Army Archard kept playing those great hits from 1967. I kept drinking that beer. There was plenty more in the cooler. I had plenty of cigarettes. I saw a figure walking along the road, growing larger as I got closer, and I beat time with my hand on the steering wheel and slapped the floormat with my tennis shoe. I knew she’d feel funny when I bumped by in her car. It hit me too that I’d go home and sleep alone, that I wouldn’t have her arms around me to hold me in the night, not have her arms any more forever.

Her arms, any more, forever:

I slammed on the brakes right beside her. She stopped walking and turned and looked at me. We looked at each other for about a minute. There were a lot of things I could have told her, a lot of promises I could have made and broken later, just anything to get her back in the car. But all I said was, “You want a ride?”

She didn’t say anything when she got in. She shut the door and knelt on the seat across from me, with her fine thick legs folded up under her, deeply tanned, muscled as hell, a bodybuilder with fourteen trophies. I was skinny, coughed in the mornings, had a lot of gas most days. Her eyes were close to me, staring into mine, deep blue and beautiful. She came to me. She came to me and she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me (she could bench two hundred) tight. She mashed her lips down over mine and crushed my mouth tight against hers and pushed me back against the door and I could hear her breathing hard through her nose. She was sucking all the air she could and kissing me as hard as she could. My side of the car was low and she was on top of me, trying to climb up into my lap, pawing at me and hugging me alternately, pushing me hard against the door. The door opened and I fell backwards out into the road and Sheena Baby crawled down from the car on top of me except for my feet, which were still in the car, and she laid down on top of me, kissing me, pushing the back of my head down hard on the asphalt, mashing my ears between her two hands, panting, forgiving all, covering me completely with love, blocking out the sun with it, there beside a flat tire and the rusty underside of the car on the open road where anybody driving by wanting a testament to love could ride by and see it, naked, exposed for the whole world to view.