“From the time we moved there from Alabama. My father had a little truck farm up there. One day, he was going to market. A white fellow came out of a side road and smacked into my father’s truck. My father came home and said, ‘Pack up.’ See, when they do you something bad, then they’re going to do worse. He hammered out the door of the truck where it’d been bashed in and we put what we could carry in the truck and we left that night and came to Houston because he had a brother there. Then, after we’d been there a year or so, my father moved on. I don’t know, none of us know, where he got to. My sisters, they’re both learning nursing. Things got a little better while the war was on. They can’t push us all the way back now.”

While Annie slept, Mason White brought them into Texas.

At Mason’s insistence, Annie had gone in alone to roadside stops, bringing them out sandwiches and coffee. “But you’re a soldier,” she’d protested.

“Don’t make no matter what I am.”

He stopped for gas only at the smallest junction where there would be a combined store and gas station, a few old men rocking on the porch storefront, picking their teeth. These settlements were so negligible that the planks out of which the tumble-down buildings were constructed looked like the debris left after a hurricane. There were no facilities for travelers, only the same old store with its brooms and hoes, bags of feed and sacks of nails and a few canned goods, a gas tank rooted in the ground as though it had dropped straight down from a hole in the sky. Sometimes, in a diner, Annie found a squalid toilet. But Mason White waited until they were out on the main road, then while she rested against the seat, White searched out a hidden place behind rocks and bushes.

He drove with absolute control, the car his servant. His plain brown face was creased with fatigue. He was a reticent man but the little space of the car in which they worked so steadily, eroding the distance before them, held the special intimacy that springs from mutual purpose. He was considerate toward her. He observed her for signs of exhaustion. “You’re too tired now. You stop, and I’ll take over,” he’d say.

They advanced hourly into increasingly dangerous territory. As the gas meter dropped down toward empty, she felt his fear and knew it was worse than her own.

“You had nerve, to pick me up and drive me like this,” he remarked once.

“I didn’t think of it like that.”

“I know it,” he said. “I’m just telling you. Five years ago, they would’ve broken my legs for this. I’m not sure what they’d do now if I wasn’t wearing these sergeant stripes, this uniform, and if all their young men were back, not just those old bones clacking around.”