The Ultimate Good Luck by Richard Ford

was no reason for it, but there was nothing else for them to do. The driver was lying on his side on the pavement away from his truck, his face frozen and messed with blood. Some of the police were guarding him as if they thought he might be of some use later on. One of them was taking the driver’s picture with a Polaroid. Quinn had his tourist card out, but when he passed by the policemandirecting traffic, the policeman called “quickly, quickly,” and waved him on.
    “What’s that about?” Rae said. She had the blue Varig bag on the seat under her arm. He had made her count the money in the parking lot, where he could see it. She turned and looked back at the Pepsi truck.
    “An accident.” He kept his eyes on the road.
    “The man was dead there,” she said. “His eyes were open.” She didn’t seem surprised. He glanced in the rearview. Some of the police had started drinking Pepsis. “All I’ve seen now are soldiers and police and dead people,” Rae said. “Do you like it here?” She wasn’t going to make an issue of the driver. It was a gift.
    “It wasn’t my first choice,” he said.
    She turned back and faced front. “Where’m I staying?”
    “In the Centro. I’ve got you a room.” It was a lie that didn’t matter.
    “Where are you?” she said, precisely.
    He pointed up the Reforma Hill above the brown low profile of town. The white soffits of the bungalows shone above the palms of the nicer district nearer down the hill. Where the rain had cleaned the air, the bungalows seemed not far away. Behind them the rain glowered in the hills. A trace of the truck’s smoke had begun stringing out into the green atmosphere. “Straight up,” he said.
    She took off her glasses, closed her eyes, then opened them widely at the mountains. “Is it pricey?”
    “Nothing’s pricey,” he said.
    “Then I’ll stay there,” she said.
    “That might be weird,” he said. He wanted her to stay as hard as he could imagine wanting, but he didn’t want it taken for granted, and he didn’t want her left there if Deats showed.
    “Have you got company?” she said.
    “Not just now.”
    “But you did have, though, right?” She looked over at him smiling.
    “They think we’re married,” he said. “It makes better sense.”
    “Isn’t that rich,” she said. “Why would they care?”
    “Maybe they don’t,” Quinn said. “Maybe I made it up.”
    “Fine,” she said, and looked away. “Then I’ll stay with you. I don’t like to see failure in your face. I’m sure the Mexicans don’t either. It’s such an unusual expression.”

10
    W HEN HE WAS FIVE his father caught a sleeve accidentally in the belt mouth of a John Deere husker on a dairy farm outside Manistee, Michigan. And when the man who owned the farm, a Dutchman named Van’t Hul, noticed him from a long way off, pulled flush against the husker’s shiny green cowling waving his free arm in the air, he came running to see what was exciting. The hand was pulled in pieces when he got there to help, and most of it was stripped loose of the arm and the bones had jammed in the husker and shut down the works as truly as a piece of hickory. But when his father got out of the hospital, he set about to quit working farms and quit saving money for farmland and quit laying up surplus machines, and moved out of Manistee County altogether and into a rented stucco house with birch trees on Menominee Street in Traverse City and went to work for John Deere selling huskers with metal features across their conveyor mouths, using his new red stump for a selling aid. His father began to seem happier right away and laughed all the time and made jokes, and smoked big cigars and told his customers he enjoyed selling huskers more than he enjoyed working them, and that if he hadn’t lost his hand to one he would never have gotten the chance to get smart. Though for years after the accident his mother would wake up in the night and scream “hand! hand!” as