Stretch’s sheets were soft cotton flannel, surely not the motel’s. It always came as a surprise to me that men should want domestic comforts. Sandro slept on the floor when he was a boy, said he felt like he didn’t deserve a bed. It was an asceticism that was some way of rejecting his privilege, refusing it. I didn’t care whether I deserved a bed or not but I had trouble settling. Trucks from the highway rumbled through my airy sleep. I couldn’t warm up and lay with my jacket splayed over the blanket, leather side up like a heel of bread. I worried that Stretch was going to sneak into bed with me. When I had convinced myself he wouldn’t, I worried about tomorrow, and my speed trial on the salt. What would happen to me? In a way, it didn’t matter. I was here. I was going through with it.
In the depths of cold motel sleep, I dreamed of a gigantic machine, an airplane so large it filled the sky with metal and the raking sound of slowing engines. I was not in Nevada but home, in New York City, which was shaded and dark under the awful machine, a passenger jet enlarged hundreds of times. It moved slowly, the speed of a plane just about to land, but with no lights under its wings. I saw huge landing flaps, ugly with rivets, open on greasy hinges, as the plane came lower and lower, until there was nothing left of the sky but a gunmetal undercarriage, an enveloping screech.
In the morning, Stretch came in and took his shower. While the water ran, I hurriedly pulled on my leathers. I was making the bed when he emerged, a towel around his waist. Tall and blond and lanky, like a giraffe, water beading on skin that was ruddy from the hot shower. He asked if I minded covering my eyes for a moment. I felt his nudity as he changed, but I suppose he could just as easily claim to have felt mine, right there under my clothes.
Dressed, he sat down on the bed and combed his wet hair into its seventies version of a duck’s ass, severe and tidy, but down the nape of his neck. The important matter of small-town hair. I laced my boots. We talked about the speed trials, which were starting today. I said I was running in them, but not that it was about art. It wasn’t a lie. I was a Nevada girl and a motorcycle rider. I had always been interested in land speed records. I was bringing to that a New York deliberateness, abstract ideas about traces and speed, which wasn’t something Stretch needed to know about. It would make me seem like a tourist.
Stretch said the motel owner’s son had a Corvette running but that he could not so much as check the oil or tire pressure, that mechanics worked on it and a driver raced it for him.
“I have to fill out his racing form because he doesn’t know what ‘displacement’ means.” He laughed and then went quiet.
“I never met a girl who rides Italian motorcycles,” he said. “It’s like you aren’t real.”
He looked at my helmet, gloves, my motorcycle key, on his bureau. The room seemed to hold its breath, the motel curtain sucked against the glass by the draft of a partly opened window, a strip of sun wavering underneath the curtain’s hem, the light-blocking fabric holding back the outside world.
He said he wished he could see me do my run, but he was stuck at the motel, retiling a rotten shower.
“It’s okay,” I said. I was relieved. I felt sure that this interlude, my night in Stretch’s bed, shouldn’t overlap with my next destination.
“Do you think you might come through here?” he asked. “I mean, ever again?”
I looked at the crates of tools and the jumbled stack of the owner’s son’s bicycle collection, some of them in good condition and others rusted skeletons with fused chains, perhaps saved simply because he had ample storage space in poor Stretch’s room. I thought about Stretch having to sit in a parking lot all night instead of lie in his own bed, and I swear, I almost decided to sleep with him. I saw our life, Stretch done with a day’s work, covered with plaster dust, or clean, pulling tube socks up over his long, tapered calves. The little episodes of rudeness and grace he’d been dealt and then would replay in miniature with me.
I stood up and collected my helmet and gloves and said I probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. And then I hugged him, said thanks.
He said he might need to go take another shower, a cold one, and somehow the comment was sweet instead of distasteful.
Later, what I remembered most was the way he’d said my name. He said it like he believed he knew me.
On occasion I let my thoughts fall into that airy space between me and whatever Stretch’s idea of me was. He would understand what I came from, even if we couldn’t talk about movies or art. “Were you in Vietnam?” I’d ask, assuming some terrible story would come tumbling out, me there to offer comfort, the two of us in the cab of an old white pickup, the desert sun orange and giant over the flat edge of a Nevada horizon. “Me?” he’d say. “Nah.”
* * *
On the short drive from town out to the salt flats, the high desert gleamed under the morning sun. White, sand, rose, and mauve — those were the colors here, sand edging to green in places, with sporadic bursts of powdery yellow, weedy sunflowers blooming three-on-the-tree.
The little gambling town’s last business was a compound of trailers orphaned on a bluff. LIQUOR AND DANCING AND NUDE WOMEN. I thought again of Pat Nixon, of underthings in a Pat Nixon palette. Faded peach, or lemon-bright chiffon. As a teenager in Reno, when I heard the words Mustang Ranch I pictured a spacious lodge with gold-veined mirrors and round beds, velvet-upholstered throw pillows shaped like logs. The actual Mustang Ranch was just a scattering of cruddy outbuildings, gloomy women with drug habits inside. Even after I understood what it was, it seemed natural enough to hear Mustang Ranch and imagine country luxury, sunken living rooms with wet bars, maybe someone putting on Wanda Jackson, “Tears at the Grand Ole Opry.” But they were listening to Top Forty in those places, or to the sound of the generator.
Beyond the access road off the interstate, a lake of white baked and shimmered, flaring back up at the sun like a knife blade turned flat. Pure white stretching so far into the distance that its horizon revealed a faint curve of the Earth. I heard the sonic rip of a military jet, like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete, but saw only blue above, a raw and saturated blue that seemed cut from an inner wedge of sky. The jet had left no contrail, just an enveloping sound that came from no single direction. Another jet scraped the basin, high and invisible. I must have heard them in the night. There was a base nearby, Area G on my map, a gray parenthesis. I thought about satellites, Soviet ones, whose features I borrowed from the vintage globe-shaped helmet of a deep-sea diver, a blinking round orb scratching its groove in the sky like a turntable stylus. Everything in Area G put away, retractable roofs closed, missiles rolled out of sight for the scheduled appearance of the probe, the military changing theater sets for the next act.
I wondered why the military didn’t claim the salt flats for themselves, for their own tests. I don’t know what kind of tests, but something involving heat, speed, thrust, the shriek of engines. American legend Flip Farmer had shot across these flats and hit five hundred miles an hour, driving a three-wheeled, forty-four-foot aluminum canister equipped with a jet engine from a navy Phantom. Why Flip, an ordinary citizen, and not the military? You’d think they would have wanted this place, a site of unchecked and almost repercussionless speed. But the military didn’t want an enormous salt desert. They gave it, more or less, to Flip Farmer, world land speed record holder.
Growing up, I loved Flip Farmer like some girls loved ponies or ice skating or Paul McCartney. I had a poster above my bed of Flip and his winning car, the Victory of Samothrace. Flip with his breakfast cereal smile, in his zip-up land speed suit, made of a silvery-blue ripstop cloth that refracted to lavender at angles and folds, and lace-up racing boots that were the color of vanilla ice cream. He had a helmet under his arm, silver, with “Farmer” in fancy purple script. I’d found that image again recently, in preparation for my own run on the salt flats, in a book about his life I’d picked up at the Strand. The Victory of Samothrace was just behind him on the salt. It was painted the same lavender as the refracting undertone of Flip’s flameproof suit, hand-rubbed color lacquered to a fine gleam, silver accents on the intake ducts and tail wing. Pure weight and energy, but weightless, too, with its enormous tailfin, a hook for scraping the sky.