Away from it all. chapt. 1, 1st draft

Rough beginning of a current novel.

Away from it All

Chapter ONE

Cody threw the empty beer can out the window. He was reaching into the cooler for another Coors when he noticed something seemed to be moving near the two trees about 15 yards from his pickup.
Though he felt a bit groggy from the beers, he felt no fear. But he wondered if someone else was out here.
Clumsily, he opened the pickup door and eased out of the seat.
Overhead, stars seemed to blaze in the clear, Nevada sky. He had gotten out of the truck earlier to admire the Milky Way, something you could not see in Las Vegas, which was over the horizon more than a hundred miles away. Its glow was faintly discernible on the low horizon.
His boot crunched some twigs and brush as it landed heavily on the ground. The sound was amplified by the total silence of the night and seemed to fill the air as much as the stars filled the sky above.
A dark shape was motionless near the trees and Cody seemed to remember seeing a large, dark rock or bush when he had driven to this spot, about 100 feet from the highway and behind a ridge that, together with a rock outcropping on one side and a smoke tree across the way effectively sheltered him from view when the occasional car or truck sped by, headlights briefly flaring the night landscape into focus before fading back to dark.
Nothing was moving but the sudden blazing streak of a shooting star a bit north and to the east. It quickly flickered out after leaving a short trail.
The air was silent, motionless. Warm for much of the day under a cloudless sky, the air had a twinge of cool typical of late April. It felt good on his bare face and arms, which had felt warm in the truck.
He felt the pressure in his groin from the beers he’d already drank, so he stepped farther away toward a shrub.
Looking around, seeing nothing, he unzipped and started to piss.
He closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of relief as the pressure subsided and the shrub received a sprinkling and fertilizing at the same time.
His eyes shut, he did not notice the dark shape move, the same shape that he’d focused on earlier. Then it settled again as part of the nearby landscape.
Cody turned back toward the truck and the door that hung open. Peering back at the nearby landscape, it somehow seemed that the dark shape seemed a little farther away from a nearby bush, but he figured that was because his perspective and angle had changed when he stepped away from the truck and changed his position.
He definitely was alone.
That's ‘s why he was out here. To be alone. To get away from Lana. It was her time of the month again and she had been bitchy as usual the past few days as her mood built up.
Nag, nag. That was all she did lately. He should get a better job. They needed to move on. They were wasting time out here.
At first, Lana had liked this part of the desert. Its wide expansive loneliness had seemed welcoming relief to the hustles and hassles they experienced every day back in Vegas. She was going to paint some artwork they could sell. And his job at the crossroads service station was enough to support their simple life and the cheap trailer they rented.
Cody didn‘t want to say it out loud, but her paintings weren‘t really that good. They were okay, but he did not think he would pay much money for any of them, at least most of them. But occasionally one was real nice, and it invariably ended up on the wall of the trailer. When she got five or six like that, she said, they would go to Reno and see if her friend Mora would show them in her gallery.
He liked Mora. He noted how she smiled broadly at him and would always give him another smile and a quick wink whenever Lana turned away. He wondered what Mora’s deal was anyway. A pretty woman like her, seemingly living without a man in her life. But he knew she seemed normal and was not a woman who preferred other women, because if she had Lana would have said something because she always did whenever she knew of a woman like that.
But Mora was definitely a mystery to Cody and he sat back in the seat and thought about her and the nice little place she had in Reno. Jobs were pretty easy to get around there and if he had a nice place to stay for free, that would be something to think about. He wondered what Mora meant by those smiles and those winks. Was she just being friendly, or flirty, or was it something else?
He pondered all this with a fuzzy mind as he snapped open another beer and took a swallow. He wasn’t enjoying this beer as much. He was getting full. And he wondered if Lana worried about where he was. She could not go to the bar over at Tenney’s because he had the truck. She was probably in bed, either asleep or awake waiting for his return. When he did get there, she would seem to be asleep even if she was awake because he knew she played that game. Though he did not wander off much alone at night, not like he had tonight. Usually they just had supper and then watched tv for a few hours. They did not talk as much as they used to, not as much as when they had first moved here three months ago, after quitting their jobs in Vegas because she wanted to get away from it all for a while. And he had wanted to get away too.
He liked the quiet of the open desert. It reminded him of the open spaces back in western Kansas, where he’d grown up.
Cody gulped down half the beer, then he stopped. He was full of beer. He needed some beer nuts or something else -- but all he had brought was the six-pack of Coors, nestled in ice inside the cooler.
Maybe he should start back.
While his dull, muddled mind mulled what to do, he did not notice the dark shape getting closer to the truck, outside the passenger window of his truck.
He felt very tired, very heavy and weary. Cody wanted to start the truck and start back for home. But his eyes closed and his hand fell away from the key in the ignition.
A few hours later the sky to the east blazed purple and then pink and then yellow as the sun reappeared in its relentless daily sojourn over the desert.
The occasional passing motorist did not spot the tan truck just out of view, behind the ridge that separated the highway from a little open flat spot between an outcropping of rock and smoke tree on the other side of the clearing.
The doors of the pickup were closed and the windows were rolled up as they had been last night.
Two beer cans lay on the ground below the driver’s window. A third partially open can of warm beer rested in the cup holder. Inside the cooler, ice slowly melted into water and three cans of Coors settled toward the bottom at a glacial melting pace.
Where the dark shape had been a few hours earlier there was now nothing. Nothing at all.
And Cody was no where to be seen.
No where.