Billy Joe rose with the sun. It was an
old habit. They had made a sort of nest in the back seat of the
Toronado and made love long into the night. She had fallen asleep in
his arms, breathing lightly onto his chest. With his mouth he nuzzled
the thin covering of hair she had grown in the last week. As the back
seat filled with cool blue light of morning, he decided he wasn't
sure if he had slept or not. Slowly pulling out from under her, then
lifting his feet and then his ass, he slid his jeans over his naked
form, zipped and buckled and got out the door to go piss. The cold
grass was almost welcome under his feet. He spat and looked around,
it was the same stupid cold-ass morning as any other farm he'd ever
known. He knew it and hated it intimately. A fog had covered the
stars near morning and had settled itself into the thousand acres of
corn surrounding them. As he neared the edge of the field and
relieved himself, he smelled something hot and new, a musk. Not the
same smell of the woman he wore on his mouth, hands and chest,
something more primal. To the right of him was a patch of matted,
tall grass that looked as though it had bedded some kind of animal
recently. He zipped up and knelt down, almost crawling on all fours,
peering around in the grass. After a minute he found what he was
looking for, and wasn't surprised by it, the scat of a coyote, maybe
several. They were less than twenty feet from the car. He wondered
what had drawn them so close. Maybe it was the sound of them in the
car. It was a hard cold world out there and you gathered close
together around whatever solace you could find.
He padded quietly back to the car, and
as he got around to the drivers side, noticed she was awake. Her
large eyes watching him intently, like a cat. Everything about her
was like a cat, he decided, the way she moved, the heavy lids of her
eyes and the slowness with which they moved. He got in the back seat
and laid down with her, her arms enveloping him along with her warmth
and smell and everything else.
