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.”

Because her fear began to intensify, because she wanted to get to the other side of that fear to prove it was unwarranted, she insisted, finally, that they both go into a bar that advertised meat-loaf sandwiches and cold beer. A few gray shacks like inflated chicken coops lay in the rough field behind the bar. In one, something like a doorway gave onto a dark interior. A shining black inner tube rested against the gray slats, and near it a yellow chicken stood in an attitude of expectancy. There was no other sign of life.

“Listen, you’ve seen the way these people stare at us? That man at the last gas station, he looked at you like you were trash.”