Empire Falls

home, filling the box with all manner of imaginary things, from marshmallows to armadillos, and arriving home weary with laughter .
    But now, three speeding tickets and a dead cat later, the judge to whom Max tried to explain the tickets (the cat never came up) wasn’t laughing. Actually, it wasn’t the three original tickets that offended him as much as the two Max had added while waiting for his court appearance, which suggested to the judge a significant learning disability. Max had to surrender his driver’s license right there in the courthouse, after which he was instructed to walk home .
    Instead, Max drove, without benefit of a valid license, to the hardware store out by the highway. There he purchased a small cardboard For Sale sign and stuck it on the Cougar’s dash. Then he drove back downtown, parked the car directly in front of the courthouse, and walked home, where he found his son reading a book at the kitchen table. Max Roby generally left matters of moral instruction to his wife, but given the afternoon’s events he was unwilling to miss out on such a powerful teaching opportunity. Joining his son at the kitchen table, he said, “Put that down a minute.”
    Miles, who had been reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for his English class, the part where Huck has been kidnapped by his Pap, suffered something like a wave of vertigo by coming up out of the story so suddenly and seeing his own father grinning at him across the table. At this time Max still had all his teeth, except for the two that had been knocked out the summer Miles and his mother visited Martha’s Vineyard .
    “Always remember one thing about cops and lawyers,” Max said. “The worst they can do to you ain’t that bad.” He paused to allow his son to digest this hard-won wisdom. “They like to think they got you by the balls, but they don’t.”
    All of which, Miles guessed, was a continuation of the discussion they’d avoided in the car when Max had observed that Grace was raising him to be afraid of things .
    “You hear what I’m saying?” Max demanded .
    Miles nodded, whereupon Max, his moral duty discharged, arose and left. He might have neither a license nor a car, but he had two good legs, and back then there were half a dozen taverns within easy walking distance. After a day like today, he saw no reason not to visit every last one of them. He did not return that night .
    S O IT WAS that by the time Miles was old enough to get his license, he had no car to practice on, and consequently he was behind from the start at driver’s education, and due to his poor driving skills he was given far less actual driving time than his classmates, when obviously he needed far more. The other kids clearly knew how to drive already. They’d had their learner’s permits for months and drove every day, so for them, the purpose of driver ed was to correct all the bad habits already instilled in them by their parents. The experienced boys all wanted to drive with their elbows out the window, and they liked to demonstrate their sure control over the vehicle by steering it with the palm of one hand. Mr. Brown, the baseball coach and driver’s ed teacher, seemed to view these deficiencies as genetic in nature and modifiable only for the duration of his course. Far more significant to Mr. Brown was that they had logged enough time behind the wheel to avoid posing an immediate threat to Mr. Brown’s own life as he sat beside them in the driver’s ed car, his foot poised above his passenger-side brake .
    Unfortunately, the first time Miles drove this car, with Mr. Brown at his right and three other students in the back, he’d gone no more than a block before he began to feel a sense of self-conscious dread descend upon him like a funeral pall. He wasn’t afraid that he would wreck the car and kill them all, but rather that he would immediately be revealed as a rank beginner. And indeed the snickers from the backseat were immediate. Having never manipulated an accelerator, Miles had no idea what might happen when he pressed down on it. What he feared was that even slight pressure might send the car rocketing forward out of control, and this reluctance caused him to inch down the street at a speed that didn’t even register on the speedometer. When he tried to give it a little more gas, the car bucked .
    “Roby,” said Mr. Brown, who was staring at him with an expression made up of equal parts fear and incredulity,