GASOLINE DREAMS: EL PASO > NYC RUN

Adrenaline hypervigilance. It comes over me riding somewhere on the interstate. Not exactly fear, because fear has focus. This is more democratic. Everything gets a vote.

The pickup in front of me could be loaded with loose missiles. A shovel, a socket wrench, a length of pipe. Anything not tied down properly is waiting for the right bump in the pavement to become airborne. The deer grazing beyond the shoulder might be the Reaper's house-pet, docile until the instant it chooses panic and crosses six lanes of traffic. Every truck I blow by has a blind spot. The loose treads lying black and prehistoric on the road are as dangerous as alligators. A floating plastic bag might rise suddenly onto my helmet and my protection becomes a condemned man's shroud.

At eighty miles an hour the imagination is a survival organ.

I watch everything.

The slight weave of the car two hundred feet ahead. The movement of chains underneath the tractor trailer. The shimmer of brake lights three vehicles forward. The dark mouth of an overpass. I know which cars have seen me and which have not. My eyes move constantly between mirrors, road, horizon, shoulder. There is a cold geometry to a 500+ mile day, and for long stretches I believe I understand it.

Then the road does something else.

Suddenly, the southern air is cotton candy. Arkansas opens green around me and the pines are reaching to embrace me. The light falls differently. Even the decay is soft at the edges. Rusted roofs disappear into trees. Kudzu swallows whatever mankind has abandoned to it. The road rolls forward and for miles nothing in the world appears to require correction.

I stop to eat.

The waitress calls me honey without irony. She keeps my coffee full and puts her hand briefly on my shoulder when she asks if everything is all right. Everything is all right. For half an hour she treats me better than my mother did.

Back outside, my machine waits in the early sun.

It has carried me too far to remain a motorbike. Machines change category after enough miles. Eventually they become accomplices. Mine is the stolen horse that found its way home. I know its sounds, the slight tremor of the handlebars, where the engine likes to sit at speed. We have developed the intimacy of fugitives.

50 miles later, I need gas.

There is an old pickup at the next pump. A rack of rifles is visible inside the rear window.

The woman who pivots out of the driver's seat has shocking blue eyes. Not a pretty blue - a tough cerulean blue. Something unnatural has happened to the available light and lodged itself inside them. She looks at me, then looks again, and holds it.

For a second the interstate, the pumps, the fluorescent beer signs and the whole machinery of the present tense disappear.

I know her.

In a past life she drove our getaway car.

She waited outside with the engine running while I pushed through the doors. Later, in some hidden room with the curtains closed against the daylight, she poured the bills across the bed, laughing, and gave me her pussy on a bed of money.