The Big Empty

A REIGN OF THUNDER-2

“So what’s your story?” she asked, shouting over the wind and the radio, which was too loud, too tinny. He turned it down.

“My story?” He laughed. “I’m not the one who was hitchhiking through the Sonoran Desert.”

She smiled self-deprecatingly. “Yeah, there is that.” She hung her head back so that her dark hair billowed out the window. “I was at an artist’s colony—the Desert Muse.” She smiled again, bitterly, it seemed. “Or the Desert Ruse, as I call it. Ever heard of it?”

He shook his head.

“Yeah, well, it’s where a bunch of grad students hang out with their professors for a week and study the fine arts. You know, like how to out-snark the other pimply kids ... or f**k your professor.”

He glanced at her sidelong, raising an eyebrow.

“Okay, so maybe not f**k him. But definitely give him something to think about. You know, like when he’s handing out teaching internships.”

He nodded slowly, exaggeratedly. “Ah.”

“Ah. So I just bugged out. I didn’t want to play anymore. And now I’m heading home. Back to Miami.”

He drove, listening, the wind buffeting his hair, which was graying at the temples. She couldn’t have been more than, say, what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? “Yeah? And?”

“And that’s all you get. At least until I know something about you. Your name, for instance.”

He accelerated, he wasn’t sure why, focusing on the road. “Cooper,” he said, finally. “Cooper Black. But, please, call me ‘Coup’—everyone does.”

“Cooper—Coup. Black? Cooper Black? Like the font?”

“Just like the font.”

“Well, that’s different.” She fell silent for a moment, watching the scenery pass. “I’m Tess, by the way. Tess Baker.” She added, “Please. Go on.”

Cooper only exhaled. “No, no, no, that’s it. I was just coming back from L.A. when I saw you with your thumb out.” He turned the radio back up but got only static. “That’s really all there is to it. Just a guy on a road trip.”

Neither said anything as the radials droned and the radio hissed.

“I think you went there for a reason ... and it didn’t go so well. That’s what I think.” She waited as he fiddled with the dial. “Can’t find your channel there, Coup?”

“No, Doctor Laura, I can’t, actually. Can’t seem to find much of anything. And I went there, if you must know, because I’d sold a book to Roman House and the editor I was working with had a heart attack—he just keeled, okay? So I had to meet this new asshole, who couldn’t stand me or the book, and who cancelled the entire project. And then ...”

He looked at her and found her arching an eyebrow quizzically.

“Then I hit him. All right? Right in the old kisser. And then I turned his desk over and threw his banker’s light, you know, the kind with the faux gold plating and green glass shade—”

She nodded impatiently.

“—right through the window. And then I ran like a rabbit, straight to my car and out of L.A., after which I passed this really good-looking hitchhiker who peppered me with questions until I started going bugfuck. Okay? All right? You happy?”

“I like a man who can open up,” she said.

“I’m not opening up. I’m trying to—”

And then they heard it, the whir of a siren, after which he looked through his rear-view mirror and she out the back window to see a brown and white State Patrol vehicle following them dangerously close, its windshield reflecting the sun like knives and its red and blue lights flashing, telling them to pull over.

“It’s just not my f*****g day,” he marveled, still looking in the mirror, even as Tess placed a hand on his leg—close to his crotch, he noticed—and said: “But it could be, Coup. It still could be.” —before her eyes expanded like saucers and she shrieked, shouting, “Look out!”

And he looked ahead in time to see a brown blur, a large mouse, he thought, or a kitten, which had been scurrying across the road, vanish beneath the filthy hood.

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