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Heath had created what amounted to a climbing wall. With my camera slung around my neck, I gripped one board with my hands while placing the toe of my tennis shoe on a board below. If I was careful, it would be an easy task.
    Of course, what I hadn't given any thought to was the condition of Mr. Heath's handiwork. You know how people like to say "Time heals all things"? Well, those people are basically stupid. Because what happens is exactly the opposite:
    Time rots all things.
    The visible decay inside Mr. Heath's establishment should have warned me what to expect on the outside. Untreated pine lumber hastily affixed to a vertical surface has a useful life as brief as a monarch butterfly's.
    When the board separated in my hands some fifteen feet above the ground, I fell backwards onto a tumbledown pile of concrete blocks, striking the back of my head and snapping my left clavicle—my collarbone—clean in two. Something was also wrong with my left leg.
    If a boy falls in a ghost town when no one is around, does he make a sound?
    Of all the dumb things that people say to one another, here, I think, is the dumbest. Following a catastrophe in which you have nearly been killed, the people who previously were walking around saying "Time heals all things" now are prone to say "Boy, were you lucky."
    The doctor who treated me actually said this the following afternoon after I'd spent the night lying on the ground in excruciating pain, getting bitten by mosquitoes and crawled on by whatever sorts of bugs and slimy creatures perform their errands at night.
    "It's a good thing you were wearing that orange cap, else your mother might never have found you," Dr. Appletree said. "It was like a bright signal by the side of the road."
    First of all, my father's Columbus Catfish cap is peach, not orange. Second, there is nothing lucky about falling and breaking your bones. Third, I might add, and would have done so right then and there if Dr. Appletree had not been attempting to maneuver my severed collarbone into a position allowing it to be held in place with a sling, a profoundly painful experience, where is the luck in living in a ghost town where nobody even comes looking for you until nearly twenty-four hours after you've gone missing?
    The only lucky part about the entire experience, so far as I was concerned, was that my camera survived the fall.
    My collarbone would take weeks to heal. The back of my head had a goose egg literally as big as a goose egg, and my left leg was bruised and swollen as if it'd received a thousand bee stings.
    It would not have surprised me if the goofball Dr. Appletree had said, "It's a lucky thing that you don't go to school, Spencer, because now you can't."
    Luck.
    Who are these people who try to make bad luck sound like it's good luck?
    My guess is that they're some of the world's luckiest people.
    That lucky Dr. Appletree's clinic was across the street from Wal-Mart. He had no competitors and could charge his patients as much money as he liked.
    My world became as small as it had been at my birth, consisting of my bedroom and nothing more. I couldn't use crutches because my broken collarbone couldn't take the weight. I couldn't use my left arm because it was strapped into a sling. Everything I had taken for granted had been compromised. Turning the pages of a book. Taking pictures. Eating with a fork. Going to the bathroom. It was all an ordeal requiring planning and patience.
    I took pills for the pain and slept a lot.
    Once again, time had become distorted.
    That first day home, when I woke up, it was dark, the television in the next room was silent, and Chief Leopard Frog was sitting quietly in the rocking chair opposite my bed.
    "What are you staring at?" I asked, not bothering to disguise the hostility in my voice.
    "Just watching over you," he replied.
    "Ha!" I retorted. "That's a laugh! Where were you when I fell from the side of the store? Where were you when I lay dying in the weeds?