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You could smell the chicken farm miles away. The wind would bring the stench racing through the open prairie, pungent enough that even the wildflowers and sweetgrass couldn't temper it.
Lucas lived in a foster home two miles from the chicken farm and so did three other boys. The old couple used to be cattle ranchers. The cows were gone but for one, the fences all broken and flaking white paint in the too-near sun, and the old man never did much that required him to move beyond the crooked screened porch.
On weekends the boys would ride their bikes down dirt roads, dust pluming to discolor their Keds, and dare each other into all manner of petty criminality, busting up mailboxes, urinating in vegetable gardens, peeping through windows at girls from school.
It was on a Sunday that Roy came to the home, wearing too-short corduroys and a long-sleeve church shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar. His hair curled like it dared you to try to tame it and he had a black eye.
"You got a bike?" Lucas asked after the adults had introduced him and it was just the five boys crowded in the old tack room, sitting on bales of hay, the air so still they sweated even in the shade, the smell of old leather oil and rat droppings so familiar to the usual residents they'd forgotten it existed.
Roy shook his head, his brow pinched. "Don't know how to ride," he said, and the boys laughed, all but Lucas. Roy did not smile. "I like to walk, though."
"Where'd you come from?" Lucas said.
"Dunno," Roy said, and shrugged.
"Nobody doesn't know where they're from," one of the boys said, and stood and walked out and kicked at Roy's shoe as if it had been an accident, then waved for the other boys to follow and most of them did. "You comin', Lucas?"
Lucas shook his head.
"How'd you get that shiner?" Lucas asked when the boys had all left and Roy shrugged again, looked toward the white square of the window, glass all broken, the sun glaring meanly outside.
"What's that smell?" Roy asked.
"Chicken shit," Lucas said, and Roy frowned more deeply. It suited him somehow, as if it was in his nature to be dissatisfied.
"You're bigger than Kyle or any of the other boys," Lucas said after a while. "He's just angry 'cause his momma's not dead like the rest of us, she just didn't want him. Anyway, I think you could take him if you had to."
Roy pulled at a piece of hay, tied it into a knot. "I don't like to fight," he said.
A sparrow flew in through the window so suddenly they both startled. It landed in the rafters and began to sing.
"Well I don't mind," Lucas said, and stood and reached out his hand.
_____
The black pavement stretched out long before them, bleeding into the night but for the white lines that framed it and the two circles laid down on it by the headlights. Somewhere, though, somehow, Lucas could still see the light of the boy; could feel it, and he had to squint past it now and then. Sometimes he looked in the rearview and expected to see it, blinding, but there was only Alton and a penlight and the darkness beyond the rear window.
"Up here," Roy said, trying to see the map in the light of the glove box. "About a mile or two."
"We've got a good couple of hours before dawn," Lucas said, even though he was going to do whatever Roy asked him to do.
Roy folded the map, looked up. The light from the glove box caught his eyes and Lucas flinched, but then Roy blinked, frowned. Just Roy. Plain old sad-faced Roy.
"These long stretches of highway," Roy said and shook his head, "we don't want to get caught between towns with the sun coming up."
Lucas nodded and checked the rear view and from behind blue-tinted goggles Alton was watching him silently.
At the motel they taped up cardboard in the windows and shut out all the lights but for the fluorescent bulb over the bathroom sink and Lucas sat on the counter and tried to eat, but nothing tasted like it had yesterday and his stomach protested. Across the room, in the farthest of two beds, Roy lay with the boy, still dressed, on top of the blankets.
After a few hours, Roy stood up carefully and stretched and came into the light.
"You should have slept more," Lucas said, pushing the bag of cold hamburgers over toward where Roy leaned against the wall. His face was puffy and his eyes dark. Marks from wrinkles in the bedcovers spider-webbed over one cheek.
"I have dreams," Roy said, arms crossed.
"You always did."
"These are different."
"About Alton?"
Roy nodded and looked over to where Alton lay breathing in the half-dark, as if saying his name might wake him or awaken something.
"I don't think I'll ever dream about anything else," Lucas said.
"I know this is a lot to ask."
"We are well past that point, my friend."
Roy smiled, just a small one, the kind that held an apology, then scrubbed at his face, noisy in the quiet room, and slid down the wall to sit on the cold tile. Lucas joined him.
The bathtub faucet dripped at long intervals and they could hear the trucks on the highway as they passed. Lucas wanted to ask What made him this way? How was he born of you? What's really going to happen? Why didn't you come to me sooner? but he only sat there next to Roy on the floor in the room under the light. He reached out, slid his arm across Roy's shoulders.
"He reminds me of you," Lucas said softly, "sorta quiet and weird--not… not weird because of what he does, just..."
"He doesn't know how to ride a bike either," Roy said, and made a fist against the floor.
"Comes by that honest, doesn't he? Never could teach you. Always pedaled like you had one leg too many."
Lucas could feel Roy shuddering beneath his arm. He couldn't see his face but he hoped it was laughter.
"You should get some sleep," Roy said after a while, still looking down.
____
The boy sat with his mother in the back of the SUV under the overpass, the indifferent thunk thunk thunk of every car overhead drowning out the sound of them.
"Do you remember the chicken farm?" Lucas asked, leaning against the hood. Roy nodded. He'd grown even quieter since he and Alton had gone off together into the dark woods and returned in the daylight. "This reminds me of that. You can't get away from it, no matter how much it stinks."
Roy stood there, arms crossed. He didn't smile or nod or look up.
"I went back there a couple years ago," Lucas continued anyway. "It's closed down, has been for years. Trouble with the bank, I guess. You can still smell the chicken shit, though. I don't know if it's just a memory or something else, but it's there, and I'll tell you I found it a comfort. That's what this is, too. This thing we're doing. It's not going to end well; it can't, not for me. But it is a comfort."
There was a sound beside him, the shift of small shoes in sand as Alton came to stand there and Roy looked over at last, at his son, at Lucas.
Alton looked up, hair smooth like his mother's, eyes sad and deep like his father's. He reached up and took Lucas's hand.
"It's time," he said.
___
There were still no cattle on the farm and the house had long fallen down, bone white and broken in the high grass, mourned only by the incessant buzz of cicadas.
Lucas lived in a trailer out behind it. He'd pulled it there after a reduced sentence for good behavior. The land had already been his, long before Alton, and in the evenings he would sit on a lawn chair and look out over the wide, reddening land and imagine what was there that he could not see.
On weekends he would walk up the paved road and try to catch a glimpse of the chicken farm beyond the tall trees and the overgrown prairie. He sniffed the air.
It was on a Sunday that Roy appeared on his doorstep, his hair wild and dusty and his beard grown past respectable.
Lucas looked past him, then at him. "Where'd you come from?" he asked.
"Don't know," Roy said, and frowned at Lucas as if it were a smile, shifted the heavy duffel on his shoulder, the shape of him dark against the sunlight and the white sky.