When Milky Way Joe was a little kid they told him he was stupid, told him the earth was flat and that love was something only to be seen in filmography. One day little Joe was sent home early for putting his fist into another kid’s face. The nose had been broken. When his mom asked why he did it, he said the other kid spit on the pink princess dress of one of the girls in his class, and tried to cut it with scissors. He was taken out of public and homeschooled until high school. “Freshman year I hit another kid in the nose. I felt bad about it.” “Why did you do it?” I asked. “Ah shoot,” Joe said. He was riding upfront with me. Allie was sleeping in the backseat. “Nobody listens to a good kid sometimes, you know? Nobody listens. Then the good kid gets real bad at talking because he can’t practice it. This kid kept putting mayonnaise and mustard and ketchup and stuff like that in this other kid’s backpack. I watched him do it for half the year. But not everybody was like that, you know? I shouldn’t have hit him. I could have not hit him. I wouldn’t have if I had been able to talk to somebody about something.” “Talk to someone about what?” The sun was up. We were in Kansas. The land was blond beard stubble on one side of the road and grey beard stubble on the other side. Crops of corn and wheat a foot high. Sometimes both the land and the road were the same color, a reddish purple. “I needed to talk to someone about the world and what’s outside of it. There wasn’t anyone with any guts though. So my fist ended up leading the way. Compensation, compensation. You kick nature out the door and it’ll come beaming through all the fuckin’ windows. I haven’t hit anyone in the face since. It made me sick to tell you the truth. It’s a damned rotten thing. Maybe a fight’s good when it’s good, I don’t know.” The towns had no coffee shops. They were small and looked abandoned, but they weren’t, far from it. We drove by a little girl playing in a parking lot. I pulled in and parked. “Hey Allie. Allie,” I said and shook her shoulder. She woke up. “What? Hmm? Yeah?” “I need you to go over there and ask that little girl where the church is.” “What? Why?” “I just need you to.” Allie got out of the car and walked towards the little girl. I watched it happen in slow motion. The long red hair, almost orange in the sunlight, surprised the little girl with joy and she went playing in it. She twirled it around herself like she was on a swing set and laughed. Allie laughed too. Then they were speaking but I couldn’t hear from the car. There were whispers. Allie glanced back at the car in contemplation. I called out to her. The little girl took Allie’s hand and led her away. I tried to yell, but no sound would come out. It was a dream and I knew it. When I awoke, Allie was gone. We were parked in a small town called Hoxie. A water tower with the name stood tall and glistening right across the street in a setting sun. It was just Joe and I. “Where’s Allie?” Joe asked. “She went to church,” I said.