Heat

Two.

Above the horizon hovers a blurred and blood-red sun, splintering in my warped vision like an explosion flash-frozen in the sky. Somewhere under the same painted clouds, a grainy photograph of Quinn and me is tacked with pushpins and peeling yellow tape to the sweaty wall of a Las Cruces police station. The same photo grinning innocently in a thousand convenience stores, from Santa Fe to Silver City.

Quinn paid a sallow perillán five American dollars for the shitty Polaroid on a blindingly sunny day in the heart of El Paso, and in it he’s just bought me my first pair of real lizard boots, turquoise and black cherry, the most gorgeous boots in the whole fucking country, and he’s got his arm around my shoulders while I’m posed in my best imitation of a cowboy, both of us with silver-grey Stetsons and scarlet bandanas around our necks like the Saturday Westerns I watched with my dad in another lifetime. The quality is shit, the colors sun-bleached and underdeveloped, but there’s no hiding the fact that with our smiles splitting our faces like fractures, we look almost like kids.

A million fucking miles from there, I’m lying half-dead in the back of the fucking Ford, liquefying from my leg upwards and soaking slowly into the upholstery as I drift in and out of claustrophobic black catacombs. Watching my hands lie motionless on the blood-spattered plaid of my shirt-front like empty gloves, repeating the promise over and over in a desperate prayer: as soon as it gets dark.

As soon as it gets dark.

As soon as it gets dark as soon as it gets dark as soon as it gets dark as soon as it gets dark as soon as it gets dark.

In the passenger seat, Quinn is dozing fitfully, Stetson angled low over his face so only the unforgiving jut of his jawbone is visible. Shielding his eyes from the Texas sunset. The Biology textbook is lying splayed on the stained floormats of the Ford and the machinepistol is in his lap now, his capable hands resting loosely on both barrel and grip.

Protecting himself.

With sun slipping gradually towards the distant mountain peaks, a weak breeze ghosts intermittently across the barren highway, but the heat is still there, sucking the moisture from my lungs and leaving my split lips cracked and bloody. I can taste the salt, smell the metallic bite of iron, suffocated in hot, sweet sickness by the bile pooling in the back of my throat. Nerve endings convulsing with every wave of shivers that rips through my skeletal muscle. The hard metal butt of a handgun is pressing painfully into the soft tissue between my vertebrae, and it takes all my strength to lift my ass and knock the semi-automatic off the seat, whining in pain and suddenly defenseless. Sweaty and parched and scorched and cold, I know I’m pathetic but I can’t stop the shaking, can’t think and can’t breathe, something gluey and astringent slowly searing my ribs from the inside out, like Drano and epoxy eating through the walls of my diaphragm. In my fucked-up state, I swear I can smell it, sick vapors of acidic air and brine rising off the dusty ground and conjuring the grey-green gloom of the ocean it once was.

And my fucking leg.

I can’t look at it, nauseated by the sweet dark scent of decay soaking through my jeans, cloying and warm like morning urine as it diffuses into the arid air inside the car and slithers hotly into my nose and mouth. The taste making me retch. Cells and cells and blood and cartilage, bleach-white bone and nerves and skin, shattered and putrefied, a terrible splattered mess of shredded tissue. Aching, gnawing pain; excruciating horror and sick anguished fascination.

Quinn is whimpering softly in his sleep, the quiet noises so familiar that I can remember hearing them echo across the vast country on midnights spent alone, waking me from dreamless oblivion. His face is still hidden, but the memories of a thousand nights linger like a projection on the backs of my retinas: lips slack and eyes motionless behind veined cellophane lids, his clenched granite jaw the only indicator of fitful dreams, hot arteries throbbing visibly in his neck. His shirt is unbuttoned over a white wife-beater, the hollow between his clavicles covered in a light sheen of sweat, and as I watch him I know he won’t remember it, the subtle signs of anxiety, the arrhythmic blur of nightmares playing out under his skull. Hot apocalypse and nuclear winter.

Staring out across the endless landscape, still shimmering like a hallucination in the heat, I can feel my chest muscles clench with anxiety, barbed electric sparks crackling under the skin. New pain spreading like a hemorrhage on each side of my sternum, winding its way through my ribs and squeezing my heart.

Under the same flattened expanse of sky, they are waiting to kill us. Gut us, scalp us, skin us alive. Watch us die shuddering on the cracked black earth, choking on mouthfuls of alkaline blood.

Sitting on the edge of the vacant highway with the trunk of the Ford packed full of stolen dope, the sparse trigonometry of the desert bathed in blood by the crimson sun, I know.

They are out there.

I know this, and I close my bloodshot eyes and shiver feverishly, nearly delirious, until Quinn wakes up.

Viral ocean eyes search my face and Quinn says, “Shit, Frank.”

This morning, as the sun rose high over the road and the inescapable heat began to mount, it was “Hang in there, cowboy.” A warm hand on the small of my back as I choked tortured screams into the upholstery, twisted and crazy with pain, hang in there, kid. Now, Quinn looks at me and says, “Shit.”

He says, “Soon, I promise.”

I trace the lines of his skin with my sore eyes, try to sculpt fear into his face. Worry. Proof that he feels something deeper than surprise when he sees me sick and lifeless, something sharper than adrenaline when he thinks of them tracking us across the desert, thirsting for blood.

“Frank, you’re giving me the fucking creeps. Stop staring.” A weak smile. The tired, sad-eyed version of his infamous smartass grin. “I’ll get you everything you need, as soon as they can’t see us.”

Another promise.

“I didn’t want this to happen, you know that.” His voice falters. “You do know that, right? They… They just caught us by surprise.”

I nod, pain shooting through my spinal column.

Quinn says, “Good.” Swallows. His eyes linger on my face for a moment longer before he looks away, visibly relaxing, and I watch silently as he scans the static highway ahead of us.

The sky is darker now; the horizon a bright gash of scarlet streaked with deep purple clouds that expertly mimic the nauseating hue of a contusion. The dead desert ground is stiff and sun-bruised, the breeze picking up almost imperceptibly. The white mile markers seem to glow by the side of the road as night languidly suffuses the infinite landscape.

Inevitably, I feel the haunting loneliness of the southwest, ripping through my body like another physical hurt. Half of me is hollow, missing; I’m lost out here in the unfeeling vastness of the desert, and even though I close my eyes against the salty sting, tears still spill through the crack between my lids, clinging to my lashes and streaking slowly down my jaw in warm rivulets. I can’t remember ever feeling so awfully, irreparably drained, and finally I give up, give in to the pain and brutal shivers and hear myself whisper, “Quinn. Please.” The words catching like barbs in my trachea, shredding delicate flesh.

There’s a fractured second of silence before I hear the passenger door creak open, springs groaning as Quinn gets out of the car. Boots on the hard ground outside, a cough as he spits into the dust. The door behind me opens and I know that he’s standing there, gaze searching my wrecked form again, looking for something I’ll never understand. When he speaks his voice sounds slightly rawer than before, rough over the consonants of my name. “Frank. Frankie.” His hands touch my waist, my shoulders, and I moan with exhaustion, silently begging for death. As my eyes jerk painfully in their sockets, Quinn wraps his strong arms around my chest just under my ribcage, lifting my body so that he can shove his own into the car. When he pulls the door shut, we’re jammed together in the backseat, me whimpering blindly with pain as he repeats, over and over, that it’s going to be okay. “Two hours,” he says. He swears, just two hours and he’ll start the car again.

Dizzy and sick, I let my head fall back against his chest, too exhausted to fight and desperate for contact. He smells like salt and cigarette smoke, the scent diffusing across mucus membrane, a single layer of epithelial cells, and agitating neurons in the parietal lobe of my brain. The pale memory of another hot summer day – lying buzzed in the dirty bed of Quinn’s pick-up with the blinding sky above us and the breeze tousling our clothes – never so far from my consciousness, shifting and trembling beneath layers of fear and adrenaline, the petrifying knowledge that now, we are hunted. Echoes of sensation flicker like pastel flame, his hands warm on my thighs, the faded dust-blue denim the same color as the clouds. Tequila and lime on his breath; “Don’t lets shit where we sleep, kid.” There were guns and dope in the glove box already. My answer was a breathless whine, and he laughed, the hurricane waves crashing in his irises reminding me of a thousand beaches I’d never seen. Lips curled in a seductive smartass grin, cowboy muscles glowing golden in the hot El Paso sun. I knew. I knew you was gonna get us both lynched.

An old woman sitting alone on the balcony of a shitty New Mexico motel, she rubbed her bony forearms and said, “Dios mío.” Crossing herself, dios mío, she said Quinn and I knew each other before we were born.