Joan came out and handed me an appointment card and as usual the clipboard with the agreement that I would stay with Fellis all night. I signed my name, dated it, and then handed it back.

I pushed Fellis in the wheelchair through the door and he said, “Bye, Joan.” The janitor was back at the bathroom like he’d forgotten to clean something, and we passed him and went around the corner. The hallway declined, and Fellis said, “I’m done for a while, let me fly,” and so I let go of the wheelchair but kept pace alongside him. Before he could crash into the wall, I grabbed the wheelchair and stopped him but the momentum flung him from the seat and he fell forward onto his hands and knees.

A small nurse and this big burly man in flannel came hurrying over. “Is he okay?” they asked, and both Fellis and I didn’t answer them because we were laughing. Fellis got back into the wheelchair and said he was fine, and before the nurse could say anything about what had happened I stopped laughing—or tried to anyway—and said, “We’re looking for the runway. Which way’s the exit?”

. . .

Out in the parking lot, I rushed Fellis in the wheelchair to his truck, Einhell. That was what we’d named it. The chassis was green, but the underbelly was red in spots. In order to pass inspection, Fellis had welded sheets of metal from a broken lawn mower over the rust, and the brand Einhell was in fading black right under the driver’s door.

I helped Fellis into the truck, had to give him a boost.

“You want me to buckle you in too?” I said, and he laughed.

I’d gotten used to driving. I didn’t have my license—and I was always nervous behind the wheel—but I had no choice. I reversed the truck, slipped it in drive, and took off to the main road. We had to wait over five minutes for the traffic to break away. When a narrow space presented itself between two cars, I gunned it, tires skidding. The person I cut off honked.

Fellis stuck his hand out the window and either waved or gave the middle finger to the honker.

I continued north to I-95 and I didn’t hit a single red light. Off the freeway and down cracked gray roads left and right we came to a stop and directly across the way arched the steel bridge, the river flowing below, to the reservation. A yellow flashing sign at the beginning read “Drive Slow, Use Caution.” This—not the sign, what lay beyond it—was what that janitor was asking about. Right over the bridge the road boiled with caterpillars. Some were dead, run over by cars and trucks—it sounded like popcorn popping when we drove over them—and others were alive, crawling among the gooey dead in search of trees with leaves that they hadn’t already eaten, or of tree trunks that the Department of Natural Resources hadn’t wrapped in duct tape and smeared with petroleum jelly to save what leaves remained.