After his mother dies--she drunkenly fell off a truss bridge--a young boy is sent down a spiral. Likewise, his father has tremendous difficulty recovering from the loss. He realizes that driving is therapeutic for him so he takes to the open road. Unfortunately, he and his son are impoverished and he cannot afford his "therapy" drives. Thus, he starts stealing coal from a coal plant and attempts to sell it for a profit. Sadly, no one buys his stolen goods and word gets around that he is a thief. He and his son start breeding dogs to make money. Their house is covered in dog hair and soot. Father and twelve-year old son struggle to connect without mom around. To fill the silence, Dad gets drunk and line-dances with his son--the beer makes him unsteady on his feet but he dances the best he can.

On the first weekend of spring, two men break into the house and slaughter all the hounds. They also tie up the father and son using wire and break the father's big toes. They never state the purpose yet the son knows they are there because of the coal. In the morning, the men untie the son and hand him an unclipped gun. They instruct the boy to strike his sleeping father with the weapon--to wake him up and to send him back to sleep with his blows. If the boy fails to comply, the man says he will put the clip back in the gun. The boy does as he is told; he shuts his eyes tightly and swings repeatedly. He hears his father moaning but he does not stop until the other men demand he return the gun. He later remembers trying to explain the scenario to the police: he struggled to tell them specific details about the invaders. He implies that he killed his father in the tumult and that he blamed the two men for it. It was this incident that made him decide to live alone. He never married because the thought of children petrified him: he knew what they were capable of.