning it this way and that, working it free. “Tight as a ten-year-old,” he’d say, and I wouldn’t smile or laugh, just give a little puff of air through my nose to show I’d heard, appreciated it, because that’s what men did, and he’d turn to the porch: “You gonna get me that goddamn beer or what?” and Ray would pick up little Gene and go get him a beer.
    I T WAS A LONG TIME comin’ and I was twenty years gone before I began to see there was no difference between the big and the small, the close and the far, that the times had been playing themselves out in us—Newark and us, Vietnam and us—that in Brewster just like everywhere else you could choke or fight, but by then it was too late.
    Stop, children, what’s that sound? Even if we’d stopped, we wouldn’t have heard a thing.

I CAN SEE IT NOW. At the time it was different. Maybe it was me. Back then the roots of why things happened always seemed deeper than I could go. It was as if half of my