* * *
They say you can’t go home again.
That is a lie.
If you are lucky and time it right, you arrive at sunset when the old town is filled with yellow light.
I got off the train and walked up through Green Town and looked at the courthouse, burning with sunset light. Every tree was hung with gold doubloons of color. Every roof and coping and bit of gingerbread was purest brass and ancient gold.
I sat in the courthouse square with dogs and old men until the sun had set and Green Town was dark. I wanted to savor Ralph Underhill’s death.
No one in history had ever done a crime like this.
I would stay, kill, depart, a stranger among strangers.
How would anyone dare to say, finding Ralph Underhill’s body on his doorstep, that a boy aged twelve, arriving on a kind of Time Machine train, traveled out of hideous self-contempt, had gunned down the Past? It was beyond all reason. I was safe in my pure insanity.
Finally, at eight-thirty on this cool October night, I walked across town, past the ravine.
I never doubted Ralph would still be there.
People do, after all, move away.…
I turned down Park Street and walked two hundred yards to a single streetlamp and looked across. Ralph Underhill’s white two-story Victorian house waited for me.
And I could feel him in it.
He was there, forty-eight years old, even as I felt myself here, forty-eight, and full of an old and tired and self-devouring spirit.
I stepped out of the light, opened my suitcase, put the pistol in my right-hand coat pocket, shut the case, and hid it in the bushes where, later, I would grab it and walk down into the ravine and across town to the train.
I walked across the street and stood before his house and it was the same house I had stood before thirty-six years ago. There were the windows upon which I had hurled those spring bouquets of rock in love and total giving. There were the sidewalks, spotted with firecracker burn marks from ancient July Fourths when Ralph and I had just blown up the whole damned world, shrieking celebrations.
I walked up on the porch and saw on the mailbox in small letters: UNDERHILL.
What if his wife answers?
No, I thought, he himself, with absolute Greek-tragic perfection, will open the door and take the wound and almost gladly die for old crimes and minor sins somehow grown to crimes.
I rang the bell.
Will he know me, I wondered, after all this time? In the instant before the first shot, tell him your name. He must know who it is.
Silence.
I rang the bell again.
The doorknob rattled.
I touched the pistol in my pocket, my heart hammering, but did not take it out.
The door opened.
Ralph Underhill stood there.
He blinked, gazing out at me.
“Ralph?” I said.