You woke up startled in the high-contrast autumn dawn, to the patter of rain on the car’s sheet metal roof.

It was loud, and sounded like dry rice being poured into a cheap pan.

Below you, the continuous rolling growl of the engine.

All of the innumerable variations of sleep do have one thing in common: you only know you’re sleeping when you wake up a little.

Even lucid dreaming, that’s true.

And lucid dreaming might not be a bad way to understand how you made your way through the world.

You were neither sleepwalking nor merely lucid.

And especially then, at seventeen, you were sensual perfection at its most muted.

Bent up in the backseat, your faded jeans had twisted at the waist.

Your knees ached.

You needed to keep stretching just to keep still.

You pulled your scratchy green army coat up close against your freezing cheeks, and you couldn’t tell, but maybe the smell of motor oil had saturated your jacket more than it had the rest of the car.

*

James did all the driving.

Tall and bony; and his black hair hung chin-length, a little longer in the back.

Dennis sat shotgun, maybe awake.

Stocky and dusty blond, Dennis had the chin of a five-star-general and wide sideburns cutting down close to the edges of his face.

Both men were silent.

You didn’t know their names yet.

Waking weird, the time warp of sleeping in motion, you thought it could’ve been Oklahoma already, maybe even Arkansas.

You were in a place where the roads go straight ahead.

Tall antennas scratched up into the low sky like robot trees among the other various species of trees planted alongside one another.

Cattle stood dumb among the sparse white flowers in the black field.

The metal machinery in the mud was painted beige to camouflage it in a desert landscape.

You figured this was probably only Texas.

*

You’d driven all night after driving since the morning before, about twenty-two hours since taking off from Santa Fe.

The sustained silence had a cumulative effect: that total loss of short-term memory that comes hard from looking out a silent window.

Every singular moment of the continuous hours had its own immersive display: The meander and warble of the beams in unison with the curves of the dark road; a long series of barns all built in a similar style each collapsed differently.

Every time you passed a harshly-lit low billboard, the blankness of your own expression, reflected faintly on the window over quivering flashes of the moon, stunned you.

Your mind, so flipping and agile, was somehow hidden behind such a dull gaze.

Like any one bubble within a foam, each instant of those silent hours expanded until it burst.

And finally, the dissipating hours lifted like a mist.

*

Waiting for each of your senses to knock back into position, it took you a long while to adjust to being conscious again.

Everything ached.

Everything fuzzy and throbbing, the silent hours had buried your voice, internalized you.

You understood their silence – the men’s – the momentum of their daze.

When you met them only two days before, or one day maybe, as travel days smeared into one another, their shared daze spooked you a little.

But in a way you found it charming.

You sat up, goose bumps up your arms and throat clenched.

Cracking that silence, you told them simply, you said – It’s cold in here.

But its shell – The Silence – had hardened layer upon layer each minute that had passed.

The men had both retreated too far down inside themselves to return quickly to the surface.

You understood they weren’t exactly ignoring you.

You let your remark dangle.

They both remained blank.

It’s freezing in here, what gives? – You said.

Dennis sighed.

Being friendly, at least cordial, seemed to come more easily to Dennis.

Maybe he had shallower depths to return from.

James was able to blink, but that was it.

Dennis glanced over his shoulder at you, but turned back toward the road ahead before speaking. – No heat. Slows it down.

Jesus Christ. – You said. – You guys are something. You know that?

Using your fuzzy purse as a pillow, you laid back down, pulled your jacket back up around your ears.

The rain shook on the glass, clinging together in tiny splotches.

You closed your eyes, your sense of time passing obliterated, you didn’t know for how long.

And, though hypnotized by the whiz of the road passing under you, you didn’t – couldn’t – fall back asleep.

*

You sat up and massaged Dennis’s shoulders.

Gripping hard, you felt his flannel shirt slip and bunch against muscle.

But even after so many hours silent and still, he didn’t acknowledge your touch with so much as a flinch.

Looking at James in profile, you kept at it, massaging Dennis’s shoulders.

You kept at it like you didn’t notice Dennis not noticing you.

I’m hungry. – You said, easing up on your grip and petting his shoulders to smooth down his shirt.

We’re stopping soon – he replied. – Gotta pick up that piston.

How soon? – You asked, your palms flat on his shoulders.

I don’t know. – He said. – Two, three hours.

Suppressing a sigh, improvising a fake yawn, you laid back down and flipped around backwards on the small seat, attempting some variation in your bend.

All you wanted was to settle your hip somewhere in-between, away from all the lumps and bolts scattered under the thin, torn foam.

*

You had been on your way to the Grand Canyon with some guy, or you were supposed to have been.

He said you’d get there.

But he kept pulling over to the side of the road and getting stoned so much that you two weren’t going anywhere.

You didn’t know him enough to know if this was how he always was.

His hearse-looking truck painted psychedelic – a flat, contained design on a black-steel field – was impossible to get comfortable in.

Sitting around roadside in the beating sun, he’d paw at you.

Crowd you.

Even with all his talk of openness and freedom, he’d crowd you.

And since leaving New York, you’d been so relieved to not think about how you looked.

The same big gray T-shirt didn’t need much washing.

Your red hair was thick, and playing with it enough to prevent it from getting matted was all the styling you felt necessary.

But, smoking so much weed in such tight quarters with this guy, the paranoia kept creeping up on you.

In some diner’s parking lot, he slept sitting up in the driver’s seat.

With a dusty thud, you threw your heavy bag to the gravel.

He kept the passenger-side door shut by tying it closed with a rope.

You dealt with that and climbed out.

You picked up your bag, and threw it through the open window of this denim-blue, souped-up ’55 Chevy parked next to you.

*

Not just Not-Flashy, The 55 had been stripped of all decorative markings, transformed into austere minimalism.

Without ornamentation of any sort, its matte finish and its shape, all slow curves, were strange as a shark.

The only conspicuous modification: a big odometer, you guessed, bolted to the dash, which appeared filched from a submarine’s control room.

You stowed-away quiet in the backseat, small and alert, waiting to see who’d step out of the diner and get in.

It had to be someone cool.

If they weren’t cool they wouldn’t have a car like that.

Two guys a little older than you, Dennis and James, approached, motor oil smeared into their torn clothes.

Dennis got in first, shotgun.

He looked at you but turned away quick and remained silent, without even a shrug or blink of acknowledgement.

Dennis glanced to James as James climbed in, but James didn’t even look at you before pulling off, still silent – no hello, not even a look of surprise.

None.

Dust blew up into thick, lingering clouds behind the car.

*

Finally, resituating your weight after sitting some minutes, you had to say – Hey it’s really bumpy back here.

Neither of the men responded or even glanced back at you.

They were silent, eyes on the road.

What kind of car is this anyway? – You asked.

Silent, eyes on the road.

Up against their silence, that paranoia that you’d hoped to ditch back with that psychedelic truck came swelling up again.

Maybe they really hadn’t seen you.

Maybe you’d been smoking so much, maybe you really had become invisible.

You’d know if you didn’t exist.

Wouldn’t you?

Assuming you did still exist, if you hadn’t faded and they could still see you, what kind of guys wouldn’t even acknowledge you with a nod?

– You guys aren’t the Zodiac Killers, are you?

Dennis half-spun around in his seat and smiled.

His eyes kind, he held his gaze on you a moment.

He said – Just passing through – as if that answered your question.

And he turned back to the road ahead, the road as if projected up on a screen.

Staring straight ahead, the three of you sat silent in the car’s immersive roar.

Which way we going? – You asked, simplifying your line of questioning.

The men had to at least acknowledge that you were moving.

East. – Dennis said, without turning around.

And though you’d grown up in Long Island and this drift of yours began when you left New York City only the year before, you responded – Cool.

You didn’t know why you said it, why you lied, but you said – Cool, I’ve never been East before.

*

Pulling into Santa Fe, the men had three hundred racing bread, and twenty to spare.

You had nothing.

Dennis not only did all the work, even most of the heavy lifting alone, but he also navigated whenever the car pulled into a town.

None of his directions gave you any reason to believe that he had any more knowledge of Santa Fe than James did.

Apparently he navigated by no greater authority than his own hunches.

But still, James submitted to his authority.

*

In the touristy, old city center, among generations of Mexican women with their hand-spun carpets and beads, you felt yourself the center from which various overlapping mud brick patterns uncoiled.

You passed the afternoon’s dwindling hours asking the arty old squares and families, milling about, for spare change.

Though you’d picked up the habit out of necessity, you enjoyed it: approaching strangers, meeting people and disarming them with immediate kindness, humility.

You told people that you needed a bus back to San Francisco. – I got sick and had to use the allowance my parents gave me.

*

Shortly after dark you met back up with the guys to cruise the drive-in.

Rolling slowly through the lot, Dennis mumbled narration.

– A ’70 Camaro

– … A ’68 Barracuda

– … Some muscle here

– A ’32 Ford with a Four-Twenty-Seven …

– … Eleven-inch rubber in the rear.

Even at a crawl, the growl of The 55 must’ve been intimidating.

People watched you pass, hushed.

His voice no louder than his breath – All we got to do is roll one. – Dennis said.

Moving right up into the middle of things, James parked and you all got out.

A few people gathered around The 55.

– Chevy block Four-Fifty-Four, four-speed trans, double-headers.

*

Demonstratively not-in-a-hurry, sly, you three meandered.

With challenges and taunts in codes, his voice a modest drawl, James knew how to provoke a race.

The most you had ever heard him speak:

– Not bad for homegrown.

– Gee Mister, must be pretty quick.

You fell in easily with those two.

It wasn’t alarming to imagine having to sleep with either of them.

Maybe they reminded you of your brother, but not too much.

Even as much as you enjoyed watching them, set apart like an audience by the conclusive fact that you had no idea what they were talking about, you still felt a part of their gang.

And you liked the idea of anticipating how fast something was only by looking at it at rest.

All at once, you understood in your gut why fast cars are sexy.

The same gaze translates.

The same gaze considers a body at rest, its parts as parts, and how these parts all come together with unified intent, imagining the body’s performance.

All suspense.

All potential.

*

James worked a local with a catfish-looking mustache up into a rage.

And so they would race.

The entire lot formed a parade out to Airport Road, the last mile a dramatic crawl.

Its streetlights dim, the dark road was lit by headlights alone.

Parked, people scurried and stumbled around The 55, headless unless they bent down into the beams.

Without faces, only their subtle uniforms were visible.

Everyone wore one of the same couple cuts of jeans, but matching patches clarified allegiances.

A crowd gathered around for The 55’s transformation.

Obviously part of the performance, moving symmetrically, James helped Dennis disassemble the car’s extra weight with a silent, complex choreography.

The hood unhinged behind the front wheel, low next to the door.

The trunk, a flimsy metal sheet, lifted off.

Some trusted third-party inspected the cars and held the money.

The cars in position, the yellow stripe of the road stretched ahead in their beams.

You liked the smell of the oil and peeling rubber.

The roar of the engines drowned out all sound that the excited crowd might’ve made, made everyone pull close to shout into each other’s ears.

The smoke, low on the pavement, made the crowd appear as if in a dream and faraway.

Through this cloud, the organizers blinked their flashlight-semaphore language.

And as the cars passed them, the people all fanned out across the road in a unified motion like a wave or a flag clapping in the wind.

*

You liked Dennis and James.

Compared to the put-on of the street-racer greaser-slicks they faced, the depoliticized Panther-cool of all those hot-rod types, not only James in his wool turtleneck, but even Dennis in his denim jacket appeared humble, if not frumpy.

The racing consumed them, the driving and the racing.

Most of those other people seemed to just be into the fashion of racing.

You could tell the difference.

*

Pulling back into the old downtown late, the guys agreed to splurge with the prize money and get a motel room.

You rarely even thought about wanting money anymore, and had become accustomed to plenty of discomforts.

You didn’t want to owe anyone anything.

But you were happy to share their room.

James jumped out of the car at a red light.

He stared weird at you, lingering at the open door in the middle of the street as the light turned green.

Dennis slid across the bench to the driver’s seat.

You stayed in back.

James said he’d check out a couple bars.

Wound up, he felt like sitting alone in a crowd.

Said he’d walk over to the motel later.

Stepping past mannequins in the Woolworth’s lit-up windows, his silhouette was strange, lanky past decapitated heads in the hat store’s display.

*

You’d been considering which of the guys you’d prefer to make it with.

But as long as you were all three hanging out together, you thought that maybe it wouldn’t happen.

Symbiotic as the guys may have been, they never gave you the impression that they were kinky with each other.

That night you didn’t particularly feel like balling. You were tired.

And of course you hadn’t recognized the unspoken code between them, but you were a little bit relieved that the guys had negotiated which one of them would split and leave the other one alone with you.

Choosing would’ve been the most exhausting part.

You probably wanted James to compete for you, angle himself strategically against Dennis.

But you understood that not competing had more to do with the guys’ relationship with each other than it did with either one of them and you.

Maybe you would’ve liked to be desired enough to make James risk something.

But that was probably only your conceptual desire.

In actuality, you hardly felt much preference either way.

So maybe it was just that the men had decided you were Dennis’s for the night without even consulting you, but once you were alone with Dennis you felt you probably would’ve preferred James.

The thought of you with anyone else …

*

You two were clumsy getting started.

That’s not uncommon.

Silent, Dennis laid spread out on his back on the bed, his eyes on the cracked plaster ceiling, never even turning to look at you.

After all that noise, the entire day and night before and all that morning with the rumble of the engine and the whir of the road, with downtown’s crush of tourists and the radios among the crowds at the race, the silence of the motel room hit you hard.

It felt oppressive, like every little move you made was too loud and clumsy.

Dennis was sticky with sweat and oil.

And you didn’t know what the hell was on his mind, what with that stupid, bemused smirk all the time.

His stupid default expression: vacant smirking.

It got weirder the more it remained.

James did all the driving, travel and racing, so you guessed that maybe Dennis got some kind of satisfaction just being the mechanic, which, maybe you thought was maybe kind of mysterious or interesting.

Sprawled out in his dirty clothes over the comforter, he never even looked at you.

You unpacked, did some light organizing.

The tap of drawers closing and the whoosh of the curtain’s rings against its rail were clunky loud.

You flinched when your arm brushed against the greasy patterned curtain.

Dennis looked dirty, like anywhere that his body folded he would stick to himself.

He moved to one side of the bed, lay with his hands behind his head as you undid the bedding at the other top corner.

It was a tricky bed to get into, layers of sheets and blankets to unfold just right.

He’d un-tucked his T-shirt from his jeans before laying down, but tucked it back in when he hopped up to help you fold back the bedding.

You both remained silent.

You wondered if you would hear James at the door when he arrived.

*

Driving, until you stopped in Santa Fe, you’d flipped back and forth being comfortable or not with their silence.

It’d creep you out.

You’d sing to yourself in the backseat.

Then you’d appreciate the silence for a while, how tiny the codes between the guys could shrink down to.

That intimacy of habit, that was interesting to watch.

But at the motel, Dennis might have been cute, but if you were about to screw him, that silence made you uneasy.

Not suspenseful and in no way a turn-on, it only made you uneasy.

A good romp, you felt, especially the first time with someone, it was all about communication.

Standing there, the blankets folded back, the silence thickening between you two, panicking, you considered voices: a persona to slip into, some litany of swears, filth to loosen him up.

But that wasn’t your style.

Communication didn’t mean playacting.

And you’d never had any hangups.

That was the thing about you that people liked.

You didn’t hold back or flinch or compromise, and you put up no false fronts.

And you made your openness appear effortless.

But without the bluster of the engine and the woof of the wind, Dennis’s silence felt amplified.

Overlapping waves of crickets chirped outside.

Finally, pressed together chest-to-chest, next to the bed, you kissed him.

There was an audible smacking of lips.

The least gasp or sigh you might let slip would crack through the whole motel like a wail.

You licked at his lips, your fingers through the back of his hair.

No louder than a breath, you moaned.

You hoped that maybe after a strained minute, your sounds might become involuntary.

Your voice in your chest might climb up into your throat, you hoped, and rupture with a squeak.

And with his calloused hands slow and steady on your lower back, the back of your neck, he smirked that stupid smirk.

*

On your back crossing the desert, sprawled out in the lumpy backseat, peaks of sandy jagged stone rolled past, cutting against flat blue sky, framed by the window and the ceiling.

In New Mexico the telephone poles go off and just keep going.

A poster of an afro’d toddler-angel taped to the backseat crinkled against your side.

However weird and quiet the guys had been the day before, driving all day, you expected that by that morning, and leaving Santa Fe, they would’ve gotten over it.

You didn’t realize that the silence was a shared state between them that they returned to each morning, hitting reset.

*

You said – Why can’t I ever sit up front? What is this anyways, some kind of masculine power trip? I’m shoved back here with these goddamn tools.

You’d been swapping rides constantly and even when a stranger sometimes welcomed you with a hint of menace, that was still at least showing you the respect of some special attention.

Even the playful mocking of your voice, which happened all the time with new people – it always shocked people how low your voice was – at least that was something, an acknowledgement of some kind.

These guys just remained silent.

You seemed to be tracking the surface of some well-lit moon.

You were bored.

You said – Screwdrivers and wrenches don’t make it for me, you know?

Ignoring you, Dennis turned to James, said – She’s not breathing right, might be the jets.

James nodded.

Dennis continued. – We’ll need bread to do a little work on the carburetors and check out the rear end.

I don’t see anybody paying attention to my rear end. – You said.

You thought you were being pretty funny.

But still they ignored you.

Neither of them even smirked, zero acknowledgement that they’d even heard you.

You told them that you had to take a leak.

They’d have to consent to that.

Such a request required specific action.

They opened the car up for a short sprint, Dennis listening close to the engine and James wanting to get a sense of its feel.

After all, it was a car made and optimized for sprints, not marathons.

Something must’ve been iffy, the stress of the race the night before, maybe something with the engine.

You didn’t know what Dennis heard or what James felt, but they pushed it to full throttle, then let the car rest a few times before pulling over.

*

Pulled over on the side of the road, Dennis fooled around with something, a “foul plug” under the hood.

You and James sat in the dirt between brushy little splotches of dead grass.

Across the road and up ahead a little ways, a fossil of a blown-out tire curled like a thick rubber ribbon.

It was the first time that you and James had ever sat alone even for a minute.

The flat heat and vast silence between you two was strange after a couple days around each other all the time.

Like the shock of the motel room the night before, the desert’s silence was made deeper by following the holler and bump of the wind and the engine.

You wanted to ask who owned the car, but didn’t.

He stared at you.

In the distance, a thick blue stripe of rain appeared darker than the blue around it, angling between the ground and a cloud only halfway up into the sky.

*

Dennis the vacant stud executed his perfected touch with such grace.

Practiced but intuitive, he always knew the exact right pressure to apply.

Confident that he would never not find work, his simple skills added weight to his unconscious step and unthinking extra inches whenever he’d spread himself out in any shared space like a man far taller than he actually stood.

He took it for granted that his big unwashed balls must’ve smelled sweet as chocolate.

And you felt this complete lack of self-reflection made him as much like some animated meat in the world as a man.

And you liked that about him.

It was exactly this quality that elevated him to such a state of perfected masculinity.

He would never pause for even a second, even if he was uncertain of his next required action.

His pace would never fail to fall in synch with the scamper and breeze of the forest, the drift of the West’s wide open or the multi-planed acute rushes of the unrelenting city.

Like a thick, throbbing five-foot-six penis on two feet, a collar cinching under its head, his mellow bump through the world stood up noticeably and cracked a smile only when noticing this same walking-genital quality in someone else.

And then he would smile, because for him, this recognition was a liberty granted: his fundamental simplicity justified.

*

James told Dennis to turn off the radio. – It just gets in the way.

You scooted behind James in the backseat and squeezed his shoulders.

Recoiling, he glanced at Dennis and told you that he likes the tension in his neck.

He’s not going to stop even to eat.

He said he’s – Gonna keep the hunger on.

Both men stared straight ahead.

You wondered what it was that any of you was projecting on to the road.

It wasn’t some Freedom.

You were all three too tied to the road to romanticize it like that.

And you always carried condoms with you.

That was the one discipline that you never let slide.

With a dull ache in your abdomen, you kept an eye on them and they never glanced back at you.

You reached down and stuffed a sock down into your panties.

*

You sang to yourself in the backseat, and neither of the guys seemed to notice or mind.

You’d driven a long way the day before to get to Santa Fe, but it never occurred to you and you never got the impression that you were particularly in a hurry.

You had no idea or expectation either way about heading out on the road the next day, continuing east or not.

Having witnessed the car sprint the night before, you assumed that these guys drifted from sprint to sprint, following hunches or whims in no particular hurry, a meditation on America.

It never occurred to you that in between sprints, they were in some kind of marathon and that this marathon that you hadn’t even realized was happening in the background too big to be seen, somehow grounded everything.

The marathon’s course unified the car and James’s mind and Dennis’s body all into pure drive.

The sprints, it turned out, were only possible because they existed within the marathon.

And the marathon itself, though meaningless, granted some semblance of meaning to its participants.

*

The experience of travel, the drift: people don’t think about it, but sleeping anywhere, whenever, that’s the lesson travel really teaches.

Life without pattern.

Eight-hours-a-night sleep and sixteen hours waking, that’s an exception.

It changes you to be up for two hours and then sleep for one, over and over through each twenty-four hour cycle.

It has the cumulative effect of living a fifty-sum-day-week, each morning’s alarm and each night’s last call separated by no more than the shock awake into some sudden small town or rest stop, and the stumble to the next quiet spot.

Sleep under a chipped-paint table in the back room of a café for an hour; or sleep leaning cheek to hot glass sitting up shotgun in a parked car; sleep in the shade of a statue in the park.

Driving, the only continuity.

And maybe you’d grown immune to the smell of oil.

The car had come to smell sweet, like your three bodies combined, like overripe nectarines.

*

Pulling into Boswell around dawn, the white noise and blur of the rain so severe, you didn’t know how long you’d slept for.

Boswell what? Arkansas? Oklahoma?

The slam of the car door woke you, surprised to find yourself in the unfamiliar car – a GTO.

His shoulders hunched, Dennis shuffled away from the car.

He’d been driving while you slept shotgun.

And your neck cramped from the weight of how your head had hung.

You were parked behind The 55 in front of a gas station under a small covering not large enough for the GTO to also fit under.

Warren stood out front, the gas station not yet open.

Stuck in the rain, bouncing on his toes, he greeted Dennis – The men’s room is locked.

Dennis shrugged and blew into his cupped hands.

With light steps through the rain, lifting his knees high to keep his fancy boots from the mud, Warren jogged over to the other side of the building to check for another restroom.

*

Dennis had looked under the hood of Warren’s GTO on the side of the road the night before.

The rain had died down for a bit and, sharing hard-boiled eggs and scotch, Dennis performed the check-up in the beams of The 55.

He diagnosed that the GTO needed some repair and agreed that you’d all wait with Warren in Boswell.

You figured you must’ve been up the whole night.

The dense rattle of the rain swaddling your thoughts so tightly, you felt awake within a dream.

You could hardly breathe with the need to stretch, move, walk.

But the rain, near blinding and immersively loud, kept you seated shotgun: stretching your neck, tapping your knees.

Inhaling deep, you lift your chest and hold it, hold it.

And exhaling hard, your chest falling slowly, you mimicked sleep’s breath.

But the superficial prompt couldn’t stifle your restlessness.

Across the driveway, the abandoned bench of a truck’s backseat left out in the rain was soaking.

The garage door was left flipped up, tools in plain sight.

Dennis would’ve known what to do with them.

You wouldn’t know where to sell them.

And finding the second restroom also locked, pulling at the door and cursing, Warren turned and peed on the side of the garage, one arm flung over his head against the building’s gutter overflowing down on him.

*

Warren was older, probably even over forty, older than some of your friends’ parents.

He dressed particularly: a tight sweater over a butterfly collar and tight chinos.

You thought that he must be rich.

Seen through wet glass at daybreak, his face – features puffy, a big shiny white overbite – you knew it was in your head, some hypnosis of sleeplessness and the drone of loud rain, but his face seemed warped like the view at the corners of a fish-tank, disproportioned and cubed against its curves.

Dennis ducked into the backseat of The 55 and dug through the toolbox.

Screwdriver in hand, he jogged across the street.

Turning back around after zipping up, curious, Warren ran along behind him.

You needed to pee badly too, but were apprehensive about crouching in some wet bush in the cold.

And you didn’t feel like putting on a show, or pulling a wadded up bloody sock from out of your pants.

Down on one knee in the mud at the back of an abandoned car across the street, Dennis removed the license plate with a few quick, efficient gestures.

Warren stood over him watching, his posture taut and shivering in cold rain.

You really just wanted to fall back asleep while waiting for the gas station to open, but you knew that needing to pee so badly, you’d never be able to.

Your chill was so severe, it made the need to pee even worse, but also made you dread stepping out to pee even more.

Finally you had no choice.

Mustering your will, you stepped out, took a couple long steps and crouched between piles of wet tires.

You balanced yourself with one hand up against a rusted bathtub thrown up in a bush and discarded at a sloping angle.

How you would’ve loved a bath then, not just to warm up, but for time alone.

Your muscles might actually unclench.

Dennis and Warren trotted back across the street, hunched against the cold, eyes down against the rain.

Neither of them noticed you.

You dug the bloody sock down into the mud under the bushes.

Dennis crouched at the back of The 55 and quickly replaced its plate with the one he’d nabbed across the street.

You guessed that maybe Dennis must’ve owned The 55.

So strange, that shared responsibility: the car, the only possession either of the guys seemed to have.

*

That bathtub thrown up into the bush that you had leaned against, tilted a little and gave way under your weight when you started to stand.

You fantasized for a second about flipping it and letting the rain fill it up.

Freezing, you were about to jump back into the GTO

But at that moment Warren walked over to The GTO, grabbed his flask from the trunk, and got in the driver’s seat.

You didn’t have it in you to nod along to one of his ridiculous monologues. – I get to one side of this country and I just bounce right back across like a rubber ball.

– Hard pull, zero to sixty in seven-point-five.

You just wanted, just needed to sleep.

Warren emptied his flask in one long pull.

He didn’t blink.

He looked terrified of the horizon.

You hesitated, lingering between the piles of tires and the wet bushes.

You liked the idea that our moods serve to help us distinguish ourselves from World.

The shadows lightened on the small town main street in the early morning rain.

You didn’t know where you were: Oklahoma? Arkansas? And this guy?

You’d jumped in with those two, James and Dennis.

Jumped in the souped-up, optimized-by-way-of-reduction ’55 Chevy in Flagstaff.

This geezer Warren in his GTO appeared out of nowhere with his stupid dare to race.

Out of nowhere, as everyone always does or everyone always has.

Long Island to San Francisco, you thought, and back again and again.

*

With a deep sigh, Warren stepped out of the car and returned to his trunk to grab another bottle.

James emerged from the driver’s seat of The 55.

His stringy hair stuck to his face in the rain.

Trotting like a deer, he peeled his light shirt, now wet, away from his ribs.

He approached Warren, who was standing at the open trunk.

– You seen her around?

Warren looked confused. – Who?

The girl, you know, Bird, whatever her name is.

No. – Warren shook his head and looked irritated to be asked something so inconsequential compared to the troubling issues on his mind.

– You know where I can get a plate? I don’t wanna be left out in the cold, you know what I mean? I don’t wanna be from out of state.

James turned and hands on hips, his focus concentrated and distant, he looked around.

You ducked down a little between the tires and the wet bush.

He didn’t see you.

Warren got back in his car.

Sitting up straight, he tilted the bottle that he’d pulled from the trunk to refill his flask, careful not to spill it in his lap.

He dropped the now-empty bottle in front of the passenger seat, and took another steep pull from the flask.

*

You watched James march off into the old downtown, looking for you.

With drooped shoulders and his head hanging, bashful about his height and his hair always in his eyes, he had a way of moving in quick, tiny stutters.

While his shoulders slid smooth along a plane, the rest of his humped posture bounced.

Like laundry hung in a man-approximation and sent on casts down the line, he looked like a scarecrow with an appointment to make.

So you understood the bad first impressions James always seemed to make.

Seemed no one ever met him and took any kind of instant liking to him or even treated him friendly.

He had a way that triggered people’s suspicions quick.

Even Warren, immediately obnoxious as his constant bragging was, it was obvious that he had receded completely into the folds of his bruised ego, you couldn’t fault Warren for his overcompensating.

But against James, people’s defenses went up as soon as he appeared.

It could be just the shadowed recesses of his eyes under those severe brows.

He was certainly the only person you’d ever met that upon first meeting you thought – “Wow, what an intense skeleton he must have.”

Seemed everyone he met had his or her own unique variation of that response, and that was enough to put everyone on defense.

And it didn’t help: that dry skin of his.

His chapping, pale and layered, it made you itch just to look at him.

But mostly, honestly, it was that stare.

*

James looked at people as if he was trying to project his own mind into the skull of the person he spoke to.

You knew it when he was attempting to do it to you, so it didn’t work.

But you recognized the shift in his focus.

The dilation in his eyes was a real material shift, however contrived the fixing of his stare may’ve seemed.

When you’d been the focus of it, you squirmed, wanted to shout – Just drop it. OK? It doesn’t work.

And of course even as you wiggled out of it, he’d insist that he had no idea what you were talking about.

But you knew better.

You too had a stare, and you too kept your hair in your eyes to hide it.

You knew when you were turning it on or off, so you knew that he knew too.

In those couple days, you’d already witnessed his stare a few times, and it was the worst when you stood as a third party witness to it.

Because when you watched him doing it to someone else, then, from the outside you could see what was actually happening and how it really would – should even, couldn’t help but – work.

Not the mechanics of it, you didn’t see that – laserbeams or anything.

But it was equally as real.

His eyes, projectors as much as receptor-cones, did shoot when focused with specific aim, especially if the person on the receiving end was vulnerable, open to it.

His mind, like a beam received, could – should, couldn’t help but – fill the skull of the other person like smoke, first finding the furthest parameters and outlining for itself how far it could extend, then increasing not in range, but in density within the established space of the hosting skull.

And in that way James attempted to throw his own mind like a ventriloquist into the heads of those he met.

Only thing was, he just wasn’t good at it.

He could do it a little bit, and did, and that was something.

But you’d never seen anyone fall for it.

He never approached anyone or started conversations.

But people along the way, roadside or in some small towns, people would be friendly.

An auctioneer in an old plaid suit, an old man with a greasy scalp, counting out his pennies, or teenagers in bikinis at the lake-side beach with cans of beer, anyone – everyone James came across, five seconds or less into conversation with him ended up shaking their heads.

Looking away, rattled and annoyed, no one could name exactly why they were all so impatient to end any conversation with him.

And James would shrug and saunter off.

He’d have to wait to meet that whoever, that anyone, susceptible to his mind-operations.

A failed Rasputin, he drove and drove.

You imagined he must’ve thought the road a beam his own gaze projected ahead of The 55 to skate along.

*

James did have a nice smile, actually, though it appeared only when he had the good sense to laugh at himself.

For other people, his thin lips remained reserved mostly for minor scorn.

His generally passive sense of himself in the world remained aloof.

But, like daylight seeping through the cracks between boards in an old swamp shack, he did, Thank God, laugh at himself easily enough, aware of his inability to even smile about anything else.

Nothing else was meaningful enough to him to actually be funny.

And this self-awareness must’ve been at least some minor variation of charm.

Dennis on the other hand, his simple utility, his pure gendering, was the sum of his attractive qualities.

Of course you understood such an attraction contradicted any true potential Dennis and you could ever have for any meaningful connection.

But he did make you laugh when you’d have a moment alone.

Playful, he’d act out ironic romantic promises or big gestures of affection, a squeeze of your hand after ignoring you all day, a hand to your lower back as you passed through a doorway, always with a cynical smirk.

Like a wink – Isn’t it pretty to think so?

*

At that gas station that morning in the rain in Boswell, James acted like your babysitter or your boss, heading off on a mission to hunt you down.

You were just about to get back into one of the cars.

You thought maybe Warren would have a razor you could borrow.

But then you overheard their conversation, and James’s tone of voice with Warren.

And you saw that stare that he planned to keep aimed right on you.

As much as you didn’t like the look of that town, as much as the little roads shooting from it did not appear promising, you knew you had to split.

You didn’t want to get back into either of those cars with any of those three.

You dreaded equally: James’s stare, Warren’s hammy stories, and Dennis’s confidence, each a variation of attempting to pin you down.

Dennis was sound asleep, a snoring pile thrown back on the bench in front of the gas station.

In the GTO, Warren looked straight ahead off into the distance, unblinking.

No one was watching, so you didn’t say anything.

You weren’t sneaking off, but it didn’t seem necessary to announce your departure.

The rain relaxed into a drizzle.

You seized your opportunity.

*

You grabbed your bag from the backseat of The 55 and started off in the opposite direction from where James had headed, quickly cutting over a block so he wouldn’t see you if he circled back.

Tired as you were, dazed even, it still felt good to walk, to work out the cramps in your legs and your neck.

The morning air felt cool, refreshing.

Kicked you awake a little.

And that familiar rush of heading towards whatever happened to happen next, that thrill overtook your exhaustion.

*

But Boswell’s decay had no charm to it.

Two empty buildings stood side by side, but most of the buildings were set far apart from each other.

People did live in these little buildings, and their lives, their symmetrical senses, opposable thumbs, and numbing loneliness were just like your own.

But that confidence the white steeples and TV antennas pinpricking the distance gave them, a confidence they couldn’t even recognize that they possessed, that must’ve made their minds different enough from yours.

How could they not be a different species?

The sun came out in wide beams, cutting bright through the drizzling gray, and making all that peeling, glistening wet paint look eerie.

Every surface in the town – fences, garages, abandoned storefronts – curled up to reveal the colors, the layers of painted-over pasts hidden underneath.

You didn’t like it at all.

You didn’t like that town in Oklahoma or Arkansas, Boswell, or wherever one bit.

You didn’t see anyone.

Not a single person moved about, but you still knew what everyone in that town must’ve looked like, every one of them: big glasses with glares hiding their eyes, gap-toothed and missing teeth, thin greasy hair.

No thank you.

You didn’t need it.

You didn’t need their crummy spilled-Coke-sticky-puddle-ant-trap-powder-poison of a town one bit.

You considered turning back and at least sticking with those guys long enough to make it out of town.

*

Warren, like some stupid, rugged character-actor from a hundred Westerns, he said things like – You know I’m not afraid of winning this thing and taking that car from you.

And James, perpetually sighing like some kind of arrogant balladeer proud of his turn of phrase, would keep his cool and respond simply – Well, I’m not afraid of you winning either, man.

And Dennis, always on the cusp of a smile like some ditzy beach bum, would nod.

You had to get away from those guys.

Boswell Lanes, Boswell State Bank.

The rain had died down almost completely.

Your big army bag slung over your shoulder, you walked off through the few blocks of the old downtown.

Early, nothing had opened yet.

On a brick building with a screen door, the screen door reflecting pale yellow on the slick pavement, old posters crinkled in the tapping rain.

Daylight thunder boomed as you looked over an abandoned theater, its marquees empty except for tangles of dust blanketing burnt-out bulbs.

Two old men swept the sidewalk in front of the café next to the feed store.

*

Not far out from downtown at all, past the last rusty trailers, the pavement ended.

You trudged on, the gloppy mud unavoidable, the sun beating.

You wondered if anyone from the city can ever see bales of hay and think of anything besides their own impression of how the light changes on them over the course of a day.

Further on but not much further, you passed the last of the splintering telephone poles.

You considered turning back for real.

Endless fences on both sides; one small section on the left had been repaired and looked newer than the rest of the wire.

Near a dried-up pond, train tracks were bent up mangled.

The sun hot and high, it might end up early afternoon by the time you could stick your thumb up for a passing jalopy.

But you kept walking.

In the distance, faintly, an engine, and you thought for a second, hoped, it might be The 55.

Maybe James had come to find you.

But it wasn’t.

Just some farm machinery way off in the fields, couldn’t even see it.

Wanting to collapse, needing sleep so badly, you walked on.

The heat started wearing you down.

Such muscle atrophy, you couldn’t shake images of boiled meat falling from bone.

Recognizing no advantage in succumbing to this image, you kept on without accepting it, replacing it instead with a conscious blockade in place.

You visualized a wall wrapping around your head, keeping out all fear, all dust and heat, and harnessed the fight to stagger on.

But the dust – or maybe it was pollen, as all the dirt was mud, but something was in the air and it tickled the back of your throat.

The sustained feeling of being about to sneeze, and never sneezing.

Some dryness hung in the air, this grit like a swarming itch waiting only for you to stumble into it.

Deep thirst and the choking: that was enough.

You had to admit that you’d gotten yourself into some new kind of mess and once again, had no one to blame at all, but yourself.

Shit.

You had done something stupid.

You flopped down, cross-legged on the shoulder of the road, wiped out.

Nauseous with the need to sleep, your muscles clenched in defense, your head pounding with the charge of exhaustion, your neck, you moved to sit on the purple stump of a tree.

It felt petrified and its thick roots were knotted like lint.

Thought you heard the growl of The 55 in the distance again, but it never approached.

Far off in the fields, a siren was tall above a tower.

*

Sustained travel with no ends except for the travel itself, really did essentially amount to nothing more than the constant battle against one’s own sleeping patterns.

Using your bag as a pillow, that same smudged bag that you’d thrown on the ground of puddled public restrooms, you’d sleep, your arm thrown over your face to block out the light.

Every nap lasted as long as the circumstances of the opportunity allowed.

The rare full night’s sleep would throw the whole next day off.

How many continuous hours awake is a full day supposed to be?

Traveling partners afforded this to each other: two hours for you here, on the bench behind that building, on your back, knees lifted, then I get a shaded hour here in the grass.

Partnered, any moment without direct sensory stimulus you could tilt over.

But alone, you had to keep your own lookout.

*

Finally, you found yourself immersed so you had no choice but to accept it.

The familiar long hours of silent staring: strung-out and jittery, cramping along your ribs and your shoulders clenched, your peripheral vision slimming and your stare locked into hard.

Yourself in the world, always somewhere and always the same: somewhere new, and hunger.

Awake in the dream, a big part of it, that feeling of waking up somewhere new, the roar of the road leveling all the landscapes that you zoomed through into a sustained hum with minor bumps, that singular experience – no present.

No present: there was only the mulling over of the past or the resolve, it felt so real in the moment, of exactly how differently you’d live your life when you had the chance to return to it – if you ever could really arrive somewhere.

Thing was though – the big question, once the dream-state and that sense of no-present had been going on so long that you couldn’t even remember the other side of it – how did you know when it was time to return to your life?

You didn’t know when it had even begun, the dream-state and that sense of no-present.

So many cars you’d ducked in and out of, so many strange men, the hammy pinky-meat of each of their little fists clenching the wheel.

There was the persistent sense that the dream-state of the drift was not real life.

Your real life was something to be returned to, eventually, when you knew all at once that the time was right, the time had come to snap your gaze from the hypnosis of the yellow stripe of the lane in the beams.

Was it a childish dream to imagine maybe James would come bumping down this road to find you, save you, bring you anywhere?

And what about when the dream-state itself seems to have become real life?

*

From your bag you took out your small collection of photos and articles that you’d cut from magazines: Mick Jagger shirtless in a long scarf, Paul Newman brooding in a gray crewneck.

Since you were a little girl, you’d always been fixated on glamour.

Maybe the exceptionalism of the stars seemed like a positive version of your own alienation.

If you could achieve that lifestyle someday, maybe your own isolation would be pacified.

On the flipside of a photo of dead-eyed Jim Morrison was a strange picture that you’d never noticed before.

You couldn’t make out what the mechanical maze-like form was.

There were two complete sentences, two possible captions.

But the way that the piece had been cut from the paper, you couldn’t determine which caption described the photo.

Either: The Intel Corporation’s first commercially viable ‘microprocessor.’

Or: After a record-breaking twenty-four days in space, three Russians cosmonauts were killed when their capsule depressurized during their descent.

*

It reminded you.

You remembered the crackling sputter of a newscast when you were a kid.

–‘I see the earth. It is so beautiful.’

– These were the first words ever spoken from a man in space when Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history today at the age of twenty-seven.

– His spaceship, the Vostok One, orbited the earth for eighty-nine-and-a-half minutes.

You never forgot those words: I see the earth. It is so beautiful.

Except for the hair pulled back from your forehead, by 1961, by the time you were eight years old in Long Island, you already looked exactly the same.

Your stare had already developed by then, your perfect blankness.

But you hadn’t yet figured out how to best harness its power.

At twenty-five-years-old, your mom already looked tired, tired in the most expansive sense of the word.

She looked like you, like you would grow up to look: same small frame, same thick, wavy red hair.

But the same pale coloring on her, your same features on her face, that same face on her head, it all needed some smoothing at the edges, like she was you under a crinkling plastic, or a flower petal cut from rough canvas.

Your little brother would’ve been six then.

With his Naval Academy fade, his head looked big like a wobbling lollipop on his brittle, stick frame.

– When asked why Mr. Gagarin had been chosen for this distinction, his instructors described him as ‘very difficult, if not impossible to upset.’

– An old woman, her granddaughter, and a cow were the first witnesses.

The wallpaper peeled above the stove.

The radiator’s high whistle, almost silent, seemed to emanate from exactly that spot.

If your mom was twenty-five then, then your dad would’ve been about forty-seven.

Coarse hair sprouting from his ears and nose, he was jagged as a junkyard, an iceberg of a man, squeezing out at the seams of a suit two sizes too small.

*

Sitting out along that road on your own, you would’ve been happy to see your dad.

Or your brother.

As soon as that gas station opened so Warren could get his repair, James and Dennis planned to take off and find the nearest track.

And then you would never find them again.

And they’d never find you out along that road.

And who else would ever get you out of there – Boswell, wherever?

By early afternoon, noon even, those two would be a hundred miles away, walking the hot parking lot of some track, kicking tires with all the other guys, all looking under each other’s hoods, all confident and guarded.

Speaking coy, speaking in code, that’s how the races were set up and run.

Dennis and James loved their codes hidden out in the open.

Not just the simplicity of the patches stitched on jackets and the bandanas hung from which pocket and folded how, but the functional necessities were especially primed for coding.

Some rims spun better on a particular sized wheel, but were only for flash on a smaller wheel.

How much had been pared down, stripped from the dash?

This was all recognizable at a glance if you knew what to look for.

They loved how wrong someone like Warren was, wrong about every possible small choice, and how being wrong excluded him from everything that he longed to identify with.

And as much as the codes were all set up to exclude him, more than that they were rites of passage: knowledge gained and experience, instant respect shared in affirmative nods when coming across someone else who’d known to do it all correctly, someone else who got it.

*

You always remembered those words: I see the earth. It is so beautiful.

And maybe you were losing your cool.

If you didn’t focus on anything specifically, the fields were the color of singed cheese.

You probably hadn’t been out there more than a few minutes, but lugging around your own exhaustion, you just didn’t have the surplus energy to keep the panic away.

You felt it coming on again.

You had done something stupid.

No one would come down that road.

And even if someone did, you’d never want to get in a car with him.

It wouldn’t be your dad or your brother, bouncing up to lend a hand to the sloppy model far from home.

Walking off had been a real stupid idea.

James and Dennis would just say Oh well and find a track and be off, and that’d be that.

*

Maybe you could’ve walked back to the gas station and waited with Warren for his repair.

But they said it’d be simple and not take long at all.

He’d probably be gone already.

Warren didn’t even realize that James and Dennis finding a track while he got the repair was their way of giving him the head start he was too proud to accept.

By the time you got back to the gas station, if you could summon the energy to carry yourself there, Warren would probably already be stopping along some other country road outside of town, picking up some hitchhiking cowboy-businessman.

– How far you goin’?

– Oh. Just gotta get up on over to Lil’ Rock.

Unless you were already past Little Rock, which you might’ve been, but you really thought you must’ve been in just about Oklahoma.

And Warren, he just couldn’t help himself – Yep. Goin’ straight through there on my way to Virginia. CIA Headquarters. I have these papers to deliver. Top Secret.

Thing was, Warren believed his own bullshit so deeply that it might’ve all been true, in a way.

He seemed to report the world exactly as he saw it, best he could.

His storytelling and truth stretching rarely, if ever, seemed malicious.

Maybe he could only speak poetically, his metaphorical truths never impeded on by facts.

But still Warren was exhausting, undeniably, maybe more so than anyone you’d ever met, even if you could get past blaming or resenting him.

His practiced speech about the GTO – hard pull, zero to sixty in seven-point-five.

His tone clunky and his pathetic gaze worried, you doubted he knew what his words were supposed to mean any more than you did.

*

James and Dennis would be walking some parking lot in silence, as silently as they drove, the hum of the track’s crowd in the distance no different than the whir of the road.

And after a while they’d negotiate with some yokels, try to psyche them out with mind-games and James’s stare.

Each taking one side, choreographed symmetrically, they’d flip the hood open from its hinge at the front of the car, lift it off, and set it aside.

Their unified front, their telepathy: it was such a practiced performance, a demonstration of militancy.

But you knew that it’d take no more than one of them betting the tools.

The other one would have to be aware to not let his chin drop.

One impulsive, proud bet would reveal the fraud of their partnership, the enabling pretenses, unspoken, the wink implied between all partners, qualifying: partners – for now.

And maybe after a little while you would be able to get up from that tree stump on the side of the road and keep on walking.

Maybe you’d be lucky enough to find another tree stump to sit on by dusk, pull your hair through the hours, another night on defense, waiting for a car to pass, terrified of any beams that might appear.

Were you somehow lonely without those guys?

You were tough, or you were trapped?

One thing, you sure hadn’t had to fight off so many zits in a real long time.

It gets hard to keep your face clean traveling, the way dust sticks to sweat.

*

At school when you were a kid, all the desks were arranged on the cracked, old tiles in a wide half-moon.

The teacher, a middle-aged woman in layers of polyester, her glasses low on her nose, sat in the middle and read out loud to the surrounding children.

All the other kids huddled up next to her in the closest seats, cross-legged at her feet or hunched under desks.

Some stood behind her, some sucking their thumbs.

Some girls braided each other’s hair.

And, eyes closed, some kids scratching each other’s backs simultaneously, they were all always totally absorbed in her stories.

But across the room, behind a beam that allowed the teacher the pretense of pretending to not see you, you would sit alone, absorbed in your own books, reading quietly to yourself.

You thought about that beam, how you and the teacher both played along that neither of you could see the other, and how that beam allowed you to do so.

*

Dee Dee was your true friend.

Your lockers were next to each other first day of high school, assigned alphabetically.

And you were seated next to each other in a couple classes.

She was easy to talk to, snarky and rude, judgmental of everyone except you.

She was a head shorter than you, and wide.

None of the boys ever noticed her, but that never prevented her from having opinions about whose advances you should accept or reject.

She cherished her role as your advisor, and though she had a good number of other friends besides you, you didn’t really know any of them.

And she always chose you over them.

You didn’t think about her much.

When you did think about her, you were always mad that she just couldn’t understand why you had to leave.

A couple times, the last time especially, you tried to explain very carefully, best you could, why you had to leave.

And she just played dumb.

She pretended like none of it made any sense to her, but you knew that she had to understand.

She had just finally turned her judgment on you.

You thought about that sometimes, how you wished that you could call her, when you did occasionally miss her.

But you didn’t want to have to try to explain again.

And other than her, there was really just your friend the other model.

She had stayed in New York, seen the whole program through.

*

And you could see clearly how the whole thing was about to play out for you out there on that country road alone.

Maybe by dusk you might hopefully summon the will to move on to the next tree stump.

And by then Warren would be yammering on to a different cowboy hitchhiker.

– Hard pull, zero to sixty in seven-point-five.

He’d show off, make the cowboy squeal – Hoo-wee!

– Yep. That’s one thing I learned as a test pilot boy. You can never go fast enough.

Wow!

– Yes sir. This stretch of road here between my ranch in Dallas and my beach house in the keys, this stretch of road here …

And then it’d get dark.

And after dark, standing alone, cool, you knew Dennis would be watching James race a kid in a factory-built Corvette marketed to represent Speed Itself.

All that Corvette kid’s hushed friends surrounding him, unable to believe a ’55 Chevy could be so optimized, Dennis would be aware not to gloat or even smirk.

Keeping an eye out over his shoulder, waiting for a wrench to come crashing down on his skull, he’d never let on that he even realized he stood alone among a dozen rivals.

With the smell of motor-oil wafting through night air, he’d feel a stir in his bulge.

And what difference would it ever have even made to anyone that you got out of the car, walked off?

You were too impulsive and stupid to hang in there and do no more than the simplest thing necessary to continue, even if, goddamn, sometimes continuing something does seem like the hardest thing in the world to do.

*

But you were saved.

James pulled up hardly half an hour after you’d left the gas station.

He came up on you roadside, slouching halfway between the tree-stump you’d gotten up from and the one in the distance, your destination.

Seeing him approach, you stood up straight, weren’t about to let on that maybe you wanted him to give you a ride.

Maybe you’d let him give you one.

Neither of you said a word, but you knew that he’d come and find you.

You threw your big army bag in the backseat and stepped in shotgun, tired, relieved.

Not even saying hello, James spread his long arm over the back of your seat and though his chest rose and fell deeply, nostrils flared, he never even turned to look at you.

And you didn’t know what the hell was on his mind, with that stupid stare all the time.

His stupid default expression, intense glaring, got weirder the more constant it remained.

Dennis did all the maintenance, day-to-day and emergency, so you guessed that maybe James got some kind of satisfaction just being the driver, which maybe you thought was kind of mysterious or interesting.

Idle, the car knocked its loud, jagged purr.

After pulling away, you still both hadn’t spoken a word.

The 55 growled through golden dust and dry corn strange, back past the rusted-out abandoned cars and trailers you’d walked by before.

*

You were laughing together by the time you pulled over to the side of the road to swap seats.

The shared rupture of over-tired silliness startled you both awake.

But you knew it was horrible to laugh about that.

The laughter settled.

Running around the back of car, smiling, James tucked in his shirt while trotting, un-tucked it again settling back down shotgun.

Your eyes closed, his hand on yours heavy and warm, he demonstrated shifting the gear positions. – This is first, here’s reverse …

Aware of your breath quick and shallow, you said – Is this a game?

He inhaled, held it a moment.

Green shoots sprouted up tall all around, taller than The 55.

Not yet – he responded.

Shifting into first, you messed up the clutch and killed the car with a single lurch forward.

I can’t do it. – Your voice warbled high in your throat with frustration.

The growling volume of the stationary vehicle quieted all at once, faint smoke hovered.

His stiff movement and lingering pause awkward, his stare, he pulled you over for a kiss hard and sudden.

Submitting to him but slowing him down, trying to help smooth him out, you sighed.

I can do this. – You said.

You moved to the backseat together.

Your head thrown back, were you imagining opening your arms wide and tickling your face into the corn?

When could it have been that any one of those stalks had last been touched?

Each was one of many among its like kind.

After leaning on you a couple times, a weak spurt on the front of James’s jeans.

Even though they hung from your knee, it still took longer to pull your jeans back on than the act itself had taken.

Silent, James smirked at you and looked away as he tucked his shirt in.

Still, the thought of you with anyone else …

He climbed out and ran around the back of the car to get back into the driver’s seat.

*

But it was good that you made it back to the gas station sooner than later.

Dennis had moved from the bench he’d been sleeping sitting up on over to the driver’s seat of the GTO

He slept, leaning his forehead against the window.

It must’ve been Saturday: kids were playing baseball in the street.

A hillbilly in sleeveless overalls, he had a fade haircut and lurked around the gas station office, held the phone to his ear, but he didn’t say anything to you guys.

The hillbilly must’ve walked up on Warren passed out drunk, down in the dirt at the bumper of the truck parked in the garage, its license plate loosened but still connected.

James shook Dennis awake and you hopped into The 55.

The cops rolled up.

James and Dennis, before the cops even had a chance to address them, pulled Warren back to the GTO, each grabbing him under an arm, his fancy boots dragging.

They dropped him still asleep, shotgun in his own car.

Dennis driving The 55 and James driving the GTO, pulled off.

The cops followed for a block or two before James and Dennis, with a quickly shouted plan at a fork in the road, split up so the cops had to choose which car to follow.

James stopped to pick up a Carburetor Rebuild kit for a 1970 GTO

Meeting back up on the dirt road south of town, the tree stump you’d been sitting on visible in the distance, Dennis did the repair next to a horse that you hadn’t noticed before.

The corn was hard sunshine itself blooming, a brightness and life unlike the trawl of lived experience, its endless lumps and tangles and letdowns.

Other people often weren’t very interesting to you.

But then when they sometimes were, it was even worse.

It made you nervous.

After Dennis finished, the three of you pulled off in The 55, leaving Warren asleep shotgun in his own car.

*

Back in the car and resolved to driving again, it was a relief to return to the familiar waking dream, that drive that you had walked away from: the yellow stripe of the lanes in the beams.

Being unable to sleep, anywhere, never; eventually that changes you, changes your mind.

But you’d been preparing for that even before traveling.

Back in New York, before you left to begin your drift, every day happened the same.

You’d close the last bar and in the morning you’d wake up startled at first light, reviewing the previous night’s misdeeds, transgressions of empathy, and social affronts.

The review always involved your hypocrisy, how you treated other people.

Shocked to realize what a horrible person you actually were.

Every morning you felt terrible, sick with guilt, like the sun rose only to stand judgment on your late night behavior.

You flattered yourself a Good Person, kind and considerate.

This flattery enabled you through your dull afternoons, usually high and internalized.

And then drinks, usually around dark, starting a little before, and the depressants would saturate your attention the same as the darkness saturated the daylight.

And it’d be tilting through those hours that you might be around anyone or start talking at all.

And so if you insisted on flattering yourself a Good Person, so kind and considerate in the afternoons on your own, in your head, of course you had to actually be a Good Person later.

But you knew that you weren’t.

Intellectually, sometimes you thought other people made you so nervous because you just loved them so much that you could never be good enough for them, and so you had to have a couple drinks.

But you’d always been purposefully distant.

You knew that.

You kept peoples’ approaches short.

It was simple.

You’d figured that out.

You said polite things.

You always said the right thing.

But the timing told the truth.

The pauses, the bumps and stumbles of your speech patterns couldn’t hide the struggle you faced: the great effort you had to put into saying the polite thing, the right thing.

Your impulse, if you didn’t work to say the right thing, was just always to make up silly stories: a domesticated coyote you kept as a pet in the city, your private island you needed the spare change to move to.

You’d fallen into the habit of asking everyone for spare change without even realizing you’d done so.

Didn’t matter how supposedly close you might’ve been to someone.

You would be like that: purposefully distant, with whatever new boy might’ve been around a couple hours each day for weeks.

And then, even if you didn’t see him for some days and thought that you missed him, it still happened when you’d see him again.

People that you’d known your entire life, that’s how you ended up being towards everyone.

But that guilt at first light, this was how it always happened: you’d wake up startled, realizing that you had rushed some acquaintance you’d run into at one of the bars or on the street.

A fireman, the older son of neighbors back in Long Island, you were six years old when you met him and still somehow you’d run into him at least weekly, ever since moving to the city.

And he was always all-smiles, even though you never didn’t rush him.

Couldn’t he tell?

And yes, the bubbly pontifications he was always so eager to share were irritating. – I’ve figured it out. Everyone here is a little crazy. That’s what this scene, this circle, that’s what’s happening here, how we’ve all found each other.

Wow, you thought, keen analysis, Einstein.

But still, did he deserve your hurrying?

Or your building’s handyman out alone in a sharp coat, shouting over a crowd for the hundredth time exactly how to wiggle the basement key.

No one deserved to be hurried.

But you always just had to split.

Getting away from these guys, it swelled up inside you, urgent.

It was no choice, just an inevitability, as inevitable as you waking shocked at dawn, stunned with self-loathing and regret, shocked by your own hypocrisy, to realize that you were not actually a Good Person.

Back in The 55, resolved to driving again, everything simple again, you were relieved to return to the familiar waking dream, that drive you had walked away from.

You would get some sleep.

Needed to catch up quick, build a surplus.

Still, you knew you’d have to get out somewhere before they got back to the coast.

You’d left New York not knowing for certain where you were heading, or when you might eventually stop moving.

But you did know that you had no intention of ending up back there.

You were never one to romanticize your own confusion.

You only liked The Rolling Stones because of the black streak running through all their songs.

So it was only common sense to you, not Romance or Freedom, to be heading West, in the same direction the sun moves across the sky, the direction one heads towards the end of things.

*

You got a lot of work when you first arrived in Manhattan, only the year before.

In 1970 you were sixteen, feeling bashful and clumsy modeling a short coat with a fur-lined collar under hot lights.

You’d stand in perfect stoic profile until called to snap into action.

Pout and coo for the camera, kick one long leg out to show off a knee-high boot.

The photographer you worked with a lot, his hairline receding though he must’ve been only in his early thirties, dressed up too self-consciously cool to fool anyone.

You’d seen Blowup at The Cinema One, so you always felt a little embarrassed for him.

He truly thought no one would recognize how hard he was trying to be David Hemmings?

– Beautiful, beautiful. La-la-la.

He responded to your every flutter and bend with flattery.

– That’s it, just like that. Blow me a kiss honey. La-dee-dee-da.

– That’s it. There’s the attitude, let’s see more of that. Give it to me. La-dee-da-da-dee-da.

Floating a moment, you moved in half-time to the photographer’s wild waves.

The frantic sycophants and assistants were unified in the strobe of flashing bulbs.

– Shoulder up baby. Eyes over here. Look at my hand. Beautiful. Beautiful.

You followed his instructions but never responded verbally.

Especially dressed up glamorous, being the center of attention, your own voice buried low in your chest, muffled by your throat.

You were still self-conscious about your voice back then.

You saw people’s surprise every time you spoke, sometimes even with a look of pity.

Simple as it was, everything about modeling embarrassed you.

Your friend the other model, dressed identically to you, leaned against the wall.

Whispering in her ear, your modeling coach was pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of your technique.

She, your friend the other model, gave you an encouraging wink.

You slouch? – The photographer throwing his weight to one side, a hand on his hip, looked you up and down.

How tall are you? – He asked.

Five-seven.

Great. – He nodded thoughtfully.

When he smirked, it looked like a wince and made him look even older.

But you liked people that tried to smile and obviously had a hard time of it, more than you liked the easy-smilers.

When he called out – Isn’t she beautiful ladies and gentlemen – the room snapped to attention and applauded you politely.

You stood, feet spread to shoulder width and mouth agape, winded.

In an instant the room returned to its many tiny conversations.

The photographer called the modeling coach over.

At the catering table, careful to finger only the pieces you would eat, you picked from the serving dishes.

You rolled up cold cuts and, dunking them in a thick onion dip, you’d suck the dip from the end, whistling through the hollow of the rolled meat, then roll it up and dip it again.

Your friend the other model puffed on a joint and offered it to you.

You held it a moment while you finished swishing onion dip in your cheek.

You took a hit, the smoke filling your lungs, burning felt good, and offered it to the photographer with a hand signal.

He made a slouching, humbled show of being tempted. – Oh I wish I could. I’ve been getting too paranoid.

You nodded and exhaled a big cloud of smoke.

There’s some CIA shit going around or something. – He said.

You told the photographer – Last night I set my alarm for the lunar eclipse, but I didn’t really even need to because I was so excited about it I never fell asleep. I just watched the clock and got up and got dressed, and then sat and waited for the alarm to go off before I headed outside.

Yeah?

But I couldn’t see anything.

You looked him over closely, up and down.

You stepped to one side and the other, looking him up and down.

He squirmed as you inspected him.

You asked him if he had any spare change.

Unfolding a bill for you, he looked confused.

You explained about your private island, explained you were saving up.

*

As little as you knew her, your friend the other model, you were as close to her as anyone else.

She told tumbling monologues about her family.

Her daddy had oppressive expectations.

And Mommy drank on top of Valium.

There were many nights wandering to track Mommy down.

As a ten-year-old walking her bicycle to look for a passed-out shape in the shadows, she was known by name in every tavern of their exclusive little New England hamlet, its winding streets lined with tall stone walls.

Speaking too loudly in the country club dining room was shameful.

Her siblings and every neighbor had a high-power success story.

She felt the pressure.

You couldn’t relate.

So your little game you made up, you’d change the story of your family every time you answered a question about them with a terse response.

That seemed much simpler.

– That one died.

– No, that one did.

No one, not even your friend the other model, ever seemed to catch on.

*

You were all stretching in your seats in an Arkansas diner when Warren caught back up to you and stormed up to the table, furious.

Maybe he felt you’d all ditched him, though when racing it had to be expected that one car would pull ahead of the other.

Gruff, he asked Dennis if the leak was fixed in the GTO.

He asked this without at all acknowledging that Dennis had done him a favor, as if this repair was somehow Dennis’s responsibility.

You drifted through the room towards the pinball machine.

A sign hung next to it: No Dancing.

You stopped suppressing the urge to sing.

In 1971, traveling, Satisfaction, that song was always in your head.

Not like you just hummed the tune a lot, but like it broadcast from your skull.

Dazed with exhaustion and the long heat of a Southern afternoon, you’d fallen silent all day until the song emerged from you as a hum in the backseat, your breath quieter than the whir of the road.

Only after you’d hummed through it continuously for quite a few miles, obscuring any sense of beginning or end, did any of the words begin to form.

Then the guys pulled over to eat.

And it wasn’t just uniquely in your head, so maybe it was more like the song was the water that you as a fish swam through.

It hung in the air, everywhere, over everything, like everyone moved through it.

Any time anyone would sing it to themselves, most often not even noticing that they were doing so, no one else would notice that they were singing it either, because it was always just there in the background on a jukebox or someone’s humming.

Didn’t matter if you could locate its specific source at any moment.

Everyone assumed it would always just be there.

Sashaying through the room, you were singing it, singing with no intention or effort.

And once you realized you were singing – “it’s Me this time” – then you also realized that you could unify the room: James and Dennis and Warren and yourself, and the aggressive bumpkins crowding the place, staring you guys down.

You needed only to allow the projection of the song in your head, that song you knew was the same song in each of their heads too, even the bumpkins.

*

SATISFACTION

When I’m driving in my car and that man comes on the radio, he’s telling me more and more about some useless information supposed to fire my imagination.

When I’m watching my TV and that man comes on to tell me how white my shirts can be but he can’t be a man ‘cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.

When I’m riding round the world and I’m doing this and I’m signing that and I’m trying to make some girl who tells me baby better come back later next week cause you see I’m on a losing streak.

*

Dennis and James had calmed Warren down, and Warren ordered food.

This arrogant blonde small-town-quarterback type – a little guy, cocky in that way only little guys can be, confident that someone else has his back – he came up to the table sweating the guys with his ridiculous golly-gee accent.

He set his jaw crooked to breathe through his mouth, his chin lowered, so he could look up at them with a supposedly intimidating bashful look.

– My buddies and me been wondering where you all might be from?

You hated those good-old-boy racist rapist inbred yokel asshole motherfuckers.

They really didn’t know how monumentally stupid they sounded?

– You guys wouldn’t be hippies now would you?

– That your car?

Dennis offered his reflexive response – Just passing through.

But Warren, did he even notice when he told a story?

Anything except the truth was always on the tip of Warren’s tongue.

With a big smile he explained to The Local how James and Dennis were brothers out racing The 55, and you were Dennis’s wife and he was their manager: a family affair, wholesome.

Right before that small-town pipsqueak hot shot walked up to the table, Dennis had just told Warren – We’re broke, need to get some competition.

And they hustled up that race they needed passively, just sitting there, drawing attention simply by being outsiders.

And Warren’s story, if not saving the day, at least facilitated the day being saved.

And you did your part – I can’t get no satisfaction.

The arrogant asshole toad told them that the track was in Carlisle, The Carlisle Lakeland International Raceway.

The creep nodded to Warren before stepping away – Sure did talk to you.

And Warren smiled big, loving that he knew what to say to anyone, always perfectly charming – Sure did see you.

*

In The 55’s rumble, what color is the world through corn at sunset when pink becomes gold and gold green?

And how the rows of low green cutting across the brown appear to run.

Again and again, your head knocked against the roof of the car.

Your palms pressed flat against it to weight yourself down to the seat, you bumped hard through a field of tall grass, suddenly too fast for the terrain.

Bushes rushed alongside you low.

Fooling around with the car behind you, irritating the driver by not letting him pass, James took a turn too fast, and right after a bend there was wreckage in the middle of the road.

You were on top of it only a second after seeing it, two cars standing on end right there in the middle of the road.

James jerked the wheel fast and held it tight, trying to brake in as controlled of a manner as possible.

He did good.

Still, you ran off the road fast through the green field.

When The 55 stopped you jumped out and fell straight to the grass, had to sit, shaken, had to breathe deep.

The guys shouted at you, a continuation of the sudden whirlwind, the jolt of one second to the next – Are you OK? Are you hurt?

And over and over, you were shouting – Just scared. I’m just scared. Just scared. I’m alright.

Back in the middle of the road, an old man, silent and still, sat next to the flipped sideways bottom of his truck.

He stared at the corpse, a young man with a broken neck, lots of blood from where the bone pierced skin, too fresh to have even begun coagulating.

You thought there was no end to the surprises of the human form’s potential.

And how red red can get.

And the old man kept calling the corpse “a goddamn fool.”

– You Goddamn Fool.

Only when the dead body’s family pulled up in a station wagon – a young woman with a whole litter of children, all under the age of five or six – she stepped from the car and started to trot and then shout and then jog and then howl and then run and then scream.

And only then did you all return to The 55 off crooked in the field.

*

You drove alongside a truck pulling a long flat trailer behind it.

The trailer was empty and made of planks so it looked like a raft.

After DC we can head down to Florida. – James said.

You didn’t say anything.

Dennis said – Gotta check the points, valves, jets, carbs.

You began to understand, or at least suspect that James could like you or express interest in you only because you’d already slept with Dennis.

That’s what that night in Santa Fe had been about, James walking off.

Dennis must’ve owned the car.

*

GIMME SHELTER

A storm is threatening my very life today.

War, children, it’s just a shot away.

See the fire is sweeping our very street today.

Burns like a red coal carpet.

Mad bull lost its way.

Rape, murder!

The flood is threatening my very life today.

I tell you love, sister, it’s just a kiss away.

*

You wandered Carlisle’s Lakeland International Raceway by yourself that afternoon.

All the teams or gangs or whatever, with their color-coded uniforms, they stood around in the hot dust next to their cars with their flashy paint jobs: yellow and black, red white and blue, white and green.

Every car unfolded on display, hoods flipped open like a long line of pervert flashers.

How boring, you thought.

Did you know what else you would’ve wanted?

Playing with your hair, you sat in the bleachers alone among the pairs of dudes and couples and dudes alone.

The few women that you did come across all looked at each other like competition for limited resources.

And ever since modeling, you couldn’t get the advice of your coach out of your head.

You hated to be outside without sunscreen.

After lining up in oil puddles, red cars raced each other.

One long insect-looking car looked like a dragonfly.

It shot a parachute out behind it to brake.

Cars trailed thick smoke behind them.

You wandered off by the time The 55 came up to the line, but from the parking lot you heard the announcer tinny through the loudspeaker – Little 55 sounds strong.

*

James and Dennis had emptied the car to race, and you didn’t know where they’d set down your bag.

From afar, he didn’t see you, but you watched Warren meander through the lot on his own.

Must’ve been tired of his own stories.

You moved to approach him, but stopped, figured he must’ve wanted to be alone or he would’ve already attached himself to someone.

Strange to watch him across the dusty lot, quiet in the bright orange and purple of sundown, not quite so desperate on his own, at peace.

You were tired of your own stories.

You must’ve wanted to be alone or you would’ve attached yourself to someone.

It was strange to be in the bright orange and purple of sundown without your bag.

*

But by sundown, restless and desperate to get moving again, you fell asleep in the empty backseat of a strange car that you’d never seen before.

You didn’t know how long you slept.

The occasional burst of bright beams shocked your vision yellow.

Waking you with a slam of the door, Warren got in the car and sat in the driver’s seat.

Your eyes met in the rearview mirror.

I think there’s someone following us. – He said, hushed.

You’ll get used to it. – You said, playing along cool.

His international-man-of-intrigue-stories could be charming, when they were playful and stripped of the stress of him asking you to actually believe them.

Still you would’ve appreciated a real driver, one of the guys in his real role or being himself: a driver.

A friend of the strange car’s owner ducked his head into Warren’s open window.

Too drunk or dumb to notice or comprehend that you two didn’t belong in the car, he leaned an elbow to the window to detail some plans for after the track: grilling at the lake, skinnydipping in teams.

Going so far as to affect an accent this time, Warren’s quick story saved you both for a second time that day.

Still, you had to wonder what it meant that he was willing to just say anything, to lie at any moment.

You had your private island and your pet coyote, sure, but that was the full extent of your own storytelling impulse.

With a spit to the dirt, the yokel shuffled off.

The shared thrill, not laughter but a sustained smiling gaze, having gotten away with something together, joined Warren and you with some new sense of solidarity.

*

While you’d been asleep in the backseat of that strange car, The 55 had returned to the lot and seeing it parked, empty, you returned to it to look for your bag.

While you dug around in the dark backseat, Dennis got in, sat shotgun.

Looking to you in the rear-view mirror, he told you – we’ll be in DC tomorrow after dinner.

James sat down in the driver’s seat.

Strange to each be back in position in the car, but without its growl.

The screech and ripping engines of the track sounded far away.

Looking straight ahead, James announced plainly that he’d set up one last race, the tools against three hundred bucks.

Dennis looked at him then quickly turned away, stifled some response.

James caught your eye.

He didn’t smile, didn’t seem to attempt to convey any message.

He just looked, a look a little less than his stare.

Stepping out, Dennis finally responded – I gotta check the valves.

James turned around in his seat, looked at you.

He cleared his throat and glanced beyond you, cleared his throat again.

With a pleading tone that you’d never heard from him before, like he was bargaining with a pouting child, he said – After DC we’ll go on down to Florida. They got some nice beaches there.

You didn’t respond.

He walked off.

This time you grabbed your bag before they set it aside for the race.

Across the lot, Warren sat in the GTO, his driving gloves already on, hands on the wheel.

*

And soon: the zipping drone of the road, the yellow stripe of the lanes in the beams.

You slept shotgun while Warren drove, but never deeply, your hair in the breeze patting against your face.

He listened to bossa nova.

At some point, after a long while, you became aware that he’d been speaking.

– And we’re just gonna get healthy. Let all the scars heal.

But you didn’t flinch.

And he just kept talking. – We’ll go on. Doesn’t matter where.

When he pulled off at a rest stop, the breaking of momentum startled you.

But you squelched any big moves that might let on that you were awake, rolling over or sitting up.

You just sighed and resettled your weight without cracking open an eye.

You’d learned with plenty of practice that you could get your bearings quick and size up a situation immediately upon waking.

You knew to play possum until that creep made one move.

Sleep was your only potential defense against him making a move out there.

You wondered if James and Dennis had even noticed yet that you’d gone.

You wondered if they would put it together that Warren was gone too.

Maybe they’d catch up.

Warren parked just beyond the glow of the furthest streetlight, closed his eyes and folded his arms, attempting to sleep upright in the driver’s seat.

After a few deep breaths he looked over to you with a low groan, hoping to catch your eye.

You didn’t need to peek.

That’s why he was watching you sleep.

He was waiting to catch you.

You knew how deep the harsh lights would make the folds of his face appear.

His cologne sharp in the still air, you didn’t stir.

I’m crazy about you. We’ll build a house. – He said.

You didn’t even peek.

You didn’t let a muscle flutter, not a grind of your jaw would give you away.

You had no problem breathing deep, pretending to sleep through any fear.

You waited out his pause.

Because if I’m not grounded soon – his voice shook – I’m gonna go into orbit.

*

You jumped up alert, wide-eyed awake and on defense in no uncertain terms, when Warren touched his leather-gloved hand to your hair and called you – Baby.

Parked at a roadside café: early morning, his bossa nova loud without the wind to stifle it, your fuzzy purse in your lap.

You got out of the car, birdsong in the bright air, your neck cramped from sleeping with your head hanging wrong again.

A motorcycle with a bag tied to its back, parked far from the door, over by the parking lot’s entrance, was the only other vehicle.

Groggy, you thought, everyone knows about the majesty of birds, the mysterious grace, how they steer as a group.

But traveling, you thought, people travel, submit to the sustained fatigue, only to be able to see the world again, tune into seeing it and overcome the immunities we all build up against our wonder, so we can feel, even if only for a moment, that what we know to be most real, the birds for example, their majesty and mystery, these things are in fact real.

Feel real.

Like how you always felt about other people, like they were all more real than you.

The heat hung so solid and still over the dust and sunshine and quiet.

There was nothing else to hear out there but birdsong.

Just your slow shuffle through the lot and into the room.

The screen door creaked, then slammed loud.

*

A young longhaired kid, no older than you, wearing a turtleneck under his denim button-down, sat alone at the counter.

He stared at you when you entered, didn’t hide doing so, and turned to continue staring as you crossed the room.

You and Warren sat down at a table, both of your backs turned to the big picture window facing the lot.

You felt stiff in body, stiff in mind and in spirit and mood.

Sleeping sitting up, never really sleeping, afraid to close your eyes entirely on Warren, continuously woozy with half-sleep until driving quiet through the dawn, no longer bothering to pretend to sleep, you must’ve finally drifted off.

You dreaded sitting down to a meal with him, the beginning of conversation.

Driving, before his first coffee, his bullshit hadn’t woken up yet.

Staring straight ahead, sitting side-by-side, keeping quiet came easy.

But at the café, you sat perpendicular.

Groggy, his features already so big on his face, puffed up.

Aching and dazed, communicating nothing more than reciprocity, you returned the kid at the counter’s stare.

The waitress approached.

You looked to Warren and he smiled.

His smile widening, his hands extended, he ordered playfully – Champagne, Caviar.

You could only sigh.

He ordered eggs over-light and you got only hot tea.

Your stomach was queasy with exhaustion, but also, you sure didn’t want to owe Warren anything.

The waitress walked off.

Peripherally, that kid at the counter checked you out and you posed still for him a moment.

Maybe we ought to go to Chicago. – Warren said, sitting up straight. – I got some connections in Chicago that are out of sight.

You looked at his face closely, the soft puff of his jowls.

Even kept closely shaven, his skin was rough.

What vanity would compel someone to shave every day in dank gas station men’s rooms and rest stops?

His red eyes always looked wet.

I don’t want to go to Chicago. – You said.

He shrugged. – That’s cool then. We’ll check out New York.

Warren had said all kinds of things the night before, driving, dark, staring straight ahead, all kinds of things that anyone would’ve pretended to sleep through to save him the embarrassment.

You know. – He said – I’ve been thinking. You keep on the move like this, it catches up with you, you know?

You never responded, never let on the whole night that you heard a single word of it.

At the café that morning, so quiet, you were afraid, embarrassed to think that he might start that talk again, his voice so loud in the quiet room.

Couldn’t you both just pretend none of it had been said?

– I could see myself staying put for a while somewhere. I don’t know where, but if you’d come with me we could go wherever you want. The ocean somewhere. Mexico. Hell I’ve been all over and I know I can do just fine anywhere.

And which was more contrived: his secret C.I.A. missions, his ranch and beach house, his test pilot days, and his stilted swinger-slang – or – his everything-fell-apart-on-me middle-aged desperation to get in your pants?

Together you sat silent.

*

You both recognized the growl of the engine pulling up behind you, didn’t need to turn and look.

Warren groaned – Shit.

You played with your hair, curled it around your finger, pulling your bangs past your nose.

The screen door’s stretched springs screeched before it slammed.

You didn’t look up at James and Dennis as they entered.

They crossed the restaurant to your table.

You never looked up and didn’t think that Warren did, either.

There was a long silence, staring and silent, when they sat down and joined you.

Solemn, Warren nodded hello and got up with a sigh, walked off to the men’s room.

He dropped his napkin to the ground as he stood, but quick to step away, he didn’t stop to pick it up.

The kid across the café stood up, dropped a couple clanging coins on the counter.

James stared at you.

You looked back at him.

The kid crossed the café, walked over to the coat rack and picked up his jacket.

His hands in his lap, Dennis kept his eyes down.

There was a break, just a slip, a second, but you saw it: a puncture in James’s concentrated gaze, his attempt at his hypnosis trick.

Dennis’s mouth hung open a little.

James broke the silence, his tone flat, redoubling the mission of his Rasputin stare. – Figured we’d go up to Columbus, Ohio. There’s a man there that’s got some parts he wants to sell real cheap.

You didn’t flinch.

You looked back at James, silent.

You could hear Dennis’s light panting.

The kid moved to the middle of the restaurant and stopped, staring at you while he spread his arms wide to put on his coat.

James looked back at you, looked you in the eyes.

You looked James in the eyes.

You didn’t sigh.

You didn’t tilt your head.

You didn’t raise your voice.

You said – No good.

Dennis had hairy wrists, thick wrists.

He never looked up from them, his light panting steady.

James’s eyes darted around the room then dropped.

He flared his nostrils, inhaled deep and dropped his chin.

Birds chirped.

The screen door slammed closed behind the kid and you were up, pulling on your coat.

None of them said anything.

James glanced up at you.

You walked out the door, its stretching springs creaking, punctuated with a slam.

Across the lot, the kid stood on his motorcycle, turned at the waist, and watching you, knew to wait.

Two young goofs ogled over The 55.

You reached through the open window, grabbed your bag from The GTO.

You crossed the parking lot to the kid, had to throw your big bag off into the bushes before climbing on back, your arms around his waist.

He kickstarted the bike.

With a hard jolt, you were off up the driveway.

*

Out on the bright country road, you smiled and winced against the wind in your face, the speed cooling you in the endless sheets of sunshine.

You felt perfect: no sense of beginning or end, nameless, the constant beat of the wind on your skin a kinetic blur of boundaries.

The day was perfect, hot and kept cool moving, nothing to say and no feeling that something should be said.

You felt your lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery and thought “this is what it is to be happy.”

You pulled yourself up tight against that kid’s back, your hair blowing wildly, without pattern.

*

You rode until just after dusk and sometimes the road would look a little bit familiar to you, like you were circling back where you had come from.

But you could never totally be sure.

All the roads looked the same around that part of the country.

Same as any other part of the country, everywhere looked like itself.

But sometimes you swore you saw specifics: That crumbling barn looks like it can’t remain balanced, that dried-up creek, that skeleton of a gas station logo.

But you could never know.

You would’ve seen everything coming from the other direction before.

And it was dark the last hours you’d been with Warren in the GTO.

Eventually the road lifted a little and straightened and the distance was all blue and rippling, but you knew that it couldn’t be water.

I see the earth. It is so beautiful. – The cosmonaut had said.

Was it hills made blue by being seen through clouds?

Was it blue hills in the distance, the hills themselves somehow blue?

The sun moved low enough straight ahead of you, you could make out the lit outlines.

Those blue hills far away were the clouds.

*

You were still looking straight ahead, as always, and still aware not to stop in any one particular place too long.

The motorcycle kid and you checked into a motel.

Stiff weeds curled up from cracked pavement at the door.

You entered the room thick with bleach-smell, the door swollen crooked in its frame.

The motorcycle kid switched on a lamp on the nightstand.

You fell backwards on to the bed and bounced in place a moment, your dusty jeans leaving a pale swatch of dirt on the faded comforter.

The kid walked over to the window and looked back and forth outside quick before pulling the curtain closed.

He returned and sat down next to you.

He was muscular, not bulging but lean, sinewy with perfect baby skin.

His blond hair fell over his brow.

Not quite long enough to stay tucked behind his ear, he brushed it from his eyes constantly.

He looked at you with a purposeful, very serious expression and you sighed before mustering a tired smile.

He touched your hair and you gracefully pulled back a little, smiled again.

He leaned over and kissed you wet and aggressive and you submitted to it.

Pushing his skull hard against yours, his tongue flicking fast.

He ran his palms along the tops of your thighs in a steady rhythm; steady enough that under your jeans your thighs began to burn from friction.

And after a moment, not too soon, but it felt like you’d already waited too long, you put your hands on the back of his to stop his constant motion and break his rhythm.

You retreated from the kiss.

You picked his hands up by the wrists and placed them in his lap.

He grunted – Ungh, confused.

You dropped your chin and looked up at him through your bangs.

You sighed, told him – I’m gonna take a bath.

Frustrated, the kid leaned in towards you. – But I thought –

Yeah – you cut him off. – I’ll make it with you. It’s cool.

He sat back confident and relieved.

But first I need to take a hot bath. – You said. – OK?

Yeah. Sure. – He said. – OK.

OK then. – You stood up.

The kid leaned back on the bed on his elbows and tossed his hair as if on display, as if being photographed for a beefcake calendar.

You smiled and leaned over, kissed him on the forehead.

You grabbed your fuzzy purse and carried it along with you.

The thick carpet sticky, you walked into the bathroom and closed the door behind you.

Leaning against the sink, you were free to exhale deep.

*

You ran the bath, curious if those guys had made it to DC.

You pulled off your dusty jeans.

You might’ve knocked the kid out with the sudden waft released into the air.

You wondered who made it to DC first and won the other’s pink slip.

Wiping clean stripes across your face with your finger through caked dust, you looked at yourself in the mirror a good long while.

No shampoo around, but you could at least undo your matted hair with a bar of soap.

No way Warren even had a chance.

The question was whether James and Dennis would actually take his car from him.

Breathing deep, you held your face over the steam of the running bath.

You laid back with your eyes closed, melting into the tub.

*