Callahan bolts from the side of the road like a chaingang runaway, clearing the pond-scummy ditch like Superman: at a single bound. Beyond is an old stake fence overgrown with drifts of kudzu and what might be poison sumac. He doesn’t care if it’s poison sumac or not. He dives over the fence, rolls over in high grass and burdocks, and peers out at the highway through a hole in the foliage.

For a moment or two there’s nothing. Then a white-over-red Cadillac comes pounding down Highway 3 from the direction of Yazoo City. It’s doing seventy easy, and Callahan’s peephole is small, but he still sees them with supernatural clarity: three men, two in what appear to be yellow dusters, the third in what might be a flight-jacket. All three are smoking; the Cadillac’s closed cabin fumes with it.

They’ll see me they’ll hear me they’ll sense me, Callahan’s mind yammers, and he forces it away from its own panicky wretched certainty, yanks it away. He forces himself to think of that Elton John song — “Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved myli-iife tonight…” and it seems to work. There is one terrible, heart-stopping moment when he thinks the Caddy is slowing — long enough for him to imagine them chasing him through this weedy, forgotten field, chasing him down, dragging him into an abandoned shed or barn— and then the Caddy roars over the next hill, headed for Natchez, maybe. Or Copiah. Callahan waits another ten minutes. “Got to make sure they’re not trickin on you, man,” Lupe might have said. But even as he waits, he knows this is only a formality. They’re not trickin on him; they flat missed him. How? Why?

The answer dawns on him slowly—an answer, at least, and he’s damned if it doesn’t feel like the right one. They missed him because he was able to slip into a different version of America as he lay behind the tangle of kudzu and sumac, peering out at Route 3. Maybe different in only a few small details — Lincoln on the one and Washington on the five instead of the other way around, let us say— but enough. Just enough. And that’s good, because these guys aren’t brain-blasted, like the dead folks, or blind to him, like the bloodsucking folks. These people, whoever they are, are the most dangerous of all.