Halfway through that road the place looked almost seasonless. Some trees were bare, and the limbs swayed naked like trees in the fall, but it wasn’t fall, and the road was slick like packed-down ice, but it wasn’t winter. The area looked half dead like spring, except it wasn’t spring. It was summer, and hot.

The truck tires skidded and Fellis let off the gas. The tires caught, and he pushed the truck on toward the bridge right there in front of us.

Then Fellis gagged, and it made me gag.

“Are you gagging from the smell?” I said. “Or are you sick?”

Fellis waved a hand at me and breathed deep. We were almost by the tribal museum, almost to the bridge and out of that rotting place, when Fellis pulled over.

“Can’t you wait?” I said. Fellis got out of the truck and dropped to the ground, hands and knees among hundreds of dead caterpillars, and he vomited.

The smell took over the inside of the truck. I gagged and went to open the door but it would not open. I pulled the handle time after time but the door stayed shut. “Fellis!” I said. “Fellis! Open my door, I’m gonna be sick—” But it was too late. I threw up on the floor of his truck, and as I heaved once more Fellis came around the truck and opened my door and he said, gagging, “Oh, man,” and I pushed him out of the way and heaved once more onto the street, which appeared to be squirming.

I sat back in the truck, eyes watering.

“We have to clean that up,” Fellis said.

“Drive,” I said. “We’ll clean it up at the store.”

“I ain’t driving with puke in my car.”

“Well if you didn’t lock me in here,” I said.

“I didn’t lock you in here, shithead, you have to jimmy the handle up and down for it to catch the latch in the door.” Fellis spat onto the caterpillars. “You know that.”

“Let’s go,” I said. I tucked my face into my shirt.

“Clean it first,” Fellis said.

“With what?”

Fellis looked in the bed of his truck but found nothing.

“Throw the fucking floor mat out then,” he said.

I grabbed the wet floor mat and threw it on the side of the road.

We drove to Save ’n Shop twenty above the speed limit with the windows rolled down, and every minute or so I’d find a caterpillar crawling up my leg and I’d flick it out the window.

The parking lot to the store was full, and Fellis parked far out, the truck facing away from the store and toward a cornfield. I got out of the truck and went to the bed and lowered the hatch and sat on it. I didn’t see Fellis leave the store—I was watching this older woman lift her bags from her shopping cart and into the trunk of her blue car—but I noticed him halfway back to the truck, because he was swearing and waving a hand in the air. He held in one hand two white bags and in the other hand he held the Redbox case.