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Wilson’s men know the women here, and they find one another in the crowd andover the shoulders of the men, their behinds stuck in the air and slapped like you would slap a sack of grain

Other townspeople help the refugees down from the boxcars, and Wilson himself consults with a man and a woees should stay and which should be taken on to Dallas

Once the train is e Cowboys and Indians, using it as a massive prop

I’m huntin a nice cool drink, Lee tells her You want one?

I reckon Maury and me’ll just look around a bit

Suit yourself But try not to beat up on anyone while we’re here, what do you say?

She stands in the middle of the street for a while, not sure what to do with herself Her place, it’s been proven over and over, is out there with the meatskins and the brutishness, not here within the confines of a pretty little peppertown She tried that before, and it didn’t work out What she really wants is to feel that gurkha knife solid in her hand--her pal for it--but she keeps it sheathed so as not to frighten the children

She tries folding her ar her wrists behind her back, and then she tries stuffing her hands in her pockets, but nothing seeht, and she wishes it were just her and Maury outside where she would know there was so fro a meatskin

After a while a boy approaches her He is a little taller than she is, and he’s wearing a plaid shirt tucked into his jeans and a belt of braided leather strips with a big silver buckle that has a horse on it

My na to tell uess? You don’t know?

It doesn’t co out the truth since this see kind of place

It’s Temple, she says

Where are you frorow up?

Tennessee mostly

I knohere that is I’ve seen it on a map in school, I mean I was born here, and I haven’t been anywhere else except for Dallas once on the train It isn’t safe other places

Safe ain’t so I’m used to

Tera It speaks to a lack of sophistication

Poor graot

How old are you?

I don’t know What day is it?

Dirk looks at his digital watch, which also shows the date

It’s August fourth

Reckon I’m sixteen now My birthday was last week

She tries to re on the day itself, but being on the road ss up the lines between days

Sixteen! he says happily I’o with et a Coke

With ice?

They always serve it with ice

Okay, let’s go on a date

They walk to the diner, and Dirk insists upon holding her hand He is disappointed when Maury begins to follow silently behind them, but she refuses to leave him The diner is a real diner, with a counter and stools and booths and everything, the kind she’s seen only in a state of dusty decay on empty roadsides Dirk wants to sit in a booth, but Temple doesn’t want to pass up the opportunity to sit at the counter--so the three of them take stools next to one another and Dirk orders three Cokes and, having decided to play a more chivalrous role, unwraps Maury’s straw for him

Do you like ot lucky, we have a whole ht down the street I bet I could name a hundred different musicians you’ve never even heard of

I’d call that a pretty safe bet

I like some rock and roll, but mostly I listen to classical composers Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and Smetana That’s the music for people who are really civilized Have you heard Dvoak’s Sy in the world, and itis possible

He continues to speak of things n to Telass with a spoon and crushes them between her teeth, and the world he tells her about seems like a very nice one, a very quaint one, but also one that doesn’t quite accord with the things she’s seen and the people she’s known Still, she likes his big visions and his grand to

He describes how the administrators of the town have plans to expand, to move the blockades back and build the town out, block by block, until they’ve retaken the whole city All they need are people to defend the borders, and new settlers are arriving all the ti people filled with skill and wit and vision

And once we have all of Longview back, he says, his gestures growing row even farther, east until we meet Dallas and south to Houston We can do it All it takes is people And e connect with those cities, we can march on the rest of Texas and take it all back and claim it for civilization, and we can play Dvoak froo, because he wrote thata neorld, and pretty soon the gobblers won’t have anywhere to go but into the ocean