fast,” I tell him. “How about you? You feeling all right?” He says, “Yeah, sure. I’m feeling fine,” and I can tell he’s not buying the food poisoning story. “You don’t get car sick, do you?” the kid asks, and the question strikes me as so absurd that I almost laugh. Somehow, I manage only to smile, instead. Finally, the cashier figures out that I’m forty-eight years old, so it’s legal to sell me cigarettes, and she rings us up. I tell her to add a bag of ice. I pay for everything with my Visa card, because that one’s still good, and I tell her I don’t need the receipt. She bags the candy and beef jerky, the drinks and my smokes, and I ask the kid, wait, didn’t he need to take a leak. “I used the women’s room,” he tells me. The cashier sort of glares at him. He glares back at her twice as hard. The name printed on her name tag is Brooklyn, and I wonder who the fuck in Wall, South Dakota goes and names her daughter Brooklyn? I tell the kid to grab the ice, and then I go back outside into the broiling day and stand by the dented left front fender of my car, staring westward, back towards the highway. Towards Rapid City and the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains, towards the goddamn Pacific Ocean, and I wonder how I’ve gotten this far. The kid comes back with ten pounds of ice, and I see that there’s a polar bear wearing a toboggan cap printed on the plastic bag. I think again about Dostoevsky. I contemplate synchronicity and meaningful coincidence. “I was thinking, maybe I’ll get a room,” I say to the kid, and he sets the bag of ice down on the hood of the car. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a couple of days now. It would do me good to sleep in an actual bed. You’re welcome to join me, if you want” The kid stares at the bag of ice, and he shrugs. “You still going all the way to Rapid City, or should I start looking for another ride?” I ask myself how far I’m gonna go this time, if I’m in for a penny, in for a pound, or if I should let this one walk. “Sure,” I say. “I just need to catch a few hours shuteye, that’s all. If you want to hang around, we can get dinner tonight, and then you can see the eyes of the dinosaur.” I fish out my keys and open the back door on the driver’s side. The cooler is a third full with chilly water, and I pour that out onto the hot asphalt. It pools beneath the car with Oregon plates. “Yeah,” he says, “I don’t know. Maybe I should keep moving. I’m late, as it is.” He hands me the bag of ice, and I slam it on the blacktop a couple of times to break it up, and then I rip open the plastic bag and fill the cooler halfway. I dump the rest out on the pavement, and it begins to melt instantly. I put the cans of Coke into the cooler, and I tell the kid, “Whichever. No pressure. I just thought I’d offer. I don’t want you to feel like I’m going back on my word. I just gotta get some sleep.” He asks if I really think I have food poisoning, and I tell him maybe, I don’t either,” I say. “Two beds?” he wants to know. “Sure,” reply. “Of course. Two beds.” The kid sighs and gets back in the car, so it’s decided. Just like that. I drive back across Glenn Street to the Day’s Inn and get a room with twin beds. The clerk looks at me, and then she looks past me out the sheets of dusty plate-glass fronting the lobby. The kid is waiting in the car, sipping a Red Bull. “Is he your son?” she wants to know, and I can hear the suspicion in her voice, coiled like a rattlesnake, waiting to strike if I give the wrong answer, waiting to say, sorry Mister, but turns out there’s no room at the inn, but maybe next door at the Motel 6 they have a vacancy. It’s just down the way, and they don’t ask so many questions. “No,” I say, too tired and hot and queasy to lie. “I picked him up yesterday, hitchhiking. We’re both headed the same way, and, you know, there are bad people on the road. Homos and perverts looking to take advantage of unsuspecting innocents. You know how it is.” I’m wondering if maybe I laid it on too thick with the bit about perverts and homos, but apparently not, because then she asks, “How old is he?” I reply, “I honestly haven’t asked. But he said something about graduating high school back in May, so I’m guessing he’s not a minor. Look, I really don’t want to cause you any grief. If you’re not comfortable with this, that’s okay. That’s totally understandable. I just couldn’t keep driving when I saw him. It’s not safe out on the road, hitching.” The clerk stares out at the kid just a little while longer, and then she says, “Nah, it’s fine.” She apologizes for being a snoop. That’s the way she put it; her words, not mine. I tell her no problem. These days, the way things are, it pays to be on the alert. See something, say something, right? She gives me a keycard for a room on the first floor. She asks if I mind that it faces the interstate, and I say no, not at all. The sound of traffic helps me sleep. “Almost as good as train tracks,” I say, and I smile, and she smiles back at me. She’s missing a front tooth, a lower incisor. She asks me for the kid’s name, and I tell her his first name’s Lucas, but I don’t know his last name. She tells me when she was a kid she had an uncle named Lucas, died in the Gulf War, and I say how that’s a shame. Then I walk back out into the heat and find a place to park, and me and the kid retire to Room 107. It’s dingy and smells of pine-scented disinfectant and stale tobacco smoke. But the beds are clean and the bathroom’s clean. The kid brings in the cooler, puts his remaining Red Bull in with my four cans of Coke, and then he switches on the television set. He waits until after it’s already on and tuned to ESPN to ask if I mind, if the noise is going to annoy me. I say no, just keep the volume down, please. There’s a baseball game, the Yankees against the Detroit Tigers in Yankee Stadium. I pull the drapes closed, drink one of the Cokes, and watch the game for a few minutes. I unbutton my shirt and lay down on the bed nearest to the door, not bothering to turn down the comforter or the sheets. I’d like to brush my teeth, maybe even have a shower, but it can wait. I don’t feel like going back out to the car for my suitcase, and speaking of luggage, the kid’s backpack is sitting across from me on the other bed. I think about the loaded .38 revolver, about the kid aiming out the car window, firing pretend bullets at invisible targets. I wonder if he’s ever killed anything, and I wonder if he has the nerve. I ask myself, if I got up and opened the bag and took the gun, would he try to stop me. Would he dare? Then I tell him, “I’m just gonna nod off, okay?” The kid says, yeah, okay, fine, and he tears open the bag of beef jerky. The salty-sweet odor of teriyaki seasoning immediately fills the room, and my stomach rolls. “So, you know all about dinosaurs and stuff?” the kid asks around a mouthful of dehydrated meat. “Yeah,” I answer, and I close my eyes. On TV, there’s the sharp crack of a baseball bat making contact, and the crowd cheers. “Is that what you do, dig up dinosaur bones?” he asks. “Not exactly,” I say, then open my eyes again and stare at the cottage cheese ceiling. There’s a dark stain above the bed, and I figure that’s where the mildew smell’s coming from. “I study animals that lived at the same time as dinosaurs.” He wants to know what sorts of animals, and I sit up again. I reach for my cigarettes, open the fresh pack, light a Marlboro, and belatedly wonder about smoke detectors. I stare at the TV and explain about plesiosaurs and mosasaurs and extinct species of sea turtles, about marine reptiles and secondarily aquatic tetrapods, animals that have given up on land and gone back to the sea. I tell him about my work in the Niobrara Chalk of Kansas, the Pierre Shale of Wyoming, and the Mooreville Chalk of Alabama. “Were you telling the truth about getting fired over drugs?” he asks, and I say yeah, but I’m clean now. Well, mostly clean. He asks where it is I’m headed, and I tell him I’m headed nowhere in particular, that after a stint in rehab I just needed to get out on the road and clear my head, figure out my next move. “I thought I’d take a road trip, visit some places out West that I’ve never actually seen or haven’t seen since I was in college.” The sort of places that are of interest to geologists and paleontologists, the South Dakota Badlands, Dinosaur National Monument, the Florrisant Fossil Beds in Colorado and Como Bluff in Wyoming, a bunch of quarries and museums, and so on and so forth. I tap ash into the palm of my hand. No smoke alarms have gone off, so I guess I’m in the clear. The kid asks, “What’s there in Rapid City you want to see,” and I tell him about the museum at the School of Mines. “You’re gay?” he asks. “Yeah,” I reply, and he sort of grins and says how he could tell right off, how he wouldn’t have offered me the blowjob if he hadn’t been sure. He tells me he’ll be nineteen the week before Christmas. I didn’t ask. He volunteered as though it were the next most natural thing to say. “Lucas,” says the kid, “he’s a lot older than me, too. Maybe I just have a thing for older men.” And I reply, “Maybe so, but you should be careful about that. There are people who will take advantage of that predilection in a young man. Out in the big wide world, out on the road, there are men whose appetites get the better of the better angels of their nature.” He says I talk like a college professor, like someone who’s read a lot of books, and then he goes back to watching the ballgame. I return to staring at the water stain on the cottage cheese ceiling. I lie there thinking about wolves and Red Riding Hood, the road of needles and the road of pins, about foolhardy children straying from the paths set out before them, about Lincoln, Nebraska, and before that, the inky shadows beneath a highway overpass just outside Sioux City, Iowa. And then I drift off to sleep, and I dream of a sky above the prairie that isn’t any sort of sky at all, a sky that is, in fact, the waters of an inland sea, and I drive and I drive and I drive. Gigantic white worms have plowed the winding, switchback trails that I follow, and I anxiously check the rearview mirror, again and again, to be sure that I haven’t been followed. I roll along between cathedrals that once were the skeletons of leviathans, bare ribs for flying buttresses, an arching line of vertebrae to support the vaulted dome of Heaven. Monstrous reptiles and fish and sharks the size of whales swim and fly and sail the mesopelagic liquid sky laid out above my car, and their shadows move silent across the land, sirens leading me on. Behind the wheel, I recite a protective zoological mantra, Greek and Latin binomena for an infidel’s blasphemous benediction, an atheist’s string of prehistoric saints and petrified rosary beads—