I still just stand there, even when, at the end, he reaches out with some kind of broad and calloused hand and whacks the basketball out of the air and across the room. It jangles the metal trash can in the corner, that which has never been jangled before. I let them finish. Boy do I.
He is breathing hard after, with his face down in her hair. He says, “Babylon has been shouted (gasp), in a sense …” and I hit the mike button without thinking and say, “Damn right!” For just a second they’re as stunned as the old couple and it makes my stomach hurt. But then they’re themselves again and he says come out come out wherever you are and I do, grinning like an initiate. He beats my ass from here to Topeka. He wipes my lip-blood with the velour basketball. The room is a mess.
I feel them help me up. I see the tidy, coyote-less hills of the night scene, and the trees still appearing to blow in a fictional wind. I smell her next to me, her sweat and what’s left of her perfume and the smell of them on her. He is saying some things. At first I am just waiting for the words to stop but then I start to hear them. They sound a little like an apology, or at least an explanation. He says I violated something. He says a lot of things. The words sound like instructions and then finally they sound like an invitation.
˜
We drive in a fine and maniacal desert. We drink cheap wine and mine tastes bloody. But I don’t care. We see pink stars over glaring mesas and delicate red and white mini-marts and a hitchhiker dressed like Bing Crosby. The desert is all prophets and loam and rusty gas tanks, if you see what I mean. I’m sitting between the two of them and our knees touch. He keeps calling me bud. We’re singing obscure songs I didn’t know I knew. Dusty folkloric ballads and oddball songs from the sixties, songs about unions I guess, and simple blond girls on next-door porches, freightjumpers, that kind of thing. We’re having a hell of a time. We sing them loud. We rollick.
After a while I ask to be left in the desert and they leave me in the desert. They give me a bottle of wine. I drink it on a big rock. The rock has little pits in it and a smashed Mountain Dew can. My lips hurt a lot but I keep drinking and starting up those songs. I sing them as far as I know them. The foreman said well bless my soul. Everything in the black and hacked desert is twinkling like mad and I throw red rocks like arrowheads into the dark, and sit in that desert and think, think, think.
This story was originally published in Northwest Review, Volume 24, Number 2, in 1986.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEORGE SAUNDERS’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Story, and other publications. In 1994, his story “The 400-Pound CEO” was awarded a National Magazine Award for fiction. He lives in Rochester, New York, where he works as a geophysical engineer for an environmental company.