next to my head. Dirt blew in my face and made mud in my eyes. The truck was making a turn to the left, not the ideal direction for what I needed to do, but I scrambled up the side of the ditch, counting on the cloud of dirt to hide me. I ran at the truck; I felt it pick up speed and make a dizzying surge away; I ran harder, reaching outward, feeling a spray of gravel strafe my shins like machine-gun fire, and felt my palms grip the back door. With a last burst of strength, I hurled myself over the edge. I landed inside the truck bed, edges of metal intersecting with the knobs of my shoulders and the blades of my ribs. I was on top of one of his burlap bags of tools. I rolled off. The engine’s thrum shook my skeleton at such a pitch that the lunch in my stomach whipped and the sky above became a vomitous swirl. I closed my eyes. Wind, bugs, and sediment razed my skin.
Then there were highways. Velocity increased. The noise enveloping me lost its caged reverberation and joined with a hundred other racing vehicles. We were moving; we were out of Bloughton, maybe even out of Lomax County. Purple light turned into the red doom of an interstate at night. My extremities were numb from vibration; the back of my skull throbbed. An uncertain amount of time passed, what must have been hours. Surely I had miscalculated—this was one of his longer trips, and I would miss days, if not weeks, of school. Any enthusiasm at such a prospect was mixed with the everlasting fear of falling irreparably behind; I thought of Gottschalk and his self-satisfied smirk as he took credit for scaring me away.
But then the truck slowed. My stomach lurched as we slung through the vortex of an exit ramp. There was the distant ticking of a turn signal, the vertiginous pull of a sharp right. More turns, these made without signaling. The roads became rougher. The sky became true black with only the periodic abatement of a moth-flickered lamp. I drew my body to the far edge of the truck bed, bracing myself for the moment of escape. Through the cab window I could see my father scanning the streets as he rolled along what looked like a sparsely populated country neighborhood. He shut off the headlights and began to inch toward the shoulder. I made sure he wasn’t checking his rearview, then vaulted myself over the flatbed door.
The pulse of the engine had hammered my legs to rubber. My knees wilted and my butt scraped rock. The truck continued to creep along without me. Ten feet, twenty feet; as it took a corner the brakes tapped momentarily and colored me red. When the vehicle eventually stopped and the putter of the engine ceased, I kneeled among the tall weeds and waited. After a moment, my father emerged, a black shadow against the blacker sheet of night, and he moved with surprising swiftness to the back of the truck. Gray bags were lifted from the trunk, and then he moved away, over the slight rise in the road and down the other side.
He was out of sight. I scrambled up the shoulder and paused for breath against the side of the truck. The engine pinged softly. I moved again until I reached the crest of the hill. Beyond, I could see the distant specks of farmhouse lights. My father had vanished.
It might not have been an accident that the truck was parked beneath the arachnid limbs of an overhanging tree. I stepped carefully through the ditch, feeling gutter water sop through the worn material of my sneakers. Using the snaking root system of the tree, I pulled myself up the other side of the ditch and squatted behind the expansive trunk. I sat panting for a while, my naked knees wedged against prickly bark, an old wooden fence behind my shoulders.
Thirty minutes, tops—that was what I expected. I used the moon’s glow to monitor my watch, and thirty minutes passed. Then one hour, two hours—now it was after midnight. I slumped against the fence, clicking my thumbnail across the plastic slats of the film-advance wheel. Combined with the incriminating shots I would collect later at the cabin, one shot of a theft-in-progress was all I needed, although I planned to take as many photos as possible before once again stowing myself in