The driver hits the brakes, swerves through the oncoming lane and straight into the opposite shoulder. The pickup hits the earthen bunker lining the road and lurches up in a belch of dirt. The ditch doesn’t stop the car completely, but slows it down a good deal. The driver has to swerve again to avoid the works’ chain-link perimeter fence.

The pickup idles there for a while, its bumper just feet from a metal post in the fence. A little further down the road, backed three-quarters across the two-lane highway, the driver spies the behemoth flatbed that almost ended his life. It is packed with more steel than it looks like its eight-foot high wheels can bear. The metal of the pipes doesn’t have the finished sheen to which most are accustomed, but a gritty, burnt tarnish like the underside of a frying pan.

The driver can only hear the roar of a diesel engine, but he imagines the tires’ groan against the tread-marked asphalt. They roll back slowly, beneath blinking warning lights. He has to smile, “Guess them warin lights wern’ bright enough.”

The driver brings his forehead down to the steering wheel, unable to decide if he has just gotten lucky or been robbed of fate. Either way, he laughs and it feels good. The breathless laughter causes him to take in great gulps of the sulfur-infused air. It burns his insides, cuts his lungs, and brings to mind a saying he’s told himself countless times but whose origins he probably never knew: “There’s na such thing as an acc’dent.”

It’s one of those sayings that one goes through life reciting as a reflex, especially in those situations where words don’t seem to otherwise come so easily. Only now does the driver reflect on his motto, usually reserved for commentary on the inexplicable. He knows he should be relieved, now that his journey can continue. It dawns on him, however, like a revelation of the irrelevant: this journey –taken for revenge, for her, for them- can only have one ending. Less ambitious still: all the driver can hope for is an end.

With this thought, of a very grave comfort, the driver forces the gear shaft into drive. The pickup squeezes by the behemoth truck, in the little space left for it between the overhanging pipes –draped with a bright red warning flag, some good!- and the fence. He is escorted into town by a long blast of horn that shakes the windshield and his bowels: same as the one that had caught him off guard and off the road.