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Jimmy studies Kim over his coffee the next morning. They’re having a late breakfast at a diner across the street from the motel. It’s the kind of place you can find almost anywhere, with a line of griddles hissing behind a long bar and blue-vinyl booths edging the outer walls. He and Kim are both still in their novelty t-shirts—though he thinks Kim wears it better, tucked into her jeans, with her hair pulled up in a bun. A couple of loose strands dangle on her shoulders.
She tilts her head sideways at him. “What’s up?”
Jimmy grins and shrugs. He sets his coffee down and digs into his stack of chocolate chip pancakes, spearing pieces with his fork and shoving them in his mouth. “So how’d you hear about this place, anyway?” he asks around a mouthful of pancakes.
“What, this diner?” Kim asks innocently.
Jimmy gestures to a big poster for the White Sands National Monument. “Come on, Kim, your secret’s out.” He clicks his fingers a couple of times. “Spill.”
Kim grins. “It’s where they shot Hang ‘Em High.” She stares at him. “Clint Eastwood? I thought you were the big fan.”
Jimmy grimaces.
“I’ll watch it with you some time,” Kim says.
“Deal.” Jimmy takes another bite of pancakes and chews thoughtfully. “Man, d’you know who makes the best pancakes?” He pops another slice into his mouth and then says, “Chuck.”
“Oh yeah?” Kim asks. “With a little smiley face in the chocolate chips?”
“Nah,” Jimmy says, and then he shrugs. “They’re just great. No idea how. I think Grammy Davenport taught him before she moved into the home.”
“‘Grammy’, huh?” Kim says, eyes twinkling.
“Shut up,” Jimmy says warmly. He stabs another bit of pancake and glances out the diner window, to where unknown mountains rise above the flat roofs of the hotels and restaurants. Brown and mottled, they make it look like the land is rippling, folding up toward the sky.
He and Kim finish their food and head back to her car. The sky is marbled, a cerulean blue rippled with flecks of white, and though it’s just gone midday it’s still pleasant out, maybe mid 70s. Jimmy settles into the passenger seat and winds down his window for the brief drive to a nearby Walmart. They fill the trunk of Kim’s car with water and supplies, and then they’re back out on the road, pulling away from the city of Alamogordo and following the signs for White Sands National Monument.
Jimmy takes in the boundless countryside by the light of day: the patchy shrubs dotting the brown dirt, the sporadic telephone poles, the brief glimpse of a shallow lake reflecting the clouds above. It’s no wonder he couldn’t see many lights beyond the road last night; there’s nothing but endless desert out here, until behind them the mountains and before them the fading horizon.
Soon, they’re pulling off the highway again. The White Sands visitor center is close to the road, its buildings the same earthen color as the land. He and Kim follow clay paths inside, lingering briefly beside signs describing an ancient tropical paradise crowded with mammoths, beside signs depicting old military airplanes flying through the blue skies.
Inside the visitor center there’s even more placards and dioramas, and Jimmy stops beside one that says, Nature’s Laboratory. His eyes skim the text for a moment, then he turns to Kim. “So did you pick the nerdiest place in the state on purpose or what?”
Kim stares are him flatly. “Jimmy, we passed a space museum on our way here.”
Jimmy grimaces. “Fair enough,” he says. He shifts over a bit. “Huh, look at that little critter!” A pocket mouse peeks out from a collection of other white animals superimposed on the sands. Beside it is a picture of a white cricket that looks so fake Jimmy leans in closer. “How’d they even find one of those to take a photo of it?”
“I have no idea,” Kim says, smile ghosting on her face.
They move slowly through the center, pausing over each display. There’s a couple of other people around, and a loud family enters for a few minutes at one point, the kids screaming incomprehensibly; but for the most part the room is quiet, and Jimmy feels the need to whisper when he speaks, as if they’re in some grand museum instead of the visitor center of a local tourist attraction.
A display entitled Surviving in a Moving Landscape shows how the dunes can shift almost forty feet a year in places, driven by high winds, and Jimmy unconsciously makes a little interested humming noise.
“See?” Kim murmurs, glancing sidelong at him. “All those idiots driving straight there are missing out, they’re not going to know about the”—she leans forward and peers at the next board—“the plight of the bleached earless lizard.” She stands upright. “Never mind, we can go now.”
“Yes,” Jimmy hisses, drawing out the ‘s’ sibilantly.
Kim thanks the Parks Department woman behind the front desk, and they wander back to her car. Jimmy stares at the countryside as Kim pulls out of the parking lot and follows the side-road further away from the highway, passing a couple of small hillocks that look nothing at all like the vast rolling dunes he saw countless photographs of inside the visitor center.
They stop at the ticket gate and pay the entry fee. The woman in the booth looks tired, and she counts out their change slowly. As they idle there, waiting, Jimmy notices a haze in the distance, glowing slightly, like sea spray on a violent day.
And then onward. The road is thin and winding, framed on the left by more of the small hills.
The dirt looks a little paler already, Jimmy thinks. “Do you know how far?” he asks, glancing over at Kim.
She shakes her head.
Minutes pass. Guitars clang through the car stereo, high smashing symbols, a sea of sound. The dunes on their left become increasingly pale, and soon afterwards Jimmy can start to make out distant white mounds, curving in a line across the receding road and out to the right. He suddenly recalls a story he read in high school, and he understands part of it now, because the far-off dunes do look like white elephants—herds of them, frozen in place.
Though the dunes move, he remembers. He wonders which direction they’re headed.
The tape in the stereo stops playing but neither or he or Kim move to change it. They drive in silence past signs that warn of unexploded ordnance hidden in the sands.
Shades of white appear in the verge beside the embankment, now. The road is dead flat, but it feels to Jimmy like the car is climbing higher and higher through the foothills of a mountain, and he’s watching the first patches of snow emerge in the shadowed places. He and Kim ascend these faux peaks slowly, the whiteness around them growing bit by bit, the color seeping away from the land, as if, like David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death, the two of them are climbing to the other world, all light and shadows.
They keep driving until there’s almost no brown earth left, and only sharp tussock grasses poke up, resilient. Soon, the white sand begins to pile beside the road like snowbanks, too, and a thin layer of the dust coats the surface of the asphalt. Kim takes the corners slower and slower, tires crunching. The noise of it is quieter than he would expect, fuzzy. The dunes seem to swaddle the sound as snow does, that empty-aired silence of a fresh fall.
As they drive onward, stereo off, wheels humming, Jimmy wonders if it’s not the snow but the color that does the muffling: white itself leeching noise from the world.
Here and there they see parked cars and small figures traversing the slopes, but they carry on. The road cuts a swathe through the dunes, and soon the sealed surface is covered entirely in white—until, other than the occasional tire-mark and the sloping embankments, it’s impossible to tell there’s a road before them at all.
Jimmy turns to Kim and laughs out loud at the absurdity of it: driving through New Mexico with his window down, the weather warm, and before him a kind of pristine white wonderland that seems more like it’s lifted from a storybook than any winter he’s really experienced.
Kim grins back at him.
“All right,” Jimmy says. “This was a pretty good idea.”
Kim bows her head and does a little twirl with her hand. “Thank you, thank you.”
Ahead of them, the road curves sharply to the left, visibly looping back on itself, and beside it a tiny wooden shack decorates a sparsely populated parking area.
“I think this is it,” Kim murmurs, pulling off the road and parking up beside a minivan. She lifts her hips to pull a brochure from her back pocket and then unfolds it, staring at the map inside for a few moments before nodding.
Jimmy pops open his door and steps out of the car, stretching out his shoulders. The parking area is dirty with kicked-up sand, and all around them white dunes rise, pockmarked by grasses. Three children run up and down one of the nearby slopes and laugh loudly, and nearby a group of adults gather before a tour guide.
He and Kim wander over to the closest dune. They climb it slowly, the sand collapsing in little furrows beneath their feet. At the top, Jimmy looks back to where they came from, to the mountains, soft and indistinct. He realizes that the haze he saw from afar was actually the white sand of the dunes, picked up by the wind and left hanging in the air like a fine fog. Almost unnoticeable, but just enough to blur the edges of the outside world.
He can’t see the end of the dunes from here, can’t see the end of the folding white sands that rise and fall around them.
“How come I didn’t know there were places like this?” he asks softly, turning to Kim.
She glances over at him and a grin bursts onto her face. “Because you haven’t seen Hang ‘Em High .”
Jimmy laughs brightly, and Kim joins in. She gestures, and they descend the dune again, feet skimming down in small avalanches in the sand. They walk back to Kim’s car and she pops the trunk, and they start sorting through supplies. Jimmy cracks open a bottle of sunblock and squeezes some onto his palm then rubs it onto his face thickly, reaching around to do the back of his neck.
“Good?” he says, turning to Kim when he’s done.
She chuckles and rubs in a bit on his cheek, then takes the bottle from him. Jimmy sorts through bottled water and food and packs them into a brand new backpack then slings it over his shoulder, looking up towards the sun. It’s high above them, but still not too hot, and Jimmy squints at it for a moment then tucks his hat down a little lower on his head.
There’s a trailhead off the parking lot, and he and Kim follow the red trail-marker posts out into the dunes like breadcrumbs. The path between each post is marked with footprints, and every now and then a set split off, or loop around and climb a nearby dune. He and Kim follow the trail for a while longer and then break off, too, heading out into the white hills for a couple of minutes, until there’s no trace of the other visitors, no trace of anybody at all but their own unsteady footsteps over the undulating ground behind them.
Jimmy stops at the crest of a dune, the sand dropping away in concave arches below. He bends down and picks up a handful of the stuff, rubbing it between his fingers. It’s finer than any sand he’s ever felt—more like flour than anything, and it’s completely cool to the touch despite the afternoon sun.
“So I guess there used to be a big lake here,” Kim says, staring out over the edge of the dune.
Jimmy nods, trying to picture it. The artwork in the visitor’s center had depicted mammoths and giant sloths in the grasslands around the lake, lush and vibrant. Now it’s almost empty, textured only by the wind, little wrinkles spreading out in great zigzagged curves.
He shrugs off his backpack and sits on the edge of the slope, running his fingers through the cold sand again. It’s so soft that the cool temperature is the main reason he can tell he’s touching it at all, and he thinks about the shards of gypsum—of glass, it had seemed to him, looking at the diagrams earlier. A substance so brittle it can be ground to a powder by the wind.
And Jimmy can see that wind now, lifting the sand from the crests of the dunes like spindrift off the top of a wave.
Kim sits down beside him and gestures for a bottle of water, and Jimmy hands her one. She cracks the top and drinks, then nestles the bottle into a little divot beside her. After a moment, she bends forward and slips off her shoes, and Jimmy does the same.
He wiggles his bare toes in the sand. “Fists with your toes,” he says.
Kim chuckles. “Better than a shower and a cup of coffee.”
Jimmy rolls his jeans up to his knees and spreads his legs out on the slope, shifting them slightly, like he’s making a snow angel.
“Oh shit,” Kim says suddenly, sitting upright. She turns to Jimmy. “Andrea. I didn’t leave a message or anything.”
“Uh oh,” Jimmy says, raising his eyebrows.
“She’s going to think I’ve been kidnapped,” Kim says. “She’s pretty hyperbolic.”
“You reckon she’ll even notice?” Jimmy asks. “You must’ve fallen asleep in the library a bunch, right? A little”—he holds up a finger and his thumb—“snatched moment of sleep between three and four in the morning.”
Kim stares at him dryly.
“That was my first image of you, remember?” Jimmy says. “Snoozing over a book somewhere you shouldn’t be.”
“I actually try not to make a habit of it,” Kim says lightly, but she shrugs. “I’ll phone her when we get back later. God knows she’s stayed out enough nights with strange men that I’ve stopped worrying if she doesn’t show for a couple of days.”
“And if we see any search-party choppers flying past, we’ll just, like, flag ‘em down,” Jimmy says. He scrunches his toes in the gypsum sand, then hops to his feet again. Kim holds out her water and he takes it and shoulders the backpack, and then they move on, heading back to the trail.
The red markers carry on, and he and Kim follow them, barefoot. Jimmy keeps an eye out for white snakes and scorpions and whatever else dangerous might have adapted to the landscape here, but eventually he relaxes, enjoying the soft sand between his toes. The trail leads them circuitously around the dunes, climbing some here and there, and in other places leveling out so that the route is almost flat.
They walk for a long time, from red post to red post beneath the enormous sky.
As the afternoon wears on, the sky clears, the speckled white clouds drifting down toward the horizon and then vanishing completely until there’s nothing left but blue. He and Kim sit on the peak of another dune, looking out at the endless ripples of white.
Sometimes, Jimmy thinks he sees a lizard skitter across the sand, or a pocket mouse dart between bushes, but then he remembers the sign in the visitor’s center saying that most of the animals who live here are nocturnal and figures he must be seeing things. Other than a couple of distant birds, there’s no wildlife about at all.
“I wonder if Chuck’s ever been out here,” he says, watching fine sand blow across the dunes. After a moment, he turns to Kim. “Probably not, he’s so busy.”
Kim frowns. “How long has he lived in Albuquerque?”
Jimmy makes a thoughtful noise. “I don’t know. Twelve years?” He frowns and scratches his ankle. “He’s never actually told me why he picked it.”
“He’s married, right?” Kim says. “I’ve seen his wife around a couple of times.”
Jimmy nods. “Yeah, but he was out here a long time before that.” He realizes he doesn’t actually know how Chuck and Rebecca met. At the opera? he thinks, absurdly. It would have to be someplace fancy. Someplace worthy.
Jimmy digs his feet into the sand, watching the powder swell over the arch of each foot and swallow it. He wriggles his toes and little pockmarks appear in the sand—unsettled. “I was married, too, actually,” he says suddenly, and then when Kim raises her eyebrows he chuckles. “Sorry, train of thought.” He laughs again at her expression and then says, “Twice, even.”
“Huh,” Kim says, and her eyes twinkle as she pretends to study him. “Just trying to picture it.”
Jimmy holds his hands out winningly, then drops the pose and laughs. “Don’t worry, they couldn’t either, in the end.” He turns back to the vanishing dunes and stares out at the horizon. The sun is drifting downwards, hazing with light. “It’s nothing like what you’re imagining. No kids, no dogs, no house in the suburbs.”
Kim snorts. “That’s so not what I was thinking.”
Jimmy faces her again. “Okay, fair enough.” He studies her, and, like months ago in the bar, he knows that she’s never going to ask him about this—she’s going to wait for him to tell her, or just be content not knowing. Part of him wishes she would ask.
She wraps her arms loosely around her knees, palms cupping her elbows.
And of course the story spills out of him anyway, voice measured and careful. “The first time I was just dumb and eighteen,” Jimmy says. “I was off and on with her all through high school, or until I dropped out, anyway. But a bunch of kids drove down to Vegas after graduation, and I tagged along like a bad smell. A real drunk one.” He shakes his head slowly. “It lasted the summer, and then she moved away to college, and Dad was—well, she needed to move away, and I didn’t. So that was that.”
Kim examines him, her eyes soft. She gives him a small smile, and then after a moment she says, “I can’t believe in a building full of lawyers I’m spending time with the one high school drop out.”
Jimmy makes a shocked face. “Hey, I got my diploma. Eventually. Even got into college.”
“Wow,” Kim says, and she smiles at him.
“College of DuPage,” Jimmy says, and he holds up his fist. “Go Chaps!” He lowers his hand again. “I was a few credits short of graduating, though. Got this close.”
“Horseshoes and hand grenades, huh?” Kim says.
Jimmy grins and gives a little shrug. “Guess so. But that’s where I met Lisa. Numero dos.” He stares out over the dunes, to where the sky beyond the horizon is filling with puddles of yellow light. The shadows of the tussock grasses grow long and thin, and they stretch out in soft blues toward him and Kim. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth about the sunroof thing,” he says, finally. “Chet didn’t just owe me money. Me and Lisa…we were pretty good. For a long time. She did theater, and in college it seemed like she was really going places with it, you know?” He twists to face Kim.
She’s watching him with half her face bathed in the light of the lowering sun.
Jimmy sighs. “But then the roles started drying up, and neither of us were really working, and it was just like…” He makes a little hissing noise, then says, “Powder keg. I stopped coming home most nights, and I got into some really stupid stuff, and eventually she cheated on me with this hot-shot theater director.” He can feel his face twisting into a sneer as he says the next word: “Chet.”
“Chet,” Kim echoes, voice soft.
“And the worst part is, I introduced them! Because he was dating Mom,” Jimmy spits, and he reflexively rubs the back of his hand over his mouth, as if wiping away the taste of those words. Familiar feelings boil up in his stomach, acidic and hateful, and he grits his teeth and tries to swallow them back down again. Tries to douse them before they catch. “What a fucking mess.”
Kim is silent for a long time, until he turns to face her. She folds her lips inwards and studies him, then tilts her head and gives a little smile. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this in your stupid sombrero hat.”
Jimmy snorts. After a moment, he says, “Kim, it’s a hat on a hat.”
“Yeah,” Kim says. She reaches over and takes it off his head. Smooths out his bangs with a finger that leaves a glimmering trail over his forehead. Then she slips the hat onto her own head, tucking her bun through the back.
“Wow,” Jimmy says.
Kim shrugs. “Now I don’t have to look at it.”
Jimmy chuckles lightly and stares back out at the shadows lengthening over the dunes. The sky is swelling with the sunset now, rose-colored splashes of paint along the horizon. The white sands seem almost to reflect it, becoming nacreous with pink and yellow and orange, taking on the color of the world above.
“Hey,” Kim says quietly.
Jimmy turns to her. “Hey,” he echoes.
She gives a folded little smile and shrugs.
Jimmy shrugs back. He glances down at his feet buried in the sand and wiggles his toes, then faces Kim again. The brim of the hat casts a diagonal stripe of blue shadow over her face. “That’s the talking hat, you know,” he says, after a moment.
“Oh yeah?” Kim asks, raising her eyebrows.
“Yep, I’m all done now, no more McGill family tragedies for today,” Jimmy says. He mimes zipping his lips and throwing the key out into the dunes. Then he indicates Kim, and makes a gesture for her to speak.
She gives a small huffed laugh and looks away from him. Her eyes shift a little, tracing her thoughts like printed letters over the white surface of the desert.
Jimmy watches her. The air is cooling, and he feels the chill of it on his bare forearms as the wind picks up behind them, shifting the sands onward. “I’m just kidding,” he says softly.
“I know,” Kim says, and her eyes flick back to him. “I know that.” She smiles, then says, “Would you believe that you’re the only person here I’ve even told the name of my hometown?”
Jimmy nods slowly, though she’s not looking at him anymore but back out at the setting sun.
“I’m not ashamed of being from there,” Kim says crisply. She shakes her head as if to shake that thought of her mind. “Not at all. But I wanted a blank slate. Nothing and nobody carrying over. A clean break.” She glances at him once more.
Jimmy nods again.
“This place reminds me of it, though,” Kim says, sweeping her hand out. “I didn’t think that it would, but…white covering the fields. Farmers coming into the supermarket and brushing the snow off their shoulders and griping about the turn in the season.” She blows a stray hair away from her face. “I guess they just wanted somebody to listen to them. But it bugged me. Like they expected me to fix the weather for for them, too, in between bagging their groceries.”
The wind rises again, whipping the sleeves of Jimmy’s shirt against his upper arms. He hugs his legs and presses his forearms on the bare skin of his knees beneath his rolled up jeans.
“I’m glad you told me about them, you know,” Kim says quietly.
Jimmy nods again, and when Kim glances over he smiles effacingly, and she returns it, then goes back to staring at the dunes. The wind blows more loose threads of her hair forward.
“There was a time when I thought I could get married,” she says. “It even seemed almost inevitable. Like getting wound up so tight and then released on a path. And you just follow it without questioning anything.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. The sands scatter past them, wheeling over the dunes, ground finer and finer by the milling wind.
“There’s not a lot of choice in Red Cloud,” Kim says. “So when you think you’re stuck in Red Cloud…”
Jimmy tightens his grip on his elbows and squints into the yellowing sun. The sky around it glows amber. West, he thinks. “But you weren’t stuck in Red Cloud,” he says.
“No,” Kim says. She sighs. “No, I found out I wasn’t.”
Jimmy turns to her. The sun is so low her entire face is lit by it now, and it seems to catch in her eyebrows and eyelashes, little flecks of gold dust. The treasure of the Sierra Madre, loosed to the winds and landed here.
Kim breathes out, a long lilting breath, then she meets his eyes and gives a little laugh. “So you’ve got sandwiches somewhere in that backpack, right?”
Jimmy chuckles, and he turns and reaches behind him for the bag and goes to unzips it—but he pauses for a moment, eyes drawn to the long shadows cast backward by the two of them, rippling over the white dunes. They stretch away so far they seem to vanish before they end.
Then Jimmy turns back, and hands Kim her sandwich, and the two of them eat, watching the sun wink and dip below the horizon. The sky and the sands bleed out, kaleidoscopic with pearlescent light, and the wind carries glinting flurries of sand around the the two of them.
The vastness of the sky is staggering, and the vastness of the dunes is staggering, and as Jimmy inhales the air and the colors he thinks that there could be nothing more opposite of a Cook County jail cell than this exact spot in the middle of the White Sands National Monument.
He and Kim walk back to the car in twilight, the sky still a soft blue and light enough to see their way by. The red posts lead them to the parking lot, and they sit on the trunk of Kim’s car dusting off their feet. The white sand is dry and fine and brushes away easily.
On the drive back, they experience their earlier journey in reverse: the white dunes becoming colorful beneath the beams of the headlights, shades of brown and ocher that now seem vibrant and multi-hued compared to the gypsum. Jimmy rolls his window down again, and he watches shrubs and power-poles and then eventually storefronts flash past in the night. Alamogordo is lively, and Kim slows as they pass chain restaurants and motels, more neon signs shining.
They approach a building modeled after an old-fashioned drive-in diner, outlined in glowing pinks and blues, advertising frozen custard. It’s curving and retro futuristic, pulled straight from American Graffiti. Jimmy indicates it, and a few minutes later he and Kim are leaning against her car in the chill evening, holding sundaes in plastic cups.
They eat in companionable silence for a while, the taste of mint bright on Jimmy’s tongue. His grasshopper sundae is an unnatural green color and it seems almost to glow like the neon lights above them. Kim’s, too, is garish: strawberry and pecan, shining bright pink.
A young couple with a pair of bickering kids emerges from the store, loaded down with sundaes. One of the kids has a blotchy face, red and angry, like he’s just finished crying; and the older kid wears a resigned, empty expression that reminds Jimmy of Chuck.
He slips his spoon out of his mouth and turns to Kim. “D’you have any siblings?”
Kim shakes her head.
“Didn’t think so,” Jimmy says, eating another spoonful of frozen custard.
Kim’s eyes twinkle. “Oh yeah?”
“Nah, you’re definitely the resourceful, only kid type.”
“I seem to remember you also thinking I was the resourceful, big city type,” Kim says lightly, smiling sideways at him.
“Prft,” Jimmy says, waving dismissively with his long spoon. “That guy didn’t know what he was talking about.” The kids pile into the back of the minivan, bickering with each other. Jimmy’s sure their sundaes aren’t going to last long, and he watches the red tail-lights of the van accelerate down the main road, then turns back to Kim. He wonders which line to walk; he wonders how carefully to walk it. After a moment, he says, “I have more predictions.”
Kim lifts her eyebrows, smiling slightly around her spoon.
Jimmy holds up fingers, counting them down: “You had a dog. You got all A’s in school. And the first guy you ever slept with is the guy you were thinking about earlier when you said you could’ve got married.”
Kim stares at him for a moment, and then she holds out her hand. “Zero for three. Pay up.”
Jimmy chuckles and gently slaps her hand down. “Really, though?”
Kim shrugs.
Jimmy studies her. “Yeah. I guess you’re a real person and not, like…Molly Ringwald.”
“I’ve got some big news for you, Jimmy,” Kim says wryly. “Molly Ringwald is a real person, too.”
He laughs louder this time, turning away and leaning back against the car. “Well, jeez, I hope I get to meet her one day, then,” he says lightly, staring out at the lights of the traffic whirring by. The stream of cars and trucks is steady, and he remembers that this is the main road through the city, and that all these people could be heading someplace else entirely: Santa Fe or Roswell or Mexico. “So what do you want to do tomorrow?” he asks, watching the headlights streak past.
Kim is silent, and he turns to face her. She shrugs. “We’ll figure that out tomorrow,” she says.
Jimmy nods, digging his spoon back into the frozen custard and taking another bite. The mint is cool on his tongue when he breathes in, like ice.
“I actually would have really liked a dog, you know,” Kim says a short while later, and Jimmy turns to look at her. She smiles at him. “So, half points.”
“Half points,” Jimmy echoes warmly.
They finish their frozen custard beneath the bright pink and blue lights of the store, and linger for a long while outside watching the cars, then head back to the motel.
Inside their room, Jimmy stares out through the slats of the blinds at the glowing highway sign, listening to Kim have a stilted conversation with her roommate over the phone. He can see the traffic driving onward from here, too, the yellow beams of the headlights.
After a while, he swivels the blinds closed and hunts around unsuccessfully for a remote for the television. He finds a pile of brochures for local attractions, and dumps them on the coffee table, but eventually just has to hit the button on the set itself. It winks on with a buzz: there’s an old rerun of Saturday Night Live playing, Belushi and Ackroyd shouting about cheeseburgers and Pepsi and chips. Jimmy flops down into an armchair beside the bed.
Kim hangs up the phone and makes a disgusted scoffing noise. She hops up on the bed next to Jimmy’s chair and sits with her legs crossed. “Pass me that stack of brochures?” she asks, and Jimmy hands over the pile from the coffee table.
“All good with Andrea?” Jimmy asks.
“She spent the whole conversation telling me about a loud woman she had a run-in with at the movies,” Kim says. “So, yes. I don’t think she’d noticed I was gone until I mentioned it.”
Jimmy chuckles, and goes back to staring at the television. The sketches roll on, and he laughs quietly as Gilda does Roseanne Roseannadanna and Bill Murray performs his lounge singer routine in a ski lodge. He can hear Kim sorting through the brochures beside him.
“What do you think?” Kim says, holding up one for the space museum.
Jimmy makes a pained expression.
“They have the bones of the first chimp to go to space,” Kim adds, widening her eyes, and waving the brochure tantalizingly. “And a rocket.”
He tips his head to the side. “Hmm. I could maybe get behind a dead space chimp.”
“I’ll put it in the ‘yes’ pile, then,” Kim says, placing it on her left. She frowns down at the next few brochures, reading them thoughtfully and making a comment here or there. She’s let her hair out and it falls loosely around her head, wavy from being tied up all day.
Jimmy spends more time watching Kim’s eyes flicker over the text of the brochures and her hands turn the pages than he does watching the rest of SNL. He rests his chin on the palm of his hand and takes in her movements silently, meeting her eyes every time she glances up and smiling at her around his fingers. She smiles back.
Soon, stop-motion lobsters are climbing the Rockefeller Center, and, instead of the cast hugging on stage, the show ends with the credits rolling over a screen of white noise. Kim reaches the bottom of her stack of brochures, and she tosses aside one for the city zoo as the channel transitions to a spinning globe and the NBC Nightside logo.
The news starts up and Jimmy groans, pushing himself to his feet and walking over to turn off the set. He can feel the tingle of static electricity as his fingers pass near the screen, and he remembers running his hand over their television when he was younger—how it had felt like cleaning it, wiping away the invisible fuzzy static that had seemed to blanket the curved surface.
He presses the power button and the TV goes dark. He turns turns back to face Kim.
She’s watching him from the bed, cross-legged, her hair spilling over the shoulders of her Route 66 shirt. The amber light of the lamp hits the edges of her. She glances down at her pile of ‘yes’ brochures and sifts through them idly, then looks back up at him, eyes intense.
Jimmy stares into her gaze a long moment, then breathes out. “That was a good day,” he says.
Kim nods. “It was a good day,” she repeats.
“Yeah,” Jimmy says, nodding too. His pulse thuds beneath his jaw. He watches Kim: he can see her chest rising and falling from here, up and down steadily. “Really good,” he says, after a moment.
Kim laughs at that, and Jimmy chuckles, too, staring at her. Her eyes sparkle and she shrugs. He shrugs back.
“So,” he says, voice high and light. He exhales and gives a winning smile, but his next question comes out a little breathier and a little more strangled than he would like: “Wanna make out again, then?”
Kim laughs once, eyebrows lifting. She stares at him and doesn’t say anything.
Jimmy holds his hands out to either side and stands there, blood loud in his ears.
She looks him up and down as if taking his measure, and then eventually, she says, “Okay,” and she starts laughing brightly, seemingly just at the sight of him.
He grins in response, and then he walks over to the bed and leans down and grabs the back of her head and kisses her—and it’s like a jolt rushing through him, like everything he’s been holding back for the past week comes smashing up through a frozen surface and he can breathe again.
Their noses clash and Kim chuckles against his mouth then moves back, grabbing for his upper arms and tugging him backward, too, pulling him onto the bed. They clamber across the covers, and Kim shoves all the useless brochures aside and grabs at his shoulders, dragging him up closer and spreading her legs to make space for him between them. Jimmy moves over her, holding himself up above her.
He stares down at her between his hands, at her blue eyes gazing up at him intensely, and he exhales deeply—and then sees that he’s leaning on her hair. Kim shakes her head dismissively, but he shifts his weight back to his knees and reaches for her hair again, this time gathering it up gently and tucking it up on the pillow as best he can, running the soft threads through his fingers. He takes her in: her eyes shining and bright and her mouth half open and her hair woven loosely around his hand, and he lets out all his breath, one long shaking gasp.
Then he leans over her and kisses her again, and she tastes like strawberries and pecans—sweet and a little bitter.
Kim runs her palms up over his waist, featherlight. Not holding him up—just grazing his side and his hips as he props himself on his forearms above her. Jimmy kisses her deeper, chasing the taste of frozen custard, and then she slips her hands beneath the hem of his t-shirt.
He gasps at the feeling of her cool skin on his—her touch still so light, barely there—and pushes his hips against hers, and Kim grips his bare waist tighter, nails pinching at his skin. She drags her hands slowly up to his ribs then back down, running them around to the small of his back, nails digging sharp paths along the way. Jimmy breathes shallowly in between kissing her, and Kim inches her hands further down his back, slowly, and then she slips her fingers beneath the waistband of his jeans and boxers, tucking them there, skin on skin.
Jimmy breaks away from her mouth and inhales heavily, his eyes closed and all his weight on his elbows. Kim draws her hands up again, fingers slipping out of his jeans and then trailing along his sides. He opens his eyes and looks at her, and Kim murmurs, “Shift over,” and pushes at him and they twist so that she’s straddling his hips and looking down at him, hair-mussed and lips pink.
Jimmy breathes raggedly, watching Kim runs the palms of her hands over him. His shirt’s already half up but she pushes it above his nipples, then trails her hands down his sides, palms curved and thumbs stretched out to trace twin lines along his stomach. She leaves static-fuzzed wakes on his skin, down and down—then she presses her thumbs in a little harder and Jimmy gasps, bucking up into her.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, grabbing the backs of her hands and holding her in place.
Kim gives a light little laugh. “It’s okay, Jimmy,” she says.
Jimmy grips the back of her hands tighter and tries to catch his breath. “Why are we doing this?” he gasps, and then he shakes his head. “I mean—why aren’t we doing this?” Had he come up with reasons since he awoke in bed beside her? He can’t think of any of them now.
Kim shifts back a little, but she leaves her hands where they rest beneath his. “To start with?” she asks softly, and she gives him a small smile. “Because you woke up and looked terrified.”
“I what?” Jimmy asks.
Kim shrugs. “It’s okay. We were both pretty drunk.”
Jimmy shifts beneath her. He rubs his right thumb over Kim’s hand. “We’re not drunk now,” he murmurs.
“No,” Kim says softly. “I guess not.” She stares down at him and doesn’t move. He can see her pulse thudding at the base of her throat above her shirt, flickering beneath her skin.
Jimmy strokes his thumb back and forth. “Was I the only one?”
“Hm?” Kim raises her eyebrows.
“Terrified,” Jimmy adds.
Kim sighs. She looks down to where their hands are linked and twists hers around so their fingers weave together. “No,” she says, eventually. Her eyes meet his. Words coming slowly, she says, “Jimmy, you’re not…”
—and he thinks, what? what? pulse humming in his ears—
—and, voice so careful, she says, “… part of the plan.”
Jimmy lets out his breath in a rush of air. “Yeah,” he says lightly. He stares into her eyes. Hers are gentle, and he sighs again. He tightens his fingers. “Wanna tell me about the plan, then?”
Kim frees one of her hands and brushes his hair away from his eyes, tracing her finger over his forehead. “Come to Albuquerque,” she says, and she brushes his hair back again, then lowers her hand so it’s resting on his stomach. “Make something of myself,” she says. “Don’t think about anyone else.”
Jimmy holds her hand again. “We’re not in Albuquerque now,” he says.
“No,” Kim says, smile edging her expression. “No, I guess not.”
“Seems like the plan’s already gone off the rails,” Jimmy says, and he shrugs.
“Hm,” Kim says, mouth twitching. And then she smiles, and leans down and kisses him again, letting go of Jimmy’s hands and gripping the sides of his face.
She bites his lower lip and Jimmy groans, then Kim releases it, laughing lightly into him. She kisses him slowly, forcefully.
He runs his hands up her thighs, stopping at the top of her jeans and hooking his forefingers into her waistband so that he can drag her hips closer to his, shifting up beneath her, pressing himself tight against her. He tugs at her t-shirt, freeing it and slipping his hands up beneath the hem. The bare skin of her waist is light with downy hairs, and warm, and soft—and he runs his hands up over the curve of her ribs to the edge of her bra.
Jimmy traces the skin at the bottom of her bra with his thumbs, stroking the same path repeatedly, and then he stops to grab her shirt again and pull it upwards, and Kim sits up to help him, tugging it over her head. He closes his eyes for a moment and then opens them, and Kim’s smiling down at him.
The yellow light of the motel lamps pools in the hollows of her clavicles, her pulse thrumming fast against her neck.
She reaches out and presses a thumb to his bottom lip, tracing the pad of it back and forth, and Jimmy stays still, and lets her outline his mouth with her touch. When she goes to move away, Jimmy turns his head, mouthing at the palm of her hand, wet and a bit messy, until Kim leans back down and kisses him again. She runs her hand down the side of his stomach, stopping at the top of his jeans, trailing feathery fingers around his waistband to the front and lingering there.
Jimmy nods against her, and Kim grazes his stomach with her fingertips, light and ticklish for what feels like an eternity, before popping open the top button. Jimmy grunts, shifting his hips upwards, and she slips her hand inside and palms him through his boxers. He grips tight into the curve of her hips, clenching his fingers into her skin, pressing his eyes shut.
Kim squeezes him gently, then pulls back, hair falling down like a curtain around them. She murmurs, “Condom?”
“Wallet,” Jimmy gasps, jerking his head to the nightstand.
Kim stretches over to grab the wallet, keeping her thighs on either side of him. She opens it and rifles through, then lets out a snort of laughter. “I forgot about this haircut,” she says, and she turns his wallet to face him.
His drivers license from three years ago stares back at him, his old mullet wild and unkempt. Jimmy chuckles, tightening his grip on Kim’s thighs, and he shakes his head. “Sorely missed,” he says.
Kim laughs brightly, turning it so she can see it again. “Imagine. This guy really showed up at the great HHM. I mean, really.”
“You guys didn’t know what hit you,” Jimmy says, stroking his thumbs back and forth.
Kim chuckles softly. “No, we did not.” She sets the wallet down and reaches over to run her fingers through his hair. Tingles glimmer over his scalp, swelling outwards from the paths made by her nails and spreading down to the nape of his neck. Kim trails her hands back and forth, then down the side of his head, over his ears and into dips of his shoulders, and then she’s tugging at his shirt and Jimmy’s sitting up to help her pull it over his head.
She shifts away, shimmying back off him, and she stands at the edge of the bed to unbutton her own jeans and slip out of them so she’s just in her underwear. Jimmy watches, mouth open and frozen, until she reaches up for her bra.
“No, wait, I want to,” he says, and he shifts forward over the covers until Kim’s framed by his legs. He grips her waist and holds it for a moment, looking up at her, then he runs his hands up over her ribs and around to her back. He undoes her bra slowly, popping open the clasp and then slipping his hands up her arms to drag the bra down and off. It falls to the floor between them, and he leans forward and mouths at the soft skin between her breasts, moving his lips slowly until he reaches a nipple, and he hears Kim sigh above him.
He pulls back after a while to stare up at her, and Kim rests her palm on the side of his face for a moment, like the ghost of a touch, and then she gestures for him to shift backwards. She sets a knee on the bed beside him and lifts herself up and straddles him, sitting in his lap.
Jimmy reaches to cup her breasts in his hands, warm and heavy, and he leans in and runs his mouth over her clavicle and then up to the pulse point on her neck. He grins and murmurs, “Tastes like sunblock,” against her skin.
Kim chuckles, stroking the back of his head, weaving her fingers with his hair.
He moves his hands down her hips again and finds her bare thighs, and he pulls away from her neck for a moment to look down at the two of them together, at the size of his hands arcing over her legs, almost covering them completely. He slides his palms up then twists his hands around, dancing his thumbs lightly over the soft skin of her inner thighs. Kim tightens her grip on his head, and Jimmy tilts to look up at her.
He rubs his thumbs back and forth, moving higher and higher up the insides of her thighs, and Kim stares down at him silently, her chest rising and falling. Her grip on his hair gets tighter still, and Jimmy twists his head to lean into it, staring up into her eyes, tracing his hands up and over the smooth skin of her thighs until he’s shifting his right hand around and resting the palm of it against her stomach, his fingers teasing the edge of her underwear.
Kim closes her eyes for a brief moment then opens them again, her gaze still trained on him. Jimmy slips his fingers under the fabric, moving them down, and Kim lays a hand over his, encouraging him onward.
He traces light patterns, teasing her, and Kim’s grip tightens on the back of his hand as he dances the pad of his fingers around, missing all the places she’d really want to be touched. He stares into the dark of her pupils, breathing heavily, moving his finger downward. “Like this?” he murmurs, eventually, and he starts rubbing his thumb in gentle circles. Kim nods, eyes dropping closed, and then she guides the movement of his thumb a little, changing the speed until he gets it. He keeps up the rhythm for a while and then slips his middle finger down, moving it back and forth over her folds and then slipping between them and inside her.
The hand in his hair tightens and Jimmy leans his head forwards and grins, resting his forehead on her sternum. He slips in another finger and curls them forward, and Kim’s hand clenches in his hair. He feels her lean down and kiss the top of his head, open-mouthed, and he nods, and keeps going, rubbing his thumb steadily and pressing firmly against the warmth inside her.
She starts moving against his fingers, her thighs shifting on his jeans, and the hand that was guiding him gently now holds firm on his wrist, her nails digging into the skin. Jimmy curls his fingers again and again and the nails tighten even further. Her other hand moves slick over the back of his neck, damp with sweat, twisting to tug better at his hair.
He rubs his thumb faster and presses the pads of his fingers hard against her, and her nails pinch his wrist, five pinpricks of bright pain, then she bucks against his hand once, twice, and goes still, fingers tight and jagged in his hair.
But Jimmy can still feel her twitching around his fingers, and he closes his eyes and presses his forehead into her skin, Kim’s chest rising and falling beneath him. She untangles her hold on his hair and strokes his head, running the palm of her hand down the sweat-slicked nape of his neck for a few minutes as they catch their breath, until she finally unclenches her grip on his wrist and Jimmy slips his hand out of her underwear. He wipes it on the bed beside him and looks up at her, at her mussed hair and soft expression. Kim smiles down at him, and he returns it.
After a moment, she slips off his lap and shimmies out of her underwear. Jimmy follows after her with his hand unconsciously, until Kim steps back between his knees and he can lay his palm on her hip. She reaches out for the front of his waistband and finally unzips his jeans, and then she slides her hands around his waist, fingers trailing beneath the denim. Jimmy lifts up his hips off the bed and they tug his pants down then he kicks them off, taking his boxers with them.
Kim settles back onto his lap. Her bare thighs are hot against his, and Jimmy jerks at the feeling, grabbing Kim’s hips and holding her in place. Kim reaches for him and strokes him a couple of times, and he breathes heavily against her skin, fingers pawing uselessly at her shoulders.
He feels completely undone already, and he rakes his nails over her skin and closes his eyes. She leans closely against him, her breasts firm against his chest as she reaches behind them and it’s only when he hears the sound of foil tearing that he realizes she was getting the condom.
Jimmy takes it from her and pinches it and rolls it down over himself, glancing up at Kim, who’s watching hungrily. She meets his gaze and leans in and kisses him sloppily, open mouthed, teeth clacking.
“Mrrf, Kim,” Jimmy grunts against her, gripping the base of his dick.
She pulls back from his mouth, looking down at the two of them.
Jimmy hears her exhale, ragged, and he stares at their crosshatched legs for a moment too, rubbing his thumb over Kim’s hip. She lowers her hand, and the pads of her fingers wander down the sensitive skin inside his forearm, past the red half-moon indentations on his wrist, and then stop between their legs, and she holds him beside his own fingers and positions him. She starts lowering herself, the heat of her sliding around Jimmy and—
“Wait, wait, wait,” he gasps, and he grips her hip tighter, his thumb pressing into the hollow divot in the bone. He clenches his teeth and his fingers and breathes out carefully through his nose.
Kim leans her forehead against his, chest rising and falling unevenly, hands warm on his upper arms.
Jimmy laughs lightly and says, “Easy.” He digs his fingers into her hip, and neither of them move at all, until eventually he nods against her. Kim leans in to kiss him sloppily again, and Jimmy can barely move his mouth to keep up, he’s still so lost.
Then she starts lowering herself onto him again, a slow push, torturously slow, intense heat enveloping him bit by bit—and then he’s completely inside her, and Kim’s thighs flex around him, and her hands clench on his arms, and she gasps into his mouth. Jimmy closes his eyes. His body feels somehow hot and cold at the same time, and it’s like coming inside from the cold to an open fire, his flesh breaking out in chills, fine goosebumps spreading over his skin.
When he opens his eyes again, Kim’s staring down at him. “Hey,” she murmurs.
“Hey,” Jimmy gasps softly.
“You okay?”
Jimmy nods, and they start moving together. The bed-covers are all bunched up behind them, and Kim reaches past him to shove them aside, and they shift backwards onto the sheets. She rocks slowly above him, letting him take the full weight of her, resting her hands on his chest. Her thumbs lock into small gaps in his ribcage, little points of pressure that are almost painful.
“Is this okay?” Kim asks again, shifting down to kiss him.
“Yeah,” Jimmy gasps, and then he nods as well, just in case.
“Good,” Kim murmurs.
Jimmy reaches up to cup the back of her neck, holding her close, staring up at her. He shifts his hips slowly and Kim matches his speed, and he can feel her breathing against his lips, hot and damp.
Kim trails her hands down his ribs and over his stomach and then laughs against his mouth.
“What?” Jimmy murmurs, letting go of her neck.
She leans back a little and runs a finger through the vee of his hips then holds it up to him. It’s covered in a fine layer of white dust. “You’ve still got some sand on you,” she says, moving against him.
Jimmy holds her her waist lightly, shifting inside her, and he chuckles. “Can’t believe—we’re finally doing this—and I’m covered in sand.”
“Finally, huh?” Kim says. She grabs his hands and lifts them off her, tangling her fingers in his and rocking forward.
Jimmy nods. He tightens his fingers around hers and exhales deeply. “You telling me you didn’t want to do this after I got you a certain, mmrf”—Kim leans down and pecks him on the mouth then pulls back again—“a certain book?”
“Hmm, that wasn’t the first time,” Kim says, moving their joined hands around so that she’s resting her weight down on them. “I seem to remember you coming back to the mailroom one day soaked with coffee…”
“Really?”
Kim nods, shifting her hips slowly, and Jimmy groans.
“Covered in coffee, huh?” he says, a few moments later. “I can arrange that again.”
Kim gives a little trill of laughter. “What?” she asks, warmly.
“I don’t know,” Jimmy says, grinning. “Shut up.” He grips her fingers tighter, tugging her closer, pressing his hips up into her. He finds her mouth again and kisses it desperately, running his tongue over her lip and then inside, burning with the heat of it.
He frees one of his hands and moves it down between them, and he lets Kim guide his finger again until he figures out the right rhythm for her, and she’s shifting above him and gasping and breathing into his mouth. They settle into it and move together for what feels almost like forever, and he thinks his skin is on fire, and he can barely catch his breath, and a muscle in his forearm is flashing with pain in a line up from his middle finger, but Kim’s grabbing his wrist again and he wouldn’t stop even if he wanted to, and the pain of it is keeping him together, anyway. She presses her forehead against his again but the contact is clumsy now, messy, bone hitting bone a little too hard and they pull back.
Jimmy jerks his hips up, and Kim tips further forward, her breasts pressing on his chest and her forearms framing his head, and she tucks her head in beside his. He helps hold her up with his free hand, his other hand is rubbing rhythmically, and Kim’s shifting against it until—
“Jimmy,” she gasps, and then, “Fuck.” She spasms around him and Jimmy stills, breathing hard, feeling the weight of her on him. He moves his hand to the back of her neck, slipping it beneath her hair and pressing her into his shoulder until she starts to pull back, and he lets his arm slide loosely down to his side.
Kim looks down at him, face bright, warm by the glow of the lamp, and Jimmy trails his hands over the soft skin of her lower back, moving inside her slowly.
She sighs gently, and moves along with him, running her hand up his chest. “Do you want to try anything else?” she asks softly, cupping his cheek.
Jimmy shakes his head. “No,” he gasps. “I’m—I’m close. This is perfect. You’re perfect. You’re gorgeous. You’re—” and the words start spilling out of him, an unbroken river of words, and Kim kisses him messily and swallows them, humming with each new mouthful. She angles her hips so that he slips in deeper, and moves faster, new words leaving him with each thrust, but then eventually he realizes she’s speaking, too, so he stops talking and listens—and it’s his name, over and over, hummed to his lips.
“Jimmy,” Kim murmurs, “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy,” and the noise of his name is exactly like humming, really, like a buzzing against his mouth, and he cradles her cheeks so he can feel the sound of it there, too, and then Kim’s reaching for his own face, their forearms criss-crossing, and her thumbs are on his jaw like rubber bands, and she’s tightening around him and then he’s coming, gasping silently into her mouth, letting Kim swallow it until there’s no sound left between them at all, no sound or words or names, just—light.
They lie together later, tucked close on Kim’s side of the bed, avoiding the damp half of the sheets. Jimmy runs his hand down the curve of her waist, finally noticing how much sand the two of them are both covered in, ground so fine it was easy not to feel it during everything else.
“Shower?” Jimmy murmurs.
Kim shrugs. “Later,” she says, and she trails a finger over his stomach, dipping it in and out of his belly button, then dancing around the edge like water circling a drain. Jimmy watches the fine veins on the back of her hand, blue and sharp in the light.
He can hear the traffic going past outside again, the drone of the cars and trucks, and somewhere in a neighboring room there’s a television on: soft muffled voices with the polished accents of newsreaders.
“This is a pretty great motel, you know,” Jimmy says, shifting his head a little against the pillow.
“Mhm.” Kim nods. “I can pick ‘em.”
Jimmy laughs softly.
She stops tracing lines over his belly and reaches for his hand where it rests loosely near his hip, pulling it close to her and studying it like a scientist. She flexes his fingers ones by one and runs her thumb over the hairs on his knuckles. Seeing it through her eyes, it almost looks like a stranger’s hand, and he keeps his muscles slack, watching his digits move beyond his control.
“So, about that plan of yours…” Jimmy says lightly, a few minutes later.
Kim swats at his hand. “Shh. Don’t gloat.”
He chuckles, tightening his grip on her waist. “I was more interested in the first step.”
“Come to Albuquerque?” Kim says.
“Mm,” Jimmy hums.
Kim shrugs beneath his arm. “I like snakes and tarantulas.”
Jimmy says her name softly, and she twists up to look at him. He gives her a little smile. “You gotta admit, it’s not the most obvious choice.”
Kim looks away from him, and releases his hand. “I applied for as many programs as I could,” she says, eventually, running her finger through his chest hair, tracing letters over his skin. “Anything to help with the law school fees. And HHM were the ones who took me.”
“Good on HHM,” Jimmy murmurs.
Kim shrugs again. He feels her write the initials of the firm on his chest.
“And now you're here to fight the good fight,” he says after a while.
Kim twists and kisses his ribs, then murmurs, “That’s right,” against his skin. Jimmy weaves his fingers through her hair, following her head loosely when she shifts it back again and leans her cheek on his chest. He thinks about a younger Kim, back home in Red Cloud. A younger Kim looking for a world that makes sense.
“Right and wrong,” he says. “Good and bad. I get that. But how’d you decide on lawyer? Not—I dunno, a cop?”
“I guess I just decided,” Kim says, running her finger in small circles on his skin and then stopping. She looks up at him again. “I’m sorry, Jimmy. That’s not fair.”
Jimmy shrugs. “It’s okay.”
“Have you ever really talked to a cop?” Kim asks. “Do you know how many innocent people get locked up every day because they can’t afford a good lawyer, or the right lawyer?”
“I might have an idea,” Jimmy says softly, and Kim nods.
“Right,” she says. “So learning the law, arguing the law, being the best at it…” She sighs. “The only people who get to control anything are the lawyers, Jimmy. Nobody else. Nobody else in this world. So why go in half-cocked?”
Jimmy nods decisively. “Always go in full cock.”
Kim snorts. “Shut up.”
He laughs gently then breathes out and tightens his hand on Kim. The clock on the bedside table flicks to two o’clock, and Jimmy glances over at it then looks away, his eyes tracing up the wallpaper and around the old fashioned cornice on the ceiling. His childhood bedroom back in Cicero used to have one, too, carved with vines or flowers or something in an attempt to look fancier than it was. This one is plain, just straight lines and angles. He frowns at it.
“What’s up?” Kim asks softly. She’s looking up at him, and when Jimmy meets her gaze she runs a finger over his jaw.
Jimmy shakes his head. “I dunno. Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Kim repeats.
“I guess…” he says, eyes darting away for a moment, then back to hers. “I wish I could figure stuff out like that. I like having a goal. I like doing things. I think I can be pretty good at it. But this shit at HHM…I don’t know. I can’t work in a mailroom forever, Kim.”
She traces his jaw again, then drops her hand. “Is anyone expecting you to?” she asks quietly.
Jimmy shrugs. He breathes out through his nose and looks up at the cornice again. “What else can I do?”
Kim gives a light little laugh and taps her fingers up his chest. Her voice comes liltingly, rising upwards like a scale: “You could be a lawyer?”
“Hah,” Jimmy says dryly.
Kim stills her hand. After a moment, she slides it back towards herself and rests her chin on it, staring up at him. “Well, why not?”
“Kim, are you kidding?” he asks. “Even if I got the rest of my credits, no law school would ever accept me, and even if they did, then I’d have to sit the exams that are practically killing you, and you’re so much smarter.”
“I don’t know why you think you’re so dumb.”
Jimmy shrugs. “Fine, maybe not. But I’m not lawyer smart, Kim. That’s Chuck. That’s not me.”
Kim folds her lips inwards and frowns, then says. “Well, there are other jobs.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says bitterly. “The mailroom.”
“Albuquerque isn’t made up of just lawyers and mailroom workers, Jimmy. Hell, HHM isn’t. They’re a big company. They employ all sorts of people.”
He raises his eyebrows and waits.
Kim sighs. “Uh, there’s assistants, and executive assistants, and oppo research, and IT…” she trails off, then taps the pads of her fingers on his skin thoughtfully. “What did you do at college?”
Jimmy huffs. “Business and marketing,” he says. “But I skipped most of my classes, Kim. Barely dragged myself through the exams using good old common sense.”
Kim rolls her eyes. “Whatever. You know, they pay people to do marketing at HHM, right? I don’t know how often they use outside firms, but they’ll have a small department of some kind, I’m sure. You could see if they ever hire from within.”
The words ring a bell in Jimmy’s head. “You know, Howard did say not to think of this as a dead-end job. Said they reward effort at HHM, or something.”
Kim slaps his chest. “There you go.” But she stares at him for a moment, then says, “Would you want to do that, though?”
“I dunno,” Jimmy says. He tries to picture it, but he can only think of his professors at college, droning on before the class. He’s always liked the idea of marketing, at least, of selling people on dreams. Convincing them to think exactly the way he needs them to think. “I’ll talk to Howard,” he says.
Kim nods against the back of her hand, and he breathes out slowly. There’s a shimmer of white sand beneath her eye, glinting on her cheekbone.
He swipes it away with his thumb and gives a light chuckle. “How about that shower now?” he asks, and Kim nods.
They do go see the dead chimp, and the rocket, and all sorts of other artifacts from outer space that Jimmy doesn’t quite see the point of, wandering around the Alamogordo Space Center. There’s a moon rock that seems drab and boring considering it’s only a short drive away from a landscape that’s truly otherworldly. The moon rock just looks like a rock.
They find that there’s not much else to do in Alamogordo, but there’s a cinema, and they catch a couple of movies. It seems like Hollywood is obsessed with trilogies that weekend: Alien 3, and Lethal Weapon 3. He’s glad he’s watching them with Kim and that they're whispering commentary to each other, because otherwise he doesn’t know if he would have made it through either film. Afterward, they stumble across another tiny museum and venture inside to see an enormous, back-lit photograph of a shroud that’s supposed to have Jesus’s body marked on it; but Jimmy just finds it creepy, not sure where he’s supposed to look, or what he’s supposed to get out of it.
On Monday, they drive up into the mountains beside the city, stopping to wander through small villages. One is still set up like an Old West town, the street lined with the colorful square shop-fronts that Jimmy’s used to thinking of as empty facades. Surrounded by the tall pine trees of Lincoln National Forest, it’s like something out of Pale Rider.
They get lunch at a lodge away from the village, up in the hills on strange, sprawling parklands, with duck ponds and rotundas. A sign boasts that Garland and Gable stayed there once, and another sign says the whole building burned down in the early 20th century and had to be rebuilt, and he and Kim spend the rest of their meal laughing quietly and peering around corners for Jack Torrance. And then they move on to another town, slowly winding their way back down to Alamogordo.
But that evening, as they leave the city behind them, Jimmy only thinks of White Sands, tucked away invisibly across the flat land beside the road. He clings to the image of it in his mind, and White Sands clings to them, too: in the dust that appears in Kim’s car, and that they kept finding on their own bodies, or on each other’s bodies, late at night.
It’s still light for the first couple of hours of the drive back, and Jimmy appreciates the broad expanse of the place, the unending borders of desert on either side of the road. He looks out at it now and wonders if there’s some unique monument, or old town clinging tight to its past, or hidden natural wonder out there, too. Something magical that might be glimpsed if he could just rise a little higher above the road, could just see a little farther beyond the horizon.
The sun has long set by the time they approach Albuquerque. They take the main highway over the Sandias this time, and the Historic Route 66 wends its way around them, cutting over bridges and through tunnels. The highway is smooth and fast, and the sound of one of Kim’s now-familiar cassettes fills the car as they crest the peak of the mountains and see the city spread out before them, a glimmering crosshatch of lights.
Jimmy hears Kim’s hands tighten creakingly on the vinyl of her steering wheel, and he twists to look at her. Her eyes are trained on the road, and her lips are flat in thought.
He turns down the music. “Everything okay?”
“About this,” Kim says, and it’s like the two words have been waiting on the edge of her lips for the last two hundred miles, because they appear so crisply and clearly. “I don’t know how fair to you…” she says, then she breathes out, and flickers a glance over at him and clears her throat. “With classes coming back in a week, and you know how I…”
Jimmy exhales, too. He’s been waiting for it the entire drive, been waiting for it since Saturday night, really. Waiting for her to say something, or waiting for himself to say something. He’s not sure whether he really would have, now that Kim’s locked them into this track. So instead he says, “I know. I get it.”
She just nods. The lights of the streetlamps flash over her face. Bright then dim.
“Beside, I got plans now, too,” he says lightly, looking back out at the road instead, at the browns and greens of the Sandias.
“Yeah,” Kim says. She breathes softly beside him, hands twisting on the wheel.
“I got big plans,” Jimmy says, and they descend into the lights of the city.
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