The plateaus stretch and run with the road here in this canyon and they are like altars to a god of dusk on this here night. Down, farther down in the canyon, there are campfires along its banks. In the horizontal, there are headlights marking distances in the night. Ahead, there is a bridge.
In his old Chrysler, John totters slowly through the canyon smoking Winstons from a soft pack in his shirt pocket. He's just lost his job at the Datsun parts plant in Phoenix and as he listens to Waylon and Willie on KWJZ in the AM, he sighs wistfully at all the appropriate moments, pissed at what he is but more pissed at what he's not. As he drives he sees what you get on nights such as these, like how in places the parts and appendages of animals spill across the road like sets of once-living and obtuse marbles, and at one point a shoe marks the road's yellow centerline and at another a lost tent pole, and how somewhere along the way there are two young men in the canyon, pulling a raft into their camp where they will drink whisky and play cards. For what must be less than a second he thinks of helping the boys, but instead chooses to flick his cigarette ash towards them as he had suspected he would all along.
Out and beyond the bridge, he stops for the night at a Bakersfield motel which lay flat and long against the city and the desert like something that does not want to be seen. Everything is hot in the night and he feels like a man living in a microwave, or worse, a man living in America without a job, a family, without nothing.
"You with anyone?" the clerk asks, "'Cause if you are, it's more. You gotta pay more." The girl has peroxide blonde hair and breasts that may be rock hard rutabagas she's stolen from the local grocery. Her eyeliner is so dark that it takes John more than a moment to find her eyes. When he answers, his voice has a lilt of genteel politeness: "Nope, no people. Not a wife, not a kid, not a cousin. Lone as a wolf, Missy."
"Well ain't that nice, mister."
"Missy, how's your night coming? Slow? – Or is it a fast night?"
With eyes like something in a four year old's coloring book, she looks John over. For a moment her left hand pinches his fistful of dollars too tightly and her knuckles fade white. "Uh, it's okay. There's just this drunk old geezer in 116 and you. Geezer keeps coming in here, tryin' to tell me stories about fishing and gooks and shit like that. I hadda walk him back four times in twenty minutes. Finally, I hadda tuck him in to get him asleep but only after he made me strip him down and that shit is gross. I ain't ever touching my mom when she's that age, she's in a home. But, you know, it goes, I'm making some kinda cash."
Behind her head a poster of a beach with palm trees takes John away to a place he's never been.
"Where am I, again?"
"118, right next to the geezer," she smiles.
In the room, the drapes are closed in and the bed hastily made. There is an ugly purple carpet that tries to extend from wall to wall and the coffee-maker makes rasping noises and has probably been on for days, weeks, since Halloween. John lies on the bed and his gigantic ass makes its springs whine and squeal for mercy. Next door he hears the old man's TV sing into a warm desert night. Crickets hum like the heartbeat of the desert.
No doubt about it, this life takes you places, he thinks seriously before turning the TV on. Everything always moving, people always moving; big voices up in the sky, bigger voices talking to you right there in your face. But no doubt about it, this life got something for everyone. For a moment he itches at the droplets of sweat cascading down his forehead. You just go and get it. It don't find you, you go and get it. All the people you knew, they just dogs you use on a hunt, they'll take you where you gettin' on. All the people you will know, they just like cripples you gunna help, gunna fix and cure. Yup, in this world, that's what you do. He lets it go as he hears the sound of a cross-town train switching tracks, probably picking up lumber or cattle for a late run to Portland or Ashland or Seattle; it feels like a memory charging out of the dark syrup bubble of the past but he does not know where it's from, why it's moving, even who it belongs to. To get to sleep, he paints a picture of the plant in Phoenix one more time, but it makes him ill because it is full of full-bodied, fully-employed, fully-masculine men.
And then, without taking off his sweats or flannel jacket, he falls asleep.
At 3:00 AM, a knock unlaces the room's silence. The light at the door burns John's eyes so that for a moment he thinks he is in a place where everything is made of gold.
"Let me in?" a voice asks.
"Why? For what?"
"Twenty dollars is all."
"You a whore?"
"You got it."
"Get on in then."
He looks her over properly once she's on his bed and it's like he already owns her. It's nice when people put on makeup for you, he thinks as he inspects her figure, makes you feel pretty special, like things are new. Still, she's a cow, and John thinks he knew that before the lights were on. Sort of an air-flow, gravity-thing she has. When she enters a room you feel her like you're underwater with your eyes closed and someone's just cannon-balled right next to you.
"What, you done with the geezer? He blew his that quick?" John says with a jerk of his neck as he reaches for the lamp and a smoke.
"Whatchyousay? What geezer?" says the cow, beginning to admire the wallpaper like it belonged in the Louvre. "I'm just here for you big boy."
"That so? I'm your savior, huh? I'm the real deal. Yep. You got it. That's me."
As they fuck John realizes that there is something very special about this woman. She really isn't that big; it's just that she has this presence, this fat person's aura, and it entrances him like a movie without words or subtitles.
"You know what the bible says about children?" he asks after a moment, cupping her shoulder tenderly like it is her breast. "The Bible says children are man at his strongest. You know that? That when you're little, god made you strong and you can endure anything and something and something and something else. I forget. You ever hear that?"
"No. And why you tell me right now? You're inside me."
"Just, ah, Sorry, hun. Keep going. I got all these words rolling off my tongue like nobody's business. Keep going."
When they're done they lay on the bed like dogs so wounded the vet won't waste the money to put them down. They breathe in loud huffs usually reserved for folk tales.
"Where you headed John?" she gasps.
"Wait, how you know my name is John?"
"I saw your ID card on the table there."
"Damn I thought that cute girl at the front mighta been telling you about me. Giving you the rundown and whatnot on this hot piece o' meat right here," he laughs as he slaps the thickest parts of his belly with his palms. Next to him, she turns onto her side in spite of the bed's loud and repeated warnings.
"So where you headed?"
"Headed...headed...headed..." he sounds out. "Let me think. I got this word Reno bouncing around in my head like, like it says something, but I don't know. Got nothing there to go to. Got nothing anywhere, really, so I guess that's all the same. Mainly, I was thinking of going there 'cause I heard they'll give you a job if you play the veteran card."
"Huh," she says like it's nothing.
"Huh," he repeats.
For a few more minutes, they lay together and for some reason John feels like he wants this cow to become a part of his life. He will cure her with his dogs. He will take her like he owned her. She could be pretty and sweet one day, and he will do that, will be a part of it all, he dreams, hoping that what's taking over his mind right now is more than the usual post-coital contentment.
"You...coming?" he says as if trying the words out in his mouth for the first time.
"You asking?" she smiles as she itches a stomach fold.
"Like hell, I just did, didn't I?"
"Okay. I'm coming."
"Who're you again?"
"To you John Clapton, I'm Sheryl."
When they wake, the sun is up and shining like a pile of gold in a Bahamian ocean of shiny blue. John turns the car and listens to its growl. It has the sound of a grocery cart careening at wild speeds on a gravel track. When his hands aren't playing drums to KISS they are picking at his gums.
"I don't still have to pay you the thirty bucks, isn't that right?" John asks Sheryl when she gets in the car.
Sheryl yawns and fixes her sweatshirt against the window for a better headrest. She's tired. In one fluid move she puts a Kool cigarette in her mouth and lights it without opening her eyes or moving her head. John also notices that suddenly the lighter is back in the dash. Her answer, whatever it is, is interrupted.
"You sure are special, ain't you," John smiles with more honesty than most could believe possible. "Being able to do that and all, I mean, that was special. Shit, I'd burn my beard into a pile a ash, watch it blow on out the window if I tried that maneuver there."
In time, John will find that Sheryl's body is soft in the way that a plastic bag full of dead piglets is soft, and he does not mind, is even proud of this fact. Sheryl will find that John's humor is his best attribute, just barely edging out his ability to win money at the slots, and his ability to hold down his job as security guard at The Western Hotel and Casino. In the RV they will buy, they will drive long, happy distances together, always returning to their house in the valley which keeps Reno the littlest big city in the world. The house is shaped like a wedding cake and will one day contain four whopping boys of the Clapton variety who—given John's advanced age—Sheryl will dote on.
One day at their oak table near the big bay windows in this house—his fork almost to his mouth as a tendril of pork chop leans into his yellow teeth—John stops and looks to Sheryl.
"Honey," he beseeches, "you remember? I never gave you those thirty dollars from Bakersfield, did I?" His voice maintains its genteel lilt, though has an added bit of timbre thanks to the added years of sucking down Winstons. "It's funny that I asked that, isn't it?" he says as if it's not a question. "Shit, it's been a while since I said something funny like that." In the seats beside him, the Clapton boys look at their plates like dumb animals, undeterred by the old man.
Across the table, a look of pure childish pleasure fills Sheryl's face. Admittedly, her immediate reaction to his question is one hundred percent self-conscious, and she quickly finds herself imagining the way she looks to her husband— her pink blouse, her graying hair, her sweat which pools in the V above her swinging breasts, and all the rest. With a smile, she looks to the bay windows where she sees the Johnsons' pool shimmering with the onset of dusk. She does not know why, but the question seems to encircle an extraordinary reality of some kind, just for a few moments signifying the possibility that some kind of quaint, life-affirming saneness might rule the globe; something grand, something personal, something pure, something she cannot say or has never learned to say.
"Yea that's pretty funny ain't it?" she declares with a whirl of her fork as her head begins to turn from the window. "We're pretty funny, huh? Yup, you and me, John Clapton, we're funny like Chinks in China."