The truck bed was bobbing up and down and with it the huge screen flashing behind Michelle. A car chase was under way. To distract himself, to endure, he made a game of spotting banal details in the background of the frames, deciphering street and shop signs, or counting pores on the hero’s nose during close-up, interior shots, while his abs clenched to keep from coming inside her. From other parked vehicles’ radios came distant tire squeals, car horns, canned dialogue, but soon enough the soundtrack was overpowered by the creak of the suspension, coming in a delayed syncopation to the tide-like lurch of the truck bed.

“Fuck, Hen,” she said. “You close?”

“T—to what?”

She moaned. “Me too.”

She dropped from her squat, stapling her knees at the sides of his hips. She pressed her chest into his and clawed at his shoulder blades, while her pelvis kneaded and twisted, faster and closer and wetter and meaner, and then three loud knocks clacked against the side of the truck.

“Yo yo yo!” came a man’s voice.

Henry’s throat closed. To his left, a bald white man’s face was floating over the brim of the truck bed. His head was turned away, shielding his view with one of those mini–battering ram flashlights. The motion had not stopped. Michelle refused to be interrupted. She buried her face against his neck, gnawing and slobbering, while her lower half kept thumping onto him, into him.

“Wait,” she said.

“Y’all can’t,” the bald man said. “This a family establish—”

“Wait.”

She cupped her teeth around Henry’s ear. Between pants she whispered to him, told him she was coming, that she wanted them to come together, she wanted him to come, come for her, Henry, come.

And so, staring apologetically at the bald man, Henry did as he was told. All his joy and worry exited him in a superb blurt. From deep in his chest came a bovine moan, and that, too, was otherworldly.

“Seriously, y’all?”

Something seismic racked Michelle. She shuddered, moaned, scraping at Henry as if clambering for shelter under his skin. After another shudder she collapsed onto his chest, her frame twitching with spastic giggles. He embraced her, turned away from the man and up to the sky, watching the screen’s light bleaching out the stars.

“Lord Mary Joseph, y’all. I’m a have to call the police.”

“Don’t bother,” Michelle said. “We’re leaving.”

$11.40

Henry spreads a towel over the motel carpet. Needs to remember the tag side is facing up and off the dirty floor, since he’ll have to dry Junior off with this one later. The other is a soggy wad on top of the sick that the boy left beside the bed.