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people we see are a few crypt-lichs in down vests and baseball hats, who drop their cigarettes and lurch off in different directions when they see us coming.
    I have the same prejudices about rural Americans that most urban Americans do, * but this place is nothing anyone chose. When we pass a guy in his twenties on a bicycle, it seems like a brash piece of athleticism until I notice the two-liter Pepsi bottle bouncing off the top of his rear tire and realize he’s single-batching meth.
    “This is horrible,” Violet says.
    “I thought you were from Kansas.”
    “Fuck you. I’m from Lawrence. It’s not like this at all.”
    “I was about to be impressed.”
    “Get over it. But this place shouldn’t be like this either. Bob Dylan’s from around here.”
    “A long time ago.” *
    “And they elected Al Franken, sort of.”
    “And Michele Bachmann.”
    “
These
people didn’t have anything to do with Michele Bachmann. Her district’s way south of here.”
    The convenience store with gas pumps out front is open, at least. I recognize it from the documentary that got sent to Rec Bill. It still has an optical-orange Budweiser poster of an elk in some crosshairs in the window. And two blocks farther up I can see a diner called Debbie’s that has a car in front of it.
    I turn into the lot. Maybe Debbie’s is open too.

    Cat bells go off when Violet and I open the door, the glass of which has been partly broken out and re-backed with plywood. There’s no one in the dining room. But the fluorescents are on, and there’s an “OPEN” sign in the window.
    “Hello?” Violet says.
    At the other end of the room, a blond woman in a white T-shirt comes partly out of the kitchen. Forty-five the hard way.
    “What can I do for you?”
    “Uh… are you serving food?” Violet says.
    The woman stares at us well past long enough for it to be weird. “This
is
a restaurant, Sugar. Sit where you like. I’ll be out in a minute. Menus are on the table.”
    Violet and I take a booth at the front. We’ve spent so much time side by side that it’s startling to look her in the eyes.
    “What?” she says. “Do I have something on my face?”
    “No.”
    She checks her reflection in the mirror anyway. To stop lookingat her I take one of the menus. It’s sticky, like it’s been sprayed with atomized syrup.
    From the kitchen, we hear something metal bang something else. Then a woman, possibly the same one, shouting
“LEARN TO FLIP THE GODDAMN SIGN.”
    “Huh,” Violet says. “Do you think maybe we should leave?”
    “We probably should. I wouldn’t mind giving it a minute, though.”
    Her eyes go wide, all playful and excited. “You mean as part of the
investigation?
”
    The door from the kitchen bangs open harder than you’d think the glass of its porthole would stand—which, maybe, is what happened to the front door—and the woman stalks back to our table like she’s ready to slap us.
    “You kids made up your minds?” she says.
    “Are you sure you’re open?” Violet says.
    “That’s what the sign says.”
    “Right, but we can—”
    The woman smiles grimly. “What are you having, Sweetie?”
    “French toast, please,” Violet says.
    “A hamburger and a chocolate milkshake,” I say.
    “We don’t do milkshakes,” the woman says.
    “What are you, five?” Violet says to me. To the waitress she says “Do you do beer?”
    “Pabst and Michelob Light. We may be out of Pabst.”
    “Two Michelob Lights, then.”
    “You still want that burger?”
    “Sure, thanks,” I say.
    “Hey, are you Debbie?” Violet says.
    “Can’t no one help who they are.”
    On her way back to the kitchen, she stops at a horizontalfreezer along the wall. Takes out a cellophaned pack of prefab French toast. Violet doesn’t see it happen.
    It’s interesting. I’ve been in restaurants this hostile before, but most of them have been in Brooklyn south of 65th Street, or Queens east of Cross Bay Boulevard, and have existed for