lights hit coyote eyes slipping along the ditches, in and out of fence lines. Cappy balled up my jacket under his head, leaned on the window, and slept. I kept driving on until at last I got tired and switched off again with Cappy. This time Zack and Angus climbed in front to keep Cappy awake. I crawled in back. There was an old horse blanket that smelled of dust. I laid my head down and put the belt on because the buckle was cutting into my hip. As I dozed back there, listening to the three up in front talk and laugh, I had that same drifting sense of peace I got in my parents’ car. The guys passed the bottle back and I drank deep, to put myself out. I slipped away easily. I slept without dreaming even as the car hurtled off the road, flipped, rolled, threw its doors wide, and came to rest in an unplowed field.
I had the sense of a vast and violent motion. Before I could grasp its significance, all was still. I nearly fell back asleep thinking we had stopped. But I opened my eyes just to see where we were and the air was black. I called for Cappy, but there was no answer. There was the distant sound of distress, not weeping, but a laborious panting. I unbuckled myself and crept out the open door. The sounds came from Zack and Angus, tangled together, moving on the ground, then staggering up and falling. My brain clicked on. I searched the car—empty. One headlight flickered. I climbed out and made a widening circle around the car, but Cappy seemed to have vanished. He left for help, I thought in relief as I stepped along slowly. There was only the light of stars, and the car’s one beam; parts of the ground were so black they were like pits reaching down into the earth. For one disoriented moment, I thought I stood at the entrance to a mine shaft, and I feared that Cappy had been flung in. But it was only shadow. The deepest shadow I have ever known. I went down on my hands and knees and crawled into the shadow. I felt my way through invisible grass. The wind came up and blew my friends’ cries away from me. The sounds I made, too, when I found Cappy, were taken into the boom of air.
I sat in the police station, attached to the chair. Zack and Angus were in the Havre hospital. They’d taken Cappy someplace else to fix him up for Doe and Randall. The ghost had brought me here. I had seen him in the field as I held Cappy—my ghost had bent over me, backlit by the flashlight he held cocked over his shoulder, silver haloed, looking at me with a sour contempt. He shook me lightly. His lips had moved but the only words I could make out were Let go and I would not. I slept and woke in the chair. I must have eaten, drunk water, too. None of it do I remember. Except that again and again I looked at the round black stone that Cappy had given me, the thunderbird egg. And there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people. I thought the miles in the car had bent them, dulled their eyes, even grayed and whitened their hair and caused their hands and voices to tremble. At the same time, I found, as I rose from the chair, I’d gotten old along with them. I was broken and fragile. My shoes were lost in the accident. I walked between them, stumbled. My mother took my hand. When we got to the car, she opened the back door and crawled in. There was a pillow and the same old quilt. I sat in the front with my father. He started the engine. We pulled out just like that and started driving home.
In all those miles, in all those hours, in all that air rushing by and sky coming at us, blending into the next horizon, then the one after that, in all that time there was nothing to be said. I cannot remember speaking and I cannot remember my mother or my father speaking. I knew that they knew everything. The sentence was to endure. Nobody shed tears and there was no anger. My mother or my father drove, gripping the wheel