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looked.”
    The next morning when we were about to leave, the woman came out of the office and gave us these beautiful lunches she had packed, complete with beer and Milky Way candy bars. She whispered something to Saxony and then went back into the office.
    “What’d she say?”
    “She said that you were too skinny and that I should give you my Milky Way.”
    “You should.”
    “Nothing doing.”
    The whole trip went like that — one nice thing after another — so by the time we got to St. Louis and saw the Saarinen Arch, we were both a little rueful that we’d already come this far. We stopped in the middle of the day in Pacific, Missouri, and wandered around the Six Flags amusement park there. That night we went back to our air-conditioned motel room and made love. She kept saying my name over and over again. I’d never been with anyone who’d done that. Things were so nice now. I looked in all the dark corners of my life and wondered which one of them had something up its sleeve… . No answer. Not that I was expecting one.

3
    I pulled into a Sunoco station and a pretty blond girl with a bright red St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap came out of the garage.
    “Fill it up, please. Also, how far is it to Galen?”
    She bent down and put her hands on her knees. I noticed that her fingernails were short and that two of them were completely blackened. As if something heavy had fallen on them, the blood came up from the finger underneath and stayed.
    “Galen? Oh, ‘bout four miles. You go straight down this road to the junction and turn right, and you’ll be there in a few minutes.”
    She went back to filling the tank, and I looked at Saxony. She was smiling, but she was obviously as nervous as I was.
    “Well …” I flipped my hand in the air.
    “Well …” She dipped her head in agreement.
    “Well, kid, we’re almost there.”
    “Yes.”
    “ The Land of Laughs …”
    “Marshall France Land.”
    The road had long gradual dips and rises, and the ups and downs felt good after the straight monotony of the turnpike. We passed a true-to-life railroad dining car, a lumberyard where the fresh smell of cut wood was in and out of the car in a second, and a veterinarian’s office with the harsh sound of scared and sick dogs barking crazily from within. At the junction there was a stop sign that had been riddled with bullet holes and BB dents that had rusted orange. A kid was standing next to it, hitchhiking. He looked harmless enough, although I admit that a couple of scenes from In Cold Blood flashed through my mind.
    “Galen.”
    We told him that we were going there too and to get in. He had a kind of limp Afro of red hair, and every time I looked in the rearview mirror I saw him either looking me straight in the eye or his burning bush of hair blocking my view.
    “You guys are going to Galen? I saw that you’ve got Connecticut plates.” He pronounced it “Con_nect_-ticut.” “You didn’t come all the way out here to go to Galen, didya?”
    I nodded pleasantly and looked him over in the mirror. A little positive eye contact. The old stare-him-down game. “Yes, we did, as a matter of fact.”
    “Wowie, Connecticut to Galen,” he said sarcastically. “Some trip.”
    I had had so many twerps like him in class that his rudeness didn’t bother me. Boondocks hippie. All he needed was a “KISS” T-shirt and his underpants showing above his blue jeans to make him complete.
    Saxony turned around in her seat. “Do you live there?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Do you know Anna France?”
    “Miss France? Sure.”
    I chanced another look in the mirror, and his eyes were still on me, but now he was contentedly chewing a thumbnail.
    “You guys are here to see her?”
    “Yes, we’ve got to talk to her.”
    “Yeah? Well, she’s okay.” He sniffed and moved around in his seat. “She’s a hip lady. Very laid-back, you know?”
    All of a sudden we were there. Coming over a small rise, we passed a white house with two