Antonio’d give us twenty dollars a night toward “lodging,” but, even if me and Rachel combined it, good luck finding a motel for that kind of money. And when we sometimes did, Rachel wouldn’t go near it. “You can take the girl out of Bexley,” she’d say, “but not even you can take all the Bexley out of this girl.” So, most nights after we finished lining up the carnival trucks in a new town, me and Rachel would find a place to pitch our pup tents where nobody could hear us, and that’s when we did our business. Some nights she let me stay with her after, but she made me put my tent up every night all the same.
We’d just started going at it that first night in Chelm, Ohio, when I get this funny feeling someone’s watching us. I’ve got one hand up Rachel’s shirt and the other on her jaw, and I look up to see this bug-eyed kid with one of those Jewish hats on his head. He’s watching us through the tent flap, but not like he’s some pervert. Instead, he looks really confused.
After he sees me looking at him, he says, “Whatcha doing, Mister? Did you lose something?”
It’s such a dumb-ass question that I don’t get mad, I just answer it in a dumb-ass way. “Yeah, kid,” I says. “I lost a dollar, and now I’m looking for it.”
I can feel Rachel move behind my shoulder to hide her face from him.
“Why are you looking there?” he asks.
I don’t say...
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