Read While Drowning in the Desert for Free Online

anything.
    Just sleep.
    Then Nathan started snoring.
    I have heard snoring. This might be ungallant, but in the interest of honesty, Karen snores. Especially in the winter when she pulls the blankets completely over her head and makes a noise that is not so much a snore as it is a pre-suffocation death rattle. I wake up and open an air hole in the blankets for her and the snoring stops.
    But I hadn’t ever heard anything like Nathan’s snoring. I had never heard a sound like that before in my life. It wasn’t even a human sound, nor a sound that resembled any currently recognized species. No, it had a sort of unnatural resonance to it, kind of like the bellows of hell opening and closing, or as if Bigfoot had somehow stolen into the body of an old man and fallen blissfully asleep.
    As Nathan was.
    He didn’t have the blankets pulled up over his head, either. Although I thought about arranging it, and maybe forgetting about the airhole.
    I didn’t, though. I just lay there awake thinking about babies and stuff.

Chapter 6
    After a refreshing twenty minutes of sleep I got up, showered, and changed into yesterday’s stale, sweaty clothes. Then I woke up Nathan.
    “You snore,” he said. “I hardly slept a wink.”
    “Good morning,” I said.
    I ordered room service again for breakfast. I didn’t want to take a chance that Nate would meet some other old love while gumming his oatmeal in the coffee shop.
    The dirty rotten old bastard ordered two eggs over easy, bacon, a cinnamon roll, a Bloody Mary, tea, and dry toast.
    “Dry toast?” I asked.
    “Cholesterol,” he mumbled while sucking down a strip of bacon.
    “I thought you were Jewish,” I said, pointing my fork at the surviving bacon.
    “I am,” Nate answered. “But not a fanatic. And order your own bacon.”
    He tried to stab me with his fork.
    I chewed on my blueberry muffin and worked on the image of a nice airplane jetting us to the Palm Springs airport. A quick limo ride to Palm Desert and blessed freedom.
    “So?” Nathan asked.
    “So what?”
    “So, aren’t you going to make conversation?” he asked. “What, were you raised by apes? You just stuff your mouth and don’t talk? You’re an escort with no bazookas, the least you can do is make conversation.”
    “More bacon?”
    “That’s conversation?” Nathan asked, stuffing his mouth with more bacon.
    Conversation … conversation. I’d never been very good at conversation. It usually required talking to people.
    “Okay,” I said, after a few moments of intense concentration. “So, where do you live?”
    Nathan looked at me as if I were an idiot.
    Go figure, huh.
    Then he said, “You’re supposed to take me home, you don’t know where it is?”
    “I know where it is,” I said. “I meant, what’s it like?”
    “It’s a townhouse,” he said. “Although why they call it a townhouse I don’t know because there’s no town. It’s in a resort complex right on the golf course.”
    “Oh, that’s nice.”
    “Why is that nice?”
    “So you can just pop out your door and play a nice round of golf,” I said.
    “I hate golf,” Nathan said.
    “Then why—”
    “Because that’s where they built the townhouse,” he said. “Away from the town and on the golf course. What was I supposed to do?”
    “Uhhhh, buy a different townhouse?”
    “Away from the golf course?”
    “Yeah …”
    “Then I couldn’t watch them.”
    “Watch who?”
    “The golfers,” Nathan said. He lit a cigarette.
    My muffin was turning to sawdust in my mouth.
    “But you hate golf,” I said.
    “More than I hate golf,” Nathan said, “I hate golfers.”
    “So?”
    “So the golfers who play golf outside my townhouse?”
    “Yes?”
    “They stink,” he said. He took a long drag of the cigarette then spent the next thirty seconds coughing. “I love to watch them play because I hate them and they . stink. I love to watch them get red in the face, say dirty words and bang their clubs into trees. This