Jesus Christ! He slammed his hand against the dashboard. Keep to the future! His anger cracked reality and allowed a little mystery of the night and dawn to enter again. He stared hard beyond the insect splats on the windshield. Indians, he remembered. Sometimes warriors would do everything backwards when they went stale. But he could scarcely drive the twenty miles to Traverse City in reverse, and in forward there weren’t any new routes he hadn’t taken before. He had to change the nature of his mind first, then other changes would occur. This was a minor stroke of lightning, equal to touching an electric fence, unwarily, at night.

He slammed the Subaru into four-wheel drive and moved it deliberately across the lawn where the aerial whipped against the clothesline. He skirted most of the alfalfa field, circled through the orchard, and put the little station wagon through its paces, crossing a creek and a ditch and up onto the road, throwing two streams of dirt the last ten yards. He felt a certain sense of victory.

Chapter 13

Then life changed with as little reason as it had previously refused to change. He got up very early in the morning after the Jaws of Life barbecue, and drove south with Hudley forty-five miles to Kingsley. He was equally shattered by his behavior and a hangover so severe that he rated it in the top five of his life. The single grace note was the remnant of a dream, some shred of vision about being unable to pull a plow because there were three glass slides between vertebrae up and down his spine. In his dream he was able to pull out the obstructions and felt a vast surge of power in his sleep.

After the first few miles the dog began barking at passing cars. Hudley owned a resonant, basso bark that made Warlock clench his jaws until they hurt. At a traffic light in Traverse City he grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and shook him vigorously.

“Give me a break, Hud. I got a top fiver.”