We came over a rise north of Damascus and there was a truck in front of us. It was a live haul truck from Harlow Farms, a flatbed stacked eight cages high with chickens on their way to the plant where my wife was at that moment walking the line with a clipboard, and it was doing thirty-one miles an hour up a six percent grade with its flashers on, and white feathers were coming off it in a long slow cloud like a snowstorm, and there was a double yellow line and a blind curve every two hundred yards for the next four miles.
I said a word I don't say in front of my sons.
"Don't," Haskell said, when I swung out to look. "Not here. There's a curve. You'll kill us, and he'll have to run past it."
I swung back in. We sat behind the chicken truck. The feathers came at the windshield and stuck there.
Haskell's phone buzzed in his lap. He looked at it and didn't say anything.
"What," I said.
"They caught up," he said. "Marlene says they scratched a heat of the sixteen hundred and they're running on time now. Maybe early. They're calling the thirty-two to the clerk."
"What's that mean."
"Means it's six-thirty-eight and he'll be on the line at seven, give or take."
I looked at the dashboard. I did the math. I'm not slow with math; you can't be in my line of work. I knew we weren't going to make the start.
"It's eight laps," Haskell said, like he could hear me thinking it. "Eight minutes and forty-eight seconds. If we get there in the middle we see the end. The end's what matters."
Behind me, Jesse said, "Dad."