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face as the car body shook on its frame. The floor of the car was almost ankle-deep in trash—Styrofoam food containers, paper cups, oily rags, a can of wasp spray, a caulking gun, old newspaper black with footprints. Six weeks ago one of Pete’s army friends, a peyote-soaked Indian from the Pima rez in Arizona, had given him the car for forty dollars, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and a pocketknife. The car tags were valid, the battery good, the engine hitting on at least six of the eight cylinders.
     
    Pete had said he would trade up and buy a good used car for Vikki as soon as he got a job roughnecking on a platform out in the Gulf of Mexico. Except he’d had two other offshore jobs, and in both instances the company oversight personnel decided that a man whose back looked like red alligator hide and who screamed in his sleep probably wasn’t cut out for communal living.
     
    She had turned from the county road onto the state highway five miles back. Then a solitary vehicle had either followed her onto the state highway or come out of nowhere and remained behind her for at least the last six or seven minutes. She was driving only forty-five miles an hour because of the airflow through the windows, and the vehicle tracking behind her should have passed by this time. She accelerated up to fifty-five, then sixty, the low, humped hills dotted with dark brush speeding by. The pair of headlights, one slightly higher than the other, grew small and smaller in the rearview mirror, then disappeared into a glow behind the silhouette of a hill.
     
    She could smell the nocturnal odor of the desert, like the smell of damp flowers crushed inside the pages of an old book. She could see the slick surface of a dried-out riverbed, the mud shining under the moon, the green plant life along the banks bending in the breeze. She had spent the first thirteen years of her life in the red-butte country of southwestern Kansas, but she loved Texas and its music and its people, whether others denigrated it or not, and she loved Pete, whether others looked upon him as a sad and doomed product of war or not, and finally, she loved the life she believed they could have together if only her love could prove greater than all the forces that seemed determined to destroy it.
     
    When she had thoughts such as these, she wondered if she wasn’t grandiose and vain and driven by pride and ego. She wondered if the black wind scented by the desert and speckled with road grit wasn’t a warning about the nature of self-deception. Wasn’t the greatest vanity perhaps the belief that one’s love could change the fate of another, particularly the fate of an innocent and kind Texas boy who had made himself party to a mass murder?
     
    The images those last words conjured up in her mind made her want to weep.
     
    A brilliant glare appeared in the rearview mirror. A vehicle with its high beams on was coming hard up the state two-lane now, swinging wide on a curve across the yellow stripe. The reflected glare was like a white flame in her eyes. A Trans Am passed her, blowing road heat and exhaust and dust through her windows. The Trans Am’s windows were up, but for just an instant she saw the humped shapes of two men in the front seat, the driver wearing a top hat. Neither of them seemed to look at her. In fact, the man in the passenger seat seemed to keep his face deliberately averted. In the distance she could see the truck stop strung with lights, the run-down nightclub next door, a couple of eighteen-wheelers parked by the diesel pumps, their cabs lit. She realized she had stopped breathing when the Trans Am accelerated toward her back bumper. She let out her breath, her heart shrinking back into a cold place at the bottom of her chest.
     
    Then the car with the uneven headlights was behind her again. But this time she was not going to be frightened. She took her foot off the accelerator and watched the speedometer needle drag down to fifty-five, fifty, then forty-five,