The driver was middle-aged and wore horn-rimmed, thick glasses and had tiny red and blue veins in his jowls. He was dressed in a tweed coat, brown pants, a tie and white shirt, and shined shoes. Except for the intensity and concentration with which he drove the Firebird, he could have been a department store floorwalker or an accountant.

For three nights Johnny saw the two men on their journey westward, their vehicle low-slung, hammering hard across the Great Plains, through mesa country and badlands that were the color of chalk. They ate in truck stops, with neither pleasure nor distaste, ordering whatever was the special for the day, usually snuffing out their cigarettes in their unfinished food. At the Super 8 and the Econo Lodge they slept in beds that crackled with static electricity and smelled of other people’s copulation.

They drank brandy and soda in roadside bars, staring without interest at sports television, picked up two whores in Belfield, North Dakota, blew out a tire in Billings, hit an icy stretch on the Grand Divide, and whacked a swatch out of the guardrail west of Butte. To the men in the dream, one activity was no different in meaning or significance from another.

Then one morning Johnny American Horse woke in the coldness of the sunrise, his mind empty of images, the fir trees and ponderosa on the hillside above the Jocko wet and shining, the whole world as bright and clear as a spoon ringing against the rim of a crystal glass, and he knew he would not dream of the two men again. There was no need to. The horn-rimmed man and the man whose face had melted next to a flame were here, someplace around Missoula, waiting, but he did not know where.

The day after Johnny was released from jail on the weapons charge, he was turning over the thatch in his vegetable garden, the sun warm on his shoulders, when the scene around him seemed to dissolve and break apart, replaced by a collage of neon-lit smoke, green felt, a brass rail, and a man in a tweed jacket hunched over a bowl of chili by a window lighted from the outside.