“There’s one thing,” said the boy. He went to the cab and reached into the kitbag and pulled out the Estwing and turned back to the shoulder, back to the dog, and Reed Lester watched him and he saw the dog’s ear prick to the sound of the boy’s step, and as the boy came nearer he saw the dog’s tail strain to lift, and he watched the boy lower himself to his knee again and set his bare hand on the dog’s neck and speak to the dog, telling it something

he couldn’t hear. He saw the boy move his hand to the dog’s ears, rubbing, and then to its brow, and with his hand over the dog’s eyes he saw him cock the hammer high and bring it down once, very hard, very close to his hand.

They lifted the dog and carried it into the ditch and set it down again. The boy looked up and down the highway. Then he returned to the truck and reached behind the seat for the red mechanic’s rag his father kept there, and he carried the rag back through the ditch and tied it to the uppermost fence wire. He stood looking down on the dog as the sleet fell and he looked at the sky and he shuddered. He went once more to the truck and reached again behind the seat and returned to the ditch and unfolded the blue tarpaulin and spread it over the dog and tucked its edges under him. The tarp had been his shelter, his plastic roof on nights under the stars when the dew came down. He stood back and the sleet pocked loudly at the plastic, as if angered by it. He returned his hammer to the kitbag and the two of them got back in the truck and he turned off the flashers and started up the Chevy. The wipers leapt back to their noisy work. He checked his mirror and pulled back onto the highway and in silence he lit a cigarette and in silence they drove on.

26

There is a beam of light, shaped by an eye-sized hole in the battened window over the cot, a light with no purpose other than to push a burning coin of itself over the seams of the floorboards—irregular demarcations of an illogical timepiece. The beam is pink in the dawn and turns yellow-white on its sweep as the sun moves westward over the earth—as the earth spins eastward away from the sun—progressing from one corner of the room where a locked chest sits, to the opposite corner, the beam going ruddy, and then pink again, and then dying altogether at the lion’s foot of the stove, as if dispirited, as if defeated daily by the black iron thing.

Some days the beam never arrives at all and it’s as if the sun, and time with it, has stopped. Other days the beam flickers and withers midfloor, signaling the arrival of a storm front. And when it dies all at once, as if by a switch, she pins herself against the wall side of her cot and waits for the beam to come back and for the peeping eye that stopped it to move on again.

Currently the beam is midfloor. She could reach out and place her hand in it and feel it pool in her palm, a warm autumnal yellow, a weightless continuum to the outside world, free to come and go.

She doesn’t move, not in the least. Her heart down-beating from a race it believed it was in, a dream-race against nothing but her own shadow.

You should get up. You should get up. You should not lie here like this.

Th e coin of light rests in the center of her vision, severed in two by a crack in the timber. Th e longer she fails to get up the more it’s as if her real self has continued on in the dream, leaving behind this heavy, dark-minded thing, this shell. Why get up? Why move? Hopelessness falls like the shadow of a great bird; black thoughts rise like water. Th en, suddenly, without deciding to do so, she sits. Is sitting up. A pair of hands in her lap. Hers. She can make the fingers move like so. My fingers. My legs. Mine.

27

They rode the storm eastward and by the time they reached the outskirts of Omaha it was dark and the ice had grown thick at the edges of the windshield where the wipers and heat fought it back, and when the Chevy’s tires strayed from the tracks in the whitened road, rails of slush crushed beneath them with a wet, explosive sound.

They came into more lanes and more traffic. A semi plowed by casting a filthy wave over the windshield, and through the wash of it they saw a pair of taillights ahead but in a strange place and at a strange tilt. A little farther on they saw the tire tracks cross suddenly before them, twining in helices before trailing away into the median, and then they saw the black SUV down there and the blue glow of the phone inside and the man’s lips moving calmly as if he were only continuing the conversation he’d been having before he spun off the highway.

“All that rig and there you sit in the median,” said Reed Lester.

“We could be next,” said the boy.

“I doubt that.”

“Four-wheel drive isn’t any good on ice and I haven’t got any weight in the back.”

“You want me to get on back there, boss?”

The boy looked over. “Would you mind?”

“Hell, no. Just pull over a second.”

“I thought you might just go on out your window.”

“I could. But if I fall, then where will you be?”

The boy watched the road. The red starbursts of taillights. The bleary lit signs of gas stations and motels drifting by.

“Maybe we ought to just pull over someplace and see what happens with this,” said his passenger.

“You said you were just going to the other side of town.”

“I am but it’s a big damn town and this traffic’s gonna get a whole lot worse, and I’m in no hurry. Are you?”

The boy stared out at the storm. “You know any place to go?”

They left the highway and drove along a business strip of car lots and liquor stores and many dark, derelict buildings. In the midst of it sat a small restaurant of boxcar shape with neon beer signs burning in its windows and a radiant sign in the shape of a palm tree declaring its name which was the Paradise Lounge.

“You like burgers?” Reed Lester asked.

“Sometimes.”

“This will be one of those times.”

Lester directed him to park in back and he did so, bringing the Chevy to rest in the cratered gravel lot among another dozen cars and trucks. They transferred the wet backpack from the truckbed to the cab and the boy locked the truck and followed Lester toward a red metallic door.

Inside was a noisome crowd which somehow gave the impression of having arrived out of the inclement night hours before, and all together. Faces turned to take stock of them and turned away again with no show of impression good or bad. The air smelled of seared beef and perfume and alcohol. Islandy music piping down from the ceiling and everywhere on the walls large, richly colored images of white sands and turquoise waters and brown-backed girls.

They found two stools at the bar and sat in the electric glow of tiki torches and ordered two beers from the bartender, a large yellow-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt who, in a practiced glance, saw two men weary from the road and the weather, and turned to draw their beers. Placing the pints before them he said, “You gents going to eat here or wait for a table?”

Lester looked to the boy and the boy shrugged and Lester said they’d eat there if the bartender didn’t mind.

“I don’t mind if you don’t mind.”

“Why would we mind?”

“I know I’m pretty, but most dudes come in here would rather be served by Barb or Patti.”

They rotated on their stools and took in the waitresses, one blonde, one redheaded, both in Hawaiian shirts and both older than either of them by ten years or more.

“We’ll keep an eye out for a table,” said Lester, and the man made an approving face and took a pencil from behind his ear. “So,” he said. “What do you want on those burgers?”