I hadn’t had the radio on when I drove to town, but I turned it on now. Like my TV, it gets its programming from computer-driven space voyagers that go whirling around the earth at a height of twenty-two thousand miles, an idea that surely would have been greeted with wide-eyed wonder (but probably not outright disbelief) by the teenager Frank Anicetti had been back in the day. I tuned to the Sixties on Six and caught Danny & the Juniors working out on “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”—three or four urgent, harmonic voices singing over a jackhammer piano. They were followed by Little Richard screaming “Lucille” at the top of his lungs, and then Ernie K-Doe more or less moaning “Mother-in-Law”: She thinks her advice is a contribution, but if she would leave that would be the solution. It all sounded as fresh and sweet as the oranges Mrs. Symonds and her friends had been picking over that early afternoon.

It sounded new.

Did I want to spend years in the past? No. But I did want to go back. If only to hear how Little Richard sounded when he was still top of the pops. Or get on a Trans World Airlines plane without having to take off my shoes, submit to a full-body scan, and go through a metal detector.

And I wanted another root beer.

CHAPTER 3

1

The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine flag with the moose on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top one white and the bottom one red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as I went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street, thinking about an amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from Texas.”