Strange Highways

died.
     Mr. Enright stood in startled silence for a moment, then broke into laughter, and all the kids laughed too, and Mr. Enright said, "Mrs. Caswell, you set me up! This was staged."
     "I confess," she said, and the kids laughed harder.
     "But how did you know I'd be concerned about your pushing them past sixth-grade material?"
     "Because everyone always underestimates kids," Mrs. Caswell said. "The approved curriculum never challenges them. Everyone worries so much about psychological stress, the problems associated with being an overachiever, and the result is that kids are actually encouraged to be under achievers. But I know kids, Mr. Enright, and I tell you they're a much tougher, smarter bunch than anyone gives them credit for being. Am I right?"
     The class loudly assured her that she was right.
     Mr. Enright surveyed the class, pausing to study each child's face, and it was the first time all morning that he had really looked at them. At last he smiled. "Mrs. Caswell, this is a wonderful thing you've got going here."
     "Thank you," said Mrs. Caswell.
     Mr. Enright shook his head, smiled more broadly, and winked. "Miss Attila the Hun indeed."
     At that moment Jamie was so proud of Mrs. Caswell and so in love with her that he had to struggle valiantly to repress tears far more genuine than those of Melissa Fedder.
     Now, on the last Monday morning in October, Jamie listened to Miss Attila the Hun as she told them what medical science was like in the Middle Ages (crude) and what alchemy was (lead into gold and all sorts of crazy-fascinating stuff), and in a while he could no longer smell the chalk dust and child scents of the classroom but could almost smell the terrible, reeking, sewage-spattered streets of medieval Europe.

    8

IN HIS TEN-FOOT-SQUARE OFFICE AT THE FRONT OF THE HOUSE, JACK Caswell sat at an ancient pine desk, sipping coffee and rereading the chapter he'd written the previous day. He made a lot of pencil corrections and then switched on his computer to enter the changes.
     In the three years since his accident, unable to return to work as a game warden for the department of forestry, he had struggled to fulfill his lifelong desire to be a writer. (Sometimes, in his dreams, he could still see the big truck starting to slide on the ice-covered road, and he felt his own car entering a sickening spin too, and the bright headlights were bearing down on him, and he pumped the brake pedal, turned the wheel into the slide, but he was always too late. Even in the dreams, he was always too late.) He had written four fast-paced detective novels in the last three years, two of which had sold to New York publishers, and he had also placed eight short stories in magazines.
     Until Laura came along, his two great loves had been the outdoors and books. Before the accident, he had often hiked miles up into the mountains, to places remote and serene, with his backpack half filled with food, half with paperbacks. Augmenting his supplies with berries and nuts and edible roots, he had remained for days in the wilderness, alternately studying the wildlife and reading. He was equally a man of nature and civilization; though it was difficult to bring nature into town, it was easy to carry civilization - in the form of books - into the wild heart of the forest, allowing him to satisfy both halves of his cleft soul.
     These days, cursed with legs that would never again support him on a journey into the hills, he had to be content with the pleasures of civilization - and, damn it, he soon had to make a better living with his writing than he had managed thus far. From the sales of eight stories and two well-reviewed novels spread over three years, he had not earned a third as much as Laura's modest teaching salary. He was a long way from reaching the best-seller lists, and life at the lower end of the publishing business was far from glamorous. Without his small disability pension from the department of forestry, he and Laura would have had serious difficulty keeping themselves housed, clothed, and fed.
     When he remembered the worn brown cloth coat in which Laura had gone off to school that morning, he grew sad. But the thought of her in that drab coat also made him more determined than ever to write a breakthrough book, earn a fortune, and buy her the luxuries that she deserved.
     The strange thing