When the food comes, she sits back and claps a hand over her mouth.

“I haven’t shut up since we got here,” she says.

“I don’t mind,” Jesse says. “My life’s boring compared to yours.”

“I don’t believe you,” Johona says. “Tell me about it.”

“There’s not much to tell.”

“You do construction?”

“Sometimes.”

“What about the other times?”

Jesse makes up something new. “I sell cars.”

“Man,” Johona says. “I really wanted you to be a bank robber.”

“How come?”

“So when I’m an old lady I can say I went out with one. I’ll say, ‘We only had one night together, but it was glorious.’”

She’s trying to be funny, but Jesse hears something sad in her voice. For the first time since they sat down, there’s a silence. She sips her beer and avoids looking him in the eye.

“Why’d you ask me out if you’re taking off for Denver?” she says.

“I believe it was you who asked me out,” Jesse says.

“Which was a totally slutty thing to do.”

“You aren’t a slut.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

Johona scoffs at this. “Anyhow, why’d you say yes then?” she says.

“You remind me of someone,” Jesse says.

“A girlfriend?”

“More than that. You could be her twin.”

“So she was super foxy.”

“She was beautiful.”

Johona wasn’t expecting a serious reply. She pauses, then says, “What was her name?”

Claudine. Claudine Dejardin. Though the night Jesse met her, she called herself Pythia.

SEES ALL, KNOWS ALL promised the signboard on her booth, one of many lining the midway of a traveling fair set up in a pasture on the edge of Monongah. A month earlier the same field had been the site of a weeklong outdoor revival meeting, which hadn’t interested Jesse in the least. The fair, though, with its faintly sinister, faintly salacious air and maze of colorful wagons and patched canvas tents, strummed a restless chord in him. So one Saturday, after ten hours of drudgery at the sawmill where he’d been working since he’d been old enough to work, he hurried over to see what he could see.

The encampment was lit by flaming torches and strings of electric bulbs that shone like little suns. A steam calliope whistled out “A Picture No Artist Could Paint” and “My Wild Irish Rose,” the music so loud, you stopped trying to be heard over it after a while and pointed instead. Pointed at the sword swallower and the fat lady, pointed at the shooting gallery and Jacob’s ladder, pointed at the horse that could count. The lights, music, and frenzied whirl of strangeness worked magic on the crowd. Normally stoic farmers grinned around penny cigars, their stone-faced wives tittered like young girls, and their kids gaped goggle-eyed at the spectacle of an honest-to-God African Pygmy sitting on the shoulder of the World’s Tallest Cowpoke.