“Of course! Think I’d ask the guys who helped me out to pay for it?” Itch chuckles. “Get settled in. I think there’s a Shell station up the road. I’ll run up and grab us some.”

“Ten-four, good buddy,” Nugget tells him.

Itch’s bike rumbles away as Hunter and Nugget remove their helmets.

“He’s about the craziest son of a bitch I know,” Nugget mutters.

“Would you expect him to be any other way?”

“Nah, I s’pose not.”

They unstrap their mats and sleeping bags from the rears of their bikes, rolling everything out onto the manicured grass, where Hunter smooths his marshmallow-looking mummy bag. After shucking off his leather jacket, he wads it up and sticks it behind his head as he flops down on the bag. Ankles crossed, fingers laced behind his head, he hears the soft crunch of gravel from a black Silverado pulling an old-school twenty-eight-foot Airstream.

Across the way, in front of the long, glossy gold-and-tan RV, a father and son lay shapes on a picnic table.

Hunter hears a snort and gag from Nugget, who has sprawled out on his sleeping pad and begun snoring, all in the space of about ten seconds. Continuing to watch the father and son, who stand over a circle of stones, Hunter notices the quartered splits of firewood, piled according to no particular scheme. The father kneeling down, trying to light what looks like wads of paper beneath the wood. The sight takes Hunter back to another campground, when he was around fourteen and his father took him fishing one Saturday. They had unloaded everything from his father’s 1978 short-bed Ford Ranger with a topper and had set up their two-man tent, an old olive-drab pyramid, piled up splits of wood from the campground office, then gathered a double handful of twigs and pine straw. Once they got the twigs crackling, they stacked larger sticks on the flames, in a log-cabin structure. After the larger sticks caught, they stacked on the small quartered logs. Meanwhile, from the neighboring campsite of another father and son came a constant stream of complaining. Hank had told young Hunter in a low tone, “Can read it all over that guy’s every action.”

“What’s that?”

“Man’s got some skills, but he’s never taken his son camping before.”

Hunter and his father walked over. The father and son had on white Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and cutoff jean shorts. Opening a big nylon drawstring bag, the father shook out a new tent. The directions were spread out on a barn-red picnic table where a tackle box and fishing rods also lay.

The father muttered, “This damn shit can’t never be easy.”

Hank told the father, “Look like you could use an extra set of hands.”