Roads cut deep through marshland. Cypresses bend: blue collar knees on pavement. They started in 1975. Aching backs bent away from the sun. In the fall, leaves fell like ashes on neon vests. Cigarette embers fell on steel-toed boots. People paved this road, sliced right through grassy patches with bottle shards and obsidian eyes. The old man was one of them. Highway zero was the first job he worked, but it was far from his last. I watched him every day. In the morning, he raced the sun. Laces tied and shirts buttoned in dim lamplight, he’d be gone before dawn. So would I.
 Twigs snapped beneath my feet in the forest. It was always the same trek. My shoulders were slanted, one scrawny arm dragged down by the weight of the old man’s axe. For a moment, the trees were illuminated by an eerie glow. The freight train came through the clearing almost every morning with steel wheels screeching and cracked headlights gleaming. I paused while it passed, let the rumbling of the tracks resonate in my bones. Once it disappeared into the tree line, I swung the axe until its sharp blade was embedded in a red oak. Log after log hit the ground with a muted thud. When I got back to the house, there was a blush in the sky. The old man wouldn’t come back until the sun sank into the horizon, until night came in a curtain of stars and coyotes howled in ominous lullabies. I sat on the floor and prodded at the fire, leaving the single chair at the table open for him. The wood crackled. It told a story; everything in this town does.
 Voices don’t get carried off into the nothingness here; they stay in the wind. And this wind, this carrier of old miners’ tales and halfhearted mumbles of “how much farther,” stays on highway zero. It seeps through my rolled-down windows as I drive eighty miles an hour past the sign that displays a faded number sixty. No one will stop me. I hear nothing but the gentle hum of tires against asphalt. But a faint breeze turns to whispers, and wisps of cloud morph into a hand. The old man’s screaming. The hand’s rising to strike. He throws a bottle at my head. He misses. I almost slam on the breaks, but then he’s gone. Just the wind. And me.
 My last trip along highway zero wasn’t quite as lonely. I was in a rusty red pickup truck, the old man’s rusty red pickup truck. It was his calloused hands on the wheel, his steely eyes trained on the horizon.

 “What’s waitin’ for you in the city anyway?”

 I shifted in my seat to face the old man. For a moment, I just analyzed him. I like a lot of things the old man doesn’t like. One of them is staring. If you stare at a person long enough, you’ll notice something new about them. If I stare at a person long enough, I’ll make them into a stranger. The old man’s gruff, overgrown beard was familiar. His hard expressions were unchanging. But his eyes were bluer than I remembered, softer than when he hollered at me to quit my complaining and get back to work. They were glossier, almost as if I could look into them and be back at the pond behind our lot, contemplating my reflection rippling in murky waters. There was a sadness in his eyes; that’s how I knew he was a stranger.

 “Nothing,” I muttered.

 “Damn right.”

 A smile tugged at his lips, but it wasn’t one of joy. It was one of conviction and brutish pride.

 “Make sure you don’t leave any of your crap in my car.”

 “Yeah, alright.”

 I slammed the door shut, and he drove off without a backward glance. I was left, with one suitcase, alone at the doors of the airport. I couldn’t bring myself to walk in, couldn’t force my legs to move until I saw his truck fade into a single fleck of rusted red. That was the last time the old man and I shared a common destination.
 The city’s loud, but it’s a different kind of noise. The sounds are fleeting: the honks of taxi cabs, the wails of sirens, the rough voices of the local bar. They meld into my daily routine. I settled in quickly here, got a job, and got an apartment. I never called to tell the old man how I was doing, but he called me. I saw that beat-up landline clutched in his wrinkling hand every time the phone rang. That piercing noise, that shrill repetitive ring, is the only sound besides the old freight train that I haven’t been able to ignore. It was a sound incapable of falling into the background, a sound that made me stop and listen. The old man only ever wanted one thing: money. I always sent a check in the mail. But the phone hasn’t rung in a while; the old man doesn’t need me anymore. I bought him a tombstone before he died. He insisted on picking it himself, said

 “A man’s final restin’ place ain’t anyone’s business but his own.”

 I’ve never been to the old man’s grave, but I know he has only one visitor. The little ghost boy goes there every night. He’s whisked in by the wind. He kneels at the tombstone I bought, and he cries. He doesn’t know it, but he wants someone to wipe the tears from his flushed cheeks, wants a firm hand on his drooping shoulder. I wish I could tell him that he isn’t afraid of life without the old man; he’s afraid of time. The worst thing you can do to a boy is turn him into a man.

 Drag the axe to the forest, son.

 Swing and don’t miss, son.

 Don’t take the beating to heart, son.

 But I did.

 In some foolish game, I traded pennies and rocks for manhood, tin cans and backroads for chardonnay. But I got more than I bargained for. I got white knuckles that slammed onto keyboards. I got blunt nails that dug into her flesh deep enough to leave a mark. I got a row of empty bottles on the kitchen counter. I drank from them like he did, head tilted back and gulping. If you stare at a person long enough, you’ll notice something new about them. If I stare at myself long enough, I see the old man. I see a chest heaving out the same smoke-tainted air, see veins pumping out the same boxed wine blood.
 I try to forget him as I drive away from his trailer in the woods for the last time. I had to come back to meet with the lawyer, to sort through whatever was left of the old man’s legacy. A smile tugs at my lips, but it isn’t one of joy. It’s one of reluctant acceptance, peace at the finality of it all. But peace doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would. The road to it was harsh like the sun on hot pavement, my journey tainted by a laborious history that runs as deep as that of highway zero.
 A man doesn’t cry in front the world. He cries in dark rooms and on swing sets of long-deserted playgrounds. He cries for the old man, for that incessant drum at the back of his mind. And, as much as he hates to admit it, he cries at the thought of featherlight kisses, dreams mangled up in fatherly wishes. I’m crying out on highway zero. The tears are hot and angry. And now I realize why I can’t hate my old man. He paved the road that got me out.