Return to Oakpin(88)
They passed Fendall’s and the gaggle of shiny cars parked there. The big front windows were full of the A group having coffee and banana splits, the girls in primary colors going from table to table sampling the ice cream, their shoulders shining. Larry felt he was seeing some time capsule cartoon of a life he had known. He wondered how they could breathe in that bell jar. Wade then drove them down Main Street and through the gravel parking lot of the Dome, naming the cars there behind the old pool hall, a dozen friends inside in fancy clothes playing eight ball. You could drink there if you were careful. “Just drive,” Wendy said. “We’re not going in there tonight.”
“There,” Larry pointed. “Pull into the Trail’s End.” The old motel was dark as charcoal in the night. The windows of the office were broken out, and weeds grew along the walkway in front of all the rooms. “Should we get a room?” Larry said.
Wade was confused and did a U-turn to drive into the littered parking lot of the ruin.
“Yes. They told us to get a room, and we should get a room,” Wendy said, laughing.
“I don’t know how many people just told us to get a room,” Stephanie said.
“Twenty. ‘Get a room,’ they said,” Wendy added. “Twenty people. Trusted individuals.”
“I get that,” Larry said, “and it sounds like good advice. Who doesn’t like a room? But what exactly do we do with a room? I’ve already got a room.”
“Me too,” Stephanie said.
“What is it?” Wade said.
“We’re good,” Larry said. “I just wanted my date to be able to say I took her to the Trail’s End.”
“Do you have a room?” Stephanie asked Wade.
“Let’s can it, boys and girls,” Wade said, and he floored it and spun his wheels onto the highway out of town. They felt the old prairie darkness swallow the car. He turned at the lane for the cemetery and eased, lights out, up the hill and around the fenced property. There were no other cars on the dark plateau. Usually on weekend nights in good weather there was a car or two parked off from each other above the speckled lights of town.
“I guess we’re all alone,” Wade said.
For Stephanie, Larry pointed out at the graveyard and whispered, “Except for.” She was in his other arm, and he could feel her hand on his hot rib cage. There were a dozen antelope bedded down in the poplar grove behind the cemetery, and they were watchful but didn’t get up. Byton Hartman was singing a song about his country and how much it meant to him, by god, and how it would always mean a lot to him. He had a voice so deep, it seemed to have been machined. Wade set the vehicle in park and left it running and pulled Wendy across to him. The cab was large but small, the rear seats close but separated by the high seatbacks, and the dark warm space smelled of the dry floral scent of the girls’ perfume and the newness of the heater and soy sauce and ginger.
Larry saw Wendy slide to Wade, and then he turned to Stephanie, who had lifted her face up for the kiss. She had somehow gotten her hand inside his shirt, and he felt the impossibly smooth surface of her palm on his fevered ribs. For a while everything was shifting satin and breathing and the singing, a nonsense bass thumping, and the windows screened with condensation, and Larry let go a little and then a little more with Stephanie against him, sweet and more muscled than he’d imagined. He hadn’t imagined anything really, and here now she arched up as if she had made a decision. She bumped his chin with her forehead in such a way that he knew to unzip the back of her dress a stroke. “Larry,” she whispered into his mouth, “be careful of my dress,” and she helped him slide his hand along the moist side of her breast; she gasped, or it seemed she did, and he stopped breathing to feel the weight of her, the contour and the wonderful warmth. Their kissing was seamless. He could hear the couple in the front seat, and he realized his ears were out for every noise from there, Wendy’s breath and Wade’s little directional “uh’s” every once in a while.