“The Movement of Horses” by Adam Cushman
--page 6

         First nights on the Florida Turnpike are what make the most of men like us, those of us who saw a chance out of this God-forsaken town, but had only hell to look forward to. We move swiftly like horses because swiftly is the way that horses move. We are among the hunt. We are the primal, and the damned.
         Sometimes my thinking is really deep and stuff, as you can plainly see. Calling me a genius or comparing me to poets like Hawthorne or Hemingway will only embarrass you. They don’t hand out Pulitzers to jackoffs or hold conferences in honor of their perfectness.

~

         Halfway across the county line, we park out front of a late night CD exchange. Dane goes through my collection cases with his Buzz Light Year eyes glowing from purple neon and careful fingers.
         “What is this? Who is,” he inches closer, “Helen Reddy?”
         “That’s my mother’s ass.”
         “Your mother’s...? What are you saying?”
         “I hate that music. It’s ass. My mother’s ass. How it got in this case is beyond me.”         He scans faster now, “Bon Jovi? Fucking Journey? Tell me this is not a Brittany Spears album? Or is it your mother’s ass?”
         “You have to admit you’d bang her.”
         Dane takes most of the CD’s in with him and says to sit tight and guard our stuff. He comes out an hour later and drives us over to Shell. He pumps, buys two Slurpees and we drive onto I-95 before hitting the Turnpike. That’s when he gives me my cut, all crumpled up bills from his short’s pocket.
         “Ten bucks? There were over four hundred CD’s.”
         Dane says they offered him a hundred for the collection and that he used ninety for a tank of gas and Slurpees, plus a Heath bar for later. Again, this is a very large vehicle. Plus, most of those CD’s sucked anyway, just like Dane said.

~

         The Turnpike goes through West Palm Beach through Boca through Ft. Drum as the yellow lines shoot through my mind like smooth arrows. Outside my window the trees are blown by the mouth of the swampy woods(12).

~

         After a while we pull over to the emergency lane because Dane wants to sleep for a while, but my body is not ready to shut down. While composing a volume of haikus (in Chinese), an alligator attacks the Lincoln, gnawing at the doors and hubcaps. Thankfully, my formative years were spent on the Seminole Indian reservation. With a yawn, I step out into the cricket darkness and wrestle the beast to the ground, as it whips and flails and finally submits. I turn to get back in the car and hear the slicing air sound of its whipping tail. More out of irritation am I forced to slice the reptile’s throat with my hunting knife, all while young Dane sleeps like a breastfed infant behind the wheel.

~

         Everything I mentioned about the previous night is absolutely one hundred percent God damn true except we didn’t really make it to the Turnpike and kind of ended up in Ft. Lauderdale, in the parking lot of Guitar Planet. Dane said this would be a good place to sell my Gibson and it’s totally cool because in Arkansas, he has five Les Paul’s waiting at his cousin’s house. He even told me that last night.
         The way Dane wakes me up is he peers over the front seat and slaps my face a few times. When my eyes focus, he is looking at me with his long matted hair over half his face, like he’s aware of something nobody else knows. Then he crinkles his brow and asks me what stinks so badly.

~

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