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moment he experienced while high, and that very moment was always and easily a lungful away. He remembered the moments he’d spent, freshly stoned with his friends, traipsing through the too-familiar landscape of his hometown recast as a place laden with possibility and wonder. A trip to the drugstore for fresh-squeezed lemonade made him feel like a conquistador, laying claim to a new land. The sidewalks of the Raleigh Road strip mall might have belonged to New York or London, crowded with citizens whose own stories, ones Pete sometimes narrated aloud for his friends, were suddenly colorful and significant, ever worthy of his curiosity. Music, back in those days, had always sounded glorious. Always an anthemic aria played loudly in Pete’s head; he timed his feet to it, it spilled from trees and power lines, from clouds and the heavens above, as if the world itself hummed these tunes to accompany its perpetual turning.
    And now the music was as stale as Casey Kasem’s Sunday-afternoon Top 40 countdown. A night like the last, preview of the next. Pete tilted the pinball machine, drawing Underwood, the proprietor of the Glam, out from behind his counter to deliver his standard spiel on respect of property. A girl named Sheila Fay Mock who had renamed herself only “Chloe,” an over-eyeshadowed, lost, pouting thing who slept with boys for shared joints, tried to entice Pete out back with her usual sad barters. Sorry, Chloe, wish I had something to share. He’d give it to her if he was holding. Accepting her payback would only make him feel more desperate, as her self-disgust was contagious, Pete knew from experience.
    Cozart bummed Pete’s cigarettes and with each Marlboro promised to pay him back triple when his ship came in. Outside the lights of cruising cars swept the parking lot, a continuous parade of his peers trapped in their meaningless orbit. Throughout it all, haggard mothers arrived, their low, muddy American sedans sunken with laundry and dirty-faced kids dressed in T-shirts and diapers, who crawled about the floor of the Glam putting things in their mouths that their mothers slapped them for touching— that thang’s filthy; you come here and mind!
    Punching up his two tunes for the fourth time, Pete thought of home, of what he’d be doing if he were there. Hiding out in his room, listening to Exile on Main Street, most likely. He tried to think of other things he could do. He could read a book. He used to read a book a night almost, but in the past two years he’d read only biographies of rock stars and backpacking magazines and old issues of Rolling Stone. His parents had given him a subscription to National Geographic each year since he was eight, when he’d developed a fierce passion for the names of places, maps, accounts of foreign travel, of Life Elsewhere. But the yellow magazines stacked up on the living room coffee table and only occasionally did he take one into the bathroom.
    Pete was thinking of leaving, walking home to read some article about the Panama Canal zone, when Cozart slid up to the pinball machine, reeking of pot, and told him Tysinger was outside asking for them.
    “He saw us already,” said Cozart when Pete shrugged.
    “He saw you, you mean. What does he want?”
    “Hell if I know.”
    After his last ball, Pete moved to the plate-glass window. Tysinger’s TransAm idled out front, a couple of boys gathered around the driver’s side window. Tysinger came from the side of the neighborhood that Pete’s father, liberal voice of the coastal plain, had told him in so many words to stay away from. Danny, of course, had a built-in radar for what he called “the raffish element,” a prissy term he’d read in some book, British probably, and the people who lived on Tysinger’s street, Wilmington Avenue, and the sad blocks behind the National Guard Armory, were definitely of this element. Among those few streets you could find every cliché of white-trashdom: Cars on blocks in