ReeseBeulay is a rough-edged little man made out of hard tack and gristle, with dirt under his fingernails and attitude flavoring his voice. He's also a pure-hearted man with a passion for the best of America and the drive to recapture that spirit. He just doesn't much care if he steps on a few toes along the way; not everyone can be expected to see what's important in life, after all.

He was raised with his brother, WaylanBeulay, in a trailer park in the South. Where doesn't matter so much, although probably not the Deep South. More likely, he's a mountain child, born of coal miners in the time when coal mining wasn't a living anymore.

It wasn't long before the road leading out of the trailer park and away from the CoalMine was the most important thing in his life. The park, that was a dead end, where families went when they stopped being families anymore. The road led in, sure. But it also led out, to an entire world he wouldn't ever see if he didn't do something about it.

School was a joke. They taught him about stuff, but you don't learn about anything real by sitting on your ass. He could see that all around him. Did his father learn how to mine coal in a classroom? No. Was his brother learning how to rebuild an engine in a school? No.

What they called "education" just made it more clear. The only way to learn about the world outside the trailer park was to go there. He wasn't much over 17 before he stole his first car and set out to do just that.

Quick cut through rough times. He picked up some enemies, and not very many friends. He did a little jail time -- 90 days here and there, some vagrancy, some more serious stuff. He spent about as much time in trouble with criminals as he did with the law.

Mostly, he wasn't sure what he was looking for. Sometimes it seemed like the roads just led to more trailer parks in different states. Sure, the people in Oregon had weird accents, but the end of the road was the same either way.

One night, he was speeding down I-70 out of Saint Louis, with the cold knowledge that the men in the car two miles behind him wanted him dead as much as they wanted anything, and the further knowledge that their car was faster than his by a long stretch. Up ahead, there was a cloverleaf exit. Suddenly, he realized that four-leaf clovers were the best of luck.

Stopping to run round the exit ramps would catch them up with him that much sooner, but the hell with it, they were going to get their hands on him eventually anyhow. So he did it, coming up out of the last ramp and curving right in front of the pursuing car at a good eighty miles per hour. They braked hard to avoid the crash, lost a tire, and slammed into the guardrail at about the same speed.

Huh.

Since then, he's paid a lot more attention to the roads.

They've led him a lot of strange places, too. He's never been able to explain how to read 'em the way he does, but he has been able to see where people are taking the wrong path, sometimes, and point 'em in a better direction. Sometimes people even listen.

Sometimes he makes enemies. There was a weird guy in a suit in Taos, New Mexico, who had some sort of scam going on with a nice young couple. Something about trading a honeymoon for happiness. It wouldn't have been good for them, and he had to break it up by plowing a bulldozer through a chapel. Things like that happen, sometimes, on the road.

The big picture's been getting clearer, of late. The problem isn't the trailer parks; it's that all the roads seem to lead there. The country went wrong, somewhere along the line; forgot to build the right kind of destination. The interstates can be a maze, and we're all lost in the middle. But there's gotta be a way to get out -- no maze has no exit. When he finds it, he can show the whole country.

Not such a bad life after all.