The phone still had a cord, and Charlie let it ring four times before he crossed the kitchen, because nobody called a man his age after ten unless somebody had died.

"They put a museum in Kecksburg now," the voice said. "Gift shop and everything."

The plate he was drying stopped turning. Thirty years since that voice. His grip tightened on the rag. 

"Frank."

"You stood in that ravine with me, Charlie. You saw the marks on it same as I did. They're selling pieces of it now. Bits of rock in little keyrings, ten dollars, certificate and all. Meteorite, the card says."

"Hello to you, too, Frank. Thirty years, and that's your opening."

The line hummed between them. "Gill's gone, Charlie. Four years."

Charlie put his free hand flat on the counter. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down.

"...Why are you telling me this now, Frank?"

"I was looking at your number the night we buried her," Frank said. "Sat in the parking lot after everybody went home." He cleared his throat, and it caught. "There's no good reason. I just didn't."

"You should have called me"

"I'm calling now." A breath ran down the line. "They opened me up back in the spring. Doctors." He said it like it bored him. "Closed me right back up." 

In the window over the sink, an old man held a phone to his ear, and it took Charlie a second to place him.

"Frank, I'm—"

"I'm driving up there," Frank said. "While I still can. You coming?"

"There's nothing in those woods, Frank."

"You don't believe that." Ice shifted in a glass somewhere on his end. "There's nobody else, Charlie. Everybody else who was up there is dead. I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm asking you to drive."

Charlie stood in his kitchen with the cord pulled across it. The old man in the window had not moved either.

"When," he said.

***

The map was older than the car, folded open on Charlie's knee to the square he wanted, the creases gone soft with handling. Frank had stopped offering the phone in his coat somewhere back around noon.

They’d been en route since morning, north and then west off the interstate, and the country had been closing in the whole way, the fields giving over to hills and the hills to a stitching of timber along every ridge.

Frank rode with a tartan blanket over his knees that Charlie had not remarked on. Between them on the seat stood a plastic case of pills sorted into the days of the week. Frank had taken the Tuesday ones with gas-station coffee two hours back and had not touched the Wednesday side. It had taken him three tries to work the lid.

"We could have flown," Charlie said. "Been there by lunch."

"You hate flying."

"I'd have managed."

"When's the last time you and me talked. Really talked."

A truck blew past the other way and rocked the car. Frank's two fingers went to the dash and stayed there a moment after they were steady again.

They had not fought about anything. That was the part Charlie could never explain to himself afterward. A few letters answered slower each time, a couple of calls that ran shorter, and then a year was gone, and then it was ten. They loosened their grip on the rope a little more each year, until there was nothing left but time. 

"Tell me about Gill," Charlie said.

Frank turned his face to the window, the tree line sliding past. "She asked after you. Near the end. Wanted to know if we’d patched things up." His thumb moved on the hem of the blanket. "I told her we had."

Charlie kept his eyes on the road.

"That's why you didn't call," he said. It was not a question. "And picking up the phone would've made the lie real." 

"You had a phone too, Charlie."

They came up over a rise and the land fell open, a long valley of farms gone amber in the slant light, and past it the mountains stood blue and folded against the sky. Beside him Frank had gone still, and not from the cold.

"I know this." Charlie's grip tightened on the wheel, but it was Frank who'd said it. 

"We came in the other way. In the dark." Frank stayed locked on the glass. "Didn't think it'd still look the same."

Charlie had been nineteen that December. So had Frank. The frost had come up through boot leather and settled in for the watch. Something had crossed the sky over four states and gone down in these hills, and the Army had trucked them out in the night with a few dozen others, and strung them in a ring around it and told them to let nobody through.

"Tell me what was in that ravine, Charlie. Say it out loud."

Charlie drove a quarter mile before he replied. 

"You were there. You don't need me to draw it for you." The wheel had gone to ice under his hands. "All these years, Frank. I close my eyes, and I'm still standing in that creek."

"Nine hours we stood around that thing," Frank said. "Rifles pointed at the woods, like it meant anything." His mouth twisted. "Whatever flew that thing down didn't die in the crash. It went up into the canopy, deciding whether to let us leave or not."

"Frank."

"They could've killed us anytime they wanted." A cough doubled him over the blanket. "Even though we were just kids, I’ve never been more certain of anything, Charlie."

"I know what was in that creek scared the life out of me," Charlie said. "I've never once said it didn't. But it died in the crash, or they hauled it off on a flatbed. Sixty years ago. There's nothing up there now."

"You don't believe that."

"Say you're right. Say something was up there." Charlie let the road come at them a while. "It didn't want us." His voice flattened. "That's the part you can't sit with. Not that they were there. That we didn't matter to them at all."

Frank turned in his seat, the blanket sliding off his knees, and fixed a stare on Charlie until he had to look back.

"No. What I can't sit with is you made your peace and left me alone with it," Frank said. 

Charlie kept quiet.

"I didn't leave you alone up there, though. With that gun under your—"

"I know," Charlie said. 

Charlie reached up and touched the side of his throat, and took his fingers down again before Frank could see.

"He'd already made up his mind about you. Didn't matter what you told him."

The trooper had looked at Charlie's face, and that was all the evidence he needed. Charlie had told him his unit, his post, his orders, but it came out of the wrong man's mouth.

"So I told him. Same thing you'd told him, the same words." 

Frank looked out the window.

"They just came out of a white man."

The road went on. Charlie took the next bend.

"Your guilt's your business. But don't dress it up as a rescue." Charlie's knuckles had gone tight enough to ache. You didn't save me, Frank. "You confirmed what I was worth." 

Charlie blinked, and kept it from going further than that. 

"I said the same words you did, and mine meant nothing, and yours meant everything. That's what keeps me up at night. Not this."

The heater was on full, and neither of them was warm. The sun dropped behind the ridgeline and took the color with it. The pines shifted from green to grey with no depth, and the road ahead lost its edges.

Frank didn't say sorry. They were past the place where it would have meant anything, and they both knew it. After a while he said, "I'm glad it's you in this car." And Charlie let that be enough.

Frank reached over and worked the radio dial through the static until a station came in, playing a slow song from back when they still had zits and believed the men who gave them orders.

"Aw, hell," Frank said. "Listen to that."

And he sang it off-key, the same way he sang it at nineteen.

Drive me home, the long way round,

the night's still young, the moon's still out.

Hold my hand, don't make a sound,

we got till morning, you and me, to figure this thing out.

Charlie didn't sing. Then, somewhere in the second verse, he did, and for the length of that song the two of them were boys again, and the woods up ahead were just woods. Then the station lost itself into static, and there was only the engine and the trees coming down close on both sides.

They drove a while without talking.

"They never did find Renner," Frank said.

Davey Renner was an Ohio farm kid, two months younger than Charlie. Sometime after midnight he walked fifty feet over the line to take a piss, against orders. He never walked back down. The sound he made up there had got into both of them and never left. Neither had ever talked about it. 

By morning there was no gap in the roster. A month on, his mother in Ohio received a flag and a letter. Killed in the line of duty, it said. A training accident, four hundred miles from where he walked into it.

"He didn't die up there," Frank said. "They took him. That's why they let the rest of us go." 

The cough came again, and he rode it out with a fist against his chest. "I'm not going up there to die, Charlie. I need you to hear that. I'm going because something’s still there, and nobody's gonna go looking once I'm gone."

Charlie had no argument left. So he gave him the only thing he had.

"Then I'll get you up there. And I'll get you back down."

"Okay," Frank said. Just that. He pulled the blanket back up over his knees.

An hour later the map turned on Charlie. His turn was a route number on the map. Where it should have met the road, the signpost stood empty, just a pale square on the metal where the sign had been pried off.

Frank had gone the color of the dashboard and needed a bed. He thumbed his phone alive, held it up to the glass, and put it face down on his knee. Charlie took the next left that ran their way.

Then the center line quit. The shoulders went after that, and the blacktop narrowed and broke up under the tires, and the pines came in close until their tops met overhead and shut the sky away. The headlights pushed into the dark, catching only the shadows.

"There was a motel sign back at that fork," Frank said. "Said vacancy."

"It said vacancy when Carter was in office." Charlie was hunting now, a porch light, a gas pump, anything lit, and there was just the woods pressing in thicker. 

Charlie dropped his focus to the gas gauge. The needle was riding the red. He trained his attention dead ahead.

The cold came first. Not the chill that had been riding with them since the highway. This came down through the roof of the car, and Charlie's breath fogged in front of him with the heater still roaring at his feet.

Frank sat up against the seatbelt, his head turned to the side. "Charlie," he said. 

It landed over the back seat with a weight that slammed the car down on its springs, and the suspension threw them up again before Charlie's foot reached the brake. Then the weight was gone. It had dropped out of the trees, and gone back up, and not one branch broke to mark where.

Frank had both palms flat to the dash. Charlie stopped, dead in the middle of the road, the engine running and the breath pouring white out of them both in the green glow off the dash.

"Go," Frank said. "Charlie. Go, go, go."

Charlie put his foot to the floor. The car lurched forward, the broken blacktop hammering up through the wheel. A second one hit the hood. It came down in the headlights that time, or half of it did, gone before he could process. A third took the roof, and the fourth landed on the trunk and rode there a second, all its weight pressing the back of the trunk down, before it sprang off.

For half a second it was there in the headlights. Hairless, black, the size of an ape. Then it was gone, and Charlie wished he had not looked.

They weren't trying to stop the car. That was the thing Charlie worked out as the needle climbed. They hit it, fell back and let it run, keeping it on the road, keeping it moving. They were herding them. And the road only went to one place.

Then one came through the windshield.

Not onto it. Through it, headfirst on Frank's side, and the glass turned to white grit and the night and the cold and the noise poured in all at once. For half a second it was between the two front seats with them. A long arm slammed past his face, the hand on the end of it with too many fingers, grabbing and missing him. Then it was gone, back out the hole it made, and they were off the road.

The car came off into the brush, and for a second Charlie had no part in where it was going, the wheel loose and wild, veering left and right. Then he stood on the brake with both feet, and it slid and stopped, nosed down.

The headlights still burned out through the empty windshield frame and found nothing in the foliage. Charlie's heart was loud in his ears, and somewhere Frank's was doing the same, the two of them running out like clocks in separate rooms. The breath hung between them. Neither man moved.

When Frank spoke, the fear had gone out of his voice. What was left was calm, and worse than calm.

"This is the place," he said. "The ravine's right down there."

"Frank." Charlie had a hand on his arm. "Frank, look at me. Don't."

Frank looked at the hand on his arm, then at Charlie.

"I've got four months." His voice was gentle, which was worse. "And then a bed somewhere, and tubes, and that sorry look on your face every time you come see me." He put his own hand over Charlie's and lifted it off his arm. "I know what's down there. I've always known. I just have to see it before I go."

Frank opened the door, and the dome light flickered on and off. The blanket slid off his lap and stayed on the seat, and he stepped out without it, one foot and then the other. 

He walked down the slope and through the headlights and out the far side of them, not once looking back at the car. The trees took him a piece at a time. First there was all of him on the grass, then half of him at the tree line, then a pale shape moving between trunks, then swallowed by the woods.

For a while it was just the tick of the cooling engine. Then Frank called out, once. It was not a scream. It was Charlie's name, and there was joy in it. Whatever Frank had walked down there to find, he had found it.

It lasted about a second, and what came after it was not words.

Charlie turned the key. The engine cranked and didn’t catch. Out in the distance, the sound that had been Frank climbed higher, one long note with no person left in it. Charlie turned the key again, and Charlie’s scream stopped before the engine started.

The engine caught. He reversed off the slope in a spray of brush, hauled the wheel over with the front end fighting him, and pointed back the way they had come.

I'll get you back down. He had said that to Frank a few hours ago, and now he was driving down without him and not going back for him either. He put the pedal flat to the floor and kept his eyes on the broken center line, because the center line was the one thing out there that was not the dark.

The bend went left. Charlie went straight.

The oak came into the empty windshield frame, and he hit it doing sixty. The steering column drove up into his chest. His face went into the top of the wheel and his mouth filled with salt and grit. The hood folded inward, the dash driving back into his knees.

A rib cracked, then another, and the sound of it was lost in the metal sheets coming apart, and he could not have said which was which.

***

Charlie came up out of the dark into white morning light and the smell of his own blood.

It had dried brown down the front of his coat. The hood was wrapped around an oak, and birds were singing in the branches over it like any other morning in the world. His chest grated when he breathed.

Then he looked to the seat beside him, and it was empty, and the blanket was on it, folded where Frank had left it, and then it came back, piece by piece.

The door was already open, and a young deputy was half inside the car, two fingers pressed to Charlie's neck, finding the pulse, saying something he could not yet hear.

They got him out and sat him in the back of a cruiser with a blanket and a paper cup going cold in his hands, and after a while an older sheriff lowered himself into the open door and started asking questions. Where they had started from. Where they were going. 

Charlie answered in the voice he had kept his whole life for white men with badges, the careful one, the code switch. Where they had started from, he could tell him. Where they were going, he could tell him that too. Where they had ended up, and what had happened to Frank, he could not tell this man. 

Charlie looked at the sheriff, a decent man who only wanted something true to write down and then go home. And Charlie laid out exactly how it would go if he gave it to him. Four of them coming down out of the black onto the roof of a moving car. An arm through the windshield with too many fingers on it. Frank walking down a slope into the dark on purpose, and the sound he made when they took him.

Charlie had nothing to give them at all. An old Black man at the wheel, a white man vanished off the mountain beside him, and a story no man in that uniform was ever going to believe out of a mouth like his.

"He got out of the car," Charlie said. "Walked off. I waited on him, and he didn't come back. So I drove."

"And you didn't see anything."

Charlie looked past him, to the last place Frank had been, and he lied. The Army taught him that in one night. America had been teaching him his whole life.