## The silver sedan scrolls to a stop in front of a side street near the edge of town. It's hard not to be near the edge of town here, of course, but this one is close enough to have corn in the backyard and a clear view of the silhouttes of silos and the \*\*\*\*\* of the petroleum works\*. Sunlight, thin and clear, glints off the chrome around the windshield. The passenger-side window lowers, and a blonde female head, behind a camera, pokes out. What is there to take pictures of? A yellow diamond sign that says "WATCH CHILDREN." A rut beside the gravel beside the broken asphalt of the road. The sky--high and clear, pale blue stippled with sideways sliding clumps of clouds. Late October's leftover leaves, past the death-defying blaze of tourist brilliance, dull sienna, burnt brick, hovering on the leeward side of a few trees between here and the dirt clods and the stubble of the first few feet of the cornfields. The houses--not particularly interesting. There must be a street in this town where the houses are old, grand, creaking, picturesque, but this street is not that one. Here they are squat, utilitarian, decorated yes here and there by a half-collapsed pumpkin or a clump of some kind of corn that doesn't grow around here. A lattice. A useless small white fence, only high enough to trip someone, around a dormant flower bed. The camera clicks, and clicks, and before the next click can actuate, a stop-motion blur of a man issues forth with tarzan-like speed, silently, from one of the houses--which one? not even the one the camera could most likely have been mistaken for being pointed toward--and runs, all flowing muscle, green tanktop, and pale face gaunt with threat. Click. Yes, he is running toward the car, there can be no mistaking it now. He got out here so fast, it's as if he has trained for this exact moment, and yet looking back, the driver sees his \*\*\*\* face and gesticulations in slow motion. The driver reacts, also in retrospect apparently in slow motion, and the car begins to inch forward. The bald man stands, angry as a chimp, body posture all menace, a faint puzzlement hidden behind a wall of rage. He turns and stands in the street as the car picks up speed, its occupants' hearts beating fast. His mouth works but there is no sound. In the rear view mirror he can be seen shaking his head. The car turns a corner, and another, following the outside edge of town in a japanese tea-garden demon-dispelling bridge pattern. The image of the man, nevertheless, does not dissipate, but follows the car, across the tracks to the county road, past the winter wheat and the fallow fields, between high corn on the gravel road that leads to the splattering of parking lots behind the one restaurant across from the gas station by the highway, the highway that purports, implicitly through its green signs with frank official information and its unofficial billboards full of smiling immortality, to connect this autumnal place with reality.