They tore out the orange trees in the ’30s and replaced them with motels and hamburger stands and filling stations. Then they built a bigger freeway a few miles south that siphoned traffic off the old route, and the motels, burger joints, and filling stations started going under. Those still hanging on are struggling. There’s no money to buy new mattresses or fix neon signs. Broken windows get boarded over, and owners opt to pay electric bills instead of replacing worn linoleum. Not that it matters to the customers they get these days.

The motel Jesse and Edgar are staying in is a horseshoe of ten cabins that hugs a gravel parking lot. Jesse looks back to make sure Edgar hasn’t followed him out before crossing to the drive-in. The drive-in is where the local whores gather and where the truckers who detour over from the freeway come to find them. They favor this spot because there’s room to park their rigs on a half acre of weedy asphalt next to the burger stand, an expanse that was once a used-car lot.

The whores and truckers conduct their negotiations at the drive-in’s four wooden picnic tables. Two girls are on duty tonight. One sits at a table, nursing a cherry Coke and staring into the mirror of a compact; the other pretends to talk on the pay phone. Jesse goes to the window and orders an ice-cream cone from the old man who runs the place. The codger’s paper-thin skin is drawn so tightly over his skull, he looks like he’s about to scream.

“How you?” he says.

“Doing fine,” Jesse says.

He takes his ice cream to an empty table and sits. The girls glance at him but quickly turn away. The one with the compact, a fat blonde, is wearing hot pants and a tube top. She’s got a broken heart tattooed on one of her titties. The other girl is a little Mexican with a droopy eye.

“Sí,” she says into the pay phone, “sí,” all the while watching the road for potential customers.

A hot night wind blowing off the desert swirls trash. Bugs swarm the streetlights, and bats dart in to feed on them. The top of Jesse’s table is rough with names and dates and dirty words gouged into the wood. BIG JOE + MARY. CARL WAS HERE. FTW 13/69 HELLS ANGELS. There’s a pecker shooting jizz and a naked woman on all fours. Jesse runs his finger over the carvings and wonders about the people who made them.

An eighteen-wheeler pulls into the abandoned car lot next door. The engine gives a dusty cough and dies. The man who climbs down from the cab is a bandy-legged cowboy sporting a tiny paper American flag in the band of his Stetson. He does a couple of deep-knee bends before approaching the burger stand, where he tilts his hat to Jesse and the girls before ordering a cheeseburger.