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Hour Seven
We finally pass a jackknifed truck and get back up to speed, but Radar

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calculates in his head that we’ll need to average seventy-seven from here to
Agloe. It has been one entire hour since Ben announced that he needed to pee,
and the reason for this is simple: he is sleeping. At six o’clock exactly, he took
NyQuil. He lay down in the wayback, and then Lacey and I strapped both seat
belts around him. This made him even more uncomfortable, but 1. It was for his
own good, and 2. We all knew that in twenty minutes, no discomfort would
matter to him at all, because he would be dead asleep. And so he is now. He will
be awoken at midnight. I have just put Lacey to bed now, at 9 P.M., in the same
position in the backseat. We will wake her at 2 A.M. The idea is that everybody
sleeps for a shift so we won’t be taping our eyelids open by tomorrow morning,
when we come rolling into Agloe.
The minivan has become a kind of very small house: I am sitting in the
passenger seat, which is the den. This is, I think, the best room in the house:
there is plenty of space, and the chair is quite comfortable.
Scattered about the carpet beneath the passenger seat is the office, which
contains a map of the United States Ben got at the BP, the directions I printed
out, and the scrap paper onto which Radar has scrawled his calculations about
speed and distance. Radar sits in the driver’s seat. The living room. It is a lot like
the den, only you can’t be as relaxed when you’re there. Also, it’s cleaner.
Between the living room and the den, we have the center console, or kitchen.
Here we keep a plentiful supply of beef jerky and GoFast bars and this magical
energy drink called Bluefin, which Lacey put on the shopping list. Bluefin
comes in small, fancily contoured glass bottles, and it tastes like blue cotton
candy. It also keeps you awake better than anything in all of human history,
although it makes you a bit twitchy. Radar and I have agreed to keep drinking it
until two hours before our rest periods. Mine starts at midnight, when Ben gets
up.
This first bench seat is the first bedroom. It’s the less desirable bedroom,
because it is close to the kitchen and the living room, where people are awake
and talking, and sometimes there is music on the radio.
Behind that is the second bedroom, which is darker and quieter and
altogether superior to the first bedroom.
And behind that is the refrigerator, or cooler, which currently contains the
210 beers that Ben has not yet peed into, the turkey-that-looks-like-ham
sandwiches, and some Coke.

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There is much to recommend this house. It is carpeted throughout. It has
central air-conditioning and heating. The whole place is wired for surround
sound. Admittedly, it contains only fifty-five square feet of living space. But you
can’t beat the open floor plan.