“To prevent rickets, child. Scurvy, if we don’t have any oranges this year. Don’t you read the internet?”

“We don’t have internet at the farm.”

“Oh.” Phil was sucking on a toothpick. “How’s your mama?”

My hand stopped on a canteen. The leather casing felt like a living hide under my fingers, bunched with wrinkles, dry rivers of skin. I thought of the calf skeleton again. “Great,” I said. “She and Lobo are doing real good.”

I drifted away past Phil’s stand, and though he may have called something to my back, I ignored it. We were fine; I was fine. I was certainly not out there alone on the farm. I was certainly not thinking of leaving it all behind, leaving the farm unprotected, driving away and locking the gate forever.

I was sure Phil was one of Lobo’s customers, or had been. Maybe one of the men who came up to the farmhouse to visit with him and Mama after I was shut up in my place for the night. Was Phil one of the men who had angered him somehow, asked for too much, paid too little, tried to touch something that wasn’t his?

Lobo called these customers problems. He solved problems with his fists. Sometimes that’s the way you’ve got to do it, he said. People need a lesson they can see on their skin.

The smoke on those evenings was so thick it drifted down like mountain fog to my door. I swore I could taste it in my sleep. I was surprised the drug dogs didn’t come after us those nights, alerted to the scent as they stuck their heads out of windows, riding in the staties’ cars down the road.

Frost whitened the pavement. I glanced behind me and could see, at the other end of the parking lot, the overhang of the gas station. The line for propane slunk around the wall. I checked my phone. Grayson would still be waiting.

The roller rink was ancient. A friend of Lisbeth’s and mine had had a birthday party there when we were in junior high. I couldn’t remember the girl’s name. Kids would smoke in the bathrooms of the rink, and we came back stinking. After that, her folks forbid Lisbeth from skating again. Or maybe The Church had banned it—along with YouTube, women and girls driving, shorts. Later on there was a fire, but the rink had reopened quickly afterward, tinged with an ashy smell that we found exciting, like riding in fast cars, sticking five sticks of gum in our mouths at once, the choking game. The fire-ghost scent hung around the rink, skulking like a boy. It never went away. I wondered if the weather had finally closed the rink.

Then I found the Pumpkin King.