It was the other one, Ned, who did the real wandering. Late at night when all was shut down and the dormant machines stretched their weary metal joints (you could hear them sigh in the wind), he might steal off for a walk, a journey, a venture, a poke around town, working his way stealthily through fence gaps and along the backsides of hedges, toeing his way through the night-blue shadows. His travels took him along the topologies of night: garbage cans resting silently on the curb, awaiting pickup; toys left outside to gather shawls of dew; stray dogs and cats slinking on their betrayed hind legs. He walked through expensive backyards with gas grills and swimming pools and elaborate alarm systems and sensors that he was able to evade, except for once, in Canton, Ohio, when a loud siren went off and lights came on and he was chased like a fugitive (as he told it later, to Zip), like Harrison Ford in the movie—caught and put in the tank overnight with nothing to prove he’d actually done anything. His radar was off that night, he thought, he wasn’t paying his usual attention—because if there was one thing he did do, and knew he did, it was to mind, to pay heed to what was before him; it was his Indian shit, he told Zip, not getting into the details—that he’d been raised by a squaw, his old lady, old-school Indian stuff, a real squatter who’d crammed his soul with so much junk he could hardly stand to feel it there; he was a tiptoer; he’d seen it growing up—men able to find ways into the darkness, to tread lightly.

One would like to know exactly what it was that filled Ned when he walked through yards and places unspoken for by the light; perhaps it was the way he felt growing up, in the little squat in Petoskey, a patch of land they’d claimed as their own by parking the old bullet-shaped Airstreams side by side. Behind them sat the chief’s yellow Winnebago. And behind that, almost hidden in the wind blind of pines, stood the two teepees, trying to make it legitimate.

You see, there are varieties of darkness. It’s as simple as that. All day pitching the ride and smoking and looking up into the hard, ungiving eye of the sun while kids got on the Romper and rested their little rumps to be flung up and down. The eyes of the parents glimmered with their love, big, wide love, because what else would compel them to buy three fifty-cent tickets for a measly five minutes of being spun around on old rusted equipment? Neon bulbs worn out to a damp glow; music, once supplied by a real, air-piped organ, now the same crappy tunes came from the Sony boom box he propped in the center of the merry-go-round. Every thirty minutes he had to go turn the tape over.

There are fears so deep and dark that to admit them is to feel the universe slip out from under your own feet; or so John thought. If touched upon too long, these fears would flower out over your skin—the very skin of your life—like a huge wart. He’d seen photographs in a porn magazine of untreated growths flowering like mushrooms from the skin. Guys in the break room were passing it around, and he sat in stunned submission to what he was seeing: a giant, cauliflower growth in the crack of a man’s ass. To think that it could go like that untreated. He stared so hard and long at the photo that finally Rick, who had bought the magazine and felt it was his to stare at long and hard like that, took it back. The next Sunday he went to church and spoke to God in the hopes of never having to face any such thing in his own life. He wasn’t asking for protection; his hope was that God would forget him, pass him over, allow him to walk through his life untouched.