The first one had been killed—ripped almost in two most likely by a semitruck. I had never seen a real deer, up so close like that. But I had also never been in the middle of fog where the things immediately before you seemed to show up only after you’d passed. That’s how we ran into the scene at the side of a narrow crooked road right outside a town called Sharon. The scene should have disturbed us enough to turn around and go back to the hotel we had seen about thirty miles back. Rasul hit the brakes as soon as the three figures appeared. We skidded across the highway dividing line, and fortunately, there were no cars coming in the other direction. My heart pounded as I looked back. Two burly White men, wearing shades even at night, worked together to lift the cumbersome animal onto the bed of a pickup truck. Its head seemed to be hanging on by just a few cords connecting at its neck. Its tongue hung lazily to the side. Had it not been for the antlers, I would have thought they were lifting a horse.

“Damn …,” Rasul whispered, in awe of the sight.

Though two men were now struggling to throw it in the back of a truck, I could tell the animal had been a strong one. Its muscles bulged and stretched tight against a rich coat. The road directly ahead of us was smeared with its blood. By morning, the snowfall would have covered all evidence of the accident. As Rasul drove on—slow at first while we were caped in the fog—I turned back to watch them until a white mist suddenly cut the scene like a movie reel had stopped running. I was rooting for the men I didn’t know, and the deer too, I guess. But the last thing I saw before the mist cut them off was the massive animal slipping out of their shared grip and crumbling to the ground one more time.

“Where all the signs letting us know where we at?” I asked Rasul, teary-eyed. The neon-green billboards stating the number of miles to New York City had disappeared.

“I don’t know,” he answered, easing up on the gas as we approached another dense patch of fog. Soon as we made it through, he pulled over, completely silent. He reached over my thighs into the glove compartment to pull out the maps we hadn’t needed to make it through Ohio and Indiana.

“Damn, this shit ain’t flat as before,” he mumbled. “It’s like we in a whole other country.”

“I know,” I agreed. The clock on the dash read almost 10:00 P.M. We hadn’t stopped much, yet it seemed we had so much farther to go. But my man disagreed with me.

“I think we almost there,” he said softly, unsure.

“How you know?”