Verna continued walking. The wind in the grass mixed with the whisper of traffic on Columbus Boulevard and up ahead the yearning whistle of a passing train rose from the night. Verna breathed in the scent of sage and clean, arid earth, every step carry ing her farther than she had ever been into the eerie, unpopulated landscape of the West. The clouds changed in the inverted bowl of the sky. The gravel crunched underfoot. For a moment, under the spilling stars, almost exactly halfway from Muncie, Indiana, to easy money in the Alaskan fisheries, she allowed herself a brief intuition of better times to come.

They were making good time. In four days they had driven almost two thousand miles, passing through the rusted sprawl between Bloomington and Chicago, the scabbed, humps of Nebraska’s Badlands, the dirt hills of Idaho. They had survived a torrential late-night storm in Iowa, the whole sky fractured by lightning, and a perilous climb through the Rockies when it seemed the car might shudder and collapse. They had seen more Pizza Huts than she knew existed.

In four more days they would be in Alaska. Alaska. Just the word sounded strong and pure. From what Verna had heard, a line worker in the canneries earned at least eight hundred dollars a week, housing provided, and with nothing to spend money on, it was easy to save at least five thousand dollars by the close of the run. For her, that would be enough to put a good dent in the Visa bill she’d racked up since her apartment had flooded in the winter, and possibly even get the collection agency goons off her back. If things went well, who knew? Maybe she would stay awhile.

Verna refused to let the fantasy get any larger than that. The notion of actually getting ahead was not even worth contemplating. All she hoped for was firm ground under her feet. The dream of a house with a fenced-in yard and rosebushes would wait for another time.

She passed a spooky mound of dirt and a fallen barricade of railroad ties. The desert wind blew dry and cool. Down the road, Lucy emerged from the meadow and stood with her tail taut, ears pointed, sensing some subtle stirring of sound or motion. She looked around, first at Verna, then at the train trestle in the distance. And then, crazily, she bounded off, galloping toward the next electrical pole, and the next pole after that, making her way toward the looming shipwreck of the trestle.

“Hey!” Verna said, but Lucy had already disappeared, moving well beyond Verna’s own comfort zone: a scream’s length from humanity. Verna was a wiry woman, alert to the dangers at the margins of an unknown town. She didn’t want to go any farther. But as always, hardly Lucy would have her way.