All Write, Already!

11:15 on the highway through the bayou. They say that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil on a crossroads at midnight in a bayou like this one, just for a hand on the six-string, and I believe it. When the road dust coats you in the night, the sweat running sticky trails down your neck and pooling in the hollows of your shoulders, you can believe the old legends. I passed a Waffle House about fifteen miles back, and my own personal legend hit me again. She was a waitress at the Awful Waffle.

The knobbed plastic of my steering wheel is no substitute for the swoop and curve of her hip, but at least it's real, and not like the fever dream I've been living in for the past five months. Lately the dream has started to work its way into my waking world, denying me even the cold comfort of sleep. I've been awake for 86 hours now, and I'm still too drowsy to lie down. All I can do is drive, another hundred or thousand or million miles down the road, however long the cash I picked up on the construction job in Gautier or Biloxi will last.

Some nights, the shameful ones when I've hired the services of a surrogate to take her place, I lie awake alone in the motel bed, the breeze from the open window cooling the sweat of -- not exactly passion, but at least a replica -- on my chest and legs. I think of her, how we would collapse backwards, panting, the coal of her cigarette a beacon in the dark.

...And the man and the woman were naked, and felt no shame.

So I light another menthol, and curse the broken air conditioner, and turn off the highway. The asphalt changes to gravel, and then to dirt. There's a crossroads up ahead, and midnight's coming. I know exactly what I want to get for the price I intend to pay.