Rankin has been driving all night to get home. A lumbering four-door sedan unsuited to the winding mountain roads. Coming around the last turn of a long downhill spiral, the pine forest that has flanked both sides for the past seven hours abruptly ends, giving way to unfenced pasture. The sudden shift in brightness makes him squint. The red rising sun comes square out of the eastern sky into his eyes. The sweet reveille of insects and birdcalls, the scent of clover and alfalfa, the purple and yellow flowers of Lucerne grass. This is land he understands. Forests are for men with futures. Rankin is tumbleweed. Hatchet-boned and sinewy, slot machine eyes that want to rest at kindness but always go one click beyond. He looks like the crumpled photos of people Woody Guthrie sang about.

The dashboard light had flashed on a hundred miles ago. Its weird symbol looked like a horseshoe with a parasite crawling through its insides. Premonition told him it couldn’t be good. Now in daylight he can see it isn’t about gas, he has a quarter tank. And it isn’t the oil light. He debates the risk of pulling over to read the manual. Stopping can make the difference between getting there before his son is born and being recaptured. He has never been given to prudence. He thinks, maybe this is the first test of whether he truly has changed, as he swore to do when he heard from Chloe that he was going to be a father. Not so much from Chloe herself as from Chloe’s mother. And not so much as an act of Christian kindness, but rather her smug triumph that this was one more pleasure Rankin would never experience as a free man.

What the hell was matricide anyway?

His mouth is a sandstorm. The half-full jar of apple juice has sat in the car since before he boosted it. He wonders whose mouth had been on the rim. He’s been inside a hundred and ninety-six days if he was counting but who’s counting. He guesses he’s swallowed worse.

He yanks the wheel to the right as if someone else’s hand has done it. He leaves the engine idling and pees a long hard parabola with his back to the road. The manual is written in three languages. Two were no help at all, and the third just barely. He can tear down a tractor blindfolded and any car before they thought computers ought to run them. He spirts in disgust, when the diagram in the book matches the one that had been lit up.

Severe tire damage.

The left rear is patched and bald. No wonder they left it at the far side of the lot with the keys tucked under the visor. Everything always went smooth for Rankin when he was on the path to the wrong place. But when he tries to make things right, there was tire damage. He had not meant to hurt the prison guard. He would have been fine sticking the nail through the throat of the fat fuck, McKevit. But the kid guard was a rookie, his first night on max security. Probably had a young wife and maybe a baby on the way too. Kid wasn’t even supposed to be there. McKevit probably took the payoff then switched up.

“Okee dokie artichokee,” the kid had said when McKevit handed him the keys. Had no idea it was a setup, and he was supposed to look the other way when Rankin walked. Rankin tried to talk to the kid for a sec, but when a man has to choose between somebody else’s life and his own, that’s no choice at all. McKevit probably watched the whole thing on closed circuit. Fucker loved staging his gladiator bouts.

He pops the trunk. No spare. No jack. No luck. That’s ok. He’ll step aside to let any good fortune pass straight on past him to his boy. The logging trucks are out early. Man, those cowboys can drive! Nose those eighteen-wheelers right up on his pipes and blast their air horns. And him in a what? A Lincoln fucking Town Car? He has to drive like a Sunday school teacher in a seersucker suit, take it slow to baby the last mile out of the threadbare rubber. It’s all he can do not to floor it and let the fuckers try to pass him. He’s always dreamed he’d die in a head-on. Watched each truck coming at him in the opposite lane, thinking maybe this would be the one. Maybe his tire would blow, sending him hurtling into the 40-ton semi. Shatter him to pieces. Like the torn-up raccoon he had seen splattered on the side of the road.

And his mother, who he had left in her rocking chair. Who had called him her best little boy. The son who always knew how to make her feel good. She had bought all the books, all the equipment, all in his name to avoid suspicion of her intentions. She had told him to grind up the pills and mix them in her tea. To wait until he could see that she had lost the spark and then to put on the mask, which he did, so gently, so as not to disarray her sparse grey hair. She had told him he would want to save her, to rescue her but that he mustn’t, not if he wanted to make her happy. Not if he was her good boy. That he must not try to wake her. That it would be all right. That he mustn’t worry. That he would not get into trouble. That it would all be all right, she said. That it would be all right.