10 December 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 4

Push

by AMBER KRIEGER

It was what he wanted to do. He was flying, his body moving ahead of his head, doing things, pushing the gas, steering. The pavement was new, the road ropy and thick and black, a wonder of this world with its sharp yellow line to pull them along. The pickup's tires glided over it. It felt good, too good. He needed to push it further. Until it felt bad.

They said rain but the sky was clean and that added to the feeling. The music was crazy headbanging music he didn't even like, too loud to hear if she was saying anything, her head out the window. He thought she was. Yelling the words, or just screaming, lips wide, leaning over the doorframe and baring her teeth in the side mirror. Her hair was too tame in that rubber band.

Pull. His body leaned right, his hand caught the rubber band. It didn't slide off, tangled in those long long curls. Her hair was drier than he'd thought it would be. Last night when he'd grabbed it, he'd been dreaming about touching it all week, twisting those curly-Q curls around his finger as he'd seen her do, but it was coarse, like the scrubber side of a sponge, and he'd pulled his hand away fast. She hadn't even noticed, flying on top of him, hands behind her head and her chin up like she was doing sit-ups, muscular thighs squeezing, hips working, breasts beautiful and big, too big for his hand, swinging above him, nipples thick as the tip of his thumb. From breastfeeding, she'd said, as she let the bra drop. They swung big and empty above him, her eyes on the picture of the mountain above the motel bed, hard ridges soft with snow. He'd pulled his hand away from her hair, grabbed her thighs, her ass, closed his eyes.

"Ouch! What are you doing?" Her head back in the window long enough to smile. The rubber band ripped at the hair around it. He'd had long hair once. He knew the feeling, hot tacks all over his scalp, forgotten acupuncture needles stabbing behind his eyes. He pulled harder and she pulled away from him until it came off in his hand, a hunk of hair twisted around it, dark red and yellow highlights that didn't glint in the sun.

"That's so much better!" Her eyes were wet and hot and glittering. He knew that feeling, too, like looking through red-tinted sunglasses, the blue sky so blue you could drink it, the dirt sparkling, full of fool's gold and glass. Just a step on the way to where he was going today. Her head shot back out the window, eyes to the passing landscape, that hair whipping and snapping around her. Braless in cut-off jean shorts, the hippie chick he wanted her to be.

Outside was a checkerboard of mute green and dust brown, nothing he needed to see. Not the landscape that set him free, the Utah desert with its canyons stamped in by broken cookie cutters, its lopsided arches and lumpy spires, Play-Doh leave-behinds of some godchild with more red and orange than he had use for. Not red like her toenails or orange like fire but the somewhere in between of overripe fruit.

There was a road in southern Utah like a roller coaster. A thin track that climbed out of a pink and gray valley with no sense of top. It pulled you up and up and up by that sharp yellow line and then let you go, down, down, swinging sharply left, now right, now climbing again, with nothing but twelve inches of shoulder on either side. No concrete barriers to block your view or save your life.

He held the wheel with his knee and reached behind his seat for another beer. The can was cold but the beer was warm. He swished it in his mouth until it was flat and flavorless. Swallowed, swigged, swallowed, swigged. He was getting there. He barely remembered the cat now. The feel of it under the front, then the back tire, like something already dead but not quite flat enough, and wh