Because we've stopped at a gas station in Nowhere, Texas, and because I cannot think of anything better to do I've bought a packet of Hostess Twinkies. They are, after all, an American institution and the favourite food of Zippy the Pinhead. And if they're good enough for him, they're good enough for me. Snapshot The Gulf of Mexico is a hundred yards to our left. The landscape is flat and cheerlessly etiolated, marked only by an infinite line of telegraph poles disappearing into the dusk that is our destination.
White birds stand on the backs of cows, hitching a slow ride to nowhere in particular.
A police car flies past in the opposite direction, its red and white lights dulled in the dingy sea air, its siren silenced by the wind. There are no houses or stores, just bleak flatness all around and an oil tanker up ahead. I suggest to David that we stop and let off some firecrackers. He shakes his head, still searching for the perfect firecracker place, which I suspect exists only in his mind. The Twinkie taste won't go away.