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driver’s side of the truck, sees no one, and moves to the passenger’s side. Two men stand toward the front of the vehicle, their backs to the highway, facing the woods. Lambent moonlight spangles an arc of urine.
    He doesn’t want to endanger these people. If he stays here, they might be dead even before they empty their bladders: a longer rest stop than they had planned. Yet he’ll never elude his pursuers if he remains on foot.
    The tailgate is hinged at the bottom. Two latch bolts fix it at the top.
    He quietly slips the bolt on the right, holds the gate with one hand as he moves to the left, slips that bolt, too, and lowers the barrier, which is well oiled and rattle-free. He could have stepped onto the bumper and swung over the gate, but his four-legged friend wouldn’t have been able to climb after him.
    Understanding its new master’s intent, the dog springs into the cargo bed of the truck, landing so lightly among its contents that even the low rhythmic wheeze of the idling engine provides sufficient screening sound.
    The boy follows his spry companion into this tented blackness. Pulling the tailgate up from the inside is an awkward job, but with determination, he succeeds. He slides one bolt into its hasp, then engages the other, as outside the two men break into laughter.
    Behind the truck, the highway remains deserted. The parallel median lines, yellow in daylight, appear white under the influence of the frost-pale moon, and the boy can’t help but think of them as twin fuses along which terror will come, hissing and smoking, to a sudden detonation.
    Hurry,
he urges the men, as if by willpower alone he can move them.
Hurry.
    Groping blindly, he discovers that the truck is loaded in part with a great many blankets, some rolled and strapped singly, others bundled in bales and tied with sisal twine. His right hand finds smooth leather, the distinctive curve of a cantle, the slope of a seat, pommel, fork, and horn: a saddle.
    The driver and his partner return to the cab of the truck. One door slams, then the other.
    More saddles are braced among the blankets, some as smooth as the first, but others enhanced with ornate hand-tooled designs that, to the boy’s questioning fingertips, speak of parades, horse shows, and rodeos. Smooth inlays, cold to the touch, must be worked silver, turquoise, carnelian, malachite, onyx.
    The driver pops the hand brake. As the vehicle angles off the shoulder and onto the pavement, the tires cast loose stones that rattle like dice into the darkness.
    The truck rolls southwest into the night, with the twin fuses on the blacktop raveling longer in its wake, and utility poles, carrying electric and telephone wires, seem to march like soldiers toward a battleground beyond the horizon.
    Among mounds of blankets and saddlery, swathed in the cozy odors of felt and sheepskin and fine leather and saddle soap—and not least of all in the curiously comforting, secondhand scent of horses—the motherless boy and the ragtag dog huddle together. They are bonded by grievous loss and by a sharp instinct for survival, traveling into an unknown land, toward an unknowable future.

Chapter 5
    WEDNESDAY, after a fruitless day of job-seeking, Micky Bellsong returned to the trailer park, where much of the meager landscaping drooped wearily under the scorching sun and the rest appeared to be withered beyond recovery. The raging tornadoes that routinely sought vulnerable trailer parks across the plains states were unknown here in southern California, but summer heat made these blighted streets miserable enough until the next earthquake could do a tornado’s work.
    Aunt Geneva’s aged house trailer looked like a giant oven built for the roasting of whole cows, in multiples. Perhaps a malevolent sun god lived in the metal walls, for the air immediately around the place shimmered as if with the spirits of attending demons.
    Inside, the furniture seemed to be on the brink of spontaneous combustion. The