It’s just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There’s nothing you’re ever going to say that’s going to make anybody happy when they’re feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.

Finally he set fire to the radio. He piled some paper around it. He struck a match to the paper. We sat there watching it. I had never seen anybody set fire to a radio before.

As the radio gently burned away, the flames began to affect the songs that we were listening to. A record that was #1 on the Top 40 suddenly dropped to #13 inside of itself. A song that was #9 became #27 in the middle of a chorus about loving somebody. They tumbled in popularity like broken birds. Then it was too late for all of them.

Elmira

I return as if in the dream of a young American duck hunting prince to Elmira and I am standing again on the bridge across the Long Tom River. It is always late December and the river is high and muddy and stirs dark leafless branches from its cold depths.

Sometimes it is raining on the bridge and I’m looking down-stream to where the river flows into the lake. There is always a marshy field in my dream surrounded by an old back wooden fence and an ancient shed showing light through the walls and the roof.

I’m warm and dry under sweet layers of royal underwear and rain clothes.

Sometimes it is cold and clear and I can see my breath and there’s frost on the bridge and I’m looking upstream into a tangle of trees that lead to the mountains many miles away where the Long Tom River starts its beginning.

Sometimes I write my name on the bridge in frost. I spell my name out very carefully, and sometimes I write ‘Elmira’ in frost, too, and just as carefully.

I’m always carrying a double-barrel sixteen-gauge shotgun with lots of shells in my pockets… perhaps too many shells because I am a teen-ager and it’s easy to worry about running out of shells, so I’m weighed down with too many shells.

I’m almost like a deep-sea diver because my pockets are filled with such an abundance of lead. Sometimes I even walk funny because I’ve got so many shells in my pockets.

I’m always alone on the bridge and there’s always a small flock of mallards that fly very high over the bridge and down towards the lake.

Sometimes I look both ways on the road to see if a car is coming and if a car isn’t coming, I shoot at them, but they are too high for my shot to do anything but annoy them a little.