It is summer and school is out. There is even less for Lincoln to do, and more to wonder about.

Burt is driving. Lincoln clings on behind, too conscious of their bodies, of the rules governing teenage touch. Instead of holding Burt around the waist, his hands are braced on the rear rack of the three-wheeler. Each bump in the trail sends shocks up his arms but he likes it: the danger of almost falling, the ache in the backs of his arms, the growing muscle. When he breathes in through his nose the wind feels sharp, as if it were March instead of August. He thinks maybe his nose is bleeding, but he doesn’t care. He is too preoccupied with the terror of the trail. Burt yells each time the machine lifts into the air. He pushes it faster with every near-spill.

Burt’s father lives in the Cities and his mother back on the reservation. He shuttles between the two of them, doing everything wrong so they decide that a change of scenery will help, will kick him from bad habits toward good ones. He moves in these different worlds, from trail to street, and imparts the wrong walk, the affectations of the city on the reservation, a wildness to his city self. Up north he saunters with a pimp-daddy limp down the highway, rolling along, certain of his cool among the ditch-driven blackbirds and marginal muskrat. Everyone thinks he’s hurt himself and so they pull alongside and ask, Are you hurt? He shakes his head and sneers. After a month of this they start to call him Hurt. On the Southside he pisses on the sidewalk as if he were on a deer drive and lights campfires under the Cedar Avenue overpass. Lincoln suspects that he does this on purpose, has created a studied craziness for himself.

They pull the three-wheeler to the top of a rise and Burt chokes off the engine.

“Need some fuckin shock absorbers on this thing.”

Lincoln agrees. Burt swings one leg over as if dismounting a horse. Lincoln does the same and shakes the cramps out of his hands.

Burt raps the gas tank with his knuckles, first at the top and then down the side until it stops ringing.

“We outta gas?”

“Naw. I’m just makin sure we got enough for transportation and refreshments.” He unscrews the cap and sets it on the seat. He leans over, and with his nose a couple of inches away from the tank, inhales in short bursts. He stands and shakes his head back and forth.

Lincoln walks up to the tank and does the same. The gas is sloshing to a still and it looks black and deep through the opening, as deep as a well. He breathes in through his nose, holds it, and breathes again. Lincoln stands straight. His head feels porous, bigger than before. He exhales, as if some great truth had been casually disclosed. Burt huffs again, miming the breath-holding technique of pot-smokers, the relaxed concentration of his father and uncles.