Heat
One.
The insides of my eyelids are blood red against the burning summer sky.
Forty-seven miles past the Texas border, and the insides of my eyelids are blood red and twitching, a vicious glint of light refracting through a chip in the windshield of the Ford and scalding the nerves bunched closely in each socket. My leg, stretched across the back seat like a dead thing, throbs in muted unison with my heartbeat. Quinn has a battered Biology textbook spread open in his lap and he’s reading aloud, half under his breath, slurring slightly around the damp paper of a cigarette. “Platelets collect at the site of the injury. The presence of platelets catalyzes the conversion of prothrombin to thrombin, which in turn stimulates the conversion of inactive fibrinogen to its active form, fibrin.” Running his calloused fingers over the barrel of the HK machinepistol on the seat beside him as he speaks. “Strands of fibrin form a mesh-like clump at the site of the injury, preventing blood loss.” With every word, my leg aches worse. I can’t see it with my eyes closed to the blinding sky, but I can feel the swelling, the sharper spike of hideous pain at the entrance and exit wounds. The shirts Quinn spread over the car seats are already soaked through with blood and fluid.
Forty-seven miles past the Texas border, the trunk of the car packed full of dope, bricks upon bricks of gritty brown powder stacked in methodical rows and fastened under a waterproof yellow tarpaulin. The smell of butane and fresh leather, like Quinn was polishing his brand-new Larry Mahans with lighter fluid.
The Ford is parked crookedly on the non-existent shoulder, miles of barren highway stretching out ahead of us like a scar across the desert. Incorporeal oases shimmer on the horizon, giving the impression of spreading oil-slicks as they flicker and dance on my retinas. Above us, a hawk scrolls the distant updrafts, hunting prey, and quick-moving shadows of clouds skim fitfully over the hard country. Even with all four windows down, the summer heat is building, coiling and intensifying like a living entity as dry sunlight sears the scorched metal roof.
I close my eyes again, hear the rattle and spark of a cheap plastic lighter as Quinn lights another cigarette. Unconcerned. He’s the one that got us here, but there’s no forgetting I’m the one that agreed.
Slick city kid playing cowboy in an El Paso bar, cheap faux leather boots and rolled-up sleeves, drinking tequila with lime and making eyes at girls with too much makeup, Quinn thought I was a fucking riot. So self-important with my prep school smarts, him stroking my sick little ego, making me repeat the names once, twice, a thousand times. Phencyclidine. Lysergic acid diethylamide. Diacetylmorphine. His easy smile always overtaking his eyes with the first syllable. Until one day he spat onto the dirty floorboards, hiked his lizard-skin Noconas onto the neighboring barstool, and asked, “You want an education?”
In spite of the sweat pooling between my shirt – soaked skintight – and the Ford’s hot upholstery, I’m shaking so hard that I can hear my molars jarring against each other, bone glancing off bone with an unnerving mechanical clatter that makes my guts churn, muscles spasming beneath the surface. A bag of incoherent body parts, hands jammed deep into the pockets of my jeans like I can stop the painful rattling of loose tendons and ligaments, limbs all knocking against each other. The nausea’s worse than before, each uncontrollable paroxysm of shivers making me moan out loud, the sound guttural and sick like a death rattle.
Suddenly anemic and cold under the scorching Texas sun.
I don’t want to say anything; I know I shouldn’t I know I shouldn’t I know, but his name comes out before I can stop myself, wavering pathetically in the air. “Quinn…”
He glances up from the textbook, shifting his weight, and twists in his seat so he can examine me, tapping the end of his cigarette on the edge of the passenger side window. The ashy grey flakes drop instantly: breezeless.
Quinn’s tropical eyes, so out of place on this arid stretch of highway, ghost over my face, my shivering body, chewed-up leg leaking blood all over his shirts and the car seat, and he says nothing. His weathered face, in shadow under the rim of a tan Stetson, likewise betrays nothing, just pronounced cheekbones and a hard aquiline chin with muscles that stand out as he clenches and relaxes his jaw.
I stammer his name a second time, unable to meet his gaze head-on, my stomach lurching uncomfortably somewhere under my ribs. His head tilts to the side in an admission of pity, Oh Frank, and it’s in that instant that something gives inside of me.
Oh God, oh fuck, I feel waves of peristalsis distorting the walls of my stomach and then I completely lose my shit, barely managing to shove open the door of the Ford before I’m twisted backwards at the waist, stomach walls contracting once, twice, three times as I heave my insides into the hot desert haze, spitting a stream of dark vomit onto the parched ground. My hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, I can still see blood clinging to my cuticles, beneath my nails.
As I drag myself painfully back into a sitting position, weak ribs threatening to splinter, Quinn says, “Chyme.”
I wipe my mouth on my shirtsleeve and look at him, silent, until a tremor of concern distorts the corners of his mouth.
“Frank…” He’s biting his lower lip, weathered hands tensed in his lap. Unsure. Searching for answers I can’t bear to know he doesn’t have.
Sickly curious, I stare past his labyrinthine irises to my reflection in the dusty rearview, wanting to see what he sees. My eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, concave cheeks streaked with salt and dirt. Bruised lips split. Something gluey and hot is coating my eyelashes, trapping them in spiky webs that cast clownish shadows across the planes of my face like a grotesque marionette. The right leg of my jeans in nearly black with blood, starting to stiffen at its edges even as the material slowly wicks fresh fluid past the knee. Where the ashy red of the fabric churns into raw, torn flesh, you can see threads of denim nestled deep into the wounds. Layers of skin, unnatural pearly white smeared with blood and shredded tissue. Ceaseless throbbing, clenching muscle, the deep-seated ache of fractured bone. Unbelievable pain.
Quinn says, “As soon as it gets dark.”
Quinn has said this before. Says it’s a promise.
The sun is almost directly above us, pouring through the windshield like ribbons of lye and pooling in the hollows of my face, uncomfortably hot.
As soon as it gets dark.
I close my eyes, instantly enveloped in red as the penetrating light pools like fresh blood in the space between my lids and corneas. With my face angled directly towards the sun like a desperate flower, I can see a map of my capillaries etched on the inside of each eye, twitching with blood pressure.
Quinn’s gaze trails across my skin like the sting of a sunburn as he watches me gasp out breath after breath, the only sound for miles until the sound of his jeans sliding on the upholstery signals his surrender. Then the soft rustle of torn pages as he flips through the textbook again; the rough grace of his drawl beginning another paragraph, another twisted lullaby.
As soon as it gets dark.
Quinn says, “Blood is transported to the tissues of the body via the aorta, and returned to the heart through the inferior and superior vena cava.”
I already know this. A long time ago, before Texas, before New Mexico, before sitting in the Ford with the taste of vomit clinging to my gums and my leg swollen carmine, one cowboy boot dark black with blood, I had an education.
But it wasn’t anything compared to what Quinn had to offer.
Forty-seven miles past the Texas border, and the insides of my eyelids are blood red and twitching, a vicious glint of light refracting through a chip in the windshield of the Ford and scalding the nerves bunched closely in each socket. My leg, stretched across the back seat like a dead thing, throbs in muted unison with my heartbeat. Quinn has a battered Biology textbook spread open in his lap and he’s reading aloud, half under his breath, slurring slightly around the damp paper of a cigarette. “Platelets collect at the site of the injury. The presence of platelets catalyzes the conversion of prothrombin to thrombin, which in turn stimulates the conversion of inactive fibrinogen to its active form, fibrin.” Running his calloused fingers over the barrel of the HK machinepistol on the seat beside him as he speaks. “Strands of fibrin form a mesh-like clump at the site of the injury, preventing blood loss.” With every word, my leg aches worse. I can’t see it with my eyes closed to the blinding sky, but I can feel the swelling, the sharper spike of hideous pain at the entrance and exit wounds. The shirts Quinn spread over the car seats are already soaked through with blood and fluid.
Forty-seven miles past the Texas border, the trunk of the car packed full of dope, bricks upon bricks of gritty brown powder stacked in methodical rows and fastened under a waterproof yellow tarpaulin. The smell of butane and fresh leather, like Quinn was polishing his brand-new Larry Mahans with lighter fluid.
The Ford is parked crookedly on the non-existent shoulder, miles of barren highway stretching out ahead of us like a scar across the desert. Incorporeal oases shimmer on the horizon, giving the impression of spreading oil-slicks as they flicker and dance on my retinas. Above us, a hawk scrolls the distant updrafts, hunting prey, and quick-moving shadows of clouds skim fitfully over the hard country. Even with all four windows down, the summer heat is building, coiling and intensifying like a living entity as dry sunlight sears the scorched metal roof.
I close my eyes again, hear the rattle and spark of a cheap plastic lighter as Quinn lights another cigarette. Unconcerned. He’s the one that got us here, but there’s no forgetting I’m the one that agreed.
Slick city kid playing cowboy in an El Paso bar, cheap faux leather boots and rolled-up sleeves, drinking tequila with lime and making eyes at girls with too much makeup, Quinn thought I was a fucking riot. So self-important with my prep school smarts, him stroking my sick little ego, making me repeat the names once, twice, a thousand times. Phencyclidine. Lysergic acid diethylamide. Diacetylmorphine. His easy smile always overtaking his eyes with the first syllable. Until one day he spat onto the dirty floorboards, hiked his lizard-skin Noconas onto the neighboring barstool, and asked, “You want an education?”
In spite of the sweat pooling between my shirt – soaked skintight – and the Ford’s hot upholstery, I’m shaking so hard that I can hear my molars jarring against each other, bone glancing off bone with an unnerving mechanical clatter that makes my guts churn, muscles spasming beneath the surface. A bag of incoherent body parts, hands jammed deep into the pockets of my jeans like I can stop the painful rattling of loose tendons and ligaments, limbs all knocking against each other. The nausea’s worse than before, each uncontrollable paroxysm of shivers making me moan out loud, the sound guttural and sick like a death rattle.
Suddenly anemic and cold under the scorching Texas sun.
I don’t want to say anything; I know I shouldn’t I know I shouldn’t I know, but his name comes out before I can stop myself, wavering pathetically in the air. “Quinn…”
He glances up from the textbook, shifting his weight, and twists in his seat so he can examine me, tapping the end of his cigarette on the edge of the passenger side window. The ashy grey flakes drop instantly: breezeless.
Quinn’s tropical eyes, so out of place on this arid stretch of highway, ghost over my face, my shivering body, chewed-up leg leaking blood all over his shirts and the car seat, and he says nothing. His weathered face, in shadow under the rim of a tan Stetson, likewise betrays nothing, just pronounced cheekbones and a hard aquiline chin with muscles that stand out as he clenches and relaxes his jaw.
I stammer his name a second time, unable to meet his gaze head-on, my stomach lurching uncomfortably somewhere under my ribs. His head tilts to the side in an admission of pity, Oh Frank, and it’s in that instant that something gives inside of me.
Oh God, oh fuck, I feel waves of peristalsis distorting the walls of my stomach and then I completely lose my shit, barely managing to shove open the door of the Ford before I’m twisted backwards at the waist, stomach walls contracting once, twice, three times as I heave my insides into the hot desert haze, spitting a stream of dark vomit onto the parched ground. My hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, I can still see blood clinging to my cuticles, beneath my nails.
As I drag myself painfully back into a sitting position, weak ribs threatening to splinter, Quinn says, “Chyme.”
I wipe my mouth on my shirtsleeve and look at him, silent, until a tremor of concern distorts the corners of his mouth.
“Frank…” He’s biting his lower lip, weathered hands tensed in his lap. Unsure. Searching for answers I can’t bear to know he doesn’t have.
Sickly curious, I stare past his labyrinthine irises to my reflection in the dusty rearview, wanting to see what he sees. My eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, concave cheeks streaked with salt and dirt. Bruised lips split. Something gluey and hot is coating my eyelashes, trapping them in spiky webs that cast clownish shadows across the planes of my face like a grotesque marionette. The right leg of my jeans in nearly black with blood, starting to stiffen at its edges even as the material slowly wicks fresh fluid past the knee. Where the ashy red of the fabric churns into raw, torn flesh, you can see threads of denim nestled deep into the wounds. Layers of skin, unnatural pearly white smeared with blood and shredded tissue. Ceaseless throbbing, clenching muscle, the deep-seated ache of fractured bone. Unbelievable pain.
Quinn says, “As soon as it gets dark.”
Quinn has said this before. Says it’s a promise.
The sun is almost directly above us, pouring through the windshield like ribbons of lye and pooling in the hollows of my face, uncomfortably hot.
As soon as it gets dark.
I close my eyes, instantly enveloped in red as the penetrating light pools like fresh blood in the space between my lids and corneas. With my face angled directly towards the sun like a desperate flower, I can see a map of my capillaries etched on the inside of each eye, twitching with blood pressure.
Quinn’s gaze trails across my skin like the sting of a sunburn as he watches me gasp out breath after breath, the only sound for miles until the sound of his jeans sliding on the upholstery signals his surrender. Then the soft rustle of torn pages as he flips through the textbook again; the rough grace of his drawl beginning another paragraph, another twisted lullaby.
As soon as it gets dark.
Quinn says, “Blood is transported to the tissues of the body via the aorta, and returned to the heart through the inferior and superior vena cava.”
I already know this. A long time ago, before Texas, before New Mexico, before sitting in the Ford with the taste of vomit clinging to my gums and my leg swollen carmine, one cowboy boot dark black with blood, I had an education.
But it wasn’t anything compared to what Quinn had to offer.