"What… are… you… doing?"

Splish splat.

"Thomas, don't do that." She started to laugh. It sounded so much better than the rain. "Don't be crazy! Close the door."

My back was to her, and I felt her grab a handful of my sweatshirt. She laughed harder and gave a strong tug.

"Will you please get back in here? What are you doing?"

I looked up into the rain, and it was coming down so hard and sharp that it forced my eyes closed. "Penance! Penance! All of my fucking life people have been asking me what it was like to be Stephen Abbey's son. Every time I try to answer that question, I sound dumber and dumber."

I stopped flapping my feet. I felt so sad, like such an idiot. I wanted to turn around and look at her, but I couldn't. "I'm sorry, Sax. If I had anything to say, God knows, I'd tell you."

The wind was blowing the rain right into my face. A family walked by and gaped at me.

"I don't care, Thomas." The wind gusted and closed my eyes again. I didn't know if I'd heard her right.

"What?"

"I said that I don't care about your father." She touched my back with the flat of her hand, and now her voice was strong and insistent and loving.

I turned around and put my wet arms around her. I kissed her warm neck and could feel her kissing mine.

"Hold me tight, you old sponge. You've already got me soaked." She squeezed tighter and gave my neck a bite.

I couldn't think of anything to say except for a line from France's book The Green Dog's Sorrow: "The Voice of Salt loved Krang too. When it was with her, it always whispered."

2

We had planned to make the trip in two days, but suddenly we were stopping at Stuckey's for pralines, Frontier Town or Santa Claus Village or Reptile City whenever we saw them advertised, and anywhere in general if we were in the mood.

"Wait a minute. Do you want to see… hold it… the site of the Battle of Green River?"

"I don't know. Sure. What war was it in?"

"What's the difference? Five miles to go. Sax, what's your favorite France book?"

"It's a toss-up between Pool of Stars and Land of Laughs."

"Pool of Stars? Really?"

"Yes, I think my favorite scene of all is in there. The one where the girl goes down to the beach at night. When she sees the old man and the white bird scooping those blue holes out of the ocean."

"Jeez, I couldn't say what my favorite scene is. Something out of Land of Laughs, though. Definitely. But I'd have trouble choosing between a funny scene and a magical one. In many ways I like the funny scenes more now, but when I was little those battles between the Words and the Silence… phew!"

"Thomas, don't drive off the road."

Sometimes we pulled off the highway into a parking area and perched on the hot hood of the car, watching everyone fly by. Neither of us would say a word, and there wasn't any urge to keep moving, to get there.

The first night out, we stayed in a little town just west of Pittsburgh. The people who ran our motel raised black-and-tan coonhounds, and after dinner we took a few puppies out onto the front lawn and let them bite us for a while.

"Thomas?"

"Uh-huh? Hey, catch him before he gets away."

"Listen to me, Thomas, this is serious."

"Okay."

"Do you know this is the first time I've ever been to a motel with anyone?"

"Is that right?"

"Uh-huh. And you know what else? I'm very pleased." She handed me a puppy and stood up. "When I was younger and used to think about my burns all the time, I never thought any man would ever want to go to a motel with me, the way I 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 "Connect-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 thin pillars and a dentist's shingle hanging from a lamppost on the front lawn. Then there was the Dagenais Lawnmower Repair Service in a blue-silver tin shack, a Montgomery Ward outlet store, a firehouse with its big doors swung open but no fire trucks inside, and a grain store that was advertising a special this week on the fifty-pound bag of Purina Dog Chow.