Worlds within worlds. I see their reflections in the shimmering surface of Harris Lake. The smothering gauze of summer has burned to ash and the gentle haze of autumn has floated in, wrapped in a smoky-sweet cloud of burning leaves while trilling cicadas announce the change.

As I sit in my chair, a pinwheel of movement catches my eye, but when I turn to look it’s only a trio of squirrels chasing each other through the grass. A brisk wind swirls off the lake and dries my cheeks. On the breeze floats childish laughter, tinkling like a wind chime of tin and glass.

I’ll be dead before winter comes. I know this. Cancer has built a playground in my core. Malevolently vibrant cells flit about inside me. My body teems with dark life. Worlds within worlds.

My granddaughter pushed me out here and locked the wheels on my chair. A smoothing of the flannel blanket on my lap and a kiss on the cheek. Then she disappeared into the house to watch TV, perhaps wondering at the eccentricity of her grandfather who insists on being rolled outside despite the hundreds of channels on cable.

From beneath the blanket I draw forth a notebook and pen. My hand shakes with palsy and fear. So I draw. Doodling has always calmed me. Before long my hand steadies, and my eyes focus on my drawing. It’s a passable sketch of Harris Lake Dam, not as it looks now - a chalky ridge on the lake’s horizon - but as it looked then, when except for the narrow Harris River the valley was still dry and the dam stood tall and smooth as a tombstone, and cast a mile-long cool gray shadow upon the forgotten grave of Harris Valley.

I’m afraid of dying. When I was young, I knew I’d live forever. I thought I was different in some fundamental way that trumped physical law, but with each friend’s death my immortality has faded.

Now I’m clinging to a memory of a time when I knew with certainty that there was more to life than eating and sleeping and aching and dying.

It was the summer of 1948. Hotter than hell on a Sunday, but I was happy. Happy to be working, happy to be young, and happy to ride alongside a veteran of WWII in the passenger seat of a government-issue Olds 68 sedan. I was fiddling with the radio knobs. Sinatra faded in and out, teasing me with a note or two before fading into static.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched Frank Reilly, as I often did. To my naïve surveyor’s eyes, he was 200 pounds of what every man wanted to be, and every woman wanted to possess. Rawbone good looks, whipcord muscles that seemed more stone than flesh, and eyes of piercing blue, that’s what he had. He didn’t give a damn and buried in that nonchalance of manner rested his appeal. It wasn’t until later that I realized he might be hard, and wrapped tight as a steel cable — but when a single strand of his world was severed the others popped under the strain.

“You hungover?” Frank asked, never taking his eyes off the rutted lane.

“Why, you got some hair of the dog for me?” The previous night’s tequila bender spent with two local college girls had me dry-mouthed and worn.

“Hmm.” Frank shook his head.

I turned down the radio.

“I was just cutting loose a little. Don’t you ever cut loose?” I’d been working with Frank for three months now; I was the surveyor, he was the hired muscle, together we were assigned to clear five-hundred square miles of the Harris River valley. But in three months of work with the man, I’d never been able to get him to open up. Countless invitations to join me for drinks were turned down. At first I’d asked him just so I could use him for girl bait — the townie gals would be all over him. But after a while I just wanted to get him to open up and let me in on the mystery of Frank Reilly.

Frank glared at me with those unnerving eyes of his, like he did when I’d screwed up, and I sank down into the seat. The fellows from the Corps of Engineers had passed on a few stories about Frank. They said he was ex-military, that he’d greased more than his share of gooks in the Pacific, and that he’d been some sort of marksman in the war. There’s something about being stared at by a man who’s killed; you wonder what he’s thinking, and feel kind of like a deer must feel when he realizes he’s walked right up on a hunter and there’s nowhere to hide.

I turned away and stared out the window. We were passing the cemetery. Most of the graves had been dug up and the bodies moved, but the ones who had no family were just left in the ground. I shivered. I could visualize the water flowing over those graves, seeping into the ground, eating away at the dirt until the coffins broke free.

Then we were passing a row of shanties. Each one seemed empty, but Frank slowed, staring at the clapboard shacks for signs of life. There was none. On the other side of the valley, in Parker and Gustafson’s quadrant, I’d heard there was one squatter left, and the federal marshals were going to have to flush him out, but our quadrant was clear. We were spending the week making just one last sweep.

Then we saw the filling station.

Frank slammed on the brakes and it was all I could do not to eat the dashboard.

“Would ya look at that?” he whispered.

In a roadside clearing, in a spot I’d have bet my life nothing had stood before, the station squatted beneath a stand of oaks. I wiped my eyes and looked around to make sure we hadn’t taken a wrong turn, but I already knew we hadn’t; we were on the cemetery road, and the only thing on the road should have been the graveyard.

I fumbled with my maps.

Then Frank got out and started walking slowly toward the station.

I gave up on folding the maps, tossed them in the backseat, and got out of the Olds. Frank stopped about halfway to the filling station and stood frozen in the hard-packed dirt driveway. His shoulders were slumped, his hands thrust deeply into his pockets.

I looked past him at the station. It wasn’t like one of those modern gas stations that were popping up all over the place with their gleaming service bays, cement driveways, and well-lit signs. No, this was a mom and pop station, the likes of which I hadn’t seen for fifteen years. A solitary hand-primed gasoline pump stood lonely vigil in the front drive. The top reservoir globe was empty and the pump looked like it hadn’t been used for years and years. Rickety wooden steps led up to a clapboard porch, where two rocking chairs creaked in the light breeze. The hand-painted sign above the door was faded dusky gray, and its lettering was illegible. The front door to the place was propped open by a worn and cracked butter churn hewed from knotty pine. Beyond the doorway the interior of the station was cloaked in gloom.

I stopped by Frank’s side.

“This looks just like—” His voice trailed off in a breathless whisper.

“Like what, Frank?” I asked. I was whispering too. There was something about the place that inspired reverence.

“A place I used to go when I was a kid.” I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to himself.

Then he started toward the station, dragging his feet in the dirt as if they each weighed a ton.

I followed him. In the past month I’d stared down the business end of a double-barreled shotgun, handed a shoeless woman an eviction notice while her hound dog hurled its body into her screen door, and taken down countless hand-scrawled signs that threatened murder, but there was something about the filling station that made me want to hide behind the broad back of Frank Reilly.

We stepped through the door and into the past. The interior of the place was a picture postcard postmarked in the roaring twenties. Brightly colored tin signs lined the left wall of the place, touting everything from motor oil to RC Cola. To our right, a soda bar — complete with four leather upholstered stools — gathered dust in the shadows.

Frank stumbled over something and bent down to pick it up. He cried out as he snatched it from the floor. He held it up to the fading daylight leaking through the open door. It was a child’s toy, an airplane.

He was out the door before I knew it. It was all I could do to keep from running after him. When I caught up to him he was back at the car, still holding the toy airplane above his head and squinting at it, as if unsure of its reality. I could see it clearly now. It was a tri-plane. The wing style was vintage World War I, but the lines of it were as streamlined as a V-2 rocket.

I’d just opened my mouth to ask him about the toy when he turned away and folded himself into the car - passenger side, for a change; he never let me drive.

He told me to drive to Kate’s, a tiny saloon just past the Harris County line, so I did, and I decided to hold my questions until we were sitting at a wobbly table by the jukebox.

He drained his beer in two swallows and motioned to the barkeep for another. I sipped mine and waited for him to unload. Something told me that a piece of the Frank Reilly puzzle was about to be revealed.

“Back in ’28,” he said. His eyes were focused on a bare spot of wall just above the jukebox. “I was just a kid ... living in the boonies outside Chillicothe. It was the summer of my tenth birthday. My parents weren’t around much back then — mom was in the hospital and dad spent a lot of time there too.”

I just nodded. The bartender set another beer in front of Frank. He didn’t seem to notice; his eyes had taken on a faraway cast, as if he were in another place, another time.

“There was this station down the road about two miles from the house. It had stood vacant for a couple years when a new family moved in, took over.”

“Station like the one...?” I asked.

Frank shook his head. “It was the station we saw today.”

“But—,” I started.

His fist slammed into the table. I jumped. The bartender looked up from the bar, thought about saying something, but then thought better of it.

“There was this girl, Jenny Owens. She lived in the back of the station with her parents. We hit it off, and not just because we were the only kids around for five square miles. She was — special.”

“Your first love?” The words came out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

Frank looked at me harshly, but then his face softened. “Yeah.” He was rolling the little plane back and forth across the table, his calloused hands threatening to swallow it. “She loved Amelia Earhart. I mean we all did, back then, but Jenny ate, drank, and dreamed nothing but Amelia Earhart. When I got a chance to buy her the plane — this plane — at the general store in Chillicothe, I spent every penny I had on it. You should have seen her face light up. Buddy, it was something else.”

“I’ll bet it was,” I said.

“Then her parents had to move.” A dark cloud crossed Frank’s face. “I don’t even remember why. Right after that my mom died and I had to move too.”

“Did you ever try to look her up?” I asked.

“I did.” Frank now held the plane so tightly the tendons stood out on the back of his hand like taut barbwire. “Just before the war. Found out she’d died. Car wreck. I knew though, before I asked her parents, that she was gone. I knew the second I heard about Amelia Earhart’s plane going missing. Is that crazy?”

“No,” I said quickly. I was suddenly dying of thirst. The beer I’d been sipping disappeared in two gulps. Wiping a hand across my face, I ordered another two pulls.

A couple of hours later I left Frank in the bar and swayed back to my room at the Howard Johnson’s. I was in serious need of a nap but before I laid down I had the switchboard put in a call to the county courthouse. I asked the Clerk of Court if a record existed of a filling station on the cemetery road. He thought I was putting him on. I laughed it off as a joke and collapsed onto the thin mattress, an arm flung across my eyes against the late afternoon sun that leaked through the gauzy curtains.

When I awoke, the room was dark and the phone was ringing. Ron Nichols, the project foreman in charge of the dam construction, was on the other end of the line. “Your buddy’s on the dam, drinking. You better get out there.” His voice was thick with sleep. I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Yeah, I’ll take care of it.”

I hung up the phone and peered out the window. The Olds was parked in front of Frank’s room. He must have walked to the dam. The keys were in the ignition. In twenty minutes I had driven around the barricades to the center of the dam.

The lights weren’t powered up yet, but the moon was full. The moonlight shone off the pale surface of the dam, which glowed with surreal phosphorescence. I thought of bones.

I heard whistling and crept to the dam’s edge. Frank was sitting on a ledge about ten feet down the side, his feet hanging out over a whole lot of nothing. He spotted me and beckoned. I shakily descended the utility ladder and sat down beside him. He handed me a half-full pint of brown whiskey. I took a slug and felt the warmth loosening the tightness in my shoulders.

“They’re going to flood it all, you know.”

I nodded. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew that he needed me to listen.

“They don’t give a damn who they flood out or what they wash away — in the name of progress — you know that?”

“I know, Frank, sure. Maybe we should talk back at the hotel?”

He ignored me and went on. “This dam. It’s a big thing ... a grownup thing ... a kid shouldn’t have to worry about a thing like this.”

I thought of a family we’d intimidated into leaving the valley. Twin blonde haired boys, their clear blue eyes perfect windows into their hearts, had stared at me hauntingly as their parents loaded the family’s possessions onto a rusting flatbed truck.

“Yeah,” I said quietly, reaching for the whiskey.

He handed me the bottle and then pulled something from inside his jacket. It was a small wooden doll, no larger than four inches tall, burnished smooth and shiny by handling and age.

“I was thinking,” Frank said. “Thinking about how a man could make a lifetime just taking things from other people. Hell, I done it.”

“How do you mean?” The doll wore the pinstripes of the New York Yankees and clutched a tiny bat not much bigger than a machine-rolled cigarette.

“I didn’t take this.” His voice cracked with sorrow. I thought of my father speaking at my grandad’s funeral and how his voice had sounded just like Frank’s did now.

“Where’d it come from Frank?”

“The station, that damned ... blessed filling station. I had to go back, just to see if it was real. I thought I heard ... I thought I heard kids laughing, but I knew they weren’t there. Sounded like a radio that’s got a torn speaker, hollow and not really there, you know?”

“I guess,” I said. I was thinking about that filling station at night, about the weirdness of it, and about how I wouldn’t have been caught dead sneaking around that place after dark.

“I couldn’t find the kids. But I found this behind the soda bar.”

He handed me the figurine. It was much lighter than I’d expected. Was it hollow? I turned it over in my hands. Under the feet, where it should have said Made in USA, there were hand-painted symbols. Chinese writing or Japanese.

“Damn,” I whispered.

“I’ve seen this doll before,” Frank said. He wiped his hands across his cheeks and I thought I saw a reflection there. Was he crying?

I looked away, embarrassed. In the distance, where I imagined the filling station must be, I thought I saw a flash of yellow light that might have been a firefly.

“I was in Guam. I got cut off from my platoon. Scared shitless, that’s how I felt. Don’t ever believe that crap they show in the movies. Ain’t nothing like that. It’s more like being lost in a pig slaughterhouse with no way out — and you’re the pig.”

I tried to hand him the whiskey but he brushed my hand away. The way he was talking gave me a jittery feeling in my stomach.

He pulled his knees to his chest and sighed.

“You were lost?” I prodded him.

“It was beautiful there. You didn’t notice the beauty so much when the bullets were flying and men were screaming for their mothers and you just wanted to hunker down under your steel pot, but it really was beautiful there.”

That was something I hadn’t heard before.

“I’d gotten separated from my platoon, and I was sure I knew the way back, but my compass was acting screwy — jumping all over the place. I was just starting to panic when I came up on a little lagoon. It was amazing. Looked like something out of one of those Hope and Crosby road movies - all it needed was Dorothy Lamour in a two piece.”

I leaned back against the cool surface of the dam and closed my eyes.

“When I got close to the water and saw how clear and cool it looked I forgot all about my platoon and the war with Tojo and just fell to my knees in the sand and dipped my face in the water.

“It was stagnant, that’s what saved me. I came up spluttering and when I did I glimpsed a flash of green moving on the other side of the lagoon. I snapped up my rifle and fired before I knew what was happening. I rolled backwards into the bushes, already feeling the machine gun bullets I felt sure were coming, but nothing happened.”

“Jesus. You got him?”

Frank nodded. “Yeah, I got him. When I poked my head above those bushes he was sitting there at the edge of the water with a surprised look on his face. I crept up on him, watching to make sure he was alone. He was. He’d gotten lost, just like me. My luck was just better than his.”

“Man.” I whistled appreciatively. “Then he died?”

Frank took a deep breath before replying. “Yeah, but it took a while. I’d plugged him good in the top of his chest. In between coughing up blood he was making these little hitching sounds. I’ll remember that sound till the day I die. Breathing. Man, that’s something you take for granted until you see a guy like that, a guy trying so hard just to get one good breath.”

I caught a chill, inhaled deply, then exhaled. I looked down at the Yankees doll that I was still holding. It felt cold and when I unfolded my hands, it seemed to be staring straight at me. I handed it back to Frank.

“After he died I searched his body like I was supposed to. Not much on him. A little funny money, a photograph of a tiny Japanese girl he’d never see again, and this doll. Made me think about him playing with it as a kid. Maybe he kept it as a good luck charm. Damn sure didn’t work for him though, did it?” Frank barked out a laugh.

“And you’ve kept it ever since?” I already knew the answer.

“’Course not. I gave it to my platoon leader. That was the last I ever saw of it - until this evening.” He’d set the doll down beside him on the concrete ledge. It stood next to us, and for a while the three of us gazed down into the valley.

“What do you think it all means?” I asked.

“It’s a message.” Frank’s eyes were clear and fervent as the Tennessee sky. “I think it’s a message to me. What do you think?”

I answered him before I even realized I had an answer to give. “I think we should get the hell out of here. You for sure. Get the hell out.”

Frank smiled and shook his head. “Way too late for that.”

We talked for the rest of the night, but it was just more of the same — me trying to get him to leave and him trying to figure out his “message”. By the time we got back to the motor hotel and I fell into my bed the orange haze of dawn was streaming through my window.

Once again I was awakened by the phone. I stumbled across the room and answered. “Yeah.”

The voice on the other end was high-pitched and excited. “Man oh man. You gotta get down to the cemetery road right now!”

“Gustaffson?”

“Yeah. It’s your buddy Reilly. He’s got a gun.”

I slammed down the receiver and sprinted outside. I was relieved to see the Olds still in the lot.

When I rounded the curve north of the cemetery I saw the cop cars. Lots of them. And the olive drab jeeps that meant the National Guard was here as well. I pulled up behind a state trooper car with the driver’s side door open. A brown-shirted cop knelt behind the door. He waved me back, but I wasn’t stopping. The Olds was still rolling when I jumped out and ran up to the trooper’s car. I caught a glimpse of a legion of uniforms crouched behind other vehicles — each of them watching the filling station — before I crouched in the dirt behind the trooper. He turned toward me, his pistol held in a two-handed grip and pointed at the dirt between his feet. His florid face oozed sweat. He was smiling.

He nodded at the Olds. “You with the dam?”

“Huh? Yeah.” He’d seen the markings on the car. “What—?”

“I think we got him,” he said, sounding like an excited kid. “Sniper from the National Guard. Helluva shot.” He gestured toward the tree line a few hundred feet away. A skinny young man stood up, shouldered a rifle, and started striding across the meadow towards us. The trooper stared hard into my face. “You okay buddy?”

I was shaking my head. This couldn’t be happening. I’d been with Frank just a few hours before. Time must have passed, because the next thing I knew I was leaning on the hood of the trooper’s car watching them carry Frank’s body out of the filling station on a stretcher. A tan sheet covered his body.

A rushing filled my ears and I felt as if I would faint. Voices faded in and out.

“Some kind of war hero.”

“Must have snapped.”

I felt dizzy.

“Didn’t fire at us.”

“I’m telling you...”

I was light-headed.

“Damn shame.”

“Fired over our heads.”

Finally, mercifully, I passed out.

Less than two weeks after Frank’s death, I stood on a ridge with a crowd of spectators waiting for the opening of the Harris River Dam floodgates. Most of the watchers had worked on the dam. There were a few locals, but not many.

I looked at my watch. 11:55. Five more minutes. They were to open the floodgates at noon.

“In a hurry?”

An gray-haired older man wearing a rumpled suit stood at my elbow.

“No sir, not really, just wanted to see this. I’m a little impatient.”

He cocked his head and gave me an odd look.

I moved away from him to the highest point on the ridge. From the peak I could see the filling station among the trees. Still there. I wondered if the others could see it. “Wonder what that building is?” The old man had followed me up the ridge and was pointing at the station. I was about to answer when I spotted the kids. Three of them. A girl burst around the corner of the station, her arms pinwheeling as she tried to make the turn. Then she caught her balance and scooted out of sight behind the building. Seconds later the two boys appeared, side by side, running like rabbits. Then they disappeared around the corner after the girl.

“Didya see that? Didya see those kids? You did, didn’t you? We have to...” He was tugging at my sleeve.

I removed his hand from my arm and shook my head and whispered. “What did you say?” The old man was leaning toward me. I could see in his face that he was already doubting what he’d seen. “I said, I think — I think they’re all right.” Then I turned and walked away from Harris Valley and left the sound of rushing water behind.

I’m back in my room now. Through my window I have a clear view of the lake at the bottom of the hill. The purple sky of dusk shimmers off the waves. Lightning bugs magically transport themselves from place to place, glowing brightly, vanishing, and then warming into existence again, their aimless flight marked by blazing neon trails.

Each night for the last week the voices have grown louder, more insistent, and I think tonight I’ll be able to make out the words spoken between childish giggles. Tantalizingly just beyond the reach of my ears, eyes, and hands they dance, and with each laugh and furtive glimpse of color I feel the strength returning to my legs.

And now they’ve come. They’re closer than ever before. I hear rustling in the bushes beneath my window ledge, and I close my eyes for a moment, becoming ready, becoming strong. When I open my eyes a small figurine dances on the windowsill, clutched in a nutmeg-colored hand. It’s a New York Yankees doll, carved from wood and hand-painted. The puppeteer’s voice is singsong, and breathless, and I know I’m hearing Japanese.

Then more rustling, and a nasal droning, and the airplane dives by my window, flying so quickly I can hardly spot the thin arm and hand that propels Amelia Earhart’s tri-wing through the shimmering moonlight.

And I stand. Simple as that. It’s been ten exhausted years since I’ve felt my legs beneath me, but I’m as steady as the Harris Dam, and I do not waver.

A stillness blankets all, and the scent wafts through the window, enfolding me in a nostalgia so tightly wrapped I find it hard to breath. It’s the smell of hotdogs at the ballpark, and mercurochrome, and a treehouse on the first day of spring.

Then Frank’s there, not as a man — never again as a man — but as the tousle-haired boy he should have always been. His grin is fireworks, and then he’s scampering away toward the lake. Close on his heels, cackling like tickled babies, follow a boy with darkly shining hair and a girl with honey eyes.

I take a deep breath and vault into the yard.

I almost beat them to the lake.

©2006, William Bolen