It was a short drive down the hill from the Park and Shop across the bridge and up the winding road that led to town center. The roads looked in a bit better shape than RJ remembered, the hills unchanged. They were mostly covered in maples, sycamores and a few oak trees, but where a road cut thru the hills or construction took away the topsoil, there were small rock slides exposing dull yellow clay and grey sandstone shot thru with thin black coal seams.

RJ didn’t remember there being so many pick up trucks in town, but then reminded himself that he wasn’t even driving yet when he last visited Wayne West Virginia. Not being one of the cool kids with encyclopedic knowledge of car models, he was unlikely to have noticed what sort of cars anyone was driving. Still, it struck him as stereotypical of the region. There didn’t seem to be many SUVs, which was funny because as this was exactly the kind of ‘urban’ landscape SUVs were meant for.

As he continued on into town the few things he recognized seemed to have either suffered drastically over the years or remained impervious to the wearing effects of time. There were a few more trailers in the trailer park though most looked exactly like the ones that were there 10 years ago. He remembered playing with the kids that lived there without ever knowing their names. They would just meet up at random times among the piles of gravel and sand the DRW kept on the opposite side. The road crews chased them off regularly, but they always came back and played there.  Once RJ had slipped on a small pile of road salt and scraped up his arm badly, the salt crystals adding their burn to the sting of the injury, but even that wasn’t enough to deter him from visiting there the very next day. For a brief moment he considered turning down that road to see if the gravel piles were still there, but drove on past consoling himself with the thought that there would be time enough to visit around town after the funeral. Besides, there was a place just ahead he was going to stop regardless of the time spent.

RJ cursed under his breath as he passed a shiny new gas station complete with electronic sinage and a well lit interior. The price of unleaded gas was a few cents cheaper too. He hadn’t needed to fill his tank at that strange little station a few miles back after all. He shook his head and made a mental note to stop here on the way back out if need be. Growling to himself, he sped up a bit anticipating the bridge ahead and near it, the place where he spent most of his time while living in Wayne. It was a small house with two bedrooms situated on the hillside overlooking the ‘Brinkley Bridge.’  So called because of the ticker-tape noise it made as cars traveled across its rickety frame. Some time later the bridge fell and was replaced with a concrete and steel structure, but the memory and the sound was still fresh in RJ’s mind. He crossed the bridge slowly as traffic would let him, glancing down over the side to see if the flood wall was still there. Unable to resist the draw of his memories, as soon as he crossed the bridge he pulled over next to the railroad tracks and got out to look down at the bend of Twelve-pole Creek that flowed under the bridge and back the way he came.

He half expected to see the iron framework of the old bridge still in the waters below the new one, but there was no sign of it or the pylons it once stood on. He couldn’t tell if there’s been any change to the 20 foot high flood wall holding back the waters from the lower course of Twelve-pole. Gone also were the large blocks of sandstone he had laboriously chiseled to free fossils for high school projects. There wasn’t supposed to be any substantial fossil finds in the area, but he had found six or seven bones in the rock that were the size of a man’s hand. RJ made a face at the memory, he’d probably destroyed any value the fossils had by using ten penny nails as chisels and clumsily hitting them with a common claw-hammer. Still he wondered as he stood there what had become of those fossils, and the really superb one of a dinosaur footprint he had carried around for years?

RJ shrugged to himself and turned to get back in the car. He’d probably given those fossils away as he did so many things he once valued, in order to curry favor with some friend or group he wanted to hang out with. His eyes traveled up the hillside opposite looking for his childhood home, but in its place was a billboard proclaiming “A ghost town is dead!” He stared at it for a while trying to work out what it was trying to sell, and the nearest he could come to was something about advertising on the billboard itself. The clock display on the dash caught his eye as he started the car, he would be late for the funeral home if he didn’t get moving, and he needed to find a place to stop for the night afterwards. He was still puzzling over the words on the sign as he gave his honda some gas to climb up the last hill before Wayne’s main street.
“A ghost town is dead!”..WTF?

He felt a bit of confusion as he topped the hill, not remembering which way to go around the courthouse. The pizza place, a small chain called Gino’s, seemed to have moved across the street from where he remembered it. He paused at the stop sign a bit longer than normal trying to get his bearings, and it was the old battleship grey artillery cannon that cleared things up for him. He mock-saluted it and drove slowly down hill past the Methodist church and along the bus garage where the middle school now stood. It had been a ‘Junior’ high school when he went there, but now the parking lot was all that was left of the old building on the hill and its hundreds of steps. He spared it a lingering look suddenly remembering a near brush with kissing the Dalson twins on a dare. Their dare, not his. Someone had built a nice multi-level home on the grounds, and the sign above the bus garage proudly proclaimed “Wayne Community Center.”  RJ wondered when Wayne had developed a sense of community, he sure didn’t remember one. There had been nothing more elaborate than hobby days at the one room public library to distract children from the dismally uninteresting landscape they found themselves in.

The town center was soon behind him, and he turned at the bridge on this end of town, not as new as the Brinkley Bridge, but still not resembling the one he thought he would find here. He remembered a second place he had lived, near the bridge here, but couldn’t spot it from the car. The coincidence had never before struck him that he had lived next to the bridge leading into town, and then moved next to the bridge leading out of town. Too late to ask mom if there was any significance to the choice. Again he was jolted into facing his task here, and he started looking for the funeral home. He was pretty sure where it was, since it was the same place that held his father’s funeral and his brother’s before that.  Soon as he made a turn and saw the parking lot and the low unassuming building marked Morris Funeral home and he knew he was in the right place.