"I think nature is more efficient than we are at garbage disposal," said Del. "But it does seem like there would be more of them, like they would take a while to go away, when you think of the really old ones that they find."

Handing it back to Ry, he said, "It's not my area of expertise, but it must have been some kind of a rodent. I couldn't say what kind."

"Probably the predators chomp them right up, even their skulls," said Ry. "Probably fifty percent of what we're walking around on is undigested skull bits."

Del grinned. "You might be right about that," he said. "Though I'd prefer to think about it a little less graphically."

A spattering of cars and trucks had zipped past in one direction or the other as they walked down the road, but no one had stopped. Finally the rasp of a dragging m.u.f.fler approached from behind and slowed to keep pace alongside them. The m.u.f.fler trailed from the underside of a road boat, a slab on wheels, an Oldsmobile. The car rolled to a stop. It was white, with a spray of rust speckled thick across the hood where blowing sand had blasted away the paint. The window lowered and the driver leaned over and said, "You fellas need a lift?"

Del stepped up, rested his hands on top of the door, and peered in.

"Just to the next town, if you're going that far," he said. "We're having a little car trouble."

"Hop in," said the man. "You'll both have to ride up front; the backseat seems to be full."

They could see that was true; the back was piled high with cardboard cartons.

Ry slid to the middle and Del sat down beside him and pulled the door slab shut. Ry fished surrept.i.tiously behind himself, searching for a seat belt in the crevice, but with no luck. The driver wore no seat belt and Del didn't seem to have found one either, and Ry guessed that no seat belts had been worn in this car for a long, long time.

They lurched forward and slammed to a halt to let another car fly by, then peeled out onto the highway. In no time they reached their cruising speed of Mach one. Ry was just guessing at this; the speedometer needle lay lifeless at zero. The landscape rattled by. The air-freshening cardboard pine tree jiggled a few inches in front of his nose, intertwined with a Saint Christopher's medal.

Ry slipped his hands between his knees to take up less s.p.a.ce and to conceal his crossed fingers.

RIDING WITH CARL.

Their host was Carl. Wooly coils of silvery-white hair forested the back and sides of his head, thinning to a zone of barren scrub at the tree line of the shiny dome of his head. His mustache was waxed into handlebars. He was comfortably rounded, like a small planet, with an atmosphere made up of warmth and good humor and aftershave.

"So," he asked, "are you from around here, or just pa.s.sing through?"

He wanted to hear all about their car trouble and where they were headed and where they were from. When they told him, he said, "Is that right." Or, "Isn't that something." As if it was the most interesting thing he had come across yet.

The sediment of dirt deposited evenly across the windshield, punctuated by the dried fluids of unfortunate insects, glowed incandescent in the sunlight. It was like trying to see through dandelion fluff.

Carl fiddled with the wiper wand until a spit's worth of fluid came out and the wiper blades did their best to spread it around. This smeared the dirt into a translucent blindfold. Although it did clear off a few small areas to almost-transparency. Ry hoped Carl could see through them.

"It's all right," said Carl calmly. "I can look out the sides. We're okay so long as we stay between the ditches."

He leaned out the window.

"I can't see much anyway," he said, just as cheery. "Cataracts."

Ry noticed that though they were staying between the ditches, they were drifting from side to side, all the way across the road. He couldn't see out the front, but he could see that sometimes there was a lane to their left, sometimes to the right. And he felt the physical sensation of veering one way and then the other. There wasn't a whole lot of oncoming traffic, but still. It made him nervous. He glanced at Del, but Del was leaning out of his window, looking into the distance. Ry wondered how Carl had seen the two of them in the first place. He had to be able to see pretty decently for that, right?

Carl leaned out his window, too, squinting into the brightness. The moving air lifted clumps of his hair so that he resembled an elderly sheep, face into the wind. Drawing his head back inside, he asked Ry again where they were from, and where they were going. When Ry mentioned the car trouble, his kindly features were gently shaded with concern.

"Is that right," he said. "Isn't that something."

"You're all clear to get back in the right-hand lane now," said Del.

They meandered into their own lane in time to dodge an oncoming tractor trailer. The driver blasted his horn as he brushed past.

"That was a little close," said Del.

"I've had a lot of close calls." Carl smiled. He seemed to be untroubled by their brush with disaster.

"When you're in the service, you never know what's going to happen next," he said. "You get used to it."

"What branch?" asked Del.

"Marines," said Carl. "Korea. The infamous winter of 1950. Below-zero temperatures for weeks, in leather shoes. We were on the front lines, so we couldn't even have fires. To this day, I have no feeling from the knees down."

He looked at them, and Ry could tell Carl had just let them in on what had been an unimaginably grueling part of his life: a cold, cold fire that he had pa.s.sed through, a crucible that had formed him. You had to respect that. At the same time, Ry wished mightily that he were not captive, maybe soon to be a casualty, in a car being hurled headlong down the road by a guy who couldn't see much, who couldn't remember what you said two minutes ago, and who had just told you that he had no feeling in the part of his body he was driving the car with.

Ry's mouth opened and he said, "Huh."

Carl had to be fibbing, or at least exaggerating. He had to have some feeling in his foot to keep it pressed down on the gas pedal. Especially at the speed they were going. Though maybe a lead foot and a dead-weight foot were about the same. He glanced down at Carl's senseless foot. It was wearing a bedroom slipper. One of those corduroy ones designed to look like a loafer. Pajama pants peeked out from under his trouser legs.

"So," said Carl brightly, "are you from around here, or just pa.s.sing through?"

The car drifted into the westbound lane and continued there. Maybe it was easier for Carl to go straight if he could see the edge of the road. Up close.

Del was still hanging out the window, peering down the road. Ry guessed that his plan was to be Carl's eyes and nudge him out of the path of danger. It was a good plan. Except that the three large animals that went bounding majestically across the road materialized on Carl's side of the car. They seemed to come out of nowhere. Carl saw them just in time to brake into a sideways skid, so Ry got to see them, too, through Del's window, before the car spun completely backward and came to a halt. He turned and looked again through Carl's window in time to see the lovely animals bound away, unfazed.

Maybe they were fazed. Ry was fazed. Carl seemed unfazed as he turned the car again and drove on. He seemed to be aiming for the middle of the road now.

He was a really nice old man. He might be somebody's grandfather. Ry didn't want to hurt his feelings or be rude. But he also didn't want to die. He looked at Del. Del's face was on heightened alert, but he also appeared to be sticking with his look-down-the-road plan.

"What were they?" asked Ry.

"What were who?" asked Carl.

"Those animals that went across the road," said Ry. "They looked like deer, but different."

"Could have been," said Carl. "I can't say I was really paying attention."

"They were antelope," said Del. "p.r.o.nghorn antelope."

The car swerved abruptly back to the right and a couple of cars screamed by. The faces of the drivers of the cars turned toward Carl like sunflowers following the sun. Their mouths formed angry words. They made hand gestures.

"I don't know where everybody's going," said Carl, shaking his head. "Look around," he said, chuckling. "There's no place to go!"

Ry wished he could see better through the smeared windshield. He wished the dials on the dashboard worked. All of the needles rested, lifeless, at zero. Zero mph, zero rpm, zero gas. Zero mph sounded really good right now. Zero gas might be a good thing, if it were true. If they ran out of gas, they could get out of the barreling behemoth death trap. Dessicated insects had collected in the crevices both inside and outside the dials. Trying to get in, trying to get out.

Another dark, blurry shape seemed to be materializing in the distance, growing in size and in loudness of rumbling. It pixelated ahead of them. In their lane. Which was legally its lane. It was time for a new plan. And a brilliantly simple idea formed in Ry's mind. He would say he was sick and he had to throw up. It was even sort of true. Once he got out of the car, he would not get back in. He would walk forever; he did not care now how far.

He was about to put his plan into action-his lips had parted to speak-when Del said, "Hey, Carl, can you pull over to the right up here? This is our stop."

"Hm?" said Carl. "Oh. All right. Of course. We'll just pull right over."

As he spoke, he somehow relocated his unfeeling, slippered foot onto the brake pedal and gradually slowed the car. He reflexively flipped on his turn signal, steered expertly into the narrow parking area in front of a long, low shedlike building, stopped neatly at the opening onto the porch. A competent driver had stepped forward on the runaway bus that was Carl, a cowboy jumped onto the wild pony and settled it down. A fragment of the real Carl, unfogged by time, had surfaced. Momentarily.

Ahead of them large, bright letters on a giant sign that even Carl's eyes could make out told them that this was CECILE'S TRADING POST. Underneath it said that Cecile's had GAS*SNACKS*AMMO*BAIT*SOUVENIRS*CRAFTS.

"Out looking for souvenirs, are you?" asked Carl.

"I need some postcards," said Del. "I want to write to my friends and tell them about my vacation." He was out of the car. Ry was right behind him.

"Good for you," said Carl. "Tell them all I said h.e.l.lo."

"Thanks for the lift," said Ry.

"Glad to help out," said Carl. He winked. "My good deed for the day."

He threw the car into reverse, cranked the steering wheel, and reared back in a tight arc. But before he could pull out, Del was over at the pa.s.senger side window again, his hands resting on the door.

"Listen," he said. "I noticed your m.u.f.fler is dragging. I can hook it up so it doesn't drag till you can get somewhere, if you have a coat hanger in the car. Take me about two seconds."

"Oh, I don't have anything like that, I don't think," said Carl. Looking over his shoulder into the backseat.

"Let me just ask inside this place then," said Del. "They probably have something we can use. Can you hang on just a minute while I go in and see?"

"Well, all right," said Carl.

"I'll be right back," said Del. As he pa.s.sed Ry, he said, "Go talk to him. Don't let him drive away."

Ry stepped uncertainly toward the car, his hands in his pockets.

"So...," he said. He hadn't had a lot of practice at making conversation with old geezers. Except for his grandfather, but that was different. His grandfather still had all his marbles.

"So, what's in all those boxes back there?" he asked.

Carl looked over his shoulder again, then back at Ry.

"No idea," he said. "Looks like someone's moving, maybe."

"Aren't they yours?" asked Ry.

"Nope," said Carl. "I never saw them before today."

"How did they get in your car?" asked Ry.

"Oh, this isn't my car," said Carl. "I don't have a car. I used to have cars. I have had many, many a car in my time." He smiled, a sweet smile. A glimmer of-mischief?-seemed to pa.s.s through his eyes. Ry wondered if he had imagined it. He knew Del had only been inside for a couple of minutes, but it seemed like forever. He couldn't think of any more topics.

He was about to ask, Well, whose car is it then? when hinges creaked behind him. He turned with relief to see Del come back outside with a coat hanger in his hand.

"Got one," said Del, holding it up. "This should do it."

But in the pa.s.sing instant that the top half of Ry was turned toward Del, the lower half of Carl found a way to let his weight fall hard on the gas pedal. The Oldsmobile spun out of the dirt and clattered up onto the hard road, throwing up a choking curtain of dust into their faces. It roared off.

By the time they could see it again, the Oldsmobile was half a mile away.

"I hope he doesn't kill anyone," said Del.

"Should we report him? To the police or something?" asked Ry.

"I reported him to Cecile," said Del. "She said she would call. I guess we better go ask her to call again."

(POST-CARL).

Later, when Del was putting the generator back into the w.i.l.l.ys, Ry said, "So, how come twisting the wires together would be shoddy, but hooking up a m.u.f.fler with a coat hanger isn't?"

"It is," said Del. "But that was an emergency. It was a desperate measure."

"Isn't it an emergency when your car dies in the middle of nowhere?" asked Ry.

"It could be," said Del. "If your life was in danger. Otherwise, it's just an interesting situation. You could even think of it as fun."

He had soldered the broken wire together over a small fire they built. Ry had helped lay the fire and he held things in place while Del soldered, but he had the feeling that Del would have managed just fine by himself. The plan had been to walk to a town, find a mechanic to solder the wire, maybe get a ride back. But while they were at Cecile's, Del found this d.i.n.ky little soldering tool in a jewelry-making kit. The kit was in the crafts section, a dusty pile of battered boxes. Del happened on it by luck, while Ry searched for food they could call breakfast.

It turned out to be a parallel-universe breakfast. A long shelf-life version; you didn't want to know how old any of it was. Just be like an astronaut and choke it down. He picked jerky, pickled eggs, potato chips, and orange soda. Corresponding to bacon, scrambled or fried, home fries, and juice.

It was not only the food that was of indeterminate age at Cecile's. Without even exploring very far, Ry found small American flags with the wrong number of stars, yellowing comic books with heroes he had never heard of, and music on ca.s.sette tapes. The cars in the postcards all looked like-well, Carl's or Del's, so he couldn't really draw any conclusions there. But the little girls and women were wearing dresses, an old-fashioned kind with big full skirts. Maybe it was more of an antique shop. He brushed past a spinning rack of brochures that ill.u.s.trated a variety of ways of going to h.e.l.l in hand-drawn wavy letters, and found himself in a small section of actual groceries. Maybe this was a better idea. He picked up a box of Cheerios. The sell-by date stamped on the top was two years past. The contest deadline on the back of the box, likewise. Antique cereal. It might still be okay. According to legend, Twinkies lasted for seventeen years. Maybe Cheerios did, too.

He decided to go with the stuff up front. It was probably the faster-moving stuff. Relatively. He went back up to the counter. Del was already there, taking money from his wallet to pay for the food and-a jewelry kit?

"You don't by any chance have a cup of coffee you could spare?" he asked Cecile. Who was herself ageless, in a way. And preserved.

Her smile was lively.

"You bet," she said. She disappeared through a curtained doorway and returned with a Styrofoam cup of steaming brown toxins.

"Don't worry about it," she said when Del asked her how much.

"Do you need a lift?" she asked. "I can call someone."

Del said no thanks, and as they started their hike back toward the car, juggling the generator, the jewelry kit, "breakfast," and Del's coffee, Ry asked him why.

"No sense making someone go out of their way," said Del. "We can probably get a ride with someone who's already going where we need to go."

And even as he spoke, he turned and raised his thumb, along with his coffee cup, at a pa.s.sing tractor trailer. The trucker tootled at them and eased his rig to a halt a few dozen yards ahead.

"Don't worry," said Del as they trotted toward it. "Most people are nice."

"I'm not worried about 'nice,'" said Ry. "Carl was 'nice.'"

Del smiled his almost-smile.

"And most people are better drivers than Carl," he said.