chest he and Vikki used as a refrigerator. He broke the eggs in the skillet and set the ham and a slice of sourdough bread beside them and let the skillet begin to heat on the propane stove. The smell of the breakfast he wanted to cook for Vikki rose into his face, and he rushed out the back door into the yard so he would not retch on his clothes.

He held on to the sides of a horse tank, his stomach empty now, his back shaking, a pressure band tightening across his scalp, his breath an insult to the air and the freshness of the morning. He thought he heard the thropping downdraft of gunships and the great clanking weight of an armored vehicle topping a rise, its treads dripping sand, a CD of Burn, Motherfucker, Burn screaming over the intercom. He stared into the distant wastes, but the only living things he saw were carrion birds floating high on the wind stream, turning in slow circles as the land heated and the smell of mortality rose into the sky.

He went back inside and rinsed his mouth, then scraped Vikki’s breakfast onto a plate. The eggs were burned on the edges, the yolks broken and hard and stained with black grease. He sat in a chair and hung his head between his knees, the kitchen spinning around him. Through the partially opened door of the bedroom, through the blue light and the dust stirring in the breeze, he could see her head on the pillow, her eyes closed, her lips parted with her breathing. The poverty of the surroundings into which he had taken her made him ashamed. The cracks in the linoleum were ingrained with dirt, the mismatched furniture bought at Goodwill, the walls a sickly green. Everything he touched except Vikki Gaddis was somehow an extension of his own failure.

Her eyes opened. Pete sat up straight in the chair, trying to smile, his face stiff and unnatural with the effort.

“I was fixing you breakfast, but I made a mess of it,” he said.

“Where you been, hon?”

“You know, up yonder,” he replied, gesturing in the direction of the highway. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. “Why would people throw away their tennis shoes but take the shoestrings with them?” he asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“In the places where the wets go through, there’s trash and garbage everywhere. They throw away their old tennis shoes, but they take out the strings first. Why do they do that?”

She was standing up now, pulling her jeans over her panties, looking down at her fingers as she buttoned her jeans over the flatness of her stomach.

“It’s ’cause they don’t own much else, isn’t it?” he said in answer to his own question. “Them poor people don’t own nothing but the word of the coyote that takes them across. That’s a miserable fate for someone, isn’t it?”

“What have you got into, Pete?”

He knitted his fingers together between his thighs and squeezed them so hard he could feel the blood stop in his veins. “A guy was gonna give me three hundred bucks to drive a truck to San Antone. He said not to worry about anything in the back. He gave me a hundred up front. He said it was just a few people who needed to get to their relatives’ houses. I checked the guy out. He’s not a mule. Mules don’t use trucks to run dope, anyway.”

“You checked him out? Who did you check him out with?” she said, looking at him, her hands letting go of her clothes.

“Guys I know, guys who hang around the bar.”

Her face was empty, still creased from the pillow, as she walked to the stove and poured herself a cup of coffee. She was barefoot, her skin white against the dirtiness of the linoleum. He went into the bedroom and picked up her slippers from under the bed and brought them to her. He set them down by her feet and waited for her to put them on.

“There were some men here last night,” she said.

“What?” The blood drained from his cheeks, making him seem younger than even his twenty years.

“Two of them came to the door. One stayed in the car. He never turned off the motor. The one who talked had funny eyes, like they didn’t go together. Who is he?”

“What did he say?”

Pete hadn’t answered her question. But her heart was racing, and she answered him anyway. “That y’all