A Map of Tulsa Read Online Free PDF

memorably a birdbath. She rocked back and forth where she was squatting and then stuck out both arms and pushed me over into the dirt-grass.
    On top of me, Adrienne was neither lascivious nor chaste; she was simply very straightforward. She unbuttoned my fly like untying a shoe. She was quick. I was so in awe of her that I forgot to kiss back. She moved her lips from place to place with methodical deliberateness. She was a type of partner new to me. And half the sucking that I did was just buying time. Anyway she got bored and yanked my pants off. It was light now, not very, but enough for me to see our nakedness in true color. She was whiter than me. She maintained herself on top of me, and had the stage presence to let me totally imprint on her as being the image of the memory we were making, limp back, chin raised, neck red.
    It reached into my fundamental idea of “morning” and messed it up; we rolled over. I was on top. “You have to come on the grass,” she said. But I was not going to come. I was too excited.
    The sounds Adrienne was making seemed connected up to a story I hadn’t followed. I couldn’t tell if she was faking it or not. She probably just loved to make noise.
    We finally stopped. She looked into my eyes, greedily aware of what she had done. Dogs were barking somewhere.
    “I think the dogs are coming this way,” I said. I had to recover some sense of my voice. She didn’t reply. She grasped me so suddenly it hurt. I was intimidated, and she laughed. One thing I could do was I crawled back on top of her and so she had to let go.
    “Your arms are getting dirty,” I said. I felt the breeze on my hip.
    We continued for a long time, silently now. The sun was rising over the people’s back wall, and I was the one raising it. It got brighter and warmer the more I went. I always think about this of course. I have tried to measure the added amount of that second time, and how much it accounted for. I want to know whether I won Adrienne, or just lucked into her. I try to measure it when I listen to slow music, and I compare it to that music. It is like the music might stop, if I listen hard enough. When I look at cold statues I remember the sweat on Adrienne’s chest. She was not loud that second time, she was intent, and she looked into my eyes so much that we suddenly became friends. I started laughing. It seemed like a place to stop.
    It was because of the birds chirruping right above usthat I had started laughing. “You have to go,” she whispered.
    “Can’t we hide here?” I asked, taking her hand.
    She suited up and stood waiting as I tucked in my shirt. She led me out straight by the people’s back windows and around the side of their house.
    “Is this okay?”
    We came out on open lawn, in the sun, on a quiet street. It wasn’t even clear which house this lawn belonged to, these houses were so far apart and the lawns were continuous—and in the morning humidity I could hear the
brrrum
of a central AC start up. I wished that we could get inside one of the houses. I would have liked to sit on someone’s nice furniture and drink orange juice.
    “Do you know where we are?” I asked.
    “You go now.” She smiled.
    “Won’t you walk me to my car?”
    “Nope.” She was already backing away, going in the other direction.
    I waved, stiffly. She drew herself up and patted the air between us, pushing me off like a boat.
    For the first block not one car passed, but then on the next street there were two or three. Did they realize? The dew was burning off the yards I passed, and if I stretched my arm out over the grass, I could feel the waves of heat. It smelled sour. I found Philbrook; I was going to hop the wall and invade the grounds except I had to pee. And I didn’t want to desecrate anything. My parents would be on their way to church by now, I calculated. I would drive home, but I would have to wait an hour or two before they came back and I could confront them. So I droveslowly. I