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trapped beneath the long, dirt-blackened floorboards.
    Past the corner, the tracks, which had hogged the center of Alton Avenue all through town, now moved to one side, so the trolley car skimmed and swayed along in the shade of old buttonwood trees, on the edge of front yards where men in suspenders were trimming their hedges and fat women in cotton dresses were bending to their flowerbeds. The last brick rows of Wenrich’s Corner were left behind, and a ragged area of open fields and scattered stone farmhouses was traversed, with relatively few stops. The tracks seemed to give the car a livelier ride; the shiny straw seats and the stiff porcelain hand-loops glittered in the shuttling, slanting sunlight, and the air that rushed in through the window grates of crimped black wire had the smell of moist hay. Farnham was always thrilled by a spot where the trolley car, on Smokeville’s outskirts, leaned into a long curve and deftly rattled across a spindly wooden trestle bridge at a sudden scary height above a stagnant brook; from its glaring black surface a few white ducks would thrash up in alarm. These ducks would resettle while still in sight, making concentric circles on the water. The wire grate was always dirty, and dust came off in squares on Farnham’s face as he pressed to see.
    An isolated row of asbestos-shingled houses, gaunter and meaner somehow than those in Wenrich’s Corner, would fling into view, and then a long brick building that people said was a hat factory, and more drab houses, while the irritable conductor moved along the aisle slamming seat backs into the other position. Smokeville was the end of the line, where the cars reversed direction. Farnham and his partner would hoist up their packets of circulars and step into the town; the boys were sent out in pairs because two could work both sides of a street and one could watch that the other didn’t dump his leaflets down the sewer. This had happened more than once, it was said, though Farnham could scarcely believe such evil existed in the world. Smokeville was considered undesirable duty by the movie-circular boys, because of its steep streets and the long cement stairs up to the porches. Yet often, Farnham remembered, he and his companion, when their circulars were at last all gone, would agree to buy candy bars with their trolley dimes and in the resilience of youth walk the three miles back, along the tracks. Milk-white water trickled in the ditches near the hat factory, and the gaps between the ties of the rickety trestle were giddying if you looked down at the white ducks hiding in the reeds.
    Three miles the other way from Wenrich’s Corner, along an avenue whose general slope was downward as it passed between tall tight rowsof houses with octagonal cupolas roofed in slates like fish scales, lay Alton, where Farnham’s father worked and his mother shopped. When Farnham reached high-school age, in that era before the century was even half depleted, he and his pals would take the trolley to town just for the nightlife—for the bowling alleys and the packs of strange girls roaming the wide pavements and the big first-run movie theatres, with names like Majestic and Orpheum, where the same show played for weeks at a time and plush curtains lifted in thick crimson festoons to reveal the lightstruck screen. The trolley cars had run all through the war and it seemed they must last forever. But while Farnham was at college they were phased out and replaced by belching, dark-windowed buses, and by the time he was married and living far away, even the old tracks were torn up and buried, buried everywhere but at Wenrich’s Corner itself, where a few yards of track glinted through the asphalt like the spine of a dinosaur drowned in tar, or like a silver version of those curved lines whereby cartoonists indicate swift motion, with a word like “
Zip!
” or “
Zoom!
”
    Farnham in his middle age was susceptible to images of trolley cars in old