Reno, Nevada
Reno, Nevada back then was as good a town as any and likely better than most. Not a bad place to wind up when he came back home from the war. Things worked out fine for a while. But just as he figured, his flair for card playing began to fade. He thought about going...
Twin Falls, Idaho
Twin Falls, Idaho sidestepped the worst of the late spring snowstorm. It curled south at the last minute. The weather forecasters on TV said it was a big one. They were even on the verge of assigning the storm a particularly fearsome name. They pasted on their most...
Vernal, Utah
Vernal, Utah is where something as cryptic as love itself prompted her to turn on the car radio. This was something she had not done in years. She had drifted away from listening to the car radio, quite strange given how there had been a time she would not have...
Jerome, Idaho
Jerome, Idaho, the whole damned town, woke up on the wrong side of the bed. This included the woman who opened the Red Star Café in Jerome every morning at four-thirty. Driving in to work that morning, it dawned on her that intimacy was an impossibility, with him in...
Holbrook, Arizona
Holbrook, Arizona affected her in ways she was not expecting. It was as if she was familiar with every inch of town before she arrived. She was certain she would know the people she would run into, how cold it would feel at night and in the morning how the sunlight...
Riley, Oregon
Riley, Oregon stirred up a buried sadness that caught him off guard. It wasn’t the town but a lingering stain that scarred the sky. Months ago the forest fires raged. The smoke was gone but those stains were still there. He wanted to know why the fires were so much...
Hobbs, New Mexico
Hobbs, New Mexico glimmered through the dust. It shrank into his rear-view mirror, a wobbling string of distant lights back in town flickering and fading. That’s how it was, along with warm memories of the Saxony Steak Room. The memories reminded him of another...
Ajo, Arizona
Ajo, Arizona sank into restless sleep under a sky without stars. Each night the townspeople dreamed each pretty much the same dream. They kept walking along scarred railroad tracks out toward the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. They kept looking for the...
Sheridan, Wyoming
Sheridan, Wyoming is where he wound up renting a drafty warehouse by the Sheridan County Airport. He quickly filled it with old Wurlitzer jukeboxes. They came in by the truckload, all of them beat up, windows cracked or shattered, turntables cockeyed, tubes burnt...
Kanab, Utah
Kanab, Utah probably wasn’t going to become a town where you could get a decent cup of coffee. But there was a redeeming quality. That clutch of angels parading down the highway around sunrise every morning past a Mexican Restaurant. They were as real as the...
Hesperia, California
Hesperia, California was where it dawned on me the hellhound was on my trail. Robert Johnson knew what was happening. “Blues fallin' down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail.” This is precisely what seems to unfold when you drive through Hesperia, California. You...
Nipomo, California
Nipomo, California was where Dorothea Lange took a picture that seemed to sear us with all the anguish of the Great Depression. That woman whose picture Dorothea Lange took, she stood as a bulwark against all those forces working against her. If your first glance...
Gunnison, Colorado
Gunnison, Colorado is where he landed after they paid him off and suggested it might be best if he disappeared. He rolled into town in a brand new 1961 DeSoto, drew on what he had learned long ago about the backcountry up in the Adirondacks, and went to work as a...
Klamath Falls, Oregon
Klamath Falls, Oregon was eventually chosen as the site for the campus of the International Academy of Provocateurs. Some had suggested Cairo, others Istanbul, sentiments leaning toward cities where raffish elements were well entrenched. In the end, Klamath Falls,...
Farmington, New Mexico
Farmington, New Mexico would never see anyone like her again. When she first hit town in 1906, they were just finishing up the railroad to Durango, Colorado. She was dispatched to Farmington by the president of the Denver & Rio Grande Western to inspect the...
El Centro, California
El Centro, California suddenly shook with invisible fury. The sun had just set on a spring evening in 1940 when the earthquake struck. Geologists called it a right-lateral strike-slip. Centered five miles north of Calexico, it ruptured the Imperial Fault, tore up...
Cody, Wyoming
Cody, Wyoming, she made it clear at every opportunity, was the last place she wanted to be. She never mentioned how she wound up in Cody and never shared any of the particulars of an often alluded to fall from grace back east. After she flunked out of real estate...
Gold Beach, Oregon
Gold Beach, Oregon was the return address handwritten on the large manilla envelope, no name, just a post office box. She was certain she didn’t know anyone in Gold Beach or anywhere in Oregon, although a cousin she lost touch with long ago once worked for a summer...
