Free The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

sprinkles water on it and yawns. He remembers that we’re an hour off
     down here, the soap is already over.
    The air turns tangy and alive, the sun is gone, the sky is black. Glimmers of light bristle forward in the dome above the
     coyote’s head. He moves out. The night has a seething quality, a crisp silence that hides the tunneling of small, cowering
     mammals, the slumped somnolence of the wandering cattle, the wide-eyed jitters of the stick-leg deer. The moon, from the bitter
     cold of outer space, croons to the griddle of the desert. The coyote listens and turns to the west. An image has moved forward
     in his head: Out of the murk a picture comes to the forefront, melting into view. The thick, spongy edges of lightness, the
     dark legs and face, the palpable panic of the herd. The sheep are waiting. The moon pushes him forward from behind and snakes
     slide under bushes until he passes. Out of nowhere a skunk appears, startled, hunkering low with wide mirrored eyes. The coyote
     darts, bites, and opens the belly with one efficient fang. He drags it around in a gleeful circle, then thrustsone shoulder at a time into the cooling wetness. It is night and feelings are rising up, like blood to a scrape.
    The desert is lunar. Every so often a night bird courses low over the sand and the mice shudder, the lizards peer lidlessly
     around, unroll their tongues and reel them in again. The moon lowers itself, sitting for a few moments on the shoulders of
     a western butte, considering the lake of shadows. In its distant, porous memory, the moon can conjure up how it pulled the
     ice back like a bedsheet, exposing the tender ground beneath. The face on the butte is ice blue and furious, slumping beneath
     its shoulders infinitesimally, down and down, until it is gone and the stars are livid and blinking. The insects teem, the
     rodents scrabble, the night-blooming flowers push themselves open and await their guests.
    We have two things going for us: a spectacular white rental car and a bag of red-hot cinnamon Fireranchers. We discuss for
     a fair amount of time while sucking on the Fireranchers whether it is right to “beat” a rental car more than you would beat
     your own car. We decide it isn’t right, although we immediately follow that up by seeing how fast it can go on a stretch of
     gummy blacktop. It goes to one hundred and thirty miles an hour before it starts shivering.
    The rental car has air conditioning but we’re not using it. Instead we’re keeping a spray bottle full of water in the cooler
     and spritzing ourselves with it every few miles. Now there is a contest to see who can put a new Firerancher in his or her
     mouth and not bite it for however long it takes it to disintegrate. I will lose this game and we both know it. We’re playing
     it because we’re stupendously bored but still in high spirits.Every so often I put my foot on the dashboard for a leg inspection. My shinbone is a gentle, peeled blue. This is from when
     I fell down the mountain into the den of rattlesnakes.
    “It wasn’t a mountain, it was a path,” Eric says. “And there weren’t any rattlesnakes.”
    I spray cold water on my shin and then put my leg back down where it belongs. My whole body feels swampy. The air is a blast
     furnace and the windshield is a magnifying glass trained on our forearms. We are one moment from ignition. I turn the water
     bottle around and squirt myself flat in the face and then offer to do Eric.
    “I’ll do myself,” he says threateningly. I hand the bottle over. It’s not my style to squirt him with ice water while he’s
     driving but predictably he falls apart for an instant and turns the bottle on me. It dries in one second from the hot breath
     coming through the window. We roll along in silence for awhile, sweating and thinking, working on our Fireranchers. Mine is
     so thin I try just resting my teeth on it to see how it feels. I bite it in half.
    We are taking the low road from Tucson to