This was it. This was where he had written all of the books. This was where he had eaten and slept and walked and known people and bought things like potatoes and newspapers and gas for his car. Most of the people here had known him. Had known Marshall France.

The main part of the town was on the other side of some railroad tracks. As we approached the crossing, the safety bars started to descend and a bell began its warning. I was delighted by the reprieve. Anything that would postpone our seeing Anna France was welcome. I've always liked to stop and watch trains go by. I remember the cross-country trips that my mother and I frequently made on the Twentieth Century and Super Chief when my parents were still married.

When we got to the lowered bars I switched off the engine and rested my arm on the back of Saxony's seat. It felt hot and clammy. It had turned out to be one of those summer days when the air feels like soft lead and the clouds can't decide on whether they want to downpour or just move on.

"You can let me off here."

"Can you tell us where Miss France lives?"

He stuck his skinny arm between our two seats and jabbed his index finger forward while he talked. "Go to the end of this street, It's about three blocks. Then you take your right onto Connolly Street. Her house is number eight. If you miss it, just ask anyone around there. They'll tell you. Thanks for the ride."

He got out of the car, and when he walked away I saw that he had colorful patches sewn onto both of his back pockets. One of them was a hand giving you the finger, the other was of a hand giving you the V-for-peace sign. Both patches were red, white, and blue, and the fingers had stars all up and down them.

The train turned out to be a slow-moving two-hundred-car-long freight. A passing parade of Erie Lackawanna, Chesapeake & Ohio, Seatrain… Loud, even clickety-clicks, the different sounds each car made when it passed. Then the coziness of the little brick-red caboose when it passed and a guy in its high square window was reading a newspaper and smoking a pipe, oblivious of the world. I liked the whole thing.

When the train was gone, the red-and-white-striped bars began rising slowly, almost as if they were tired and weren't in the mood to go up. I started the engine and bumped the car up and over the tracks. I looked in the mirror and saw that there was no one behind us.

"You see? That's the difference between here and in the East."

"What is?"

"We were just at that crossing for what, five or eight minutes, right? Well, in the East if you were there half that long there would be a line of cars ten miles long waiting to go. Here… well, just look behind us." She did, but she didn't say anything. "You see? Not a car. Not one. That's your difference."

"Uh-huh. Thomas, do you realize where we are on this earth? Do you realize that we are actually here?"

"I'm trying not to think about it yet. It makes my stomach ache." An understatement. I was quickly on my way to being terrified of talking to Anna France, but I didn't want Saxony to know that. I kept thinking of every word David Louis had said about her. Witch. Neurotic. To avoid any more conversation, I rolled my window down all the way and took a deep breath. The air smelled of hot dust and something else.

"Hey, look, Sax, a barbecue! Let's have some lunch."

A big green canopy had been set up in an open lot between Phend's Sporting Goods and the Glass Insurance Company. Underneath the canopy about twenty people were sitting at redwood picnic tables, eating and talking. A hand-painted sign in front announced that it was the annual Lions Club barbecue. I parked the car next to a dirty pickup truck and got out. The air was still and redolent with the smell of woodsmoke and grilled meat. A slight breeze pushed by. I started to stretch, but when I happened to look toward the eaters I stopped in mid-flight. Almost all of them had stopped eating and were looking at us. Except for one nice-looking woman with short black hair who was hurrying by with a couple of boxes of hamburger rolls in her hands, they were all frozen in position – a fat man in a straw hat with a sparerib held near his open mouth, a woman pouring an empty Coke can into a full cup, a child holding a stuffed pink-and-white rabbit over his head with two hands.

"What is this, Ode on a Grecian Urn?" I mumbled to no one.

I watched the woman with the rolls spear open a box with a barbecue fork. The freeze on the rest of them lasted maybe ten long seconds, and then a loud engine noise which turned out to be a truck carrying a palomino horse broke the spell. One of the men behind the grills smiled and waved us over with a greasy spatula.

"There's plenty here, folks. Come on over and support the Galen Lions."

We started over, and the man nodded his approval. There was space on one of the benches, so Saxony sat down while I went over to the smoking grills.

My new pal scraped grease off the silver bars into the fire and called over his shoulder for more ribs. Then he looked at me and tapped the grill. "Connecticut, huh? You came all this way just to taste my spareribs, huh?"

He had on a puffy white cooking glove that was stained grease-brown on the palm. I smiled stupidly and laughed through my nose.

"Now, you see, I got the ribs and Bob Schott over there's got the hamburgers. If I were you, though, I wouldn't eat 'em, because Bob's a doctor and he might try to poison you so he'll have a couple of new customers later."

Bob thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He looked around to see if everyone was laughing as hard as he was.

"But now, you take some ribs from me, and you'll know what good is, because I own the market here and this meat is fresh off the truck this morning. It's the best stuff I've got." He pointed at the grilling ribs. They were basted in a red sauce and dripped hot grease onto the coals, which in turn gave off an almost continual sizzle. They smelled great.

"Sure, Dan, sure. You know that they're just the ones you couldn't sell last week."

When I looked over my shoulder at Saxony to see how all these knee-slappers were going down with her, I was surprised to see her laughing.

"Us dopes's keeping you from eating, friend. What would you and your lady like?"

Dan, the master of ceremonies, was shiny-bald except for some short brown hair on the sides of his head. His eyes were dark and friendly and set into a fat, red, unwrinkled face that looked as if it had eaten a lot of spareribs over the years. He had on a white T-shirt, rumpled tan pants, and black work boots. Overall he reminded me of an actor who died a couple of years ago named Johnny Fox, who was infamous for beating his wife but who nevertheless always played the part in cowboy movies of a cowardly small-town mayor or shopowner. The kind who's afraid to challenge the Dalton gang when they come into town looking to tear everything apart.

My father used to bring home men like Johnny Fox. They always looked astonished that he had actually invited them to dinner. He would come in the front door and yell to Esther, our cook, that there'd be another for dinner.

If I was in the room with my mother, she'd inevitably groan and look at the ceiling, as if the answer were written up there. "Your father's found another monster," she'd say, and then push herself wearily up and out of her chair so that she'd at least be standing when he appeared in the doorway with his new pal in tow.

Looking sheepish and naughty at the same time, he'd boom out, "Look who's in for dinner, Meg, Johnny Fox! You remember Johnny, don't you?"

Johnny would tiptoe forward and shake her hand as if she were an electric eel about to strike. They were all petrified of her and sensed, despite her invariable politeness, that she couldn't stand having them in her house, much less at her table. But the meals went well. There'd be talk about the movies they were working on, gossip, tidbits from their world. Then, when we were done, Johnny (or whoever) would beat as hasty a retreat as possible out the door, thanking Mother obsequiously for the delicious meal. Once a cameraman named Whitey, who'd brained his wife with a toaster and got thirty days for it, fell back over the rubber welcome mat and sprained his ankle trying to get out.