Jesse grabbed her hand and pulled it to his chest. “I want to come with you,” he said.

“You’ll have to leave everything behind, your whole life,” Claudine said. “You’ll be an outcast. You’ll live by new laws.”

“Your law,” Jesse said. “I’ll live by your law.”

Claudine turned him that night. He remembers her blood trickling down his throat, the heat of it, the stink of it. He remembers the thunder in his brain and the lightning in his veins as he was destroyed and reborn.

“How long did you go out?” Johona says.

“Not long,” he says.

“Did you break up with her, or did she break up with you?”

More memories come, memories Jesse doesn’t want to revisit. “Tell me something about you now,” he says.

Johona puffs on her cigarette. “I’ve been thinking I’d like being a chef,” she says. “Not a cook, a real chef.”

“You any good in the kitchen?”

“I burn water, but I could learn. My plan is to go to cooking school somewhere cool like L.A. or New York, somewhere something’s happening. Have you ever been to L.A.?”

“Lots of times,” Jesse says.

“Isn’t it bitchin’? My old boyfriend and me went once. Venice Beach, Universal Studios. We got stoned with this old hippie and walked all the way down Hollywood Boulevard.”

“L.A.’s too big for me,” Jesse says. “I’m a country boy.”

“I love that it’s big. I love that you can get lost there.”

Edgar stands and points.

“Skunk,” he says.

Johona stands too.

“Where?”

“Down in them bushes.”

Johona squints.

“It’s too dark,” she says.

“A mama and a baby.”

“Can you see them?” Johona says to Jesse.

Jesse gets up to look. The disgruntled mutter of powerful engines held in check catches his attention instead. Someone’s coming up the road. Headlight beams bounce across the overlook.

“Duck,” Johona says. “If it’s cops, they’ll bust us.”

Jesse crouches and pulls Edgar down with him.

10

10

I KNOW MICKEY MOUSE IS A CARTOON. HIM AND MINNIE AND Tom and Jerry. Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. Woody Woodpecker and Fred Flintstone. Popeye Bluto Olive Oyl Wimpy and all them.

But the folks that show the cartoons are real. You got Quick-Fire McIntyre in Birmingham Uncle Bob in Tucson Mr. Patches in St. Louis Happy Herb in Indianapolis Fred and Fae in Denver Captain Delta in Stockton Cactus Vick in Little Rock and Lorenzo in Tulsa.

I know radio and TV come through the air but the telephone needs a wire. I know everything costs money plus tax. Ten pennies makes a dime. Ten dimes makes a dollar. So do four quarters. I can pump gas and wash bugs off the windshield. I can drive if there’s not too many curves. I bet I can change a tire.