Saguaro Riptide

EIGHT

Heat waves curled off the highway’s back and broke against the Saturn’s windshield in a rushing hiss. If you watched them long enough you’d swear that the horizon was doing the mambo. If you stared at the white line splitting the road you’d swear that it was an albino snake slithering over blistering blacktop. And if you ignored both those options and glanced at the desert you’d swear that you were in the same spot you’d passed twenty minutes before.

Woodrow Saad Muhammad did all of these things, and doing them-one after another in quick succession-made him exceedingly uneasy.

Ensconced within a car, air-conditioner running efficiently, Sonny Rollins on the tape deck, he felt separated from all that surrounded him. Completely alien.

By extension, he did not feel that he could stop the car and step outside. Not without a spacesuit. For all around him was another world. That was the only sane explanation for his feelings of unease.

And in that world there was nothing at all. Only the desert. Earth the color of mummified flesh. Brittle plants crippled by environment. Razor-wire tumbleweeds. Curling heat waves and a cloudless sky so blue and deep Woodrow felt as if he could drown in it.

It all seemed so unreal.

Woodrow hadn’t seen another car for at least fifteen minutes. He examined his left hand and was pleased to find that the bandage he had taken from the first aid kit in the trunk was holding firm. Though his hand still ached in spite of the aspirin he’d swallowed, the dog bite was no longer bleeding.

He had cleaned the wound thoroughly with astringent, of course. Still, it occurred to him that the dog bite might become infected. He did not wish to consider such matters as rabies. His knowledge of canine diseases was extremely limited, and he did not care to expand it through personal experience. Woodrow sincerely hoped that Jack Baddalach took his animal to the vet on a regular basis.

Perhaps he would ask Baddalach about that before he killed him.

While considering how best to pursue that particular line of questioning, Woodrow fiddled with the tape deck control knobs.

Sonny Rollins’s sax stabbed a sharp riff through Woodrow’s eardrum. It was a singularly unpleasant sensation. Quickly, Woodrow turned off the tape deck and turned up the air- conditioning.

A moment later, he found himself shivering.

His hand ached persistently.

He pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

The Saturn roared forward.

The horizon did the mambo.

Something in it, up ahead, danced to the tune.

A building.

A gas station.

***

The pump jockey looked like a poster boy for the Aryan Brotherhood, but Woodrow didn’t pay him any mind. He parked his automobile at the pump, whispered “fill ’er up” to the cracker through lips that betrayed not the slightest tremor of hatred or disdain, and went in search of a restroom.

He wandered past a Coca-Cola machine and continued around the side of the gas station, where he confronted two doors.

Both doors were metal. Long ago they had been white. Now they were pockmarked with rust spots the size of quarters. Woodrow wondered how anything could rust in an environment of such unremitting dryness, but he didn’t wonder for long because he could spare no time for idle speculation.

His need was unquestionably urgent.

He tried the door to the MEN’S. It was locked.

Tried the WOMEN’s. Locked as well.

Woodrow returned to the front of the gas station. Mr. Aryan Brotherhood was sitting in a lawn chair crisscrossed with orange and turquoise straps. He didn’t look up as Woodrow approached. Instead, he stared at the highway.

No cars in sight, but he stared just the same.

Woodrow said, “I need the key to the restroom.”

The man did not utter a word. Neither did he look in Woodrow’s direction.

“The restroom key,” Woodrow said, slowly this time, with just enough edge in his voice to provide an unmistakable emphasis. “The doors are locked. I need the key.”

The man’s head jerked quite suddenly. He looked at Woodrow, a slash of a smile on his face, a ribbon of sweat on his upper lip.

“Guess someone’s in there,” the man said. “Guess you’ll just have to wait.”

Woodrow stared at the man. But the man had already looked away, once more directing his gaze toward the road.

There was nothing to see but the desert, the heat.

Woodrow took a few steps toward the restrooms.

“Hold on,” the guy said.

Woodrow turned.

“Pump’s self-serve.” The man gave Woodrow a look that was all ice. “And you gotta pay first.”

“When I’m ready,” Woodrow said.

Woodrow’s Saturn waited at the pump. The only other car on the lot was a beat-up Camaro. Woodrow could not read the license plate from his vantage point, but he speculated that it would be something clever, like GRZMNKY or WHTEPWR.

It was very quiet.

Just Woodrow and the cracker.

There wasn’t anyone else at the gas station.

Knowing this, Woodrow stood in the heat, his eyes trained on the locked bathroom doors.

Waiting with a heavy bladder.

It seemed that he would wait for a very long time.

Time afforded him the opportunity for introspection.

It had started bad with the kid at Baddalach’s condo. The kid went yack yack yack while Woodrow stood there listening, knowing all the while that, upon reflection, he would loathe his indecisiveness.

He hated that feeling worse than anything else. The feeling that he was a wriggling fish with a hook in its mouth, and someone else was jerking on the line. And the kid had played him for all he was worth. Without question, the kid had caught him off guard-his head had ached terribly, a result of the fall he’d taken while battling Baddalach’s dog-but that was no excuse because Woodrow was a professional. He should have been able to adjust to the situation, no matter how fluid it became.

But he hadn’t. The kid had landed and gutted him with nothing but a torrent of little barbed words. In the end, the Combat Commander had been useless against the kid’s mouth.

And now there was this hillbilly. He wasn’t as smart as the kid, but he was every inch as calculating. Like that ofay bastard they’d tossed in Woodrow’s cell in Rahway, everything sliding sideways out of his cracker mouth as if his brain were greased with K-Y Jelly. Push push push, until push finally came to shove.

At Rahway, Woodrow had put up with it way too long. And then one day he began to loathe himself for putting up with it at all. That was when Woodrow sharpened his toothbrush and stabbed the cracker.

He’d done it in the showers. Stabbed the man twenty-seven times. Every wound was distinct in his memory to this day. Stabbing and stabbing. Scarlet blood everywhere, the cracker’s white skin going whiter and whiter, excrement dribbling down his leg as he fouled himself, not one word issuing from his cracker lips …

Afterward, Woodrow’s only regret had been that you couldn’t cut out a man’s tongue with a sharpened toothbrush. That particular regret troubled him to this day, and he realized it was a direct result of his hesitation in dealing with the situation in a timely fashion.

In retrospect, Woodrow could see how he should have handled the situation. If he had bitch-slapped the cracker the first time the white man entered the cell, he wouldn’t be thinking about him right now. .

If he’d shot the kid in Baddalach’s condo the second he opened his mouth, his gut wouldn’t be churning this minute. .

But no, he had waited, waited until those little things piled one on top of another, waited until all those little things added up to something big.

Something unforgettable.

A memory to churn up on very bad days.

The cracker came around the corner of the gas station. He was holding a tire iron. The sun was behind him, and Woodrow noticed for the first time that the sun was very bright today.

A grin was smeared on the cracker’s face-that Crisco grin they all had.

Woodrow’s head began to throb. The light was very bright. And there was a hum behind it-

“You better go now,” the cracker said.

Woodrow’s bladder ached. “That’s exactly what I’d like to do.”

“I mean you’d better haul ass.”

“I haven’t relieved myself” Woodrow did not blink, even though the light was burning straight through his eyes, singeing his brain. “And I didn’t get my gas.”

“I’m real sorry about that,” the cracker said, still grinning. “But the fact is I’m closed now. We Westerners, we like to take our afternoon siestas. But if you want to wait around for an hour or so. .”

The cracker shrugged, slimy smile coming on, but it was suddenly eclipsed by the glaring white light, and the taffy-pulling machine in Woodrow’s head started working again, kneading his brain, and his eyelids were once more as heavy as iron and he blinked once. . twice-

The desert seemed different behind the gas station. No ribbon of highway, no Coca-Cola machine. Only what Allah had put there a long time ago.

Woodrow kind of liked it that way. Quite suddenly, he had developed an appreciation for the alien world he’d discovered through a tinted windshield.

This world seemed beautiful. Almost like the Valley of Fire. Earth the color of his first love’s skin. A blue ocean of sky. Tumbleweeds dancing on the wind.

Razor-wire tumbleweeds. Yes. But their beauty was undeniable.

Woodrow admired the scene as much as anything he’d observed in an art gallery.

There was no sense soiling such magnificence.

He grabbed hold of the dead cracker’s overalls and dragged the corpse to the side of the gas station. His headache was nearly gone now. Nothing more than a dull whisper. And the sun was washed with a flat haze. The blinding brightness was gone.

In truth, Woodrow could not recall killing the cracker. But he knew he must have done it, for he still held the cracker’s tire iron in one hand.

Woodrow took a handkerchief from the dead cracker’s pocket. He wiped down the tire iron and tossed it into a pile of twisted auto parts heaped near the cracker’s Camaro.

Still not a car in sight. Woodrow popped the Camaro’s trunk, hoisted the redneck’s corpse, and deposited it in a nest of Eager Beaver magazines and empty Budweiser cans.

Woodrow urinated. Slammed the trunk.

He gassed up the Saturn. Then he purchased a Diet Coca-Cola from the machine next to the locked rest rooms. The can seemed very cold in his hand.

Woodrow popped the top and stared at the desert while he drank. The Coca-Cola was very cold, and the fingers of his left hand tightened around the can. The coldness lessened the pain of the dog bite on Woodrow’s palm.

He took his time, properly quenching his thirst.

Without question, he had never enjoyed a Coke quite as much as this one.