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there.” I point with my rag. “And up the road a ways is a bar. They call it Hap’s. Right past it, there’s another store, but they don’t sell gas.” I stop and think for a second. Behind me, I hear the woman’s camera clicking, but I’m afraid to look her way. “We got a ball diamond just up there around the bend, but it’s mostly houses, I guess. It’s kinda spread out.”
    “Looks like it,” the man says. He bends down and flicks a speck of dust off the top of his shiny shoe, then straightens back up. “Why the hell do they call it
Knockemstiff
?” he asks. “Seems like a pretty tough name for a place this quiet.”
    I sigh and reach in my pocket for a cigarette, but I’ve left my pack inside. I’ve probably been asked that question thirty or forty times since I started working for Maude, but I’m no storyteller. And the tale of how Knockemstiff got its name sounds stupid, even when the old-timers get loaded and tell it. But these people have come clear from California, and the man is expecting some kind of answer. “Not much of a story,” I say. “Supposedly these two women got in a fight over a man up there in front of the church. One was the wife and the other was the girlfriend. The preacher heard one of them swear she was going to knock the other one stiff.” I shrug and look at the man. “I guess the place hadn’t been named yet. That all happened before I was born.”
    The man nods as I finish talking, and I turn to see the woman standing next to me now, writing something down in a little black notebook. “My wife’s a photographer,” he explains. “We’ve been driving across the country all summer, looking for places just like this to put in her book. It’s been pretty exciting for her.”
    I pull my eyes away from the woman’s made-up face. She’s wearing white slacks and sandals and a soft flowered blouse. I wonder if the man is putting me on, making fun of me in front of his pretty wife. It’s hard to imagine why someone would make a special trip just to take a picture of Knockemstiff, or put such a picture in a book, but then I’ve never been able to figure out why the government sent those VISTA guys here two years ago to help the kids out, either. I look down at the greasy rag in my hands. The pink polish on the woman’s toenails is the same color as her lips. All of her parts match perfectly, and I try to remember if I’ve ever seen that before in real life.
    “Did you know there’s a place called Toad Suck?” the man says, smiling.
    “That’s a good name.”
    “It’s in Alabama,” he says. “Or Arkansas, I can’t remember. Which is it, Charlotte?”
    “Arkansas,” the woman says. She’s fiddling with her camera, taking another glass lens out of the leather bag hanging from her shoulder.
    “It’s hard to believe there’s people that poor in this country,” the man says. “Living in the richest nation in the world.” He shakes his head and frowns, and though I don’t figure he really gives a shit, I can’t help but think that he sounds just like the VISTA man. I smile to myself and remember the first time Gordon Biddle stopped at the store in his short pants and floppy straw hat, looking for volunteers to help build a ball diamond. Someone had talked the paper mill in town into donating a little piece of flat land that sat at the edge of one of their timber stands. The boys from the holler worked like dogs for him all that summer, clearing the field of brush and rocks, smoothing over the rough spots with picks and shovels. Gordon paid more attention to them that one summer than most of their parents ever had. Once or twice a week, he’d load a bunch of them in his station wagon and take them swimming at the state park over by Hillsboro. Then one night he just packed up and left without even saying good-bye, and there was a lot of stupid talk about him and that Russell boy after that. Within a couple of weeks, the government sent another VISTA man,