PULL OVER AND SLEEP, my late ex-wife used to say to me, at night on the long hauls, YOU'RE GOING TO KILL US ALL. I'd squint at the road, stay vigilant, say, I can't; I feel it deep; death is nigh upon us, looming up ahead. She'd say: SOUNDS LIKE SOMEONE NEEDS TO GET BACK ON HIS MEDS. I'd say, Drowsiness, to me, is a side-effect worse than death. In this way, we'd claw through the miles, chew up the time, stay the road. She kept me alert, I appreciated that, and missed it after she took the cats and split. // I recall her now as I drive the long stretch across the desert to make it back home to her funeral. It stinks, driving alone in the car like this; it reeks mephitic and rich, burnt match, spent shell. This is the last time, I swear, I'm ever driving home. // I have not slept since getting the news about my late ex-wife. I can't close my eyes. I can't say her name. I can't even spell it out loud. Her death, I fear—I feel—I know—is all my fault. Let me explain. // This all started on a slick misty October night in 1999; my junior year of high school; I remember it with trepidation and ease. After school, I'd been breaking out a new piece of ground for my father up in the bench hills—a big swath abutting the edge of a reservoir. In my days and nights plowing this field, I encountered no one. Prairie dogs galore, and the scavengers that hunted them. Occasionally, I'd spot a moose making it down for water. One day while exploring I found some cliffs about thirty feet above the reservoir water. I told the gang—my girlfriend, my best friend, and my other best friend—about it, and they decided they had to see it for themselves. I told them I'd pick them up. // Then, I drove a maroon Chevy Silverado, just one bench seat. My girlfriend rode love-gun, my best friend sat bitch, and my other best friend got the window. It was dark out. I drove slow through valley fog until we got up on Bench Road, above the mist and cloud. Then, after a few miles of bad pavement through the empty wheat fields, the road gave way to gravel. That stretch slowed me down to forty-five, but I could do it in my sleep. So I drove it cool, with the windows down and the wet air slicking my elbow. October. Sage-stink, overpowering, chilly. I could tell the gang wanted a thrill, so I gave them one. I gassed it over whoops and through hairpins. They cried out Bench Road was a dirt-coaster. I felt that flutter in my gut too but I knew how to hold it in—I knew what was coming. I anticipated the steep stuff, gassed it, fishtailed. I kept it up until I had to slow down to make the farm-road that ran east for eight miles through sagebrush, across lava and shale, and skirting our section of plowed earth, until it stopped at the reservoir cliffs. Once we were creeping on two tracks, well off the gravel, my best friend said: "That gave me a hoot." My other best friend said, "It tickled my taint." My girlfriend said, I'D DO IT AGAIN, MAYBE, IF I COULD DRIVE. On the farm road, I could only do fifteen, so I bumped it along, bleak dust rolling in the cab through the windows, and took in the gauzy black strip where the headlights no longer reached. What was out there? The darkness enclosed us in a cipher, all around. // My best friend leaned up and squinted into the expanse, on point. He was staring dead ahead. He asked if we believed in the Dogman, part-man, part-dog, a creature that on four legs ran as fast as a vehicle on the night highway and looked like some crazed desert mutt. But it wasn't. You knew it was the Dogman when it'd look over at you, and you'd lock onto its yellow eyes, and then the Dogman'd rise up on its hind legs and sprint along with you at eighty, ninety miles an hour, locking eyes the whole time, waggling its tongue, slinging spit, scowling. Try to run you off the road. If you didn't, the Dogman'd lean back and howl, then veer off and disappear into the sage, full speed. After you saw the Dogman, it was pretty much guaranteed you'd die. All through this story, my girlfriend squeezed her nails into my thigh. I said, Yeah, well, I've been out here all alone for weeks and seen all the beasts out here, and that one doesn't exist. My other best friend was struck mute, a big guy, but a wimp, and he found the state football radio broadcast on the dial. The Cavemen crushed the Diggers on a violent punt return. The announcer gasped. One kid broke his femur, no shit. My girlfriend whispered in my ear: HOW LONG TILL WE GET THERE? I HAVE TO PEE. I told her, Soon, safe, sound. She squeezed my hand. I knew right then I wanted to marry her. I decided it and put it in my mind, and that's exactly what I did—and she eventually became my wife, then my ex-wife, now my late ex-wife. Some kind of drive, this life. What a fucking trip. // The cliffs were more tenuous than I'd anticipated. Through the night and fog, none of us could make out the surface of the water. I knew what was down there, because I'd been here, and I'd seen it in the light. I stripped to my boxers, but my friends wouldn't budge or unbutton a fly. My girlfriend took one look at the setup, said I DON'T FEEL GOOD ABOUT THIS and got back inside my truck. Abandoned, I surged with anger—flared, as I do—and decided then that I'd dive off the cliff head-first, just to prove to the gang that I could be brave when they refused. I was crazed. I took two steps back from the edge and dug in. My best friends hollered for me to hold up; my girlfriend started screaming. I could hear her from inside the Silverado as I launched head-first off the lip: WHY ARE YOU BEING SO DUMB? // I fell through states of matter: —gas —semi-solid-cloud —liquid —plasma. I could not feel up or down, top or bottom, saw nothing. All black, my eyes wide open. I gritted my jaw and stifled my panic. Then I slammed into the water sideways and, on impact, blacked out. // I do not know how long I was unconscious. I came to against the base of the cliff, and could her the gang yelling out for me from the sky above. The impact had ripped my boxers clean off me; on the rocks, I was naked, bruised. I caught my breath, yelled to them that I was alive and fine, and scrambled up the stone wall. At the top, they shoved and hugged me, punched and loved me. I had never been naked in front of a woman before, but I was that night. My girlfriend turned her back as I put on my clothes, then held me as a shivered. My teeth wouldn't stop chattering. I was soaking wet. I got behind the wheel and the gang loaded up and we started to haul back to the valley. My girlfriend put her hand on my knee, no nails, all care. I entered a stage of complete disbelief that I'd survived. I was gratified and elated, on an empty stomach, horny, hot-headed. I razzed my friends for being cowards, my girlfriend for losing faith. I flared—gunned it across the sagebrush twenty, thirty miles an hour. I hit the tops of the whoops and felt my front tires leave the ground. I really had them all bucking, but held the truck in complete check and control. YOU ARE BEING INSANE, yelled my girlfriend. "Dude!" both of my best friends yelled. I howled: Come out, Dogman, I'll break ye neck and skin ye hide! No one laughed. They all were bracing, cussing. I came up over a whoop and—this was where the night turned—there was a man standing in the middle of the road, waiting for us. I'd been checking time on the dash clock—11:39 PM—and snapped to attention to see him in my headlights. // My girlfriend saw him too, screeched: IT'S HALF-MAN HALF-ALIEN! The man had the slouch of a truck-jockey, and wore a Dallas Cowboy pullover jacket, a straw hat. I had one foot over the brake and one foot over the gas—a driving trick I learned from an old pro: coast?—stop?—go? The man reached for his belt buckle, so I gassed it. He didn't even have time to put his hands up. I didn't swerve, hit him doing about thirty-six, felt him go under the bumper and against my feet, slapping and cracking. I got over him, coasted twenty feet up a hill. He was back there, folded up in the dark. I put it in reverse to see if I could use my reverse lights to show me something and just then, out from the sagebrush, pulled another pickup truck. Four square yellow brick brights in my side-view, coming for us. // I dropped it into D and spit rocks. Whipped the truck through the sagebrush and to the gravel and beat it down into the fog of the valley once more. The truck kept up until the pavement—I was doing seventy-five through the fog on Bench Road. No way in hell that demon was catching me with me on my known straight-and-narrow. // We didn't speak in the truck. We couldn't process language, our mouths, all dust and mote. For twenty minutes, I drove us through the fog too fast, and then, out of the corner of my eye, saw a car, parked, lights off, in the barrow pit. I'd missed it by inches. I said, Did you guys see that? My best friend said: "That old dude in the gutter?" And my other best friend said: "That old lady in the pasture?" ALL I SAW WAS BLOOD, my girlfriend said, ALL OVER THE ROAD. // So I whipped it around and went back to the scene and saw it all in my headlamps: a big rusted black sedan, an old man in irrigation boots and a denim jacket and a feeding cap, and an old woman, out yonder, wandering. Gore and guts across the pavement like it'd been swept with a push broom. // I rolled down my window and asked the man what caused the mess. The old man plucked a piece of grass from near his feet, and stuck it in his mouth, said, What'd ye hit, a pack of coyotes? I peeled off without hearing more—another witness was the last thing I needed. Through town, I drove the speed limit, but when I got out on the desert to take my girlfriend home—she lived fifty miles away, in Mudville—I was doing eighty, all the way. She hadn't touched me since the collision. She kept her hands woven together in panicked prayer. I could barely even look at her, I felt so rotten and low, kept my hands at ten and two. // So, shit. I sort of just went word-vomit then, trying to corroborate a story. Tied and twisted everyone with my words. By the end, they admitted they had no idea what had happened, and that was our story. I made the gang covenant to keep the secret. We would never speak of it again. Eventually, I got everyone home safe and sound. // At the house, I checked my truck. I didn't have a headlight out, and I couldn't find any blood or dents or hair. Had the mist and fog wiped them clean off my hood? That made little sense, but it was my best guess. What I did know for certain was that I'd killed a man, and I should be in jail, and I wasn't yet. I deliberated my few possible moves. Inside, I showered, went to bed mumbling, Where would I be without my friends? My family? My best girl? // The next day at sunrise, I returned to the bench to do tractor-work. These details I have never forgotten. At the scene of the collision, I found what I thought I would: beer bottles, tire tracks—and the body of a man. I was right—a Cowboy's jacket. He carried no identification in his wallet, just a few paper bills that looked like board game money and a paper flyer for a C.D.L. course. His poor body was wrenched and purple. I knelt in the dirt and wept for what I had done. Then I loaded him into the bed of my truck and took him to the field, near the tractor. With my shovel, I dug a deep hole in the soft plowed dirt. There, I threw him in, interred him. Then I got in the tractor and lightly plowed over the section two or three times, to cover my tracks, and pay my respects. // The wallet, though, I could not bear to bury. There was a photo in there of what looked like his wife and daughters. At the top of a lava outcropping—an island of rock in a sea of dirt—I found a natural tomb in the stone, protected from water and snow, and deposited the wallet in there. I marked its location in my mind, knew I'd never forget it. Then I let the truck driver flyer blow away in the wind. No one else ever needed to see that. // I worked in the tractor, spent the day feeling thousands of eyes out in the sage. Watching me. Condemning me. Cursing me. I deserved it. I quit that night before it got dark, and in my haste to get the hell back to pavement, left the tractor door open. I was too scared to return and close it. I told my father I was done with the job but not the work. I couldn't go back. He was confused, displeased. That night, a blizzard set in that lasted all winter, and by the time my father got back to the tractor in the spring, the hunters and snowmachiners and weather had broken out all the windows, popped the tires, put some slugs in the motor. We had to junk the tractor. I take the blame for that too. // I never returned to that bench farm above the reservoir. My father sold it the following year, the year 2000, the new millenium. The gang and I all moved on with our lives. My girlfriend and I got married. My best friend worked at the tire store. My other best friend became a county cop. I stayed on the farm. Those were good, steady years.  We lived clean, upright lives, built houses, broke out more dirt, served God and our neighbors, et cetera. My friends had kids and mortgages and riding lawn mowers—my wife and I didn't, but that's another story. We were all established and happy, well beyond what we needed. Ups and downs, whoops and turns, sure, but at the end of the day, none of us lost the road. // But then, a few years ago, the gang got together all around a bonfire in my backyard. Chopping up the glory days. Things had gone so well for all of us, I thought it was time to get our secret out in the air. For one, I could not believe I'd gotten away with it, and that fact gnawed away at me. Sometimes, it stabbed at me too. Often, I would not sleep because I could see the man's face as I saw it over the hood, eyes wide open, yellow—it was all too much. So I told the gang I wanted to break my own pact, get it all out in the open, once and for all. I went first, reported every relevant detail. When I started to describe how I'd found the man and buried him—a part of the story the gang didn't know—I realized no one was listening to me. They were all looking at the stars, poking at the fire, toeing mud off their boots. // Finally, my best friend said, "Dude, you didn't kill anybody. You hit your head on the lake." I said, That's not how I recall it; we're all entitled to our own story; but here's the truth: I have the proof; I stashed the wallet; I still know where it is. My other best friend said, "There is no wallet because there was no body. You got to get over it." I shot up to my feet and started pacing, saying I could show them the wallet if they dared go to the farm with me. My wife tried to talk me out of it. I would not hear her words. Eventually, she acquiesced, walked to my truck, said, LET'S JUST GET THIS OVER WITH. We loaded up and drove to the Bench Road, to the sage-heath. // The land had changed, though there weren't any more humans up there. There were four-hundred new turbines to catch the south wind, and heavy duty power lines that fed the valley. The stars were out, and the scarlet eyes of the turbines blinked in unison every nine seconds, for aeronautical safety. // The farmer who owned the land had developed it, fenced off the dirt road, gated it, posted a No Trespassing sign. That wouldn't stop me. I got out and scaled the gate, telling the gang to follow. We would walk if we had to. I tripped on the loose dirt on the other side. // In the moonlight, from my hands and knees, I could see that all the sagebrush was gone; all of the lava was buried; all of the hills had been developed, planted, plowed. // I understood that the wallet could never be recovered. I no longer had proof. // I stood, cussed at the black sky of the east, kicked dirt clods, jumped up and down on my hat. // My wife and my best friends came over the fence to put me back inside the truck. I fought them, running circles around them, and they didn't catch me, but we all lost our breath because none of us were in good shape. We stood there in a big circle, panting. // Out ahead of us in the field, clear out there, four yellow lights appeared. One by one, we all afixed on the lights with our eyes. The lights grew bigger, accelerated across the whoops of the earth, growing into bricks of light that were coming right for us. My best friend turned to run, and tripped over my other best friend. They tangled in the dirt. One of them screamed. My ex-wife closed her eyes and pinched her nose, as if she was dunking. She hated water, and couldn't swim. // Unlike the rest of the gang, I faced the light-bricks, didn't blink. I wasn't scared, even if they still were. I never had been. I squared. That light trucked through my chest, heart, lungs, and I wanted to puke and scream but couldn't do both, so I did neither, just watched it happen. The light passed through me, accelerated, whipped the wind turbines, disappeared. I loaded the gang into the pickup. Guys, I said, I don't think I can die. My best friend said, "Get out, I'm driving." My other best friend still was catching his breath. My wife said: I AM SO SICK OF THIS SHIT. // I got jaundiced, depressed. I was convinced I should have died by the lights, but didn't. That's all I'd talk about. My wife took me to the hospital. The doctors started me on a battery of drugs, pills, psychotherapy. When I dreamt, I saw the stars of cowboys, headlamps, running lights, the man's face, the embroidery of red thread in his leather wallet. Vivid dreams where I'd be driving, and the accelerator pedal would stick, and I'd keep picking up speed, unable to slow down or stop. // Faster, faster, infinitely, until I hit a wall. // The last time I told my wife about a dream, she said, I LOVE YOU BUT I AM SCARED AND OFFICIALLY MOVING OUT. I could hardly blame her. I was worried about me too. I stayed in the hospital, for my own safety. // Soon after, she became my ex-wife, as I learned through her divorce lawyers. I guess I signed off on it, someway, somehow, though I don't recall seeing the paperwork. // Things got foggy once I was checked myself out. I quit the farm and moved two time-zones away. // Lost track of my friends. // Lost track of my family. // Lost track of my meds. // Time: a dark dirt road that only I drove. // First, my best friend died. That brought me home. He was at work after-hours putting a lift on his Ford Bronco. In the tire shop were a few other rigs; particularly, a big yellow Kenworth semi that was in getting new drums and air bags. The security camera showed it all: my best friend walked behind the semi and then slipped. Went head first, then heels. Cracked his skull on the shop floor, drowned in a puddle of oil and blood. My other best friend, the cop, had the security camera footage and showed it to me. He says he slipped; to me, though, it looked like the truck bumped him. My trust in the world had shifted, slipped a gear. We both spoke at the funeral. My ex-wife sang a hymn. I got back on the road as soon as I could flee the cemetery. // Next time I heard from home, it was the news that my other best friend had been smashed. He was on the highway at dawn, helping an old lady whose radiator had blown. A big rigger hauling hay bales was texting, saw them too late, pulled the wheel hard, jackknifed, rolled the trailer, dumped all the bales. Undetermined if my other best friend had been killed by the trailer or the hay. He, the old lady, and both their cars were decimated. I drove back home for that funeral too. Closed casket. My ex-wife, who never liked my other best friend all that much, did not attend. // I returned again to my new life, alone, and cycled. Where did I go wrong with my life? What foul choices had I made? Had I surrounded myself with all the wrong people? With my best friends gone, with my family far away, who would I tell my stories to? Who would listen? Who would care? // And I also thought: I've cursed the people I love. I've damned them. These deaths are somehow all my fault. // A few days later, I got the call about my late ex-wife. She'd been coming back from visiting her new boyfriend in Montana, at night (like how I always used to drive her) she'd ran full-speed into the back of a logging truck that had lost power on the shoulder and was not fully pulled off the road. It all happened so fast and hard, she probably didn't even sense it. Probably looked like a big black wall. // That poor woman, who put up with so much of my shit. My good friends, who tried. Without them, who am I? // The end. The end. The end. // When I could grieve my late ex-wife no longer, I packed a bag and loaded my rig and got going on the trip towards home. Stopped at the gas station, fueled up. Put in a tank, then filled ten jugs, loaded them into the trunk and backseat. Enough juice to stop a semi, or a demon wall of dark or light. // Then I deadhead across the desert. // Now I am in speeding through the expanse. Stars out, roads empty, no fog. I will not make it to my late ex-wife's funeral—I plan to hold my own. I drive to finish what I start. I am sleepy, but will not stop. I am angry—and want to be. I scan for the lights, chase the brights. I pin it at ninety-nine. // I AM THE DOGMAN, I think, and, THESE FUMES ARE GETTING TO MY HEAD >>>

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In the last five years, I’ve watched four of my closest friends die: stroke, cancer, suicide, withdrawals. These losses were sudden and catastrophic. In the same stretch, I went through two divorces; living deaths, where once daily, dependable people I loved were suddenly unreachable, only visiting in the ether of dreams, memories, haunts. In October 2017, I traveled home to Idaho to officiate a friend’s funeral. I was cycling through a lot of anger, loneliness, nostalgia, was hyper-aware of my pasts, and reading too much Poe. I thought about the dogman tales my friends and I used to tell in the pickup. That cheered me up. I thought I better write one down before I forgot, or worse, ended up like them.

(For a soundtrack, put on repeat Alessandro Cortini's ["La Sveglia"] or shuffle through the excellent album [Risveglio].)