What the Mirror Showed: The Battles Behind Smokey Robinson’s ‘The Tracks of My Tears’

In the summer of 1965, the Miracles released a single that stopped at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, and by the commercial logic of Motown — a company then in the middle of the most ruthless hit streak in American pop — that made “The Tracks of My Tears” a near-miss, a noble also-ran in a year when the Supremes alone put five singles at number one. Nothing about its first life suggested destiny. It climbed respectably, sold steadily, and made room for the next release. Yet this modest performer went on to be voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry, placed at number 50 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, and finally named by that same magazine in 2021 as the single greatest Motown song ever made. The journey between those two judgements — the chart’s shrug and history’s coronation — is one of the great slow vindications in popular music, and it began with a guitarist fooling around with a calypso record, a songwriter stuck on a single word, and a face in a bathroom mirror.

The battles behind the song are written into every stage of it. It was fought over at one of Motown’s fearsome quality-control meetings, where the ending Robinson had recorded was argued out of existence and replaced by something better. It was fought for across six months of writer’s block, as Robinson circled one unfinished syllable — trace what? — before the answer surfaced while he was shaving. And it has been fought over ever since in the matter of credit: three Miracles wrote it, a guitarist’s four bars open it, yet the world largely remembers one name. “The Tracks of My Tears” is a song about a man smiling in public while coming apart in private. Its own history rhymes with its lyric. For years it stood in the bright room of the Motown catalogue, grinning among the bigger hits, while its true stature waited for someone to take a good look at its face.

A Guitar Figure in Search of a Song

Every account of the song begins with the guitar, which is only fair, because the song began there too. Marv Tarplin was the Miracles’ guitarist — not a background singer, not a dancer in the matching suits, but the quiet man at the edge of the stage whose playing had been part of the group’s sound since the late 1950s. Tarplin was musical in a way that crossed borders: he listened to everything, and one of the things he had been listening to was Harry Belafonte’s “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)”, the calypso hit of a decade earlier. Turning its chord movement over in his hands, switching the chords around and altering the rhythm, he found a loping, sunlit figure of his own — a circular guitar pattern that seemed to smile even before anyone had sung a note over it.

Robinson, remembering the origin in The Motown Story, Motown’s own five-LP history, was plain about where the credit lay. “‘Tracks of My Tears’ was actually started by Marv Tarplin,” he said, “who is a young cat who plays guitar for our act. So he had this musical thing — and we worked around with it, and worked around, and it became ‘Tracks of My Tears’.” Tarplin made tape recordings of his ideas and passed them to Robinson, who carried this one around for months. The figure was irresistible and unusable in equal measure: it sounded like the beginning of something, but nobody yet knew of what.

That the seed came from the guitarist matters to everything that follows. Motown’s public story was already simplifying itself into a tale of one genius, Berry Gordy, and a handful of star faces, with Smokey Robinson first among them. But inside the Miracles, creation was genuinely communal. Tarplin supplied the musical cell. Pete Moore, the group’s bass singer and vocal arranger, worked alongside Robinson on the song’s development and its harmonies. Robinson wrote the lyric and the melody’s completion. When the record appeared, the writing credit read Robinson, Warren “Pete” Moore and Marvin Tarplin — three names, one of them belonging to a man whose instrument most listeners would have struggled to pick out of the mix. Within a few years, that four-bar guitar introduction would be counted among the most famous opening figures in pop. In the spring of 1965, it was a calypso-flavoured puzzle waiting for words.

Trace What?

Robinson has told the story of the lyric’s long blockage so often, and with such consistency, that it has the polish of a parable — but it is a parable with a specific mechanical problem at its centre. He had the chorus almost immediately, he told CBS News in 2023: “I came up with the first three lines of the chorus. ‘Take a good look at my face, see my smile looks out of place, if you look closer it’s easier to trace…’” And there the song stopped dead, because the rhyme and the sense both demanded an object. “Trace what?” he asked himself. “‘Trace that I’m here and you’re not’? No. ‘Trace…’ I went through twenty of those, you know?”

Twenty failed completions, across roughly six months. Robinson turned the cassette over, wrote other songs, produced other records, toured, and kept coming back to the unfinished chorus the way the tongue returns to a broken tooth. The lines he already had described a face performing happiness — a smile out of place, an expression that would not survive close inspection. What the lyric needed was a physical trace, something the eye could actually follow on a human face, to prove the grief the smile was denying. Scars were too melodramatic. Red eyes were too plain, and Robinson disliked the literalness of it. The song sat in the drawer of his mind, three-quarters built, while its author — by then the most reliable songwriter at the most reliable hit factory in America — could not finish it.

The answer, when it came, arrived by the most domestic route imaginable. “One morning, just by chance, I was shaving,” Robinson recalled, “and somehow or other the thought just came to me: ‘What if somebody had cried so much their tears left tracks on their face?’ I said, ‘That’s it.’” He would refine the image in a 2006 interview with NPR — “Like footprints on my face” — but the breakthrough was complete in that bathroom moment. Tracks: the word did everything at once. It was visual, something a lover could genuinely trace. It was permanent, a record of crying that no smile could wipe away. And it carried the ghost of the railway and the road, of journeys and departures, inside a song about a woman who had left. The six-month block dissolved in days. Robinson finished the verses around the concept the chorus had been waiting for: a man who is the life of the party, laughing loud and hearty, while deep inside he is blue.

The Masquerade

It is worth pausing over what Robinson built once the key turned, because the finished lyric is a small masterpiece of construction disguised as a simple lament. The narrator of “The Tracks of My Tears” is not a man alone in a room. He is a man in company — at the party, with another girl on his arm, performing recovery. The song’s whole architecture is the distance between the performance and the fact. Outside, he is masquerading. Inside, his hope is fading. His smile, in the bridge’s extraordinary phrase, is his make-up, worn since his break-up: cosmetic, applied, a clown’s face painted on by hand each morning.

This is why the song towered over the standard heartbreak material of its season. Most pop laments of 1965 asked for sympathy; this one staged an inspection. The singer invites the lost woman — and by extension every listener — to examine the evidence of him at close range, to read his face the way you would read a document. The metaphor of the tracks gives the grief a forensic quality: tears are not described as flowing, which any song can do, but as having left marks, which turns past suffering into present proof. The man has not merely cried; he has cried so much that the crying is now part of his features. Robinson, who was twenty-five and already the acknowledged poet laureate of Detroit soul, had found the image that would outlive everything else he wrote — and he had found it, fittingly, looking at his own face in a mirror, seeing what a close look reveals.

The verses play variations on the single conceit with a craftsman’s economy. The party scene establishes the public self. The second verse, with the substitute girl who is cute but temporary — “you’re the permanent one” — deepens the humiliation: even his attempts at moving on are auditions for an audience of one departed woman. Nothing in the lyric strays from the premise, and nothing needs to. Three minutes, one metaphor, total conviction. If the song has a “battle” in its writing beyond the six months of block, it is this discipline: Robinson resisted every temptation to widen the song, and let a single close-up carry the whole weight.

The House That the Miracles Built

To understand what the song was fighting within, you have to understand that the Miracles were not merely one of Motown’s acts. They were its foundation stone. Robinson and his friends — Bobby Rogers, Ronnie White, Pete Moore and Emerson Rogers, soon replaced by his sister Claudette — began singing together in Detroit in the mid-1950s as schoolboys, first as the Five Chimes, then the Matadors. In 1957 they auditioned for the management team behind Jackie Wilson and failed to impress — but the audition put them in a room with a young songwriter named Berry Gordy, who had written hits for Wilson and who recognised in Robinson a kindred obsessive. Gordy became their mentor and producer. When he founded his own company at the turn of the decade, the Miracles were its first signing, and in 1960 their “Shop Around” — Gordy and Robinson writing, the group singing — became Motown’s first million-selling record, the proof of concept for everything Hitsville became.

Robinson’s position inside the company grew into something no other artist there matched. He was not simply a star under contract; he was the house’s chief lyricist and one of its chief producers, the man Gordy sent other acts to be finished by. By the spring of 1965 he had written “My Guy” for Mary Wells, “The Way You Do the Things You Do” and “My Girl” for the Temptations, hits for Marvin Gaye and the Marvelettes — a catalogue of other people’s signature songs so strong that his own group’s records competed, in effect, against Smokey Robinson songs performed by his rivals. The Miracles were Motown’s first family and its resident paradox: the most decorated songwriting engine in the building fronted the group, yet the company’s newest sensations — the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops — were the ones stacking up number ones while the founding act’s own singles, however beautiful, kept landing in the teens.

That is the pressure inside “The Tracks of My Tears”. It was made by the group that had built the house, at the moment the house was filling with louder tenants. It was made, too, by a group still functioning as a genuine collective — Moore arranging voices, Tarplin bringing in music, Robinson finishing — inside a company increasingly organised around solo brands and production teams. The song’s six-month gestation and its quality-control argument were not interruptions of the Motown method. They were the method, applied by its originators, to a piece of material whose worth the market was about to underestimate for four decades.

Inside the Snakepit

The record was cut at Hitsville U.S.A., in Studio A — the converted garage at 2648 West Grand Boulevard that everyone at Motown called the Snakepit — in the spring of 1965, with Robinson himself producing. The ingredients assembled there represent the Motown machine at its most refined. The Funk Brothers, the label’s uncredited house band, laid down a track of deceptive lightness: the drums pattering with a hesitancy that sounds almost like reluctance, the bass moving in melodic counterpoint, Tarplin’s guitar figure chiming at the front like sunlight on water. Members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra added the string wash that lifts the record out of the garage and into the widescreen. Behind Robinson, the Miracles — Claudette Rogers Robinson, Pete Moore, Ronnie White and Bobby Rogers — sang the wordless doo-doo syllables that frame the record, a Caribbean-tinged echo of the Belafonte source, arranged under Moore’s direction.

Robinson’s lead vocal is the record’s defining wager. He sings the whole performance in his high, feather-edged tenor, close to the microphone, almost conversational — no shouting, no gospel theatrics, none of the pleading melisma that soul singers used to prove sincerity. The restraint is the point: this is a man maintaining his composure in public, and the vocal maintains it too, cracking only in implication. When the chorus arrives, the famous line is delivered not as a wail but as a quiet instruction — take a good look — as if the singer were simply pointing at the evidence. It remains one of the most imitated and least successfully imitated vocals in soul music, because what it requires is not range but control: the sound of a smile being held in place by main force.

Consider, too, the record’s dimensions: two minutes and fifty-five seconds, in which the arrangement never once crowds the voice. The calypso bounce in Tarplin’s figure gives the grief a terrible lightness — the sound of the party still going on around the singer — while the strings supply the interior weather the words describe. That tension, between the rhythm’s social smile and the lyric’s private devastation, is the song’s subject rendered in pure sound. Motown’s engineers, mixing for car radios and jukeboxes, kept the tambourine high and the voices higher; but nothing in the commercial polish blunts the design. Every element of the record is performing the same double act as its narrator: bright on the outside, blue within. It is as complete a fusion of lyric and arrangement as the company ever achieved, and it was achieved by the group its founder had signed first, working in a garage.

Released on June 23, 1965, on Motown’s Tamla label as Tamla 54118, with “A Fork in the Road” on the flip, the single carried the group billing in transition — the world was learning to call them Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, a change that said much about where Motown saw the value residing. As a piece of record-making, though, “The Tracks of My Tears” belonged to the collective as completely as anything the company ever released: Tarplin’s figure, Moore’s harmonies, Robinson’s words and voice, the Funk Brothers’ touch, the Symphony’s strings. The machine had made many hits. It had rarely made anything this balanced.

The Meeting That Changed the Ending

The song nearly went out into the world in a lesser form, and its rescue is the most famous quality-control story in the Miracles’ history. As first recorded, Robinson had ended the performance by fading out on the pleading coda — the repeated “I need you, need you” — letting the record dissolve on the beg rather than conclude on the chorus. It is a defensible artistic choice; fades were the era’s grammar, and the pleading tail is genuinely affecting. But it meant the record left its greatest asset — the chorus, the title image, the thing a listener carries away — behind.

Motown in 1965 ran the most feared internal review process in the business. Finished records were played at the company’s regular product meetings — in Robinson’s own account of this episode, one of the famous Monday morning meetings — and scrutinised by Gordy and the gathered staff, salesmen and songwriters together, with careers and release schedules riding on the verdicts. Records could be killed, sent back, or reordered there. When “The Tracks of My Tears” was played in that room, the consensus pushed back on its ending: the song, the meeting argued, should finish on its chorus. Robinson listened, and was persuaded. The ending was rebuilt so that the record closes with the full choral statement — take a good look at my face — rather than expiring in the fade.

Understand what it meant for that argument to happen at all. Motown’s meetings were built on a principle almost no other label dared to institutionalise: that a record could be interrogated before it was sold, by people whose job was to be unconvinced. Gordy’s favourite test hung over every playback — if a hungry man had one dollar, would he spend it on this record or on a hot dog? A record that could not beat lunch did not ship. The system generated friction by design; producers dreaded it, fought it, and privately admitted it caught what affection missed. For the Miracles’ new single, it caught an ending. The fade Robinson had chosen dissolved the record’s plea into the air; the meeting’s ending returned it to the song’s central demand, the close look at the face, and made the listener’s last impression the image the whole record existed to plant. Singles lived or died on such impressions — on what a listener hummed in the car afterwards. The factory had, on this occasion, out-produced its own best producer, and its best producer was big enough to let it.

It is easy to file this under executive interference, the factory sanding down the art. The truth is more interesting, and more characteristic of Motown at its best. The quality-control meeting was the one place in Gordy’s empire where hierarchy partially dissolved in front of a loudspeaker: the test was the record, and on this occasion the record’s makers in the room heard what its producer, too close to his own six months of labour, had missed — that a song about evidence should end by presenting it. Robinson’s willingness to be overruled on his own masterpiece, in his own company’s meeting, by his own colleagues, is part of why the masterpiece exists. Berry Gordy, who rarely surrendered a superlative, would later say the song represented Robinson’s best work. The meeting he built had helped make it so.

Number Sixteen

And then the song was released, and the charts delivered their famously inadequate verdict. “The Tracks of My Tears” rose through the summer of 1965 and stalled at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. On the R&B chart it fared better, reaching number 2 — held from the summit, one suspects, by the sheer traffic of a season in which great soul records were queueing weekly. In Cash Box it peaked at number 18. In Britain, issued in 1965, it did not chart at all. Measured against the Miracles’ own “Going to a Go-Go”, which would crack the pop top ten within months, or against the Supremes’ assembly-line supremacy, number 16 looked like what it was: a solid, respectable, unspectacular result for the label’s flagship male group.

Yet the numbers have a second story to tell, because the record did not behave like a number-16 single. It sold, and kept selling: within two years it had passed a million copies, the Miracles’ fourth million-seller. Radio did not let it go. The song finished 1965 at only number 78 on Billboard’s year-end chart — an accounting of its chart weeks, not of its penetration — but in the real world of jukeboxes, oldies programming before the term existed, and singers learning their craft, “The Tracks of My Tears” was becoming furniture: permanent, assumed, everywhere. The industry had a category for records like this, though it rarely applied it to soul ballads by Black groups in 1965. It was becoming a standard — and standards are measured in decades, not chart weeks.

The slow climb is the central fact of the song’s biography, and it should be stated plainly: almost nothing about the record’s first reception predicted its eventual rank. The song that would be called the greatest Motown ever released was, on release, not even the Miracles’ biggest hit of its own album cycle. Posterity would have to do the work that promotion could not. It did — but it took forty years, and it did the work in stages, each generation of listeners and critics re-marking the record upward like examiners who had initially skimmed the paper and missed the best answer in the class.

The Album, the Billing, the Group

“The Tracks of My Tears” anchored Going to a Go-Go, the album the Miracles released in November 1965 and the most successful of their career — a record that caught the group at a genuine peak. Its four singles charted in sequence through 1965: “Ooo Baby Baby” first, then “The Tracks of My Tears”, then “My Girl Has Gone”, then the title song. Few vocal groups in pop history have front-loaded an album with material of this density, and the album’s success underlined the strange arithmetic of the group’s position. The Miracles were Motown’s founding act, the group that had given the company its first million-seller with “Shop Around” in 1960, the act around which Gordy had built the corporation. They were also, by 1965, being repackaged.

The repackaging is visible in the billing. The album and the reissued single carried the name “Smokey Robinson and the Miracles” — a small typographical earthquake. Until then they had been simply the Miracles, five (then six) voices in a democracy of matching outfits. Gordy’s marketing instincts said that Robinson’s name was the bankable asset: he was the writer of “My Girl” and “My Guy”, the label’s resident poet, the face interviewers wanted. The new billing was commercially sensible and personally corrosive. Pete Moore, Bobby Rogers, Ronnie White and Claudette Robinson did not become less essential to the records in 1965 — the harmonies on “The Tracks of My Tears” are inconceivable without them — but they became, on the label’s own packaging, an accompaniment.

This is the quiet battle running beneath the song’s whole afterlife, and it matters that the song itself resists the billing. Its writing credit names three Miracles. Its opening belongs to the guitarist. Its background arrangement belongs to Moore. The record is the group’s collective masterpiece released under one man’s growing brand — a tension everyone involved could feel, even as the brand grew more valuable and the democracy of the nameplate receded. The world would spend the next half-century catching up to what the label copy tried to simplify.

Carried by Other Voices

If the charts undervalued the song, singers did not — and it was singers who began its long reclamation. In 1967, Johnny Rivers took “The Tracks of My Tears” to number 10 on the Hot 100, three places higher than the Miracles had managed, in a version that put the song in front of the white pop audience Motown had courted but not fully reached with the original. In 1969 Aretha Franklin recorded it for her Soul ’69 album and saw it issued as a single, where, flipped under “The Weight”, it reached number 21 on the R&B chart — the Queen of Soul treating a two-year-old Motown ballad as contemporary repertoire. The same year, 1969, the original finally conquered Britain: reissued in the great Motown revival of that summer, the Miracles’ own record climbed to number 9 on the UK chart, four years after British buyers had ignored it entirely.

Then came the version that fixed the song in a new generation’s ear. Linda Ronstadt recorded “Tracks of My Tears” for her 1975 album Prisoner in Disguise, produced by Peter Asher, and her single reached number 25 on the Hot 100, number 4 on the adult contemporary chart, and — in tandem with its B-side duet with Emmylou Harris, “The Sweetest Gift” — number 11 on the country chart. Ronstadt, the defining female rock singer of the decade, sang it straight and true, and her respect for the song became part of its legend; in May 1983, on the Motown 25 television special, she and Robinson performed it together, the cover artist and the author sharing the song as equals, twenty years of the long climb compressed into one duet.

The covers kept coming — Go West took it back into the UK top twenty in 1993, at number 16 — but by then the pattern was set. “The Tracks of My Tears” had become one of those rare songs that other artists record not to improve or to sell, but to measure themselves: a fixed star of the repertoire. Each cover functioned as a fresh review the original had never received in 1965, and each returned the listener to the Miracles’ record, to Tarplin’s guitar and Robinson’s held smile, with the force of a recommendation from a trusted friend.

The roll of interpreters tells its own story about the song’s reach across the fences the industry had built. A white LA rocker, Johnny Rivers, carried it highest on the pop chart. The Queen of Soul claimed it for an album of contemporary material in 1969. Ronstadt, a country-rock singer from Tucson, made it a hit on the pop, adult contemporary and country charts simultaneously — three audiences agreeing on one Detroit ballad. Shirley took it into the Australian top twenty in 1977; Colin Blunstone, the English voice of the Zombies, took it back onto the UK chart in 1982. Soul, rock, country, MOR: the song passed through every category the business used to keep records apart, and belonged in each. Songs do not achieve that by fashion. They achieve it because the human situation they describe predates every category, and because the describing was done once, definitively, in a Detroit garage.

The Honours Arrive

Posterity’s paperwork, when it finally arrived, arrived in bulk. The Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts placed the song at number 127 on their Songs of the Century list, the 365 greatest songs of the twentieth century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it among its 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. ASCAP gave its writers — Robinson, Moore and Tarplin together, the three names on the label — its Award of Merit. A panel of twenty of the world’s leading songwriters and producers, including Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Hal David and Jerry Leiber, convened for Britain’s Mojo magazine, placed it at number 5 on their list of the ten best songs of all time: five of the greatest tunesmiths’ judges in existence putting a number-16 single from 1965 in their all-time top five.

The institutional honours followed the critical ones. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked the Miracles’ original at number 50 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2007 the recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2008 the Library of Congress preserved it in the National Recording Registry as a work of cultural, historical and aesthetic significance — the United States government formally filing a Detroit soul single among the sounds the nation must keep forever. And in 2021, Rolling Stone, revisiting the entire Motown catalogue, delivered the verdict that completed the arc: “The Tracks of My Tears” was ranked the greatest Motown song of all time. Not the greatest Miracles song. Not the greatest soul ballad. The greatest record, of the hundreds the most celebrated hit factory in history ever produced, was the one that had peaked at number 16.

It is worth standing back from that list, because it demonstrates something the record business of 1965 had no mechanism to know. Every one of these honours was conferred by listening again. The song did not change: the same take, the same guitar figure, the same ending the Monday meeting rescued. What changed was the jury. Chart positions are awarded by a fortnight’s buyers; canons are awarded by decades of them, and “The Tracks of My Tears”, built on a single perfect metaphor and sung without a wasted gesture, was engineered — accidentally, then deliberately — to win the long vote.

Three Names on the Label

The last battle is the one the honours themselves keep half-losing: the battle for shared credit. The song’s formal recognitions mostly got it right — ASCAP’s award went to all three writers; the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Registry honour the Miracles’ recording itself. But the culture’s shorthand did not. “The Tracks of My Tears” is filed in the public mind under Smokey Robinson, genius, with the Miracles as a kind of elegant scenery — the billing of 1965 hardened into the memory of the song.

The record contradicts the shorthand in every bar. Remove Marv Tarplin and the song has no opening, no musical cell, no reason to exist; remove Pete Moore and it has no harmonic architecture and no third of its writing; remove Claudette Robinson, Bobby Rogers and Ronnie White and its choruses lose their ache. Robinson himself, to his lasting credit, spent decades saying so — naming Tarplin as the song’s originator in interview after interview, insisting on the group’s authorship of the group’s masterpiece. Tarplin, who left the Miracles’ touring ranks in the early 1970s, died in 2011, a year before the Miracles were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a group — an induction from which Robinson, already inducted solo in 1987, stood aside so the others could take the honour as their own. The guitarist who started the song was not there to hear the applause. He is there in the first four bars of every playing, which may be the more permanent venue.

The case of Pete Moore sharpens the point. Moore was the group’s bass voice, its vocal arranger and Robinson’s most frequent collaborator inside the group — the man who built the cushion of harmony that every Miracles lead floats on, and who shared the writing of this song and of “Ooo Baby Baby” and dozens more. In the public story he is a footnote. Yet when the Motown 25 cameras rolled, when the anthologies were compiled, when the awards were struck, the documents kept quietly telling the truth that the marketing had obscured: three writers, six Miracles, one record. The battle for the song’s credit is not really a battle between the men themselves — Robinson’s advocacy for his bandmates is a matter of record — but between the archive and the brand, and the archive, bar by bar, is winning.

That the group’s defining record is also the clearest evidence of their collective genius is the song’s final irony and its final justice. “The Tracks of My Tears” was not a solo performance with backing. It was what the Miracles, at their 1965 peak, could do together and no one else could do at all.

Why It Endures

Why does this song, of all the thousands Hitsville produced, sit at the top of the pile sixty years on? Part of the answer is craft: a metaphor so complete that psychologists could teach from it, a melody carried on one of pop’s great guitar figures, a vocal of supernatural composure. Part is the theme’s universality — everyone who has ever smiled at a gathering while privately in pieces has lived inside this song’s three minutes, and everyone knows the exact social labour it describes. And part is that the song’s own biography enacts its lyric. It smiled in public for years, a modest hit among giants, while the depth of it waited underneath for closer inspection. Take a good look at its chart position, and it looks out of place. Look closer, and it is easy to trace the truth: the marks left by the most beautiful crying in pop.

Robinson went through twenty discarded endings for the thought before the mirror gave it to him. The industry took forty years to finish the same sentence. Both were looking for the word that would make the evidence legible. The word was tracks — and the tracks, once cut, never faded.