“Anything for you, dear?” Everyone under forty -even two killers- is a “dear” in the eyes of paternal Midwesterners. There’s no question of them letting someone get up from a table without being sufficiently overfed. The driver declines but has neither the arguing power nor the stamina to talk down the friendliest woman in all of Iowa, unless they’re all as bad as she. He escapes with a mere bowl of “Big Betty’s Homemade Chili.” The woman automatically denies being Big Betty, though she isn’t asked, before launching into a story about how Betty was the woman who founded this guest house way back when, and she dies when they filled up during a snowstorm and she gave her bed up for some weary traveler, or some such malarkey. The hitchhiker doesn’t mind the fable of biblical length –and with as little bearing on the present- because he is working hard to finish the pile of food, now mixed into a puddle of fatty gravy, on his plate. The driver wishes this woman would die; either from overzealous compassion, like kind Lady Bertha, or a hole in the chest the size of a Cadillac motor courtesy of Dr. Barringer, it doesn’t matter.

The chili arrives –a steaming pot of orange glop- and they are ready to split. The bill comes to two dollars and change, so they leave a five dollar bill, even though this invites the risk of the kind host fussing profusely until one of them goes deaf; and she does, all the way out to the pickup.

Once inside the truck, the driver and the hitchhiker exhale as if they haven’t taken a breath since they entered the old lady’s establishment. They can mark yet another entry off their own personal atlases of places to never visit again.

The hitchhiker picks up the road atlas and finds himself engrossed once more. This time, he wishes he had a pencil so he could mark the smiling face of a fat pig woman over Grinnell. Next up: a windmill named Pleasant Valley, somewhere between here and the corn cob of Iowa City. The hitchhiker thinks how more useful it would be for a road atlas to predict the weather than to make cartoon characters out of America’s cities. At least Pleasant Valley sounds nice. Looking up, there’s nothing but cold, blue skies ahead.