After Elsie returned from Ohio, it seemed almost too much work to take a bath in the farmhouse’s one tub and go out again, into the dark. He and she needed the dark now. With the freedoms they had granted each other they needed such privacy that even a distant streetlight or the remotest chance of a Willow cop with a flashlight and barking voice could not be borne. Where could they go, with their maturing needs and fears of eventual desertion? His summer had not been so distracted that he had missed the implication, in her letters from camp, that she had found companionship with the boy counsellors, or the gossip, when in August she had returned, that while he was cutting brush in future housing developments she was to be seen at the township public pool, lounging in a two-piece bathing suit on a towel on the grass, with another boy, a boy her age, in her class, who would be there with her after September.

“My father owns a hundred acres of woods not that far from Brechstown,” she told Owen, after an hour of directionless cruising one evening. “There’s an old road in. Nobody ever comes there.”

“Sounds perfect,” he said, but did it? He let her direct him, turn by turn, on narrow roads he had never driven before. He was frightened at the road entrance, with its No Trespassing sign and rusting remains of barbed-wire fence; there was a sandstone boulder that with his summer muscles he rolled five feet to the side so they could get by. They were in the fragile old black Chevrolet that his father, mocking his own poverty, called “the flivver.” As branches raked the creeping car’s sides, Owen felt guilt, yet less than if it had been her father’s Chrysler, which was kept so shipshape and Simonized. A litter of cans and wrappers in the headlights revealed that others had been here before, also pushing aside the boulder in their strength of desire. The road was rough; the old car rocked. Suppose they broke an axle or got a flat tire? The scandal, the disgrace would stain his charmed life forever.

“Isn’t this far enough?” he asked. He felt a trap closing behind him.