Don't Stop Now (9 page)

The sun leaks through a slit in the room-darkening curtains, throwing a white slash on the wall. I sit up, and my eyes adjust to the hotel room, but not before my nose does. The room reeks of skunk, and I can't help but hold my hand over my face. Once I can see, I spy Josh in the second of two beds, asleep. I whip back the sheets, all my clothes still in their appropriate place on my body, and feel a nip of disappointment. I fumble my way into the bathroom and pray that the shower will wash the smell out of my nose. I expect to find bugs—or worse—when I pull back the shower curtain, but thankfully all I find is a tiny wrapped bar of soap and a mini bottle of shampoo/conditioner combo. The water heats up quickly, and I manage to lose the smell from my nose and the lameness of last night from my brain. I exit the bathroom with a towel around my middle, hoping that Josh will like what he sees. But Josh is still asleep, and I dress quickly to ensure the stank clings to as little of my body as possible. As a tribute to the fabulous town of Mitchell, I wear my new Corn Palace T-shirt, powder blue, kid-size for clinginess, which claims,
THE WORLD'S ONLY CORN PALACE
. It's
A-MAIZE-ING
! Not able to stand the stench any longer, I head to the door, which I'm slightly surprised to see Josh has bolted and chained; he seems too carefree to worry about safety. Maybe Wall didn't feel too savory after midnight.

The unlocking causes Josh to stir, so I call, “Good morning.” A mumble comes from Josh's general direction. “I'm going outside,” I tell him. “Need fresh air.”

“Shower,” is all he can say.

“Meet me outside when you're ready,” I tell him, and then I enter the morning air of Wall, which, strangely, doesn't smell at all of the skunk stench in our room. Glad I didn't think to look under the beds.

We're on the second floor of a motel, and the balcony view is a dusty parking lot and a road strewn with fast-food restaurants. A few rooms down, a family props their door open with a cooler. Two bright blond boys calculatedly drop ice cubes over the railing. I look over the balcony to see a puddle surrounded by pigeons. “I almost got him! Didja see that?” the taller boy shrieks at the smaller one. I pray they don't look over at me to join in on their merry animal abuse game, but luckily Josh emerges from behind the clunky motel door and gives me a warm, kinda sexy smile. “Morning, Sunshine.” I smile back and hope those little Aryans think we're together. As if they care. I could step on them anyway.

After we check out from the tiny front office (and decide not to partake in what smells like last week's free coffee), we head to the car. Our destination is only a few blocks away, but we drive based on the barrenness of the town. Wall Drug, it turns out, is not exactly a drugstore but a full-on city block of
stuff
. Unlike the House on the Rock, however, this is mostly stuff you can buy. And most of it is stamped with
WALL DRUG
in some form.

Hungry and groggy, we make our way to the sprawling restaurant, a counter-service-seat-yourself kind of place, with a sign claiming to seat 530. Quite a few tables are
ocupado
, but not enough to feel crowded by the other guests. Josh and I order coffee and some cinnamon-sugar doughnuts, and Josh adds, “Why don't you add in some of that free ice water?” He charms the girl behind the counter, name-tagged Nadia.

Josh doesn't like to talk much before his morning coffee, so I look around at all of the crap they have hanging from the walls and ceiling. I read the brochure in the plastic holder on the table, explaining how Wall Drug began as a simple rest stop for those needing a drink and turned into a mecca of kitsch (my words, not theirs). After breakfast, I expect to be wowed by the hilarity that is Wall Drug, but as Josh and I stroll through store after store of stuff we don't need and don't really want, I feel let down. There's a scuzziness to the place that's not exactly funny.

Josh and I choose a few items to show the world we have indeed been to Wall Drug—bumper stickers, T-shirts, a mug. As we pay, I detect an Eastern Europe an accent on our cashier, a ripe-looking girl named Polina. Underneath her name, her name tag reads, “Kiev.”

“My great-grandparents were from Kiev,” I tell her. She gives me a slight smile and nod, and continues ringing up our spoils. I fill the silence. “I noticed a lot of name tags list different countries.”

“Yes, we all came over together,” she says, friendly, but not overly warm. She explains how Wall Drug recruits people from other countries to work here for months at a time. They all live together in a little apartment complex. “We do it so we can see America,” she says.

“So where else have you been?” I ask.

“Nowhere. This is all we have seen for three months.” She tips her head to showcase what she has seen of our fabulous country. She doesn't try to hide her lack of enthusiasm.

“Will you get to go anywhere other than Wall? Before you go home?” It seems so tragic that someone would come all this way to experience life in another country, and all they get to see is the inside of this stankhole filled with obnoxious tourists picking up stuffed jackalopes and commemorative spoons while they're on their way to somewhere else.

“A few of us are going to Las Vegas when we're done in a month.” She sounds excited.

Vegas. The real America? As real as Wall Drug. At least she won't be working.

That's when Josh interjects his charm into the conversation and tells Polina about the crazy times he and his dad have had in Vegas. I glaze over, having heard his dad regale us with the same stories in an almost desperately cool manner over the flaming table at Benihana's Japanese Steak House. Plus, how many times do I have to witness Josh flirting with someone? Me included?

I finally catch Josh's eye when I see him write something on a Wall Drug brochure and slip it across the counter to Polina. He nods in acknowledgment—it's time to go—and I walk away to wait by the door without a goodbye to my new foreign acquaintance. I step out onto Wall's main street, which isn't nearly as quaint or, um, corny as Mitchell, and instead has a more dusty, used feel. I'm ready to get the heck out of Wall. The idea that there are people flown in from other countries, essentially kept prisoner in Dead Street America and forced to shill crap is überdisturbing. I jump a bit when Josh plants his hand on my shoulder. “Ready to book?” he asks.

“Beyond ready.” As we walk to the car, I poke. “So you gave that girl your phone number? Even though we don't live near here and she's from a land far, far away?” I should hide my snark, but I don't get why being together on the road, in hotels, is not swaying Josh in any way toward me romantically. Maybe I should have a bumper sticker made:
WHY THE HECK DON'T YOU WANT ME
? Not as catchy as the Wall Drug ones, but maybe it would be effective if I stuck it to my butt. Or to Josh's forehead.

“I didn't give her my phone number,” Josh defends. “I wrote down some of the must-sees of Vegas. That would have been tacky, dontcha think?”

“Tacky how?”

“Since I'm here with you and all.” He says this as he gets into the car and starts it, so there's no opportunity for me to see his expression. With me
how
? I want to ask, but it's time to navigate the frig out of Wall, and it's still too early in the day for me to try and have
that
conversation. I've held off for four years, haven't I?

“Hasta la pasta, Wall!” Josh calls out the window as he peels out of the parking lot. It's dorky lines like this that make me like Josh so much. And coming from those lips, delicious looking, always just a little chapped because he's too guy to wear Chapstick, well, the dorkiness just gets filtered out.

 

We head south of Wall toward Badlands National Park. “I love how that sounds. Badlands!” Josh yells and flashes the devil sign like we're at a cheese-rock arena concert.

As we drive into the park, we notice a cavalcade of Corvettes driving in the opposite direction. New ones, classic ones, all driven by older men and women. “Must be some kind of club. Like, retirees who like to drive Corvettes,” I guess. A particularly sleek iridescent purple 'Vette rumbles by.

“Maybe they're vets who drive 'Vettes? You know, like war veterans?” Josh guesses, with a smile in his eyes at his cleverness.

“Or maybe they're not war vets. Maybe they're veterinarians,” I pontificate.

He ignores me. “That's the life, man. Not having to work, slick car, driving anywhere you want to go.” Josh pulls the Eurosport into a parking spot at a scenic overlook, where more Corvettes are pulling away.

“Isn't that what you're doing now? Aside from the slickness of the car. And you didn't even have to fight in a war—or work with animals—or work at all, for that matter to earn the right to retire,” I point out. Sometimes Josh's rich-daddy side rears its ugly head, and I have to take him down a notch.

“I'm working.” He's defensive. “Once I get the band together, write songs, tour. That's work.”

“Mmmhmmm.” We step out to read some of the park signage that explains the lore of the Badlands, which were so named by the Lakota Indians and early French trappers because of the varied harshness of the landscape, from vast empty prairies to rainbow-colored rock formations that made the land difficult to cross. I look across the endless low hills and imagine a time when roads didn't cut through nature. The only way from point A to point B was up and down, up and down, slipping on rocks, tasting the dry air. I smack my tongue and am thankful for the cooler of pop in the car.

Josh and I decide to make a plan for the next couple of days, so we don't miss out on anything we want to see but so we also don't forget that we have a final destination. That forces me to look at my phone. No reception. Well, then I must not be missing any calls, so there's no need to feel guilty, I assure myself.

We choose to spend the day driving and hiking around the Badlands, then spend tonight in Deadwood, again because of the name. (Josh claims that it sounds like a “sexy Wild West town. You know, prostitutes were legal there up until the 1980s?” How he knew this charming fact, I have no idea. Nor do I want to.) After that, well, that's as far as we got with our plan.

I can't say I've ever been a nature girl, but this Badlands place is pretty sweet. It's not all big trees covering my head, making me wonder what's dangling above me. The Badlands basically call out, “Don't bother. You'd never make it across alive,” making it perfectly acceptable to drive around on manmade roads and watch the nature from the safety and (albeit un-air-conditioned) comfort of our car. Periodically, we can park and walk on a gravelly path, well-marked by signage of just how far we can go to maintain contact with civilization.

It's on one of these walks where, uninterrupted by the din of the open car windows or the curse of the cell phone reception, I get up the nerve to have the talk.

Josh sits down on a large tan rock, smoothed by thousands of butts before him. I scooch him over with my hip, and we sit, back to back supporting each other.

“Beautiful day, eh?” he asks. I look around at the striped hills, the way the colors change from the sandy brown bottom to a pinkish red layer, then top off with a gray cap. No cities to be seen. No suburban sprawl. No prepackaging.

“I guess,” I answer. It is beautiful—I know it is—but it's hard for me to experience it as beauty instead of just anxiety at the thought of having to conquer it. Or maybe it's not conquering “it” that worries me, but “him.”

Then I notice something. It's an unnatural color, a red that's a little too bright, too harsh, to be part of this world, just a little farther down the path. I un-lean myself from Josh and head toward the color, which stains the side of a rock about half my height and three times as wide. Graffiti. At first, I'm appalled that someone would deface nature, but rocks aren't really nature, are they? I mean, they're not alive, not unless they're a donkey that magically got turned into a rock.

And who bothers to bring spray paint with them when they're driving through a national park?

But when I read and discover what it says, I forget my disgust, my curiosity. Because this message was meant for me. A simple heart, with a cupid's arrow piercing from bottom left to top right, surrounds the dripping, but legible letters, telling me, don't stop now. A message. A mantra. For the road. For Josh. For the quest. I believe it.

The crunch of the earth behind me signals Josh's approach. I turn to see him, hair tucked behind his ear, orange T-shirt off, hanging from the back of his loose shorts. Framed by the untouchable Badlands,
he
is nature. He is all that I want to see and experience right now.

I walk up to him and run my fingers over the brown stubble on his cheeks. My red hair looks foreign in the reflection of his sunglasses. “Hey,” I breathe.

“Hey.” I see his eyebrow cock in question. I lean forward and gently brush his lips with mine. “What…?” he begins to say, and I kiss him again, more pressure, more urgent. He kisses back. I'm surprised and elated and melting into him. His hand is on my shoulder, my back, and mine is on his, his bare skin, taut and sticky from the heat. We kiss, a kiss I've dreamed about for years, even while kissing other guys. While he was with other girls. A kiss worth waiting for. Then Josh pulls away.

“Wait…,” he says again.

“‘Don't stop now,'” I quote the rock.

“I don't know, Lil. I don't think…”

“You don't think what?” I ask, getting defensive, my big ol' quest in danger of being crushed. By a rock, perhaps.

“I just don't think we should.” He looks down and kicks his foot against my rock.

“Why not?” I sound like a kid.

“I just like you too much, I guess.” His answer is barely an answer.