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wished for another beer; one really only sets your mouth. I picked up the chainsaw and thought about WOXO being off the air. That was the direction that funny fogbank had come from. And it was the direction Shaymore (pronounced Shammore by the locals) lay in. Shaymore was where the Arrowhead Project was.
    That was old Bill Giosti’s theory about the so-called Black Spring: the Arrowhead Project. In the western part of Shaymore, not far from where the town borders on Stoneham, there was a small government preserve surrounded with wire. There were sentries and closed-circuit television cameras and God knew what else. Or so I had heard; I’d never actually seen it, although the Old Shaymore Road runs along the eastern side of the government land for a mile or so.
    No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead Project came from and no one could tell you for one hundred percent sure that that really was the name of the project—if there was a project. Bill Giosti said there was, but when you asked him how and where he came by his information, he got vague. His niece, he said, worked for the Continental Phone Company, and she had heard things. It got like that.
    â€œAtomic things,” Bill said that day, leaning in the Scout’s window and blowing a healthy draft of Pabst into my face. “That’s what they’re fooling around with up there. Shooting atoms into the air and all that.”
    â€œMr. Giosti, the air’s full of atoms,” Billy had said. “That’s what Mrs. Neary says. Mrs. Neary says everything’s full of atoms.”
    Bill Giosti gave my son Bill a long, bloodshot glance that finally deflated him. “These are different atoms, son.”
    â€œOh, yeah,” Billy muttered, giving in.
    Dick Muehler, our insurance agent, said the Arrowhead Project was an agricultural station the government was running, no more or less. “Bigger tomatoes with a longer growing season,” Dick said sagely, and then went back to showing me how I could help my family most efficiently by dying young. Janine Lawless, our postlady, said it was a geological survey having something to do with shale oil. She knew for a fact, because her husband’s brother worked for a man who had—
    Mrs. Carmody, now…she probably leaned more to Bill Giosti’s view of the matter. Not just atoms, but different atoms.
    I cut two more chunks off the big tree and dropped them over the side before Billy came back with a fresh beer in one hand and a note from Steff in the other. If there’s anything Big Bill likes to do more than run messages, I don’t know what it could be.
    â€œThanks,” I said, taking them both.
    â€œCan I have a swallow?”
    â€œJust one. You took two last time. Can’t have you running around drunk at ten in the morning.”
    â€œQuarter past,” he said, and smiled shyly over the top of the can. I smiled back—not that it was such a great joke, you know, but Billy makes them so rarely—and then read the note.
    â€œGot JBQ on the radio,” Steffy had written. “Don’t get drunk before you go to town. You can have one more, but that’s it before lunch. Do you think you can get up our road okay?”
    I handed him the note back and took my beer. “Tell her the road’s okay because a power truck just went by. They’ll be working their way up here.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œChamp?”
    â€œWhat, Dad?”
    â€œTell her everything’s okay.”
    He smiled again, maybe telling himself first. “Okay.”
    He ran back and I watched him go, legs pumping, soles of his zori showing. I love him. It’s his face and sometimes the way his eyes turn up to mine that make me feel as if things are really okay. It’s a lie, of course—things are not okay and never have been—but my kid makes me believe the lie.
    I drank some beer, set the can down carefully on a rock, and got the