Something had happened. Something had gone on between Kansas and Ohio, but my brain wouldn’t work and I found myself lost in fatigue. Joe was gone. Milky Way Joe. He was gone. At least I knew where he went though. I dropped him off at Indianapolis International and he caught a flight back to Portland. “Will I see you around Boston at all?” I asked him at the gate. “You’ll see me,” he said. And as he walked towards the doors he turned, grinned and waved. And then I was alone, so I drove. I didn’t get too far. I barely made it into Ohio before I had to pull over and shut my eyes. Odd dreams came that I did not remember upon waking. No music had been played. The guitar that had been gifted to me and the voice which had sung a song, they were both discarded. It didn’t seem like anyone needed a song from me. And what the hell happened between Kansas and Ohio? What went on in Illinois and Indiana? Something important but I was too tired to relay it. I was beat. I was a mechanical man. And I was a man without a home, going home, mixed up and chewed up. The dark crawled in around me in an apartment I rented for just a night. The guitar and the voice and the melodies, it was all a beautiful thing, but a thing which was bouncing along, making its way down the road, and soon it would end up in the river. I would not join it. Soon it would part from me. What happened between Kansas and Ohio? I asked for an answer in the dark but knew I wouldn’t get one unless I slept, and had better dreams. Something had happened when Milky Way Joe and I crossed the Mississippi River, pondering the blues as we soared over the bridge, nestling ourselves into the palm of Quincy, Illinois. We both changed the instant it happened. I wrote a song that night while Joe went to sleep. I wrote a song and stretched. I stretched my legs and my back and I breathed like a yogi. Then I awoke in the morning and opened a window, letting the aroma of a petit thunderstorm tap its jazz into my nostrils. I made a pot of coffee and poured myself a cup and thought about love. Then Joe came down the stairs and we hit the road. We saw where Lincoln was buried in Springfield. The majestic tomb cradled the king under ten feet of cement. Someone had tried to steal his bones once and Milky Way Joe said “someone’s always trying to steal the frame of a great man after he’s been long dead.” Then I took out one of my favorite letters of history, a letter from Lincoln to a woman he knew before his wife. Before reading the letter aloud I apologized to Mrs. Lincoln, if it should be disrespectful to read a letter her husband had written to another woman. And after I read it Milky Way Joe said “that was right as rain Roc. That man belongs to the ages and you belong to love letters.” We kept on keepin’ on, right on into Indiana where we spent the night at an old house on the top floor. The bedrooms each had a rocking chair in the corner. “You see man,” Milky said, “you put an empty chair in a room and you’re asking for something to fill it and watch you while you're sleeping.” I hit him on the shoulder and told him I wouldn’t be able to sleep if he went on like that. In the morning we visited James Dean’s grave. Joe put a pack of cigarettes beside it, we said “Thanks Jim,” and kept on rolling. We caught a baseball game, shot pool, went around drinking beer, had an argument, made up, slept for two hours, and headed for the airport. And that was that.