Land Rover
- Dec 5, 2025
- 6 min read
by Stevie doCarmo
Look at these two.
Peacocking — angel-strange, hetero as fuck — down the manicured shoulder of the remotest stretch of the commercial strip outside our ritzy-titzy, last-stop-on-the-commuter-train town.
J. Crew, Trader Joe’s, Warby Parker, Anthropologie: all behind them now. By a par-five at least. Only car dealerships left to kiss their asses as they hoof insouciantly past.
Skedaddling urbanity.
Entering rurality.
I’m watching them from a realm of algorithmically managed AC, lighting, smooth jazz. From behind an expanse of plate glass measurable in acres. Marking their progress through a hot, breezeless July day. Waiting for the young woman at the spotlit marble counter yonder to tell me the Land Rover’s 47-point servicing is done.
Breezeless judging by all those limp American flags.
They’re nothing if not gaudy. A Hollywood wet dream circa — here it gets weird — the ’70s. Denim miniskirt on her. Firetruck-red disco halter. Crazy-bitch platforms whose gleam says lamé.
Blonde because blonde.
And the Electric Horseman. Snug Levi’s hugging rodeo thighs. Western shirt with sleeves shoved up, open at the chest, mother-of-pearl snaps tugged apart. Tortured Tony Lama’s. A big straw cowboy hat tipped slyly forward on his brow, throwing shade.
I said a cowboy hat.
Hilarious because this is not cattle country.
The town whose dust they’re shaking off is dustless.
Lamé shoes and a ten-gallon lid and whose children are these? Because they’re not so old it’s not a question. That of which of my attorney or therapist or anesthesiologist neighbors spawned them, only let me help you here, the answer’s none, because no way is this local produce I’m looking at.
Hilarious. But a little rankling, too. A little grating on some blood-whisper, iris-tightening level, because these peasants, these urchins, get off where, exactly, prancing past the Porsche place, the Maserati place, the British-imports place (there are Bentleys in this hangar-size room) like huh-what? Like being twenty and beautiful and ridiculous makes them a big noise. Like poverty unto ridelessness is immaterial since the only thing the big glittering logos on these palaces refer to, end of the day, is sex, which is their thing, their intellectual property, and fuck any rich twats staring from behind all that glass who don’t know it.
Except this (as they approach, short- and sharp-shadowed, my dead-on twelve o’clock):
Try not liking them.
However much we might want to unscrew their heads.
Because there it is. The excellent old American thing we thought was extinct. Beat to death with a selfie stick. CGIed and remastered and rebooted into pixel dust. Vaporwave. The Karen Black and Billy Jack thing. Laurel Canyon and CBGB and Cocksucker Blues. Jostling shoulders in the sun as I’m looking left and right to see if anyone else in here sees this. Youths without goddamn iPhones clapped to their faces. Loose on a NASCAR-and-Schlitz summer day. The sweaty magic of it. Of the frenetically talking male unit’s sudden spastic shark-fin-slicing-the-surf hand gesture. The female’s corresponding company-halt so she can put her hand on her bare midriff, slack her knees, throw back her Goldie Hawn hair and laugh in a bright, chiming way I can hear even if I can’t hear it.
Unreal.
I suddenly want the Land Rover done this minute.
I glance at the rayon-sheathed young woman at the spotlit counter and she’s texting.
Who are they? What explains them? If they’re not just a hot-blacktop mirage?
Where did they come from and what errand are they on?
Their backs now. A red bandana stuffed in his frayed ass pocket. Her coltish legs. Blessedly devoid of butterfly tattoos. Dolphins and mermaids. Taylor maxims relayed in louchely leaning cursive.
What’s out there for them? Down that road? Where the hawk glides and the corn abides? Where car-struck deer lie buzzard-swarmed and the hand-painted political signage augurs an imperial unhipness?
Is it the snot-and-aplomb past I’m looking at? Out in that asphalt shimmer? Or some ultra-cis, pronatalist future in sexy sheep’s clothing? Lighting out to meet itself, Adam and Eve, chick and dude, sperm and ovum, in a resurgent Eden done for real this time with town?
Town and its bazillion abstruse social complexities all amounting to one sort of queer or other.
Is that the errand they’re on? Leaving? Not to, like, get somewhere but as an end in itself?
Do they do it every day? Up and march out of some random exurban yuppieville like Lot and Lot’s Wife? (Not once has either glanced backward.) Just for the sheer fuck-all thrill of it?
I want to pull up beside them. A mile from here. Out in those sun-baked hills. Drop the Rover’s passenger window. Watch them shuffle over, knocking elbows, mouth-breathing, peering into my chilly leather cave like fascinated raccoons. Let their eyes adjust to see my craggy face staring back at them from deep inside all that tinted-window dark. Say to them:
“Don’t get America pregnant.”
No. Say:
“You’re not fooling anyone.”
No. Say:
“Ever been in a car like this?”
The past or the future?
What does it mean I can’t tell? After staring at them two whole minutes?
Someone cancels on me. Hours later. As I’m parallel parking that boat.
I sit at the bar of the new “brasserie” in town, denying myself my phone. Nursing a cloying Belgian-style thing arrived in a snifter. Eavesdropping on two young women debating the perfect number of children, the perfect age for squeezing them out.
Was it the male unit’s idea she hike in those fucked-up shoes?
Where are they now? Right now? Right this minute?
The purple-haired debater has a Playboy Bunny tattooed inside her wrist.
The bartender wears earbuds.
Could someone have warned me aging would mean the world’s deliquescing and disintegrating? Not mine?
Who are you staring into my terrarium, and what is it you think you know about me?
Later I turn off the TV. The computer. The other computer. Brush and floss.
It occurs to me the dog needs walking. Then I remember he’s two years dead.
I stand all but naked at a triple-paned, super-efficient polycarbonate window. Six floors up. Top floor. In the dark. Seeing both my ghostly reflection and the river glistening down there under a bright half-moon hanging at my dead-on twelve o’clock.
Except this:
Try not wanting them.
I pull up beside them in my old silver Civic.
Vinyl seats. Stick shift. AM/FM radio.
No cigarette lighter, no rear defrost. Zero to sixty in who knows because it’d kill the hamster.
I roll down the window. Grinning.
“Ever been in a car like this?”
We ride a while. Through the countryside. Her laugh is measles-grade contagious. He loses the cowboy hat, which doesn’t fit under the roof.
A cool, overcast October day. Scarecrow weather.
We pull over. Get out and trek into a field. Tall grass. Hay waiting to happen. I’ve got a few pills in a sandwich baggie in my front jeans pocket. A present from this girl in my dorm. We crest a hill, find a dilapidated barn. Doors missing. Paint mostly gone. In we go, the three of us. It’s musty. Dusty. Sunlight streams in through holes and gaps in planks and slates, never mind the cloudy day. I’m wearing my favorite concert tee from that year. A dove beats its wings noisily above us, does a frantic circuit of the place. Flies out. The ten-gallon hat is back on. My left hand slides past the mother-of-pearl buttons. Feels his nipple go hard against my palm. My right hand is under her hoisted skirt, in her underwear, feeling her go slick around my fingertip.
I have to get my mouth to their ears. Both of them. One at a time. It’s extremely important. That I whisper this thing I have to say.
Want to say.
Have to say. Right this minute. To both of them.
Whisper it to them.
Want to say.
Have to say:
I love you.
Stevie doCarmo grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, USA, and lives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He’s a professor of English at Bucks County Community College in suburban Philadelphia and holds a PhD in modern American literature from Lehigh University. His fiction has appeared at Packingtown Review, The Headlight Review, The Capra Review, The Spotlong Review, BULL, Literally Stories, and elsewhere.
