Joshua is driving now, east, in the rain. The car is like one bead in a string, laid out from one ocean to the other, people with someplace they need to go. He's a good driver. He drives all the time, and he's careful. When he turned seventeen and got his driver's license, he drove everywhere, even when he didn't need to. Tandar was never allowed to drive, so Joshua drove them both.
Late at night the boys would try to get lost on back roads, most nights, until they knew all the roads for fifty miles around. Sometimes Tandar even drove, but not usually, and they never said. On one of those nights--Joshua was driving--a possum ran up the embankment and out on the road in front of them. Joshua didn't have time to miss, or anyway he wasn't so careful then and he was going fast and he wasn't quick enough. And the possum really didn't understand, so she stopped where she was, and a wheel went right up over her. The boys laughed and laughed. Because it was funny, it was so unexpected, so solid and loud. Every time one of them tried to say something they both remembered how real it was and it started them off laughing again. Mostly they didn't know what else to do about it.
"This shouldn't be funny," Tandar said after a while, and they didn't laugh too much longer. They stayed out driving for hours though.
Now Joshua has been driving for hours again, hunching forward, trying to see through the rain and the thrashing wipers. The rental car he's driving is nice and new, but it smells like somebody's cigarettes. Two cups of coffee rest in holders on the dash, one half-empty, and a little knapsack sits in the back seat with Joshua's coat. The radio is turned up loud.
He's come this far from Denver without stopping, except to get gas for the car and use the bathroom. He hasn't eaten, and it looks like he won't until he's reached New Jersey. He usually doesn't when he's alone. He's been driving for about twenty-six hours.
Fifty feet in front of him a tractor-trailer throws a long gout of spray through the air and it falls over his little white car. As soon as the road curves left he signals and slides over, frantic tires skating across the dotted line without touching the reflective cat's-eyes. The bumper and the license plate jut forward into the air, speckled with black road dirt, and the cloud of spray falls more heavily on his windshield. His face is hardly visible through it, squinting, teeth gritting, as he uses every trick he knows and all the power of the engine to hurl himself forward and forward.
North of here, he cannot see it, is Pittsburgh, wet and shining in the rain. The road sways tenuously around the mountains, over them and under them, on and on to the distant glimmering Delaware, over it and home. It will take him hours more.