Chapter 33
A FEW businesses clung to the hillside where Sand River Bridge ended and Frayville proper began. A vacant, boarded-up restaurant on the left overlooked the lush wooded valley beneath the bridge, a gorgeous view if you ignored the gravel pit and the abandoned train yard in the middle of it, all sadly abandoned. Just like us.
Across Main Street, the pizza place and the Quick-Stop, fine purveyors of off-brand Real Hunter Meat Stix and liquor and cheap porn magazines and plastic bags of surplus comics for rednecks headed north, competed for the Ugliest Building in Town prize. Over the years I’d grown accustomed to seeing kids hanging out in the Quick-Stop parking lot, skateboarding and dancing and working on sugar highs from slushies and candy. The empty town was bad enough, but t
