There was laundry under a tree in a sunken place. On the far side of the road, which had accompanied the train across dry riverbeds, began a pale-green-grassed desert befogged by trees. Blue and red bush-pocked conehills lay ahead. Once those were reached, the road would end at last, like a wailing lover who'd run alongside as long as she could, until she collapsed breathless in the desperate sands. But for now the road went on, in panting little zigzags which never grazed the train's progress.
The train crossed a slanted plain which ended in gross knobs and knuckles. These were the hands of other dying roads, which went down into the earth; they went nowhere, but their hands refused to be buried; they clutched at distances they could never catch. The train left them all behind.
Inside, the music streamed on as reliably as propaganda. In the evening, when the shadows of the blinds curved around his arm like vertebrae, the songs seemed friendlier, perhaps as a result of simple contrast to the loneliness which existed between him and this woman who slumped in the seat with one leg up, eyes closed. Later, to his intense surprise, she leaned her silent head against his arm. He watched the veins on her tanned hands. Then it was night, and morning.
Years later he'd drive the freeway past the place where she used to live and the sadness of it screamed at him; he wanted to chop down her exit sign. Years later he'd look out his window into the rain (the maple tree was taller than before), and he'd watch the cars go planing by in their troughs of wet grayness, and he knew that no matter how long he looked out the window she'd never again come past the ivy tree to turn in at the streetlamp, slowly crossing his line of sight in her new red car (it must not be new anymore; she probably had another) as he leaped up and ran down the stairs so that he could open the door like thought as her finger approached the bell. He remembered the first day he'd met her when they went walking in wide horse-meadows and he climbed the fence first and then turned to her and she leaped into his arms, so shy and skinny and lovely but not shy after that.
She was still sleeping. Her head had been on his shoulder all night, but now she made a face in her sleep and turned to press her forehead to the window.
Continuing south to loud waltz music in the front and mariachi music in the back, they crossed a yellow-brown plain cut with deep sandy washes where cattle lurked like lost souls and the cement vaults of cemeteries were painted blue and orange. Gradually it became greener. That was probably his fault. Everything else was. There were still chollas and ocotillos, but there were also dark green mushroom-shaped trees.
Past rusty-pale railroad cars, they saw a half-naked brown boy on a bicycle, whitish houses plated with curvy orange tiles. Between the blinds of his window the list of monotonously strange entities went on, retreating down forsaken roads. The time was coming when he'd want to tell her so much because he wasn't with her anymore, but at the moment they continued together, so he had nothing to say. It was not a question of boredom; it was just that they were caught up on all each other's secrets so that the next moment would also die easily, leading to death the moment beyond it like that girl who was taking her little daughter for a walk along the railroad tracks. There was a watde fence, with great trees inside; then laundry drying under an aqueduct, a family bathing in a curvy river, prickly pears, long, whiplike fingers of cactus. . The gray-blue sea kept breaking white and clean against a coast of scrub and thorn and cactus, the cacti like mutilated hands planted at the wrist. They were so far away now. They'd gone almost to the end. Two vultures passed overhead. Long shady combers broke shallowly on the beach, the water getting lighter as the sun got higher.
Across the aisle, a man in a T-shirt slept on his wife's shoulder, his breasts and belly jiggling like his massive brown arms, and the water giggled and slapped in the jug at his feet.
