Empire Falls

make good neighbors.”
    Miles smiled and said good night, then went around to unlock the Jetta. He was about to get in when he heard the passenger-side window of Horace’s car roll down and saw Horace leaning toward him. “Speaking of taking people in,” he said, “you keep an eye on that new boy you hired.”
    “Okay,” Miles said. “You want to tell me why?”
    Horace thought about it. “Not at the moment,” he concluded, then added, “Don’t ever become a reporter.”

CHAPTER 14
    I N THE FALL of Miles Roby’s junior year, his father, flush with summer house-painting money, bought a secondhand Mercury Cougar, the idea being that Miles would soon be old enough to get his license. By Thanksgiving, however, Max himself had received three speeding tickets and run over a cat. Miles had been with him for the latter and seen, as Max had not, the animal streak under the wheels, and he’d turned in time to see the cat continue to run frantically around its own head, which had been flattened by one of the Cougar’s rear wheels .
    “What the hell was that?” Max said a few seconds after he felt the thump. He’d been leaning forward, one hand on the wheel, the other pressing the lighter to the tip of his cigarette .
    “Cat,” Miles sighed, disappointed in himself for not seeing the animal in time to alert his father and save its life. When he rode anywhere with his father, Miles always felt a deep kinship with anything alive that couldn’t run as fast as Max drove, which, since there were no cheetahs in Maine, was just about everything .
    On general principle his father was dead set against swerving to avoid obstacles. If, for instance, they were traveling on the highway behind a semi and the semi blew a tire, throwing a large curve of retread into their lane, Max ran over it, claiming it was more dangerous to try to swerve around it, which for all Miles knew might have been true. What he suspected, however, was that Max enjoyed running things over and seeing what happened to them. Once, the year before, in the car Max had purchased before the Cougar, they’d encountered a cardboard box sitting square in the middle of their lane on a narrow county road. Since no one was coming toward them and no one was following, and since there was plenty of time to slow down and maneuver around the box—indeed, had Max suffered an uncharacteristic fit of good citizenship, there would’ve been time to pull over, get out and drag the box onto the shoulder—Miles was surprised when his father actually accelerated into it. He braced for something like an explosion, but the box, thankfully empty, was sucked under the car, where it got caught in the drive-shaft and made a hell of a racket for a hundred yards or so before it flapped away, mangled and reduced to two dimensions, into a ditch .
    “What if that box had been full of rocks?” Miles asked .
    “What would a box full of rocks be doing sitting in the middle of the road?” Max wondered back, pushing in the cigarette lighter on the dash and patting his shirt pocket for his pack of Luckies .
    Miles was tempted to reply, “Waiting for an idiot to hit it doing sixty miles an hour,” but he said instead, “If it had been full of rocks we might both be dead.”
    Max considered this. “What would you have done?”
    Miles sensed a trap in this innocent question, but at fifteen he continued to play the hand he’d been dealt, confident he had enough to trump with. “I might’ve stopped to see what was in the box before I hit it.”
    Max nodded. “What if it was full of rattlesnakes? Then when you opened it, you’d be dead.”
    Miles had not grown up in his father’s intermittent company for nothing. “What would a box full of rattlesnakes be doing sitting in the middle of the road?”
    “Waiting for some dumbbell like you to stop and look inside,” Max said, causing in Miles a deep regret for having held his tongue earlier .
    They’d ridden on in silence for a while until Max observed, like a man who was himself acquainted with regret, at least in its more abstract manifestations, “Your mother’s raising you to be scared of the whole damn world. You know that, don’t you?”
    Miles chose to ignore this. “What if the box had been full of dynamite?” he said, signaling his belief that their discussion might reach a better conclusion if it were a game, and one that didn’t feature his mother .
    Max must have agreed, because they played it all the way