Lobo’s anger radiated from the gun. It smelled like a grave. I wondered if the gun would always hold the memory of how long it had been buried and why. Maybe that was why I thought I could get rid of it.

“No way,” Dance said.

“You’re on a bike. You need protection.”

“I have a knife.”

“We all have knives.”

“You should keep the gun. It’s all about appearances, right? Hopefully you won’t ever have to use it. But a gun’s not like a knife. Just the sight of a gun might scare somebody off. A knife, when you use it, you have to get close.”

“I know that,” I said.

But he kept on talking. “If you pull out a knife in a fight, everybody gets cut, including you. You’re going to get hurt, too.”

We watched him go. We let him get a start on us. Then we packed up and drove. Too soon we passed him on the snow-freckled road, waving to him out of the open windows. Wind rushed into the cab, and we hurried to roll the windows back up, shivering in relief.

I watched through the rearview as long as I could for Dance: a slender figure, a tear in the gray air. A scavenger, gone off to find something to use, something to unearth again.

We were never going to get out of Appalachia.

I felt it in my bones as we slogged over the hills. Roads that should have taken minutes took hours. Starla fussed. We had to stop, then stop again. It seemed like there was always going to be, just around the next hill or the next, a gas station that was open, neon lights shining over the parking lot. A supermarket selling fuel, selling anything—chips stale in their bright bags, crumbled old chocolate. Even an enterprising stranger by the side of the road, sitting in a lawn chair, wrapped in fur, with gas cans and a cardboard sign: $100 bucks a gallon.

We could pay it. We still had cash. What use was cash? There was nothing to buy.

I missed strangers. Just the ordinariness of seeing a face I didn’t know. All the faces I saw now were familiar, dirty, and becoming harder. Jamey’s cheeks had lost their baby fat. I know I was imagining things but I felt Starla’s had, as well, that she was shedding some of the glow she had, her hair dulling to a color like dust. I had never seen a child so quiet, so compliant.