Something is coming. I feel it before the men tell me, before even Eddie, who is so loose-lipped, let’s slip that the little games we play every Friday night are building to something bigger. Finally, at the end of a particularly slow round, a man named Matthew clears his throat and asks:

“Think we can fit a Saturday game in next week?”

The others cough and nod and scratch their ears and one by one their eyes turn to me. They have spoken of this already and agreed. They’re asking me.

“I’ve got nothing planned,” I tell them, and I wonder if they can hear my heartbeat dancing in my chest.

I win the next round.

Last week was close.

Last week, during a bathroom break, I asked about the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ and they pretended not to hear me. I asked and Caleb put out a cigarette, hardly halfway burned, and suggested he might take an early night. The whole game was called early. I packed my bags and lay awake in my motel room, listening to my neighbor pace and cough. I stared at the white bulk of my backpack in the moonlight and I considered the tenuous allegiance of man.

And then, the next day at the store, it was though nothing had happened. I had gotten off with a warning and I spent another sleepless night shuffling cards until they warped and split. Now, as the motel’s digital clock ticks itself toward a crimson 3:00am, the pocket of my jeans buzzes with a message from Eddie:

‘We’re in charge of food for Saturday.’

And then:

‘Barbecue.’

My seasonal employment at the store does not grant me any particular discount on its products so Eddie, with his name thickly embroidered on his breast, accompanies me to the back in order to ‘negotiate’ with the Meat Department. As a stocker, I am more than familiar with the labyrinthine warehouse in the back of the store- a place that is too large and too convoluted to exist in the shell it presents to the outside world. I have seen, occasionally, the once-white door of the Meat Locker, these visitations always preceded by a stark drop in temperature. I have seen Veronica, the manager there, her apron stained red and her eyes glittering.

“She kept fucking whispering to customers,” Eddie explains, pushing through a wall of stacked toilet paper, “And, like, it’s not against the rules. And we thought she had some mental thing so they didn’t fire her. And… Jesus!”

Veronicastands in a pool of pink froth, running a rag back and forth across the cooler’sdoor. She wrings the cloth onto the floor and dips it in a bucket at herfeet, the liquid there tinted red and steaming.

“Veronica,” Eddie says, holding a box of cereal to his chest as though it will ward off her eyes, “Me and some of the guys were, uh, looking to barbecue this weekend. Think you can hook us up?”

Veronica does not turn. She drops the rag into the bucket and leans forward to rest her head on the door, as though vexed by Eddie’s request. Eddie himself has been moving backward, his footsteps so small as to be imperceptible to the eye. I stand several inches ahead of him, now.

Veronica turns, finally. She is tall- taller than me- and her arms are long and lanky. Her face and hair, where they touched the door, are stained red. Red, too, are her hands, her apron, and her eyes (the latter as though she has been tired for a long time, or sad). Eddie’s box of cereal collapses under her gaze and he sets it back on the shelf, crooked and leaning. He clears his throat and says:

“Seems like They should give you guys gloves for that.”

It’s an absurd time to invoke the capital ‘They’- ‘They’ being the store’s faceless administration and this being a lowest-common-denominator conversation starter. I tried, once, to complain that ‘They’ were taking their time fixing the punch-out machine and was quickly shut down, having not yet earned the right to complain. Eddie, a veteran, derides ‘Them’ in the lull of every conversation. Something tells me Veronica, who wipes her forehead with the back of her hand (smearing the red stain down over her eyelids) does not care for, or even know about, ‘Their’ policy on wearing gloves.

And yet, she smiles. It’s a mean smile, one that reveals a row of sharp, crooked teeth as she pulls her hair back into a ponytail and slips a tie from her wrist, but the meanness is not for us.

“Youknow what They did?” she asks, “They told me it wasn’t my job to wash thedoor. They said to leave it for the night crew. This,” she says, gesturing to the red mess around her, “This is myday off.”

She draws gloves over her red, dripping hands.

“So, you guys need some meat?”

I think of Veronica’s hands as we play the game.

The novelty of Saturday is that we do not stop to eat. We leave great, greasy prints on the cards, we smear them with sauce and saliva and spilled beer. We play a deck until it sticks to itself and will not come apart or until we suspect an opponent has learned to identify the important suits by the crust on their edges or by their texture and smell. Marinade and cigarette ash congeals on the table. The smell of charcoal hangs in the air.

The meat makes me sick, the sheer quantity of it. I excuse myself to the restroom and see my own face stained red and streaked with ashen warpaint.

Alice’s picks rattle incessantly. The bike rusts in the motel parking. The pages of ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ wilt like the petals of a dying flower.

This is all taking too long.

As long as I lose more than I win I will always be less than a friend to these men.

Time to start winning.

-traveler

I lose money, but not so much that I lose my room at the motel. A week passes and, with it, several more games. I lose less, but my relationship with these men remains purely transactional. I see their interest wane as my money does. Eddie is the exception- he seems like the sort of guy that could use a friend. I do what I can to fulfill that need.

The apartment in which we play has a room set up for the game. There are layers of ritual underneath the crushed cigarette butts and plastic chairs and I trip over myself trying to maintain these unspoken traditions. A man always coughs when someone enters the room, for instance. A toilet-stall cough- a polite, if unnecessary, acknowledgment of another soul’s presence. I have the cough, now, and I could not let Eddie into my room without a small croak.

Someone must always be smoking. This one was difficult for me- I learned only as the room became tense watching a curled cigarette turn to ash on the edge of a plate, a full pack having materialized near my elbow and a matchstick having perched itself between my lips. I lit up (my first in a long time) and the collective sigh of relief snuffed the failing cherry at the table. I won the next three rounds.

Behind each chair (and, so, behind each man) is a picture of a nude woman and it is customary to call these women by their names and to ask them for luck when the deck draws foul. The men at the table regard these foldouts with worship and fear. Upon returning, too early, from drinks on the porch, I found a man, Caleb, on his knees in the room, pleading with a woman named Candy that he win the night’s pot. Perceiving me in the doorway, he coughed and rose on stiff knees. He had been weeping, but he was not ashamed. I regard Candy fearfully, now. I dread the eyes of the women on my back and the eyes of the men on the women. They are everywhere- looking out from the magazine racks in the check-out lanes, peering from the calendar in the motel lobby when I go for a cup of watery coffee. Always the picture of a woman, always the eyes of a man. Eddie points them out to me, sometimes. He laughs and rolls his eyes.

Ilaugh, too, and I cough and smoke and stare and ask the women favors and callthem by their names. They see through me and I begin to lose, but my lossesendear me to the men and so I stay the course.

-traveler

No, no. This long autumn has tried to turn me away before. No wall has been too high to climb, no bramble too sharp or thick to press through. Now this- kept from a place for lack of a friend, for a failure to be in the know. There is time for friendship, I think. For the lowest bar of friendship, anyway. I dredge my resources, picking through the leaves and mud of the Wayside until I’m sure that I’ve narrowed the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ to a region that spans four counties. I rent a room in the center at a motel that accepts long-term guests. I pay by the week. I set out to make a friend.

It has been too long.

The woman in the room next to me will die there. She tells me as much, but anybody standing in her doorway would know without having to ask. She is painfully old and her sickness hangs in the air around her like a dark cloud. I dare not go into that room and she dares not leave it. We are of different worlds.

The farmer in the room on the opposite side is a young couple the next morning. They are friendly and impermanent- good for practice, though I see them toe the threshold of my room and I wonder what cloud hangs about me.

I drink, alone, at bars. I read books in the park. I take the bike apart and put it together again, exchanging pleasantries with a group of older men who sit and sip coffee at the edge of the parking lot. They see through me- are disturbed by my appearance each morning. I am a ghost, here, narrowing my haunts.

Itake a seasonal job at the local store to make up for three-week’s failure-pay at the motel: bagger,stock-boy, department store jack-of-all-trades. It’s simple work, unionized ifI stay on after the holidays. I wash my uniform in the sink and dry it in theshower. People learn my name.

Myname is the bait, a distraction from the looming prison above it, from the flimsystick-and-string trigger. Sometimes the anticipation is such that I hold my breath without realizing, turningblue as I slide boxes of turkey stuffing onto shelves. The world is filled witha nervous darkness. Hold your breath long enough and it creeps in from thesides.

Another stocker emerges from the shadows and mistakes my sudden exhalation for a gasp of fear.

“Easy,man,” he says, “Didn’t see you was in the zone.”

“Just wasn’t expecting anyone there.”

“You play cards, man? Got a game tonight, need some players.”

“Sure,” I tell him, “Where?”

He wavers at my eagerness.

“You know how to play?”

“Yeah.”

“You play for money?”

“Sure.”

His eyes narrow but the trap has already dropped around him.

“All right, bro. Sunset Condos #9. Come by after your shift. Name’s Eddie.”

He points to his name- embroidered in lush green thread. I point to mine, scribbled on a plastic tag.

Eddie’s not there when I arrive, but they’re expecting me all the same.

“Who’s this broken-faced asshole?”

“A friend of a friend.”

-traveler

I lose weeks searching for the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ but find nothing about its entry real or truthful. Nobody I speak to has been, but many know someone who has. Because I know nobody, I am forbidden from finding it.

-traveler

The worn treads of my bike do not take well to the streets of Bakersfield, Indiana- a place known, colloquially, as ‘Fast-Food City.’ The pavement darkens half a mile outside its borders, appearing wet despite the driving sun and releasing thick vapors that hang lethargically as a low fog. A small brush fire burns on the side of the highway, emitting angry hisses as I empty the contents of my water bottle into it. The flames spread until I stomp them out.

There are more fires leading to the exit ramp, fires that would require more than the work of a single man’s boots. I ignore them and take shallow breaths as I pass through the smoke.

The bike skids coming off the ramp but I hold a wobbling balance and blame the poor visibility. It skids again at a stoplight, the tires sliding across the road as though caught in an early autumn’s frost. I stop, again, and run my fingers across the asphalt. They come away slick with grease.

‘‘Fast-Food City’ is home to a neon skyline and a rubbery, prismatic sunset. To say that pictures do not do it justice would be misleading, because the pictures are beautiful and, in a just world, they would reflect the degeneracy of the place that once called itself ‘Bakersfield.’

The fall of Bakersfield proper began in 2012 with the completion of a spiraling highway off-ramp that fed into its outskirts. Unsurprisingly, the few fast-food restaurants there began to see a dramatic uptick in drive-thru business and their growing fortune caught the eye of the city’s entrepreneurial crowd. Something went wrong (what that something is has been fiercely debated in economic circles) and the growth of Bakersfield’s fast-food industry hit no upper limit.

When the few vacant lots had been filled, the need for on-the-go burgers and tacos and dippable pancakes was still enough that it was lucrative to transition existing businesses to meet the new demand. Coffee chains expanded, like a cancer, to consume the grocery stores they had once been embedded in. Banks began to deliver sub sandwiches through their aging pneumatic tubes. The sewage system began to clog with oil and fat.

‘Fast-Food City’ exists in a sort of capitalistic feedback loop. Its infamy now attracts as many customers as its restaurants and it chugs along, adapting to the strange niche economy with the purchase of specialized machinery to warm its congealed arteries in the winter and to regulate the apneatic release of its hostile atmosphere.’

The roads become perilous with a slick, rainbow sheen so I pull off to the side and proceed toward the center of the city on foot. I am the only one walking and I attract the uncomfortable gaze of passing drivers- they watch me weave my way around gray puddles and collected piles of fryer scrapings. My clothes grow heavy and my mouth accumulates an uncomfortable coating from the air.

Most of the restaurants I approach have been sealed up except for one or two drive-through windows. Through the film on the glass doors I can see that many of the dining areas have been converted into dormitories. The businesses themselves exist in ‘neighborhoods.’ There will be nothing but cheap tex-mex for a few blocks before some invisible border marks the edges of a sandwich district.

I squeeze through an alleyway and into something that must have once been a massive parking lot. Now it’s dotted with coffee booths, each manned by a single barista. They, at least, seem open to serving a man on foot. The woman I order from is friendly. She doesn’t let on that there is anything strange about this place or work. I want to ask her where she sleeps- whether she grew up here and knew Bakersfield before the fall. I’ve worked customer service, though, and I know what it’s like to be asked personal questions by a stranger. I know what it’s like to have my place in life outlined by a person I serve. I’m not here to save anyone or to tear them down. I’m here to see the fountain in the middle of town and to wash the greasy coating from my insides with a coffee and to leave.

The woman points me in the right direction and offers me a day-old scone, which I tuck into my bag for later. I make it to the fountain just as the sun begins to set and watch its strange transformation. The water, or what was once mostly water, slops thickly into the base at daytime temperatures but congeals at nightfall, exiting the top in yellow, sputtering curls until the pump can no longer handle the strain and grinds to a halt somewhere below. Come morning, the fountain will warm and be fully functional by the time the restaurants are changing out their breakfast menus.

-traveler