I stretched, and the effort reminded me that my ribs were probably broken, that my legs and feet were tender, that my stomach was empty. I stripped off my wet shirt and sucked the moisture out of the material. Afterward, I bent to grab tufts of grass, squeezing the dew off of them and licking the water off of my hands. It took about ten minutes to quench my thirst. When I was ready, I used the sun and my watch to realign myself and started walking east. My shoes and the cuffs of my jeans became even more soaked as I hiked through the wet grass, making travel more difficult than before. There wasn’t a single tree—not one. Nor could I discern any visible roads, fences, or power lines. Yet my spirits remained high.

You wake up, live through the day, go to sleep; then you do it all over again. There’s a kind of victory in that, I told myself.

I had an exquisite view of the eastern half of the sky, clear and perfect, stretching to the horizon with nothing, nothing at all, to interrupt it. The perpetual wind blowing from the west and north pushed my back, urging me along, even as it turned the landscape into a waving sea of grass and drove cumulus and cirrus clouds across the sky, the shadows of the clouds sliding along beneath them. There was a dragonfly and, later, a squadron of Monarch butterflies. I also saw plenty of animals that had eluded me the day before—badgers, gophers, prairie dogs, more jackrabbits.

“Don’t mind me,” I told them. “I’m just passing through.”

No one could possibly mistake it for Eden, yet the Great Plains had a kind of austere beauty, at least in the morning. I began to like it, although I did so against my better judgment. For the first time, I could appreciate why immigrants might travel across continents and oceans to get there. It was a country with both a glorious and appalling past. It was here that intrepid pioneers, lured by a Homestead Act that promised free land to anyone who would live on it and improve it, withstood loneliness, drought, blizzards, dust storms, and unyielding soil to help forge a nation. It was also here that men, who measured civilization by the color of their skin and advanced weaponry, pushed Native Americans off their ancestral homes and herded them onto reservations. It was a land of outlaws and legendary lawmen, of boomtowns and busts, of builders and destroyers and dreamers. It was also a land with a precarious present and dubious future.

I had no idea what would happen to the Great Plains.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t care.

All I wanted to do was get off them.

That was becoming increasingly unlikely.

It was against my own intellectual inclination to linger in the past—the dark land, a poet once called it. Yet, without a clear destination, I was becoming more pessimistic with every thirsty step. I found myself thinking less about what was in front of me and more about what was behind. Normally my memories were happy ones. Oh, the stories I could tell. Now they were filled with grieving—the death of my father and before that the death of my mother, who had become little more than an image to me, an impression of beauty and strength that could very well be more a manifestation of my imagination than actual memory. Regrets, too, things I had done that I wish I hadn’t, things I had said that I wish I could take back, which were actually fewer in number than those things that I had left undone and unsaid that now made me sad.

No, no, no. Stop it. Get out of your head.

Easier said than done. I became obsessed with the notion that if I died out there, no one would ever know what had happened to me. Without my wallet, no one would even know who I was, assuming someone stumbled upon my body, which seemed unlikely.

Stop it. Just stop it.

I’ve been here before, I told myself. Just the other day, Miller’s minions locked me in that damn trunk. Things looked bleak then, too. Remember? What did I do about it? I got tough, that’s what I did. There was a nun, my sixth-grade homeroom teacher back at St. Mark’s Elementary School, Sister John Evangela. Do you know what she used to tell us? “You can live for forty days without food, four days without water, and four minutes without oxygen, but you can’t live four seconds without hope.” Well, guess what? I had hope, and plenty of it.

“Hear that, bitch?” I spun in a circle, making sure the Great Plains knew I was talking to her. “You ain’t putting me down. A little heat, a little wind, a couple of miles of empty country? C’mon, is that all you got? It didn’t stop the pioneers, did it? It didn’t stop them, and they had ornery Indians to deal with, too. It isn’t going to stop me, either. Get used to the idea. Great American Desert, my ass.”

That’s telling her.

Despite my defiance, dehydration and hunger were taking their toll. I was no longer sweating; I wiped my brow with my thumb, and my thumb came away dry. My pace had dropped off dramatically; if I was making two miles an hour now, I was lucky. It was becoming harder to walk in a straight line. It was becoming harder to walk, period. Just breathing the furnacelike air in and out had become a burden. Hell, I decided, was a place where you found yourself under a relentless, unmoving sun in a land that did not change, where the wind never stopped blowing.

I stumbled and fell, not for the first time. I rolled onto my back and looked up at the sky. A bird with a long, curved bill circled above me.