As though this were a silent signal, he turns and begins walking again. He has broken his rhythm during this forty-second stop. He will struggle out of harmony. The heat will bear down on him for several long minutes before his stride becomes the metronome that permits his mantric mindless peace. His heart palpitates at the restart. His skin flushes unbearably hot. Sweat gushes off his face. Khaki shorts find a new way to bind and hold his balls, rubbing a deeper blister between his legs.
Still in stride, he reaches into his front pocket and takes out a small sandwich bag. His fingers wiggle in the plastic and remove a melted glob of Vaseline. His hand slips under his waistband. He stops, spreads his legs, and smears the goo around his crotch. The boots crunch along once again, searching for the harmonic drum of his steps on the desert floor. The heat has swollen his penis. He feels awkward as it flexes and flops until it finds its spot, riding the rhythm between the hot wet shorts and his bare Vaselined leg.
He begins to think of his best friend’s mother down the street. Beautiful, warm disposition, a light, insightful sense of humor. He imagines her flat-roofed stucco tract home. He sees her on her couch. Lying on her side in the dark with the curtains pulled against the afternoon sun. He sees her ankles crossed and her body stretched out. Her palm is resting behind her sweating neck, revealing a black patch of armpit next to her face. Her breasts are outlined in the transparent, sweat-soaked, white cotton blouse. She slowly lifts her hips and shifts her weight toward the outside of the couch. Her eyes are closed. She’s nearly asleep, wide-hipped, heavy-breasted, peaceful.
The fan, which always sits on the parquet floor during hot weather, buzzes left to right, an admiring machine repeating its once-over from head to toe. Repeating toe to head, head to toe, over and over. The breeze hits her thighs, flowing up the stream of her loose dress, following the indented line to the V under her stomach, fluttering her dress, trembling in the V, and continuing. It buzzes over the stomach, up along her breasts, giving her nipples a pulsation of cool against the white wet cloth, causing a slight blush and tightness.
The fan continues up the curves of her thin muscular neck and stops on her face to reverse direction. A few sweat-joined strands of jet-black hair reverberate along her cheek for a second. Asleep. Her face turns like a dark flower to the cool moon of the fan’s breeze. Her lips kiss the fan’s invisible pressure, her tongue sliding slowly along her upper lip, pulling cool drops of sweat into her mouth. The fan’s buzz changes to a deeper tone and travels down her body.
Eddie stumbles, unconscious of the variation of his cadence, on and on, over and around the knee-high brush, zigzagging along the frying desert floor. “Where am I? I’m here and I’m OK . . . still have a canteen and a half of water . . . about four or five hours to the gas station . . . it’s only . . . four-thirty . . . shit . . . but . . . hell, the headlights on the road work pretty good . . . like last time . . . full moon up at eight . . . plenty of time . . . I’m not scared, am I?” His heart pounds slightly. He swallows and waits for panic. Nothing. “No.” He checks his bearings, turning in a slow circle, finding all the landmarks exactly where he wants them to be. “Four-thirty-two . . . four or five hours. . . .” His heart races. He inhales the hot air deeply, blows it out and inhales again, blows it out fast and inhales again.
“Fuck that. Who the fuck cares what time it is or what the fuck time I get there? . . . I got the fucking direction and I don’t need to waste my fucking energy getting all the fuck worked up over fucking nothing. Fuck it. I ain’t scared and I’m not going to start getting fucking scared by wondering what the fuck time it is, or when the fuck I’m getting where the fuck I’m going.” You’d have heard him laughing at himself if you had happened to be in the middle of the Mojave in August 1964. “I’m not scared, I’m OK. Now where was I? Oh, yeah.”
He sees her again. It was the time he came to her house last week. It was really hot that day. Good thing he wasn’t out here then, 106 in San Diego. That’d be somewhere like 120 out here. Anyway, he went into her house in the late afternoon. The house was asleep, everything completely still. He trailed the absence of sound out to the back yard patio, found the woman’s husband and their kids passed out in the heat, lying on mattresses they had dragged outside into the shade.
He could hear pipes and faucets sputter from the bathroom shower inside the house, settling into a high-pressure rain. The woman gasped for breath as she stepped into the shower. He argued with himself as he involuntarily walked back into the house. His silent steps wound from the patio along the corridor between the bedrooms and the bathroom. From the amplified splash and the sound of the spray and the bare feet squeaking against the wet porcelain, he determined that the bathroom door remained wide open. He could hear the water storming over her body and exploding in wet impact on the floor of the tub. Taking a breath, he turned the corner of the corridor and faced the bathroom. Cold steamless water ran over her silhouette, streams of water raced in clear webs on the inside of the shower curtain. The shadow bent at the waist and long arms stretched downward, breasts falling easily under shoulders, head down, hair hanging like a black waterfall.
She stood up, arms pulling the mane of hair up and over her shoulders. Her face was tilted upward, her mouth open. The jet of water blasting against her neck. Cool air swirled from the bathroom door.
She twisted the faucet shut. Eddie slipped out of the doorway and waited. Hearing her yank the shower curtain aside, he timed his voice to say, “Robert? . . .” with perfect innocence, and turned the corner. Her eyes met his. She was mid-stride, one leg suspended over the rim of the tub. She made no effort to cover herself, but froze there like a photograph, her eyes driving into his, betraying a mixture of curiosity and amusement.
She stood there, skin gleaming, holding his eyes prisoner with a magnetic power within her gaze. He could see nothing of her but a terrifying and increasing depth behind her eyes. He felt his body go weightless in panic as he realized he was far beyond his depth.
At that instant she smiled and reached smoothly for a towel and hugged it front of herself. She glanced out of the side of her eye, letting slip for an instant something that felt to Eddie like understanding and forgiveness, unsettling him even more and informing him immediately who held all the power. Her attitude shamed him, as though in these frozen instants he could see the real meaning of his mistake.
It was as though she had expected, even recognized, the inevitability of this contact but was disappointed in what Eddie had done with it. Without a word, she told him he had gone about it entirely wrong, and although she would not use the word, he knew “fool” was the only one appropriate. His face burned, his eyes dropped down, unfocused. Still holding her image, almost but not quite registering his boots on the wooden floor, he said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Her voice held a curious tone, coming from deeper in her chest, ironic and more real than it had ever sounded to him before. It made him imagine the way she would sound giving simple directions to a stranger who had lost his way. A matter-of-fact voice that in some way labeled him an equal. It seemed final and strangely welcome, spoken under her breath. A code, a frightening challenge, a whispered riddle. “Oh, yeah, sure, you are.”
SHERRY BABY
Eleven-thirty, a moonless night. Empty streets in suburbia. The tenth day of a heat wave. The Santa Ana gusts hot and dry, ninety-two degrees. Eddie Burnett is urinating under a street lamp on the middle of an asphalt road. It’s a tradition with him this summer. Standing in one spot, he turns a slow circle. His record is four revolutions, he calls them “piss rings.” He does this almost every night on the way home from his girlfriend’s house. The rings stain the road for several days. Each night a new overlapping ring, until he gets five. He’s doing this to commemorate the 1964 Summer Olympic Games.
His girlfriend’s house? Not really. That is, it’s an unrequited love. Sherry likes him, but on the social level he’s considered much too goony for her. Eddie does not quite get it. He gets his hair cut by his mother, and