He turned and walked on down the row. After a second Mr. Hufnagle and Ms. Garrigan went after him, Ms. Garrigan looking back once over her shoulder at Calvert with an expression he could not name, and they stopped at the girl from Tamaqua with the canal lock, and Calvert heard Mr. Hufnagle's voice saying something about locktenders, and the gym came back.
He sat down on the folding chair behind his table, because his legs had decided that for him. He sat there until Mrs. Agard came, and when she came she did not ask him how it went. She looked at his face and sat down in the chair next to him and handed him a styrofoam cup of hot chocolate from the snack table that was mostly water and tasted like the cup, and they sat there side by side and drank it, and after a while she said, "Dombrowski?" and he nodded, and she said, "I know. I saw the list at eight. I didn't know whether to tell you," and he said, "It's okay," and she said, "No, I should have told you," and they sat there some more.
At eleven thirty the district man got on the microphone and said that first round judging was complete and that the gym would be closed to visitors until one so that the judges could deliberate and the second round finalists could be posted, and that there was chili and hot dogs in the cafeteria courtesy of the Mahanoy Area Home and School, a dollar fifty, and the Amelia Earhart girl's mother said, "Oh, thank God," to nobody in particular, and everybody started moving toward the doors at once.
Calvert did not go to the cafeteria. He put the logbook shoebox under his arm, because he was not going to leave it under a table in an empty gym no matter what the district man said, and he went out through the lobby and the front doors and down the concrete steps into the parking lot.
It was cold. It was the kind of March cold that the valley did better than anywhere, a gray wet cold that came down off Broad Mountain and sat on the town like a lid. There was old snow along the edges of the lot, gone black and crusted with cinders from the plows. Past the football field the land went up in a long slope to the ridge, and on the ridge the culm banks stood against the sky, the great black heaps of slate and waste coal from a hundred years of mining, some of them smoking faintly where they had caught fire underground years ago and never gone out. When Calvert was small his grandfather had told him that the culm banks were mountains that people had built by accident, one bucket at a time, and that someday they would be the only thing left to show that anybody had ever been here. Calvert had believed that for a long time. He was not sure he didn't still believe it.
The white Ford pickup with the ladder rack was parked at the far end of the lot by the bus garage. Mick was sitting on the tailgate with his feet hanging and his hands in his sweatshirt pocket, looking at the ridge. Butchie Saylor was not with him.
Calvert walked across the lot. It seemed to take a long time. He stopped a few feet from the truck and stood there with the shoebox under his arm.
"You want a hot dog?" he said. "They've got chili. A dollar fifty."