We ride through the badlands in an army surplus vehicle with tinted windows, wearing tinted sunglasses and braided hair falling over our hard bodies. We are there to trespass, which we do, and to accomplish an elaborate series of armed robberies which somehow never come to pass. Hot on our trail is the crew of a made-for-TV movie about our short careers, filming a reenactment of each leg of our rebel odyssey just as it happens, or sometimes slightly before because of a tight production schedule.

Their overhead shot of our arrival in a small mestizo village in Arizona creates a buzz that is subsiding just as we get there. I dismount and flag down an old friend who was once a built butch dyke but is now a fresh-faced young man. I start in on a long and disingenuous speech about how brave he is to have made a new life for himself as a man. He tells me that lately he has been camping out with a male-to-female transvestite from Alberta who is constantly nagging but really knows how to dance.

A few days later, our vehicle breaks down on the highway and the only path down to the town goes through the stucco stairwell and back patio of a small family away on vacation. The next time we break down we track dust and pine needles through the same stairwell and patio. The third time the family lets my posse pass but stands there to greet me, and I understand that they have been stationed there to extract my debt to society.

There are five bell jars on the kitchen counter, each with a headless chicken that is half alive but subdued. It is my job to chop these chickens into very small pieces and place them into thin plastic bags that will later be donated to a Chinese restaurant. Finding a knife sharp enough for the job, I start with the claws and the beaks but soon am forced to kill and to keep killing. There is no blood. Once, though, I glance down among the feathers and bones to see a tiny black embryonic crow, with a cute little oversize beak like a Japanese cartoon rendering, which I must also cut in half.