See, I had just become my race plus his—and, I can tell you, that combo is work.

4.

Since the farmer’s shirtless son owned the new red wrecker, he said he’d tow our car to Falls, just for the price of his gas plus one in-town meal for him and his folks, okay? Just so’s they’d have something to do of a till-recently slow Sunday. (Now I see this was their country way of not making us feel overgrateful.)

The red truck soon got our muddied car free of its ditch, back right side up. The tires were okay. So the farmers climbed in; they’d ride in our handsome towed Packard. It was strange to look through the wrecking truck’s rear window and see them, proud, windblown, fiddling with dashboard knobs, playing like they were city folks and us. The youngest boy worked a steering wheel that had no say-so.

Dad held one arm, cradling it like a baby. He pressed hard and silent against the tow truck’s passenger door. They pulled a spare quilt up around him. Times we would hit a big bump, he’d half-groan. I heard his head knock the rolled-up window, him barely noticing. I felt worried, and I piled against his yellow quilt, maybe hurting him.

Though the farmers were being very good to us, their strong ruddy son, our driver, couldn’t help criticize Dad’s speed. And on a secondary road and with plenty of warning signs.

“City people don’t know how many head of deer we got back in these woods. Why, won’t but just last summer—Jenny’s brother’s son?—he seen him a bear, not ten miles from the highway back in Pike’s Woods. A good-sized one, too. Black. And just a-padding along like it owned the woods, which it pertwell used to, I reckon. It didn’t know there was so many head of US out here!”

And he gave off a grim and snuffly country kind of laugh. But Dad and me didn’t bother to respond. “Funny” was not being much help to us here lately.

Riding, silent, I became a pop quiz of listed questions: When had my mother learned of Dad’s true racial mix? Had she ever really known? Did she only sense it? Was her fling with Dix a revenge on Clyde’s homeliness or his race or both? Did Falls allow her weekly blond betrayal because it half-suspected? Did all those colored service-station attendants guess Clyde’s history at once? What other codes had been forever lost on me? And how fast could I make up these lapses to “Almost Monster”? Such a name for so kind a man, so true a dad.

Clyde had asked, “Buddy? Ain’t I been good enough for you?” Ouch. Helping him, I wanted to hurt somebody else now. Proof.

The farmers said they’d leave us at Falls General Hospital. Then they’d pull his car to the Shell station that Clyde liked. As we finally entered Falls, we passed my school, our church, our American Grill. We drew near the house and—though it was one block over—I saw, through moving trees, one white Pontiac still gleaming there.