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.They must have slept, Cattie later realized, because it surprised her to see the world outside the window when she woke, Randall already up and out there with it, his back to her as he peed.Steam rose in a delicate plume.She wished it was possible to stand behind him and lay her head between his shoulder blades.She wanted to touch him without forcing him to respond.And then he was gone, walking down the road like an advertisement for the army, his fatigues still shipshape, his stride purposeful, the ground sparkling with reflected light on ice.His back said to her he was embarrassed to have revealed his secret grief, his confusion about his friend.The sunlight warmed the car’s interior, and Cattie studied the U.S.Atlas.Seymour, he had said.He guessed they were between ten and twenty miles from it.He believed it’d be no more than eight hours before he would be back, with tire or tires, depending.He’d taken two hundred of her remaining four-hundred-some dollars for the purpose.He instructed her to lock the doors and to be glad that Bitch would bark her head off if anyone approached.“I’m sorry,” he said gruffly.“It’s not your fault the tire blew.”By nightfall, she was wondering if his apology had to do with abandoning her.Now she regretted having passed up the two offers of help that had come her way during the long day.The two boys on their ATVs; the farmer in his pickup.From the radio she’d learned it was Friday.From the atlas she’d discovered she was still a long way from Houston.When she studied the car, standing in the ear-aching wind, she saw that it wasn’t one but two tires that were no longer functional, the car’s front end slanted decidedly downward as if disappointed or exhausted, resting on its chin.The day had alternated between sunny and cloudy, and her mood had shifted as dramatically as the clouds above.Optimism, despair.A funny story for Ito, later, or the beginning of a terrible nightmare, as yet to unfold.She’d walked a few hundred yards in both directions on the road, testing her cell phone reception.The boys on the ATVs had smirked in a very familiar, debilitating way, and that had sent her back to the locked car.“Sic ’em,” she practiced on Bitch, whom she discovered she could goad into growling.The car was redolent of dog.In the dark she grew angry.What sort of fools made a road that only two or three or four or five people drove on in a twenty-four-hour period? How goddamn useful was a road like that? Was it even officially a road if nobody fucking drove on it? Where was asshole Randall? Had he gotten lost? Or had he just decided to hell with her, and taken off with her money?No, she realized, all of a sudden, interrupting her own inner rant.He wouldn’t leave the dogs.He might have left Cattie in this mess, Cattie and the embarrassed confession he’d made to her, but he wouldn’t have intentionally abandoned Bitch and the puppies.It felt comforting, to Cattie, to know something so surely.With the passenger-side door open, she oversaw yet another series of peeing with the slight animals, slighter still in the enormous plain and its relentless weather, one at a time in the hard ruts of the frozen roadway shoulder, their hindquarters shivering, their slitty little eyes squeezing out tiny beads of tears.The same farmer drove up in the same truck the next morning and blew his horn.This time he had a woman in the front seat beside him.“I called the highway patrol,” he told Cattie when she stepped out of the car.“They’re backed up with the jackknifed big rigs on the interstate, so I brought my wife.”He was lifting tires from the bed of his truck.The woman sat inside the truck, not looking at Cattie.It seemed it might have been better for the farmer to have come alone.“She’s shy,” he explained, dropping the first tire onto the ground beside Ito’s car.It spun for a long while before settling flat.“You go on and get in the cab.I’ll be done in a jiff.”“I can help,” Cattie said.He looked her over, then toward his truck.“She doesn’t bite.That’s just her natural expression.”This turned out to be true.The wife scowled.She moved her jaw as if shifting something from one side of her mouth to the other, an object her molars worked at.She reminded Cattie of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, barrelish and monosyllabic.Her hairline seemed very low.“My boyfriend walked to Seymour,” Cattie told the woman.“Yeah,” said the woman, as if somebody had already fed her this ridiculous line.“He’s in the army,” Cattie went on, “just back from Iraq.” Once more the molars went round, grinding, the woman staring out at her husband, whose arm was seesawing away at a jack, lifting Ito’s car.It was a relief when he finished, bringing with him the frozen outer air, and the sound of recognizable words.“You drive this, Mama,” he said.To Cattie, he said, “I’ll make sure your alignment isn’t catty-wampus.”“There’s dogs in the back,” Cattie told him, wishing she could ride with him instead.“Sometimes the puppies crawl under the pedals.” Catty-wampus indeed, she thought.Wampus might be her middle name.They rode not far on the empty blacktop, turning in at the mailbox that said “Kinderknechts” on it.A trailer sat all alone in the middle of a large flat piece of fenced land.What did the fence hold in? Or out? There were tires on the trailer’s roof, which may have been where the ones on the car came from, and a large American flag whipping bravely in the cold wind over the front door
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