Thirty minutes away from the interstate, Ray had taken them into what was better known as the middle of nowhere. Kurt had never gone next-door from Texas and he'd always had an image of Louisiana being nothing but marshes and swamps, but the land this far north was pretty average for the middle of nowhere with a two lane road running through its center. Not far up, a sign proclaimed Fontaine's Landing was five miles down a road leading off to their right. Ray turned right.

Fontaine's landing was a tiny town. A small river Kurt had never heard of, a tributary of the Red, sat on its western edge. The day was growing into dusk and the lights were just coming on along a small main street which had a few even smaller streets branching out from it as the remaining area became more sparsely populated the farther you got from the center.

Regular bulbs, tinted yellow to show through the occasional fog, spelled out Jerreau's and OPEN ALL NIGHT was written in neon on a sign in front of the place. The area around it was just about empty of cars and Ray was able to park the rig out in front. No one walked in or out and the street was silent.

Kurt grabbed his backpack--containing a change of underwear, a journal, some essential toiletries, and a few packs of cigarettes--and climbed out of the truck, leaving his duffel inside. "Burgers are on me," Ray said, slamming the door of the truck and heading towards Jerreau's. Kurt slung his backpack over one shoulder and followed him.

The door opened into a short, dim hallway that led into the main restaurant. Walking through, he passed a coat check on his right, empty at present, but with a bored-looking girl sitting at the counter, painting her nails. She didn't bother to look up as they passed.

The main room of the restaurant was empty and dim with windowless brick walls and a linoleum floor. A few booths lined the edges with smaller, circular tables spread around the room. In the far corner, Kurt saw a stage, no longer or wider than a small car, upon which sat a stool and a microphone stand. It was illuminated by a row of track lights, also dimmed.

A waitress approached with some menus in her hand. "Two," Ray said. She nodded and walked away toward one of the smaller tables near the far wall. Kurt and Ray followed.

She dropped the menus on the table. "I'll give you fellas a couple of minutes to figure out what you want," she said, a southern accent dropping certain sounds out of the words.

As she walked away, Kurt slung his pack over the back of the chair and sat down. "That super-chug of coffee's banging at the door of my bladder," Ray said, still standing. "I'm gonna hit the head."

"Sure."

Ray walked back the way they had come and Kurt picked up the menu. It was a pretty simple affair, a single-fold laminated sheet of paper with the Jerreau's logo on the outside. Kurt opened it and started scanning for the cheeseburgers. There were a couple of seafood entrees, a ham-steak special, some meat entrees and side-orders, and no burgers. Holding the menu, he stood and looked for the waitress, who he found over at a small stand by the doors to the kitchen, filling sugar dispensers.

"Hey," Kurt called as he walked toward her, "where are the bathrooms?"

"Back in the hall, across from the coat check," she said, not bothering to look up from what she was doing.

Kurt altered his course and walked into the hall. Just as she had said, across from the coat check, there was a door with a restrooms sign on it, almost invisible unless you were looking for it. It opened into another small hallway which had doors into facilities for men and women on opposite sides. Kurt pushed open the door into the men's room.

Stark white, lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb, the bathroom had one stall, a urinal, a sink, and no Ray. Kurt went over to the stall and knocked on the door. It swung open to reveal an unoccupied toilet inside.

Kurt walked out. Maybe Ray had gone into the women's room by accident, he thought, seeing as the hallway was as dark as the rest of the place. Kurt knocked once, and getting no reply, pushed the door open only to find that it was as empty as the men's room.

This was getting to be more than odd. The menu still in his hand, Kurt walked down the hall out to the coat check, a faster step replacing his previous relaxed pace. "Hey," he said to the coat check girl, causing her to raise her head from the profound attention she'd been giving to her nails. "Did you see the guy I came in with walk by here?"

Her jaw moved a couple of times, chewing her gum as she thought. "Yeah, he left a couple of minutes ago." She went back to painting her nails, applying short, even strokes with the brush.

Kurt jogged toward the door, coming out of it onto an empty street. Ray's truck was gone and Kurt's duffel sat on the sidewalk. Kurt ran out into the middle of the street and looked down it in both directions, but the truck was already out of sight. "Shit," he yelled, throwing the menu on the ground and stamping his foot. "Shit! Shit! Shit!" He kicked the menu which caught the air and dropped less than a yard away. "Fuck!"

Kurt stalked over to his duffel, sitting on it and staring down the street in the direction from which he and Ray had come. Ray was probably getting a big laugh out of it, chortling all along as he headed back to the main highway. Stranded some college boy in the middle of nowhere. He and his buddies would laugh it up over six packs of whatever was on sale. Big fucking joke.

Kurt realized that there was little time for self pity, though. It would take him the better part of a day or more to walk back to the main highway, his duffel and his backpack each slung over a shoulder. If he wanted to avoid that, he had two choices open to him. Either continue sitting on his duffel, looking pitiful, and hope that some good samaritan might come driving along, or go back inside Jerreau's and see what he could find out about getting a ride to someplace a bit more developed where he might get back on route to New Orleans.

He went out into the middle of the street and picked up the menu first. There was no sense in pissing off the management by leaving it sitting out there for the first customer to bring in with a question about how it ended up as a speed bump. He didn't worry about obstructing traffic. The street was as dead as if he were in a western movie and the townsfolk had been given fair warning that the bad guys were about to ride into town.

As he walked back to his duffel, he couldn't help but seethe. At least when he'd got his ass kicked in a fight there was some chance to kick the opposing ass. A situation like this was a sucker punch, sure and clean, without any possibility of reprisal. "You fucking bastard," he shouted, stepping back and launching a kick at his duffel. The toe of his boot connected squarely against the midsection of the bag and sent it leaping. Kurt was not so oblivious, though, that he didn't notice the piece of paper that flew along with it.

It lay six inches from his duffel, face down, and one of the few remaining rays of the sun glinted off of the silver of a paper clip which held something against it. He picked it up. The clip held a five dollar bill to the sheet, obscuring in part a note written on it. Kurt, cheeseburgers are on me. Ray.

The final insult. A token five bucks to pay for a meal he couldn't even get. Kurt almost tore it up, money and all, but then thought better of it. As much as his pride shouted at him to throw the money away, another part of him cautioned about needing every penny he could get. Kurt pocketed the money and then crumpled the note, throwing it onto the sidewalk and spitting after it. He grabbed his duffel and walked back into Jerreau's.

Checking his duffel was interesting. Putting it on the counter, he watched the coat-check girl try to grapple with it. Her wet nails prohibited grabbing the straps, so she set her palms on opposite sides of the bag, pushing inwards as she extended her fingers away from it. Of course this didn't provide enough purchase to lift it, just enough to drag it off the counter and let it fall to the floor as she jumped back to avoid it falling on one of her feet.

"Gee," she said, blowing on her nails then looking at Kurt, "I hope I didn't break nothing."

Kurt couldn't be sure whether she was talking about his bag or her fingernails. "Can I get a ticket," he asked.

She looked at the stack of claim tickets and then at her nails. "Aww, no one checks bags that big here. I'll remember ya."

"Thanks," Kurt said, putting her near the bottom of his mental list of people he'd ask about catching a ride. Entering the main room, he found it empty. Even the waitress was nowhere to be seen. He'd worked in a restaurant afternoons and weekends during high school, bussing tables and washing dishes. The next place to look was the kitchen.

She was in there, leaning against the shelf on which the finished orders were put, chatting with the cook. The sound of the door swinging shut against the jamb caused her to look in his direction, but his presence in the kitchen didn't phase her. "Can I help ya," she asked as the cook looked at him from across the shelf and nodded a greeting.

How to proceed, Kurt wondered. "Ummm," he paused, "that guy I came in here with," he paused again.

"Yeah," the waitress said, her eyebrow raising in expectation.

"Well... umm... he was my ride... and he ditched me."

"Stranded ya here, did he," the waitress asked. Kurt nodded. "Well, ain't no surprise. Seems some trucker or another dumps someone here every couple of weeks or so."

Kurt felt a pang of anger mix with a wave of relief. He was pissed that it had happened to someone else, but at the same time, there was some comfort in not being the first or only. "Well," he said, "I'm trying to get to New Orleans or at least the main highway."

"Don't you worry about it none," the waitress said, leaving the shelf and walking towards him. "Seems all of them find themselves a ride with one of the regulars here. Some of them are pretty helpful." She put an arm around Kurt's shoulders, turning him around. "You just have a seat out on the floor and we'll get you taken care of. Place ought to start filling after it gets dark."

"Thanks," was all Kurt could think to say.

"Don't mention it. You want anything to eat while you wait?"

"I'd sort of been looking forward to a cheeseburger, but I didn't see any on the menu."

The waitress laughed. "Yeah." She turned her head back toward the cook. "Frank, could ya fix this young gentleman a cheeseburger?"

"No problem," Frank said.

Kurt watched the restaurant fill up, the first customer wandering in about a half an hour after he'd wolfed down the cheeseburger, washing it down with two glasses of milk. At least Ray hadn't lied on one point... it was damn good.

The second customer came in about ten minutes after the first, sitting down at the first's table. The third and fourth came in together fifteen minutes later and took their own table. Kurt pulled his journal out of his backpack and made some notes in it; remembrances of the road, a few descriptive sentences about Jerreau's. The waitress, whose name turned out to be Paige, brought him an ashtray, and when she saw him pull out his pack of generic cigarettes, went a step further, going back into the kitchen to bum a real Marlboro off of Frank. "Figure you need a little something good to happen to you today," Paige said, handing him the cigarette. Kurt thanked her. He had two packs of Marlboros stashed in his backpack along with the generics, but he was rationing them.

Within the space of about three hours, the restaurant filled. The first customer was still there, as was everyone who had come in after him. Most of them weren't eating either, just sitting and drinking coffee, talking to each other. Another odd thing Kurt noticed as the place began to fill was that they were all wearing black; black pants, black sweaters or turtlenecks, some in black coats. Many of them wore sunglasses, even in the dim light of the restaurant.

It took a while for the whole atmosphere to click, but finally the people and their clothes caught an association in the back of his mind, dragging it out into his thoughts. From all appearances, they looked like beatniks. He'd seen beatniks at school, a revival of the old counter-culture as coffee houses started making a comeback. Funny thing was that the beat authors he'd studied in literature classes had never really hung out in coffee houses. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs... they'd all hung out in apartments and automats, taking Benzedrine and heroin, reading their works in progress only to a few close friends whose opinions they trusted. Most of the beatniks he'd known, though, were either college students with an overinflated opinion of themselves or yuppie trash who were tied down to jobs and mortgages and spent their spare time playing at mock-rebellion. Instead of uppers and heroin, they preferred espresso and bong hits. What it lacked in authenticity was made even more disappointing by the generally boring poets who would take the coffee-house stages, saying nothing original, but instead using the opportunity to read their poetry as a personal form of group therapy.

Kurt broke his train of thought and looked around the room. As full as the restaurant was, he just didn't feel comfortable about approaching anyone for a ride. They were all sitting at their tables, almost as if they were in their own little cliques, and he could imagine the looks of disdain if he broke in on their conversations, just like the coffee house yuppies when he'd been tempted to jump in on some conversation about an author he liked. He never did, though, expecting that they'd look down their noses at him, a moron at a MENSA convention. One of them would draw some connection from Dostoyevsky through Thoreau and on into Kant, and for all the reading he tried to get in above and beyond class work, he'd still find himself lost and feel like a poser. Yet there was a part of him that did suspect that if he knew all the references, he'd find the guy was just blowing smoke out his ass.

He stayed seated at his little table near the back of the room, partially hidden in the shadows, and not a one of them seemed to notice him. "Heck," he muttered under his breath. "Probably would have been better off sitting on the sidewalk and looking pitiful." He pulled out the pack of Marlboros, drawing out one cigarette, and put the pack in his pocket instead of his backpack. If worse came to worse, he'd go hang out by the door as people started to leave. Considering how everyone was still there, he figured that something would happen on the stage. He'd try and find a ride, maybe a place to crash for the night, once it was over.

As if his thoughts about the stage had been a cue, a man detached himself from one of the tables and walked over to Paige, whispering something in her ear. As he separated from her and walked toward the stage, she went to the wall and turned up the track lights a notch. The buzz of conversation lowered and the attention of the customers turned to the man as he ascended the one step up to the stage and went to the lone stool, taking the microphone from the stand and holding it in front of him as he sat.

He was a scrawny, scraggly character, sporting the standard uniform of black clothing and sunglasses, with an unruly mop of hair standing in sharp contrast to his well-kept Van Dyke beard and waxed moustache. "Evening, folks," he said with about as much energy as a telethon host on valium at four in the morning. "As most of y'all know, tonight's our open mike. I don't guarantee you'll get floored by anyone, but we got a pretty good group of regulars."

Great, Kurt thought, just what he should have expected. A poetry night. If you had a bunch of retro-beatniks, bad poetry couldn't be far behind. But, he reasoned, if he pretended to pay attention and looked thoughtful, it would be to his advantage.

"Our first poet this evening has sipped from the wells of many greats. He's known to quite a few of you and he recently had a poem published in our newsletter. I present to you... the poet Alain."

From behind him, in the darker recesses of the club, Kurt heard a chair slide out and heavy footsteps approach as a scattering of snapping went up around the room. Kurt turned in his seat to see a man he hadn't noticed come in, which in itself was odd as the man was as big as a linebacker, wearing a black coat over a white turtleneck. His short, dark hair framed a square jaw and his eyes were hidden by sunglasses.

As he passed Kurt's table, he paused, sliding his glasses down his nose and looking at Kurt. "How's it going," he asked.

Being this close to him, even in the dark light of the restaurant, Kurt could see a scar running down the left side of Alain's face from eye to lip, and at the end of a length of chain, dangling from Alain's ear, sat a silver wolf's head, with red eyes set in it that almost seemed to glow. His normal response to such a question would have been a standard okay, but something drew a more truthful word out of him. "Shitty," he replied, staring back at Alain.

Standing next to the man would have been one thing, Kurt was no by no means a small man, standing a bit over six feet and having some muscle from working on his uncle's farm during summers, hefting bags of grain and bales of hay daily, but when Alain loomed over him like this, Kurt couldn't help but feel puny. "Too bad," Alain said, sliding the glasses back up his nose. "Catch you later." And suddenly it was broken, Alain walking toward the stage, his movements unusually fluid for a man that big, yet seeming to fit him. Kurt deflated in his chair, slouching and wondering what the heck that had all been about.

The host had left the stage by the time Alain got there. Sitting on the stool, he took the microphone from the stand and the room grew silent. He reached into the hip pocket of his coat, drew out a folded piece of paper, and gripping a corner of it with his thumb and forefinger, snapped it open with a flick of his wrist. "I'd like to read you something inspired by the work of Allen Ginsberg. I call it Growl."

Alain let the edge of the paper rest against his knee as he took a better grip on it, lowered his head for a dramatic moment, then lifted it and began reading. "I've seen the best mouths of my generation destroyed by daylight," he recited, his voice filling the room with a strong presence, "starving hysterical naked, dragging their burning carcasses through the garlic streets at dawn looking for a sanguine fix, canine-headed tricksters burning for the ancient satiating connection to the pumping dynamo in the cyanide of light.

"Who poverty and tatters and dull-eyed and staked sat up baying in the supernatural darkness of cold stone castles floating across the tops of villages contemplating jazz..." The audience sat in a stupor, heedless to anything but his voice. Even Kurt could not deny the compulsion that the voice held, demanding to be heard not in plaintive cries or booming screams, but with an allure that stirred memories of the one kid everyone knew who could have people almost falling into the campfire as they strained forward to hear every word of his whispered tale.

Stopping abruptly, though, Alain crumpled the paper and put it in his pocket, then replaced the microphone and stood. The people in the room, assuming he was done, broke out in a thunderous round of snapping fingers and whistles. Alain raised a hand to stop them and leaned into the mike. "Don't applaud." As they went silent, he left the stage and walked toward the hallway leading out.

For the second time in less than five minutes, Kurt found himself thinking what the Hell was that all about? He recognized bits of it as the opening of Ginsberg's Howl but the rest? He shook his head, trying not to think any more about it as he'd only get himself more confused.

Moments later, the host took the stage again. "The poet Alain, friends and friendettes," he said in that same slow, tired voice. He looked at a pad of paper in his hand, then looked back out at the audience.

"How about some coffee," Kurt heard beside him, distracting him from the stage. He turned in his seat to find Paige standing right next to him with a cup in one hand and a coffee pot in her other. Kurt nodded. "Leaded okay," she asked.

"Yeah," Kurt said as scattered snaps rose up in the room to signify another poet coming to the stage, "sure."

Paige put the cup down on the table and filled it. "Cream and sugar?"

"Uh, neither," Kurt said.

"A man after my own heart," Paige said, smiling.

He returned it with a half-hearted smile of his own. Paige started to turn away, but then turned back. "Oh, you want me to ask Ronnie to make an announcement about you needin' a ride?"

"Uh, yeah. That would be great," he said. At least it would beat sitting on his duffel and throwing his lost-puppy look at people.

"I'll tell him," she said, smiling again, and then walked away.

Kurt turned back to the stage. A goateed man, wearing sunglasses with small round lenses and a black Jerreau's tee-shirt, from which sprouted the palest arms Kurt had ever seen, sat on the stool, clutching a set of bongos between his knees. He paused for a moment, lowering his head and taking a deep breath, then looked out at the audience. Boom-boom-bahbahbah-boom. "Hemocytes, erythrocytes, leukocytes," he said, slow and rhythmic, adding stress on the sibilants. Boom-boom-bah-long pause-bahboom. "Lust-o-cyyyytes-aah! Lots-o-cyyyytes-aah," the poet went on, rising in pitch as he elongated sounds, then dropping at the ends of words. Boom-bahbahbahbah-short pause-boomboomboomboom. "Bright... Cyte... Night..."

A large hand fell on Kurt's shoulder, making him jump. "So what did you think," Alain asked as he moved around in front of Kurt, blocking Kurt's view of the stage.

"Jesus," Kurt said. He paused a moment, the poet going into a bongo solo. "I thought you left."

Alain set his coffee cup on the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down opposite Kurt, the stage in view just over his shoulder. "Went to the bathroom," he said, shrugging off his coat and putting it on the back of his chair. "You didn't answer my question. What did you think?"

This was giving Kurt a serious case of the willies. Even though Alain's sunglasses remained on, he could almost feel Alain's eyes behind them, looking not at him, but through him. And, even seated, Alain dwarfed him. Kurt decided that this was a man he did not want to offend.

"Pretty good. Interesting variation on 'Howl.'"

"Sight, mannnn....," the poet on stage whispered into the microphone, his bongo solo over. "I sight a cyte! There is a cyte within my sight and it makes me, makes me want to buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, bite!" He began pounding on the bongos again, making a frenetic attempt to avoid anything that was even close to a rhythm.

Alain's head turned to watch the action on the stage. "It was a piece of shit, completely derivative," he said as he turned back.

"Yeah, but it's better than this," Kurt said, nodding toward the stage and forcing a weak laugh, trying to hide his nerves with a mocking nonchalance. "What's with the blood and the biting stuff anyway? Is it Vampire night?"

Alain laughed as well, a slow sound that Kurt found unnerving. "Something like that," he said.

Kurt shuddered, but tried to make it as hard to notice as possible. Once again, the thought what the heck is this all about? came into his mind. Why was this guy sitting at his table? He hadn't invited him, he hadn't even seen him until the emcee called Alain to the stage. But here he was, sitting across the table, talking to Kurt like they were friends.

The poet had stopped beating on the bongos and put them down by his feet. "You see, there's a dam of cells, pink and fleshy, holding my prize into its never-ending, coursing, throbbing, pumping journey through the venal streets of the soul." He fell to the stage, flat on his stomach, reaching out and swiping at his bongos like a swimmer. "Bite! Bite! Bite! The cyte! Bite the cyte! Bite the cyte!" Suddenly he stood and leaned into the microphone, caressing it with his hands. "I'll absorb you, my pretty pretty baby. Let me drink you, my city city baby. Let me swoop down and touch that alabaster, ivory, clean and perfumed, not a blemish on it... Please, baby. Please, baby. Please..." He stooped, grabbed his bongos and placed them in the crook of his arm, beating them with each subsequent syllable as he repeated the word "baby" over and over, increasing his volume, speed, and pitch every few beats, twirling around like a dog who saw the arm move though the ball was never thrown, finally falling to the floor in an exhausted heap. He paused a moment, breathing hard, took the microphone stand and pulled it down, bringing the mike to his face. "Oh, yeah, man," he said in a spent hoarseness. "The cyte is allllll right."

For all of this effort, having paused long enough for the audience to realize the performance was over, he received a reluctant round of snaps as the level of conversation in the room rose to a steady buzz.

Kurt reached into his pocket and pulled out the pack of Marlboros. "Mind if I smoke?"

"Yes."

"Okay." Kurt put the pack on the table, but pushed it aside.

The emcee, Ronnie, took the stage again. "The poet Murray, girls and boys." A lackadaisical, obligatory bit of snapping came from the crowd. "Before we go on, I have an announcement to make."

Alain's head turned toward the stage and Ronnie's head seemed to snap into line with it, looking straight at him. "Well, maybe later," Ronnie said, turning his head and looking back at the rest of the audience again. "Coming to the stage next is another regular here. Give it up for the poetess Diana."

"So, tell me about yourself," Alain said.

Now Kurt understood what the heck it was all about. "Hey, look... I'm not... I mean it's okay that you are. You know, live and let live and all that. To each his own. But..." he said, rambling it all out in one breath.

Alain cut him off with a laugh. "Don't worry, Kurt, I'm straight." He took off his glasses and smiled. "100% red-blooded American male." There was a friendliness in his voice, in his eyes, but something still disturbed Kurt. Something about the way Alain said it, something that just didn't sit right. He couldn't quite put his finger on it. He believed that Alain was straight, as he'd said, but there seemed to be a note under the next sentence that rang... not false... just incomplete.

Kurt forced a weak smile for a moment, then his smile disappeared. "How did you know my name?"

"Paige told me. She caught me on the way back from the bathroom. Thought I might be able to help you out."

Kurt slumped in his chair, all the tension draining out of him in a wave of relief. "Thank God," he said with a sigh. That explained why Alain had sat down, why Ronnie had cut off the announcement, why Alain was being friendly. "I'm really sorry about that. You know, thinking you were..."

"Gay," Alain asked, cutting him off. "I'm not offended. I can understand why you might have come to such a conclusion."

Kurt felt even more relieved. He hadn't alienated Alain. New Orleans loomed closer after almost seeming like an impossible goal. "So when are you leaving?"

Alain took a sip of his coffee and swallowed. "Tomorrow night," he said, stealing a glance at the woman on stage.

The words slammed into Kurt like two blows from a sledge-hammer. "T-tomorrow. I'm sorry. I've got people expecting me. I can't wait that long."

Alain turned back to him, putting his coffee cup on the table with a thud. "How much money do you have in your wallet, Kurt? I'll make you a bet. If I don't call it exactly, I'll give you double the amount I'm off by."

Kurt turned his head, eyeing Alain with suspicion. "And what if you're right?"

"You ride with me tomorrow." Alain said it with such casualness that one might think he was talking about the weather.

"I don't think so," Kurt said, sitting up straighter in his chair.

Alain leaned in, looking into Kurt's eyes. Even in the darkness, Kurt could see the irises of Alan's eyes. They were an unusually soft brown. "Come on, Kurt. What have you got to lose? I'll even pay you. All you have to do is help out with the driving and a small task when we get where we're going. We'll have a long way to go and a short time to get there. Either way you make money."

Kurt saw a flaw and pounced on it. "A task? All of the sudden there's a task. What exactly do you need me to do? And, while we're at it, if you have so little time to get there, why are you waiting until tomorrow to leave?"

Alain stole another glance at the stage. "It's nothing big, I assure you. Totally legal. I just need some assistance. And as for why we're leaving tomorrow... I have business to wrap up here first." He turned back to Kurt and fixed his eyes on him again. "Now what about the bet?"

Kurt drew away, pushing himself into the back of his chair. He didn't like the way this sounded. "I don't think so."

Alain didn't move, but no matter where Kurt moved, it seemed as if Alain's eyes were drilling into his. "I know your type, Kurt. You're dirt poor, barely scraping by on part-time jobs and student loans. You didn't hitchhike so you could see the sights. You did it because you couldn't afford a bus ticket. What are the people who are waiting for you going to think of you, dressed in jeans and a discount-store shirt, less in your pocket for the whole trip than they're blowing on dinner tonight?"

Kurt thought about Janine's parents... The stockbroker father and the mother with her foo-foo boutique. He knew they expected better for her. They hadn't sent her to good schools, spent time and energy giving her culture and class, just so she could run off with him; some working stiff who was getting a degree in English and then going for his teaching credential because that was the only way he could get even a partial scholarship without joining the military. Behind his eyes he saw them. At that very moment they were out with family friends whose son had come home from the Wharton School of Business, destined for a Harvard MBA. They all sat in a booth at some snazzy restaurant, a fifty-dollar bottle of wine in an ice bucket by the table, both sets of parents trying to push the two kids together until the silver spoons in their mouths clicked against each other. He could see Janine... laughing at the guy's jokes, not drawing away when he would make the occasional contact of his hand with hers, looking into his eyes and everything beginning to fade away with a "Kurt who?"

"I can't pay you a whole lot," Alain said, breaking Kurt out of his reverie, "but this is a one way trip for me. I won't need the car after we get there. Two days from now, give or take a few hours, you're tooling down to New Orleans with the pink slip and enough money to pay for gas to get there and back. You can make up for the lost time by driving your girlfriend back to school. And you won't look so bad to her parents coming into town in your own car instead of walking up their street after your latest ride drops you off."

Kurt didn't notice, but during Alain's speech, he had gone from drawing back in his chair to leaning forward, his arms on the table, his eyes meeting Alain's as their faces sat not more than 18 inches apart. "Okay. How much do I have in my wallet," he asked, regretting it the moment he finished.