nce a year, they’d meet for lunch in some charming New England town. The kind of place with booths covered in naugahyde, like tanned skin, and squeaking springs like bones. You’d almost feel they were all trapped in a bell jar of time, except the three of them were looking so old these days. Jay and Mike and Fred.
    Things ached. As they should after so much pain. Burns and scars and broken bones. It all mended but none of it looked pretty. At one time, they’d been called unstoppable. Invincible. But you wouldn’t know it. Age wears even the biggest mountains down.
    They came like three kings, laden down with gifts. Scrapbooks and old newspaper clippings. Frankincense. It used to be a competition: how many could you bag. In a day, in a season. A premium on teenagers. Now it was just comparing histories. A way for them not to forget, since it seemed everyone else did.
    There used to be more of them. The guy who wanted to be a lumberjack. The one with the acupuncture fetish. That little doll would even sometimes show up. It was almost like a convention. Sometimes the owner would bring the good stuff out from behind the counter. It had been a party. But even in paradise, the milk goes off and flies get after the honey.
    Fred would take off the fedora, run those long nails over his smooth head like some idle god. He’d prattle on about the old days. Jay and Mike would nod or grunt once in a while. They both still kept their faces covered. Better to fit in.
    They’d finish their lunch. Separate bills. None of them tipped. The waitress cleaned the table with a dirty rag and watched them go. Bastards, sure, but harmless.

hey sat there for a while longer, passing the bottle of J&B back and forth while the camp burned around them. Everyone else was dead, even the guys he had liked.
   It was a disappointing ending. Not an ending at all, really, because he still had none of the answers. Did they win or lose? Was he himself? Or something else? Was this guy, the camp’s big black mechanic, who he said he was? Was anyone really? When you get down to the brass tacks of the thing, maybe we’re all hiding some thing. Maybe there’s a murderous tentacled alien presence lurking inside all of us.
   It hurt his brain to think about the big questions. He failed his way out of first year philosophy and also he was drunk.
   They said they’d wait a while and see what happened. It had been a while and nothing had happened. And they were quickly running out of scotch. He wished he could dig his Apple II out of the wreckage and give the chess simulator a spin. Even down here, in the Antarctic, things were like any place else. Sure, aliens attack, your friends die, things get blown up, but in the end all you got’s another cold, hard morning and an empty bottle.

he sees the girl through the crowd. Even in the dim lights of the club, she can pick her out. It’s that stupid winged Viking helmet that gives her away. Funny how the past can cut through the haze like a razor.
    They finish off the set with The Thrill is Gone. She purrs the last words, letting her lips wet the mic, as Al plays out the song. There’s some clapping, not as much as there used to be, and one annoying asshole whistling at the bar. She puts the mic back in its cradle, running one hand down the stand like a lover’s spine. It should be her moment. It is when you really win them over, but the club’s already refilling with noise. She looks back at the guys. Al just shrugs. He used to say “Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.” Now he was the first one packing up. She’s not sure if they’ll play another set.
    She looks for the girl as she makes her way off the stage. She moves through people like water and puts one foot up on the rail. Pruitt slides a fat ounce of bourbon in front of her, one rock. He’s got a bar towel over one shoulder, bone white and ironed crisp. It takes the attention away from his claw hand. “That’s the last of your rider, Chris.”
    “This is my first one.”
    He jabs his chin at the room. She knows it, too. It’s a one drink crowd. Even for an old friend.
    She scoops up her bourbon and minnows back through the crowd. Nobody high fives. She searches through faces as she moves. They’re all familiar faces but no one she knows. She puts a dart in her mouth but doesn’t light it. All this clear air is just killing the blues.   
    The steel door bangs open as she steps out into the alley. A deep dish Chicago rain rattling down through fire escapes. She lights the cigarette and leans back against the brick.
    “Hey, Chris.”
    And there she is. Long strawberry hair, matchstick legs. All grown up but still a little girl to her.
    “You still wearing that thing around?”           
    Sara snatches the silver helmet off her head and laughs. “I pulled it out of storage. I was at a costume party.”
    "What’re you doin here?”
    “I came to see you play.”
    Nobody she knew came to see her play anymore. Babies and marriage and mortgages and old friendships die in that slow sagging way, so you don’t even notice. But she lets the lie sit. 
    “How’s your brother?”
    “Oh, good.” Sara tucks her hair behind her ears and stares down at the rain splashing off the pavement.  “He just got divorced.”
    “I thought he was already divorced.”
    "Yeah, and now he is again.” Sara giggles. “You should give him a call.”
    She tries to laugh with her, so they can share the moment. But the sounds rub up against each other like sandpaper. Then Sara’s laughter puckers up quick and she can feel a shift.  
    “I was wondering, Chris.” But Sara doesn’t finish the question. It hangs. She’s holding the helmet with both hands, turning it slow. It reminds her of those old cowboy movies her dad used to watch. Men holding their hats at a funeral for the sheriff. When the good passes on.
    “And what’s that, kiddo?”
    Sara breathes in and her mouth sets into that stubborn line, a posture so familiar that all of a sudden she can see her as that little girl. Her and her brother in their little desert island suburb and all those late nights babysitting.
    “I was wondering if I could score some E off you.”
    It’s like a punch in the stomach. No. Like a skewer straight through her guts, the guts of all her years, pinning her and every past version of herself against that brick wall.
    She leaves the girl there, behind her, and pushes back through the doors into the heat and noise of the bar. Somewhere in there she’ll find the boys and she’ll drag them back on stage. Forget the covers, she’ll sing something that means something. She’ll sing the blues. Maybe they’ll listen this time. Maybe she’ll never leave.           

he’ll be back in a few hours, she says. He doesn’t even turn around. He just stays hunched on the stool, the rhythmic sound of the milk splashing into the pail. She repeats herself, as she always must now.
    There’s a long pause, his rough hands frozen around Abby’s teat, more intimate than anything they’ve shared in the last ten years. He grunts. As you wish. And returns to his task. He still doesn’t turn around.
    She walks out of the barn and heads down the hill through the pasture. Overgrown now, strangled with weed. Those three words, the same three words. Words that had been romantic when they were young.  More than the typical I love yous most young lovers toss at each other. As you wish. It had meant, whatever you desire. Now the words were a bad caricature, like the scarecrow she passes at the edge of their field, dancing in the wind. Inconceivable. As you wish. I don’t care what you do.
    She gathers her skirts as she hops the old cow fence, broken here where rustlers made off with most of the herd last fall. When they’d first returned to the farm it had seemed like some magical game. The swashbuckler and the princess, playing farmboy and maid again. But games always end. They were good at impressions, but never at the real thing.
    She pushes through the old orchard. Fat dead apples litter the ground like small bodies. Babies. There’d been three miscarriages. She finds the trail and climbs the hill to the woodcutter’s cabin. She goes around back first and fills a bucket from the pump.
    She doesn’t knock. Knowing he’ll be there. Where else would he go. When his friend, the giant, died, he showed up and they’d taken him in. Given him work to do. Which he never did.
    It’s dark inside. The smell of bad cider and urine. She feels her way over to the shutter and bangs it open.
He groans. Curled up naked on the floor like an autumn leaf after the colour had passed out of it. His long beautiful hair was mostly gone now. He wasn’t ugly. But at one time, he’d been beautiful. Weren’t they all.  At one time he’d had a passion, a fire inside him. More fever than fire. One that could burn you if you stood too close. But then he killed the man that killed his father and now he was prepared to die.
    Weren’t they all.
    She lets her skirts drop to the floor. It hardly makes a noise, and he doesn’t open his eyes.        

e watches the kids go by on skateboards and scooters, bicycle and training wheels, only the bravest stopping to peer through the untamed rosebushes at the peeling paint and crumbling brick that he calls a home. He drops the curtain. How quickly heroes become monsters.
    He’s about to head back to the kitchen to pop a TV dinner in the microwave when he hears the shatter of glass behind him. He turns to see a rock rolling across the floor and the busted maw of his front window. By the time he gets to the curtain, the culprits are gone. He picks up the rock. Nothing special about it. Just a rock, a careless thing.
    He pads down the hallway, the shag carpet underfoot thick like the silence in this old place. The basement door creaks with the ghosts of thousand bad horror movies, reminding him to remind that damn woman to bring some WD-40 the next time she’s in. He takes the stairs one at a time now, with his damn hip. Still aches sixty years after the crash. 
    It’s where he left it, there on his workbench, covered in an old painter’s tarp. Once, everyone from the Nazis and the mafia to the Feds wanted what’s under there. Hell, even Howard Hughes came calling, first with a carload of cash and then a carload of thugs.
    He pulls the tarp off like a magician with a bad trick. Metal fins polished to a shine, leather straps oiled and soft to the touch, the faint whiff of fuel lingering in the air. It’s heavy for him now, but he slings it over his shoulders like a large baby. Or a bomb.
    He lost the helmet. Betty backed the car over it a few dozen times when she found out he was still flying on the sly. He gave up the air shows after that. Then he gave up flying altogether. But it was too late. They were already too far gone.
    She always told him the helmet made him look like a hood ornament anyway.
    It’s harder going back up, it always is. The pack’s only about twenty pounds, but he’s dragging a lot more than that behind him up the stairs. He pushes out through the torn screen door into the backyard. The grass still dead from the leak at the chemical plant all those years back. He leans a ladder up against the house and peers up at the curling shingles. He always hated heights, funny being a flyboy, but it was different on solid ground.     
    It takes him a while, but he makes it to the roof. It’s only a bungalow but he can still see the better part of the neighbourhood. Almost unrecognizable now. Most of the old places either bulldozed for condominiums or covered up in that crap they spray on like cotton candy.
    He straps in tight, the pack snug against his back, and straightens up as best he can. He inches down to the edge of the roof. He runs his thumb over the ignition.
    He could go back downstairs. Back to the same old. Back to that pantheon of TV dinners.
    He doesn’t even feel his thumb twitch.
    He’s already fifty feet up before he remembers how to control the damn thing. And then it all comes back and the years burn off in the roar of the exhaust.  
    He pulls a loop-de-loop and zooms back down for a pass over his neighbourhood. Any minute those kids’ll come running out into the backyards, pointing and cheering. Who is that? Superman? Their parents will nod knowingly, their own childhood twinkling inside them. 
    He makes another pass, the sun dying low over the hills. They’ll be calling the newspapers now. Helicopters and crews on the way.
    The tank’s starting to sputter as he turns around for a third time, this time flying low, brushing trees. Nobody. The backyards are silent.
    Even if they came out, those kids, what would they see? An old man stuck in a future long past. Hovercrafts, UFOs and jetpacks. The world moves on. Heroes become monsters.
    Not monsters. No. Even worse. Forgotten.
    The silence is everywhere now. He’s floating on it. He stretches out his arms like a superhero. Blue sky above, green lawn below. He’s never felt so light. Like he doesn’t even exist.