The postman will not tell you who belongs to what mailbox in the post office. I knew that, and so I didn’t bother wandering into the tiny Bingham, New Mexico, post office to ask the question. I could not hang out in the post office waiting to see who opened the box of interest. It was a one-room affair. I therefore mailed a big red-paper-covered box to PO Box 219, Bingham, NM, 87832. Then I waited hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, three days in my Jeep, pretending to look at topographical maps and aerial photographs on my dash, three days in the diner across the road, pretending to study maps and photographs on the table in front of me. I told anyone who wondered about me that I was a petroleum geologist and that I believed there was oil in the area. I left my perches when the postman left for lunch. When the postman left at five I drove to the little town of San Antonio at the junction of the I-5 and US 380 and slept in a Motel 6, with air-conditioning and cable TV.

On day one I sat in one of the three window booths of the Bingham Eatery. They had just months earlier had the seats and stools reupholstered with new vinyl that did not quite match the very old Formica veneer of the tables and counter. The vinyl still smelled new. The clashing reds were unsettling to my eyes, but I was comforted to discover that I was not alone, as the first thing the waitress, DeLois from her name tag, said to me was “Sorry about the colors, but it hasn’t really made anybody sick yet.”

“What brings you here?” was the second thing she said. She was a middle-aged, stout, blond woman set atop spindly stockinged legs. She actually wore a uniform, light blue, a deliberate relief perhaps from the fighting reds.

“Work,” I said.

“It would have to be, ’cause we ain’t on the way to no place. There’s no passing through Bingham. You’re either here because of whatever weird shit brought you here or you’re lost. I pegged you for lost.”

“I’m plenty lost,” I said, “but I know where I am.”

“What kind of work?”

“I’m a geologist. I’m looking for oil.”

“I ain’t never heard of oil in New Mexico,” she said. She tugged at the sash around her middle, her apron. It dented her.

“Not yet,” I said.

“What will you have?” she asked.

I looked at the menu, black marker on whiteboard, set high on the wall behind the counter. “The griddle cakes?”

She gave a surreptitious sidelong glance back at the window to the kitchen and offered me the faintest shake of her head.

“Oatmeal?”

DeLois stared at me without moving.

“Huevos rancheros?”

She nodded, then called the order back to the cook.

“Your name is interesting,” I said.