And now, as our bodies thickened with muscle, as we stopped shaving and grew patchy beards, we saw our fathers even in the mirror. We began to look like them.

Somehow Kevin ducked down and pushed his way through their black swirling color and ran for the front door and threw it open and not thirty seconds later most of the bats had disappeared into the twilight gloom.

I thumped him on the back and realized that we had changed places, if only for a moment. It was a strange place to be, just as it was very strange to look back upon yesterday—it lay so distant, so irrevocable. “I’ll be glad when we get out of this canyon,” I said.

On her cheeks tears would have left behind a salty rime. On her lips, the dried blood of wine. One time her vibrator was lying on the coffee table, another time a butcher knife. He never knew what to say in these situations. Usually

Forest, I surprised myself by saying yes. I wasn’t the only one surprised. “You’re sure?” he said. “Sure

His hand was out before him, his fingers gripping an imaginary bottle. “Here’s your maple syrup,” he said. When Dave said, “And what is that for?” Gordon said, “To eat my ass with.” Right then a skateboarder-type with green hair

And then she began bleeding. A rope of red trailed down her leg. And Kevin, now in a panic, wrapped her in a bathrobe and with shampoo still in her hair drove her to St. Charles where she delivered, with a rush of blood, the baby that looked like a baby, a little girl, only too small and too red, the size of his hand.

The caboose of the nightmare parade is a semi dragging a flatbed. On the flatbed are couches and chairs, arranged helter-skelter, with many men and women splayed out on them. Beer cans roll around their feet. Mexican trumpets blasting from a boom box overwhelm the noise of the diesel engine.

When he started back the way we came, I followed him—and both of us were glad when three hours later we drove from the Ochocos and into the flatter country where among the sagebrush and dry gullies and cattle and knotted systems of fence-line we were no longer surrounded by forest.