It was Sunday. Morning. Dice checked his watch. "He's expecting us at noon. Christ, would you turn that fucking thing off? I knew we should have taken my car." Spider wanted to smoke. but not in front of Dice. He pressed the pedal, his right leg hard. The needle edged eighty. The shape his tires were in anything over seventy was asking for it. The sinews in the backs of his hands stood out, a blue vein throbbed below the middle knuckle of his right hand. He pressed another button on the radio, spanish music. "Jesus Fuck," Dice said. Spider coughed.

A blue REST AREA sign swung up from around the bend. "I gotta get some gas, Dice." He had forty-seven dollars in his pocket, and a couple quarters. Not counting his emergency twenty, but he never counted that.

He drifted left up the ramp, letting the hill slow the car, and aimed it under the canopy next to the pumps. They got out of the car together. Dice walked to the mens room, tried the door, then turned and went in the door to get the key. Spider went to the booth, gave the attendant a twenty, and pumped his gas. The truck parking area was nearly full, gray boxes ranked diagonally across the parking lot. A yellow and red sign promised more than it could deliver with glossy blue letters. A flatbed truck with giant fiberglass teddy bears painted purple, yellow and pink idled next to the curb, a tattooed forearm as big as a ham hanging from the window. Another rig had a ferris wheel folded like a dead spider, the elliptical cars stacked like oranges behind it. A carnival caravan.

Spider leaned against the quarter panel. The pump clicked next to him. A green Toyota with a hole in the muffler pulled up next to him, away from the pumps. The back seat had two car seats in it, each one with a grimy kid in it. The girl was younger, maybe two, Spider figured, and she was asleep, red creases in her fat little legs, a pink t-shirt with a picture of a cat in white glitter, a long drip of melted chocolate made a cigar for the cat. Her hair was wet with sweat. The boy was blonde, probably four, leaning forward in his seat and looking at Spider, his skinny arms sticking out of a green GI Joe shirt. The woman who was driving was leaning across the empty passenger's seat, cranking down the window. "Please mister."

The gas pump beside him clicked, $20.00 showing. "Please mister," she said again, "I'm sorry to bother you."

Spider looked over his shoulder. Between the advertisements taped to the window he could see Dice talking to the girl behind the register. She stood straight, he arms folded in front of her. Dice was laughing and fiddling with the peanuts, flashing his watch.

"I've never done this before, mister. My boyfriend kicked us out and I'm almost out of gas. I need to get to my mother's house in Pomona. I've been driving around here for almost an hour, mister." From behind her in the back seat, the boys blue eyes looked out at him through black and wet lashes. She was still leaning across the console and looking up at him. One of her teeth was chipped. Her fingernails showed pink crescents between the polish and the cuticle. "What are their names?" Spider asked her. She stared at him, blinked, just looking at him. "Your kids, what are their names?"

"Jason and Crystal."

"What is he, four?"

"What?"

"How old is he?"

"Oh. He just turned three last month."

"He's a big boy. You're a big boy, Jason." Jason looked at him round-eyed.

Spider reached in his pocket, took out the money that was folded there, peeled two dollars off and put them back in his pocket. He leaned over and handed her the other bills. "Get some gas and get them something to drink," he said. "Thank you. Thank you so much, mister." Spider heard Dice's steps on the concrete behind him. "And some fruit. They need something decent to eat." Her eyes went to the mirror as she pushed the money into her pocket. "I will, I will. Thank you so much." She twisted the shift on the steering column and pulled ahead into a parking space at the air pumps. Spider flipped the handle down and replace the nozzle in the pump, ignoring Dice's stare. He climbed back into the drivers seat and started the engine. Dice got in and slammed the door.

"What the hell was that?"

Spider shifted into reverse and angled the car to the ramp that led back to the highway. He pressed the button on the radio again. When the car got up to highway speed Dice said it again, "What the hell was that about?"

Spider told him.

"Jesus, you are an idiot. That was a total scam man, you know that? You just got scammed by a tweaker, do you know that?"

"It was my money, Dice."

"Not any more it isn't."

They drove in silence for a few miles. Spider had a coughing jag. He wished he'd had that cigarette.

"Jesus. A freak. A fucking tweak."

"What difference does that make, Dice?"

"Spider, I'm not so sure I should do this with you. I thought you were more reliable than this. More predictable. That's important."

"I'll do my part."

He kept driving. Up ahead in the lane to the left, a car-carrier jounced on the road, piled with shrink-wrapped luxury cars swaying in time with the dangling chains. Spider checked his mirror and signaled to pass as they went under a bridge. He pressed the accelerator and moved up next to the truck.

Spider reached down into the pocket in the door, fingering the box. The cough came up from his asshole, straight up his spine, twisting and crushing everything in his chest, pushing the air in his lungs out out out. He gripped the wheel. He could feel the blood squeezing out of his head, there was nothing to cough, nothing to spit, but the cough would not stop. His throat was turning inside out. He could feel the wheel between his hands, there were some shooting blue dots in front of the windshield and then nothing.

Whenever Spider had tried to imagine what it was like to be blind he had always thought of it in terms of blackness, in terms of the absence of color, the absence of form or movement, the way it was when he used to hide in the back of the closet under the stairs in the basement. Blindness meant total darkness to him. Darkness like black velvet wrapped a hundred times around your head in a cave two hundred feet below the surface of the earth, like being in a crack in the back of that cave and buried in tar.

This wasn't that kind of darkness. This was just his eyes turned off. He could hear the engine of the truck next to them, he could hear every bearing grinding. He could feel the ridges in the pedal under his foot. The wheel in his hands was shimmying ever so slightly, he was used to that, but conscious of it in an entirely new way. The car was drifting. Turn on the eyes, goddamn it. He was sucking air and hacking, something thick was in his throat, in a place it didn't belong. His ears hurt. He could feel the seat under him, behind him, pushing him forward, he knew he was drifting in his lane but he didn't know how much and he tried to correct for it, but not too much. Spider listened to the engine next to him to try to assess whether he was correcting for the drift. He had read that right handed people overcompensated to the left when blindfolded. Then as quickly as it had come, the cough finished itself. Spider blinked and saw that he was still next to the truck, in the far left of his lane. He blinked his eyes to clear the water from them. How long was that? A couple seconds. Dice was looking at him with a strange expression. "Are you ok, man?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, Dice. No problem." He coughed again and his throat burned. Spider was breathing very carefully.

They were Lexus' on the truck. He watched for the exit.

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