It was a small town in Texas. Some people said it was nothing more than a greasy spot pressed against an old creased map. It went by the name Nowhere. It was the last town on Earth.
Everybody and everything in the world except the people and things in Nowhere had disappeared. No names in the phone book. No gravestones. No national monuments. No bibles and bubble gum and beer nuts. Nothing. Just a big void like the vacuum of space.
One afternoon a man from Nowhere named Frank went to drive out of town. Just beyond town his car ran into something more hardened and vengeful than Joseph's brothers. Although the car was destroyed Frank suffered little more than a bump on the forehead. Normally in a situation like that you'd call a tow truck and have the wreck towed. Frank didn't.
"I don't need no damn car," he said. So he left it there with steam hissing out of a radiator split down the middle and the hood all crumpled and flopped out like a Saint Bernard's tongue on a hot July afternoon. Frank knew the wreck was of absolutely no consequence. It never was. It never would be. Things never changed in Nowhere.
Frank walked down the road a stretch to Too Tall Liquors. It was the only hard liquor store in Nowhere. His life long friend Walt was the proprietor of the store. Walt stood out front of the store looking at Frank and his wrecked car. Frank walked over. Walt stood under a green metal awning hung over the door. He figured that if you stood in the sun too long you might come down with a case of skin cancer. He read that in a magazine. Back when there were magazines.
"Nasty bump you got there," said Walt.
Frank shrugged. "Nothing to it," he said. Frank always said that. For instance when somebody Frank knew passed he shrugged and said, "Well, that's life. Nothing to it. No, sir."
"So, you going to call the insurance company?" Walt said.
"Nope," said Frank.
"Yessir," Walt said. "Guess that'd be kinda pointless since there ain't no insurance company to call.
Hardly any sense paying for a long distance telephone call. Nosiree."
Frank and Walt chuckled. They knew the telephones in Nowhere only called other telephones in Nowhere because outside of Nowhere there were no phones to call.
"Figured I'd just leave her there," said Frank. "Might serve as a warning to others who figure they'd tempt the Devil."
Most Nowherians decided what had happened to the world outside of their little town was undoubtedly the work of the Devil. Folks blamed unfortunate things like floods and hurricanes and tornadoes on the Devil. If somebody went crazy and killed his family or neighbors it was said the Devil made him do it. The Devil was also known as the Prince of the World and the tempter of the Gospels. Old Beelzebub had the horns of a goat and the teeth of a pig. Some people called him Lord of the Flies.
Before the disappearance a four lane highway ran on the far side of town. Some of the cars traveling east to west and west to east on the highway stopped in town on occasion. Tourists jumped out of shiny new cars and took pictures of the quaint old buildings on Main Street. Somebody famous once lived in Nowhere but heck if anybody remembered his name. The famous person with a name nobody remembered was a movie star. Soon after he became famous the movie actor moved to Hollywood. He disappeared along with Hollywood and everything else. Now nobody could remember his face.
No tourists or traveling salesmen from Chicago or Wichita Falls stopped in for a Coke at Hardly There Pizzeria or an ice cream cone at Fandango Frozen Delights of Texas. Famous movie stars are pretty much of no account unless a reputation or an encyclopedia entry can be attributed to them. Most of the books and magazines in the Nowhere Public Library had blank pages in them because nothing existed beyond town but a brick wall painted to look like the Texas countryside.
One day sunny day in September the highway just up and disappeared. So did the train tracks that ran down the center of town and had for a hundred and fifty years. Nobody really saw the highway or the tracks disappear. Nobody witnessed this remarkable event. It was like the highway and tracks never existed in the first place. There was nothing where they once stood but dirt and weeds. Most people didn't notice the highway and railroad tracks missing at first, although they did miss the train coming through town at midnight tooting its horn to warn the careless away from the crossings.
Frank was the first and last Nowherian to drive out and see if the freeway had disappeared. He figured it might be some sort of mirage or optical illusion. But when he tried to get out past town he hit a brick wall painted to resemble the Nowherian countryside. He was going ten miles per hour when he ran up against the painted landscape. People from Nowhere drive well under the speed limit to the endless irritation of people not from Nowhere who no longer visited because they no longer existed.
"Looks like you could use a pick-me-up," said Walt. He one-eyed the red and purple welt on Frank's forehead.
"Sure could," Frank said.
Walt turned around and went inside and came out a minute or so later with two drinks with ice cubes floating in too tall glasses. Walt sold too tall glasses with "Nowhere: A Nice Place to Do Nothing" stenciled in fancy red lettering across them. He handed a too tall glass to Frank.
"Health," said Walt.
"Health," Frank said.
They lofted the too tall glasses and drank.
Nobody knew why people in Nowhere said "health" when they drank things not unhealthy for them. But they did. And always had far back as anybody could remember.
Frank and Walt drank the Nowhere city commemorative beverage – sassafras and vodka. The sassafras wasn't real sassafras. It was artificial sassafras flavoring. Nobody bothered to use the bark from the sassafras tree to flavor root beer anymore. Frank and Walt had no idea real sassafras had something to do with a species of deciduous tree in the family Lauraceae. Frank and Walt and other adults in Nowhere – with the exception of Baptist adults and a few other tea-totalers – liked to drink ethanol in various percentages with artificial and sometimes real citrus and fruit flavors added. Other adults drank their ethanol "straight up." It similar to isopropyl alcohol. Isopropyl alcohol was used as a solvent and for pharmaceutical applications.
Frank felt a little better after quaffing most of his non-sassafras flavored vodka drink.
In Nowhere people called the consumption of alcohol "quaffing." In places that no longer existed the word defined the "overindulgence in drink." In Nowhere it was a word used to indicate drinking regardless of indulgence. "See you at the Water Tank," Nowherians said when they saw each other in the street, usually on Friday. "See you there and we'll quaff a few." The Water Tank was the only bar in Nowhere. It was now the only bar in the world. The Water Tank was famous for quaffing and billiards – or what Nowherians called pool. Nowherians, lubricated on ethanol and fermented hops and barley and sometimes various fermented grapes, played eight-ball, nine-ball, ten-ball, straight pool, one-pocket and bank pool on two worn green felted tables at the Water Tank. They usually played eight-ball because it was a Nowherian tradition.
Frank was now a bit more loquacious thanks to the non-sassafras vodka drink. He stood under the green metal awning and squinted off to the west where his 1976 Ford Torino sat smashed like a big red swatted fly up against an invisible barrier or what Frank and Walt and everybody else in Nowhere thought of as landscape painted brick wall. 1976 was the last year Ford Motor Company made the Torino. The car was named after the city of Turin, considered at one time to be the Italian version of Detroit. Both Turin and Detroit no longer existed. Cars were no longer made in Detroit or Turin or anywhere else because there were no people to drive them.
"Damn," said Frank. "Sure was a pretty car."
"Yessir," said Walt. "She will be again."
"You know, I really thought I had a chance," Frank said. "I figured I'd plow right through there. But I didn't estimate the thing right. Never do. Probably never will."
"Nope," said Walt. "How fast you going?"
"Ten. Same as always."
"Don't seem fast enough."
"Nope," said Frank.
"Gonna get you another car?" Walt said.
"Don't need one. Heck, Nowhere's half a mile across. I'll walk, I reckon."
Both Frank and Walt knew Frank's wrecked car wasn't something that would sit at the edge of town until it was towed away or turned to a pile of rusty dust.
Just about every Nowherian – especially Baptists Nowherians – believed the Devil had something to do with the landscape painted wall and the disappearance of the rest of the world. Most Nowherians didn't bother with to think about it much. Let the Devil has his due they said between sips of iced tea. They drank iced tea when they were not drinking ethanol.
"Yessir," said Walt. He often said that when there was nothing else to say.
Frank and Walt finished their Nowhere city commemorative drinks made of vodka and non-sassafras sassafras. The non-sassafras sassafras flavor chemical was manufactured in Cleveland, Ohio, which did not exist anymore. The vodka was distilled from corn grown in Canada. It was a country far up north that no longer existed. The vodka was sold in a bottle shaped like a human skull. The factory that made the glass bottles shaped like skulls no longer existed.
Frank and Walt stood for a long time squinting into the sun. They looked at Frank's car with its snout smashed up against a picture perfect reproduction of the Texas landscape. The Devil and his helpers did a damn fine job painting in cypress and pecan trees and tufts of little bluestem and witchgrass and a big wide blue sky with puffy clouds here and there. Sometimes if you looked at it real hard you'd swear the clouds were slowly moving to the west. It was an optical illusion like everything else.
"Think we'll ever get to the bottom of it?" Walt said after a long spell of silence. Long spells of silence were very common in Nowhere.
Frank shrugged. "Don't rightly know," he said.
"Yessir," said Walt.
"Can't say I remember ever leaving Nowhere," Frank said. He thought real hard about it. But couldn't recall anything other than waking up in bed at six o'clock that morning. He thought maybe he was drafted into the Army as a young man and had gone to Germany and France. But he couldn't remember anything about it.
"Mighty peculiar how we never want for anything," Walt said. "Why just this afternoon I was down at the grocery store on Haystack Street and the shelves were bursting full. Damnest thing. There ain't been a delivery truck in here since before I can remember. Awful odd how cans of Dinty Moore and Twinkies and Miller High Life never seem to disappear even though folks buy them all the time. Especially the Twinkies."
"Lord works in mysterious ways," Frank said. He often said that when he couldn't figure something out.
If something didn't have an explanation Frank and most everybody else in Nowhere reckoned it must be an act of God. A lot of Nowherians had a good healthy fear of God, especially on Sunday. Things that didn't set well with Nowherians, like relatives disappeared in Pittsburg and Atlanta, now that was the work of the Devil.
"Yessir," said Walt.
"Guess it had to be tested," said Frank. "There's no reason to leave Nowhere even if I wanted to."
"Yessir," Walt said.
"It occurs to me Nowhere might be heaven," said Frank. "Sure ain't no angels walking the streets. But we didn't suffer the fate of all them other folks, the ones outside the pretty painted walls. Hell might not be a lake of fire where sinners get tossed to burn forever like they have it there in the Book of Revelations. Hell might be you just up and disappear like you was never on the Earth."
"Maybe it was aliens," Walt said.
Years before Walt swore on a stack of bibles he saw a UFO out over a cow pasture in the Norwherian countryside. That was before the Nowherian countryside had turned into a painted picture on a wall with nothing on the other side of it.
"No telling," Frank said.
"Yessir," said Walt, and then he said, "Ready for another pick-me-up?"
"Best get on home," Frank said. "Much obliged for the pick-me-up."
"Yessir," Walt said. "What're you going to do about the old Ford?" he said, nodding with a squint at the wreck yonder.
"By the time I get home she'll be setting there waiting for me," Frank said. "There won't be a scratch on her."
"Ain't it the truth," said Walt. "Guess I had a momentary lapse there. Happens more and more these days."
"Sure does," Frank said. "See you tomorrow."
"Yessir," said Walt. "Think you might try again?"
"Must be predestined. I do it every darn day. Got to admit, though, I'm getting tired of this old bump on my head," Frank said, touching the red and purple lump. It didn't hurt as much as it did last time.
"I've done this now going on five hundred years," Frank said out loud to nobody in particular as he walked down the middle of the street. "And damn if I won't do it for another five hundred."
Frank knew that couldn't be right. It just didn't make sense. Five hundred years? No man lives that long, except for those fellows in the Bible. Frank thought maybe this place here was heaven or hell. He wasn't Catholic, but if he was this would be purgatory. It was a place that existed for an eternity and a man did the same little things over and over day in and day out forever. He did that until God came along and had him do something else.
The highway and railroad tracks were gone because they were no longer needed. No trains rolled through. And since the shelves at the grocery store and Billy Bohanan's Hardware were always full no matter how many things were sold there was no reason to find a way out of Nowhere. People stayed put. It was tradition. It was habit. It didn't matter one way or the other if you ran smack into a life-like parlor room reproduction of the Texas countryside. You rub the bump on your sore forehead and do the same thing the very next day. Life's a series of rituals.
Frank noticed a can glinting in street dead ahead of him. Convict Hill Collard Greens a paper label half peeled off the can read. Frank stood over the can looking at it. Then he kicked it. Hard. The collard greens can tumbled furiously end over end through the air. It disappeared in a weed choked ditch a few yards up and to the right.
"No mind," Frank said to nobody.
It would be right there square in the middle of the road at the exact same place and time tomorrow.