12. The Answer Man

Phil Parker had the great good fortune—or great ill luck—to meet the Answer Man three times during his life. On the first of these occasions, in 1937, he was twenty-five, engaged to be married, and the possessor of a law degree on which the ink had almost dried. He was also caught on the horns of a dilemma so fierce that his eyes watered each time he thought of it.

Nonetheless, it had to be thought about, and resolved in one way or the other. To that end, he left his apartment in Boston and came up to the small New Hampshire town of Curry, where his parents owned a summer home. Here he planned to spend a decision-making weekend. He sat on the deck overlooking the lake with a sixpack of beer on Friday night. He thought about his dilemma, slept on it, woke up on Saturday morning with a hangover and no decision made.

On Saturday night he sat on the deck overlooking the lake with a quart bottle of Old Tyme ginger ale. He woke up on Sunday morning with no decision made, but with no hangover—a plus, but not enough. When he got back to Boston that evening, Sally Ann would be waiting to find out what he had decided.

So he climbed into his old Chevrolet after breakfast and went motoring along New Hampshire back roads on a gorgeous, sunshiny October day. The trees were in full autumn flame, and Phil pulled over several times to admire various vistas. He reflected that there was no beauty like New England beauty at the end of the cycle.

As morning drew on toward noon, he scolded himself for dillydallying. Getting drunk on beer hadn’t solved his problem, sipping ginger ale hadn’t solved it, and mooning over fall foliage wouldn’t do it, either. And yet he suspected that his absorption in the scenery was quite a bit more than communing with nature. It was either part of the solution or his mind’s effort to squirm away from a decision that would—one way or the other—set himself and his fiancée on a lifetime course.

It’s part of growing up, he told himself.

Yes, but the idea of choosing one single thing was abhorrent to him. He knew it had to be done, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Wasn’t it a little like picking the prison cell you wanted to spend your sentence in? Your life sentence? That was silly and overblown… yet it wasn’t.

His dilemma was simple and clear-cut, as most of the real ballbreakers are: where was he to practice law? Each choice was full of ramifications.

Phil’s father was a senior partner in an old Boston law firm of the white shoe variety—Warwick, Lodge, Nestor, Parker, Allburton, and Frye. Sally Ann’s father was a senior partner in the same firm. John Parker and Ted Allburton had been best friends since college. They had married less than a year apart, each serving as the other’s best man. Phil Parker had been born in 1912, Sally Ann in 1914. They were playmates growing up, and maintained their liking for each other even during that difficult period in early adolescence when boys and girls tend to express a public disdain for the opposite sex, no matter what they may feel privately.

The parents on both sides might have been the least surprised people on earth when Phil and Sally Ann began to “keep company,” as the saying was in those days, but neither couple quite dared to hope that their children’s affection would survive four years of separation: Vassar for Sally Ann, Harvard for Phil. When it did, the parents were delighted, as were Phil and Sally Ann (of course). Love wasn’t the problem. At least not directly, although love played a part (as it almost always does).

Currywas the problem, that small town near the Maine–New Hampshire state line where the Parkers and Allburtons had summer homes on adjoining lakefront lots.

Phil had been in love with Curry at least as long as he had been in love with Sally Ann, and now it seemed he might have to choose between them. He wanted to hang out his shingle in Curry, although it boasted only two thousand year-round residents. The downtown area, where Route 23 crossed Route 111, consisted of a restaurant, two gas stations, a hardware store, the AP, and the town hall. There was no bar and no movie theater. For those amenities you had to go to North Conway, quite some distance away. There was an elementary school (in those days called a grammar), but no high school. Curry teens made their glum bus ride to Patten High, ten miles away.

There was also no lawyer in town. Phil could be the first. The Parkers and Allburtons thought he was crazy to even consider Curry. John Parker was hurt and angry that his son was thinking of not joining the firm, where his grandfather had been a senior partner back in the horse-and-buggy days. He also found it difficult to believe, he said, that a young man who had graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School would even consider practicing in the wilds of New Hampshire… which he called the forgotten wilds of New Hampshire (sometimes, after a cocktail or two, the misbegotten wilds).

“Your clients will be farmers suing each other over cows breaking down fences,” John Parker said. “Your biggest cases will involve poaching or fender-benders on Route 23. You can’t be serious.” But the dismay on his face made it clear that he knew his son might be.

Ted Allburton was even angrier than his old friend. He had one special reason to be angry other than the ones John had already voiced to his son: Phil would not be committing a wanton act of destruction upon his future alone. He was planning to take a hostage, that hostage being his daughter.

When Phil persisted, Allburton had drawn a line in the dirt, one that was deep and harsh. “I’ll forbid the marriage.”

“Sir,” Phil had replied, keeping his voice level and (he hoped) polite, “I love Sally Ann. She says she loves me. And she’s of age.”

“You mean she could marry you without my consent.” Ted was a big, broad-shouldered man partial to suspenders (which he called braces). His blue eyes could be warm, but that day they’d been like flints. “That’s true, she could. And I like you, Phil. Always have. But if you were to do what you’re considering, any marriage would take place without my blessing. And that, I believe, would make her very unhappy. In fact, I rather doubt she’ll do it.”

Phil had looked into those flinty eyes and understood Ted Allburton was understating the case. He was sure Sally Ann wouldn’t do it.

Phil didn’t know if she would or not, especially if Mr. Allburton decided against a cash dowry. Phil knew Sal understood what he wanted more clearly than their elders, who either wouldn’t or couldn’t understand at all, and he knew part of her wanted it, too. After all, she’d also grown up spending her summers and the occasional snowy and magical Christmas in Curry.

She was willing to listen when Phil told her that he believed Curry, and all of southern New Hampshire, was going to grow. “It’ll be slow getting started,” he had told her that summer, when he still had hopes of bringing his parents onboard with his tentative plan, if not the Allburtons. “The depression’s not really going to end for another seven years or so… unless there really is a war. My dad thinks there will be, but I don’t. The growth is going to start in the North Conway area and spread from there. By 1950 there’ll be more highways. More highways mean more tourists, and more tourists mean more businesses. The new people will come from Massachusetts and New York, Sal, and they’ll come by the thousands. Tens of thousands! To swim in clean lakes in the summer, to watch the leaves change in the fall, to ski in the winter. Your father thinks I’ll live poor and die poor. I think he’s wrong.”

Unfortunately it wasn’t 1950, or even 1945. It was 1937, and he hadn’t been able to bring any of them around. He hadn’t—not yet, anyway—dared to ask Sally to commit, which might mean turning her back on her family… or having them turn their backs on her. It seemed horribly unfair, but to leave her dangling on the horns of his dilemma was unfair, too. And so he had told her he was going to come up here, spend the weekend, and come to a decision. Either the firm on Commonwealth Avenue or the little wooden office behind the Curry town hall and next to the Sunoco. Boston or Curry. The lady or the tiger. And so far he had decided…

“Absolutely nothing,” he muttered. “Gosh Almighty!”

He was on Route 111 now, and headed back toward the lake. His stomach was talking to him about lunch, but it was doing it in low and rather respectful tones, as if it was also abashed by his inability to decide.

His greatest wish was that he could make his father and mother understand that the firm was just not right for him, that he would be a square peg in a round hole. The fact that the firm had been right for his father and grandfather (not to mention the Hon. Theodore Allburton, Esq., and his father) did not make it right for him. He had tried in every way he could think of to express to them that he might be capable of doing perfectly adequate work at the double brownstone on Comm Ave and still feel desperately unhappy there. Would that unhappiness seep into his home life? It could, and probably would.

“Nonsense,” his father had replied. “Once you get broken in, you’ll love it. I did, and you will. A fresh challenge every day! No suits in small claims court over broken plows and stolen farm wagons!”

Broken in. What a phrase! It had haunted him through all this spring and summer. It was what you did with horses. Broke them in, worked them until they became nags, then shipped them off to the glue factory. He felt the metaphor, while melodramatic, was also realistic.

His mother, who at least sensed that his distress was real—a true thing—was kinder. “You won’t know if the firm is right for you until you’ve tried it,” she said, and that was the most reasonable and seductive reasoning put forward to him in favor of the firm. Because he knew himself.

He had been a very good student of the law. Not good enough to be brilliant, perhaps, but there was no shame in being very good. He wasn’t much of a rebel, though, and neither was Sally Ann. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been so deeply distressed at the idea of going against the wishes of their parents—they weren’t still teenagers, for gosh sake!

If he went to work for the firm, Phil suspected he would find aspects of it challenging, and he suspected even more strongly that he would, in time, become broken in. His idea of being the first lawyer in a sleepy little town that might someday grow into an affluent large town, possibly even a small city, would recede. Slowly at first, then, as the first strands of gray appeared at his temples, more quickly. In five years it would seem more dream than desire. There would be children and a house to take care of, more hostages to fortune, and each year—hell, each month, each week, each goshdarn day—it would be more difficult to turn back.

A lifetime course.

He tried to imagine telling Sally Ann he had settled on Curry. His parents would help them get started (probably), even if the Allburtons wouldn’t. He had some savings, and so did Sal (not much). It would be hard, but not impossible (perhaps). He suspected Ted Allburton was wrong about his daughter refusing to marry without his blessing, Phil dared to believe he knew Sal better than her father did in that respect, but what would a marriage lacking that blessing be like? Was it fair to either of them to start out with acrimony instead of support?

So his mind swung back and forth—town or city, lady or tiger—as he breasted one of the long hills on Route 111. A bright yellow sign, hand-painted, caught his eye. 2 MILES TO THE ANSWER MAN, it read. Phil grinned, then laughed out loud. It would be nice if there really was such a guy, he thought. I could certainly use a few answers.

He drove on and passed another sign soon enough. This one was electric blue. ANSWER MAN 1 MILE.

Phil topped another long rise and there, at the bottom of the downgrade, he saw a splash of bright red at the side of the road. As he drew closer he saw it was a large beach umbrella with hanging scalloped sides. There was a table beneath it. A man sat behind it in the shade. Phil thought the set-up looked like the lemonade stands you often passed in the summer. But those were hopeful little kids who had forgotten to add sugar to their puckery brew more often than not, and this wasn’t summer but mid-autumn.

More curious than ever, Phil pulled over and got out of his jalopy. “Hello!”

“Hello yourself,” the Answer Man responded, equably enough.

He looked to be about fifty. His thinning hair was salt-and-pepper. His face was lined but his eyes were bright and interested and unaided by specs. He wore a white shirt, plain gray slacks, and black shoes. His long-fingered hands were folded neatly on the surface of his table. A bag like a doctor’s satchel rested by one foot. He looked like an intelligent fellow, and Phil got no sense of eccentricity about him. He in fact reminded Phil of the dozen or so mid-level and middle-aged lawyers in the firm: solid, respectable men who lacked that final increment of ability which would propel them to partner level. It was that very feeling of comfy corporate normality that made the man’s appearance here beneath a bright red umbrella, sitting in the middle of nowhere in particular, so curious.

There was a folding wooden camp chair on the other side of the table. The client’s chair, presumably. Three little signs had been set up in a row to face the Answer Man’s prospective customers.

THE ANSWER MAN

read the sign in the middle.

$25 PER 5 MINUTES

read the sign on the left.

YOUR FIRST 2 ANSWERS FREE

read the sign on the right.

“What is this, exactly?” asked Phil.

The Answer Man fixed him with a look that was ironic but not unfriendly. “You look like a smart young man,” he said. “A young man who has been to college, judging by the pennant I see on your car aerial. Harvard, no less! Ten thousand men of Harvard cry for victory today!”

“Right,” Phil said, smiling. “For they know that over Eli, fair Harvard holds sway.”

The Answer Man smiled back. “Such young fellows as yourself—and girls, and girls—are so used to asking questions that they don’t even think about what they are asking. And, since business has been slow this morning, I’m going to do you a favor of not answering that question. Which still leaves you with two free ones, if you want them.”

Phil thought that even if the guy had a few screws loose, what he said made perfect sense. He had asked a question to which the answer was obvious. For twenty-five bucks, this man would answer questions for five minutes. That was what was going on here. And that was all.

“Well, say—don’t you think twenty-five smackers for five minutes’ worth of answers is pretty steep? It’s no wonder your biz has been on the slow side.”

“Well, what is steep? No, don’t answer that—you’re not the Answer Man, I am. My rates vary according to my location and my prospective customers. I have charged a hundred dollars for five minutes, and on one storied occasion I charged a thousand. One thousand iron men! Yes! But I’ve also charged as little as a dime. You might say I charge what the traffic will bear. Answers aren’t always painful, young man, but correct answers should never come cheap.”

Phil opened his mouth to ask if the guy was serious, then closed it again. He could easily imagine the Answer Man saying Yes I am, and that’s your second free question.

“How would I know the answers you gave me would be true and correct?”

“You wouldn’t now, but in the course of time, you would,” said the Answer Man. “And that’s—”

“Two,” Phil said. He was grinning widely, enjoying the game. He said, “How much ‘course of time’ are we talking about?” It was no sooner out than he clapped a hand over his mouth, but too late.

“It’s been slow today, so I’m going to give you a third free one,” the man behind the table said. “The answer: it varies. Which helps you get to the truth of my profession—if it’s the truth you’re seeking—not at all. Do you see what I mean about how easy it is to ask questions that don’t aid understanding? It devalues the whole process of asking, doesn’t it? Of delving into matters?”

The Answer Man leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers at the nape of his neck, and gazed at Phil. “I shouldn’t be surprised at how unhelpful the questions of smart people can be, having been in this business for as long as I have, yet somehow I still am. It’s loose. It’s lazy. I have often wondered if smart people really understand what answers they seek in life. Perhaps they just cruise along on a magic carpet of ego, making assumptions that are often wrong. That’s the only reason I can think of as to why they ask such impotent questions.”

“Impotent! Really!”

The Answer Man went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You asked me how you’d know if my answers were the correct ones. ‘True and correct’ is how you put it, which was quite nice. So I gave you one for free. If this were the pre-Christmas rush, I would have seen you back into your car and down the road two minutes ago.”

The breeze gusted, flapping the scalloped edge of the red umbrella and ruffling the wings of the Answer Man’s salt-and-pepper hair. He looked down the empty road with an expression of deep melancholy.

“Fall is a slow time for me, and October is the slowest month of all. I think more people are able to find answers on their own in the autumn.”

He continued to look along the black ribbon of road winding its way into the blazing trees for a moment. Then his eyes cleared and he looked back at Phil again.

“Why didn’t you just ask me something specific?”

Phil was caught by surprise. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“What you really wanted to know is if I’m a fake,” the Answer Man said. “And if you had asked me what your mother’s maiden name was, for example, or the name of your fifth-grade teacher, something I couldn’t possibly know unless I am what I say I am, you could have found out.” He shook his head. “People without your intellectual advantages usually ask exactly that sort of question. People with them—people with a Harvard education, let us say—hardly ever do. It goes back to what I said. Smart people labor under a dual disadvantage: they don’t know the answers they need, and they don’t know what questions to ask. Education doesn’t inculcate mental discipline. You’d think it would, but it’s often just the opposite.”

“Okay,” Phil said (nettled). “What is my mother’s maiden name?”

“Sorry,” the Answer Man said, and tapped the sign that said $25 PER 5 MINUTES. “For that you need to pay.”

“You crooked me!” Phil exclaimed humorously. He didn’t feel humorous; he felt exasperated. With both of them.

“Not at all,” the Answer Man replied equably. “You crooked yourself.”

Phil was about to remonstrate, then didn’t. He could see the man’s point. This was a kind of intellectual three-card monte.

“It’s been interesting, sir, but twenty-five dollars is a little high for a fellow not long out of college and thinking of starting his own business, so I better get back on the road. It’s been fun passing the time of day with you.”

As he started away, Phil thought—no, he was sure—that the man sitting beneath the red umbrella would say, Business being so slow and all, maybe I could give you five minutes for twenty dollars. Hell, I’ll make it fifteen. Fifteen simoleons and you can set your mind to rest about all sorts of things. And when that happened, Phil decided, he was going to pay right up and sit right down. The man was obviously a charlatan, and a screwtip in the bargain, but what the hey. He had a twenty, a ten, and two fives in his wallet. Even with a splurge here, that was more than enough to buy a tank of ethyl for the old jalop’ and a good lunch at a roadside restaurant. Phil thought that even hearing the questions—spoken right out loud instead of just knocking around in his head—might go a good way toward solving his problem.

The self-styled Answer Man was right about one thing, Phil thought; getting good answers was mostly a matter of asking good questions.

But all the Answer Man said was, “You drive safe, now.”

Phil walked to his car, crossed around the slightly dented front fender, and looked back. He still expected the Answer Man to offer him a cut rate, but the Answer Man seemed to have dismissed Phil entirely—he was looking over toward Vermont, humming and using a small twig to clean beneath his nails.

He intends to let me go, Phil thought, nettled all over again. Well be damned to him, that’s just what I’m going to do.

He opened the driver’s door of his Chevy, hesitated, then closed it again. He took out his wallet. He removed the twenty and one of the fives.

Just hearing the questions out loud, he thought again. And I don’t have to tell anyone that I stooped to paying a fortune teller during a depression.

Also, it might be worth twenty-five dollars just to see the smug son of a buck groping around and making excuses when Phil did ask him for his mother’s maiden name.

“Change your mind?” The Answer Man tucked his nail-cleaning twig into the breast pocket of his shirt and picked up his satchel.

Phil smiled and held out his money. “For the next five minutes, I’m the one asking the questions.”

The Answer Man laughed and pointed a finger at Phil. “Good one, my friend. I like you. But before I take your money, there’s one rule we need to get straight.”

Oh, here it comes, Phil thought. The hole he intends to wriggle through.

From his bag, the Answer Man removed what looked like an old-fashioned Big Ben alarm clock. When he set it on the table, Phil saw it was actually a giant-sized stopwatch, with numbers running from 5 to 0.

“I am not a psychiatrist or a counselor. Nor am I a fortune teller, although I’m sure that’s what you’re thinking. Here’s the point: don’t try asking me any questions with should I in them. No should I this, no should I that. I answer questions, but I’m not going to solve your problems.”

Phil, who had planned to ask the fellow if he should join the firm or open his own office in Curry, started to pull back his money. Then he thought, If I can’t couch my questions in a way that skirts his “should I” prohibition, what kind of a courtroom lawyer will I make?

“I’m in,” Phil said, and handed over his money. Into the Answer Man’s bag it went.

“I can’t keep calling you son, son. Perhaps you’ll give me your name.”

“Phil.”

“Phil what?”

Phil smiled craftily. “Just Phil. I think that’s all you need, considering we’re not going to be together long.”

“All right, Just Phil. Give me a sec to wind this sucker up. And I see you’re wearing your own timepiece, looks like a very fine Bulova, so if you care to check it against mine, feel free.”

“Oh, I will,” Phil said. “I intend to get my money’s worth.”

“And so you shall.” The Answer Man wound his oversized stopwatch with a clackety-clack sound very similar to the clock Phil had kept by his bedside during his undergraduate years. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.” Phil sat down in the client’s chair. “But if you can’t answer my first question, I’ll have my money back double-quick. You’ll either give it to me willingly, or I’ll take it by force.”

“That sounds positively brutal!” the Answer Man said… but he laughed when he said it. “I’ll ask again: are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“So we begin.” The Answer Man clicked a lever on the back of his clock, and it began to tick.

“Your suggestion: what’s my mother’s maiden name?”

The Answer Man didn’t hesitate. “Sporan.”

Phil’s mouth dropped open. “How in the hell do you know that?”

“I don’t want to waste time you’ve paid for, Phil, but I have to point out that you’ve asked another question to which you know the answer. I know because I am, ta-da, the Answer Man.”

Phil felt like he had been tagged by a right hook. He actually shook his head to clear it. The ticking of the Answer Man’s big stopwatch was very loud. The hand was approaching the 4.

“What’s my girl’s name?”

“Sally Ann Allburton.” No hesitation at all.

Phil began to be afraid. He told himself not to be, it was a fine October day, and he was both younger and no doubt stronger than the man on the other side of the table. It must be a trick, had to be, but that didn’t make it any less eerie.

“Tempus is fugiting, Phil.”

He shook his head again. “Okay. I’m trying to decide if I should—”

The Answer Man wagged a finger at him. “What did I tell you about that word?”

Phil tried to put his thoughts in order. Mock court, he thought. Think of it as mock court. He’s the judge. There’s been an objection to your line of questioning. How do you get around it?

“Can you answer questions about future events?”

The Answer Man rolled his eyes. “We’ve already established that, have we not? I said you’d know if my answers were true and correct in the course of time. Such an answer presupposes knowledge of the future. For me there is no future and no past. Everything is happening now.”

What old-lady-séance bullshit, Phil thought. Meanwhile, the black hand on the big stopwatch was almost to 3.

“Will Sally Ann agree to marry me when I propose?”

“Yes.”

“Will we live in Curry? The town down the road?”

“Yes.”

The big black hand on the stopwatch reached 3, then passed it.

“Will we be happy?”

“A broad question, and one to which you should also know the answer even at your young age. There will be ups, there will be downs. There will be agreements and there will be arguments. But on measure, yes—the two of you will be happy.”

He somehow knew my mother’s maiden name, Phil thought. And Sally’s. The rest is just carny fortune teller guesswork. But why? For a measly twenty-five dollars?

“Tempus still fugits,” said the Answer Man.

The ticking of the oversized stopwatch seemed louder than ever. The hand was past 3 and closing the gap on 2. Phil had no sane reason to be relieved by what the Answer Man was telling him, because it was what he wanted to hear, wasn’t it? And hadn’t he already made his decision about Curry? Wasn’t all that “horns of a dilemma” stuff so much self-dramatization? And as for Sal… didn’t he pretty much know she would marry him even if he did make moving to rural New Hampshire part of the deal? Not for absolute sure, not a hundred per cent, but ninety?

Abruptly he changed direction. “Tell me where my father was born. If you can.”

Again the Answer Man did not hesitate. “He was actually born while at sea, on a ship called the Marybelle.”

Phil again felt like he had been socked in the jaw. It was an old family story, much treasured and often told. Grandfather and Grandmother had been returning to America after a pilgrimage to London, where their parents had been born and lived their early lives. Gram had insisted on making the trip even though she was eight months pregnant by the time they returned. There was a storm. Grandmother’s seasickness was so violent it triggered her labor. There was a doctor onboard, and he delivered the infant. No one expected baby John to live, but—wrapped in cotton batting and fed from an eyedropper—he had. And thus, Philip Yeager Parker, Harvard Law School graduate, became possible.

He started to ask again how the man on the other side of the table—hands still neatly folded—could know such a thing, then didn’t. The reply would be the same: Because I am the Answer Man.

Questions crammed his mind like a panicked crowd trying to escape a burning building. The stopwatch hand reached 2 and passed it. The ticking seemed louder than ever.

The Answer Man waited, hands folded.

“Will Curry prosper the way I think it will?” Phil blurted.

“Yes.”

What else? What else?

“Sally’s father… and her mother, I suppose… will they come around to us?”

“Yes. In time.”

“How long?”

The Answer Man seemed to calculate briefly as the single hand on his clock reached 1. He said, “Seven years.”

Phil’s heart sank. Seven years was a lifetime. He could tell himself the Answer Man had plucked that number out of thin air, but he no longer believed it.

“Your time grows short, Just Phil.”

He could see that for himself, but he couldn’t think of another question except how long will I live and the concomitant question, how long will Sally Ann live. Did he want to know either of those things? He did not.

But he didn’t want to waste his remaining forty or fifty seconds, so he asked the only thing that came to mind. “My father says there’s going to be a war. I say there won’t be. Which of us is right?”

“He is.”

“Will America be in it?”

“Yes.”

“How long before we’re in it?”

“Four years and two months.”

He was down to twenty seconds now, maybe a little more.

“Will I be in it?”

“Yes.”

“Will I be hurt?”

“No.”

But that wasn’t the right question. It left a loophole.

“Will I be killed?”

The big stopwatch reached zero and went off with a brRRANG sound. The Answer Man silenced it.

“You asked that question just before the alarm, so I’ll answer. No, Just Phil, you will not be killed.”

Phil sat back in his chair and let out a breath. “I don’t know how you did that, sir, but it was very intense. I have to believe it was a shuck and jive, you must have known I was coming, got some background, but you certainly earned your twenty-five smacks.”

The Answer Man only smiled.

“But I didn’t know exactly where I was going or what road I was going to take… so how could you?”

No reply. Of course not. His five minutes were up.

“You know what? I feel… weird. Swimmy.”

The world seemed to be going away. The Answer Man was still sitting at his table, but he appeared to be withdrawing. As if on rails. Grayness began to encroach on Phil’s field of vision. He raised his hands to his eyes to clear them, and gray became black.

When Phil came to, he was behind the wheel of his Chevrolet, parked on the shoulder of Route 111. His watch said it was 1:20. I passed out. First time in my life, but don’t they say there’s a first time for everything?

Passed out, yes. Pulled over first, thank God, and turned off the engine. Probably from hunger. He’d had six bottles of beer on Friday night, and he supposed there were calories and at least some nourishment in beer, but he hadn’t had much to eat yesterday or today, so it made a degree of sense. But when you passed out—as opposed to being asleep—did you have dreams? Because he’d had a doozy. He could remember every detail: the scalloped red umbrella, the big stopwatch (or maybe you called that sort of thing a stopclock), the Answer Man’s salt-and-pepper hair. He could remember every question and every answer.

It was no dream.

“Yes,” he said aloud. “Yes it was. Had to be. He knew Mother’s maiden name and where Father was born in the dream because I knew those things.”

He got out of his car and walked slowly to where the Answer Man had been. The table was gone, the chairs were gone, but he could see marks in the soft earth where they had been. The grayness started to come back and he slapped himself hard, first on one cheek and then on the other. Then he kicked at the dirt until the marks were gone.

“This never happened,” he told the empty road and the blazing trees. He said it again: “This never happened.”

He got back behind the wheel, started his engine, and pulled onto the highway. He decided he wouldn’t tell Sally Ann about passing out; it would worry her, and she would probably insist that he see a doctor. It was just hunger, that was all. Hunger and the most vivid dream he’d ever had. Two hamburgs, a Coca-Cola, and a piece of apple pie would put him right, and he was pretty sure there was a greasy spoon in Ossipee, not five miles down the road.

One good thing had come from his odd roadside fugue. No, actually two things. He would tell her he meant to hang out his shingle in the little town of Curry. Would she still give him her hand in marriage?

Parents be damned.

Phil Parker and Sally Ann Allburton were married in Boston’s Old South Church on April 29th, 1938. Ted Allburton walked his daughter down the aisle. This walk, which he had at first refused to make, was a result of his wife’s diplomacy and his daughter’s gentle supplications. Once he was able to think about Sal’s impending nuptials calmly, Mr. Allburton realized there was another reason to make that short walk: business. John Parker was a senior partner in the firm. Ted heartily disapproved of Phil’s decision to throw away a bright future in a hick farming community, but there was the firm to think of. In the years ahead there must be no friction between the partners. So he did his duty, but he did it with a set, unsmiling face. As he watched the ceremony, two old sayings came to Ted Allburton’s mind.

Youth must be served was one.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure was the other.

There was no honeymoon. Phil’s parents had reluctantly opened his trust fund, thirty thousand dollars, and he was anxious not to waste it. A week after the ceremony, he opened the little office next to the Sunoco station. The sign on the door—painted by his new bride—read PHILIP Y. PARKER, ATTORNEY AT LAW. On his desk was a telephone and an appointment book full of blank pages. They did not stay blank for long. On the very afternoon he opened for business, a farmer named Regis Toomey walked in. He was wearing bib overalls and a straw hat. He was everything Phil’s father had predicted. Toomey offered to take off his muddy boots and Phil told him not to bother.

“I’m thinking you came by that mud honorably. Sit down and tell me why you’re here.”

Toomey sat. He took off his straw hat and placed it on his lap. “How much do you charge?” It came out Yankee: Chaaage.

“Fifty per cent of what I get for you. If I get nothing, twenty-five dollars.” He hadn’t forgotten the Answer Man’s little sign, and he, Phil, hoped to have answers for all sorts of people. Starting with this man.

“Sounds fair,” said Toomey. “Here’s what. The bank wants to foreclose me and auction off the farm.” Faaam. “But I’ve got a paper…” He brought it out of the front pocket of his biballs and passed it across the desk. “… says I’ve got ninety days’ grace. Bank fella says that’s null and void if I didn’t make the last payment.”

“Did you?”

“All but ten dollars. The wife went groceryin’, don’tcha see, and that left me short.”

Phil could hardly believe it. “Are you saying the bank wants to take your farm because of a ten-dollar shortfall?”

“Bank fella says so. Says they can auction it off, but I’m guessin’ they already have a buyer lined up.”

“We’ll see about that,” Phil said.

“I don’t have twenty-five dollars just about now, Lawyer Parker.”

Sally Ann came out of the other room with a pot of coffee. She was wearing a dark blue dress and a pinafore of a slightly lighter shade. Her face, free of makeup, shone. Her blond hair was pulled back. Toomey was struck dumb.

“We’ll take your case, Mr. Toomey,” she said. “And because it’s our first, no charge no matter the outcome. Isn’t that right, Philip?”

“Absolutely,” Phil said, although he had been looking forward to that twenty-five bucks. “What’s the bank fella’s name?”

“Mr. Lathrop,” Toomey said, and grimaced like a man who’s bitten into something sour. “First Bank. He’s the chief loan officer, and in charge of mortgages.”

Phil presented himself at the First Bank of New Hampshire that very afternoon, and enquired of Mr. Lathrop if his bosses would enjoy a story in the Union Leader about a cruel bank that took a farmer’s property in the depths of a depression over a measly ten dollars.

After discussion, some of it fairly warm, Mr. Lathrop saw the light.

“I’m tempted to take you to court anyway,” Phil said pleasantly. “Unfair business practices… pain and suffering… financial deception…”

“That’s outrageous,” Mr. Lathrop said. “You’d never win.”

“Perhaps not, but the bank would lose either way. I think five hundred dollars paid into Mr. Toomey’s account would close this matter to the mutual satisfaction of both parties.”

Lathrop groused, but the money was paid. Toomey offered to fork over half, but Phil—with Sally Ann’s concurrence—refused. He did take twenty-five dollars when Toomey insisted, thinking of the Answer Man as he did it.

The news spread, both in Curry and the surrounding towns. Phil discovered several banks were using the same short-payment fiddle to foreclose on farms. In one case, a farmer in neighboring Hancock came up twenty dollars short three months before his mortgage would have been paid off. His farm was foreclosed and then sold to a construction company for twelve thousand dollars. Phil took that one to court and got eight thousand back for the farmer. Not full value, but better than nothing, and the press coverage was gold.

By 1939 his little office had been refurbished—new shingles and a fresh coat of paint. Like Sally Ann’s face, it shone. When the Sunoco station went bust, Phil bought it and added an associate just out of law school. Sally Ann picked out a secretary (smart but elderly and plain) who doubled as a receptionist to help him winnow his cases.

By 1941 his business was in the black. The future looked bright. Then, four years and two months after Phil’s encounter with the man sitting under a red umbrella by the side of the road, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Not long before their wedding, Sally Ann Allburton took Phil by the hand and led him out onto the back lawn of the Allburton house in Wellesley. They sat on a bench by the goldfish pond, where a skim of ice had melted only recently. Her color was high and she wouldn’t look him in the face, but she was determined to say what was on her mind. Phil thought that on that afternoon she had never looked more like her father.

“You need to lay in a supply of French letters,” she said, looking fixedly down at their linked hands. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” Phil said. He had also heard them called English caps and, as an undergrad, naughty bags. He had worn such a thing exactly once, on a trip to a house of ill repute in Providence. It was an expedition that still filled him with shame. “But why? Don’t you want—”

“Children? Of course I want children, but not until I’m sure I won’t have to come begging to my parents—or you to yours—to help us out. My father would love that, and he’d put conditions on it. Strings to draw you away from what you really want to do. I can’t have that. I won’t have that.”

She snatched a quick glance at him, reading his emotional temperature, then looked back down at their linked hands again. “There is a thing for women, it’s called a diaphragm, but if I ask Dr. Grayson, he’ll tell my parents.”

“A doctor is enjoined from such behavior,” Phil said.

“He would do it, just the same. So… French letters. Do you agree?”

He thought about asking her how she even knew about such things and decided he didn’t want to know; some questions should not be answered. “I agree.”

Now she did look at him. “And you must buy them in Portland, or Fryeburg, or North Conway. Far from Curry. Because people talk.”

Phil burst out laughing. “You are a sly one!”

“I am when I have to be,” she said.

His business prospered, and several times he and Sally Ann discussed throwing the French letters away, but in those first years Phil was working farmers’ hours, dawn to dusk, often in court, often on the road, and the idea of adding a kiddie seemed more like a burden than a blessing.

Then, December 7th.

“I’m going to enlist,” he told Sally Ann that night. They had been listening to the radio all day.

“You could get a deferment, you know. You’re almost thirty.”

“I don’t want a deferment.”

“No,” she said, and took his hand. “Of course you don’t. If you did, I’d love you less. Those dirty, sneaking Japs! Also…”

“Also what?”

Her answer made him realize—as with the business about buying his French letters far from Curry—just how much her father’s child she was. “Also it would look bad. Business would suffer. You might be called a coward. Just come back to me, Phil. Promise.”

Phil remembered what the Answer Man had told him under the red umbrella that day in October: not killed, not injured. He had no business believing such a thing, not all these years later… but he did. “I promise. I absolutely do.”

She put her arms around his neck. “Then come to bed. And never mind the damn rubber. I want to feel you in me.”

Nine weeks later, Phil sat in a Parris Island Quonset hut, sweating and aching in every muscle. He was reading a letter from Sally Ann. She was pregnant.

On the morning of February 18th, 1944, Lieutenant Philip Parker led his contingent of the 22nd Marines ashore on the atoll of Eniwetok. The Navy had subjected the Japanese to three days of bombardment, and intelligence said the enemy forces were thin on the ground. Unlike most of Naval intelligence, this turned out to be true. On the other hand, nobody had bothered to tell the gyrenes about the steep sand dunes they would have to climb after the Higgins boats grounded. The Japs were waiting for them, but they were armed with rifles instead of the dreaded Nambu light machine guns. Phil lost six of his thirty-six, two killed and four wounded, only one seriously. By the time they reached the top of the dunes, the Japs had melted into the thick brush.

The 22nd Marines swept west, meeting only scattered resistance. One of Phil’s men was shot in the shoulder; another fell into a hole and broke his leg. Those were his only casualties after the landing.

“Walk in the park,” Sergeant Myers said.

When they reached the ocean on the far side of the atoll, Phil got a walkie-talkie message from the jackleg Marine HQ that had been set up on the other side of the dunes that had caused them the worst casualties. They could still hear scattered fire from the south, but that was dying out even as they ate a noon meal. A picnic lunch at the seashore, Phil thought. Who knew war could be so pleasant?

“What’s the word, Loot?” Myers asked when Phil holstered the walkie.

“Johnny Walker says the island is secure,” Phil said. He was speaking of Colonel John T. Walker, who was bossing this little farrago along with his fellow colonel, Russell Ayers.

“It don’t sound secure,” said Private First Class Molocky. He nodded toward the south.

But by 1500, the shooting had fizzled away to nothing. Phil waited for orders, got none, posted three guards at the edge of the overgrowth, and told the rest of the men they could fall out until further notice. At 2000 hours they were told to pack up and head back east, where they would reconnect with the main landing force. There was grumbling about having to trek back through the thick underbrush when it would soon be dark, but orders wuz orders and they saddled up. After Private Frankland broke his leg in another hole and Private Gordon nearly put out an eye running into a tree, Phil radioed HQ and asked permission to camp for the night because the terrain was difficult.

“Fucking difficult is right,” said Private First Class Molocky.

Permission was granted. They camped under their netting, but plenty of mosquitos still got in.

“At least the ground’s dry,” Myers said. “I’ve had trench foot, and it’s not for sissies.”

Phil fell asleep to the sound of his men slapping and Private Frankland—he with the broken leg—moaning. He awoke just before dawn, aware that shapes were moving north of their little encampment through the gloom. Hundreds of shapes. He found out later that Eniwetok was riddled with spider holes. Frankland had probably broken his leg in one of them; a Japanese infantryman might have been at the bottom, looking up, as Rangell and Sergeant Myers pulled him out of it.

Myers now put a hand on Phil’s shoulder and murmured, “Not a word, not a sound. They might miss us. I think—”

That was when one of the Marines coughed. Conflicting lights crisscrossed the gray morning—grayer still under the canopy—and picked out the humped shapes swaddled in mosquito netting. The firing began. Six Marines were slaughtered in their sleep. Eight more were wounded. Only one Marine got off a shot. Myers had his arm around Phil; Phil had an arm around Myers. They listened to bullets whicker overhead, and several thumped the ground around them. Then there was a harsh command in Japanese—zenpo, zenpo it sounded like—and the Nips moved on, running and crashing through the brush.

“They’re counterattacking,” Phil said. “That’s the only reason I can think of why they didn’t finish us off.”

“HQ being their objective?” Myers asked.

“Got to be. Come on. You, me, anybody else who’s not wounded.”

“You’re crazy,” Myers said. His teeth shone as his lips parted in a grin. “I like it.”

Phil counted only six men who chased after the Japanese; there might have been one or two more. Now the firing started up again ahead of them, first sporadic, then constant. Grenades crumped, and Phil heard the chatter of the dreaded Nambu. It was joined by other machine guns. Three? Four?

The remaining Marines in Phil’s contingent burst out of the overgrowth and saw the far side of the dunes that had given them so much trouble the day before. It was covered with Japanese soldiers headed for the lightly defended HQ, but Phil’s men were behind them.

A portly Jap—perhaps the only overweight Jap in the whole army, Phil thought later—had fallen slightly behind his comrades. He was carrying a Nambu light machine gun and was festooned with belts of ammunition. Slightly ahead of him was another, thinner machine-gunner.

Phil drew his knife and ran at the portly soldier, feeling that if he could get that machine gun, he could do a fair amount of damage. Maybe a lot. He plunged the knife into the nape of the Jap’s neck. It was his first kill, but in the heat of the moment that hardly registered. The Jap shrieked and fell forward. The skinny machine-gunner ahead of him turned, raising his weapon.

“Loot! Drop! Drop!” Myers screamed.

Phil didn’t, because in that moment he thought of the Answer Man. Will I be hurt? he had asked. The Answer Man said no, but then Phil realized he’d asked the wrong question. He had asked the right one just before his five minutes ran out. Will I be killed? And the answer: No, Just Phil, you will not be killed.

In that moment on Eniwetok, he believed it. Perhaps because the Answer Man had known his mother’s maiden name and where his father had been born. Perhaps because he had no other choice. The skinny Jap opened fire with his Nambu. Phil was aware of Myers staggering backward in a spray of blood. Destry and Molocky fell on either side of him. He heard bullets whip by on both sides of his head. He was aware of tugs at his pants and shirt, as if he were being nipped by a playful puppy. He would later count over a dozen holes in his clothing, but not a single bullet hit him or even grazed him.

He opened fire, raking the appropriated Nambu from left to right, knocking down Japanese soldiers like Kewpie dolls. Others turned, momentarily shocked to stillness by this unexpected attack from their rear, then opened fire. Bullets struck the sand in front of Phil, covering the toes of his boots. More ripped at his clothes. He was aware at least two of his men were firing back. He pulled another ammo belt from the dead Jap at his feet and opened fire again, unaware of the twenty-pound weight of the Nambu, unaware that it was heating up, unaware that he was screaming.

Now the Americans were returning fire from the other side of the dune; Phil could tell by the sound of the carbines. He advanced, still firing. He walked over dead Jap soldiers. The Nambu jammed. He threw it aside, bent, and a bullet whanged his helmet off his head and sent it flying. Phil hardly noticed. He picked up another machine gun and began firing again.

He became aware that Myers was beside him again, half of his face awash with blood, a piece of his scalp dangling and swinging as he walked. “Yaah, sons of bitches!” he screamed. “Yaah, you sons of bitches, welcome to America!”

That was so crazy Phil began to laugh. He was still laughing when they crested the dune. He threw the Nambu aside and raised both arms. “Marines! Marines! Don’t shoot! Marines!”

The counterattack—such as it was—ended. Sergeant Rick Myers was awarded a Silver Star (he said he would rather have had his right eye back). Lieutenant Philip Parker was one of 473 Medal of Honor recipients during the Second World War, and although unwounded, his war was over. A photographer took a picture of his bullet-riddled shirt with the sun shining through the holes, and it made all the papers back home in what combat Marines called “the world.” He was an authentic hero, and would spend the rest of his service in America, making speeches and selling War Bonds.

Ted Allburton embraced him and called him a warrior. Called him son. Phil thought, This man is ridiculous. But he hugged back willingly enough, knowing when a hatchet was being buried.

He met his son, now nearly three years old.

Sometimes at night, lying wakeful beside his sleeping wife, Phil thought of the skinny Japanese soldier, the one who had heard his compatriot’s dying scream. He saw the skinny soldier turn. He saw the skinny soldier’s wide brown eyes beneath his field cap, a scar in the shape of a fishhook beside one of them. Something the skinny soldier might have gotten as a child. He saw the skinny soldier open fire. He remembered the sound the bullets made as they whispered around him. He thought of how some of those passing slugs had tugged playfully at his clothes, as if they weren’t pellets of death, or worse, bringers of lifelong injury. He thought of how sure he’d been of his survival because of the Answer Man’s—call it what it was—his prophecy. And on those nights he wondered if the man under the red umbrella had seen the future… or made it. To this question Phil found no answer.

On his War Bonds rounds, which consisted of speaking engagements in the New England states and sometimes New York as well, Phil had the chance to talk with many soldiers who had served, and heard many stories of difficult homecomings. One ex-Marine put it very succinctly. “At first, after four years apart, we were strangers sleeping together.” Phil and Sally Ann were spared this awkward phase, possibly—probably—because they had grown up together from childhood. The physical love between them came naturally. Once, at the moment of their mutual climax, Sally Ann said, “Oh, my heero,” and they both collapsed with the giggles.

Jacob was shy of him at first, clinging to his mother and looking with fearful eyes at the tall man who had come into their lives. When Phil tried to hold him, the boy struggled to be put down, sometimes crying. He would toddle to his mother, grasp her leg, and stare at the stranger he was supposed to call Daddy.

One evening while Jake was sitting between his mother’s feet and playing with his blocks, Phil sat down across from him and rolled him a tennis ball. He expected nothing, and was delighted when Jake rolled it back. Back and forth went the ball. Sally Ann put down her book to watch. Phil gave the ball a low bounce. Jake put out his hands and caught it. When Phil laughed, Jake laughed with him. After that it was all right between them. Better than all right. Phil loved everything about his son—his blue eyes, his fine brown hair, his sturdy body. Most of all he loved the little boy’s potential. He couldn’t see the man Jake might become and didn’t want to. Let it be a surprise, he thought.

There came an evening late in that year of 1944 when Jake refused to let Sal pick him up and carry him to bed. “Want Daddy,” he said. It might not have been the best night of Phil’s life, but he couldn’t think of a better one.

Will Curry prosper the way I think it will?he’d asked on that long-ago day that seemed like a dream (although he still remembered each question asked and each reply given). The Answer Man had told him it would, and he was right about that, as well. Partly because of his fame as a Medal of Honor–winning Marine, but mostly because he asked a fair price for his services and because he was good at his job (“a clevah bastid,” the locals said), Phil Parker had more clients than he could handle in the years after the war.

The associate he’d added in 1939 was killed in a bombing raid over Hamburg, so Phil added a new fellow, then a second, then—at Sal’s urging—a young woman. That caused some disgruntled talk among Curry’s old Yankees, but by 1950, there were new people in town with new ideas and new money. A shopping center was built in the neighboring town of Patten; Phil and his associates did the legal work and made a good profit. In Curry, the five-room grammar was replaced by a spanking new eight-room elementary school. Phil bought the old building for a song, and it became his new office: Phil Parker Associates. The Allburtons came often to visit with their daughter, their grandson… and, of course, with the war hero. Phil was quite sure Ted had come to believe he had always supported his son-in-law’s prescient decision to move to Curry, which was booming.

Phil was able to put aside any old animosity he might have held onto concerning his father-in-law because of Ted’s fierce and unconditional love for Jake. On the boy’s sixth birthday, Ted gave him a little baseball glove and played underhanded toss with the boy in the backyard until it was almost too dark to see and Sally Ann had to tell them both to come in and eat supper.

No matter the press of work, Phil always tried to get home before dark in order to have a catch with his son. By the time Jake was eight, they were standing thirty feet apart, then forty, and throwing overhand.

“Bring it, Dad!” Jake would cry. “Really steam it in!”

Phil wouldn’t throw even close to as hard as he could have, not to a boy of eight, but he increased the speed of his throws little by little. On spring and summer weekends, the two of them would sit together listening to the Red Sox on the radio. Sometimes all three of them.

One November day, after they had been out throwing the baseball in two inches of snow, Sally Ann took Phil aside. “Did you play ball as a kid? Because I don’t remember that you did.”

Phil shook his head. “Pick-up games after school, sometimes, but not often. I could field, but I couldn’t hit worth a damn. The guys used to call me Whiffer Parker.”

“I never played sports, either, but Jake… is he good, or is it just my imagination and a mother’s pride?”

“He’s good. I can’t wait to take him to his first Sox game.”

That happened in 1950. They sat in the bleachers, Phil on one side, Ted on the other, the boy between them, staring at the green outfield grass of Fenway Park, eyes wide, mouth agape, his bag of popcorn forgotten on his lap.

Ted leaned over and said, “Someday maybe you’ll be out there, Jake.”

Jake looked up at his granddad and smiled. “I know I will,” he said.

On an unseasonably warm October day in 1951, Phil visited the new Western Auto store in North Conway and drove back home along Route 111 with a present for the whole family in the trunk: a Zenith television set, the Regent model with the porthole screen. He also bought rabbit ears, but with an antenna they might be able to get the Boston stations. He was thinking Jake would go out of his mind with happiness at the prospect of actually watching Range Rider instead of listening to it on the radio.

There was something else on his mind as well, potentially more important than the new TV. He’d had a conversation that morning with a man named Blaylock Atherton, who happened to be the Republican in charge of the New Hampshire state senate. A real mover and shaker was Senator Atherton, and it had been an interesting conversation indeed. Phil was thinking of the discussion he’d have with Sally Ann about that when he passed a bright yellow sign planted on a stick by the side of the road. The message, 2 MILES TO THE ANSWER MAN, brought back brilliant memories.

Can’t be him, not after all these years, Phil thought. But in his heart he knew it was.

Just past the Curry town line he passed another sign, this one in electric blue, announcing that the Answer Man was a mile ahead. Phil breasted the hill at the edge of town. Two hundred yards ahead he saw the red umbrella. This time the Answer Man had set up shop in a large clearing not far from the new elementary school. It was where the Curry Volunteer Fire Station would stand in a year or so.

Heart thumping, new TV and Blaylock Atherton forgotten, Phil pulled off the road and got out. His Chevrolet jalopy was long gone. He slammed the door of his new Buick and for a moment just stood there, amazed by what he saw. More like thunderstruck.

Phil had aged; the Answer Man hadn’t. He looked exactly the same as he had on that October day fourteen years ago. His thinning hair was no thinner now. His eyes were the same bright blue. White shirt, gray slacks, black shoes—all just as before. His long-fingered hands were folded on his table just as before. Only the signs flanking the one proclaiming him the Answer Man had changed. The one on the left read $50 PER 3 MINUTES. The one on the right read YOUR FIRST ANSWER FREE.

I guess even magic isn’t immune to inflation, Phil thought. Meanwhile, the Answer Man was looking at him with lively interest.

“Do I know you?” he asked, then chuckled. “Don’t answer that! You’re not the Answer Man, I am. Just let me think.” Like a creature in a fairy tale, he laid his finger to one side of his nose. “I’ve got it. You’re Just Phil. You wanted to know if your girl would marry you, although you knew she would, and if you’d come to live in this little village, although you knew that, too.”

“They were impotent questions,” Phil said.

“Yes, they were. They were indeed. Sit down, Just Phil. If, that is, you’d like to do some business. If not, you are of course free to go on your way. Freedom is what makes America great, or so they say.”

A bell rang loudly not far away. The doors of the new elementary school flew open. Yelling kids carrying book satchels and lunch boxes fled out the doors as if from an explosion. One of them was undoubtedly his son, although in the general scrum Phil couldn’t pick him out; there were lots of boys wearing Red Sox caps. Two school buses were ready to take in those who lived more than a mile away.

Phil sat down in the client’s chair. He started to ask if this strange roadside salesman was human or some sort of supernatural being, but he must have learned at least a few things between twenty-five and thirty-nine, because he shut his mouth before he could waste his free question. Of course the Answer Man wasn’t a human being. No man looked exactly the same after fourteen years, and no man could have known that he would survive close-range machine-gun fire on Eniwetok.

What he said instead was, “Your price seems to have gone up.”

“For certain people,” the Answer Man said.

“So you knew I was coming.”

The Answer Man smiled. “You are trying to get information by making statements. I’m hep to that trick.”

I’ll just bet you are, Phil thought. A real hep cat.

Children were walking past the site of the future fire station now, and although kids were curious by nature, the few who looked at the vacant lot looked away without interest.

“They don’t see us, do they?”

“Another question to which you know the answer, my friend. Of course they don’t. Reality has folds, and we’re currently in one of them. That’s your free question. If you want to ask others, you have to pay. And in case you were wondering, I don’t take checks.”

Feeling like a man in a dream, Phil took his wallet out of his hip pocket. In it were three twenties and a ten (there was also a C-note for emergencies, tucked in behind his driver’s license). He gave the ten and two of the twenties to the Answer Man, who made them disappear. He picked up his little bag—same bag—and took out the same oversized stopwatch. This time the numbers only went from 0 to 3, but there was the same ratcheting sound as he wound it up.

“I hope you’re ready, Just Phil.”

He thought he was. There weren’t any dilemmas this time, he was perfectly happy with the current course of his life, but he supposed men and women were always curious about the future.

“I’m ready. Let’s go.”

The Answer Man’s reply was just as it had been on that day in 1937. “So we begin.” He clicked the lever on the back of his big clock. It began to tick and the single hand started its journey from 3 to 2.

Phil thought of his conversation with Blaylock Atherton—not a proposal but a possibility. A trial balloon.

“If I’m asked, should I run—”

The Answer Man raised an admonitory finger. “Have you forgotten what I told you about that word? I am the Answer Man, not your agony aunt.”

Phil hadn’t forgotten, exactly; he had just gotten used to asking questions that didn’t advance matters. Impotent questions, in fact.

“All right, here’s my question. Will I run for the U.S. Senate?”

“No.”

“No?”

“The answer won’t change just because you ask the question again. In the meantime, tempus is fugiting.”

“Is it because Sal won’t want me to run?”

“No.” The single hand on the clock passed 2.

“Is Atherton going to offer the chance to someone else?”

“Yes.”

“Bastard,” Phil said, but was it really a disappointment? Yes, but not a big one. He had his law practice, and it still engaged him. Nor was he crazy about leaving New Hampshire for Washington DC; he was a country mouse and supposed he always would be.

As he had fourteen years ago, Phil changed direction. “Will Sal and Jake like the TV?”

“Yes.” A brief smile flicked across the Answer Man’s face.

Having thought of Jake, another question occurred to Phil. It was out of his mouth before he realized he might not want to know the answer.

“Will my son play pro baseball?”

“No.”

The hand on the clock passed 1 and headed for zero.

“Any pro sport?”

“No.”

This was more disappointing than hearing he wouldn’t be asked to run for the Senate, but was it surprising? It wasn’t. Sports were a pyramid, and only those who were almost divinely talented reached the top.

“College ball?” Surely that would be in Jacob’s grasp.

“No.”

Like a gambler on a losing streak who keeps throwing good money after bad, Phil asked, “High school ball? Surely—”

“No.”

Phil stared at the Answer Man, mystified and starting to be worried. Starting to be scared, actually. Don’t ask, he thought, and one of his mother’s favorite sayings occurred to him: Peep not at a keyhole, lest ye be vexed.

The hand on the Answer Man’s clock reached zero and gave out its hoarse brRRANG sound just before Phil asked his last question: “Is my son okay?”

“I can’t answer that, sorry. You were just a bit late, Just Phil.”

“I was?”

No answer. Of course not. His time was up.

“I suppose I was. All right, I’ll go again. I can do that, can’t I?” No answer, so Phil answered for himself. “I can, of course I can. The sign says per three minutes.” He bent and slipped the hundred out from behind his license. “Just let me… okay, here it is…”

He lifted his head and saw the sign now read $200 PER 3 MINUTES and NO FREE ANSWERS.

“Wait,” he said. “That isn’t what it said. You crooked me.”

As before—or almost—the Answer Man said, “Perhaps you crooked yourself.”

And—as before—the Answer Man seemed to be withdrawing, as if on rails. The grayness started to come. Phil fought it with no success.

He came to behind the wheel of the Buick, hearing a tapping on the passenger side window. “Dad? Dad, wake up!”

He looked around, at first not sure where he was. Or when. Then he saw his son peering in at him. His friend Harry Washburn was with him, both wearing identical Red Sox caps. That slotted Phil into place. Not 1937 but 1951. Not a young man with the ink still wet on his law degree but a war vet who was important enough in this part of New Hampshire to be considered a viable candidate for the U.S. Senate. A husband. A father.

He leaned over and opened the door. “Hey, kiddo. I must have dozed off.”

Jake wasn’t interested in that. “We missed the bus because we were playing pepper behind the school. Can we have a ride home?”

“What would you have done if I hadn’t been here?”

“Walked, accourse,” Jake said. “Or hooked a ride from Missus Keene. She’s nice.”

“Pretty, too,” Harry said.

“Well, hop in. I got something in North Conway you boys might like.”

“Really?” Jake got in front. Harry got in back. “What?”

“You’ll see.” Phil looked at the spot where the Answer Man’s table and umbrella had been. He looked in his wallet and saw the C-note, folded small behind his driver’s license. Unless the whole thing had been a dream—and he knew it hadn’t been—he supposed the Answer Man must have put it back. Or maybe I put it back myself.

He drove home.

The TV was a great success. The rabbit ears would only pull in WMUR out of Manchester (the picture sometimes—well, often—obscured by snow flurries), but once Phil put up the antenna, the Parkers could indeed get two Boston stations, WNAC and WHDH.

Phil and Sal enjoyed evening shows like The Red Skelton Hour and Schlitz Playhouse, but Jake did more than enjoy the television; he embraced it with the all-in fervor of a first love. He watched Weekday Matinee after school, where the same old movie played all week long. He watched Jack and Pat’s Country Jamboree. He watched Boston Blackie. He watched ads for Camel cigarettes and Bab-O cleanser. On Saturday he and his friends gathered as if in church to watch Crusader Rabbit, The Little Rascals, and thousands of old cartoons.

Sally Ann was first amused, then uneasy. “He’s addicted to that thing,” she said, with no idea this parental cry would be repeated for generations to come. “He never plays catch with you when you come home anymore, just wants to watch some junky old Hopalong Cassidy movie he’s seen four times already.”

Jake actually did want to have a catch sometimes, or hit behind the garage when Phil slow-pitched to him, but these occasions were rarer than they had been. In the pre-TV days, Jake would have been waiting for his dad on the front stoop with his glove on and his bat propped beside him.

The truth was Phil didn’t mind his son’s loss of interest as much as Sal did. When the Answer Man told him that Jake wouldn’t play organized ball—no, not even in high school—his mind had first jumped (as any parent’s would) to dire possibilities. Now it seemed the reason was more prosaic: Jake was just losing interest in baseball, as Phil himself had lost interest in learning to play the piano when he was about Jake’s age.

Inspired by shows like The Lone Ranger and Wild Bill Hickok, Jake started to write his own Western stories. Each came with an exclamation mark and bore titles like “Gundown at Laramie!” and “Shoot-Out at Dead Man’s Canyon!” They were lurid but not half-bad… at least in the opinion of the author’s father. Perhaps someday he would be a writer instead of an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox. Phil thought that would be a fine thing.

Blaylock Atherton called one evening and asked if Phil had thought any more about running for the Senate, perhaps not this time but what about ’56? Phil said he was considering it. He told Atherton that Sally Ann wasn’t crazy about the idea, but said she would support him if that was his decision.

“Well, don’t consider too long,” Atherton said. “In politics we have to think ahead. Tempus fugit, you know.”

“So I’ve heard,” Phil said.

One Saturday morning in February of 1952, Harry Washburn came into Phil’s closet of a home study, where Phil was going over depositions for an upcoming trial. He was alarmed to see a streak of blood on one of Harry’s freckled cheeks and more on his hands.

“Did you hurt yourself, Harry?”

“It’s not mine,” Harry said. “Jake has a nosebleed and it won’t stop. He got blood all over his Roy Rogers shirt. Top to bottom.”

Phil thought that had to be an exaggeration until he saw for himself. On the Zenith’s round screen Annie Oakley was shooting it out with a bad guy, but none of the four or five little boys was paying attention to anything but Jake. His favorite shirt—his Saturday morning cowboy-watching shirt—was indeed soaked with blood. So was the lap of his jeans.

Jake looked at his father and said, “It won’t stop.” His voice was clogged and nasal.

Phil told the other boys to watch the show, everything was fine, five-by-five. He kept his voice level, but the amount of blood he was looking at scared him badly. He took Jake into the kitchen, made him sit down and tilt his head back, then filled a dishcloth with ice cubes and pressed it to the top of the boy’s nose. “Hold it there, Jake-O. It’ll stop.”

Sally Ann breezed in from a trip to the IGA, saw Jake’s blood-soaked shirt, and drew in breath to scream. Phil shook his head at her and she didn’t. Kneeling beside him, she asked what had happened. “Did one of your friends punch you in the nose playing cowboys?”

“No, it just started. There’s blood on the floor but I didn’t get any on your blue rug, at least.”

“I gotted it on me, too,” Sammy Dillon said. He and Harry had come into the kitchen. The other boys were standing behind them. “But I warshed it off.”

“That’s good, Sammy,” Sally Ann said. “I think you and the rest of the guys had better go home now.”

They went willingly enough, only pausing at the kitchen door to get a final look at their gore-spattered friend. When they were gone, Sally Ann leaned over their son and whispered to Phil. “I don’t think it’s stopping.”

“It will,” Phil said.

It didn’t. It slowed from the original shirt-soaking gusher, but continued to seep. The Parkers’ local doc was on vacation, so they took him to the hospital in North Conway, where Richmond, the on-call MD, peered up Jake’s nose with a little light and nodded. “We’ll fix that in a jiff, young man. Mother and Dad are going to wait outside while we do our biz.”

Sal wanted to stay, but Phil, having an idea of what the fix would entail, took her by the arm and escorted her firmly out into the waiting room and closed the door. Which did no good at all, because when his nose was cauterized, Jake’s howls filled the small hospital from end to end. Phil and Sally Ann clutched each other, both of them shedding tears, waiting for it to be over. Eventually it was… and wasn’t.

Dr. Richmond came out with one lapel of his white coat dotted with Jake’s blood. He smiled and said, “Brave kid. That’s no fun. Can I talk to your parents a minute, Jacob?”

He took them into the exam room. “Have you seen the bruising?”

“Sure, a couple on his arms,” Phil said. “He’s a boy, Dr. Richmond. He probably got them climbing trees or something.”

“On his chest, as well. Scrapper, is he?”

“No, not really,” Phil said. “He and his friends sometimes tussle, but it’s all in fun.”

“I want to do a blood test,” Dr. Richmond said. “Just crossing t’s, you know—”

“Oh my God,” Sally Ann said. Later she would tell Phil that she knew, right then she knew.

“Check his white count and his platelets. Rule out anything serious.”

“Doc, it was just a nosebleed,” Phil said.

“Bring him back in, Phil,” Sally Ann said. She had a white look around her eyes and mouth that Phil became very familiar with over the next year or so.

Phil brought Jake back into the exam room, and once he had been assured that a blood-draw would be a walk in the park compared to having his nose cauterized, Jake rolled up his sleeve and took the needle stoically.

A week later their family doctor called and told them he was sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looked like Jake had acute lymphocytic leukemia.

Their sturdy son went downhill fast. Eight months into what was then called “the wasting disease,” Jake had a remission that gave his parents several weeks of cruel hope. Then came the crash. Jacob Theodore Parker died in Portsmouth Regional Hospital on March 23rd, 1953, at the age of ten.

Sal laid her head on her husband’s shoulder during most of Jake’s closing ceremony. She cried. Phil did not. His tears had all been used up during Jake’s last hospital stay. Sal had hoped for another remission right to the end—prayed for it—but Phil knew Jake was going down. The Answer Man had as much as told him so.

Later that day he asked himself if he had smelled gin on her breath at the funeral. If he did, it would hardly have been worth noticing. The Parkers were part of the Booze and Cigarettes generation. Sally Ann had been enjoying light cocktails with her mother and father and their friends since she was sixteen, and there were always cocktails waiting when Phil came home. Two before dinner was the usual. Sometimes Phil would have a can or two of beer while they watched TV. Sal would have another gin and tonic. It was only later that Phil looked back and realized that one GT in the evening had progressed to two and sometimes three. But she was always up at six, making Jake’s school lunch and breakfast for the three of them. It was also the generation of Females Cook, Males Eat.

He did notice at the reception after the graveside ceremony. There was no way not to. Sal was in the kitchen, telling Mrs. Keene a story about Jake losing his first tooth, how she had looped one end of a thread around that troublesome wiggler and tied the other to the knob of his bedroom door.

“When I slammed the door, that tooth flew right out!” Sal said, only tooth came out toof, and Phil saw Mrs. Keene—the pretty one, Harry had said on the day Phil met the Answer Man for the second time—easing back from her, a step at a time. Easing back from her breath. Sal matched her step for step, commencing a second story. She had a pony glass in one hand, tilting slowly so what was in it slopped on the floor.

Phil took her by the arm and told her his folks wanted to see her (they didn’t). Sal came willingly enough, but looked back over her shoulder to say, “That toof just flew! Gosh, what a sight!”

Mrs. Keene gave Phil a commiserating smile. It was the first of many.

He got Sal as far as the doorway to the living room before her knees buckled. The glass dropped from her hand. He caught it and had a memory, momentary but oh God so brilliant, of catching a return throw from Jake behind the garage. He got her through the groups of people in the living room, by then supporting almost all of her weight. His mother gave him a look and nodded: Get her out of here. Phil nodded back.

There was no point trying to take her upstairs, so he half-carried her into the guest room and laid her down among the coats of the mourners. She began to snore immediately. When Phil came back, he told folks that Sal was overcome with grief and felt she couldn’t see people, at least for awhile. There were sympathetic nods and more murmurs of condolence—God, so many condolences that Phil found himself wishing someone would crack a dirty joke about the farmer’s daughter—but he was pretty sure there were people (Mrs. Keene for one, his mom for another) who knew it wasn’t just grief that had overcome his wife.

It was the first lie he told about her drinking, but not the last.

Phil suggested they might try to have another baby. Sal agreed with a kind of listless, what-does-it-matter lack of interest. Sometimes he wanted to grasp her by the shoulders—hard enough to hurt, to leave bruises, to get through to her—and tell her that she wasn’t the only one who’d lost a child. He didn’t. He kept his anger to himself, knowing what she’d say: You have your work. I have nothing.

But she did. She had her Gilbey’s Gin and her Kool cigarettes. Two packs a day. She kept them in a little alligator case that looked like a change purse. She became pregnant in 1954. He suggested she quit smoking. She suggested he should keep his advice, however well-meant, to himself. She miscarried in her fourth month.

“No more of that,” she told him from her bed in North Conway Hospital. “I’m forty. Too old to have a baby.”

So it was back to the French letters, but on New Year’s Eve of 1956, Phil realized he still had three rubbers left in a box of a dozen he’d purchased in North Conway not long after Easter. Sally Ann was willing enough to lift her nightgown and take him into herself, but when he looked at her and saw her looking at the ceiling, he knew she was just waiting for him to spend and get off her. This was not conducive to intimacy.

Only once, in 1957, did Phil tackle her about the drinking. He told her that if she had to go to one of those drying-out spas to quit or at least cut down, he had found a good one in Boca Raton, far enough from New Hampshire that no one would know. He could say she was visiting friends. He could even say they were separating, if that was what she wanted, but she had to stop.

She looked at him, his now overweight wife with the bad complexion and the dull eyes and the clumpy hair. He found her eyes especially fascinating. There were no depths there.

“Why?” she said.

On the evening of November 8th, 1960, Phil came home to an empty house. There was a note on the kitchen counter that said, Dinner in oven. I have gone to GD to watch election results come in. S.

There was no invitation for Phil to join her, and he had never cared much for the Green Door in North Conway, anyway. Once, around the time he and Sal were married, it had been quite a nice bar. Now it was a dive.

According to the police report, Mrs. Parker left the Green Door at approximately 12:40 AM on the morning of November 9th, shortly after Kennedy had been declared the winner. The bartender cut her off at eleven but allowed her to stay and watch the returns.

Coming home on Route 16, driving at a high rate of speed, her little Renault Dauphine veered off the road and struck a bridge abutment. Death was instantaneous. The postmortem reported a blood alcohol level of .39. Upon hearing the news that his daughter was dead, Ted Allburton suffered a heart attack. After five days in intensive care, he died. The back-to-back funerals almost made Phil wish he were back on Eniwetok.

Three weeks after the death of his wife, Phil drove to the Curry Volunteer Fire Station, where there had once been a vacant lot. It was late, and the fire station was dark. Between the red-painted double doors was a manger scene: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, wise men, assorted animals. The manger was—to the best of Phil’s memory—the exact place where a red umbrella had once shaded the Answer Man’s little table.

“Come here and talk to me,” Phil said to the windy darkness. From the pocket of his overcoat he took a roll of bills. “I’ve got eight hundred here, maybe even a thousand, and I’ve got a few questions. Number one is this—was it an accident, or did she kill herself?”

Nothing. Just the empty lot, the empty fire station, a cold east wind, and a bunch of stupid plaster statuary lit by a hidden electric bulb.

“Number two is why. Why me? I know that sounds like self-pity, and I’m sure it is, but I’m honestly curious. That fucking dummocks friend of Jake’s, Harry Washburn, is still alive, he’s a plumber’s apprentice down in Somersworth. Sammy Dillon is alive, too, so why not my boy? If Jake was alive, Sally would be alive, right? So tell me. I guess I don’t even want to know why me after all, I want to know why at all? Come on, fella. Get out here, wind up your clock, and take my money.”

Nothing. Of course.

“You were never there at all, were you? You were just a figment of my fucking imagination, so fuck you and fuck me and fuck the whole fucking world.”

Phil spent the following three years in a daze of dysthymic depression. He did his work, always showed up for court on time, won some cases, lost others, didn’t much care either way. Sometimes he dreamed of the Answer Man, and in some of these dreams he leaped across the table, knocked the ticking stopclock to the ground, and locked his hands around the Answer Man’s neck. But the Answer Man always faded away to nothing, like smoke. Because really, that was what he had to be, wasn’t he? Just smoke.

That period of his life ended with the Burned Woman. Her name was Christine Lacasse, but Phil always thought of her as the Burned Woman.

One day in the early spring of 1964, his secretary came into his office looking pale and distraught. Phil thought there were tears in Marie’s eyes, but wasn’t sure until she wiped one away with the heel of her hand. Phil asked if she was all right.

“Yes, but there’s a woman here to see you, and I wanted to warn you before I sent her in. She’s been burned, and badly. Her face… Phil, her face is terrible.”

“What does she want?”

“She says she wants to sue the New England Freedom Corporation for five million dollars.”

Phil smiled. “That would be a trick, wouldn’t it?”

New England Freedom did business in the six states stretching from Presque Isle to Providence. They had grown into one of the biggest development companies in the northland during postwar years that Phil supposed were now over. They built housing developments, shopping centers, industrial centers, even prisons.

“You better send her in, Marie. Thanks for preparing me.”

Not that anything could truly prepare him for the woman who shuffled in on two canes. From the left side of her face, Phil guessed she might be in her late forties or early fifties. The right side of her face was buried in a landslide of flesh that had melted and then hardened. The hand gripping the cane on that side was a claw. She saw his expression and the left side of her mouth pulled up in a smile that showed the few teeth remaining to her.

“Pretty, ain’t I?” she said. Her voice was as harsh as a crow’s caw. Phil guessed she had inhaled the fire that had burned her and scorched her vocal cords. He supposed she was lucky to be able to speak at all.

Phil had no intention of responding to a question that had to be rhetorical, or downright sarcastic. “Sit down, Miss Lacasse, and tell me what I can do for you.”

“It’s Missus. I’m a widow-woman, don’t you know. As to what you can do for me, you can sue the shit out of NEF.” She pronounced it Neff. “Five million, not a penny more or a penny less. Not that you will, I’d bet a cracker. I’ve been to half a dozen other lawyers, including Feld and Pillsbury in Portland, and not one of em will have anything to do with me or my case. NEF’s too big for em. Can I have a glass of water before you kick me out?”

He buzzed Marie and asked her to bring Mrs. Lacasse a glass of water. Meanwhile, the Burned Woman was fumbling with her good hand in a little pack cinched around her waist. She brought out a bottle of pills, and thrust them across Phil’s desk.

“Open these for me, would ya? I can do it meself, but it hurts like a bugger. I want two. No, three.”

Phil opened the brown bottle, shook out three pills, handed them across to her, and re-capped the bottle. Marie came in with the water and Lacasse swallowed the pills. “It’s the morph, don’tcha know. For pain. Talking hurts. Well, everything hurts, but it’s the talking that’s the worst. Eating ain’t no fun, either. Doctor says these pills’ll kill me in a year or three. I said they won’t kill me until I get my case in court. I’m fixed on that, Lawyer Parker.

“Ah, they’re starting to work. Good. I’d take another but then I’d get sloppy, start puttin’ things in the wrong order.”

“Tell me how I can help,” Phil said.

She threw back her head and gave a witch’s cackle. He saw that part of her neck had run down into her shoulder. “Help me sue the shit out of those fuckers, that’s how you can help.” And with that, she told her tale.

Christine Lacasse had lived with her husband and five children in Morrow Estates, a NEF-built community in the town of Albany, just south of North Conway. The lights in their house kept fizzing on and off, and sometimes smoke drifted out of the electrical sockets. Ronald Lacasse was a long-haul truck driver, making good money, but gone much of the time. Christine Lacasse did ladies’ hair at home, and her driers and blowers were always shorting out. One day the electrical panels in the utility rooms of their four-house bloc caught fire and they had no power for almost a week. Christine, not yet the Burned Woman, talked to the Estates superintendent, who merely shrugged and blamed New Hampshire Power and Light.

“I knew better than that,” she told Phil, sipping at her water. “I didn’t fall off a haytruck yesterday. A power surge wouldn’t cause the electric panels of four houses to catch afire. The fuses would blow first. Other blocs of houses in Morrow Estates had problems with their lights and their electric heat, but nothing like ours.”

When she got no satisfaction from the super, she called NEF’s Portsmouth office, spoke to a functionary there, and got the runaround. She investigated the corporation bigwigs at the North Conway library, found the number for NEF’s Boston HQ, called them, and asked to speak to the president. No, she was told, he was far too busy to speak to a housewife from East Overshoe, New Hampshire. She got another functionary instead, probably one with a better salary and better suits than the Portsmouth functionary. She told the Boston fella that sometimes when the power was flickering the wall in her little home salon got hot, and she could hear a buzzing, like there were wasps in there. She said she could smell a kind of frying. The functionary told her that she was probably using hair driers and blowers with a voltage too high for the electrical system. Mrs. Lacasse enquired if his mother had had any kids who lived, and hung up.

That Christmas, NEF put up Christmas lights all over Morrow Estates. “The Corporation did that?” Phil asked. “Not the Homeowners Association in the Estates?”

“Didn’t have no Homeowners Association,” she told Phil. “Nothing like that. Everyone got a flier from NEF in their mailbox after Thanksgiving. Said they were doing it in the spirit of the season.”

“Just out of the goodness of their hearts,” Phil said, scribbling on his legal pad.

The Burned Woman gave her witch’s cackle and pointed one deformed, half-melted finger at him. “I like you. You’ll kick me out like all the others, but I like you. And none of the others wrote down anything I said.”

“Do you still have that flier?”

“Mine burned up, but I’ve got a pile of other ones just like it.”

“I’ll want one. No, I want all of them. Tell me about the fire.”

She said her husband was home that Christmas. The presents were under the tree. Two nights before the holiday, with the kids all tucked up in their beds (dreams of sugarplums optional), their house and the Duffys’ house next door caught fire. Christine was wakened by screams from outside. The house was full of smoke, but she saw no flames. What she saw out the bedroom window was Rona Duffy, her next-door neighbor, rolling around in the snow, trying to put out her flaming nightgown.

“That house of theirs was burnin’ like a birthday candle. I shook Ronald awake and told him to get the kids out, but he never did. By then I was out of door and throwing snow over Rona.” Mrs. Lacasse added matter-of-factly, “She died. Her two kids were with her ex-husband in Rutland, lucky for them. Mine weren’t so lucky. I don’t know what happened to them. I think the smoke must have gotten to Ronnie before he could get to them. I went back in to do it myself and half the goddam living room ceiling fell on me. Lawyer Parker, that house went up six licks to the dozen. I crawled out, on fire. And you know what happened during the year I was in the hospital?”

“They played beanbag with the blame until that old beanbag disappeared,” Phil said. “Is that about right?”

The twisted finger pointed at him again. She gave another cackle. Phil thought it was the way the damned in hell must laugh.

“NEF said it was the fault of the company that did the wiring. The company that did the wiring said the state had inspected both the Christmas lights and the original wiring specifications, so it was the state’s fault. The state said the specs weren’t the same as the actual wiring in the houses still standin’ and the engineering firm must have cheated to save money. The engineering company said they took their orders from New England Freedom Corp. And do you know what New England Freedom Corp said?”

“Sue us if you don’t like it,” Phil said.

“Sue us if you don’t like it is exactly right. A big old corporation against a woman who looks like a chicken that got left in the oven too long. Okay, I said, I’ll see you in court. They did offer me a settlement, forty thousand dollars, and I turned em down. I want five million, one for each of my children, fourteen to three years old. They can have my husband for free, he should have got em out. Now is it time for me to go?”

For the first time since Sal died—maybe for the first time since Jake died—Phil felt a stirring of real interest. Also outrage. He liked the idea of going against a heavyweight corporation. Not for the money, although his piece of five million would be considerable. Not for the publicity, because he had all the business he could handle… or wanted to handle. It was something else. It was a chance to get his hands around a neck that wouldn’t fade away like smoke.

“No,” Phil said. “It’s not time for you to go.”

Phil pursued New England Freedom relentlessly for the next five years. His father disapproved, saying Phil had a Don Quixote complex and accusing him of letting his other cases slide. Phil said that was probably true but pointed out that he no longer had to save up to send his son to Harvard, and John—Old John, by then—never said another word about the case. Ted Allburton’s widow said she understood and was with him a hundred per cent. “You’re doing it because you can’t sue the cancer that took Jakey,” she said.

Phil didn’t disagree—there might have been an element of truth in what she said—but he was really doing it because he couldn’t get the Answer Man out of his mind. Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, he’d tell himself he was being foolish; the Answer Man wasn’t responsible for his misfortunes or for those of the Burned Woman. All that was true, but something else was, as well: when he really needed answers, the man with the red umbrella was gone. And, like Mrs. Lacasse, he had to hold somebody responsible.

He got NEF into Boston District Court shortly before Mrs. Lacasse came down with pneumonia. He won. NEF appealed, as Phil and Christine had known they would, but she did have that one conditional victory before the pneumonia took her off in the fall of 1967. By then Phil had seen her wasting away almost by the day and knew, just as he’d known with Jake, that the writing was on the wall. He added Ronald Lacasse’s brother to the case. Tim Lacasse had none of the Burned Woman’s thirst for revenge, none of her fervor; he told Phil to go at it, knock himself out, and followed the case from his home in North Carolina. He refused to pay any fees, but would be happy to take some money if it fell out of the sky, wafted down south from Boston or New Hampshire. The Burned Woman left no estate. Phil continued anyway, paying expenses out of his own pocket. Twice NEF offered to settle, first for three hundred thousand dollars, then for eight hundred thousand. The publicity was making them très uncomfortable. Tim Lacasse urged Phil (via long distance) to take the money. Phil refused. He wanted the whole five million, because it was what Mrs. Lacasse had wanted. A million for each child. There were delays. There were continuances. NEF lost in the First Circuit and appealed yet again, but when the Supreme Court refused to hear their case, they ran out of road. The final bill for the Christmas lights—the straw that broke the camel’s back—and the shitty wiring Phil proved was standard NEF policy (focusing on other developments the corporation had built) was 7.4 million dollars awarded to Plaintiff Tim Lacasse. Plus considerable court costs. NEF, initially unable to believe it could not outlast a country lawyer from East Overshoe, could have saved almost two and a half million dollars by giving up.

Tim Lacasse threatened to sue when Phil informed him they would be splitting the award right down the middle. “Go right ahead,” Phil said. “Your three-point-seven will melt like snow in April.”

Tim Lacasse finally agreed to the split, and on a day in 1970, Phil hung a framed picture on his office wall, where he would see it first thing every day. The picture showed Ronald and Christine Lacasse on their wedding day. He was beefy and grinning. In her white wedding gown, Christine looked drop-dead gorgeous.

Below the photograph were six words in capitals Phil had carefully lettered himself.

ALWAYS REMEMBER OTHERS HAVE IT WORSE

Following the final adjudication of the suit against New England Freedom—a case that made him something of a star in legal circles—Phil could have had all the work he wanted. He eased up on the throttle instead, and because he was now financially comfortable, he began to take a greater number of pro bono cases. In 1978, fourteen years before the Innocence Project was founded, he got a new trial, and eventually freedom, for a man who had served twelve years of a life sentence in New Hampshire State Prison.

There was a hole in his life where Jake and Sal had been, of course. Legal work couldn’t fill it, so he became more active in the community. He served as a trustee for the Curry Public Library and inaugurated the first Curry Book Festival. He did PSAs on the New Hampshire TV channels for the annual statewide blood drive. He worked one evening a week at the North Conway food bank (because others have it worse) and one evening a week at Harvest Hills, the animal shelter across the state line in Fryeburg. In 1979 he got a beagle puppy there. Frank went with him everywhere for the next fourteen years, riding shotgun.

He did not remarry, but he had a lady friend down the road in Moultonborough who he visited from time to time. Her name was Sarah Coombes. He did her legal work and paid off the mortgage on her house. He and Frank didn’t always spend the night, but Sarah kept a bag of Gaines-Burgers in her pantry for those times when they did. These visits grew rarer as the years passed; Phil was more likely to go home when the day was finished and microwave whatever his housekeeper and woman of general work left for him. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—he was struck by the emptiness of the house. On those occasions he’d call Frank to his side and scratch him behind the ears, and tell him that others had it worse.

The one community job he refused was co-coaching the Curry Little League team. That was just too close to home for Just Phil.

So the time passed, so the story was told. For the most part, it was good time. There were scars, but not disfiguring ones, and what were scars, after all, but wounds that had healed?

He picked up a limp and began to walk with a cane. Marie retired. He began to suffer arthritis in his hands, feet, and hips. Marie died. He announced his retirement and the town (Curry was now on the verge of becoming a small city) threw him one hell of a party. He was given many presents, including a plaque proclaiming him CURRY’S #1 CITIZEN. Several speeches were made, culminating in Phil’s address to a gathering that almost filled the auditorium of the new high school. It was a modest address, it was witty, and most of all it was short. He needed to piss like a racehorse.

Frank the beagle died peacefully in the fall of 1993. Phil buried him in the backyard, digging the hole with his own hands, although his joints squalled in protest at every shovelful. When the grave was filled and patted down and re-sodded, he gave a funeral oration, also short. “I loved you, old boy. Still do.” That was the year Phil turned eighty-one.

In 1995, he began to suffer migraines for the first time in his life. He went to see Dr. Barlow, who he still thought of as the New Doc, although Phil had been seeing him for checkups and arthritis for ten years. Barlow asked him if he was having double vision with the headaches. Phil said he was, and admitted that sometimes he found himself in different parts of the house when the headaches eased up, without remembering how he got there. Dr. Barlow sent him to Portsmouth for an MRI.

“Not such good news,” said the New Doc after examining the results. “It’s a brain tumor.” Then, as if congratulating him: “Quite rare in a man your age.”

Barlow recommended a neurologist at Mass General. Because Phil no longer drove except around town, he hired a young fellow named Logan Phipps to chauffeur him. Logan talked a great deal about his family, his friends, his girl, the weather, his part-time job, his desire to go back to school. Other things, as well. It all went in one of Phil’s less than acute ears and out the other, but he nodded along. It came to him on that ride that you began to separate from life. It wasn’t a big deal. It was like tearing a supermarket coupon slowly but steadily along a perforation.

The neurologist examined Phil and examined the scans of Phil’s elderly brain. He told Phil he could operate and take that nasty brain tumor right out, which made Phil think of an old song where a girl proclaimed she was going to wash that man right out of her hair. Sal frequently sang it in the shower, sometimes while she was washing her own hair, which Phil never took personally. When Phil asked the neurologist what the odds were that he would wake up from that operation—and as himself—the neuro guy told him fifty-fifty. Phil said he was sorry, but at his age those odds weren’t good enough.

“Your headaches may be quite bad before…” The neuro guy shrugged, not quite wanting to say before the end.

“Others have it worse,” Phil said.

On a windy October day in the fall of 1995, Phil slid behind the wheel of his car for the last time. Not a Chevrolet jalopy or a Buick these days but a Cadillac Seville equipped with all the bells and whistles. “I hope to Christ I don’t kill anybody, Frank,” he said to the dog that wasn’t there. He was headache free for the time being, but a coldness—sort of a distantness—had begun to inhabit his fingers and toes.

He drove through town at twenty miles an hour, increasing his speed to thirty when he left downtown. Several cars swerved around him, horns blaring. “Eat shit and die,” Phil told each of them. “Bark if you agree, Frank.”

On Route 111 the traffic thinned away to almost nothing, and was he surprised when he passed the bright yellow sign reading 2 MILES TO THE ANSWER MAN? He was not. Why else was he risking his life and the lives of anyone he happened to meet going the other way? Nor did he believe it was the spreading black rot in his brain sending out false information. He came to the next one soon after: bright blue, ANSWER MAN 1 MILE. And there, just over a rise on the outskirts of Curry Township, was the table and the bright red umbrella. Phil pulled over and turned off the engine. He grabbed his cane and struggled out from behind the wheel.

“You stay there, Frank. This won’t take long.”

Was he surprised to see the Answer Man looked just the same? Same bright eyes, same thinning hair, same clothes? He was not. There was just one change Phil could see, although it was hard to be sure with his vision doubling and sometimes trebling. There was only a single sign on the Answer Man’s table. It read

ALL ANSWERS FREE

He sat down in the client’s chair with a grunt and a grimace. “You’re just the same.”

“So are you, Just Phil.”

Phil laughed. “Pull the other one, why don’t you?” A stupid question, he supposed, but why not? Today all the answers were free.

“It’s true. Inside, you are just the same.”

“If you say so, but I have my doubts. Have you still got your big clock in your bag?”

“Yes, but today I won’t need it.”

“Freebie Friday, is it?”

The Answer Man smiled. “It’s Tuesday, Just Phil.”

“I know that. It was an impotent question. Are you familiar with those?”

“I’m familiar with every kind of question. What’s yours?”

Phil decided he no longer wanted to ask why me; it was, the Answer Man would have said, another impotent question. It was him because he was him. There was no other reason. Nor was he curious about how long he would live. He might see the snow fly, but it was a sure thing he wasn’t going to be around for the spring melt. There was only one thing he was curious about.

“Do we go on? After we die, do we go on?”

“Yes.”

The grayness started to come, closing in around them very slowly. At the same time, the Answer Man began to recede. Also very slowly. Phil didn’t mind. There was no headache, that was a relief, and the foliage—what he could still see of it—was very beautiful. In fall the trees burned so bright at the end of the cycle. And since all the answers were free…

“Is it heaven we go to? Is it hell? Is it reincarnation? Are we still ourselves? Do we remember? Will I see my wife and son? Will it be good? Will it be awful? Are there dreams? Is there sorrow or joy or any emotion?”

The Answer Man, almost lost in the gray, said: “Yes.”

Phil came around behind the wheel of his Cadillac, surprised to find he wasn’t dead. He felt okay for the time being; actually pretty good. No headache, no pain in his hands or feet. He started the engine.

“Do you think I can get us back home in one piece, Frank? And without killing someone? Bark once for yes, twice for no.”

Frank barked once, so it was yes.

It was yes.