Sweet Talk Read Online Free PDF Page B

another mile and said, “If you had managed to get your license, you could do something on this trip besides blow snot into your hand.”
    “Don’t you think we should call ahead to Elko for a motel room?”
    “I might not want to stop at Elko.”
    “Sam, look at the map. You’ll be tired when we get to Elko.”
    “I’ll let you know when I’m tired.”
    We reached Elko at sundown, and Sam was tired. In the office of the Shangri-la Motor Lodge we watched another couple get the last room. “I suppose you’re going to be mad because I was right,” I said.
    “Just get in the van.” We bought a sack of hamburgers and set out for Utah. Ahead of us a full moon rose, flat and yellow like a fifty-dollar gold piece, then lost its color as it rose higher. We entered the Utah salt flats, the dead floor of a dead ocean. The salt crystals glittered like snow under the white moon. My nose stopped running, and I felt suddenly lucid and calm.
    “Has he been in any movies?” Sam said.
    “Has who been in any movies?”
    “The fag tennis player.”
    I had to think a moment before I recalled my phantom lover.
    “He’s not a fag.”
    “I thought you made him up.”
    “I did make him up but I didn’t make up any fag.”
    A few minutes later he said, “You might at least sing something. You might at least try to keep me awake.” I sang a few Beatles tunes, then Simon and Garfunkel, the Everly Brothers, and Elvis Presley. I worked my way back through my youth to a Girl Scout song I remembered as “Eye, Eye, Eye, Icky, Eye, Kai, A-nah.” It was supposed to be sung around a campfire to remind the girls of their Indian heritage and the pleasures of surviving in the wilderness. “Ah woo, ah woo. Ah wooknee key chee,” I sang. “I am now five years old,” I said, and then I sang, “Home, Home on the Range,” the song I remembered singing when I was a child going cross-country with my parents to visit some relatives. The only thing I remembered about that trip besides a lot of going to the bathroom in gas stations was that there were rules that made the traveling life simple. One was: Do not hang over the edge of the front seat to talk to your mother or father. The other was: If you have to throw up, do it in the blue coffee can; the red one is full of cookies.
    “It’s just the jobs and money,” I said. “It isn’t us, is it?”
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    A day and a half later we crossed from Wyoming into Nebraska, the western edge of the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson had made so that we could all live in white, classical houses and be farmers. Fifty miles later the corn arrived, hundreds of miles of it, singing green from horizon to horizon. We began to relax and I had the feeling that we had survived the test of American geography. I put away our guidebooks and took out the dictionary.
Matachin, mastigophobia, matutolypea
. I tried to find words Sam didn’t know. He guessed all the definitions and was smug and happy behind the wheel. I reached over and put a hand on his knee. He looked at me and smiled. “Ah,my little buttercup,” he said. “My sweet cream pie.” I thought of my Alpine lover for the first time in a long while, and he was nothing more than mist over a distant mountain.
    In a motel lobby near Omaha, we had to wait in line for twenty minutes behind three families. Sam put his arm around me and pulled a tennis ball out of his jacket. He bounced it on the thin carpet, tentatively, and when he saw it had enough spring, he dropped into an exaggerated basketball player’s crouch and ran across the lobby. He whirled in front of the cigarette machine and passed the ball to me. I snagged it and threw it back. Several people had turned to stare at us. Sam winked at them and dunked the ball through an imaginary net by the wall clock, then passed the ball back to me. I dribbled around a stack of suitcases and went for a lay-up by a hanging fern. I misjudged and knocked the plant to the