THEY DROVE early, no cars on the road, got an hour south and passed a I lake, and then the capitol, a white dome. Only a few cars, even then. Another thirty miles they stopped for gas, and she showed him the rest of the way; she drew a finger line on the map west, across green and pink and orange states, mountains and rivers and state parks and towns, her hands red from the cold; she blew at them. Floodlights at the station pumps behind them turned off, and the new light sprung. They swore hunched over the flat country unfolded on the hood, the lot of those fuckers, the whole town, even, were forgotten already, so early, its face blurred a drunk fingerprint.

They got back on beneath long clouds, steel gray, and they passed cars gone north on the other side and sometimes they came up on cars in the south lane. Someone had yanked out the back hitch and left a hole in the panel. The metal around it rusted back to a lip. She had covered it with a square patch of cardboard, edges layered shut with duct tape. He watched the metal back door stutter, and then he watched her head through the glass nod. He worked at a joint and passed a long ditch filled up with rainwater. He smoked half and pinched it out and got an empty cigarette box from the floorboard, put the stub in the box and tossed it on the passenger side.

A combine turned a dead cornfield and a wire fence posted shoulder high for two miles, and then a water tower, and then he kept his eyes too long on a tree shaking with cowbirds gone purple and red in the early light and didn’t know he let the front end drift until the fender caught the guardrail and kicked sparks; they rained a tail past his window open to trees in the median, and he watched it pass fired and orange, and then the sparks cleared and he righted the car and put his face back to the road. The rust he colored blue flaked at the wind, rushed over the hood. Once more quickly he turned over his shoulder to the tree, the birds become leaves.

He drank some of the gas station coffee and it burned the roof of his mouth and his tongue. He lipped the cup and tuned the radio through fuzz and then he clicked it off. When it was quiet he thought for a while about space, and everything contained in it, planets and chairs and dogs and weather, and he was glad to be awake, and stoned, quickly moving through cold sharp air, and he was glad of the girl he followed, and of the new year, and he was glad of the morning, the blue light plain on the road. The tree and the birds and the sparks from the fender that soon were portents, and for good, signs the world had an energy, just there, like the pitch of fast water, or burning leaves.

Her car started to wobble, but he did not worry. It was old, a gray station wagon with mismatched and balding wheels, wood panel at the sides and back hitch; he figured the alignment was bad. He watched it shake. Four exits passed.

He tried the radio again, and found nothing. He got the box from the passenger seat and went back at the joint and when it burned his lips he rolled down the window and held an arm over the frame and dropped the end. He left the window and screamed at the trees gone by for some miles and his feet wanted to dance like mad, and they swiped the pedals and lurched the car, and the cold air rushed the window and smelled like burnt wood, and he held his mouth closed and pushed air from both nostrils, and it fogged inside the car with the window down, and it fogged inside with the window up and the heat off. He pressed an asthma inhaler and held his breath. He stared long at a billboard. It read WISE MEN SEEK HIM.

Her car turned sideways and rolled onto its head and slid into the median, which was mostly small pine, and long dry grass. He watched this all as if it were a dance.

He slowed his car and pulled onto the shoulder and got out.

Her car rested still upside down and left a path mashed brown back to the interstate. The wheels were still turning. The front right was torn, and it clapped against the metal going around, and the top of the car was pressed flat.

The window glass was smashed out, and the seatbelt was still across her chest and over her lap. Her head touched the roof. Her eyes were closed and her neck bent forward sharply so her chin went down into the collarbone. There was some blood but not so much.

One of the side mirrors was snapped off and laid at his feet and he picked it up. He turned and threw the mirror at the road.

He leaned at the driver’s side and put his hands flat on some of her hair run over the frame.

A truck pulled in behind him. Then an old man stood beside in the gray light and asked about the turned car. Terry pressed on her hair, turned his head to the old man. He opened his mouth to speak and then he stopped. The words slipped, weren’t there to begin with. He went back to his hands and looked.

There was a police car and an ambulance. The policeman made him take his hands off her hair. There was some glass beneath but he didn’t feel it. The policeman said his hands were bleeding.

One of the ambulance drivers quickly taped his hands, and then two of them zipped her up and lifted her into the back. One of them shut the doors. One said she was busted something unnatural. One touched his right shoulder and kept a hand there.

He sat in the grass on the shoulder and watched her move away in white and orange lights. He was not yet a man. He wanted a bomb to go off and light the gray sky The police car waited on him to stand. He didn’t pull the glass out of his hands, not for a long time.