Vegas never called his name because he didn’t have one. Nonetheless the boyman went out tripping with his boys to Sin City, his father’s old car stuffed with their bodies and their suitcases stuffed with booze and condoms and all other sorts of playboy paraphernalia.
Together they holed up in motels along the way and wooed the poolside ladies when they could. Someone started keeping score about who screwed whom and then they all lost track. Sometimes they screwed each other. They had all the money in the world to pay for gas and food, all the hamburgers and the hotdogs in the world belonged to them. They were living like kings off the edge of the highway. The skies were clearer in New Mexico. Sometimes they just hung out by themselves and grilled their spoils beneath the stars. “This is good living,” they murmured to one another, “We could live like this for the rest of our lives.”
Somewhere on the road to Arizona, they started telling stories about the rancheros and the caballeros and the lawlessness of the old Western way. The boyman wanted most to know about the Diné and their medicine men but nobody knew what to say. It was a lifelong dream. Where could he find them? Where were the Diné? One day an old man on the side of the road pointed them down the highway then waved his hand to an arbitrary left.
“There’s the rez,” he said. “That’s where the Navajos are at.”
The buildings were each a mile apart. They found a cluster of houses and the people that lived inside them. His boys cried out, hey! and he slowed the car. He caught sight of a woman with turquoise jewelry and told his boys, don’t drive off, he’d be a minute. Then he hopped out, asked her if she’d walk with him a bit.
“Are you a Navajo woman?” he murmured when they were out of earshot.
“Yeah,” she answered plainly, “Yeah, I’m a Navajo woman.”
“I would like to speak to your medicine man.”
“My what?”
“Your medicine man.”
He’d never seen a woman laugh so hard before.
“Didja screwer?” his boys asked him when he climbed back into the car.
“Drive,” he mumbled. “Just drive.”
Off the rez, his boys began to poke fun at his dream. “Didja find him? Didja find your medicine man?” He withheld the reminder that the car was his and that he could put them all out like bad dogs at a moment’s notice. He was silent when they crossed over from New Mexico into Arizona and then Nevada, silent still when they were off screwing those poolside ladies, still when he screwed the girl at the front desk. He did the deed right where she worked, it wasn’t difficult, there was no one else on the road that night.
In the morning, the girl at the front desk called. Round two? No, she said, there was somebody on the phone for him. He wondered if it was his old man howling for his car. Instead when he lifted the receiver to his ear, he heard a voice crooning softly over the line like a salesman: ““Do you want a woman who’ll stand on the side of the road like a JESUS SAVES billboard with her tits-out-mouth-wide-open and all the space she has to make you feel like a real-good-man? Then pump your clutch and keep on driving!”
Every now and then he caught sight of the mares in the distance, lithe bodies outrunning their own dust.
The air between his boys started going bad, no matter how long they tried to leave the windows open. They were getting tired of the motels and their poolside women. There were only so many sun-bleached bitches they could do before his boys wanted more. Then the car broke down and they had to call in for a spare tire and some gas, and they had to shell out cash for the towing service and the repairs. The boyman was leaning on the hood when he heard his boys grumbling ahead of him, saying that they should’ve never gone to the rez, that the old Navajos had done their ancient Indian magic on the car.
Well, he could leave them behind. Yeah, that’s what he’d do, he’d make like a wild horse and leave them all behind.
So he threw their bags out from the trunk and drove away.
They could all tell hell about Vegas.
Pump your clutch and keep on driving!
He U-turned, hightailed all the way back to New Mexico. The radio cut in and out. There was nothing for him to hear besides reports of flash flooding out in the arroyos.
He found another motel and called it a night. Almost all the lights were out, but there were better places to be than Las Vegas, there always were.
There was another call waiting for him in the dark.
“The vultures are circling,” said the voice, “Look, I said the vultures are circling you.”
“What?”
"You’re a skinny kid with nowhere to hide. How ‘bout that?” And the line went dead.
Eventually he made a common-law marriage with hunger. Gas station meals weren’t enough to tide him over but he was well past the territory of well-to-do restaurants or even diners. The road he drove was absent from the atlas, and he didn’t have time to turn back again. The motels grew dustier and more than once he passed a sign that said, in great red letters, WRONG WAY. Soon all indications of route or direction disappeared, and he was alone with the road. He was making the dead man’s journey; his boys were long forgotten and Vegas was just a name. All he had were his hot desires and the horses and the phantom women on the shoulder, the dusty motels, the moon hanging heavy over the desert. Sometimes he stayed out to watch the sky; every lost thing in the world ended up on the moon and now, standing underneath it, he could see them all dotting the surface. All his old lovers must be having a party on the Sea of Tranquility. Sorry, he thought, sorry I couldn’t make it.
There were more and more women popping up, beautiful women, busty women, women in little skirts and attendant gear. He kept his eyes ahead but they were bright in all his corners. Some even took a seat in the back of his car. “Are you ready? We are,” they sighed warmly. A sign popped up before him: WELCOME! and then LA JORNADA DEL MUERTO. And the radio finally hissed back into clarity.
“D-D-D-Do you want a real-good-woman?” the newscaster asked. “Take the next exit, you real-good-man.”
He took the next exit.
The land was open-air and flat, as if a great force had landed and expanded at its center. Then he saw it in the distance, the great flash and then the horizon beginning to climb into beautiful art deco buildings, each tower curving tall and into the center plume, everything shining in the lukewarm, dying light. The desert made its own oasis. It was warm and strange when he got out of the car at the mouth of the glittering town. Who needed Vegas when he had Manhattan? Then all those women at his edges came into full focus, the mares and the dust behind them. Maybe the Diné and their medicine man were here, gambling away all their good fortunes. He walked until he entered the great mushroom plume, the centerpiece, the origin. There was a wall of light and then a wall of sound, a kind of ululation or maybe even singing. Something hot was filling him up. He was surrounded by thousands of others, animals, people, the midpoint– they were in-between the phases of matter. They were multitudes upon multitudes. He could screw whomever he wanted. He could have it all. He was a real-good-man. And as he walked into the centerfold he finally saw the medicine men, the great machines, the great wheeling divinities with their hundred hands and hundred eyes towering over him and masked by nuclear clouds of inconceivability: the irascible angels, turning up the heat in Lustland.
