It was a quiet and peaceful morning. Over in the west some heat lightning was skipping about the dark horizon. There was that freshness in the air that you never get except on a summer morning before the sun gets up and the beat closes down on you. To my right, over in the village, the street lights were still burning, hanging still and bright, unstirred by any breeze. It was too nice a morning, I thought, for anything to happen.

There were no cars on the road. There were just the two of us, the trucker and myself, and his truck in the ditch, squashing down my car. He came down the road toward me.

He came up to me and stopped, peering at me, his arms hanging at his side. "What the hell is going on?" he asked. "What did we run into?"

"I don't know," I said.

"I'm sorry about your car," he told me. "I'll report it to the company.

They'll take care of it." He stood, not moving, acting as if he might never move again. "Just like running into nothing," he declared. "There's nothing there." Then slow anger flared in him.

"By God," he said, "I'm going to find out…" He turned abruptly and went stalking up the highway, heading toward whatever we had hit. I followed along behind him.

He was grunting like an angry hog.

He went straight up the middle of the road and he hit the barrier, but by this time he was roaring mad and he wasn't going to let it stop him, so he kept ploughing into it and he got a good deal farther than I had expected that he would. But finally it stopped him and he stood there for a moment, with his body braced ridiculously against a nothingness, leaning into it, and with his legs driving like well-oiled pistons in an attempt to drive himself ahead. In the stillness of the morning I could hear his shoes chuffing on the pavement.

Then the barrier let him have it. It snapped him back. It was as if a sudden wind had struck him and was blowing him down the road, tumbling as he rolled. He finally ended up jammed half underneath the front end of the cab.