FRANCIS WANTED some beer on Sunday. They drove to the border because of the blue laws and stopped at a filling station two miles after the green sign for North Carolina. Francis came out of the store and held six at the plastic tie, dropped the balled receipt in the parking lot, opened the door and sat back down inside the car. They made back south across the line and stopped a half mile past because the tower was sixty feet above the road and the top was a sombrero made of bright colored lights, and because Noah said, if God lived anyplace, it was there, or somewhere very close.

The tower was the centerpiece of the complex, a half-mile stretch of shops and restaurants cast bright colors; pink and green, blue and orange and yellow, built to look like desert missions. But in the weak light, when Noah passed the entrance and drove the gullet and the storefronts ticked close at both sides of the car, the paint jobs looked dusted, color muted behind a white coat of dust from the interstate. The head of the tower was built in the shape of a sombrero, and dotted with colored lights, green and yellow and white and red and orange, bright over the empty shops selling coffee mugs, baby spoons, stick puzzles, dice, picture key chains, ashtrays, live hermit crabs, pinatas and yardsticks to go with, knives and conch shells, penny rockets and roman candles and smoke bombs and sparklers and one knee-high fuse rocket with a plastic blue tip they called the gravedigger.

They paid a quarter, stood shoulder close and rode a metal box like a dumbwaiter to the top of the sombrero tower. Terry put his hands at the bars. The gears below turned a hard sound, and the metal wire on top scratched at the pulley He watched the ground drop away.

The bill was a circle platform, and wide, big enough for twenty more. There was no one else. Noah put a finger in his beer can and wet the end. He touched a green bulb. It hissed.

Shit. It’s damn hot.

It’s a light bulb, Francis said.

Terry walked one lap on the platform. He squinted his eyes south at the light a white halo over the road and over the trees, put his hands on the black rail. He looked north; town lights the same; dumb, white. What he thought was, lean over at the dark. He dreamt times that he flew. Whole dreams felt a year, and he woke tired, shoulders sore, hours afterward looked at birds, great sadness in his throat. He kept his hands on the rail, and put his feet at the first bar and pushed up. The air felt good, cool at his face. His shirt bunched at the back and Noah yanked him down.

Get down man, Noah said.

Terry shook himself out a little. He brushed at the front of his shirt. Noah went back to where he and Francis stood and thumped a cigarette over the rail. Terry went up beside them. They lit a joint and passed it.

Fuck the Eiffel tower, Noah said. I won’t ever go. Too fucking high.

Terry spit over the rail. Halfway down he couldn’t see it anymore.

My uncle went there, Francis said. He brought me this plastic bird. You turned a switch near its ass, and it flew around. But the wings didn’t last, they were this thin stuff. They just broke off after a little while.

I hate France.

You ever been?

No.

All those sonsofbitches smoke cigarettes.

My grandfather was there in the war. He said they’re nice mostly, said he went on this girl in a windmill, with like, tulips all around it.

I can’t trust a beret. I can’t trust, like a country with nothing but stupid white people, like a whole place populated by rich, tennis playing dickheads.

I hate white people, Francis said.

Me too.

Noah and Francis drank a beer apiece and threw the cans over the railing. They took the cage down, then Terry left them and paid another quarter to go back up. Noah and Francis watched him rise, frayed wire over the dumbwaiter creaking like blackboard chalk and pulling him up; Noah said hurry up, man, and his voice got smaller; Francis bent down and picked at something in the grass. On the deck Terry listened close; strained engines, rushed air from cars shot past north and south, white highbeams, red brakelights, blurred yellow headlamps.