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could stick my finger in Death’s eye. That was my big dream, still is; but Eli tells me of the Keepers of the Skulls, and I listen to him. I listen. At sixty miles an hour we roll westward. The death of Oliver Marshall could happen eight seconds from now—whiz, crash, smash!—and it could happen ninety years from now and perhaps it will never happen.
Perhaps it will never happen.
    Consider Kansas, LuAnn. You only know Georgia, but for a moment consider Kansas. Miles of corn, and the dusty wind whipping off the plains. Growing up in a town with 953 inhabitants. Give us this day our daily death, O Lord. The wind, the dust, the highway, the thin sharp faces. You want to see a movie? You drive half a day to Emporia. You want to buy a book? I guess you go to Topeka for that. Chinese food? Pizza? Enchiladas? Don’t be funny. Your school has eight grades and nineteen students. One teacher. He doesn’t know much, he grew up around here, too; too sickly to farm, he got a job teaching. The dust, LuAnn. The waving corn. The long summer afternoons. Sex. Sex isn’t a mystery there, LuAnn, it’s a necessity. Thirteen years old, you go behind the barn, you go to the far side of the creek. It’s the only game there is. We all played it. Christa pulls down her jeans; how strange she looks, she’s got nothing between her legs but yellow curls. Now you show me yours, she says. Here, get on top of me. Is it a thrill, LuAnn? It’s no thrill. You’re desperate, so you do it, and all the girls are pregnant by the time they’re sixteen, and the wheel keeps turning. It’s death, LuAnn, death in life. I couldn’t take it. I had to escape. Not to Wichita, not to Kansas City, but east, to the real world, the world on the TV. Do you know how hard I worked to get out of Kansas? Saving to buy books. Sixty miles twice a day to get to high school and back. The whole Abe Lincoln bit, yes, because I was living the one and irreplaceable life of Oliver Marshall, and I couldn’t afford to waste it raising corn. Fine, a scholarship to an Ivy League school. Fine, straight-A average in the pre-med program. I’m a climber, LuAnn, the devil’s burning my tail and I have to keep going higher. But for what? For what? For thirty or forty or fifty pretty decent years, and then the exit? No. No. I reject that. Death may have been good enough for Beethoven and Jesus and President Eisenhower, but, meaning no offense, I’m different, I can’t just lie down and go. Why is it all so short? Why does it come so soon? Why can’t we drink the universe? Death’s been hovering over me all my life. My father, he died at thirty-six, stomach cancer, he coughed blood one day and said, Hon, I think I’ve been losing a lot of weight lately, and ten days later he looked like a skeleton, and ten days after that he
was
a skeleton. They let him have thirty-six years. What kind of life is that? I was eleven when he died. I had a dog, the dog died, muzzle turning gray, ears going limp, tail hanging, good-bye. I had grandparents once, just like you, four of them, they died, one two three four, the leathery faces, the gravestones in the dust. Why? Why? Why? I want to see so much, LuAnn! Africa and Asia and the South Pole, and Mars, and the planets out by Alpha Centauri! I want to watch the sunrise the day the twenty-first century starts, and the twenty-second century, too. Am I greedy? Yes, I’m greedy. I have it now. I have it all. I’m scheduled to lose it all, just like everyone else, and I refuse to surrender. So I drive west with the morning sun at my back and Timothy snoring next to me and Ned writing poetry back there and Eli brooding about the girl Timothy wouldn’t let him keep, and I think all this to you, LuAnn, these things I couldn’t explain. Oliver Marshall’s Meditation on Death. Soon we’ll be in Arizona. Then will come the disappointment and the disillusionment, and we’ll have some beers and tell ourselves the whole thing was obviously a crock, and