In some places the road cracked and buckled, and you could see America crawling up through the broken tarmac, the America that was here before the road got laid and will reclaim its face one day. Dirt and wildflowers and earthworms, plump as a grown man’s ring finger. Where the buffaloes roamed. The road wasn’t alive, but it was embedded in something that was. The inside of the earth spins, and the outside drifts, and the skin pocks and burbles. Nothing was ever truly built, Precarious thought. You set things up and then you maintained them. Nothing in this world is permanent without help, and one day Rushmore will just be a mountain again.

It was getting nippy in Northern California, and Southern California was full of Southern Californians, so Precarious thought about taking a drive. Quick one this time, maybe. Last one, who knows? That would work itself out several horizons from now, and there was packing to do. Not much–Precarious traveled light–but the things he needed, he needed. A carton of unfiltered Camel soft packs was in the glove compartment with the maps, plus lighter fluid and flints for his Zippo, which he kept in the change pocket of his jeans. Just in case, he also had some matches.

There was dope in the car: Precarious had no doubt that he could find whatever it was he wanted, and some stuff he didn’t need, in any of his regular haunts, but he preferred to smoke his own. Or snort. Or whatever. He stuck to weed, mostly, while he was driving, but he wanted to be prepared. Before he’d take off, Precarious would roll a hundred joints or so: he could do it one-handed, but with both hands. Fun trick for parties, but you can roll joints one-handed or you can roll them perfect, and Precarious liked his joints perfect and when he was done rolling them, he put them in a little tin that had a clasp and a faded, stamped-metal cartoon of Tom Mix on the top.

The backup stash got broken into backup stashes and secreted around the car. Precarious was good at finding hidey-holes and nooks, and if he couldn’t find one, he wasn’t averse to getting his tools and making one. Sometimes, he’d just weld a little safe to the chassis. Man had a God-given right to a hidey-hole, he figured. The joints went in the tin with Tom Mix on the top, and the tin went in the briefcase, which was the only piece of luggage Precarious ever took with him when he went for a drive.

It was a custom job, he got one of the extras that Fender made for Garcia. It didn’t do the things Garcia’s did, but it was still tweed like a guitar case, and had a tasteful Stealie embedded near the handle, and Precarious thought it was nifty. He used to bring a duffel bag, and then a backpack, but he had pared it down to the size of a briefcase. Joint tin. Socks, underwear, t-shirts: three of each rolled tight like he was taught in the Army. Shaving kit with a .22 pistol in it. Wallet with two hundred in cash, plus another two grand in the briefcase’s hidden pocket. Paperback. He didn’t need anything else.

There were bucket seats in the 1971 Dodge Challenger, and a 440 cubic inch V8 engine that was so big the hood needed a bulge in it, and Precarious set his briefcase on the passenger’s seat, and turned the key. The engine sounded like your first love’s voice, and Precarious started off with no particular place to go. He figured he would follow the Challenger’s hood for a while, stay right behind it, see where it went. The car had the Top Banana paint scheme. Precarious couldn’t resist: yellow as a child’s crayoned sun, but with bold black stripes down the side. Precarious didn’t know why a car with stripes was better than a car without them, but he figured his ignorance of a root cause didn’t make it any less of a fact.

It was overcast, just a bit, and the Challenger’s stubborn wheels held the road around the curves around the mountains and into America. The highway was a promise, and it was clear from Provo to Portland, either one, and Precarious lit a cigarette and arched his butt up off the seat to put his Zippo back in the pocket of his jeans. He thought about hitting Route 77, but idly, and the sun started peeking out a little, so he flipped the visor down and the on-ramp to Route 77 fell into his lap. There was a discussion about boundaries during which Precarious punched the on-ramp very hard several times, and then he was on the Interstitial Highway System.

It was fall on Route 77, and the leaves were falling off the trees. They’d hit the ground running, the trees in hot pursuit. There was a nipsey in the air, whispering poetry to drivers with their windows down. Pumpkin growing contests were held, and so were punkin’ chunkin’ contests, and the invariable happened, and many cars were destroyed by 1,500 pound gourds launched from a few miles away. Autumn evenings look like homework and football practice on Route 77, and all the gas stations have added pumpkin spice to their hi-test.

Precarious flew down the road in his Dodge Challenger and thought about nothing at all, but thought very deeply about it. Other times, he would sing along with the radio, but the radio was to be taken with a shaker of salt. There was FM and AM, but there was also PM and you needed to careful with that band of frequencies. One of the stations was real-time 911 calls, and you owe yourself the kindness of never tuning in. There were rock stations that played lost albums, the stuff Skynrd made after they all survived that plane crash, the record Hendrix and Miles David did. A sports talk station had a call-in show that had never had a non-Bababooey caller, and four successive hosts have been driven mad on-air. Art Bell’s show came in crystal clear on Route 77.

Autumn was all right on the Interstitial, Precarious thought, unless an election broke out, and then an election broke out. BAHDAHDAHBWAHBAH! all the stations played at once: John Phillips Sousa was the Emergency Broadcast Signal for elections in Route 77, and Precarious started looking for cover. He tossed his half-smoked Camel out the window and turned off the radio so he could see where he was going. SHWAMP signs on sticks came rocketing out of the ground, impaling several pedestrians. Precarious was halfway to America, on the edge of the desert, and the sky was full of politicians. They swooped and pandered like sleazy eagles, and they smelled a voter in the car.

The gas stations would go partisan next, Precarious knew, and not the whole place at once, either: pump would turn against pump. The billboards would be plastered over with a new image every day, the paint and paper building up on the face of the sign until they began toppling over. This, too, killed pedestrians. Taking advantage of Route 77’s lax adopt-a-highway-section program, campaigns snatched up alternating miles of road, and some of the old-timers remember an election where that didn’t lead to barricades and sabotage within hours, but no one believes them.

Election Day loomed in his rearview, and Precarious gripped the steering wheel with his left hand and reached over to his tweed briefcase with his right, and he took his .22 caliber pistol from the case, making sure the safety was on, and jammed it between his thigh and the leather bucket seat. You can never be too careful with elections, and up ahead was a bar with a motel attached. A couple of drinks and a few hours of sleep sounded like the perfect way to hunker down while the election blew over. The parking lot was not full, and he parked the Challenger easily. The pistol, along with the keys, went in the briefcase, which went with Precarious. He’d watch the worst of it through the window, and when it cleared he would be back on Route 77, which is the road to Little Aleppo. It is a hard truck, but God will forgive you the miles.

America was a year-round kind of place, Precarious noted. In winter, there was the southern route, a big dip down through the desert and the fields, and in the summer all the roads were passable in the places that weren’t on fire. The West caught fire every summer, so Precarious nibbled at the edges of the mountains and skirted the valleys that made for such pretty pictures. Country was big enough so that it was easy enough to avoid trouble if you’re not looking for it, he thought.

Used to be bigger, though. Everything’s bigger when you have to walk it, Precarious figured. Lewis, Clark? Took almost two years to get from St. Louis to the Pacific. They weren’t going for speed, but that’s still a long time. After a while, we got coast-to-coast time down to four or five months, but then Lincoln pounded in the Golden Spike with his hands, or something, and the railroad cinched itself across America’s belly and it was Penn Station to Union Station in three-and-a-half days.

And that was a good number, at least as far as Precarious was concerned. There were airplanes, obviously, and if you had a few people to share the driving, then you could make the trip in 40 hours straight or so, but if you were alone in the car, then three-and-a-half days was right. Eyesight goes wooly after a while, back starts folding. You could cannonball it, tearing ass like a dipshit all the way, and make it in under 30 hours, but that sounded like punishment to Precarious. He’d pissed in bottles plenty of times when he couldn’t stop, but didn’t want to participate in an activity that had bottle-pissing built into it.

Precarious cruised, and 1973 Chevrolet Monte Carlo is a good car for that activity. It had two enormous doors, and a split-bench seat made from light blue leather the same color as the Landau roof, which was the same color as the jean jacket your older brother gave you, the one with the Zeppelin logo painted on the back. The rest of the car was Tuxedo Black, and under the hood was a Turbo-Jet 454ci engine that for reasons known only to Detroit made just 245 horsepower, but it made a good noise when you eased the gas pedal down. There was power everything, so when Precarious moved the seat back, there would be this faint and guilty-sounding whir, and not the sure, metal KaCHUNK of the slide that used to control the whole deal.

There was a rabbit off to his left as he passed the Continental Divide, and all of the Southwest was to his right, and he thought of Lewis and Clark again. Precarious had been in the army, and a fight or two. Gave himself a couple stitches one time, but that’s not tough so much as dumb. Those fuckers were tougher than he was, and he didn’t think much of the argument that it was a different time: it wasn’t like everyone was walking across the damn country back then, just those iron bastards. It was starting to snow just a little, big wet poofy flakes that made a PWOMP sound on the windshield, and Precarious thought of Lewis and Clark as he adjusted the heater vent so it was blowing outwards toward his arm, which was hanging out of the open window.

Dip your foot in the ocean, and then walk back up the beach to the parking lot where your car is. Point it away from the water, and step on the gas. Hit the brakes when you see the waves again: that’s America. Precarious was thinking about that, and maybe stopping for a cheeseburger, when he saw a grestle out the windshield, and a Menlo Scatback passed him on the left. Up ahead, there was a billboard that read SCENERY and goddammit he was on Route 77 again. No wonder nothing was making sense, and he made a mental note to beat the on-ramp’s ass again, which was becoming a pattern, he further mentally noted.

I’m enjoying the ride, he thought, and put his annoyance aside as his hunger rose. There was the Pioneer Chicken Stand, and Big Kahuna Burger, and Top Jimmy’s Tacos. Route 77 had fast food, and suspiciously fast food, where the meal is waiting on the table when you walk in. There were drive-by restaurants, that shot Chinese food at your car window if you wore the wrong color. There were pizza boys with swords on motorcycles everywhere.

Precarious had always thought of the Interstitial Highway as a rough-and-tumble kind of place, so he was surprised to see foodie culture infest Route 77. One place called Freddy Avlo’s didn’t allow their patrons to eat the food, just post pictures of it on the internet. The Bucolic Pantry took locally-sourced to new heights by restricting the radius of what they considered local to 1000 feet. Luckily, there was a supermarket next door. Farm-to-table was brought to its logical conclusion at The Duck Pond, which was a duck pond. Gourmands and food bloggers would trek for miles to wade into the pond, snatch up a duck, eat it raw, and then work the phrase, “But have you ever had fresh duck?” into conversations once they get back home.

Not for him. Precarious tried to withhold judgment on things he knew he didn’t understand, and he surely did not get obsessing over food as much as some people seemed to, but he couldn’t help himself. There was a difference between bad food and good food, sure, but there was also a difference between good food and fancy bullshit. It’s all left in the toilet the next morning, he thought, and pulled into Tommy’s, which was a 48-hour diner, which is like a 24-hour diner, but twice as much.

To the right, there was a big room with tables, and to the left was the counter and some booths and the kitchen cutout, and in the middle by the door was Tommy, who was not the first Tommy, but was merely the current Tommy. There will always be a Tommy, because Tommy runs the place, and Tommy’s needs running. 48-hour diners were always on the precipice of an all-out riot: it was always three in the morning after a country music concert ended, a rap show finished, all the bars closed, and the local meth dealer just got locked up in a 48-hour diner. Two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon at Tommy’s would find a drunken brawl between warring tribes of metalheads and bowling teams, if not for Tommy.

Tommy kept the peace. The diner never closed–Christmas, hurricanes, presidential assassinations–and Tommy kept his eye out for troublemakers. Precarious liked him a lot: little guy in a white dress shirt and black slacks, both purchased for their price instead of their style, and a thick helmet of wavy black hair. Tommy couldn’t have been 5’6″, but when the waitresses got turned into giant ants that one time, he beat them all to death with the diner’s massive, leather-bound menu like a man twice his size. He had new waitresses within an hour, with the same beehive hairdos and clompy shoes.

If you were trouble, you got tossed. Tommy would 86 you easy as 1-2-3. Once, Precarious had been lingering over the last piece of bacon when he saw Tommy’s head shoot up from his calculator, like a dog smelling something. Tommy ran out to the parking lot, stopped a car that was pulling in, and threw the entire carload of people out of the diner before they had even parked. When Tommy came back in, he caught Precarious’ eye.

“No good,” Tommy said.

Precarious smiled and threw up his hands in agreement, and a cook called out DING hashbrowns are up, and then two sloppy teenagers were full-on dry humping on top of one of the tables, so Tommy went to deal with that. And something after that, and after that, and it would get to Tommy after a while, and he would start staring at the cakes going around and around, and then he would attempt to burn the place down using himself as the kindling. The kitchen wouldn’t even slow down, and there would be a new Tommy along any minute. Tommy’s was a 48-hour diner, and it stayed open.

Precarious had never seen a Changing of the Tommys, but he’d heard it described in great detail and decided he didn’t particularly need to see one. He came in for the eggs, never had to see the menu, which like all 48-hour diners contained every meal known to man. It had a table of contents, and an index. Precarious knew better, though. You kept it basic at a place where Booth War occasionally broke out.

The bill came to six bucks, and Precarious left a ten on the table. He nodded goodbye at Tommy, who was eyeing the pastry carousel with a faraway look, and walked out to the parking lot, where there were teenagers negotiating things with each others, and a girl was crying in the passenger seat of an Oldsmobile as the cars sped by on. Precarious joined them and hit cruising speed in no time and before he knew it he was halfway home, or maybe halfway there, on Route 77, which is the road to Little Aleppo. It is a hard truck, but God will forgive you the miles.

Where there was no highway, there was a road, and where there was no road, there was a trail, and where there was no trail, there was a path. After that, Precarious Lee thought, what was the point? If there was anything worth seeing, someone would have left some blacktop leading to it. And if it was hell, there’d be a road through it: the Pan-American through the Atacama, or the Trans-Siberian underlining the Targa. Where the road stopped, so did Precarious. He went places with parking lots.

Everest. Mountains in general, but Everest in particular. That asshole, they asked him why he climbed it. “Because it’s there.” Leave it there, asshole: it’s trying to kill you. Asshole. Nine hundred degrees below zero and no oxygen, for what? Enlightenment? It was down here, too, he thought. And there’s diners you can stop at. A view? Shit, America was made out of views. A story, he thought. That’s what they everyone on that dumb mountain wanted. Not just any story, though. Going to Caesar’s with the house note and betting it on black? That’s a hell of a story, Precarious figured, but not a lot of people had it in their quivers. Mountains were for looking at. Driving in between. Boggling over when you’ve been driving four hours and they’re still the exact same size in your windshield.

Precarious had a farm kid’s childhood, and it was a long time ago. There was a swimmin’ hole. Chores and fishing in the creek and camping out, just immersed in nature, and he hated every fucking second of it. It was quiet, and it was slow, and there wasn’t an electrical hookup anywhere in sight. Unacceptable, he decided. Precarious believed that people were born with their personalities already in them. Indoor and outdoor cats, and city and country mice. He dated a girl once who liked to read psychology, and she said that his driving was a reaction to the perceived trauma of being trapped on the farm as a kid. Precarious said that everyone’s life is a reaction to the perceived trauma of childhood. How you react? That’s up to the personality you were born with, he thought.

He reacted by buying a 1974 Cadillac Coupe de Ville in Diplomat Blue with a Landau roof and a V8 engine 500 cubic inches across. It was an automatic, but fuck it: it was a Cadillac. Besides, he felt like shooting pool, and Precarious firmly believed that one should take a Caddy to the pool hall. His cue started the trip in the trunk, but bounced around until he stopped to fish the case out from behind the spare tire and his secondary backup stash. Precarious had a secondary backup stash because he believed in contingencies, and he also believed that he needed a joint while he drove. Therefore: secondary backup stash.

He left in the middle of the night this time. There was no one to wake up, but he still closed the door behind him gently, keeping the knob swiveled until it was nestled in the catch and then he let it go as soft as he could, and he never remembers starting the car, but all of a sudden he is in Marin, and then he is in California, and then he is in America and has nothing to do but shoot some pool and not climb Mount Everest.

Precarious loved the Interstate Highway System. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he had a couple books on its history, and Eisenhower, the whole thing. His first assignment out of West Point, Ike, was an expeditionary trip cross-country. This was in 1920, something like that. Big convoy of trucks going from one coast to the other, and if that takes you a week nowadays, then your drivers stopped somewhere along the route for a couple days. Two months. And the General asked himself, how can a country call itself united when you can’t get from end to the other? So he built us our Interstate. Reaction to a perceived trauma, Precarious noted.

The on-ramp to Route 77 was around here somewhere, and Precarious was fairly certain he owed it an ass-kicking, but after a few hours he was getting cranky, so he stopped at a 48-hour diner called Blinky’s. Usually, he sat at the counter, but it was full and he sat in a booth. When the waitress came over, it was the on-ramp in a bad wig and an apron, so Precarious flat-out slugged the squirrelly sonuvabitch and then he was on the Interstitial.

Precarious loved the Interstate, but he was in love with the Interstitial. Driving it was like hearing your favorite song for the first time, he thought. That first time she took your hand and led you from the couch into the bedroom. A virgin on the highway, Precarious thought. Of course, he further thought, things seemed new on the Interstitial because they were new most of the time. For instance, he had just passed a VRRV, which is a Virtual Reality Recreational Vehicle: the passengers wear VR helmets and the outside of the thing is covered in self-moldable smartcloth, so you can imagine you’re in any kind of vehicle you want, and then the vehicle can actually be that. Precarious liked the concept. In reality, though,  the jackasses in the sucker were pretending to be a blimp, and they were doing 3 mph in the left lane.

He passed through the Brooklyn Canyons, where you can see the different eras of inhabitants etched into the strata of the cliffs, Native and Dutch and Italian and Dominican and Black and Hipster. Precarious averted his eyes and drove casually by Area 77. It is a felony to even read about Area 77, so you should have averted your eyes from the last sentence, and this one, too. He had heard all sorts of rumors about the place. Aliens, reality-slicing multi-beings, Abandoned Gods’ summer place. Once in Miss Rosa’s, someone started ranting about artificial intelligences and time machines made out of scarves. Precarious listened with a smile and didn’t say anything, and so did Miss Rosa, who always did know a lot more than she let on, but she didn’t say anything, either.

His favorite Area 77 rumor was the one he heard last time he played pool at Alabama Average’s place. The bartender there is named Sandra on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Sondra on the other days. She had always had a little crush on Precarious–she liked ’em leathery–and leaned in close and told him the real secret behind Area 77.

“That’s where they make the spaghetti.”

And Precarious spent the good part of an hour trying to get her to explain that, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Just because something makes no sense is no reason not to believe in it, though, and Precarious decided that her explanation was as good as any other. Precarious was also inclined to agree with bartenders, especially lady bartenders who had a crush on him.

To get to Alabama Average’s pool hall, you took Route 77 downtown, and then to the Southside, or perhaps the Northside, or West or East depending on what city the Interstitial thought it was in at the time. Cross the tracks. The telephone wires have sneakers hanging from them, but the legs are still attached, and all the corners conspire with the stairwells and backrooms to overthrow the avenues. The porches watch you drive by, and gossip after you pass. There is no supermarket, but there are shopping carts everywhere. The pool hall is in the neighborhood it is supposed to be in.

Sometimes, the place was on the second floor, and other times it was in the basement, just never the ground floor, and the building had no elevator but it did have air conditioning and Alabama Average kept it at 62 degrees. He liked it cold. Besides, he was stealing his electricity from the police station down the street, so he didn’t care how much it cost. He was in the back, in his small office with all the pictures of fat guys leaning over pool tables on the wall, when Precarious walked in, carrying the case with his cue. Although if he was out in the big room, Precarious would have barely noticed him. Very plain-looking man, just nothing remarkable about his appearance at all. Little bit of a southern accent.

Precarious wasn’t a showy guy, but he fancied up his cue just a little. Metal Stealie countersank into the butt, a lightning bolt or two. Not too much, but Precarious had found that on Route 77, life was lot easier when people knew who he worked for. Most everyone else on 77 was unemployed, or unemployable, or topiary that had come to life, and he never pried. Someone wanted to tell him something, they could. People’s statements were more interesting than their answers, he figured.

Kid Delicious was practicing long shots at a table half-invisible off to the right, and El Paso Elroy was watching his left hand. Montreal Frenchy and  Mata Harriet had been playing one-pocket at table nine for two or three days. Ronnie the Thermos was eating a sandwich, which he was not supposed to be doing so close to the tables. Nobody liked Ronnie the Thermos.

At table five, Precarious screwed his cue together, and the threads made no noise at all because he had oiled them well and stored them correctly, and he squinted down the green, soft felt and WHAK the balls scattered and ran from each other. Precarious squinted again because there was a cigarette jammed in the corner of his mouth because he was playing pool and that’s how you play pool, and he watched the balls react to their perceived trauma, each one, and again and again, but they respond according to their weight and mass and coefficient of drag and what not, Precarious thought. You can explain what they do by knowing what they are.

He never played with anyone at Alabama Average’s, mostly because everyone in there would hustle him to the poorhouse if he ever mentioned anything about a game. He just liked the place, only pool halls are lit that way, those high-watts over the table against that murky black, and you can see the smoke blue and just like in the movies, swirling around and reacting to its perceived trauma, as the balls did the same, and so did we all around the tables.

And then Precarious had a beer and flirted some more with Sondra–it was a Thursday–and took a piss and then he was on the highway, sitting on a ten-foot long bench seat made from leather in a 1974 Cadillac, and he had a case besides him, it had a pool cue in it, and everywhere in the world that he wanted to go had a road that led to it, but for now he was happy on Route 77, which is the road to Little Aleppo. It is a hard truck, but God will forgive you the miles.

Precarious Lee could sleep anywhere, a hotel bed or pulled off to the side of the road with America nestled around him like a blanket. If you’re going East, then you sleep from sunrise until noon. Going West, you take your break from midday until evening. There were 18 hours a day the sun wasn’t directly in your eyes, Precarious figured. Might as well work around the facts instead of being stubborn about schedules. This leads to a lot of night driving, when there was no world at all beyond the pocked roadway and his headlights, and in the morning everything would be 500 miles newer.

Sometimes he would get a room, always a motel. Precarious wasn’t principled, but he wasn’t paying for a hotel. Shower was the important part of the transaction, he thought. He had long ago had his fill of truck stop facilities, and he wasn’t in a hurry, or broke. Certainly wasn’t cheap, but he’d be damned if he’d check himself into the Four Seasons. Shave, shower, shit, and shuteye, plus a door that locks is worth ponying up for, Precarious thought.

Or he would drop in on friends, never uninvited, and less and less lately. Precarious stayed on Route 77 for longer these days, farther, and he noticed that others were doing the same. Drivers he saw once in a while, now every hundred miles, it seemed. There was a line at the gas station for one of the pumps, which was odd, but the vehicles in the line were a Boston Duck Boat driven by a wereduck who had stolen it for political reasons he will not explain to anyone and a living bio-bus made from a humpback whale, which is fairly normal for Route 77.

He did not remember getting on 77 this trip, but it was billboard mating season along the shoulder of the road and fast food joint ads fought with motel signs for the right to hump the mile markers, so Precarious did not doubt that he was on the Interstitial Highway System. He tried to redrive his steps, but couldn’t place his entrance, and then he remembered a conversation he’d had with Alice Who Isn’t From Texas. The on-ramp, she said, had learned hypnosis and was making folks forget things, and also dance like chickens. Precarious lit a cigarette and made two mental notes. Listen to Alice Who Isn’t From Texas more, and get a bigger car and run that fucking on-ramp over next time around.

The Plymouth wouldn’t do it, he figured, not even a 1971 Road Runner with a 440 cubic inch engine that made 370 horsepower, and still not even if that Road Runner came out of the factory dressed in something the brochure called Sassy Grass Green. It was just a matter of weight, Precarious thought. Obviously, he could have used the band’s truck to do it, but he wouldn’t even consider the thought. Truck wasn’t his. Can’t kill an on-ramp with it, at least not on purpose.

Besides, the truck didn’t belong on Route 77. Had no business there, Precarious thought, and he chose his words carefully. The trucks were for business, and you could do business on the Interstate, or you could do business on the Interstitial, but not both. It was a dangerous idea to do business through the Interstitial, draws attention and the money gets all screwed up, books mistranslated. Precarious had known a couple dealers who thought the Interstitial was the Northwest Passage of dope. Forcade got away with it for a while, but not forever. You can’t get away with anything for ever.

Precarious wondered if Route 77 was infinite, and then he wondered if it was exfinite, and then he decided exfinite wasn’t a word and lit anther cigarette that he drew from the soft and crumpled pack with his lips. Almost out, and a look in the passenger seat showed the carton empty, and he wanted to stretch his legs, so he pulled in to The Biggest Truck Stop In The World, which was not, but the owner had copyrighted the title and slapped it on billboards up and down the Interstitial. He had also armed the billboards, so people had stopped arguing the name.

The parking lot was the size of a glacier, but not a huge one, a parking lot-sized glacier. Precarious always liked to see who was traveling: there was a ghost truck in the far corner, the Marie Celentano, which was found driver-less, but with the frozen pizza still piping hot. Big Daddy had parked his dragster in the handicapped spot again, and Precarious looked around for that monster-mouse creature that hung around with him. Precarious wasn’t prejudiced, but that thing was a menace. There were several buses of Japanese tourists.

The pumps were to the right, and there were picnic tables and a hedge maze with a demon in it to the left. No one went in the hedge maze, and Precarious figured that was the difference between Route 77 and, say, I-80. Back on the Interstate, you could post a million signs and put up a billion fences, you wouldn’t be able to keep people out. Someone on 77 tells you there’s a demon in the hedge maze, you believe him. The Biggest Truck Stop In The World was in the middle, and it looked like a truck stop, only very slightly larger, but not all that much.

The Biggest Truck Stop was based around a simple organizing principle, which is that people become exponentially stupider the farther away they are from home. It actually followed the inverse square law, one of the cashiers figured out. The souvenir shop is large enough that it contains its own weather, and occasionally shoppers are killed by lightning strike while looking at t-shirts, but there is a pair of sunglasses that fits perfectly, and a novelty license plate with your name on it, no matter how fucked up your name is. There is a Bandana Republic, and they only sell one thing.

The bathrooms were past the food court, which featured well over a dozen Orange Juliuses, all of whom were in active late-stage Capitalist War with each other, which mostly entailed setting each other’s stores on fire. Down along Chicken Row, KFC, Church’s, Popeye’s, and Roy Rogers were side-by-side. They were also constantly setting each other on fire, plus the trash cans have begun openly and racistly berating customers who dump their trays along with their garbage. Much of the food court’s problems can be attributed to poor management.

Precarious got a haircut at the barber shop every once in a while, and a professional-grade shave. It was truck stop barber, so it wasn’t fancy, but it was a truck stop barber, so he knew what he was doing. Precarious would let his beard grow out for a week or two, and then let the guy cut ridiculous stuff into his face: Fu manchus, and tight little romantic mustaches, and sloppy muttonchops. When he got home, it would come off, but for a while he would have a road face.

There was a dentist, and a notary public. There was also a notary private, but no one know who he was. All the way in back was for the truckers, the real truckers. A lounge with relatively few angry spiders. Personal bathrooms, or you could pay extra to have people watch you poop. Prostitutes are available if you know what to look for, which is a person walking up to you and asking if you’d like to purchase sex. There were also drug dealers, and not the pleasant kind, the kind that got into the business for the stabbing, and had been awake since their birth. Precarious thought the whole section was a damn free-for-all, and not the pleasant kind, and stayed up front. He didn’t mind being a customer.

He pissed, and then stopped at the taco stand that had not been set on fire and got two fish tacos and ate them standing up, ten feet away from the register, and as he walked across the parking lot to the Plymouth Road Runner that had left the factory Sassy Grass Green he put on his new sunglasses, and wiped his hands on his pants. On the way back out onto the road, he passed an incoming bus of Japanese tourists and whapped a soft pack, the first from a new carton, of Camels onto the back of his hand three times and ripped off the cellophane and put it in his pocket.

The first cigarette is tricky from a soft pack. Precarious steered out of the parking lot with his knee, and held the pack in one hand and finger-flicked its bottom with the other, and Pop! there they come, there are always two and never parallel. One above the other, and Precarious lights it with the Road Runner’s lighter and rolls down the window and throws the pack onto the passenger seat, where there is a fresh carton of Camels, and a novelty license plate that says “Precarious” which he will have for the rest of his life.

Precarious thought he saw the on-ramp in the distance, and he had a new pair of sunglasses. He stepped on the gas, and the car made whatever sound you think it made, and then he was on Route 77, which is the road to Little Aleppo. It is a hard truck, but God will forgive you the miles.