Living legends of the Enchanted Southwest
Watch Authentic Indians.
Handmade crafts, Leather,
Pan for Gold with Real Prospectors
He’ll drive with one hand. With the other, unbuttons her shirt. Then when trucks pass, close, going the opposite direction, he’ll drive with no hands for a moment, waving to the truckers with his left hand, his right hand never leaving her breasts. She’ll arch her back, smile, eyes closed. The wind of the passing trucks will explode against the car like split-second thunder-storms.
Swim
Ski
Relax
Play
In Lostlake City
DO NOT PARK
IN DESIGNATED
PARKING AREAS
Someday she’ll return, using this same road, and it will be late spring, and the migrating desert showers will wash the wind-shield of collected bugs and dust over and over, and the smell of wet pavement will lift her drooping eyelids, and she’ll not stop until she’s knocking on his door and it’s opening and he’s standing there. She’ll feel the explosion of his body or the explosion of the door slamming.
15 Restaurants
11 Motels
Next 2 exits
RATTLESNAKE-SKIN BOOTS
TURQUOISE BELT BUCKLES
BEADED MOCCASINS, SNO CONES
They took nothing. Credit cards bought gas and food, plastic combs, miniature toothbrushes, motel rooms, tourist T-shirts, foaming shaving cream and disposable razors. She watched him shaving as she lay in the bathtub. Then he shaved her. Rinsing her with the showerhead, soaping her over and over again. Shoved a blob of jelly, from a plastic single-serving container taken from the diner, far inside her, went to retrieve it with his tongue, drop by drop, taste by taste, but there was always more where that came from.
While she takes a turn driving, he’ll lay his head in her lap and watch her play with herself. The sound is sticky and sweet like a child sucking candy. The sun will appear and disappear. A band of light across her bare knees. She’ll hold his hand and his fingers will join hers moving in and out. The seat wet between her thighs. A cattle crossing will bounce his head in her lap and her legs will tighten around their joined hands. Air coming in the vents is humid, thick with the warm smell of manure, straw, the heat of bodies on the endless flat pasture under the sun. He’ll roll to his back to let her wet fingers embrace his erection.
Make a Bee-Line to ROCK CITY
He has no sunglasses. His eyes are slits. Bright white sky and blinking lines on the road. Touches blistered chapped lips with his tongue. Digs into his pocket, sitting on one hip and easing up on the gas. Crackle of paper among the loose change. He unwraps the butter scotch and slips it into his mouth, rolls it with his tongue, coats his mouth with the syrup. When he passes a mailbox on the side of the road, he looks far up the dirt driveway beside it, but can’t see where it leads. At the next mailbox, five miles later, he stops for a second. The name on the box says Granger, but, again, the driveway is too long to see what it leads to.
SLIPPERY WHEN WET |
FALLING ROCK |
They weren’t allowed to rent a shower together, so they paid for two but when no one was looking she slipped into his. Someone far away was singing. They stood for a while, back to back, turned and simultaneously leaned against the opposite walls of the shower stall, then slid down and sat facing each other, legs crossing. She told him he looked like he was crying, the water running down his face, but his tears would probably taste soapy. She said once she’d put dish detergent into a doll that was supposed to wet and cry. From then on it had peed foam and bawled suds. He reached out and put a hand on each of her breasts, holding her nipples between two fingers. A door slammed in the stall beside theirs. Water started and a man grunted. He rose to his knees, pulled on her arms so she slid the rest of the way to the floor of the shower, the drain under her back. He eased over her, his mouth moving from breast to breast. Then he lathered her all over, slowly, using almost the whole bar of soap, her ears and neck, toes, ankles, knees, lingering between her legs where the hair was growing back and sometimes itched so badly while they drove that she had to put her hand in her pants and scratch. She was slick to hold. He didn’t rinse her before pushing his cock in. The sting of the soap made them open their eyes wide and dig their fingernails into each other’s skin. Staring at each other but not smiling.
Relax in Nature’s Spa
CHICKEN HOLLER HOT SPRINGS
Sandwiches, Live Bait
Finally she stops and buys half a cantaloupe at a roadside fruit stand. After eating as much as she can with a plastic spoon, she presses her face down into the rind and scrapes the remaining flesh with her teeth. The juice is cool on her cheek and chin. Part of a tattered map, blown by the wind, is propped against the base of a telephone pole. He had laughed at her for getting cantaloupe Marguaritas, but then he’d sipped some of hers, ordered one for himself, said it tasted like her. She breaks the rind in half and slips one piece into her pants, between her legs. The crescent shape fits her perfectly.
MARVEL AT MYTHICAL RELICS
INDIAN JEWELRY
VELVET PAINTINGS
TEXMEX CHICKEN-FRIED STEAK
TACOS, BURRITOS
FREE 72 OZ STEAK IF YOU CAN EAT IT ALL!
When the dirt road gets so bumpy he has to keep both hands on the wheel, she’ll take over using the vibrator on herself. He’ll watch her, and watch the road. The road always disappears around a bend or beyond a small rise. The car bounces over ruts and rocks. She won’t even have to move the vibrator, just hold it inside. She’ll say he chose a good road, and her laugh will turn into a long moan, her head thrown over the back of the seat. One of her feet pressed against his leg. Her toes will clutch his pants.
Poison Spring Battleground
next exit, south 12 miles
For three days he’s had a postcard to send home, but can’t find the words to explain. It’s a picture of the four corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet. He hadn’t gotten down on hands and knees to be in all four states simultaneously. But he had walked around them, one step in each state, making a circle, three times. When he arrives at Chief Yellow-horse’s Trading Post and Rock Museum, he buys another post-card, a roadrunner following the dotted line on highway 160. This one’s for her, wherever she is, if she even left a forwarding address. The rock museum costs a dollar. A square room, glass cases around the edges, dusty brown pebbles with handwritten nametags. Some of the rocks are sawed in half to show blue rings inside. A bin of rose quartz pieces for a nickel each. Black onyx for a dime. Shark’s teeth are a quarter.
They’ll toss their clothes into the back seat. Their skin slippery with sweat. She’ll dribble diluted soda over and between his bare legs. Tint of warm root beer smell lingering in the car. She’ll hold an ice cube in her lips and touch his shoulder with it. Runs it down his arm. It’ll melt in his elbow. She’ll fish another ice out of her drink, move it slowly down his chest. When she gets to his stomach, the ice will be gone, her tongue on his skin. She’ll keep his hard-on cool by pausing occasionally to slip her last piece of ice into her mouth, then sucking him while he slides a finger in and out of her. The last time she puts the ice into her mouth, his hand will be there to take it from her lips. He’ll push the ice into her, roll it around inside with a finger until it’s gone. The road lies on the rippling desert like a ribbon. Leaving the peak of each of the road’s humps, the car will be airborne for a second.
Black Hills Gold, Arrowheads,
Petrified Wood, Chicken Nuggets,
Soda, Thick Milkshakes, Museum
WAGON MOUND TRAVELERS REST
He had to slow down, find a turnout, pull her from the car and half carry her to the shade of a locked utility shack. She dropped to her knees, then stretched out full length on her stomach. He sat beside her, stroking her back. Her body shuddered several more times, then calmed. When she rolled over, the hair on her temples was wet and matted with tears, her eyes thick, murky, glistening, open, looking at him. She smiled.
INDIAN BURIAL MOUNDS NEXT EXIT
GAS, FOOD, LODGING
DUST STORMS NEXT 18 MILES
The waterpark is 48 miles off the main interstate. He’s the only car going in this direction and passes no others coming the opposite way. The park was described in a tourbook but wasn’t marked on the map. Bumper boats, olympic pool, 3 different corkscrew waterslides, high dive. The only other car in the lot has 2 flat tires. Small boats with cartoon character names painted on the sides are upside down beside an empty concrete pond, a layer of mud and leaves at the bottom. Another layer of dirt at the bottom of the swimming pool is enough to have sprouted grass which is now dry and brown, gone to seed. The scaffold for the waterslides is still standing, but the slides have been dismantled. The pieces are a big aqua-blue pile of fiberglass.
She’ll look out the back windshield. The earth is a faint, rolling line against a blue-black sky. His hair tickling her cheek. She’ll be on his lap, straddling him, her chin hooked over his shoulder, his cock has been inside her for miles and miles. Sometimes she’ll rock slowly from side to side. Sometimes he’ll push up from underneath. Sometimes they’ll sit and feel the pulse of the engine, the powerful vibration. The air coming through the vent, splashing against her back before it spreads through the car, is almost slightly damp. Smells of rain on pavement, clean and dusty. Out the front windshield, both sky and land stay so dark, there’s no line where they meet. No lights and no stars.
If we go west fast enough, will it stay predawn forever?
We can try.
Did you ever pester your parents, When’ll we get there, daddy?
And I’d’ve thought it was torture if he said never.
Gospel Harmony House Christian Dinner Theatre
MERGING TRAFFIC |
DEER XING |
SHARPCURVES |
They started walking toward the entrance of the WalMart store, but she turned off abruptly, crossed a road and climbed a small hill where someone had set up three crosses in the grass. They were plant stakes lashed together. Kite string was tangled on a tumbleweed. When she got back to the parking lot, five or Six big cockleburs were clinging to each of her socks. She sat on the hood of the car picking them off. When he came from the store with two blankets, toilet paper, aspirin and glass cleaner, she said, There weren’t any graves up there after all. He put the bag in the back seat, turned and smiled. Kiss me, she said.
BIMBO’S FIREWORKS
Open all year
He spreads a map over his steering wheel. This road came forty-five miles off the interstate. He pays and follows the roped-off trail, stands looking at the cliff dwellings as the guide explains which was the steam room, which compartment stored food, which housed secret rituals, where the women were allowed to go and where they weren’t, why they died off before white settlers ever arrived, and the impossibly straight narrow paths which connected them directly to other cliff dwelling cities and even now were still visible from the sky, spokes on a wheel converging on their religious center.
Two Guns United Methodist Church
Sunday Worship 10 a.m.
Visitors Welcome
She doesn’t even know how long she’s been sitting by the side of the road. The car shakes when the semis go past. Sometimes she can see a face turned toward her for a split second. The last time she went behind a rock to pee, she found three big black feathers with white tips. Now she’s holding one, brushing it lightly over her face. Her eyes are closed. Somehow the scent of the feather is faintly wild. When she returns – in a year, two years, five years – in heavy sleep long past midnight but long before dawn, he’ll never know any time passed at all. Like so many nights before she left, her footsteps will pad down the sidewalk. The nurse who shares his life will long since have put on her white legs and horned hat and gone to the hospital. Using the key he made for her, which she still carries on her chain, she’ll let herself in. Move past the odor of hairspray in the bathroom. Drop her clothes in a heap in the doorway – simple clothes she’ll easily be able to pull on in the moments before she leaves him. Then she’ll stand there, listen to his body resting. Watch the dim form of him under the sheet become clearer. She’ll crawl to the bedside, lean her elbows and chin on the mattress, his hand lying open near her face. She’ll touch his palm with the wild feather, watch the fingers contract and relax. Until his hand reaches for her, pulls her into the bed and remembers her. She opens her eyes and squints although dusk has deadened the glare on the road. Slips the feather behind one ear. She doesn’t remember which direction she’d been going before she stopped here to rest.
The music channel hadn’t had any music for a while. She sat up, stared at the screen, counted the number of times either the interviewer or musician said man, lost track quickly, changed to the weather station, turned the sound down. She massaged his shoulders and back, each vertebra, his butt, his legs, the soles of his feet, each toe. He said, I’m yours forever. Said it into the pillow. Anything you want, he said. She lay her cheek against his back and watched a monsoon, palm trees bending to touch the tops of cottages, beach furniture thrown through windows. He had rolled over and was looking at her. His eyes looked almost swollen shut. Anything, he said. She looked back at the screen, yachts tossed like toys, roofs blown off, an entire pier folded sideways along the beach. She said, I’ve never been in something like that.
He pinned her wrists in just one of his hands, hurled her face-down. She was open and ready as though panting heavy fogged air from her cunt, and he slammed himself in there, withdrew completely and slammed in again and again. With each thrust she said, Oh! And he answered when he came, a long, guttural cry, releasing her wrists to hold onto her hips and pump her body on his cock.
They lay separate for a while. Now, she said, hold me . . . with both hands. Hold me like something you’d never want to break. Tomorrow I’ll drop you off at the nearest airport.
SPECIAL PERMIT REQUIRED FOR:
Pedestrians
Bicycles
Motor Scooters
Farm Implements
Animals on Foot
He’ll set the car on cruise control and they’ll each climb out a window, pull themselves to the roof of the car, to the luggage rack. Their hair and clothes lash and snap in the rushing wind. Dawn has been coming on for hours. The sun may never appear. The sky behind them pink-gold on the horizon, bleeding to greenish, but like wet blue ink straight above them. She’ll unbutton her shirt and hold her arms straight up, lets the wind undress her. They’ll take turns loosening their clothes and feeling thin, cool rushing air whip the material away. Bursting through low pockets of fog, they come out wet and sparkling, tingling, goosebumped. They’ll slide their bodies together, without hurry and without holding back, no rush to get anywhere, saving nothing for later, passing the same rocks, bushes and fenceposts over and over. As the car leaves the road, leaping and bounding with naive zest, they’ll pull each other closer and hold on, seeing the lovely sky in each other’s eyes, tasting the sage and salty sand on each other’s skin, hearing the surge of velocity in the other’s shouted or breathless laughter, feeling the tug of joy in their guts, in their vigorous appetites. The sky still deep violet-black, the dawn still waiting, the car still soaring from butte to pinnacle to always higher peaks.