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swerving just in time. A deer was standing in the middle of the road. In the backseat, Derek remained unfazed. They rounded a curve and passed a deer warning sign. “Little late now,” Fetterman muttered. He’d always thought deer warning signs had a lot more artistry than other road signs; the deer were rendered in much greater detail than humans. Derek took off his headphones, and Fetterman seized the opportunity to ask him a question. “Do you know why deer graze so close to the road?” he said, regretting that his earnest attempt at conversation sounded like the setup to a joke. Derek ignored him, made a minute technical adjustment, and put the headphones back on. Fetterman answered anyway. “Because the grass is saltiest there, especially in winter,” he said, a fact he’d learned in his defensive driving course. “It’s the foie gras of grass.” He could hear the metallic screed of what sounded like a symphony of Bessemer converters. There were still two hours to go before they reached Lockett Meadow, and he suspected they would spend it in silence.
    By the time they passed the first sign for Flagstaff, Fetterman was already wondering if the trip was a mistake. He hated outdoor activities and tried to avoid them as much as possible. Once, when he and Sonya were first courting, she’d invited him on a ski getaway with two other couples. Fetterman had pointed out that skiing combined three things he loathed—extreme cold, extreme height, and extreme speed—but agreed to go anyway. Hespent the majority of the weekend in a foul mood, watching stand-up comics on HBO while Sonya and her friends donned Thinsulate and tested the strength of their anterior cruciate ligaments. He figured he had only himself to blame: He should have said no. Bad things happened when you followed the crowd. Maybe he would say that to Derek at some point over the weekend, tell him that he agreed in principle with wanting to strike out on your own, rebel against everything, find your drummer, but it was possible to do so in a less destructive way. In his head, he searched for phrases that wouldn’t sound pedantic and square. Then he tried to imagine what would have happened if his own father had ever said such a thing to him.
    Fetterman had been a wayward teenager himself—
Who wasn’t?
he liked to ask, when telling stories of his youth—and had never really connected with his father, who worked in radio and died shortly after Fetterman went to college. In fact, the closest he’d felt to him was an experience that took place when his father was absent. It happened on an afternoon in the summer of 1977, when Fetterman was seventeen. He’d just had a blowout fight with his girlfriend and had gone for a long walk on the jetty in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He thought he was alone, but then he spotted an old man fishing by himself at the end of the pier. The old-timer had a radio with him, and when Fetterman approached, he looked up at him with watery blue eyes. “Elvis is dead,” he said. Fetterman’s first instinct was to run home and tell his father the news. His father had worshipped Elvis, had gotten his first job in radio in the 1950s after seeing Elvis on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. But by the time he got home,Fetterman realized, his father would already know. If he didn’t know now. He looked at the old man sitting alone, and suddenly he understood: His father
did
know; he could feel it. “Elvis is dead, Pop,” he said, staring across the wide, churning surface of the ocean. His father died of a heart attack the following year.
    Fetterman needed to use the bathroom and fill the gas tank. He got off at a rest area in McGuireville, stepping out of the car with one hand at his lower back. The rush of heat took him by surprise. Twenty years in the desert, and most days he still felt like a Yankee. He opened Derek’s door and a strange smell spilled