Intensity

and trees cracking in the wind and pavement as slick as ice.
        The guy with the walrus mustache goes to the Pontiac.
        Vess enters the convenience store, wondering what an electrician from Washington is doing on the road in northern California at this ungodly hour of the night.
        He's fascinated by the way in which lives connect briefly, with a potential for drama that is sometimes fulfilled and sometimes not. A man stops for gasoline, lingers to buy potato chips and Coke, makes a comment on the weather to a stranger-and continues on his journey. The stranger could as easily follow the man to the car and blow his brains out. There would be risks for the shooter, but not serious risks; it could be managed with surprising discretion. The man's survival is either full of mysterious meaning or utterly meaningless; Vess is unable to decide which.
        If fate doesn't actually exist, it ought to.
        The small store is warm, clean, and brightly lighted. Three narrow aisles extend to the left of the door, offering the usual roadside merchandise: every imaginable snack food, the basic patent medicines, magazines, paperback books, postcards, novelty items designed to hang from rearview mirrors, and selected canned goods that sell to campers and to people, like Vess, who travel in homes on wheels. Along the back wall are tall coolers full of beer and soft drinks, as well as a couple of freezers containing ice cream treats. To the right of the door is the service counter that separates the two cashiers' stations and the clerical area from the public part of the store.
        Two employees are on duty, both men. These days, no one works alone in such places at night-and with good reason.
        The guy at the cash register is a redhead in his thirties with freckles and a two-inch-diameter birthmark, as pink as uncooked salmon, on his pale forehead. The mark is uncannily like the image of a fetus curled in a womb, as if a gestating twin had died early in the mother's pregnancy and left its fossilized image on the surviving brother's brow.
        The redheaded cashier is reading a paperback. He looks up at Vess, and his eyes are as gray as ashes but clear and piercing. "What can I do for you, sir?"
        "I'm at pump seven," Vess says.
        The radio is tuned to a country station. Alan Jackson sings about midnight in Montgomery, the wind, a whippoorwill, a lonesome chill, and the ghost of Hank Williams.
        "How you want to pay?" asks the cashier.
        "If I put any more on the credit cards, the Bank of America's going to send someone around to break my legs," says Vess, and he slaps down a hundred-dollar bill. "Figure I'll need about sixty bucks' worth."
        The combination of the song, the birthmark, and the cashier's haunting gray eyes generates in Vess an eerie sense of expectancy. Something exceptional is about to happen.
        "Paying off Christmas like the rest of us, huh?" says the cashier as he rings up the sale. "Hell, I'll still be payin' off Christmas next Christmas."
        The second clerk sits on a stool farther along the counter. He's not at a cash register but is laboring on the bookkeeping or checking inventory sheets-anyway, doing some kind of paperwork.
        Vess has not previously looked directly at the second man, and now he discovers that this is the exceptional thing he felt looming.
        "Storm coming," he says to the second clerk.
        The man looks up from the papers spread on the counter. He is in his twenties, at least half Asian, and strikingly handsome. No. More than handsome. Jet-black hair, golden complexion, eyes as liquid as oil and as deep as wells. There is a gentle quality to his good looks that almost gives him an effeminate aspect-but not quite.
        Ariel would love him. He is just her type.
        "Might be cold enough for snow in some of the mountain passes," says the Asian, "if you're going that way."
        He has a pleasant-almost musical-voice that would charm Ariel. He is really quite breathtaking.
        To the cashier who is counting out change, Vess says, "Just hold on to that. I need a supply of munchies too. I'll be back as soon as I fill up the tank."
        He leaves quickly, afraid that they might sense his excitement and become alarmed.
        Although he's been in the store no more than a minute, the night seems markedly colder than it was when he went inside. Invigorating. He catches