Free The Cavanaugh Quest by Thomas Gifford Page A

the fact that I’d gotten up way too early. Something made me jerk and I looked at Archie. He’d gotten out of the flowered chair and was peering into one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases built into the wall. They were glossy white. He finally reached up and withdrew a large brown leather photograph album.
    “You awake?” He cleared his writing gear to one side of the old oak desk and placed the photograph album in the center. I nodded. “Thought you might like to see this,” he said. He opened the album, which was held together by heavy brown twine threaded through each page. I went over to the desk. I looked at my watch. An hour had passed since we’d come back to the library.
    “Sure,” I said. “What is it?”
    He spread the pages flat; black-and-white snapshots, some slightly yellowed, held in place by little black pasted-down corner pieces. I’d seen the album before, as a child, and later checking on pictures of my mother. Archie was not the dramatic type: He’d left her pictures where they’d always been, bearing her no grudges but merely glad to be rid of her.
    “Pictures we took up at the lodge. All these fellows you see as old men now, me and the rest of them, this is the way we looked back in ’33, ’34. You were just getting yourself born, Paul.” He pointed to the first picture, upper left, left-hand page, and began telling me about them, identifying the men and what they were amusing themselves with on those long-ago summer days when they went up north to get away from it all.
    I wasn’t really listening but I was getting enough, like background music, and I was thinking about the men. There was the picture of Hub with the slicked-back hair, the shadows on his face, the bony shoulders square and taut. Archie was smiling remotely, squinting from behind round, silver-rimmed spectacles, looking up from a book as he lay in a striped canvas chair.
    Ole Kronstrom and Jonathan Goode bulked large and white in swimming suits which clung tightly to their wet bodies. They stood in the sand near the water, fishing poles in their hands, shadows black on the beach.
    Martin Boyle in a sweater and a white shirt stood beside a four-door Pontiac sedan, his foot on the running board, a hand raised in salute to the photographer. A dog of no discernible known breed stood at his feet, staring up at him. Timothy Dierker sat behind the wheel, framed in the window, his face in motion, mouth open, saying something. James Crocker, the football star overflowing his trousers ten years later, looked down into the camera from atop a ladder where he was painting a wall of the lodge. He waved his paintbrush, carelessly letting white paint drip down the handle of the brush.
    They appeared to be men from another age, another century; I didn’t know anyone who went off that way anymore, hunting and fishing and away from their wives. I didn’t know men who gathered in groups of any. kind; a night out with the boys, it seemed an anachronism, the way nobody wrote like Robert Benchley anymore. It seemed unbelievable that those men could still be alive. They looked out from an innocent, pre-World War II past, sealed away like relics in a tomb. They didn’t look curious or amused or even very intelligent. But they did look privileged, almost without care, in a way that was unheard of anymore. Arrogance of a subtle sort; the arrogance of innocence.
    “Why are you laughing, Paul?”
    “I’m not. It just makes me smile, that’s all. Long time ago. People looked different then. Not just their clothing. The people themselves. Do you see it?”
    He shook his head. “How can I? I’m one of them.”
    He slipped a finger under the next page and slowly turned it over. More pictures: the lodge, the boys.
    “Do you still go up there?”
    “Hell, no,” he scoffed. “My God, I outgrew that a long time ago …”
    “Lost interest in hunting and fishing?”
    “I never was much for that stuff. Did you ever go fishing, Paul? Sitting in a