Three Miles Past Read Online Free

already been seeing the signs for the truck stop, could feel a flat coming on.
    He didn’t even have to get the jack out this time. Just opened the tailgate, positioned Lobo on the road, then closed the tailgate, pulled away. At first, years ago, he’d always had to wait, to see the trucks come, watch them flatten all the bones at once, human and canine, but now, now he knew it happened whether he was there or not. The only other choice would be someone stopping to autopsy this dog that had already been hit. Or to move it out of the way. But only the state cops did that, and this was a county road, or parish, whatever things were in Louisiana.
    The next dog he left on an exit ramp, in the intersection, where everybody was supposed to yield.
    The Golden Retriever with the red handkerchief he simply stood up with a dry branch in a low spot on the service road, eighteen miles down from Lobo. Stood him up, circled back, then ran him down, leaning into his horn at the last minute, closing his eyes to the thumping from underneath, the crunching— Marissa , that had been it—then downshifting for the hill ahead, for Beaumont.

 
     
     
     
    2.
     
    Four months later—Houston—William tried for the third time to balance his empty beer can on the four-wheel-drive shifter of the Chevy he had now. For a moment, maybe, it held, staying there for him, but then fell into the passenger side floorboard with the rest.
    He was sitting in the first visitor row of the downtown hospital.
    The Chevy was because that state cop had caressed the Ford with his flashlight. William had tried to forget it, tried not to feel the heat the flashlight had pulled across the skin of his truck, the sharp-edged shadows the trim and fender flares had cast, but it was too much. Each time since then that he’d walked up on the truck from that angle—after work (stacking transmissions), after the bar, after buying all the newspapers he was in—it had been the same: that night, the bear. And because it was like that for him, it had to be for the cop, too. So the Ford had to go.
    William had sold it to one of the mechanics at his work, Al, who never looked anybody in the eye but had told William once that he’d started out at the shop scraping gaskets too. That if William just stuck around long enough, a sentence he finished by studying the insulation chicken-wired to the metal walls.
    William had shrugged, looked out at the traffic, Al peeling up a line of the seal that had been under the camper shell. Then, William had been saving it, the shell, for his next Ford, but that was what he’d sold the first Ford for, right?
    Now it was in his efficiency apartment, the camper, leaned up over the window.
    He didn’t know what to do with it.
    The Chevy was one the garage across the street had applied for the title for, in lieu of payment for services. The title had come back salvage; the manager let William have it for eight hundred. Alone in the parking lot after hours, William sifted through the cab, the gum wrappers, beer caps, and dimes that had settled behind the seat. The stack of magazines by the seat adjustment: Shaved , Bare , Lassie .
    William dropped them into the asphalt, backing away, shaking his head no, he wasn’t like that anymore.
    But then the magazines started opening by themselves, in the wind.
    After three weeks, William made himself throw them away in fourteen separate dumpsters. It was too late, though; his beard was thick again, full. He replaced the magazines under the seat with clippings of himself: a missing girl in Pensacola, another just outside Hattiesburg. Sixteen over the last nine and a half years, the first two still buried in plastic dropcloths, soaked first in ammonia, then pesticide, then gear oil. So none of the gas of decay would work its way up through the soil.
    He’d put them side by side, east and west, face-up.
    The first time he’d gone back to see them, grass was growing everywhere but the two rectangles where