Opossum Gen'l Store, Old Route 41, southern West Virgina.

We stood out on the porch, speaking with the man while he finished his dinner of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. He was brother in law to the owner of the store, and from Beckley, about an hour or so south of the mostly nameless place we were in. Beckley's one of the last real towns before you hit the panhandle of Virginia. He was very courteous and informative, seemingly in no hurry to point us in as many fruitful directions as possible. We narrowed it down to one, and that was to get to Beckley or thereabouts and spend the night. He urged us to try to get off the old route as soon after dark as possible; this, as the sun was sinking, the sky a thickening shade of burgundy through the wild palisades of evergreens.

He hinted that the innumerable dead deer alongside the road weren't always the only ones to die at night. He took one short look at our car and warned us we'd have no chance if we hit a buck. It's not so much that they're fast out of the undergrowth, lunging out of the thickets into the road. It's the fog, and not five minutes after departing, it reached down and choked the road nearly all the way to New River.

I wasn't privy to the conversation when it turned to blood, but the man told Robert that before the place was reborn as the Opossum Gen'l Store, it was a hillbilly drinking joint. The new owners bought it cheap, with bullet holes in the walls and dried blood on the floor. They mopped up, patched the holes, spray-painted a new sign on a piece of plywood, installed a snack bar with orange formica-topped tables and deep friend shrimp baskets, red and white checkerboard wallpaper on the main counter, built a display rack in back with assorted rifles, a cheap SKS "semi-automitic," and an M1 Carbine replica, a glass case filled with secondhand Rugers, Colts, Smith and Wessons, and a Luger replica. The back of the store smelled like leather and damp wood. Next to the glass case stood a finely engraved hand-made saddle for sale. An aisle over were tackle, flies, and a plastic lined box of something that looked like Nightcrawlers. The other two or three aisles resembled any small convenience store, the only indication otherwise being the occasional local packages of jerky. At the counter were various postcards and other cheap gift items. One postcard of a still operating steam engine somewhere in the vicinity caught my eye. I asked one of the ladies about it. I, as yet unsure of what exactly a southern West Virginia accent sounds like and with no reason to think she was from anywhere else, mistook her for a local. She had in fact only just moved there from Tennessee or Kentucky; I can't remember which. Family asked her back. She came and was helping run the store, and she knew nothing about steam engines in West Virginia. I paid for my purchase, thanked her and walked back out on to the porch, where the gentleman with the orderly blond moustache, white, collared, tucked-in shirt, the top button undone, and rolled up sleeves revealing a large cross with a snake twined around it tattooed on the bottom of his right forearm began to incongruously talk about the problems in town with too many kids on Crystal Meth and Oxycontin. He shook his head sadly, disapprovingly, changed the subject and asked us where we were headed after Beckley.

We spoke for a few more minutes, enjoying the easy tempo of the conversation, I finished my drink, we thanked him for his time, he wished us a good journey and safe drive that night, and we got in the car and left, pressing into the blackening woods and opaque white mist in the headlights.