Bridge of Sighs

out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my
thoughts
became. I discovered I could think things in a new landscape that never would have occurred to me at home or in my own well-traveled neighborhood. I was just a boy, of course, and my thoughts were those of a boy and, as such, probably no different from the thoughts of thousands of other boys my age, but they were new to me and seemed as strange and unaccountable as the recent transformations of my body, which now required new shoes every few months. My mother had recently taken to buying my pants several inches too long, cuffing them thickly, then slowly letting them out as I grew. When I set out on my bike, it was usually with a sense of anticipation, not just that I might discover something new, like a cave in Whitcombe Park, or some
one
new, like Gabriel Mock Junior, but also I might
think
something new and unexpected, as if I were letting out my brain, its thoughts, much as my mother let out my pants’ cuffs. And when returning home from my travels, I had the very pleasurable sense that I was a different boy from the one who’d left and half expected my parents and neighbors to notice the change.
    But also this. If setting out into the unknown was thrilling, so, in a different but equally strange way, was coming back. I almost never rode home directly and instead wove a route through all the streets of our East End neighborhood, taking inventory of the houses and sheds and chain-link fences, to make sure nothing had vanished or been swallowed up by the hollow earth while I was away, that everything was in its correct place, as if to reclaim all of it as my own. It occurred to me that I was just becoming a route man, like my father and Mr. Marconi and like Bobby on his paper route, learning how intense the pleasure of the familiar can be, how welcome and reassuring the old, safe, comforting places of the world and the self.
    Though my travels through Thomaston that summer were extensive, I stayed away from the West End. Just once did I venture back to Berman Court, which I was surprised to discover I could still locate. After I’d been away for so long the street looked almost as foreign and unexpected as Whitcombe Park that first morning I met little Gabriel Mock. The apartment house at the end, with its high windows overlooking the stream, had the feel of a storybook I’d lost, forgotten, then found again. Nothing had changed in any way I could put my finger on, yet it all felt completely alien, as if our ever having lived there was an implausible dream from which I’d awakened in our true home in the East End. Leaning my bike up against the footbridge, I followed along the Cayoga as far as the railroad trestle and covered bridge, which now looked even more abandoned and dilapidated. The sheets of plywood that had been scattered on top of the railroad ties were gone, and so, I thought, was the trunk, until I noticed it had fallen between the ties and broken on the rocks below. The only evidence of what had happened to me were the grooves sawed into the thick crossbeams, which were now eye level. I ran my index finger over them and discovered to my surprise that the terror I’d felt in the trunk had mutated into something almost pleasurable.
    I don’t remember how long I remained there on the trestle. I left only when I felt, or imagined I felt, the tracks begin to vibrate and heard, or imagined I did, the rumble of an approaching train.

    B ACK THEN most people paid the milkman by leaving money in the tin milk cases that sat on their back porches. If they wanted two quarts of milk, they’d fold a bill or two into an envelope or a piece of notepaper, and my father would make change and leave it in the box with the milk. On Saturdays he collected from those customers who preferred not to pay daily and resolved the disputes that inevitably resulted from this time-honored system. Seldom a week went by without someone remembering that the five-dollar bill they’d left in the box had in fact been a ten, or that they’d asked and been charged for two quarts of milk but received only one.
    My father’s route in the Borough was, as I said, the plum, in part because there were fewer collection difficulties there than in the West or East End, though my father maintained that the rich were more likely to try and pull a fast one. Recalling Gabriel Mock’s observation that they were all rascals, I asked if he