‘Eddie lives here,’ he said. ‘Last one on the right.’ A bunch of scrubby one-story houses in various stages of disrepair were scattered up and down the street. The houses looked to Carla as if they’d landed here by crazy accident, after being picked up and flung around by a storm in some other part of the county. It made her think of that scene in The Wizard of Oz, when the farmhouse goes flying and lands with a disgusting splat on a pair of legs in funky shoes. If another storm came along tomorrow, she guessed, these same houses would be scrambled all over again. Because in this kind of place, nothing lasted. Everything was tentative, temporary. You couldn’t count on anything. Not even more of the same. As Lonnie drove slowly down the road – the pace was a must, because the potholes were humongous – Carla looked left and right. Gutters dangled at crazy angles off the front edges of these houses, looking like broken arms. Two of the houses were dark wood, while the rest were swallowed up by dirty aluminum siding.
