Eli knew that most folks had it worse. Hardworking families lost their farms and ranches, piled what little they could salvage onto antique Model Ts, headed for California, where they were about as welcome as boll weevils. Men in cities stood in lines blocks long, waiting for a bowl of soup so thin they said you could read a magazine right through it. He blamed the sonsofbitches on Wall Street. The bankers and stock traders and professional liars who played with money as though it had no connection to anything real, like it was all a bunch of numbers and at the end of the day you added up your score and figured whether you won or lost. All their crazy speculation had nothing to do with putting food on the table or a roof over your head. Now the whole shebang had collapsed. Folks were scared to death, and he couldn’t blame them. And yet a rich man who lost a pile of money on the stock market would go out and hang himself, while a poor man would live with his wife and five children on two filthy mattresses inside a ripped tent in a migrant camp and never give up hope.

After sundown, the cold took hold like a vise. Eli could feel it, even inside the Cadillac. As a young cowhand, he had camped out on nights so cold he could hear porcupines whimpering off in the woods. On such a night, there would be patches of black ice on the asphalt, but still he would not stop or slow down. Somewhere between Douglas and Casper, he pulled off to the side of the road, stepped out of the car, saw what a man who lived his life in cities would not see in a thousand years. The moon not yet up, a sky dark as ink, from one horizon to the other a wash of stars. It was more than forty years now since he had ridden alone most of one summer across Nebraska, looking for a likely place to homestead with Livvy. Night after night, he would lie on the open prairie, listen to the horses shuffle in their hobbles, hear the calls of the night birds, look up at the stars and think himself the luckiest man alive.

The cold revived him somewhat, but by the time he reached Casper he was driving a dozen miles at a stretch with no recollection at all of what had transpired between one point and the next. He stopped at a filling station, where a kid took his time polishing the windshield, treating the Cadillac like a prize thoroughbred.

“She’s a beauty, mister.”

“Thank you, son. She was payment for an old debt from a damned fool who lost most of what he had on the stock market.”

The boy whistled.

“How fast will she go on the open road?”

“Too goddamned fast, truth be told.”