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By Root 350 0

the third guy I’ve seen do that. He swelled up this big around,” and so on. I didn’t mind very much. Vince had a colorful past, had been married often, worked at hazardous jobs, fought in the Vietnam war, spent 210 days in jail the previous year for assaulting an alcoholism counselor right in the counselor’s office, and, like many people you sit beside on the bus, as I’d found out since I’d quit driving a car, he apparently ran through this history repeatedly in the privacy of his thoughts and felt proud to share it with any polite listener. Overhead, the sky continued clear. The fields had been plowed in straight rows, but nothing had sprouted yet, and from here to every horizon we saw only the fastidious organization of lifeless dirt. Come late August the horizon would no longer be visible. The Old Highway would drill like a tunnel through tall corn. The sound of insects in the fields would be deafening, and above it all would carry the call, the whir-and-twitter, of redwing blackbirds. Right now we drifted through a soft ocher haze of dust.

Here along the Sioux, I saw as the bus carried us into Riverside in a bubble of air-conditioned artificial silence, Sam Clemens would have truly felt at home. Here was a river town with a Tom Sawyer feel, sunny and muggy and lazy, whose silence continued after we’d stepped out into the heat, life in general so quiet the flies were audible.

The bus stopped before a tobacco-and-fireworks stand run by two women decked in turquoise and wearing buckskin gowns and beaded headbands. Nearby several longhaired Indian men stood around talking, in jeans and boots and checkered shirts with the tails hanging out. Two of them clutched at one another, empty-eyed and drunk, waltzing together with such languor it took a minute to understand they were fighting. The Old Highway kept on across the river and quickly out of town, intersecting the main street and the weedy swatch of railroad right-of-way paralleling it. There were two casinos, each with its nightclub and restaurant, one with a small motel. Otherwise the town seemed built of service stations, hardware stores, lumber yards.

Vince urged me to come to his favored casino, the one closer to the water. By this time I could see he’d attached himself to me, and I went along.

Near the river the air felt even wetter and heavier. There were budding willow trees, and somewhere loud cicadas. The waterfront smelled of agricultural chemicals but also of something sweet and strangely familiar, like cotton candy. Joined as it was to the Mississippi, the river reached a finger of the South into the region, while the casinos, one russet, one sky blue, both covered with murals depicting empty arid desert scenes, and Vince’s with a tall eagle-topped Styrofoam totem pole, labored to produce a Western flavor.

Smokey Henderson’s trio was in fact playing in town, and right here at Vince’s gambling spot. According to the poster just inside the tavern’s entrance, they didn’t strike up until the evening. Of course I’d known this but hadn’t consciously considered it. I hadn’t asked about return buses, either. I think I really intended to stay overnight, drinking and gambling to the detriment of my health and finances. Excessively, in other words. I couldn’t expect to find much to distract me until I started. Why should I? Why should anything be going on in the sunny lifeless afternoon, why would there be any attempt to entertain these retirees interested only in killing the most time with the least number of quarters? But apparently something was happening inside, past the barroom where Vince and I sat. A half-dozen young women had assembled in a clump at the back of the large room, and a couple more were just coming from the darker recesses, the entrance to a showroom with a stage. “You ain’t getting me back there to watch little girls shake their pussies,” Vince told the bartender, taking me by the arm and sitting me on a bar stool beside him. “Naked girls used to make me howl, but now they just give me a serious dose of heartache. Ask me what my favorite pastime