Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl

little globules in a city that treats sausage like a religion.

      On the way back I realize I can’t face another day of the deplorable liquor selection at the house on Foxglove Lane, so I stop to pick up a decent bottle of bourbon. Do I have a problem? Such things are relative. In Utah, I would be considered an alcoholic, whereas here in Sheboygan I am well within the norm. In the Keys, I am the very soul of moderation; if the tourists are included in the sample group, I am practically a teetotaler.

      When I get back to the house it is noticeably colder; the furnace is out. I risk a fire in the fireplace and warm myself by it. I’m not ready to spend the money or the time to bring in a furnace contractor at this point. I want to get right back to those cardboard boxes on the bed.

      My old room is chilly, so I rummage around in the packed closet and come up with my high school letter jacket. Its white leather sleeves, cracked with age, come to about the middle of my forearms. Not because my arms have gotten longer, but because the rest of me has gotten larger.

      The next box I open has “L.L. Bean” printed on it. It is full of books, and I get a whiff of library smell when I pull it open. The books have a consistent theme. Personnel directories from Falls Dieworks, family albums, high school and college yearbooks. Books with pictures of people we once knew. Here is my high school graduation yearbook, covered in fake maroon leather with a gold bas-relief Viking head. Sheboygan North High School. Raiders, 1972.

      I flip immediately to the pictures of the seniors whose last names start with the letter H, and there she is. Delores Ann Hagen.

      Lori.

      She is wearing a black sweater and has a scarf tied dramatically around her neck. Her body is turned to the side and she is looking over her shoulder, her head slightly tilted. A half-smile, a dimple, and a look in her eyes that tells you she knows exactly the effect she has on boys, and takes pleasure in it. Even in a black and white photo you can tell she is that rarest of colorations: a genuine brown-eyed blonde.

      I usually think of myself as slightly ridiculous. For the moment, I have passed beyond slightly. I am fifty-four years old, sitting on a dusty, saggy old bed, shivering, wearing an old jacket that’s about four sizes too small for me, looking down at a tiny picture of an eighteen-year-old girl I haven’t seen in decades and it’s giving me an erection. The picture is only her head and shoulders, she is fully clothed, and the image is not more than an inch and a half wide by two inches high, yet Lori is able somehow to reach out from that page and across thirty-plus years, and get to me just like she always did. It triggers a memory of a warm day in late October.

      * *

      October, 1971

      The temperature was up in the ’70s, rare in Sheboygan at that time of year. By third period they had opened the windows at North High and the feel of summer with the smell of autumn leaves wafted into the classrooms and through the halls.

      The fresh air seemed to animate everyone and there was near pandemonium between the bells. I had English third period; so did Lori.

      “Indian summer,” she said, smiling at me, her eyes twinkling. She was wearing a lime-green sleeveless top and a pleated skirt that was hemmed about four inches above her knees, which was about as revealing as girls’ clothes got at North High back then. Now I see teenage lasses waiting for the school bus with bare midriffs and their thighs exposed nearly to the hips. Imagine trying to pay attention to algebra surrounded by that. It strikes me as cruelty to animals.

      “Why do you suppose they call it ‘Indian summer’?” she asked.

      “The origin of the term is not known,” I said with an exaggeratedly authoritative air, having read an item in the news-paper about it that very morning. “One theory is that European settlers saw Indians hunting during warm days in fall.”

      “How do you know stuff like that?” She wrinkled her little nose. “You’re too smart. No wonder you’re wrecking the curve.”

      Her observation about my effect on the curve was obsolete. By the fall of my senior year, my class rank was tumbling. With what had been going on at my house for the last six months since the letter came from the Bank of Wisconsin, it was almost impossible to study, or even care about exams or grades. The only curves I cared about were Lori’s. But one’s image in high school is a fairly sturdy thing, and my classmates still thought of me as a top student.

      I fumfered around for something to say, anything to hold her attention until I could find a natural opportunity to firm up the tentative plans we had made the day before. Had to be cool about this.

      “Have you heard the new James Taylor album? Mud Slide Slim?”

      “No. Is it as good as Sweet Baby James?”

      I shook my head. “Not even close, but what is? It’s got a couple of good songs.”

      The bell rang. To hell with cool. “Do you need me to carry your books after school today?” This was our code. It meant I would get on her bus after school and we’d get off at the stop nearest the quarry.

      “Oh, yes.” She pretended to lift the two slim volumes in her hands with great effort. “They’re sooo heavy.”

      We laughed and took our seats. Most of the rest of that school day is lost in a fog. I remember that in English class we read John Keats’ poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Mr. Osbourne in Physics chided me for not paying attention.

      During lunch my friend Bill Sorenson also remarked on my absence of mind. He guessed correctly that I was anticipating a rendezvous with Lori and made obscene hand gestures and mouth noises that drew snickers from the other diners at our table. Most of what passed for conversation among the guys at North was to some degree malevolent, but at least by senior year the cruelty was usually just for laughs. There were still a few social rejects in the class who took some serious flak, but I was not one of them at that point. “Local man” had not yet been “found dead in garage.”

      I must have gone to see the cross country coach to get excused from practice, but I don’t recollect what lie I told. Mostly, I remember my head swimming, my face burning, and the time passing like a tortoise on Quaaludes until Lori and I got off the bus.

      To get to the quarry you had to walk across a large field of waist-high weeds, crawl through a hole in a barbed-wire fence, and ignore a menacing black and yellow “No Trespassing” sign. The quarry was no longer in operation; the fence and sign were there for safety’s sake. When I was in grade school a kid in my class had drowned there.

      The quarrymen had hit groundwater, creating a twenty-acre lagoon that looked as blue as a sapphire when the sky was clear. The walls were striated limestone, notched with coves that afforded privacy. On the floor of the quarry there were piles of crushed stone, mixed gravel and powder, saffron-colored like beach sand.

      In keeping with the custom, I removed my shoes as if I were entering a Japanese home and left them outside the cove we had selected as a “Do Not Disturb” sign, confident that this would be respected by any others making use of the quarry. Teenage pranksterism and spite always gave way to the conspiracy of “us against them” where romance was concerned.

      “Want to take a dip?” I asked. It was calm and warm in the quarry and a haze of autumn mist and limestone dust hung in the air. A flock of seagulls that had strayed over from Lake Michigan languidly circled the sun-dappled lagoon, which looked intensely inviting. Still, my question was a joke. The water in the lagoon was icy cold in late October, Indian summer or not.

      “You first,” said Lori, settling herself on a soft mound of loose scree. She had a businesslike air about her, less playful than she normally was when we were alone together. I assumed this was because of the plans we had made. We had been to the quarry before, but all we had done previously was neck, pet, and smoke cigarettes.

      “Have you been to the drugstore?” she asked.

      “Yep.” I had a three-pack of Trojans in my pocket, the first condoms I had ever seen, let alone purchased. Buying them had not embarrassed me, but I hadn’t gone