“You do it.”

“No, you do it.”

“You big baby.”

“That’s mean! You’re always trying to scare me!”

Allie and Michael lay on their bellies, staring into the damp, moldy crawlspace under their red brick ranch-style house.  They’d explored every other inch of the place, starting with the attic, over the course of the last week.

“It’s not my fault you’re a big fraidy-cat,” Allie said.  She scooted forward along the bright green grass until her head and shoulders had disappeared into the dark.  “There’s nothing under here except dirt and spiders.”

“I hate spiders,” said Michael, and shuddered.  He sat up and brushed off his Yankees T-shirt.  “I want to go home.”

“This is our home.”  Allie emerged from the crawlspace with smudges of brown grime under her chin.  “Dad got a new job, remember?  We live here now.”

Michael’s bottom lip began to quiver.  Allie put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed it lightly.  “It’ll be okay,” she told him.  “Don’t cry, dummy” she said, and stood up.  “Let’s go have lunch.”

Allie and Michael grew up in the city.  They’d lived in a cramped fourth floor walk-up above a bodega all their lives, and this new house in the country, with lots of windows and a wide-open yard, frightened them both just a little.  It excited them, too.  They’d never had their own rooms, and sometimes, at night when the unfamiliar noises got to be too much, Michael would climb into Allie’s bed, and they’d huddle together imagining car horns and sirens.  Their mother had died in December, and their father had decided they all needed a change of scenery and some fresh air.  Now, in May, a little more than a week after moving in, all three of them secretly missed traffic and crowds and hustle.

Their house sat on a dead-end, gravel road in a valley, surrounded by old-growth forest six miles away from a one-grocery-store town.  Allie and Michael hadn’t quite worked up the courage to explore the woods, but they had spent time walking up and down the road, waving to the few neighbors they had and making up stories about them.

“Mrs. Roberson has an army of rats in her basement!”  Michael didn’t like Mrs. Roberson.  She had a cloudy left eye and a hunch in her back.  She’d dropped off a broccoli and rice casserole for them, though, the first night they’d spent in their new home.  Michael didn’t like that either.  He hated broccoli.

“Heather Fields hit a boy with her car once, and she didn’t even stop!”  Allie, who at eleven was all knees and elbows, and showing the first signs of acne on her cheeks, was just a little jealous of the beautiful, sophisticated sixteen-year-old Heather.  She drove a red sports car and had offered to take Allie to the mall three towns over once school was out.

After they’d eaten, just past the high heat of the day, and with nothing left to uncover in their house and all of their toys still tucked away in boxes, Allie and Michael went for a walk.

Michael noticed the narrow dirt trail first.

“Where do you think that goes?” he asked, pointing into a dark canopy of tree limbs and thick vines, down a path barely wide enough for two people.  “I never saw it before.”

“‘I’ve never seen it.’  Talk right, Michael.”  Allie peered down the path herself.  “Let’s go look.”

Allie dragged Michael along at first, keeping a tight grip on his sweaty hand, but he got excited and broke her hold when they found a long wooden bridge.  It spanned about a hundred feet, over a slow-flowing creek and above a field full of yellow buttercups.  Michael ran to the middle and looked down.

“There’s lots of dead trees down there,” he yelled back to Allie.  “And there’s a snake in the water!”

“Don’t go down there,” Allie called to him, and quickened her own pace, careful not to step too hard on the old boards.  “This thing’s really old, Michael.  It’s not safe,” she said, once she reached him.  “Let’s just keep going.”

The trail seemed darker as they walked on, the tree canopy closer, and all the leaves brittle and lifeless.

“Do you hear that?” Allie asked Michael.

“I don’t hear anything,” he said.

“Exactly,” she answered.

“Stop trying to scare me!”

“I’m not!  I just think it’s weird.”  Allie grabbed for Michael’s hand again and pulled him closer to her as they kept walking.

Ten minutes later, the canopy opened up to reveal a fork in the trail, and at its center, a stone farmhouse, tucked away behind two of the biggest sycamore trees Allie and Michael had ever seen.  The house’s shutters were ragged, bright white that had gone gray, and its metal roof looked close to collapsing.  On its rickety front porch, a gray-haired old man in faded denim overalls sat in a rocking chair.  He stood when he noticed them.

“You two lost?” he asked.

“No sir,” Michael answered.

“We were just walking,” Allie added.

“Only people ever come see me are lost,” the old man said.  He beckoned them forward with a paper-thin arm.  “Sit with me a while?  I just made some strawberry ice cream.  Seems a good day for it.”

Allie and Michael looked at each other, and then up at the man, and walked up the front porch steps side by side.  Allie sat on a whitewashed porch swing off to the right, and Michael on the top step.

“I’m Amos,” the old man told them.

“Allie Daniels,” Allie replied.

“I’m Michael,” said Michael.

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Amos,” Allie added.

“Nice to meet you two, as well,” Mr. Amos said.  “I’ll just step inside a minute and be back with some of that ice cream.”  The screen door creaked close behind him.

“Is this okay?”  Michael chewed at the nail of his pinky finger.

“I guess so,” said Allie.

“Dad always tells us not to bother grownups.”

“He invited us,” Allie reasoned.

Mr. Amos returned holding three ceramic mugs overflowing with ice cream, each scoop studded with bright red strawberries.  He presented one to Allie and one to Michael, and sat back in his chair with his own.

“I always did love strawberry ice cream best,” he said.  “You’re lucky you stopped by while they’re in season.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Michael.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

Allie explained that they’d just moved from the city, and that they hadn’t even started school yet, and that Michael wouldn’t know a fresh strawberry from a spaghetti noodle. “And mom always did the grocery shopping before.”

“Before what?” Mr. Amos asked.

“Our mom died,” said Michael.

Mr. Amos sat his empty mug down on the window ledge behind him.  He shook his head and tucked his knuckles under his chin.  “I’m real sorry,” he said.  “My wife died about three years ago.”

“Do you live here alone?”  Allie felt bad asking the question right after it came out of her mouth.  “Sorry.  It just looks like really a big house for one person.”

“I’ve been here a while,” he said, and got an odd sort of foggy look on his face.  “Things never really were the same after she went.  Seems like I used to live totally different.”

They all sat silent for a moment.  Allie picked at a hole in the seam of her pink tank top.  “Everything’s different now for us, too,” she finally said.

Michael, from his perch on the top step, slurped the rest of his ice cream down in one bug gulp, and said, “I don’t like it here.  It’s too quiet and there’s nothing to do.”

“Well, now we got each other, don’t we?”  Mr. Amos got up and clapped his wrinkled hands together.

“Really?”  Michael’s eyes grew to the size of saucers.

“We could come back tomorrow,” Allie said.  “We could bring some books and games and stuff.  Have you ever played Crazy Eights?”

“I don’t reckon I have,” Mr. Amos said.  He came around to collect their mugs.  “But I still got room in this old brain for some new stuff.”

Allie glanced at Michael, and the two of them stood up in unison.

“We should get back home and stop bugging you for now,” Michael said.

“You’re not bugging me at all,” Mr. Amos said.  He nudged the screen door open with his bare foot and stepped inside, clutching the mugs to his chest.  “Y’all wait just one more minute before you leave.”

When he came back this time, he handed Michael an intricately carved little wooden fox.  “I carved that when I was about your age,” he said, “from a sycamore tree in my back yard.  Looked just like one of those before it fell down in a storm.”  He pointed to the trees in front of the house.

“Can I keep it?” Michael stared down at the fox in his palm, and wondered just how long it took Mr. Amos to make it.

“I think you should have it,” Mr. Amos answered.  “It’s meant for a boy, not for an old man.  It feels like it’s been sitting here waiting for you.”

“Thank you,” Michael said.  He looked at the fox one more time before stuffing it, as gently as he could, into the pocket of his khaki shorts.  “Can you teach me how to make one?”

“I sure can,” Mr. Amos said.  “Y’all come back and see me whenever you want.”  He smiled at them.

“Thanks,” said Michael, and smiled back.  Allie realized it was the first time he’d smiled since they moved.

“Thank you for the ice cream,” said Allie.  “We’ll come back tomorrow, before lunch.”  She paused.  “If that’s okay,” she added.

“I look forward to it,” Mr. Amos said.  “It’s been a long time since I had company.  I think I’ll sleep real good tonight, now I’ve got two new friends to see in the morning.”

Allie and Michael stepped off of Mr. Amos’s porch and out toward the path.  They turned around once, just before they reached the sycamore trees, and waved.  The old man waved back, and, as they walked away, Allie and Michael never heard the creak of his screen door.

************

They went back the next day, carrying a cardboard box full of sandwiches, chips, sodas, and books for Mr. Amos, and a deck of cards, so they could to teach him to play Crazy Eights.  They found the dirt trail, and crossed the bridge, but found no house at the fork in the path, and no sign that the house behind the sycamore trees, or the old man who lived there, had ever existed in the first place.  In his pocket, Michael felt the solid weight of the little wooden fox.

************

The following May, as the school year wound to a close and Allie and Michael began to dream about summer and all of its promise and possibilities, they decided to look for the house at the fork one more time.  They had to do it in the morning, because Allie had a sleepover later that day, and Michael wanted to meet some of his friends to practice for football.  He’d be old enough to play in the fall, in the youth league in town.

They didn’t expect to find anything, and couldn’t explain how they’d ever found anything in the first place.  None of their neighbors knew of a man called Amos, and all of them insisted there had never been a trail off of the road, or a bridge, or a stone farmhouse.  The whole neighborhood, they said, had been carved out of the woods only twenty years ago.  But Allie and Michael wanted to go back and see, for themselves, just in case, and so on a humid, overcast day, they set out looking for the trail.  They found it, and the bridge, and the fork and the giant sycamore trees.  Only now, instead of Mr. Amos’s stone farmhouse, there was a log cabin, and on its porch, a young man with dark hair in a plaid shirt rested in a red Adirondack chair.  He stood up when he noticed them coming.

“You kids lost?”

Allie and Michael looked at the young man, and then at each other, and walked up the front porch steps.

The war raged and ravaged and tore at the outside world for a year before the draft.  The whole country watched grainy news footage of dusty, decimated cityscapes and bleeding, wide-eyed children waiting for treatment in makeshift hospitals.  It all felt very far away, before the draft.  After, no one could run far or fast enough.  The draft would catch up with you eventually, if you were a healthy young man without connections.

Nick Keene had been running his whole life, and he was an expert.  He’d started the day his mama killed his daddy in their kitchen.  In the high heat of a Deep South summer, Nick had watched the whole thing, had seen his mother plant a knife deep in his father’s potbelly, had seen his father drop, bleed, and close his eyes a final time.

“Nicky,” his mama had implored him, wringing her bloody hands around a ratty dishtowel. “Nicky baby, you gotta say you did it.”  She stepped over his daddy’s body, not even cold.  She put those stained, raw hands on his shoulders.  “You tell’em you did it.  Ain’t nobody gonna put a baby on death row.  You love me, don’tchu baby?”

He did, in the deep, whole, unconditional way that only children can love, but he ran.  He ran and ran until he reached the next state, and then he kept going.  He missed his parents, his life, his home, but he never looked back.  He was twelve years old, and he’d been running ever since.

********************

Nick Keene became Nick Keys, shirking the weight of a family name and a desperate guilt he couldn’t bear to carry.  A string of low-paying jobs took him all across the country, but hard luck followed him everywhere.  He fell out with a girl in Omaha after she lost their baby, crashed a car working as a chauffeur in Los Angeles, lost all his money teaming up with a card counter at the tables in Atlantic City, broke a toe on the docks in New Orleans.  Whether it was something big or something tiny, Nick couldn’t catch a break.

Things had started to change in Kentucky.  At twenty-one, Nick made his money playing music with another runaway.  Tommy Flint was the best guitarist Nick had ever seen, and he often wondered why Tommy had never been discovered, especially considering that Tommy’s ex-partner, Rocky Rush, had.  Rocky’s music topped charts all over the world.  Nick was jealous, and knew Tommy must feel the same, but together, he and Tommy had styled themselves Flint and Key, and they were pretty good.

They hitchhiked when they had to, and took night buses when they could.  They’d stay a little while in a town and then move on.  Nick didn’t know what Tommy was running from, and Tommy didn’t ask about Nick’s past, and between the two of them, they had enough suffering and fear and bad luck to write ten albums worth of songs.  Good songs, songs that made money and got people talking.  Nick figured it was only a matter of time before the right person heard the right one, and they’d be set up for the rest of their lives.

On the night Nick got his draft notice, they sat across from each other in an almost empty diner after a bar gig, splitting a Hot Brown and cold pie over steaming cups of dark black coffee.

“What’ll you do?” Tommy asked.

“Shit,” Nick replied, and took another bite of pie.  “Shit,” he said again.  The white lights overhead suddenly felt too bright, and Nick rubbed his eyes with the calloused fingers of one hand while he considered.  “I have to go see my mama,” he finally said.

“I didn’t know you had one,” Tommy retorted, in a mild attempt to lighten Nick’s mood and the terrible enormity of the situation.  They both knew the draft was a death sentence.

“I didn’t come from nothing,” Nick said, and put three dollars down on the table.  “Everybody has a mother.”  He got up from the vinyl booth, heaved his guitar case over his shoulder, and walked out, leaving Tommy behind him.

“Now, wait,” he heard Tommy plead, shocked and distressed in a way that warmed his frightened heart.  “Don’t go off alone.”

Nick just kept walking.  He heard the door jingle as it closed behind him.  He’d never been good at goodbyes.

********************

It took three weeks to make his way home.  When he got there, robbed of his guitar at a bus station in Tennessee and sick from hunger, Nick found his mother in the graveyard, six stones down from a tall magnolia tree.  He found his father, too, not far away, but he lingered by his mother’s plot, scooping the creeping weeds away with the toe of his scuffed brown boot.  He leaned over and ran his fingers along the carved letters of her name, Judith Keene.  She’d only been gone for a month.  He’d only just missed her.  She’d never tried to find him, and he’d never come back to her, not in nine years.  He’d never even written her a letter.

Nick walked from the cemetery to the house where he grew up.  He stood on the sidewalk, just out of the glow of the one leaning streetlight, and stared at the final ruin of his childhood.  The bungalow sat empty and dark, covered in an impenetrable curtain of thick kudzu.

“You’re Nick Keene,” someone said from behind him.

Nick turned, but didn’t step into the light.  “What do you know about Nick Keene?” he asked.

A woman took a step towards him, coming into the halo of bright yellow light, and smiled.  She was a knockout.  Bright auburn hair, ivory pale skin, dressed in a dark blue cocktail dress.

“I know you’re him,” she answered, “and I know you’re hungry.  Come on with me and we’ll get you a sandwich and something to drink.”

She turned and started walking, and Nick followed.  He was hungry, and she was offering.

“Who are you?”  He caught up with her, looked at her delicate profile, and realized she couldn’t be much older than he was.

“I was a friend of Judy’s” she said.

“You knew my mother?”  Nick couldn’t recall that his mother ever had close friends, or any friends at all.

“I did her a favor once.”

“What kind of favor?”

The woman didn’t answer.  Nick wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.

“Where are we going?” he asked instead.

“My place,” the woman answered.  “Everything else is closed.”

“Why’re you helping me?”

“Well,” the woman stopped, “the way I see it, you have no past, not anymore.  And if you’re back here, that probably means you don’t have much of a future, either.”  She looked him right in the eyes, and held his gaze.  “You get drafted?”

Nick looked down at the pavement.  “Yeah,” he answered.  “I wanted to see my mama one last time.  I wanted to make things right.”

“Then the least I can do is feed you,” the woman said, and started moving again.

Nick followed, and lost track of time in the humid night air.  He thought they might have gone about a mile, into what was left of downtown with half of its boys away at war, when she walked around the corner of the bank and unlocked a side door.

“Here we are,” she said.

He followed her up a set of narrow stairs and into a large apartment.

“How long’s this been here?”  Nick looked around him, at the expensive furniture and the tall windows.  “I don’t remember this being here when I was a kid.”

“Sit down,” the woman said, and motioned to a leather armchair in the corner.  “I’ll only be a minute.”  She walked towards what Nick assumed was the kitchen, and turned the radio on before stepping out of site.

Rocky Rush’s caramel voice flooded the space around him.  Nick wondered what his life would be like, if he’d been discovered like Rocky, flown off to Hollywood or New York to record music and become famous and live secure and safe for the rest of his life.  All it would have taken was one moment, one right moment in front of the right person.

“Lucky bastard,” Nick grunted.

The woman came back with a plate of club sandwiches and a rocks glass full of something brown and syrupy. “That’s what you want, then,” she said, “to be up on stage, to be a star.”

Nick considered.  He took a bite of food, and a swig of what turned out to be good whiskey.  His throat felt warm.  “I want enough money to live in a place for more than a few weeks.  I want a job that won’t end when the project’s done.”  His voice started to quiver.  “I don’t want to go and fight and die in a country I don’t care about.”

“Your mama didn’t want to die, either,” the woman said.  “She told me so herself.  Said she’d do anything to stay free and alive.  She missed you, though, towards the end.”

Nick realized he’d finished the whiskey.  The woman took it and poured him another, standing over him after handing him the glass, swaying lightly to the rhythm of Rocky’s minor key love song.

“Do you play music?”

“I did,” Nick said.  He told her about Tommy, and their time together and their songs.  “But somebody swiped my guitar outside of Memphis,” he finished.

“That’s too bad,” the woman said.  “Luck’s a funny thing, isn’t it?”  She sat down beside him, nestled herself right against his shoulder.  “I bet you’re every bit as good as Rocky Rush.  I bet he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Nick said.  He’d finished the second glass by now, and felt himself getting tired.  He felt tired all the way to his bones.  He leaned his head back.  The woman snuggled in closer.  He could feel the silk of her hair against the skin of his neck.  “Lucky son of a bitch.”  Nick closed his eyes and sighed.

“You want it, don’t you?  Just a little bit of his luck.”

Nick didn’t reply.

“To be a star?”

“I do,” Nick said quietly.

“I thought so,” the woman said, and kissed him lightly on the lips just as he drifted off to sleep.

********************

Nick woke up alone, with a painful hangover and a heavy ball of dread and fear in the pit of his stomach, and no memory of how he’d come to be in the empty attic above the bank.  He remembered, though, that he was going to war, and that his mother was dead.  He had no past, and his future was a pine box six feet under the cold ground.  He stood up and made his way down the stairs and into the bright sunlight, each step taking him closer and closer to what he knew would be the end.

The closest military induction center was four towns over.  Nick walked in and gave his name at a small desk in the front.

“Keene?”

“Nicholas Keene,” Nick replied, and gave his birth date as he presented his draft notice.

The lanky soldier behind the desk looked through every piece of paper in sight, and then said, “Hang on just a minute, a’right?”

Nick waited.  The soldier came back empty-handed, and told him there must have been a mistake, and that he was free to go.

Nick figured the mistake was on their side, that it would catch up with him eventually, but he went, and he used what little money he had left for a bus ticket that would take him as far away as he could go.  On the bus, he sat down beside a paunchy older man in a khaki suit.

“Hey, I know you,” the man said.  “You’re Nick Keys, aren’t you?”

“Who’s asking?”

The man reached into his pocket and presented Nick with a crisp white business card.  “I caught your act in Louisville a couple of months ago,” he said.

“I know your name,” Nick said.  He couldn’t believe it.  “You’re with Columbia.”

“Sure am.  Just down here to see some family, and then I’m heading back up to New York.”

“Oh,” Nick said.  He waited, hoped, the man would say more.

“You here alone?” the man asked.  “Where’s your partner?  You two were dynamite together.”

“He’s still in Kentucky,” Nick answered.  “I’m on my own,” he added.

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” the man said.  “Are you interested in being a solo act?”

********************

Rocky Rush died in the war a year later. That he had even been drafted surprised his many fans and broke the hearts of thousands of teenage girls.  The shock of his death started a movement among young people all over the country to hold the government accountable for allowing so many young men to die in a conflict many of them didn’t even understand.

Nick played his first sold out show the night he heard the news.  He wrote a song about Rocky, once he was back in his dressing room and three beers deep.  It hit number one, and stayed there long enough to break a record.  Nick Keys, the runaway with no home and no family, was a star.

********************

Tommy Flint sat at the bar of a dive outside of Cincinnati, hunched over in his threadbare coat with one hand resting on his tattered black guitar case.  He downed a shot of the strongest thing the bartender had on offer, and hummed the chorus of Nick’s latest hit.  He laughed, low and bitter.

“That lucky son of a bitch,” he said.

“Who?” a delicate female voice answered back.

“Nick Keys,” Tommy answered, with a little less enunciation than he’d like.  “He was my partner,” he finished, and held up his empty glass for a refill.

“Oh?”

Tommy lifted his head and turned to see a striking young woman with auburn hair and ivory skin, wearing a blue cocktail dress.

“I met him once,” she said.  “I did him a favor.”

“He was a good guy,” Tommy slurred.  “Better than all of’m.”

“I’m sure you’re a good guy, too,” the woman said.  “And I’m sure you’re just as talented as he is.  He probably just ended up in the right place at the right time.”

“Mmhmm,” Tommy replied.

“Luck’s funny that way, isn’t it?”

She held up her hand to signal the bartender, and ordered a champagne cocktail.  “This round’s on me,” she told Tommy.  “Is that what you want, then?  To be on stage?  To be a star?”

Tommy downed another shot.

“Just a little bit of his luck,” the woman purred.

“I do,” Tommy answered.

The woman leaned over and kissed his cheek.  “I thought so,” she told him.