Tylosaurus, Archelon, Dolichorhynchops, Xiphactinus, Thalassomedon, Cretoxyrhina mantelli, Good Lord deliver us. I take a wrong turn and stop at a deserted gas station, but all the pumps are out of order. The flyblown windows of the gas station are filled with jackalopes and pyramids made of empty oil cans. A sign nailed to the door reads “We’re Open!” but all the doors have been locked against me. I peer inside, and there’s an antique Bell & Howell 8 mm. home projector throwing images on a sheetrock wall. Angry men on horseback riding the hills of a rough and wooded country, hunting a wolf, a ruthless murderer of lambs and babes in cribs and travelers caught unawares. The flanks of the horses are encrusted with barnacles. The wolf turns out to be something else altogether, not a proper wolf at all. And then, on the way back to my car, passing the useless, broken down pumps, I watch a solar eclipse that is really only the circumference of an enormous ammonite’s shell passing between me and the sun shining down on the ocean. Placenticeras, Hoploscaphites, Oxybeloceras, Sphenodiscus pleurisepta, Our Father who art forsaken, hossannah, amen, amen. I get back in the car, wishing that I could stop smelling that terrible, terrible stench, wishing it were only from having hit a dead skunk, wishing it were only the funk of road—though, in a sense, is it not? I drive, wandering out to where the deeps get deeper, and the sky grows darker, and the roof of the car begins to groan and buckle from the weight of all that water pushing down on me. And then the kid is shaking me awake, and he says that I was talking in my sleep. “Sounded like you were having one hell of a nightmare,” he says. I say it wasn’t as bad as all that, but sure, I have bad dreams. He’s opened the drapes, and I see that the sun is down. The kid sits down on his bed, which doesn’t look as if it’s been slept in. I glance at the clock on the table between the beds and see it’s almost midnight. The TV’s been switched off, and the only light is coming from the open bathroom door. I smell soap and shampoo and steam, and I ask the kid if he had a shower. He says yeah, he took a shower, and then, he says, he found my keys and went outside and looked in the trunk. His hair’s still wet I sit up and rub my eyes, and now I see that he’s holding the revolver from his backpack. Quel courage. I see that it’s aimed at me. “What I want to know,” he says, “I mean, what I most wanna know, is whether or not you’re afraid of dying, whether you’re afraid of going to Hell for what you’ve done?” And I reply, “Or maybe just for being a faggot? That would be transgression enough, right?” And I ask him if I can get one of the Cokes from the cooler, and if he minds if I light a cigarette. Isn’t that how it works? The condemned man is at least accorded a final cigarette? He tells me to sit still, and he goes to the Coleman icebox and takes out one of the cans of Coca-Cola and drops it on the bed beside me. He lights one of the Marlboros, and passes it to me, and I sit smoking and trying to wake up. But the dream still feels more real and less improbable than sitting in a motel room in Wall, South Dakota, staring at the muzzle of the kid’s dead brother’s gun. I take a long drag on the cigarette, and then I answer his question. “Yeah,” I say, “I’m scared of dying. I probably would have stopped a long time ago, if I weren’t afraid to just lie down and fucking die.” He asks, “You were gonna do for me what you done for them?” and he nods towards the door to Room 107 and towards the car outside and towards the broken things he found in the trunk. “I hadn’t yet decided,” I tell him, and that’s the truth, for whatever the truth might be worth. “Did you fuck them?” he wants to know. “Did you fuck them, and if you did, was it before or after they were dead?” I ask, “Are you going to ask me questions all night long? Is that how this is gonna go? You sitting there, holding that gun on me, satisfying your morbid curiosity.” And he tells me, “Yeah, Mister, maybe that’s how it’s gonna go. Or maybe I already called the cops. Or maybe I’ll take the gun and the car and be on my way. Maybe I’ll even leave you alive.” I laugh and smoke my Marlboro. “Well,” I say, “that’s an awful lot of choices. How are you ever going to decide which it’s going to be?” He says, “You don’t sound scared.” I shake my head or I shrug or something of the sort. “Kid, I’ve been afraid so long I don’t know anything else. I’ve been afraid so long I got tired, and I got sloppy, and I’m starting to think it was all on purpose. Maybe you’ve been sent by the gods to hand down my sentence and be my salvation, both at the selfsame time, doom and deliverance wielding a suicide’s revolver. “ The kid looks a little taken aback, either by so many words or by the sentiment I open the Coke and take a drink, then set the can down beside the clock on the table between the beds. “I’m not afraid of you,” he says, and he only almost sounds as if he means it “Fear isn’t anything to be ashamed of,” I tell the kid. “Fear isn’t cowardice. Fear isn’t weakness. Maybe you’ll figure that out one day, a little farther down the road.” And then I ask him if he really has a boyfriend in Rapid City or if Lucas is nothing more than a useful fiction, a convenient lie. “That ain’t really none of your business,” he replies, and I agree, but he’s not the only one with questions. “Why do you do it?” he asks, and I tell him I don’t know. “That’s a lie,” he says, and I suggest that if he’d called the cops, they’d be here by now. And he tells me that he doesn’t believe I was ever really a college professor, and I say fair enough, you believe what you want to believe. “But it’s getting late,” I say. “And you’re holding all the cards.” I imagine that I can hear the hooves of the horses from my nightmare, the horses bearing Wild West wolf slayers charged with a holy task of vengeance and retribution. “How do I know, if I leave you alive, if I leave you free, how do I know you won’t come after me? How do I know you won’t follow me?” I taste tinfoil and copper and a dozen poisons hiding in the cigarette smoke. Then I glance past him at the window, at the night waiting out there, at the headlights and taillights of cars and trucks racing by out on the interstate. “Kid, you don’t know shit, and however I were to answer that question, you still wouldn’t know shit. Whatever course you choose,” I say, “it’s a gamble. Just do me a favor and don’t take all goddamn night about it.” And he sits there watching me, and the clock strikes twelve midnight without making a sound. I think about the concrete Wall Drug dinosaur gazing out across the plains with its incandescent scarlet eyes, standing guard just as surely as any gargoyle, a sentinel watching for the evil that sometimes comes rolling along on steel belts, padding up to the off-ramp on four rubber paws, inevitable as rain and taxes and death. Then the kid asks me if next time I’ll let him tag along and let him watch, if maybe that’s one of the choices laid out before him. “If I don’t call the cops,” he says. “If I don’t pull the trigger. If we could come to some sort of understanding.” I have to admit, he catches me entirely off my guard. I don’t answer right away. I tell the kid with broken china-blue eyes and dirty blond hair how I have to think on it a little while, that it’s no simple proposition he making. And he says that’s fine by him, that he figures neither of us is in a hurry, that neither of us has anywhere else to be. Then he lights a cigarette for himself, and he waits for whatever I’m going to decide, and the indifferent, all-powerful, unknowing clock starts counting down another day.