Got too much power already, Bob argued, following Alan out into the blaze of light. We blinked, we staggered, we crawled up over the gunwales of the open boat and flopped inside. Four of us in the front seat, nobody in the rear except a case of beer that Alan had acquired somehow, as we left. Elbows and impacted ribs, shoulders jammed, we shuffled the bottle left and right as somebody, Alan perhaps, piloted the car northward under the spangled light of the trees, up the dusty street scattering chickens, pursued by yapping curs, the final passionate farewells of our new friends at La Cantina Contenta still resounding in our ears, minds, blood, corazones. Mi corazon es su corazon, compadre. Remember that.

Power is our destiny, Fred argued in return. We are bound for Andromeda and beyond. The Earth is but a footstool to the stars. God is our goal, God is our fate, and by God if God doesn’t exist we shall create the S.O.B.

The wind howled, the sun screamed, the motor sang.

Red-tail hawks squinted at us from the telephone poles, one hawk per mile, regular as command posts along the Manfred Line. One black buzzard soared above, waiting. The red needle crept to seventy, eighty, eighty-five.

I never saw so blue a sky. A sky so bloody blue, so deeply transparent you could see infinity through it, the fine-grained blackness of outer space, the stellar clouds of the Horsehead Nebula.

We stopped at Algodones, next town up the road, for brief refreshment. Bob’s turn to stand us all a round, and he knew it. Alan performed a four-wheel drift on the plaza dust. Nice old mission church there, two wooden bell towers mounted on adobe walls four feet thick. Black crosses. Golden light. Magpies screeching in the cornfields. The bar did not have a name and didn’t need one. Like the other it was black as a pit inside, cool, roomy, not crowded yet, stinking of stale beer and male sweat and dried urine, the way we liked it.

We ordered tequila, salt, limes. The management had no limes. Nor lemons neither. Si, no tenemos lemons.

Who needs fruit, explained Bob.

We poured salt on our wrists, tipped off a shot of tequila, licked the salt, drank a second, chased it with beer, licked salt, felt good, shoved one another around a bit and rambled out into the heat and the light.

WHO’S DRIVING this car? Alan? Who’s that under the wheel? Nobody’s driving. We’re all driving. Who’s in charge here? We’re all in charge. This here’s America, my friends, this here’s democracy, and if somebody doesn’t step a little harder on the gas we’ll never get to Santa Fe.

Pit stop! yelled Fred.

Brake drums screamed. The car lurched from the pavement, fishtailed through a hedge of rabbit brush, bounded down the embankment of the roadway into a ravine.

Hang on! I shouted or somebody shouted. Or maybe we only thought it.

The Lincoln leaped from a four-foot cutbank and crashed onto a crust of red sand. A cloud of dust engulfed us.