They must be in Missouri now, if not Kansas. Her pliant nakedness, unified to his senses of touch and smell, flickered in curved short circuits as the train roared past lights defending a water tower or a set of grain silos. When the train hissed and slid to a stop, at a platform holding only a bare baggage-wagon and one loudly reuniting family, he raised the stiff green shade a few inches so he could ponder his companion’s supine beauty as a continuous, calm, exultant entity, with rises and swales and dulcet shadowed corners. The curious silvery light of her eyes now lived all along her skin. In the small space carved from the surrounding, upholding clatter and mutter of the rushing train, she was a giantess who met him, his sensation was, wherever he thrusted, with an embracing cavity. She did it all, and had to keep suppressing moans which would disturb the unknown fellow-passengers presumably sleeping an arm’s length away. “Will you forget me?” she at one point whispered, a cry come from afar, softly. There were fits of dozing amid a constant rejoining. The sly druggist had been right: Bech had under-bought. The couple’s closet of satisfied desire became nicely rank with a smell that was neither him nor her. “We’re all mixed up together,” she whispered, after she had swallowed his semen and caught her breath. The heartland they endlessly poured through seemed no vaster than territories laid open within them. “You’re perfect,” she sighed toward morning, sadly, like a distant train whistle, in his ear. She was not quite perfect, he had observed by the hard morning light in the dining car. In the dark he touched her cheeks, which had looked abraded with tiny nicks. A miracle. They were perfectly smooth. “So are you,” he told her. It was the truth.