He had driven a couple miles and passed two signs for the interstate, lit and smoked one cigarette, been parked and stayed in the car for some time until somebody knocked on his window to make sure he wasn't seeking suicide, and had stood in line at the gas station pointing at a pack of Columbus Cigarettes--the clerk asking if there was anything else when he finally said out loud for all there to bear witness, what he'd been telling himself for four years he'd never do, could never do. A thought buried way down in his heart, the valves of which he'd never opened, a heart bound by sin and recklessness and divorced totally from commitment and sacrifice and decency that he finally decided to seek. He'd spoken the line ghostly, "I'm leaving my wife."

The clerk stuttered. A lady standing behind him wearing a Jeff Gordon shirt and holding a six-pack of Old Chattanooga beer slid down her star-shaped sunglasses to the tip of her nose and glanced upon him.

A Merle Haggard song had just started and was coming through the speakers.

"I'm sorry to hear that," the clerk finally said. And he rang up the cigarettes. "It'll be six dollars and seventy-seven cents."

The bell rang when he left and the doors parted like a prison cell opening. The chorus of Merle Haggard flew through the speakers as it were the chorus from angels.

When he got back in the truck he fiddled on the knob until he found the right station. Singing along and packing the new case of cigarettes against his palm. Rolling down the driver-side window--turning his wrist and his shoulder to do so.

He turned onto the highway and hammered down upon the pedal with the sole of his foot.

Singing with the conviction of having just sprouted wings. "I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole. No one could steer me right but momma tried."

He'd married her right out of high school and they’d married because she was with child. She lost the soul that had made home of her womb but his own mother didn't believe that to be true. And his mother would get drunk, then wouldn't mind telling him.

"She is a witch. I'm telling you right now. She ain't no good. She's a liar. You'll give and give and give but she ain't satisfied lest she gets your soul. She will work your heart til it is shattered."

"What's that they say," his father would hiss. "Takes a bitch to see a witch," laughing hog-like without any joining company.

He watched them with the terror of an acid trip turned wrong, as though he'd seen down a hallway of mirrors, himself, and the ultimate fate of himself.

"I can't breathe," he whispered.

When asked at the wedding if he'd take her lawfully--in sickness and in health, there were the buzzing of flies coming for his blood and he smacked one on his neck and said finally, "Well. I reckon I do anyway."

Not long after that she did bear forth a child into the world but it was not his. This was no mystery--plain as day. It hurt him, but he loved the child anyway, through pain and suffering.

This he was thinking about at near one hundred miles an hour.

He always figured he was doing what was good, what was decent. He decided he’d never done anybody any good staying miserable.

There was a sensation rattling and crawling through his body and snaking up his spine and it rang from his hands shaking and sweating on the steering wheel.

He'd left his wife and abandoned a child too. His heart had become begotten of a strange baptism and full of total boundlessness.

The beat of the highway straddled through his feet and the sun thrummed against the tin of his heart. He listened to the soft moan of his engine.

He knew he was coming to someplace he'd not known, ever considered seeing. Ever considered had existed. It scared him, made him sweat. Between his ears hummed tribal dances celebrating the west: war, the buffalo, the maps uncharted and the red heat of the sun seeping into and reflecting against his soul. His eyes peered down the spotted white lines. The dark gravel rumbling below. He exhaled and the cigarette smoke steamed out his nostrils, his mouth. Rising there from his tongue like heat off a river.

The valley itself echoed the roar of his motor, the shadow of his soul skating top the concrete, his soul searching, screaming for whatever it was which lay ahead.

She waited for him. "He's been gone a long time, ain't he?" The child asked.

"He just went for a pack of smokes. He'll come back." The sun painted red dripped down across the horizon. "He always come back."

They waited together while the stars danced top the highway.