Read Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing for Free Online Page B

the damn dog, he thinks, driving home. It’s something else, something bigger.
    They’d driven down roads they hadn’t been on in years—past the old empty high school and the field where the drive-in used to be, now grown over with highbush honeysuckle and littered with junk cars, a few speakers still hanging off their posts like rotted teeth. It looked like a war field. Finished.
    He stops and buys a pack of cigarettes—to hell with it, hethinks, something else is going to quit long before my lungs do—aching for just some small physical pleasure to get him through the night. Before he leaves the gas station, though, feeling guilty, he shakes out three, leaving the rest of the pack on top of the trash can. Just as well, he thinks. Make some lucky sucker’s day.
    Â 
    There is a place in Highland City that every generation thinks it is the first to discover. A gladelike swimming hole in the creek, set in a deep bowl of the hills. It’s easy enough to get to from the road that you can bring in coolers and lawn chairs and cases of beer, but secluded enough that you can do anything you want out there and nobody’s going to bother you. When Jack and Jeanne were kids everyone called it Valhalla, and spent their summer nights down there, when there wasn’t something playing at the drive-in. I wonder what the kids call it now, Jack thinks, pulling into the rutted clearing off the side of the road. Probably nothing. These kids today have everything fed to them. No imagination.
    Back in high school, Jeanne was always the first one in the water. Last one out, too. She was fearless then, even of the cottonmouths that scared everybody else off. She would stand in the creek, waist deep, splashing the water with her fingertips. “Jack! Jack!” she’d shout. “Get in here. Get your ass down here!”
    He’d sit up on the bank with a beer and look at his friends. “Already got him on a chain,” they would snicker to oneanother, and Jack would do his best to laugh along with them, crack another beer, and roll his eyes. He never went in, in order to prove something. Stupid reason not to go in, he thinks now. Should have.
    He parks and pushes the seat all the way back, lights a cigarette. He closes his eyes and lets the smoke filter into his nostrils along with Jeanne’s familiar smell, which lingers after their day in the car together. He tries to imagine that she is still sitting next to him, eighteen and in a wet bikini, smoking a cigarette and playing with the radio. In those days there was always something good on the radio.
    After a while, feeling stiff and caged-in, Jack heaves himself out of the car and makes his way slowly into the trees, leaning hard on his cane. He starts down the hill, drawn by the smell of the leaves and the warm air that the woods still hold, and suddenly he can see the creek. It startles him—he remembers it being much deeper in the woods. He makes his way down to it and sits with difficulty on an old stump to light his second cigarette. The banks of the creek are worn smooth from years of bare feet, littered with beer cans and busted sneakers, fast food bags and old condoms. Jack shakes his head sadly. On a beech tree on the opposite bank, someone has spray-painted FUCK GOD .
    He lets a drag linger in his lungs, feeling it creep in and fill all the corners. We had some days, he thinks. We did have some days. Back when we thought it was all ours for the taking. Back before everything got ruined. And it all got ruined at once. Funny how it happened that way. Justwoke up one morning and there was no going back and fixing anything.
    A pair of crows take off from a tree near him, the branch shaking. There’s a feeling at the back of Jack’s neck like someone is behind him. He turns around twice, scanning the purple-lit trees. Something pops in his shoulder the second time, a painful little explosion of nerves.
    Ghosts, he thinks,