Vocabulary from " The Flamethrowers" (excerpt) by Rachel Kushner

Sweat was pooling along my collarbone, trickling down my back and into my nylon underwear, running down my legs under the leather racing suit.

I wasn't in a hurry, under no time constraint.

Through the familiar orbit east of Reno, the brothels and wrecking yards, the big puffing power plant and its cat's cradle of coils and springs and fencing, an occasional freight train and the meandering and summer-shallow Truckee River, railroad tracks and river escorting me to Fernley, where they both cut north.

From there the land was drained of color and specificity, sage-tufted dirt and incessant sameness of highway.

From there the land was drained of color and specificity, sage-tufted dirt and incessant sameness of highway.

If I stayed longer, the place the map depicted might encroach.

Pat Nixon was from Nevada, like me, and like the prim little state bird, so blue against the day.

They were seated in low-slung cockpits made of sparkling, molded fiberglass, steering jerkily, pale-knuckled, trying to avoid the guardrail reflectors on either side of the road, the fiberglass cockpits jiggling and rocking as the men attempted to steer themselves out of catastrophe, swearing and angrily bopping the steering wheel with the heel of a hand when they burned and crashed.

Done driving his dump truck, he sat inexplicably nude watching TV and made us operate the dial for him, so he wouldn't have to get up.

He acted smitten but I was the smitten one.

He was older by fourteen years and a successful artist, tall and good-looking in his work clothes and steel-toed boots — the same kinds of clothes that Bobby and Scott and Andy wore, but on Sandro they added up to something else: a guy with a family inheritance who could use a nail gun, a drill press, a person not made effete by money, who dressed like a worker or sometimes a bum but was elegant in those clothes, and never hampered by the question of whether he belonged in a given situation...

It was a black-and-white image but you could see that Sandro's eyes were the whitish-blue of a wolf's, giving him a cold, sly intensity.

That he found some perverse humor in offering me in lieu of himself.

That he found some perverse humor in offering me in lieu of himself.

Where did you say — " She was feigning a low-level politeness, just enough to satisfy him.

When I was getting ready to depart, Sandro acted as if I might not be coming back, as if I were leaving him to solitude and tedium, a penance he'd resigned himself to enduring.

When I was getting ready to depart, Sandro acted as if I might not be coming back, as if I were leaving him to solitude and tedium, a penance he'd resigned himself to enduring.

I had learned about him and the Spiral Jetty from an obituary in the newspaper and not from my art department, which was provincial and conservative (the truth in Helen's snub was that I did learn more from Sandro than I had in art school).

The white drifts looked almost like snow but they moved like soap, quivering and weightless.

The ruts that cut around and under the bamboo gates, deep trenches if the snow was soft, were to be avoided by going high, by picking a high and graceful line, with no sudden swerves or shuddering edges, as I rode the rails to the finish.

Too much effort, the plodding blobs of ski poles every ten feet.

Contemplative and aerobic.

I thought art came from a brooding solitude.

The men laughed and started to disperse.

No retorts or cross-outs.