The sky in the morning is like pajamas that were washed with a dry-erase marker. The sky in the afternoon is like weak blue Kool-Aid, spiked Kool-Aid, spiked hot Kool-Aid in the motorcycle gangster’s satchel. The sky in the evening is smeared like the math teacher’s chalkboard after he taught quadratic equations to forty hormonal eighth-graders. So many skies.

There’s a sale on used underwear in the resale garbage dump of a shop. Some bums are playing tambourines by the courthouse as a protest. God knows what they are protesting for. There’s a trash-can garage band called Purple Snowman playing Paul Simon songs. There’s a televangelist on TV who just got a news bulletin from an angel named Michael that you need to put your private jets into storage in preparation for the second coming.

In this town, nobody knows what’s coming down. Hate and anger and violence seethe under the surface, and come up at odd moments, in strange faces and figures—a stunted and angry teenager, a cripple with bright blue eyes, a toothless gas-station robber, a rebellious missionary kid, a fierce and frightening old woman, a deaf man with a hatchet collection, a neglected child, a four-hundred pound trucker, a homeless man in a stolen windbreaker who believes he is an antelope, a stoner riding the merry-go-round. They will one day break loose and break free in a way nobody will ever forget.