“I own—”

“—can’t do, Jessie,” Cully said, his voice suddenly loud in the truck. “What you can’t do is stay in my truck one more second.”

Luther met his eyes. They were bland and unblinking.

“So get out, boy.”

Luther smiled. “You just a good man who steals cars, that it, Mr. Cully, suh?”

Cully smiled, too. “Ain’t going to be a second train today, Jessie. You try the third box car from the back. Hear?”

He reached across Luther and opened the door.

“You got a family?” Luther asked. “Kids?”

Cully leaned his head back and chuckled. “Oh ho. Don’t push it, boy.” He waved his hand. “Just get out my truck.”

Luther sat there for a bit and Cully turned his head and stared out the windshield and a crow cawed from somewhere above them. Luther reached for the door handle.

He climbed out and stepped onto the gravel and his eyes fell on a stand of dark trees on the other side of the tracks, thinned by winter, the pale morning light passing between the trunks. Cully reached across and pulled the door shut and Luther looked back at him as he spun the truck around, crunching the gravel. He waved out the window and drove back the way he’d come.

The train went beyond St. Louis, crossing over the Mississippi and into Illinois. It turned out to be the first stroke of good luck Luther’d had in some time—he’d been heading for East St. Louis in the first place. It was where his father’s brother, Hollis, lived, and Luther had hoped to sell the car here and maybe lie low for a while.

Luther’s father, a man he couldn’t remember knowing in the flesh, had left the family for East St. Louis when Luther was two. He’d run off with a woman named Velma Standish, and they’d settled here and Timon Laurence had eventually set up a shop that sold and repaired watches. There had been three Laurence brothers—Cornelius, the eldest, and then Hollis, and lastly, Timon. Uncle Cornelius had often told Luther he wasn’t missing out on much growing up without Tim around, said his youngest brother had been a man born feckless and weak for women and liquor since about the time he learned what the two were. Threw away a fine woman like Luther’s mother for nothing more than junk pussy. (Uncle Cornelius had pined throughout Luther’s life for Luther’s mother with a love so chaste and patient it couldn’t help but be taken for granted and grow, through the years, entirely unremarkable. It was his lot in life, he’d told Luther not long after he’d gone fully blind, to have a heart no one wanted except in pieces and never as a whole, while his youngest brother, a man of no definable principles, culled love to him as easily as if it fell through the rain.)

Luther grew up with a single tin-plated photograph of his father. He’d touched it so many times with his thumbs that his father’s features had softened and blurred. By the time Luther grew to manhood there was no way to tell if his own features bore a resemblance. Luther had never told anyone, not his mother or his sister or even Lila, how deep it cut to grow up knowing his father never gave him a thought. That the man had glanced at this life he’d brought into the world and said to himself: I’m happier without it. Luther had long imagined he’d meet him one day and stand before him a proud young man of great promise and watch regret fill his father’s face. But it hadn’t worked out that way.