AS PATSY HAD FEARED, Jim wanted to make Phoenix in one long drive. Their alarm went off at two-thirty A.M. It woke Jim, but Patsy, improvident as ever, had read late and was sleeping unusually soundly. The alarm didn’t faze her. Jim dressed in the dark and made two tiptoe trips down the stairs loading the Ford. While he was peering into the back end trying to be sure he had everything, a light came on in the kitchen window. When he went back in, Roger was at the stove fixing breakfast.
“Sorry if I woke you,” Jim said.
“Oh, it’s might near mornin’,” Roger said.
Jim really wanted to be off, but since breakfast was already half cooked he felt the only polite thing to do was eat.
“Patsy not going to eat?”
“I’ll be lucky if I can get her awake enough to walk to the car.”
“Well, I never cooked her no eggs, anyway. She don’t care much for my fried eggs.”
Jim ate hurriedly, restless and anxious to be off. He was always anxious at the start of trips, even routine trips, and the trip coming up was not routine. Roger sipped his coffee and watched him thoughtfully.
“Well, I hope you get some good photos,” he said. “Seems to me like a long way to go just to take pictures of bronc riders, but then I’m ignorant as a bat about such things.” He got up and stood by the stove a minute staring indecisively at the skillet of bacon grease, trying to calculate whether it was worth saving. Finally he set it in the oven.
“If I had to go to rodeos all summer I’d have to take a room in the loony bin by the fall,” he said. “Never knowed a rodeo cowboy who had any sense. If you-all meet any, bring ’em by sometime.”
Jim carried his plate to the sink and hurried up to wake Patsy. She slept lightly except on those few occasions when he needed her awake, and then she was all but unwakable. Jim pulled her upright and sat her on the edge of the bed, and she sat there sound asleep in a green nightgown, her head lolling over like a child’s. When he finally got her half awake she stood up and stripped off the nightgown, dropped it on the floor, walked over to the bureau, and put her head on her arms and stood there nude, asleep.
“Come on, sweetie,” Jim said. “We’ve got to go.”
Patsy turned reluctantly and found her bra but had difficulty getting it on. She got her breasts in their cups and stood groggily in the middle of the floor, one snap fastened and her arms behind her back. She stood for almost a minute before Jim noticed her.
“Oh, damn,” he said. “Hurry up. Please fasten your other snaps.”
“Why are we leaving at midnight?” she asked. “I just finished reading.”
“It’s not midnight, it’s almost three o’clock.”
“Just as I thought, midnight,” she said and collapsed in a warm sleepy heap on the bed, still clad only in her bra.
“Get up, Patsy,” he said grumpily, his patience slipping.
“You’re grumpy with me,” she said, her face hidden under her hair. “Why are you grumpy? Come and make love to me for eight hours while I get some sleep. I don’t want to go anywhere tonight.”
Jim pulled her up a little roughly and pleaded with her, and she woke up, irritated. She shoved him away. “Get your grumpy hands off me,” she said, going into a short frenzy of activity. She grabbed panties, blouse, and shorts and strode off to the bathroom to brush her teeth. In a minute she was back, dressed, and grabbed her book and purse and foam rubber pillow and stumbled down the stairs.
Roger and his old nondescript dog Bob were standing by the Ford in the faint moonlight. When Patsy saw them she pitched her stuff into the car and went over impulsively and hugged Roger. His brown shirt smelled of starch and tobacco.
“I like your house,” she said. “I wish I were staying here. Thank you for being nice.”
“Bye, honey,” Roger said. “If this vehicle falls apart call me and I’ll come and get you in the pickup. Old Jim can hitchhike back.”
“I wish he’d hitchhike away.” She got in the car, settled her pillow by the window, and went back to sleep. Roger peered in at her a little anxiously.
“I don’t believe she’s awake good,” he said. “You sure she’s all right?” Going off without breakfast was to him a shocking act.
“She’s fine. Thanks for letting us stay. Maybe we’ll get back by in the late summer when our travels are over.”
“Hope so,” Roger said. “Me and Bob will be here, if neither of us don’t die. I guess I’ll go in and drink some more coffee. It’s too early to milk and too late to go back to bed.”
When Jim circled toward the rattly cattle guard he saw Roger going in at the back door. A mile from the house, when he turned onto the highway leading to Vernon, he could still see the light in the kitchen window, as visible as a star in the darkened country. A coyote loped across the road in front of him, his eyes golden in the headlights. He ducked under a barbed-wire fence and vanished into the mesquite.
On the edge of Vernon, Jim pulled up at a cafe called The Big Rig. A thin short young man was leaning against the wall of the cafe, a small traveling bag at his feet and a pile of rigging beside it. He was a rookie bronc rider named Peewee Raskin.
“How y’all?” he said, coming over. “That’s timing for you. I just waked up.”
Peewee was friendly, informative, and broke. Jim had met him three days before and had taken a liking to him and promised him a ride to Phoenix—a promise he had not mentioned to Patsy. She was not very hot on the idea of going to Phoenix, or anywhere where there were rodeos, and he knew that presenting her with Peewee in the abstract would only lead to argument. Peewee in the flesh was harder to resist. They stowed his gear in the back end and Peewee managed to worm his way into the back seat through Jim’s door. He eyed Patsy dubiously. “Snoozin’, ain’t she?” he said, settling himself between a pile of dresses and a cardboard box full of paperback books. He had spent the night in a horsetrailer behind the cafe and smelled of hay and horse manure. When they drove off, Jim left his window down, hoping the smell would blow away before Patsy woke up. As soon as the car started moving, Peewee leaned his head back against the seat and went to sleep, his black cowboy hat covering his face.
Jim angled southwest, driving a steady seventy-five. Though it was quite a bit farther, he wanted to go the southern route, through El Paso; the shorter route, through central New Mexico, held no attraction for him. He drove in darkness for more than an hour, then it was gray, then brightening. As he turned more and more westward the rising sun came up behind him and shone in his rear-view mirror. The country was still and dewy, the fields freshly plowed, and the pastures white with mist. He passed a cluster of oil wells, with a little pumper’s shack just down the road from them, the pumper sitting on his front steps with his socks in his hand, scratching his shins. Patsy was curled in the seat, her face hidden, goose bumps on her slim legs. The sun was well up before she awoke. She yawned, sat up, reached in her blouse to readjust a breast, and hooked a finger inside her shorts to scratch herself.
“Sleeping in cars makes my clothes feel too tight,” she said, looking vacantly at the morning country. “If there are johns in towns in this part of the wasteland find me one with a john, would you?”
“Big Spring will have one.”
Then Patsy caught a whiff of Peewee and turned and looked at him with astonishment. His only visible feature was his open mouth—the hat obscured the rest of his face. His belt buckle was also visible, a huge silver oval with a ruby-eyed steerhead for ornamentation.
“Hey,” she said. “We’ve been invaded by a cowboy. What treachery is this?”
“He was broke,” Jim said. “He barely has the money for his entry fees. I thought we’d give him a ride.”
“Gee, he’s small for a cowboy, isn’t he?” she said, giving Peewee a friendly inspection. “Most of them are immense.”
“He seems to know everything there is to know about rodeo,” Jim said. “He’ll make things a lot easier for me.”
“It would make things a lot easier for me if you’d hurry up and get us to Big Spring, chum.”
When they stopped she hurried off barefoot to the rest room, swinging her black purse by the straps. Jim got out to stretch his legs, had a Coke and went himself, signed the credit card slip, and sat in the driver’s seat fidgeting for five minutes before Patsy emerged looking no different than she had when she went in. She got herself a Coke from a Coke machine, dropped a penny on the driveway and followed it leisurely until it stopped rolling, went and got herself a package of cheese crisps from a candy machine, chatted and laughed for two or three minutes with an attendant in a green shirt, and ambled happily back to the Ford, sipping her Coke and still swinging her purse.
“Got a nickel?” she asked cheerfully. “I want some gum and all I’ve got left is some pennies and a twenty.”
“I’ve got some gum,” Jim said. “Come on and get in. The rodeo starts tomorrow.”
“What kind of gum?” she asked.
“Spearmint.”
“Give me a nickel then, please,” she said, reaching in her hand. “I want some Dentyne.”
Jim only had a quarter in change, so he gave her that and she ambled back and leaned against the water cooler, looking at the sky and idly combing her hair while the attendant finished gassing up another car. Then she got some change, bought her gum, and skipped quickly back.
“Sorry,” she said, biting open the cheese crisps and blowing the little tip of cellophane out the window. “Can’t stand Spearmint.”
Peewee had slept soundly through the stop, but the minute they started moving again he woke up and his hat fell over into the box of paperbacks. Patsy felt a little shy about him but she knew that Jim was annoyed at her for her laggardly qualities and she welcomed something to distract her from his annoyance.
“Hello,” she said, turning around and smiling at Peewee. She saw immediately, once his hat was off, that he was too young to be shy about. He had short reddish brown hair and a slightly crooked nose. He looked about sixteen.
Peewee smiled tentatively. He was blinking and trying to get the sleep out of his eyes, and it took him much aback to be spoken to at a critical juncture in his waking. And the girl who had spoken was so pretty that he just wanted to stare at her. Her eyes were merry and gray, and she had a straight nose that wrinkled a bit when she smiled, and her smile was merry too. She wore no makeup but she had a comb in her hand and now and then ran it through her black hair.
“I’m Patsy,” she said. “Very pleased to meet you.”
“Uh, yeah,” Peewee said, feeling very, very shy. He wished he was tidier and tried to tidy himself a bit, but his canvas bag was in the trunk and there was not much he could do except try to tuck his shirttail in better. Patsy kept looking at him, her chin resting on her arm, which was across the back seat.
“Peewee Raskin,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“What do you do, Peewee?”
“Uh,” Peewee said. For a moment he was honestly unable to remember what he did.
Patsy saw that he was struggling to collect his wits, and she politely looked at the road for a minute to give him a chance. Somehow he looked like a likable person, irresistibly hopeless. Jim was driving with iron concentration, determined to make up for the few minutes he had lost at the service station. He knew it was ridiculous, but despite himself he couldn’t help making schedules and straining horribly to keep them. Patsy couldn’t stand schedules and was glad Peewee had turned up in the back seat. They could make friends.
Peewee soon recovered himself and was glad when Patsy looked back at him again. He took up the question of what he did.
“Uh, I rodeo,” he said. “Much as I can afford to, anyway. This here’s actually my first year to be a pro. My folks thought I or-tent to a turned pro yet but I figure the younger the better, you know. So I done it.
“I ain’t actually won no money yet,” he added apologetically.
“Oh, well,” Patsy said, stretching. “I bet you will any time. What do you ride?”
“Bareback horses,” he said. “Try to, that is. I ain’t actually stayed on one yet, either. These pro horses they’re a different pot of beans from them amateur horses I was used to.”
“My goodness, how complicated. I didn’t know there were professional broncs.”
“Aw, yeah,” Peewee said seriously, warming to his subject. “You got to learn ’em, you see. Study ’em, I mean, so you know what to expect. Like the other night I drew this old red horse and the boys told me I ort to take a short rein so I done it an’ the ol’ son of a bitch, uh, the ol’ so-an’-so stood on his head and yanked me off flat of my face.”
Patsy giggled, delighted with him. He was not only hopelessly hopeless but hopelessly genuine too. “Those boys probably misled you on purpose,” she said. “You shouldn’t take advice from your competitors, should you?”
Peewee looked at her blankly, as if the idea that he would have competitors had never occurred to him. In truth, it had never occurred to him that anyone would regard him as competition.
“Aw, they wouldn’t have needed to do that,” he said. “I couldn’t have rode the old son of a bitch anyway.”
Patsy noticed that he was fidgeting—he had a look of discomfort on his face. He kept shifting the position of his legs.
“Are you too crowded back there?” she asked. “I’m sure we could cram some of that stuff into the luggage compartment.”
“Uh, no, I’m just fine,” Peewee said, still squirming.
He gazed out the window as if he had some inner pain, and Patsy felt perturbed. He was a very likable boy. One of his front teeth was chipped and his blue Levi shirt was at least a size too large. Watching him squirm, it occurred to her that in all likelihood his problem was the one she had had before they got to Big Spring: a full bladder, pure and simple. She was at once less perturbed, thinking he would mention it when they came to the next town; but in time they came to the next town, Midland, and passed through it, and Peewee didn’t mention stopping. Jim had begun to chat with him, quizzing him about rodeo and rodeo people, and Peewee answered lengthily and fidgeted and looked stoically out the window. Patsy grew worried, then annoyed. He was plainly not going to do anything to interrupt Jim’s ridiculous schedule, even if his bladder burst, and it probably would if something weren’t done, for there was no telling how far Jim would drive before he stopped again. If they got beyond Pecos without stopping, Peewee was doomed. The longer she thought about it the more annoyed she became. There she was again, involved in the workings of a cowboy’s bladder. It was ridiculous. But when she looked at Peewee she found she could not be angry at him. He was obviously a person who would never amount to anything, and who knew it, and who had only his friendliness with which to face the world. The way he tried not to look at her too much flattered her and made her feel nervous and strangely powerful. He was probably only keeping quiet about his bladder through fear of offending her. She began to feel responsible for him. He was a child in her keeping, virtually. Jim was the one who was infuriating, for he should have anticipated the problem, or asked Peewee, or simply stopped himself, through common consideration. He was very insensitive. He had no awareness whatever of other people’s bladders. It had been all she could do to get him to stop for her own.
She grew more and more fretful and squirmed a bit herself. It had been a fine cool morning, and she had really been very happy to be going on an endless drive, and the cheese crisps and the Coke had been exactly what she wanted for breakfast, and Peewee had been a nice surprise—up until the time when he needed to pee. But it was all getting spoiled. She grew angry at Peewee too. If he didn’t have gumption enough to speak up, he deserved to suffer. Then they reached Odessa, passed the first stations, and he was still silent. Patsy abruptly decided to act. She was tired of suffering the thought of him suffering.
“Pull into that station, please,” she said, pointing dictatorially.
“Why?” Jim asked, surprised. “We just stopped in Big Spring.”
Patsy had put on her shades, and she looked at him imperiously from behind them. “True,” she said. “We stopped in Big Spring. Would you mind stopping again please? I have to do something.”
Her tone left him no choice, so he braked hastily and swerved into the station. Patsy got out at once and strode to the rest room. The service station men looked at her hostilely when they saw they did not intend to buy gas. She waited in the rest room a minute, her bosom heaving with annoyance. Peewee’s boots tapped by and in time there was the sound of a toilet flushing from the other rest room. Then the boots went back to the car. She waited another minute and went back too, her head down. Jim was drumming his fingers on the wheel. In the back seat Peewee looked content and comfortable and grateful, but she wanted none of his gratitude.
“Thank you very much,” she said to Jim. “I hope this excessive stopping hasn’t destroyed your career.”
“Used to like outside Odessa,” Peewee said. “Nice little town.”
Patsy ignored his cheerfulness and Jim’s silent, somewhat quizzical annoyance and turned and bent over the back seat to fish in the box of paperbacks. She fished out A Charmed Life, which she had bought only a few days before. Peewee was looking at the books curiously.
When she bent over to reach down into the box he had not been able to help looking down her blouse. All he had seen was the strap of her bra and the hollow of her shoulder, but it was the kind of glimpse that was infinitely tantalizing, and he quickly looked at the books in order to cover himself. There were a great many books, it seemed to him.
He picked one off the top and stared at it with surprise. It was called The Decipherment of Linear-B. He had never seen a book with such a title, and he stared at it silently. Patsy looked back at him again, still stern, but her sternness soon broke down. Peewee pushed his hat back on his head and stared at the book with innocent fascination, as if it were an unknown species of lizard. He looked so stunned and funny that she immediately remembered he was a child in her care and forgave him his modest reticence. She had also seen him glance down her blouse and felt slightly flushed.
“Read that?” she asked, grinning merrily again.
“Read it?” Peewee grinned too and grunted a little, pleased that she was friendly again. “No, ma’am,” he said.
“Now look, call me Patsy. If you’ll call me Patsy we can be friends and talk about literature.”
“You read many Westerns?” Peewee asked, determined to do his best.
“Not many. I read Destry Rides Again when I was a little girl. Are there many good ones?”
“Uum,” Peewee said. He was still looking askance at The Decipherment of Linear-B and glanced in the box of books as if he had suddenly discovered he was sitting next to an unknown mineral that might well give him radiation burns.
“I don’t reckon there are many good ones,” he said humbly. “I mean, they’re mostly the kind of books I read. Westerns. If you read books like this here, whatever it is, then you probably wouldn’t never think a Western was no good.”
“I don’t know. I like all kinds of books.”
“Why would there need to be something like this here?” he asked, laying the book carefully back in the box. “It makes me glad I quit school when I did. I ain’t got the brain power for such as that.”
Patsy started trying to tell him what it was about, but she hadn’t read it herself—it was a relic of Jim’s flirtation with linguistics—and Peewee looked at her so raptly that it annoyed her a little. She soon broke off her lecture. It had grown hot and they all three gave themselves up to the boredom of a long desert drive. They lunched on hamburgers and shakes under the worn green awning of a drive-in in Pecos, and edged on west through the afternoon. Patsy read idly in A Charmed Life, stopping from time to time to look out the window at the bright empty country. It brought back the vacations of childhood. Every other year her parents would decide to go west and would bundle her and her sister Miri into a Cadillac and spend two or three weeks hurrying between scenic spots while the girls read comic books or Nancy Drew mysteries and waited irritably for the Grand Canyon or some other redeeming wonder to appear.
As the sun sank, it shone more hotly into the front seat, and Patsy slipped for a while into a sweaty doze. When she awoke she had a momentary sense of bewilderment and disorientation. It seemed strange that she should be in such barren gray country. If she had any sense, she reflected, she would be in a cool bed in Connecticut, having a tremendous love affair with someone sensitive—someone who would never be likely to have anything to do with Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona. But then Jim smiled at her fondly and she realized that such a fantasy was even more unreal than the locale—it was not her at all. She felt sweaty and tired and nothing seemed clearly the right thing to do.
“Couldn’t we just stop in El Paso for the night?” she asked.
Jim looked slightly weary but shook his head. “Peewee needs to be there in the morning to get entered,” he said.
She glanced around at Peewee and found that he had been exploring in the paperbacks again and had come up with Sexus—a fat red paperback and one of Jim’s recent purchases. She hadn’t read it and wasn’t especially eager to, but it was obvious that Peewee had never read anything like it in his life. He was holding the book about four inches in front of his eyes and seemed to have stopped breathing.
“You’re getting ahead of me,” she said. “I haven’t read that one. Is it pretty sexy?”
Peewee was stunned. When he opened the book he had forgotten everything. He had a terrific erection and when he saw Patsy looking at him he became horribly embarrassed, for he was sure his condition must be obvious. He dropped the book at once and tried to look out the window as if nothing had been happening, but his throat was dry and he had a hard time breathing.
“Uh, yes ma’am, it’s kinda racy,” he said.
“Patsy. Not ma’am.”
“Oh,” he said. “Patsy.”
She felt cramped and sat with her back against her door, her legs on the seat, the soles of her feet pressed against Jim’s leg. There was nothing to do but watch the distances, gray and wavery with heat, and so endless.
“God,” she said. “I had forgotten this desert. Couldn’t I just fly from El Paso and meet you gentlemen in Phoenix?”
“Sure,” Jim said. “No problem about that. We can drop you at the airport as we go through. You’ll have to change clothes, though. We’ll find a station.”
But when they arrived in El Paso three hours later and Jim asked her if she still wanted to fly, she shook her head. She did not like to do things alone, and it made her feel a little low to think that Jim was so obligingly going to let her fly. Another four hundred miles of desert with Jim and Peewee was a lot better than a pointless night alone in some motel in Phoenix.
“You would just put me on a plane, wouldn’t you?” she said.
“Why not? You’re grown. You have a right to fly to Phoenix if you’d rather. I know it’s boring poking along in this car.”
“You’re just glad to get rid of me because my rest room habits aren’t to your liking,” she said sulkily, looking at the bare brown mountains behind the town. “Somehow I’ve been offended. Probably if I went on a plane you and Peewee would scoot right over to Juárez and carry on with women of the night. I know your types. Marriage vows mean nothing to you.”
Peewee listened open-mouthed, amazed. She looked back at him sternly and he shut his mouth. He decided he had made some horrible mistake. He should not have let her see him reading that book. Clearly she had figured out that he had had a hard-on.
Jim was in traffic, an annoyance after the open desert, and he was not at all impressed with Patsy’s shift of mood. “Oh, for shit’s sake,” he said. “You’re ridiculous. You brought up the airplane. I wouldn’t go to Juárez and you know it.” But it had crossed his mind that if Patsy flew, he and Peewee might make Juárez for an hour, to rest themselves from the road.
Late afternoon depression fell on Patsy like a hot quilt and she felt ready to cry. “Don’t say things like that to me,” she said. “I’m sure they embarrass Peewee. You don’t love me. All you do is yell excretory words at me. I was pretty once, until you robbed me of my youth.” Tears ran out from under her sunglasses and she wiped them on her palms.
“If you don’t go to Juárez it’s because you’re chicken,” she said. “Any man in his right mind would dash right to Juárez the minute he got rid of me. You’re both men of no spirit. Stop at that drugstore.”
She grabbed her purse and went running into the drugstore crying, and Jim sat nervously at the wheel and tried to explain to Peewee that it was probably nothing serious, just one of Patsy’s little fits of depression. Peewee was terribly worried and nervous and had already decided never to accept another blind ride involving a wife. He racked his brain for some excuse that would allow him to get out and hitchhike to Phoenix. Patsy was beautiful but altogether too scary.
“Don’t look so worried,” Jim said. “She does this sort of thing all the time. She’ll calm down.”
“What’s gonna happen to us before she calms down?” Peewee said. “That’s what’s got me worried.”
Patsy came striding back out of the drugstore carrying a number of boxes of Kleenex in her arms. She dumped them on top of the paperbacks, glowered briefly at Peewee, and sat down.
“Drive on, you wretch,” she said. “I’ve decided to accompany you, even though I’m not wanted. Wither thou goest I might as well go. At least I’ve got some Kleenex now. I intend to cry a lot.”
“You’ll go, but you’ll bitch about it,” Jim said, driving on.
“I’ll bitch if I feel like it, of course,” she said. “Have you ever been married, Peewee?”
“Me?” Peewee asked. “Who would marry me?”
He said it so simply, with no trace of self-pity or melancholy, that it made Patsy stop feeling tense. There was always someone with a problem worse than hers. She wiped her eyes with a Kleenex and smiled back at him, and he looked at her with bewilderment and relief. They were curving west out of El Paso, with the thin winding Rio Grande visible in the valley to the south.
“Why, you look very eligible,” she said. “You could use a shirt that fits but other than that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get married and be as miserable as everyone else.”
“All I can do to get a date oncet an’ a while,” he said, sure that he was being flattered.
“What do you do when you aren’t riding professional broncs?”
“This an’ that. Work in fillin’ stations.”
The sun was lowering, dropping more rapidly toward a horizon far into New Mexico. The face of the great bare mountain to their right, El Capitan, was shining from the late sun, and the desert around them was cooler and more fragrant as the evening came.
“I never had a job,” Patsy said. “I wonder what one would be like.”
“You never?” he said. “You don’t look like you have, now you mention it. They ain’t so bad, most of ’em. The best one I ever had was in Houston.”
“Goodness. That’s where we live when we’re home. What did you do there?”
“Drove a little train. It’s over by the zoo, in Hermann Park. We lived in Houston a year. None of us ever liked the town much but I liked drivin’ that train. It just goes around the park, you know.”
“I know. How strange. I ride it all the time, or every time I go to the zoo. Maybe I rode it while you were driving it. Wouldn’t that be odd?”
“Shore would,” Peewee said, grinning at the thought. “We couldn’t take that humid weather so we all moved back to the plains.”
“Let’s eat in Las Cruces,” Jim said. Peewee’s talk of jobs made him strangely envious. All his jobs had been arranged by his father and had been with oil companies owned by his father’s friends. He had never felt that he could have gotten any of them if he had been applying strictly on his own merits.
They ate in the coffee shop of a large new motel, with red leatherette booths and fancy trays of syrups and jellies on each table. The place had a large plate-glass window; as they ate they watched the sun go down. Peewee had two cheeseburgers and Jim had a steak that was mostly gristle and Patsy had soup and a not-very-fresh salad and some rolls and butter; her legs were chilled from the air conditioning. When they left, the gray horizon had turned purple. As they drove away from Las Cruces, darkness came across the desert to meet them. The afterglow faded, there were taillights ahead and headlights coming and a swish from cars they met and a solid shock of air when they met one of the huge trucks. Before they reached Deming both Patsy and Peewee had fallen asleep again, Patsy on her pillow, Peewee under his hat.
Jim felt fresh and drove easily. After a bad stretch of dippy road they entered Arizona and he could drive faster. He could not see the scattered mountains, but he knew they were there. Patsy shivered. He rolled his window up and lost himself in fantasies of himself as a photographer. For a time the road went through a valley, through little towns that were asleep and scarcely lit, and when he rolled his window down to freshen the air he smelled alfalfa fields. Once, just outside a little town, he saw some people walking on the shoulder, and he slowed and saw that they were Indian teenagers walking home from somewhere. The boys were fat and wore cowboy hats, and the girls wore sweaters and clumped together. Off the roads he saw lights, but very low to the ground, as if they came from tepees or little huts. The lights were scattered along a gentle slope. Except for the teenagers, it was a little like being in the Old West for a moment, the scout slipping past the Indian encampment. The strange low lights were eerily beautiful, in contrast to the teenagers, who were eating Popsicles and throwing the wrappers on the ground.
He had driven over six hundred miles and, except for an interval or two, had not felt tired, but not long after he passed the teenagers an unshakable fatigue hit him, and hit him very quickly. It tugged at his eyelids, slowed his feet on the pedals, made the roadway seem very familiar and his own speed quite natural and safe. He knew how such tiredness worked, and the second time he nodded and jerked awake he slowed and eased down a steep shoulder to park on a level place by a barbed-wire fence. He pulled a jacket and a cotton blanket out of the heap of clothes in the back seat, spread the blanket over Patsy, covered himself with the jacket, and went to sleep at once.
In a little more than an hour he awoke and got out of the car to piss. He was stiff and cold and felt like driving on. The moon had risen over the valley and the clear desert sky was pale. In the moonlight he could see the dark bulks of mountains across the valley to the north.
When he started the Ford and drove up the slope of shoulder Patsy almost slid onto the floor, and the blanket slipped off her. She woke up and looked about in bewilderment. “Dumb fool,” she said vaguely and then scooted over by him and cuddled against his shoulder. It was quite cold. She turned around and fished in the clothes until she found a red cashmere sweater of his that she liked to wear. She tugged it on and snuggled against him again, nuzzling her face beneath his arm, almost into his armpit.
“What’s the appeal of my armpit?”
“Warmth,” Patsy said. “My nose is cold.” She covered her legs with the blanket and leaned her head against his shoulder, silent but friendly. When they curved up into the Superstition Mountains Jim slowed down and drove carefully, not fully trusting his reflexes. Patsy was still awake when they dropped into the flat desert east of Phoenix and saw the lights of the city brightening the sky.
“Please get a place with a swimming pool,” she said meekly. “If I’m going to have to sit around all day by myself I want something to dip my toes into. It won’t cost much.”
“You deserve that much,” he said. There were times when it was necessary for him to pretend he didn’t have almost a million dollars of his own, and it was one such time.
He pulled into a station to gas up and get a city map. Patsy got out and stretched and took a quick walk around the block, although it was almost two A.M. The air was cold and the dark sky very liquid. The sweater felt good; her legs were cold. When she was coming back to the station he saw Peewee standing at the curb looking down the wide empty street. He had his rigging and his canvas traveling bag and had tucked his shirttail in neatly. When he saw her coming he began to kick his bootheel against the curb.
“Where in the world are you going?” she asked.
“Might as well hitchhike on out to the grounds,” he said. “Ain’t no use in you-all going out of your way. I sure am much obliged for the ride. Hope I get to see you agin while we’re here.”
“Of course you will,” she said. “Don’t be so humble. Will anyone give you a ride this time of night?”
“Somebody’ll come along,” he said. “Always have.”
“He insisted,” Jim said when she was back in the car. “You scared him back there in El Paso.”
“How could I have scared him?” she said. “I didn’t do anything unusual.”
They drove down Broadway, the wide main street, rejecting block after block of palatial motels and settling finally on a modest stucco court with a small swimming pool. The manager had gone to bed, but cheerfully got up to register Jim. Patsy got out and walked across the gravel drive to stand by the water, which was bluish and lit by only two small lights. There was an old pool umbrella with five or six iron chairs grouped around it.
The room was modest and also poorly lit. The green bedspread depressed her and the green tile in the bathroom depressed her more. But whenever he was starting a new enterprise, Jim would have them poor for a time, and there was nothing to do but make the best of it. It was his one inflexible policy. Just as her spirits were sinking she caught an abrupt glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror and pulled them up again. For a girl who had just traveled seven hundred and some miles, she looked okay, and she marched back out to the car to get her purse and her suitcase, determined that no cheap motel was going to control her spirits.
“Whee, we’re starting a new life,” she said cheerfully when she came back in. Jim was yawning, more tired than he would admit. He had brought only his cameras in. Without answering, he went back out to lock the car, and Patsy went in the bathroom to test the hot water. All the same, the life didn’t feel so new. She made the shower drip and held her hand under the drip until the water got hot, wishing there was a bathtub. Behind her she heard the springs of the bed give as her tired husband sank upon it, and when she went in to get her gown he was asleep, the bed light right in his eyes. Some new life, she thought, but then he had driven all that way without any help and with her bitching at him, and she went over and took off his loafers and turned the bed light out before she went in to take her shower.