The road turned south and the speed limit fell and Billy rounded a bend to see that the Bronco had come to a stop at a T in the road. The intersection had come up suddenly and there was no hiding, and if the man checked his mirrors there’d be no missing the El Camino behind him. Likewise when the man went one way or the other there’d be no missing that the El Camino had done the same, and so he hoped the Bronco would turn right, where a sign indicated the town of Montezuma lay, instead of left, where there seemed little incentive or encouragement for any single vehicle to go, let alone two.

The Bronco sat idling at the T as if awaiting a break in traffic, but there was no traffic. The El Camino idling behind it. The snow drifting down.

“Go left, you son of a bitch, I dare you.”

The Bronco signaled left and turned, and Billy took his place at the T, signaled, and followed.

HE CAME TO ANOTHER intersection a few miles on but the Bronco had not taken it, and he followed the tracks deeper into the range. The Bronco ignored two more turns and the road began to climb in increasingly steep cutbacks, as if here were yet another pass that would take them inevitably to another summit and another vortex of snow. But the snowfall remained light and the El Camino continued to find traction. His luck was holding, and he climbed another few miles toward the white ghostly peaks before his luck ran out.

It ran out all at once, without warning, when the Bronco’s taillights disappeared, as though the car had gone off the road. Yet when he arrived at the place where the taillights had vanished he found no tracks careening from the road—found no road at all but only the sudden crunch and ping of loose gravel under him, and the road, such as it was, diving into the evergreens ahead.

He pumped the brakes and brought the El Camino to a halt and sat looking into the trees. The mountains that lay above and beyond the trees were obscured by the trees themselves and by the fog of snowfall. He rolled down his window and looked out into the white emptiness of the gorge, the air thin and cold and pungent with the smell of snow and pine. He picked up his phone and sent a final text, then sat looking at the road ahead. Or what had been the road and which, but for the tracks, might have been just a minor clearing at the end of the road where the makers of roads, going back to men in wagons, had abruptly and inexplicably stopped.

He tugged at the hairs below his lip. He thought of the set of tire chains back at the barn hung on their barn spike with the horse tack. He sat a few moments longer, sensing the rising dusk in the bowl of the gorge, in the shades of the pinewood. Then he said, “All right, son, let’s see it,” and he lifted his foot from the brake and drove on.

52

The road tunneled in wide swings through the woods and was not too steep, the snow not too deep, and he made good progress with the Bronco’s tracks before him. The road looped back upon itself, and on the far side of every loop he expected to see no more road and the Bronco parked before some ordinary mountain homestead, the man, Steve, stepping out of the car to the ordinary jubilation of dog and wife and children, and nothing for Billy to do but laugh and drive away. But around every turn there was more road, more trees, another turn, and no Bronco, and no house and no wife.

The road narrowed as it climbed. Trees and scrub trees crowding in, low-hanging boughs lapping at the windows. If a man were to stop he could not turn around but would have to back all the way down and good luck with that, pardner. He drove on and the road grew steeper, a fact he could not see or feel but knew by the increasing slippage of his tires. He shifted on the fly into his lowest gear and pressed on more slowly, all his senses wired to the messages of the climb, and still the tires spun, the tail swinging drunkenly toward tree trunks, righting, yawing again the opposite way, and he understood with a rising fury that she would not make it and that he’d known she wouldn’t. He made one more bend, tires spraying a wet slag over the undercarriage, and with his fingers light on the wheel he worked her with all his skill but the rubber spun and the motor raced and there was nothing to do but stop and hope the car held. It didn’t. Brake, no brake, it would go back the way it came. He hooked an elbow over the seat and attempted to take the curve one-handed but he overshot it and the bed of the El Camino slammed into the sudden, ungiving trunk of a pine and went no farther.

He killed the engine. He lit a cigarette and sat watching the snow mutely finding the windshield. Falling heavier now. The Bronco’s tracks were filling.

He pulled the keys from the ignition and pocketed them and buttoned the leather jacket and collected the rawhide gloves from the glovebox, and then he reached under his seat and hunted down the bottle and took a swig. He reached again under the seat, groping deeper, “Come here you motherfucker,” the blow to the tree having sent it to the very back of the cab, and at last he felt it and tugged it free. He peeled away the black watch cap and put it on his head and checked to see that the gun, a nine-millimeter he’d bought off a man in Nevada, was loaded, the safety on, then he dropped the gun into his right pocket. He picked up his phone from the seat and put that in his pocket too but then took it out again and left it on the passenger’s seat, centering it on the cover of a magazine. Finally he pulled on his gloves and got out.

He took a few steps up the road and turned to look back. His car rested nearly abeam to the road so that any vehicle coming up or going down could not pass. He stood thinking about that, then dropped his cigarette into the Bronco’s track and continued on.

The treadless cowboy boots he’d won at billiards sent him to his hands and knees, and sent him there again before he adopted a wider, splay-footed stance, digging the inside edges of the soles into the snow. By the time he reached the next bend, no more than thirty yards from the car, his legs were burning and his lungs felt pierced through by the thin air. He stopped, hands to knees, unable to curse for his wheezing and his wheezing the only sound made by any living thing on the mountain.

Before him the road looked less a road than some wide chute carved out by falling rocks or by water or both, and still the Bronco’s tracks went on, and finally so did he, staggering on until he reached the next bend where he rested again. When he came to the bend after that and there was still no sign of the Bronco other than its fading tracks, he fell once more into his wheezing stance of rest and fought with all his heart the desire to drop to his knees, to his back, in the snow.

The day was now all but gone, the sun fallen behind some distant peak. He judged that within a few minutes there’d be no light at all but the light of the snow itself where it lay on the trail.

He glanced back down the mountain at the tracks of the Bronco and his own thin herringbone footprints between. He removed a glove with his teeth and found his cigarettes and the Zippo.

“You got to the end of this to decide,” he said, and when he finished the cigarette he dropped it in the snow and went on, and he’d not gone very far before the tracks of the Bronco turned abruptly from the trail, plunging down into a deeper, scrappier woods.

He stood at the top of this gully looking down, his heart thudding in his neck. He studied the trees for possible handholds and felt for the nine-

millimeter in his pocket, making sure it was secure, and then he reached out for the first tree and stopped. There was a bootprint in the snow. Nearly as fresh as his own but not his own, the floor of this print waffled with good tread. It led to its left-footed counterpart, and he saw that the tracks had come up out of the gully and continued up the trail. He looked ahead and saw nothing in the snowfall but the white, snaking trail and the dark pattern of prints along its back.