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40 Blue Stilly It’s that drive-thru smoke shop off the highway, with all the old trucks laboring to maintain idle outside it, anytime of day. It must do the best business of anything on the 530, since the kids at Denny’s just get coffee, and you’d have to be stupid or desperate to need to stop for gas in a place like this. It’s cheaper either direction, better grade, and the tanks might even be clean. Half the population of this burg must be lined up there, pickups dying and starting and dying again. It makes me want to bring my friend Isaac down. He smokes. It would be worth the fifty-mile drive to see what the appeal is, to find out how a drive-thru smoke shop can keep a stretch of road on its feet. It’s got to send the Shell station business. The wait looks long enough to call for more fuel to get home. And maybe the smokers get hungry for burgers and fries, or milkshakes, and they stop over at that Denny’s on their way out of town. I can’t even tell what town this is meant to be. It’s too far west to be Arlington, and I had decided Silvana existed only on freeway exit signs. So I’ll bring Isaac down here sometime —take a trip on a Friday night 41 when he’s short on cash and his favorite brand. It says right on the wall they’ve got Camels. Cheap ones, and candy for the kids. Maybe we’ll figure out how, from a slow queue across the road from it, the Stilly could ever look blue. ...

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