This was the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle, rode it around the block, turned right onto a dead end street andpedaled noisily to the dead end. He walked the tricycle around the guard rail and then rode along a paved walkwaythat went winding past some overgrown lots to a set of twenty concrete steps. The plastic wheels rumbled andscreeched. Here our reconstruction yields to the awe-struck account of two elderly women watching from thesecond-story back porch of a tall house in the trees. He walked the tricycle down the steps, guiding it with a duteousand unsentimental hand, letting it bump right along, as if it were an odd-shaped little sibling, not necessarilycherished. He remounted, rode across the street, rode across the sidewalk, proceeded onto the grassy slope thatbordered the expressway. Here the women began to call. Hey, hey, they said, a little tentative at first, not ready toaccept the implications of the process unfolding before them. The boy pedaled diagonally down the slope, shrewdlyreducing the angle of descent, then paused on the bottom to aim his three-wheeler at the point on the opposite sidewhich seemed to represent the shortest distance across. Hey, sonny, no. Waving their arms, looking frantically forsome able-bodied pedestrian to appear on the scene. Wilder, meanwhile, ignoring their cries or not hearing them inthe serial whoosh of dashing hatchbacks and vans, began to pedal across the highway, mystically charged. Thewomen could only look, empty-mouthed, each with an arm in the air, a plea for the scene to reverse, the boy to pedalbackwards on his faded blue and yellow toy like a cartoon figure on morning TV. The drivers could not quitecomprehend. In their knotted posture, belted in, they knew this picture did not belong to the hurtling consciousnessof the highway, the broad-ribboned modernist stream. In speed there was sense. In signs, in patterns, in split-secondlives. What did it mean, this little rotary blur? Some force in the world had gone awry. They veered, braked, soundedtheir horns down the long afternoon, an animal lament. The child would not even look at them, pedaled straight forthe median strip, a narrow patch of pale grass. He was pumped up, chesty, his arms appearing to move as rapidly ashis legs, the round head wagging in a jig of lame-brained determination. He had to slow down to get onto the raisedmedian, rearing up to let the front wheel edge over, extremely deliberate in his movements, following somenumbered scheme, and the cars went wailing past, horns blowing belatedly, drivers' eyes searching the rearviewmirror. He walked the tricycle across the grass. The women watched him regain a firm placement on the seat. Stay,they called. Do not go. No, no. Like fpreigners reduced to simple phrases. The cars kept coming, whipping into thestraightaway, endless streaking traffic. He set off to cross the last three lanes, dropping off the median like abouncing ball, front wheel, rear wheels. Then the head-wagging race to the other side. Cars dodged, strayed, climbedthe curbstone, astonished heads appearing in the side windows. The furiously pedaling boy could not know how slowhe seemed to be moving from the vantage point of the women on the porch. The women were silent by now, outsidethe event, suddenly tired. How slow he moved, how mistaken he was in thinking he was breezing right along. It madethem tired. The horns kept blowing, sound waves mixing in the air, flattening, calling back from vanished cars,scolding. He reached the other side, briefly rode parallel to the traffic, seemed to lose his balance, fall away, goingdown the embankment in a multicolored tumble. When he reappeared a second later, he was sitting in a water furrow,part of the intermittent creek that accompanies the highway. Stunned, he made the decision to cry. It took him amoment, mud and water everywhere, the tricycle on its side. The women began to call once more, each raising anarm to revoke the action. Boy in the water, they said. Look, help, drown. And he seemed, on his seat in the creek,profoundly howling, to have heard them for the first time, looking up over the earthen mound and into the treesacross the expressway. This frightened them all the more. They called and waved, were approaching the early phasesof uncontrollable terror when a passing motorist, as such people are called, alertly pulled over, got out of the car,skidded down the embankment and lifted the boy from the murky shallows, holding him aloft for the clamoringelders to see.

　　We go to the overpass all the time. Babette, Wilder and I. We take a thermos of iced tea, park the car, watch thesetting sun. Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light. Heavy overcasts have littleeffect. Light bursts through, tracers and smoky arcs. Overcasts enhance the mood. We find little to say to each other.

　　More cars arrive, parking in a line that extends down to the residential zone. People walk up the incline and onto theoverpass, carrying fruit and nuts, cool drinks, mainly the middle-aged, the elderly, some with webbed beach chairswhich they set out on the sidewalk, but younger couples also,............