I had covered every curve, every straight line of that road. I knew where to pump my brakes, where the road dipped and often changed. I knew the soft shoulders and the bends in the land that couldn’t be fixed. There’s even a place in the road outside of Dixon that looks as if it’s a gradual hill but I have seen surveyors lay a level to the same spot for years and every time it comes out even as a concrete plane. And I wondered about that sometimes. I wondered how many other things were off-balance or different from what they appeared to be.

I heard Louise shift in the backseat and I uncovered her face to check on her but I really just wanted to see her face. Even in the thin moonlight, with her face swelling, she was beautiful. I looked at my watch every few seconds. I counted the median lines as far as I could see in both directions. I checked my watch again. Only ten minutes had passed since I had found Louise. I waited. I had too much time to think.

I remembered three years before, a family from Hot Springs had driven their car into the Flathead River at forty below. They must have been flying, their tires lifting above the drift of ice when they hit that dipped curve to soar airborne like a lover’s thrill with seven occupants. The sheer weight of that ’42 custom LaSalle broke the thick ice clean and they had disappeared like a flat dream of Christmas. They had settled, the whole carload of them, in the shallow elbow of the winter river. They froze there like a picture of themselves out for a Sunday drive.

Three weeks later the Reston brothers, a couple of white boys too dumb for pranks, the ding-a-lings we used to call them when their names were forgotten, the sorry sacks near the cutoff, told everyone they had found a carload of circus mannequins, circus dummies, in the water near the boundary curves.

It occurred to me two minutes after Railer that it was the Albin family. When I pulled up at the river Railer surprised me by motioning to me.

“You got to see this,” he said to me, almost giddy.

It was a sight that called for more witnesses. Unbelievable and rare. The wind swirled the snow to smoke above our heads.

“Don’t go telling your Indian friends,” Railer had said to me, almost laughing. The sight stunned me so much I didn’t answer. I had held my ears in the nip of cold. My eyes jelled. We stood on the dense green ice of the Flathead River and looked down between our slicksoled boots to the family trapped beneath us. This is what comes of accidents on a river curve at forty below.