In the dresser drawer the Playwood Plastic soldiers slumber in their tin box. Soldier 401 marches uphill with his rifle. Soldier 410 kneels behind his anti-tank gun. He gets into the same brass bed he slept in as a boy but the mattress is too soft and the day keeps getting brighter. Eventually he hears Mrs. Boydstun go out and he creeps down the stairs and unlatches every door in the house. He needs them unlocked at the least, open at best. Then he tiptoes into the kitchen, finds a loaf of bread, tears it in half, puts one half beneath his pillow, and divides the other between his pockets. Just in case.

He sleeps on the floor beside the bed. He is not quite twenty years old.

Pastor White gets him a job with the county highway department. In the golden days of fall, tamaracks blazing yellow on the mountainsides, Zeno works with a road crew of older men pulling a motor grader with a Caterpillar RD6 crawler, filling in mud holes or graveling over washouts, improving the roads to the even smaller towns that lie even deeper in the mountains. When winter arrives, he requests the most solitary job on offer: driving an old hardtop army Autocar rotary snowplow. Its three big spiral blades send snow over the windshield in a kind of reverse avalanche—a skyward spout that, over the course of a night, illuminated by the glow of the headlights, tends to hypnotize him. It’s a strange and lonely business: the wipers generally do little more than smear frost across the glass, and the heater works about twenty percent of the time, and the defroster is a caged fan mounted on the dashboard, and he has to drive with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a rag soaked in spirits, wiping the inside of the glass to keep it clear.

Every Sunday he sends a letter to a British veterans organization, seeking the whereabouts of a lance corporal named Rex Browning.

Time passes. The snow melts, falls again, a sawmill burns, is rebuilt again, the highway crew rocks over washouts, shores up bridges, and rain or rockfall washes them out, and they rebuild them again. Then it’s winter and the rotary plow throws its mesmeric curtain of snow over the truck cab. Cars are always freezing up or going off the roads, sliding into the slush or mud, and he’s always hauling them back up: chain, tackle, reverse.

Things occasionally go haywire with Mrs. Boydstun. Her moods seesaw. She forgets what she is supposed to buy at the store. She trips over nothing; she tries to put on lipstick but trails it back along one cheek. In the summer of 1955, Zeno drives her to Boise and a doctor diagnoses her with Huntington’s chorea. The doctor tells him to watch for slips in her speech or for involuntary jerking movements. Mrs. Boydstun lights a cigarette and says, “You watch your mouth.”