Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Picture me: I’m crazy about you
My future is anything but hazy with you
You took me here so I could hear you chat
About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat
Screw everyone else, for us they’re all ditched
And let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched.
It was Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark
Twain, where I’d worked summers growing up, where I’d
wandered the town dressed as Huck Finn, in an old straw
hat and faux-ragged pants, smiling scampishly while urging
people to visit the Ice Cream Shoppe. It was one of those
stories you dine out on, at least in New York, because no
one else could match it. No one could ever say: 
Oh yeah,
me too
.
The ‘visor hat’ comment was a little inside joke: When
I’d first told Amy I played Huck, we were out to dinner, into
our second bottle of wine, and she’d been adorably tipsy.
Big grin and the flushed cheeks she got when she drank.
Leaning across the table as if I had a magnet on me. She
kept asking me if I still had the visor, would I wear the visor
for her, and when I asked her why in the name of all that
was holy would she think that Huck Finn wore a visor, she
swallowed once and said, ‘Oh, I meant a straw hat!’ As if
those were two entirely interchangeable words. After that,
any time we watched tennis, we always complimented the

---

players’ sporty straw hats.
Hannibal was a strange choice for Amy, however, as I
don’t remember us having a particularly good or bad time
there, just a time. I remember us ambling around almost a
full year ago, pointing at things and reading placards and
saying, ‘That’s interesting,’ while the other one agreed,
‘That is.’ I’d been there since then without Amy (my
nostalgic streak uncrushable) and had a glorious day, a
wide-grin, right-with-the-world day. But with Amy, it had
been still, rote. A bit embarrassing. I remember at one point
starting a goofy story about a childhood field trip here, and I
saw her eyes go blank, and I got secretly furious, spent ten
minutes just winding myself up – because at this point of
our marriage, I was so used to being angry with her, it felt
almost enjoyable, like gnawing on a cuticle: You know you
should stop, that it doesn’t really feel as good as you think,
but you can’t quit grinding away. On the surface, of course,
she saw nothing. We just kept walking, and reading
placards, and pointing.
It was a fairly awful reminder, the dearth of good
memories we had since our move, that my wife was forced
to pick Hannibal for her treasure hunt.
I reached Hannibal in twenty minutes, drove past the
glorious Gilded Age courthouse that now held only a
chicken-wing place in its basement, and headed past a
series of shuttered businesses – ruined community banks
and defunct movie houses – toward the river. I parked in a
lot right on the Mississippi, smack in front of the 
Mark
Twain
riverboat. Parking was free. (I never failed to thrill to
the novelty, the generosity of free parking.) Banners of the
white-maned man hung listlessly from lamp poles, posters

---

curled up in the heat. It was a blow-dryer-hot day, but even
so, Hannibal seemed disturbingly quiet. As I walked along
the few blocks of souvenir stores – quilts and antiques and
taffy – I saw more for-sale signs. Becky Thatcher’s house
was closed for renovations, to be paid with money that had
yet to be raised. For ten bucks, you could graffiti your name
on Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence, but there were few
takers.
I sat in the doorstep of a vacant storefront. It occurred
to me that I had brought Amy to the end of everything. We
were literally experiencing the end of a way of life, a phrase
I’d applied only to New Guinea tribesmen and Appalachian
glassblowers. The recession had ended the mall.
Computers had ended the Blue Book plant. Carthage had
gone bust; its sister city Hannibal was losing ground to
brighter, louder, cartoonier tourist spots. My beloved
Mississippi River was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp
flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan.