What he needed was eggs and bacon and good fresh-ground coffee, but what he craved was the instantaneous fix of a gas station pastry washed down with a Styrofoam cup of industrial drip, both available at the Kwik Pump. For that matter, maybe he’d go for a drive. It was one of his favorite things, driving nowhere particular in his pickup truck with old-school country music on the radio, slowly knee-steering along with the coffee in one hand and a pastry in the other. Nutritional napalm, and no way to navigate, but the sort of unobtrusive decadence that suited him. He closed the barn door, started his pickup truck, and made the short drive across County Road M to the Kwik Pump, where a neon sign in the window promised BEER SALES TO MIDNIGHT, and a banner hung with bungee cords advertised a dollar-off special on twenty-four-packs of Old Milwaukee. Right below that was an official government-issue sign identifying the Kwik Pump as a deer carcass registration point. This was an accurate representation of the ratio of interests in the area, which ran about two to one beer to hunting.
