Martirio twinkles like a nest of fireflies from the land above Keeter's. You can see the new sign at the Seldome Motel, and one corner of Bar-B-Chew Barn is visible, alongside the radio mast. If you squint, you can see the working spine of town, a centipede's legs of pumpjacks lit up along Gurie Street - fuck, fuck, fuck. I trace the spine as far as I can, down to Liberty Drive, at least. My town is beautiful from up here. It's as if a star shines for every creature in the constellation of Martirio, and a few more shine besides. There's just one tiny black spot at the northern edge of town, where no star shines at all. That'll be home.

Waves are coming. My survival instinct wore off when I left the Johnson road. Now, stamping Lally's video into the fucken ground, I can taste the salt of waves. They come with pictures of Mom in her darkened kitchen, scraping up any ole crumb of hope, to parlay into pie. But all she scrapes is bullshit. It slays me. She'll be muttering, 'Well at least he has a job, and we still have his birthday to look forward to.' But I'm halfway to the escarpment, on my way to goddam Mexico. Probably forever.

It's a little before ten. I can reach the highway in a couple of hours, then maybe hitch a ride, or catch a bus or something, down to San Antone. I take a last look at Martirio sparkling across the flats, my universe for all these long years. Then I set off toward the hills, all crusty and alone. My coping mechanisms open up to some cream pie. Remember that ole movie, with the beach-house? Plenty of folks must do that, for real. Nothing says you have to be a particular kind of person to do that. I imagine Mom coming down, after things blow over. I buy her some souvenirs. Maybe I send a maid back with her; she can jam that up. Leona's fat ass. A learning: deep shit sweetens your plans like crazy.

It's midnight when the first headlights flicker through the branches by the highway. To be honest, I don't even know which way is south. My ole man thought Scouts was for sissies, so I don't even know which fucken way is south in life. Instead of trying to figure it out, I call some Glen Campbell to mind, to help me lope along, crusty and lonesome, older than my years. 'Wichita Lineman' is the song I call up, not 'Galveston'. I would've conjured Shania Twain or something a little more sassy, but that might boost me up too much. What happens with sassy music is you get floated away from yourself, then snap back to reality too hard. I hate that. The only antidote is to just stay depressed.

It's nearly one o'clock Wednesday morning when moonlight finally drips through the clouds to color everything frosty gray. Texas is so fucken beautiful. If you ain't here already, you should come. Feel free to skip Martirio, that's all. Herds of trucks and cars pass on the highway, but none of them look like they'd stop. I mean, I know they won't stop if I don't get up and stop them, don't get me wrong. I just don't like my chances. A better idea is to wait for a bus, which has an established tradition of stopping. I settle in the crook of a bend in the highway, pull my jacket from the pack, and fashion a backrest against a bush. I sit and wait, and turn some learnings over in my head.

Where TV lets you down, I'm discovering, is by not convincing you how things really work in the world. Like, do buses stop anywhere along the road, to pick up any kind of asshole, or do you have to be at a regular bus stop? You see plenty of movies where some crusty dude stops a bus in the middle of the desert or something. But maybe that only applies in the middle of the desert. Or maybe only the drivers who saw those movies will stop. This all scuttles through my head, and starts to warp into other kinds of movies, like the one with the black devil-car that has a vendetta against this guy. I feel my hair wisp in the breeze, the grasses and bushes wisp around me. Just nature and me, wisping, while the devil-car has this vendetta.

A chill wades through my skin to wake me. It's after five in the morning. I hear the roar of a bus on the highway, and hoist my pack up to the roadside. A motorcoach hammers around the bend, glowing cool and cozy inside. I flap my arms, and make like I just arrived from the scene of an urgent reason to travel. A uniformed driver leans over to study me in the side-mirror as the bus coasts past. Then, 'Pschhsss,' he pulls over and stops, two hundred yards down the highway. I fly towards those tail-lights.

The door puffs open. 'You in trouble?' asks the driver.

'I have to get to San Antonio.'

'Martirio's only a few miles away, you should pick up the next service there - I can't just stop on a whim, y'know.'

'Yeah, but - I'm stuck out here, and …'

'You're stuck out here?' he looks around. 'We have like predetermined stops, you can't just hail the service any old where.' I shoot him these puppy-dog eyes, and he eventually says, 'I'd have to charge you the whole fare, like from Austin - thirteen-fifty.'

I climb aboard without even checking where the cowgirl's sitting, or even if there is a cowgirl. I just gulp down the aura of crumpled bedclothes, of travelers messy with chippings of sleep, and shuffle to an empty row at the back. My adrenal gland coughs as we move away, half expecting Lally to appear, or Ella's mom, or some kind of shit. I don't even want to think what, because Fate always pays attention to what you think, then slams it up your fucken ass.

'Drrrrrr,' the motorcoach hits the road, and after nameless miles I hang suspended on the knife-edge of a doze, my brain like crystal grits. Then we pass a field of manure or something, the type of smeary tang your family pretends not to notice when you're in the car with them, and it suddenly floods my senses with Taylor Figueroa. Don't ask me why. I sense her in a field by the highway. She's down on all fours behind a bush, naked except for blue synthetic panties that strain hard into her thigh-vee, and glow dirty ripe. I'm there too. We're safe and comfortable, with time on our hands. I surf her upholstery with my nose, map her sticky heem along glimmering edges to the panty-leg, where the tang sharpens like slime-acid chocolate, stings, bounces me back from her poon. In my dream I bounce back too far. Then I see we're in a field of ass-fruit, and suddenly I don't know if it's Taylor's scent, or just the field I can smell. I scramble back to her cleft, but the edges have vanished. The forbidden odor dissolves into the body-heat and aftershave of the bus. I wake up snorting air like crazy. She's gone. Empty distance rolls past the window.

I sit up straight in the seat, hoping to fool myself into normality. But the waves start tumbling in, tidal waves of horror on the back of this beautiful dream. Now bright images of Jesus form around me. He doesn't look at me. He looks away, and takes the barrel into his mouth, tastes its heat. Around him, milky eyes dot the school yard like flowers, jerky eyes getting slower, fading dead away. Boom. Fractured air oozes coughs and gurgles, the hiss of desperate clotting, of vital last messages nobody hears. Mr Nuckles the teacher is here too, his face trimmed with bubbles of young blood. The memories are back. I shoot disorderly tears for the fallen, for Max Lechuga, Lori Donner, and everybody, and I know I'm fucked for the rest of the journey, maybe for the rest of my life, fucked and nailed through the eye of my dick to the biggest cross. How could they think I did this? I hung out with the underdog, moved out of the pack, that's how, and now I fill his place, now anything original I ever said or did has turned a sinister shade. I understand him for the first time.

'You all right?' asks an ole lady, approaching down the aisle. I must be gasping like a fish or something. She bri............