Boys Life

might. “The world’ll always need milkmen,” Mr. Bowers went on. “Isn’t that right, Tom?”
    “Right as rain,” my dad said; this was an all-purpose phrase he used when he was only half listening.
    “You come apply when you turn eighteen,” Mr. Bowers told me. “We’ll fix you up.” He gave me a clap on the shoulder that almost rattled my teeth and did rattle the bottles in the tray I was carrying.
    Then Dad climbed behind the big-spoked wheel, I got into the seat next to him, he turned the key, and the engine started and we backed away from the loading dock with our creamy cargo. Ahead of us, the moon was sinking down and the last of the stars hung on the lip of night. “What about that?” Dad asked. “Being a milkman, I mean. That appeal to you?”
    “It’d be fun,” I said.
    “Not really. Oh, it’s okay, but no job’s fun every day. I guess we’ve never talked about what you want to do, have we?”
    “No sir.”
    “Well, I don’t think you ought to be a milkman just because that’s what I do. See, I didn’t start out to be a milkman. Granddaddy Jaybird wanted me to be a farmer like him. Grandmomma Sarah wanted me to be a doctor. Can you imagine that?” He glanced at me and grinned. “Me, a doctor! Doctor Tom! No sir, that wasn’t for me.”
    “What’d you start out to be?” I asked.
    My dad was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking this question over, in a deep place. It occurred to me that maybe no one had ever asked him this before. He gripped the spoked wheel with his grown-up hands and negotiated the road that unwound before us in the headlights, and then he said, “First man on Venus. Or a rodeo rider. Or a man who can look at an empty space and see in his mind the house he wants to build there right down to the last nail and shingle. Or a detective.” My dad made a little laughing noise in his throat. “But the dairy needed another milkman, so here I am.”
    “I wouldn’t mind bein’ a race car driver,” I said. My dad sometimes took me to the stock car races at the track near Barnesboro, and we sat there eating hot dogs and watching sparks fly in the collision of banged-up metal. “Bein’ a detective would be okay, too. I’d get to solve mysteries and stuff, like the Hardy Boys.”
    “Yeah, that’d be good,” my dad agreed. “You never know how things are gonna turn out, though, and that’s the truth. You aim for one place, sure as an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you. I don’t believe I ever met one person who became what they wanted to be when they were your age.”
    “I’d like to be everybody in the world,” I said. “I’d like to live a million times.”
    “Well”-and here my father gave one of his sagely nods-“that would be a fine piece of magic, wouldn’t it?” He pointed. “Here’s our first stop.”
    That first house must’ve had children in it, because they got two quarts of chocolate milk to go along with their two quarts of plain milk. Then we were off again, driving through the streets where the only sounds were the wind and the barking of early dogs, and we stopped on Shantuck Street to deliver buttermilk and cottage cheese to somebody who must’ve liked things sour. We left bottles glistening on the steps of most of the houses on Bevard Lane, and my dad worked fast as I checked off the list and got the next items ready from the chilly back of the truck; we were a good team.
    Dad said he had some customers down south near Saxon’s Lake and then he’d swing back up so we could finish the rest of the street deliveries before my school bell rang. He drove us past the park and out of Zephyr, and the forest closed in on either side of the road.
    It was getting on toward six o’clock. To the east, over the hills of pine and kudzu, the sky was beginning to lighten. The wind shoved its way through the trees like the fist of a bully. We passed a car going north, and its driver blinked the lights and Dad waved. “Marty Barklee deliverin’ the newspapers,” Dad told me. I thought about the fact that there was a whole world going about its business before the sun, and people who were just waking up weren’t part of it. We turned off Route Ten and drove up a dirt drive to deliver milk, buttermilk, and potato salad to a small house nestled in the woods, and then we went south toward the lake again. “College,” my dad said. “You ought to go to college, it seems to me.”
    “I guess so,” I answered, but