He settled into the shotgun seat, turned to the warm window and stared out into the passing scene. It unraveled with disregard to his wishes, refusing to slow down or stop to allow him to make sense of it.  He hoped to pull something out of the blur, perhaps to find...

There was no panic, no pinpricks of urgency and nothing to dislodge the way they felt about heading out. Departures, once so weighted down with sadness, no longer felt dispiriting.

Then they lit out from the place on Kanan Dume Road, winding through the gauzy canyons up to the 101.  The only other vehicles out were the slow pickup trucks of early morning landscapers.

He took time to notice but there was nothing much to see, No place to win or lose, And no place warm to be.

After they sold motor court in Tucumcari, the couple used a small portion of the proceeds to fund a lavish honeymoon in Vegas.  They were seventeen years late.

She knew all the barroom tricks.  But she had never seen anything like the rancher who spread his hands palm down on the bar and made his knuckles crack without any tugging.

The little man who took the open stool next to her at the blackjack table wheezed and sputtered.  The dealer scowled and dealt.

Then her confidence returned.  At first, she was suspicious.  After a few days trying to puncture it, she was satisfied and lit out for Las Vegas.

When he told her they would leave at the end of the end of the month, she said she would let him go alone.  He couldn’t blame her and told her so.

Maybe the wind would never let up, maybe it would keep slicing through the log walls of their cabin forever.  None of the clay chinking they layered in worked with a damn.

Nobody wanted the party to stop and it didn’t.  It couldn’t.  Astonishing forces fed the festivities.  You couldn’t even feel the first vague hints of it winding down.