Frances scowled. She said, “Can’t you just stay here, Ray? Let me lie in bed, with you on one side, and the telephone on the other, just for the night! Please.”

Ray laughed. “Ho, I suppose that might be all right.”

“Thanks! And Ray, don’t talk about Napoleon, all right?”

“All right.” Ray undressed. He was plump, and that pleased Frances. She looked away, thinking of other things: the insomnia, the strange non sequiturs she overheard neighbors speaking through the phone lines, and her dog. Immediately, she fell into a hapless, jagged doze, only to wake moments later, frightened back from the horizon of unconsciousness, for she had seen a turtle there.

Munson was hard on folks, she guessed, tossing in the bed, punching back the stiff coverlet. There was a sense of shame and difficulty in the town, though it was hard to say why. It wasn’t easy to find another point of view, either, since Munson didn’t much care for newcomers, and they stayed away. Companies and industries—ones that made gadgets—rarely settled in Munson or the adjoining Little-Munson, though they headed in sure droves for other Florida towns.

Frances recalled passing along Munson’s main street that day and seeing the remains of a tattered, blowing poster on a pole asking as to the whereabouts of Josh White. He had been, she recalled, an argumentative boy of about thirteen. A year ago, Josh White had gone looking for his dog, who had run into Munson’s oil-black nighttime streets. It seemed that the dog was lost, but it had in fact been detained by one of the town’s sheriffs, and later the dog died, though no one could say why, only that there had been some type of a mix-up. Josh White got mad then. He fought loudly with his mother all that week in their cabin on the forest hill. The boy told his mother he would never forget the dog, though she pleaded with him to do so. But over the next month Josh White grew worse, not better, walking alone through the town late at night, hurling dirt chunks at Hodgkins’ Movie House and other local businesses. Finally, his state of mind seemed to turn entirely: when spoken to, the boy would only open a wet, rosy mouth to scream, so in a short while, his mother took him to Ohio. After weeks the boy returned, again milling around town resentfully, and shortly after that, no one ever saw Josh White again. Secretly, Frances was a bit envious of the teenager, if only because she wanted to leave Munson, too.

Lately, Frances had been thinking of various plans to leave, but they seemed to her shaky, laughable plans.