In Country 06

Book Two
The West

1

Chariot fire was still noon bound when we hit the flat basin from which rises a city built on sin: the pseudo-country that turns electricity into unhappiness faster than any other device known to humanity. It’s stratosphere tower to nowhere isn’t even useful as a radio beacon, because the mountains that surround Las Vegas loom above it. But I can’t help it, I love Las Vegas.

Even the sand is different here from California’s inland empire, which had eaten hours with the engine humming and the air conditioner flattening dried sweat hair down on my forehead. We spun down the roof of the convertible as often as we could, until the blare of heat and light over came us and we had to pull over to bring the white ragtop of the Mustang above us, creating a shade that was a cloistered parlor in which we just chatted. The weight of the dawn, was receding and gone.

Each time he turned the ignition, sped us back up, and the road became once again arrow taking us to nowhere except everywhere, I felt a roll in my midsection that purred up from my hips, reaching my ribs and then falling like a wave. The Pacific was far behind, but I felt an ocean within me, pressing and rolling. And the winds are fanned by the fan of horsepower, I don’t know how many. It isn’t the size of the engine, it’s how it moves you.

He still spoke in phrases tossed off. So did I, but we could volley back and forth, creating rallies of words. The were training wheels conversations, about little things like the veal at a restaurant, or the furniture. I spun my hands idly through a copy of Elle, the fashions were dowdy, checkered and black and white, with poor cuts. Who ever was buying this had. To get. A life.

A long gold dress by Shoji with an asymmetrical top stood out, a real woman might actual wear it and look good. I stared down at it as we spun up the odometer and down the miles to the place my mother always called “Strip City.” I later found at she had done a stint as a show girl there. I guess she meant it as if it were a good thing. My father had met her, I learned when he tended bar for a little while after ’Nam. The conflict that always called “the war.”

And there it was, a fleck of sparkles coming out the desert with an impossible sharpness. The land was surreal to me, as if the sky were changing colors and we should be in a frame of Natural Born Killers, one of my favorite movies of all time, because it was about being about. Now I think the only problem with the film is that it wasn’t set in Iraq. It’s the movie I’d write: a remake of Natural Born Killers set in country.

It was the colors, the movement and the sheer sensuousness of the moments of impact. I can remember the first time I laid my body open to a man, I did not know what to do, but I was not frightened. He was not touching me at any point, except with the very very end of him, and there was a moment where it felt as if a needle was going to enter my body. No, larger than a needle, deeper. Wider.

I was about to be stabbed. And I wanted it so much. I felt the shiver, in the same way that the shiver comes when, on a hot day, a dog licks up along the fingers, with a sloppy cold tongue and the touch of a cold nose. There is a moment where the skin sings as the wetness dries to the air, and feels the kiss of air. Then a tightening as the realization of what is, and is about, and has just, happened. And then all eases in a flooding flow, and somewhere, as if a small man was painting the roof of the skull with the colors of sensation, that moment of letting go.

Those colors that the desert has, and the movie had, and my memory holds in sepia. Were right there before me. I could not help feeling myself sink into the car seat, and feeling the vibration as a rumbling touch. As if Merc were touching me through the car, with each throw of gears and taint of accleration.

I whisper to the air. “Stab me.”

I am breathing in, and the air almost sears my lungs it is so dry. I remember Kansas and the way it was rich in moisture, without ever being humid. The air was heavy with the mist of potential, the land pregnant with rich black earth. Last night when I sucked and swallowed, it was the taste of that morning mist that came to mind. A taste of bitter, without having a taste at all. When I fell to sleep in his arms it was that idyllic summer somewhere in my childhood that appeared before my eyes, arms and legs crooked and sprawled, my teddy bear nestled by head, a smile on my face, looking at the mirror hung near the bed as my father turned out the light.

Buildings have stopped huddling together, and now string out like pearls, on our right the first casino pops up and out and beckons to us. But Merc doesn’t even notice it. He’s a man with a mission, and he knows where we are going to land.

The strip started to take a shape as we barreled down the road and between the other cars that seemed to be standing close to still. I idly remembered spending New Years 2001 here, watching the fireworks leap up from the great vast pyramid. I realized that I had begun to lay back and twist my hair again, because when the car veered through three lanes and to the exit.

I startle up.

“The Flamingo. It’s not quite seedy but definitely not respectable.”

I smile.

“Now I know where to find you if you decide to drink your life out in Vegas.”

“A man has to keep his sense of romance.”

“I’ll get lipo and be a hooker here with you if you do.”

“You aren’t ugly enough. And you don’t need to just dance.”

“Junk in the trunk.”

“Something to wave and say hello to all us guys in the audience.”

“My mother was a showgirl in Vegas when she met my father. Originally they told me they meet in New York City as students. I think they did, they just didn’t do anything but fuck one night during the summer of love. I’ve often wondered what that was like.”

“I’ve never wondered what it was like.”

“Why not?”

“We’ll get a remake sooner or later. That’s the only thing they do now. Remakes.”

“What makes you say that.”

“That’s what this is, a remake of Vietnam. Bouncing baby boy Bush proving he could win the war he didn’t fight.”

“And what do you think.”

“We’ve already lost the war. And it was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”

“I didn’t know you voted for Kerry.” I chuckled. My parents did, breaking their habit since Reagan of voting for Republican Presidents.

“I didn’t. I won’t vote for a hippy no matter how many purple hearts he faked.”

I stopped talking.

We slow into the parking lot. There is a big orange “Hooters” hotel sign next door in one direction, and the airport is close by. Hooters has always offended me, because it promotes the idea of vapidity as a feminine ideal. I can say so, because, well, I am not short on cleavage. More than part of me wishes that we would just hop a plane to someplace else, far away from here and all our problems. But then I look away from it at the distant wall of hills, and I want to see them flicker by. I think at that moment, the road took hold of me, and a short flicker of images of places I had been, and will be again, drew my sense of self back, back into my skull and away from my face. Perhaps that isn’t the right way to say it. But so it is.

Behind is the Pyramid, that looks sleek and glowering by daylight. Peeking through the clutter is the façade of New York, New York.

For a moment a trick of the air rising up from the strip makes it look as if the Eiffel Tower, visible in the far distance, has split in two. I startle and expect it to topple over for a moment, and then the illusion passes.

The car peels off the interstate.

The engine settles to a stop. He turns and looks at me.

I know that look.

It is 11:13 and too early to start drinking.

I have my hand on his. I want to tell him it is alright, the shock of last night’s dream is over, and he has talked to me enough, I’ve reached equilibrium and peace. I feel a turning in my intestines. I’m distinctly not hungry for food.

“Lunch.”

I smile wickedly. “Dessert first.”

And that’s what we did. There are mirrors on the ceilings there, carved up by slats of woods to look like palm tree designs.

It was almost without formalities that he was back on the bed, having fallen backward in mock response to my touch. I was smiling and giggling as I parted enough buttons down my front to expose my bra.

Sometimes it is about you, the waves the warmth, and some inner sea whose time and tides have reached a certain crest of the moon.

Sometimes it is about him, his flesh shining and taut, needing to be sprung and scattered about the room, like a deck of cards bent and shot outwards.

I, this moment, I could feel my knowing smile, I could look down on his half expecting, half grateful face, and know that it was about him, and about my ability to take all the ligature marks that wind around his spirit, and massage them out with my mouth and hands.

And it is not long before, almost suppressing laughter of pleasing superior joy, that my palms are on him on the way down, my fingertips dragging on the way up. I am swirling my tongue around him, moistening my lips. Sometimes I let him last along time, and sometimes, he needs to leap up into me.

And so it is with an easy detachment that I look at the lines that cut through his crest, the almost lip shape that is at the opening, the twin curves like miniature hips on the underside. I swoop and kiss it, I lick it in strokes. It is not the sensation on me that floods into my mind, it is not the sensuality. It is that I know these droplets of affection are bringing forth a flowering quiet need in him, a longing for me, a collapsing of the busy busy busy of his brain that plans and thinks and manipulates the world. He is a child and I can tell he is floating, unmoving, not wishing to break what ever this, the magic spell is upon this moment. It is not how he touches me, but how my touch is on him.

But the scent is there, that peculiar odor that is not an odor. That makes me feel light headed, as if I am breathing and the air is rushing up into my brain. I lay my lips and mouth on to him, never losing contact again. And the scent grows stronger, and becomes a kind of taste.

Even as his torso swings between relaxed and released, I stop the smooth motions.

“You know what?”

His eyebrows raise and he almost manages to open his mouth and say something.

“I want you in me.”

Perhaps more prelude would make it easier, but I am ready enough, open enough to push my weight straight down on him, my hand guiding him to the right spot, and simply bounce up and down. Yes there is a tightness and first, and a pinching as his tip presses, through, and I have to wiggle up and down to ease the catches of tightness. Yes there is a slight chafing. But while nose winces for a moment, that is all it is. Like a needle sliding in, there is a contraction, and then a giddy dizziness in the stomach, but then it is done.

And then there it is, that lovely rolling sensation upwards. That contraction that starts in the deep muscles below the hips, that races upwards, pulls in through abdomen and flowers in the chest. When I inhale, there is a purring electric motor inside me, in my core.

It doesn’t take long before the moving takes over. I never get to that hot overwhelming wetness that every porn star and porn story seems to pass, through. Instead there is a thick almost dry tightness to our coupling, a pulling at my skin and folds, that tugs and pinches and send sharp sensations which have not identity as pain or pleasure, but simply part me as if a skewer were slid up through my body and all the way to the top of my skull.

Mmmmm.

It takes only a few moments of this tight tight tight connection before he spasms and contracts. I settle myself over his chest easily and twirl my fingers through his hair. My skin is warm, cooled by the dry hotel air, my face is bright, and I know I can’t stop smiling as I stare at his profile, his sharp nose, his warm lips, his strong bones.

Moments later, he is asleep, his features untroubled by these shadowed days. I smile and smile until I, too, drop to a short kiss of sleep.

But the dream still has a hold of me. In that dream I am still riding him, he is still laughing, and the sun seems to pass in time lapse, rapidly spinning form day to night to day again, streaks of neon come and go. But I realize as I stare out the window that time is not going forward but back, and his face is not the face of Merc. But it is another face. I face I don’t recall, recalling. But it is a face I know.

I ride harder and harder, pleasure turning to pain, want turning to a burning acid agony as if I must go, not because I want to, but because I cannot stop. I feel, even in a dream, the coring of hair cross my tender lips, and wet lush want turning to a dry arid crackling itch.

The movement of the sun stops. It is dark, even the lights from the airport have stopped moving. I drift and look at a giant wall clock which was not there before It is 2 AM. I stop moving, and this, still in a dream stare at the ceiling. There are four figures lying in the bed, all of the them naked. All of them me. All of they laying in contorted curves which suggest that they are dead or asleep after coitus. I cannot tell if the dark color on them is skin or blood. All is black.

I wake up, and am nearly blinded by the light. Only an hour has passed, I head to the shower to clean myself, feeling the chaffing of dried sex between my thighs with each step.

I came out, and chariot fire had just hit the long window. Mer c was already up and lacing his boots. Obviously heedless to not having showered or cleaned in any way not available to the bed side.

He looked up at me with those piercing eyes of his.

“What? Handy wipes.”

I give an indulgent grin. Or maybe it was a smirk.

“Let’s see if there is any action in this town.” I pivot my hip out and lift my purse up by one finger and bend my elbow. I hope I look saucy and seductive.

Maybe I just look fat.