Stagg placed his comb back into the jacket pocket. He leaned back onto the bar and studied all the empty space, the possibilities, and how it would soon be filled with clapboard houses, wooden sidewalks, and the booming laughter of children. He looked up and wondered if they couldn’t do something about the metal beams and tin roof. Stagg recalled going to visit the Orpheum Theater up in Memphis when he was a kid and how the ceiling had been painted like the night sky, complete with blinking stars and moving clouds. Surely they could figure out something like that for Johnny Stagg’s Frontier Village. The possibilities just tickled him to death. And maybe, just maybe, it would be something that his son would find to his liking and take an interest. It was gonna be damn hard for the boy to stay away now.

“I better be getting back,” Bishop said. The man had a long beard that came down to his chest and wore dark sunglasses all the damn time.

“See Midnight Man,” Stagg said. “He’ll get you paid and fill up your tank on your way out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Mr. Bishop?”

Bishop stopped, ramrod straight and serious like the military man he’d never been. A damn redneck playing dress-up.

“How about you lose the bullshit about the South rising again?” Stagg said. “I’m getting too old for all that mess. If you and me get that straight from the git-go, the better we gonna get along.”

Bishop didn’t answer, turning on his black military boots and heading for the door.

*   *   *

Quinn liked early mornings on the Jericho Square, right as businesses opened and activity started to buzz in the small downtown. When he’d first come home ten years ago, most of the Square was boarded up, maybe one or two places still alive. Any business left had moved out along the highway, the old movie theater turned into a wayward church with a mentally deficient preacher, the drugstore and hardware stores that been open for decades shuttered. One of the worst sights was of old Nat Sherman’s menswear shop, windows busted, ceiling and floor caved in, with kudzu and weeds growing through the floor and pressing against broken glass. No one had the sense or pride to condemn or raze the building, letting the store return to nature in an old town that resembled something from a third world country. But a lot had changed for the better since then.