The Ford's tires hummed on the bridge seams. Below them the river was brown and fast and full of the season's last cornstalks. Walt kept his hands at ten and two.
"Then I guess I ate something else," he said.
Josie considered this and pressed PLAY. A muppet voice said *Today's letter is* — and she pressed STOP.
They had left the farm outside Atlantic, Iowa, at a quarter to six that morning, while the yard light was still on. The yard light belonged to the bank now, along with the house, the machine shed, the Farmall, the John Deere combine with the cracked header, the hog barn, and two hundred and forty acres of black ground that Walt's grandfather had broken with a team of Belgians in 1889. The auction had been the second Saturday in October. Walt had stood by the corncrib in his good coat while a man with a microphone sold his life in lots, and the neighbors who bid had not looked at him, out of courtesy, and the neighbors who had not bid had stood near him, out of a different kind of courtesy, and nobody had said much of anything. Somebody had put up a sign on a fencepost that said *FARM AID — SEPT 22 — CHAMPAIGN ILL — WILLIE KNOWS*, and it was still there when Walt drove off that morning, flapping in the dark.
What was left fit in the back of a 1976 Ford LTD Country Squire with fake wood paneling down the sides and a crack in the windshield shaped like the Platte River. Two suitcases. A box of Marian's dishes wrapped in the *Des Moines Register*. A box of Josie's toys and books. Walt's rifle in its case. A coffee can of tools. An envelope in the glove compartment containing a map that his son Jimmy had marked up in red ink and mailed from Rock Springs, Wyoming, with a letter that said, *Pop, the trailer's not much but it's got two bedrooms and the heat works. Company's hiring through spring. I'll have something lined up for you. Bring Jo. Take 80 the whole way, it's simplest. I put some stops on there. Love, J.*
And in Walt's wallet, folded into quarters behind his driver's license, forty-one dollars. That was what remained after the bank, the feed store, the implement dealer, the funeral home's last bill from Marian, and a property tax notice that had arrived, with a terrible sense of humor, the week after the auction.
Forty-one dollars, nine hundred miles, a car that drank a gallon every fourteen miles on a good day, and gas at a dollar nineteen. Walt had done the arithmetic in the dark at the kitchen table the night before, on the back of a seed-corn calendar, and then he had done it again, and it came out the same both times. It came out to a motel one night if they were careful, and gas, and food for one.
He had decided which one without much thought. It was not a thing that needed thinking.
* * *
Across the river the land opened and flattened. Nebraska, Walt had always thought, was what Iowa would look like if somebody took the hills out and ironed it. They passed Omaha on the interstate, the stockyards and the Mutual of Omaha tower and the gray grain elevators like giant's teeth, and Walt did not look to the north, where somewhere among those streets was a brick building with a cupola that he had not let himself think about in a long time. He looked straight ahead.
"Grandpa."
"Mm."
"How many more miles to Daddy's?"
"About eight hundred."
"How many is that in hours?"
"Depends how fast I go."