Rat Town Boogie
November, 1980
"Rat Town, boy.""What?" I was confused."Rat Town. Rat. Town. You want me to spell it? They'll have your muffler there. Forty miles west on the interstate." The parts man leaned over the flyspecked truckstop counter, his hands adding another layer of grease to join the smears that already reduced the stale candy and K-Whopper belt buckles below the glass to distant blurs. Then I looked up and realized that everything in the room, whether behind glass or not, was also...