You promise me we’re on the cusp of the real fun, despite the coyote hunting us around Centralia’s vacant, overgrown plots. The coyote has the same idea: real fun. For him. And he’s parading with half a grouse in his jaw.

Something smells like cordite, spent shotgun shells. The underground mine fire, maybe. Burning in Centralia since the 1960s, when someone purged a garbage dump with kerosene, so it wouldn’t reek for Memorial Day. But the fire burrowed into the abandoned mine tunnels, caught a coal seam. By the ’80s, the earth was collapsing and the government was razing the lots.

Now there’s knee-high grass, wild turkeys, grouses, the odd rat. We pass a pair of squirrel skeletons, a robin skull, a roadkill jay. No stray cats—happy hunting for other predators.

The coyote whimpers. He’s still loping after us, grouse-in-jaw.

I say, “You and Balto have the same smirk.” You adjust your backpack and fang some words about the sandwiches and the Thermos of iced tea you’ve packed for us.

The coyote stalks us to an embankment at the edge of St. Ignatius Cemetery. There, steel pipes emit smoke from the smoldering coal vein. The ground could give at any minute. You offer me a sandwich. That’s when you say it—that you brought her here, the one I’d “replaced.” I shove your shoulder. You try the sandwich again. But I’ve already started climbing, scrabbling the embankment. The earth gives in my fingers, the texture of dryer lint.

You crest the knoll before I do.

When I make it, you’re already pointing to something. A turkey carcass, its ribcage fileted open, festers beside a rock. Someone spray-tagged the stone with pink block letters: Help. Whiffs of sulfur, meaty as truck-stop egg salad, feather the air. We’re two Lycra-upholstered souls watching the burning heart of earth wheeze. You slap my forearm with one of the flaccid sandwiches. “C’mon,” you say. “Oven-roasted turkey. Spicy mustard. Pepper jack. Your favorite.”

Her favorite. But I take the turkey sandwich. Our hands graze. I strip the sandwich of its cellophane, drop the wrapping. The mustard burns my chapped lips and I imagine the coyote slurping marrow from the grouse’s bones. Steam seeps from the fissures in Old 61, the pavement bright with neon tags left by tourists like us, and I imagine you drive-shafting into the earth, into the slow-cooker hell of the endless seam of coal, and me leaving you there.