A boy who fantasizes about Playboy models while his mother recuperates from a serious heart ailment, a grandmother who takes target practice with a nickel-plated .38 caliber revolver in her crowded apartment building in a Detroit suburb, an elderly man who plunges naked into a northern Michigan lake during the late fall while recalling his life, and a police officer who finds a youth murdered under a highway overpass in the wee hours of the morning just outside of the Detroit city limits—these are a few of the stories that comprise Gary James Erwin's collection of stories, Trail Crossing Sixteen Counties.