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There are four of us in Treton. Four of us who don't go to ice cream socials and football games, don't watch the volunteer firemen's parade or buy poppies from senile women on Memorial Day. The four of us—Alex, Ben, Stan, and me—are sitting in the back of a rusty four-by-four abandoned at the edge of town, counting the cars that pass by.

The fourteenth car to drive through Treton today is an unremarkable truck towing a remarkably shiny John Deere. Every time a tractor lurches by, it reminds my mother that I am a good-for-nothing. She points at the barebacked, sunburnt, pot-bellied farm boys and asks me why I can't be like them. Driving tractors by day, spreading STDs by night. Agribusiness degree at a second-rate branch of the state university: Dream of Dreams. Strapping young men with bright futures: melanoma, meth addiction, spousal abuse, etc.

"Sam," she says, when the strain of my existence gets to be too much. "You're just like your father."

Even in this heat, Alex is buttoned up in his infamous gray pea coat with the communist star duct-taped to the shoulder. He tells old ladies that his coat is an original from the Soviet army and they run away to restock their bomb shelters. His hand's in his pocket now, groping around the polyester lining for a pack of clove cigarettes.

Alex is a communist because he likes to think and his father beats him. When his father caught him skipping church, Alex told him, "Religion is the opiate of the masses."

The next day he came to school lumpy with bruises, but when he told us he had nothing to lose but his chains, we just agreed and didn't ask about it.

The fifteenth car to pass through Treton is a gray Toyota Camry. Japanese cars are illegal in Treton. We remember Pearl Harbor.

Alex takes out the cigarettes and hands one to Stan. Ben doesn't smoke because he's not sure if it's kosher and he can't ask his parents. I don't smoke because it reminds me of my father.

Stan lights up carefully and the air fills with a carcinogenic perfume. He's in his element now: angst-ridden, asbestos -inhaling, James Dean, tragic (gay). Doomed eyes to the east, contemplating the infinite fields of government-subsidized corn spanning miles and generations. Stan says that the corn is relentless. He thinks that pretty soon the cornfields will close in on Treton and consume us while we sleep.

The sixteenth car to drive through Treton is local: a hefty gray Cadillac with a cross dangling from the rearview mirror and a "Life Begins at Conception" bumper sticker. We all think about Maggie Parson, but we don't talk about it.

The bumper sticker has a little white cartoon fetus curled up in a pink cartoon womb. Maggie Parson knows that fetuses are not at all cartoonish, they are red and wormlike and unpleasant to remove. Now that she knows the truth about fetuses, Maggie Parson can never come back to Treton.

Over at the Dairy Queen, a blonde girl in a red tank top is flipping her hair for a married man while she rings up his Blizzard and chilidog. Her name is Shelly Brown and she's been Miss Treton three years in a row. At church, Pastor Brown sets her up on the altar like she's the Virgin Mary incarnate. He likes to say that when she sings about Him in her sweet little soprano, you can hear the capital "H." Everyone agrees by default.

Pastor Brown doesn't like me because my father was a drunk and I associate with Alex-the-Satanist and Ben-the-lost-Christian. Of course, Pastor Brown hates Stan the worst of all, but he refuses to talk about that kind of sexual perversion lest it give his boys unnatural thoughts. When Pastor Brown rants about Christian values and the prideful youth of America, I close my eyes and picture the time I saw Shelly Brown give up her Christian values to my brother in the loft of our barn.

Alex starts making lewd comments about Shelly, but I tune him out. The two Carver girls are sitting on the curb eating Dilly Bars in the sunshine. When I imagine Sara and Michelle, this is how I see them: freckled and bare-kneed, with matching bows and bright sundresses.

The seventeenth car to drive through Treton is a black Ford pickup. The morning after the accident, my brother and I went to see the familiar truck (chipping paint, torn upholstery, Bud Light cans in the front seat) and the stranger blue minivan (Minnesota State Parks sticker, coffee thermos, animal crackers and juice boxes) before they cleared the road. Two parents, two little girls (one Sara, one Michelle), one of Treton's 833 residents, two automobiles, and multiple cracker elephants, seals, and monkeys perished in the crash. One can of Bud Light survived, rolling to a rest miraculously intact in the tall grass by the highway. Miraculously intact, like a cartoon fetus nestled in a cartoon womb.

Alex is done with Shelly and now he and Stan are smoking and thinking about adult things (politics, agriculture, the bourgeois, penetration) in silence. Ben is thinking about little kid things, lying back in the bed of the pickup with his face to the sky like he's finding animal shapes in the clouds. Ben's parents run a Jewish bakery on Bass Street, right next to the abandoned granary that smells like manure twenty years after its last run. The Abrams wake up at the crack of dawn each day and run giant fans through the windows to get rid of the smell, but everything you buy there tastes faintly of twenty-year-old horse shit.

All of a sudden, Ben goes, "What're we gonna do when the sun dies?" Sometimes he says unexpected stuff like that, maybe because he reads too much sci-fi.

Stan breathes in deeply, then exhales and watches the smoke writhe and disappear. After a moment, he says:

"In a city of darkness,
There's no need of the sun,
And there ain't no man righteous,
No, not one."

He takes another drawn-out drag. Smoking makes him pensive. "Bob Dylan said that."

I nod like I really get it. Stan thinks that Bob Dylan is the true messiah because he rose up from the dregs of a small town in Minnesota and made it as a sage in New York. Stan dreams of being like Bob Dylan, but these are only daydreams. When Stan dreams at night, stalks of corn burst through the floor and twine around his limbs and throat. When I dream at night, little girls with matching bows melt away into open highway.

It's getting darker now. The four lampposts on Main Street have turned on and the church's glowing cross and the liquor store sign are both blazing bright neon, beacons to all of Treton's lost souls. Mosquitoes buzz in our ears and suck our blood; cicadas grind their love songs from the tall grass by the road.

The last car to drive through Treton is a weather-beaten Chicago Cutlery truck that passes by at about the same time every night. The Chicago Cutlery Company has been out of business since the mid-eighties.

Alex is convinced it's a serial killer on the prowl. Ben and Stan agree. I know better, but I don't let on.

They still can't see the ghosts of Treton as clearly as I do. They've never noticed the two little girls waving at us from the cab, or recognized my father at the wheel. They don't know that in the back the truck is carrying Maggie Parson's fetus, Alex's childhood, Shelly Brown's virginity, one million stalks of corn and ten thousand limbless animal crackers.