“Grab her by the cunt, she’s a dyke, she likes that!” some shitbrained yokel had yelled one night — in Tulsa that had been, if she remembered right.

She and Melissa, the girl she’d been grappling with in the Mudbowl, had looked at each other, nodded to each other, and stood up facing the section of the audience from which the yell had came. They stood there wearing nothing but their sopping bikini briefs, mud dripping from their hair and breasts, and had flipped the bird at the heckler in unison. The audience had broken into spontaneous applause. which became a standing O when first Julianne, then Melissa, turned, bent, dropped trou, and shot the asshole a double moon.

She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn’t get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit — not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet.

The CD she was listening to came to an end, and she was just about to poke the eject button when she saw a car ahead, parked a little way up the ramp leading to the abandoned Mile 81 service stop. Its four-way flashers were on. There was another car in front of it, a muddy old beat-to-shit station wagon. Probably a Ford or a Chevrolet, it was hard to tell which.

Julie didn’t make a decision, because there was no decision to be made. She flipped her blinker, saw there would be no room for her on the ramp, not with the trailer in tow, and got as far over in the breakdown lane as she could without hooking her wheels in the soft ground beyond. The last thing she wanted to do was overturn the horse for which she had just paid eighteen hundred dollars.

This was probably nothing, but it didn’t hurt to check. You could never tell when some woman had all at once decided to have herself a baby on the interstate, or when some guy who stopped to help got excited and fainted. Julie put on her own four-ways, but they wouldn’t show much, not with the hoss-trailer in the way.