“I don't doubt that. I know you too well to doubt that. But life isn't just about 
taking care of yourself, keeping your head down, getting through."
  “Laura Templeton, girl philosopher.”
  “Life is about living.”
  “Deep,” Chyna said sarcastically.
  “Deeper than you think."
  The Mustang crested the long hill, and there were no burning buses or cheering 
multitudes, but ahead of them was an older-model Buick, cruising well below the posted 
limit. Laura cut their speed by more than half, and they pulled behind the other car. 
Even in the fading light, Chyna could see that the round-shouldered driver was a 
white-haired, elderly man.
  They were in a no-passing zone. The road rose and fell, turned left and right, rose 
again, and they could not see far ahead.
  Laura switched on the Mustang headlights, hoping to encourage the driver of the Buick 
either to increase his speed or to ease over where the shoulder widened to let them pass.
  “Take your own advice-relax, kiddo,” Chyna said.
  “Hate to be late for dinner.”
  “From everything you've said about her, I don't think your mom's the type to beat us 
with wire coat hangers.”
  “Mom's the best.”
  “So relax,” Chyna said.
  “But she has this disappointed look she gives you that's worse than wire coat hangers. 
Most people don't know this, but Mom is the reason the Cold War ended. Several years ago, 
the Pentagon sent her off to Moscow so she could give the whole damn Politburo the Look, 
and all those Soviet thugs just collapsed with remorse."
  Ahead of them, the old man in the Buick checked his rearview mirror.
  The white hair in the headlight beams, the angle of the man's head, and the mere 
suggestion of his eyes reflected in the mirror suddenly engendered in Chyna a powerful 
sense of deja vu. For a moment, she didn't understand why a chill came over her-but then 
she was cast back in memory to an incident that she had long tried unsuccessfully to 
forget: another twilight, nineteen years ago, a lonely Florida highway.
  “Oh, Jesus,” she said.
  Laura glanced at her. “What's wrong?”
  Chyna closed her eyes.
  “Chyna, you're as white as a ghost. What is it?”
  “A long time ago ... when I was just a little girl, seven years old ... Maybe we were 
in the Everglades, maybe not ... buttheland was swampy like the 'glades. There weren't 
many trees, and the few you could see were hung with Spanish moss. Everything was flat as 
far as you could see, lots of sky and flatness, the sunlight red and fading like now, a 
back road somewhere, far away from anything, very rural, two narrow lanes, so damn empty 
and lonely. . . ."
  Chyna had been with her mother and Jim Woltz, a Key West drug dealer and gunrunner with 
whom they had lived now and then, for a month or two at a time, during her childhood. 
They had been on a business trip and had been returning to the Keys in Woltzs vintage red 
Cadillac, one of those models with massive tailfins and with what seemed to be five tons 
of chrome grillwork. Woltz was driving fast on that straight highway, exceeding a hundred 
miles an hour at times. They hadn't encountered another car for almost fifteen minutes 
before they roared up behind the elderly couple in the tan Mercedes. The woman was 
driving. Birdlike. Close-cropped silver hair. Seventyfive if she was a day. She was doing 
forty miles an hour. Woltz could have pulled around the Mercedes; they were in a passing 
zone, and no traffic was in sight for miles on that dead-flat highway.
  “But he was high on something,” Chyna told Laura, eyes still closed, watching the 
memory with growing dread as it played like a movie on a screen behind her eyes. “He was 
most of the time high on something. Maybe it was cocaine that day. I don't know. Don't 
remember. He was drinking too. They were both drinking, him and my mother. They had a 
cooler full of ice. Bottles of grapefruit juice and vodka. The old lady in the Mercedes 
was driving really slow, and that incensed Woltz. He wasn't rational. What did it matter 
to him? He could've pulled around her. But the sight of her driving so slow on the 
wide-open highway infuriated him. Drugs and booze, that's all. So irrational. When he was 
angry ... red-faced, arteries throbbing in his neck, jaw muscles bulging. No one could 
get angry quite as totally as Jim Woltz. His rage excited my mother. Always excited her. 
So she teased him, encouraged him. I was in the backseat, hanging on tight, pleading with 
her to stop, but she kept at him."
  For a while, Woltz had hung close behind the other car, blowing his horn at the elderly 
couple, trying to force them to go faster. A few times he had nudged the rear bumper of 
the Mercedes with the front bumper of the Cadillac, metal kissing metal with a squeal. 
Eventually the old woman got rattled and began to swerve erratically, afraid to go faster 
with Woltz so close behind her but too frightened of him to pull off the road and let him 
pass by.
  “Of course,” Chyna said, “he wouldn't have gone past and left her alone. By then he was 
too psychotic. He would have stopped when she stopped. It still would have ended badly."
  Woltz had pulled alongside the Mercedes a few times, driving in the wrong lane, 
shouting and shaking his fist at the white-haired couple, who first tried to ignore him 
and then stared back wide-eyed and fearfui. Each time, rather than drive by and leave 
them in his dust, he had dropped behind again to play tag with their rear bumper. To 
Woltz, in his drug fever and alcoholic haze, this harassment was deadly serious business, 
with an importance and a meaning that could never be understood by anyone who was clean 
and sober. To Chyna's mother, Anne, it was all a game, an adventure, and it was she, in 
her ceaseless search for excitement, who said, Why don't we give her a driving test? 
Woltz said, Test? I don't need to give the old bitch a test to see she can't drive for 
shit. This time, as Woltz pulled beside the Mercedes, matching speeds with it, Anne said, 
I mean, see if she can keep it on the road. Make it a challenge for her.
  To Laura, Chyna recalled, “There was a canal parallel to the road, one of those 
drainage channels you see along some Florida highways. Not deep but deep enough. Woltz 
used the Cadillac to crowd the Mercedes onto the shoulder of the road. The woman should 
have crowded him back, forced him the other way. She should have tramped the pedal to the 
floor and pegged the speedometer and gotten the hell out of there. The Mercedes would've 
outrun the Cadillac, no problem. But she was old and scared, and she'd never encountered 
anyone like this. I think she was just disbelieving, so unable to understand the kind of 
people she was up against, unable to grasp how far they'd go even though she and her 
husband had done nothI.ng to them. Woltz forced her off the road. The Mercedes rolled 
into the canal."
  Woltz had stopped, shifted the Cadillac into reverse, and backed up to where the 
Mercedes was swiftly sinking. He and Anne had gotten out of the car to watch. Chyna's 
mother had insisted that she watch too: Come on, you little chicken. You don't want to 
miss this, baby. This is one to remember The passenger's side of the Mercedes was flat 
against the muddy bottom of the canal, and the driver's side was revealed to them as they 
stood on the embankment in the humid evening air. They were being bitten by hordes of 
mosquitoes but were hardly aware of them, mesmerized by the sight below them, gazing 
through the driver-side windows of the submerged vehicle.