Read Online Turn Left at the Trojan Horse by Brad Herzog - Free Book Online Page A

rocket attacks—from mortars. But it wasn’t me.”
    Del gives a grunt of acknowledgment. He was a gunner’s mate in the navy in Korea.
    â€œSo maybe,” I offer, “the lesson is to make the journey slow and easy…”
    Dean nods and clasps his hands behind his head. “Down here, anyone who’s in a hurry is in the wrong place.”
    The banter bears that out, its pace slow and steady, meandering without real purpose, occasionally taking an unexpected turn—just a leisurely drive down conversational switchbacks. There is no destination; the goal is simply to pass time and revel in commonalities.
    Isn’t that what my wife keeps telling me? She wants me to enjoy the moment. Take pleasure in life’s journey. I always seem to be in such a rush to get to an amorphous Somewhere. Maybe that’s why she was in such a hurry for me to leave for Anywhere. Good thing she told me to go to Ithaca before she was inspired to tell me to go to hell.
    A stooped elderly man shuffles into the café behind a walker. “That’s Bud. We call him the Mayor,” Dean whispers. “He’s ninety-five, never been married. He’s pretty amazing. He’s going in for his last chemo treatment for bladder cancer, and he just bought a computer so he can research volcanoes. The man loves volcanoes.”
    He calls out to the old man. “You still driving?”
    â€œI been drivin’ for eighty years without an accident. Couple o’ fender benders, but those don’t count,” Bud declares. “My driver’s license is good till I’m a hundred and two.”
    â€œHow about Ol’ Man Brown,” says Sharon, eliciting some knee-slapping. She turns to me. “I’m telling ya, he doesn’t drive more than five miles per hour. When he comes by here, you wonder how he keeps the motor running.”
    This sort of tittle-tattle appears to be a necessity for survival in Troy, fifty miles from the nearest grocery store, a place so remote that when the garbage truck makes the trek to town every Thursday, it is an occasion for the locals to dump their trash at the inn and stay for a game of cards. So gossip here is sustenance.
    â€œThis used to be called the Lesbi Inn,” says Dean, stretching his arms toward the rafters. “It used to be run by two gals and a guy. He was gay and so were they.”
    â€œRemember when that he/she pulled into the RV park?” Sharon asks. “We spent days trying to figure it out. We kind of determined he/she was male. He was strange.”
    Here, our waitress, a curly-haired woman named Mary, who has been hovering around the edges of the conversation, hands me a muffin and interjects a recollection. “He had a set of legs I’d kill for, though. That was what pissed me off.”
    â€œIt’s interesting,” I say, as the laughter subsides. “As isolated as this place is, as hard as it is to get to, as much as you may come here to get away from it all, once you’re here everybody knows everybody’s business.”
    Everyone nods, and Dean speaks for the bunch. “We have a little saying here: You can’t fart at one end of this canyon without someone knowing about it before you get to the other end.”
    Â 
    I cross a footbridge over the Grande Ronde and make my way to a one-story building painted periwinkle. A red one would have more satisfied my expectations, because here is the proverbial one-room schoolhouse. I walk inside, where a woman named Marilyn is tidying up, and we chat for a while. It is a Sunday, but Marilyn picks up the phone to dial the teacher, who says she will be right over. She lives just down the road.
    There are actually two rooms here, each connected to a narrow hallway in which the students’ names are taped above their lockers—Jesse, Clint, Luis, Sophia, Karina, Emily, Big Salvador, Little Salvador. That is the entire