Hot Tin Roof

The car crossed over the median and crashed, head-on, into the passenger van–empty, you find out later, of its typical brood of children, who were spending that evening at a soccer tournament.

The thunderous crash, a deafening concussion of metal, was worse than you could have imagined, and then you saw it–Was it? Yes. It was–A man. You saw a man flying through the air and for a second, maybe, you hoped he would float smoothly away with the flock of birds spraying from the wild roadside brush.

The land beneath the trap had been in our family since before the time of steel and always without poachers. We had taken it from the Indians who had in antiquity taken it from their own or those like them. That history we owned and we were unabashed. We did not think of them as savages because our fathers had taught us to think of ourselves as savages. We thought of them as obsolete. We were the inheritors of their earth. We are not apologizers.