“She got me my first job,” Caddy said. “She was stripping first. I met her out in Memphis at some club, drinking and partying like you do when you’re that age. Right? Ansley always seemed to have money. The best clothes. Hair and nails done, lots of jewelry. And boys. Damn, Ansley Cuthbert was the queen bee. When you met her out, she’d have a minimum of six, eight boys buzzing around her.”

Caddy looked out at the dark, rainy landscape, the trucking companies, garages, liquor stores, pool halls, and cut-rate motels. This was always the crossover, the river of grit, before you got into Memphis proper. It was still early, but girls were working the big truck stop by Shelby Drive. Across the street was a Best Western that used to rent out rooms by the hour, one of the closest motels to Dixie Belles, a regular for businessmen who didn’t want to take their girls back to the Peabody or the Madison downtown. There was a barbecue restaurant in the lobby and Jacuzzis in every room. Sometimes she’d fly so goddamn high she didn’t realize or give a damn where she was headed, only that the money was right and she got paid up front. Those four years never seemed real to her, nothing but images from a fuzzy dream, anesthetized to pain and feeling nothing but indifference. Shots of Goldschläger, big glasses of Jack Daniel’s, lots of blow on little compact mirrors, Ecstasy, enough weed to choke a goat, and finally stuff you shot into your veins, pushing the plunger to unclog your fucking head and feel even less. There used to be a Western-wear shop on the corner behind the Wendy’s where she’d buy getups for her stage show, belt buckles and big hats, fancy boots and spurs. Now the shop was gone, only a big ceramic red boot out by the highway.

“Tell me where to turn.”

Everything was the same but different. Across the highway from an old farmhouse where she used to shoot up was a sprawling intermodal facility, slapping Conex containers onto 18-wheelers or loading them onto trains. Giant cranes, lit up in the dark, lifted those big containers from a stacked maze of hundreds and put them onto the right track and the hell out of Memphis. In the light and the rain, the whole setup looked like a kid’s toy room, an Erector Set with train tracks.

“Here,” Caddy said.