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The tan and grey interior of Marty’s ‘95 Chevy Caprice has always tasted like fresh pencil shavings with the softest undertone of chocolate milkshake. Has since day one, but it’s a good combination. Palpable. Pleasant. And Marty would drive. Always drove, and there weren’t no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Marty’d drive, jaw set, lips pursed, and deep in thought while his squinting, summer blue eyes ate up miles of sun baked blacktop, and hard packed, dust whipped, back road.
This was fine by Rust who was allowed to turn over thoughts in his head like smooth-worn familiar stones, reviewing the clues they had accumulated- where flap the tatters of the King – and simultaneously relieved him of the burden of concentrating on the road when his visions saw fit to strike him. Episodes. Incidents. Instances. Fits. Their names didn’t matter, what mattered was that he was granted the luxury to let them ebb and flow, run their course without alarm like- along the shore the cloud waves break – yes, waves crashing upon a shore.
In Carcosa.
Lost Carcosa.
Dora’s journal was laid out flat in his lap, he turned the pages again. Then again. Black stars danced in the margins like hopping fleas.
Today the chevy’s air conditioner is broken, and Marty was quick to cut in with a sullen “Goddamn compressor’s shit the bed. Go on and crank your window down.” the moment Rust saw fit to slide into the passenger seat. Their jackets were left sprawled in the back seat like a secret crime scene all their own, ties were loosened and the Louisiana air crawled in between them hot and heavy like a stove boiled cotton sheet. Sunlight kissed kicked up dust and brought in that old book smell, that lurid cesspool color of cicada song. It gives him a headache inside of twenty minutes. He thought that he’d shed Alaska’s pine-cold and acclimated to southern bake some years ago, but the body was always quick to remember what the mind chose to forget.
Marty sighed with all the the nostril expulsitory force of a keyed up, snorting bull. “Can’t believe this piece of shit bullshit. I’m gettin’ it fixed today.”
“Mmmhm.” And this fit the mold for most of Rust’s replies to idle chatter these days, it was easier than saying precisely what he knew Marty didn’t want to hear.
Heat slick air streams in through the ink stained pages of his ledger and lifts up the feathered waves of his honey-wheat hair while he scribbles out his musings. His sticks and spirals matching hers, as though the act of tracing them could divine their hidden secrets. Sigils laid out in repeat, their replication giving power to the beast and marking it for summoning. And strange moons circle through the skies. One bony fingered hand held the edges of the fluttering paper down while the other wrote. A pen cap sat stiffly between his gnawing teeth, giving his mouth something to do, and tying him over til the moment of that next cigarette. An archaic way to mark the crawling passage of time.
They pass big Avery Oaks lining cool purple-mint marshes, the branches strung up with Spanish moss, thick as dusted cobwebs. As though someone had left them forgotten and decaying in a boarded up attic for a long, long time. If he looked hard enough, he could almost see heavy Alaskan icicles in their place weighing the branches down. Tamarack. Pine. Black spruce, draped heavy with ice in temperatures so cold the moisture froze, shimmered, then glittered in the very air. He wouldn’t taste pencil wood or pine smell then, only the graphite, silver, powdery, and rolling frost on his tongue.
Somewhere between one crumbled out gas station and the next, Marty clicks the radio on. Something rolling, splashes of color. Hendrix. Voodoo Child. Humming out of the speakers and sending hot reds and oranges into his mouth. Making him remember the heat. Making it hard to concentrate. Marty taps his thumbs in a beaten tattoo against the baked bread leather of the steering wheel and Rust thinks about uttered words on cars as vessels for silent reflection.
Above ground graves, spread out white and pretty like scattered shoe boxes, wind by them as they near the coast. The feet all gone from them, the old shoes didn’t fit anymore. Rust thumbed his upper lip, smoothing away the beads of sweat that had accumulated there. He held his fingers close to his mouth, the tip of one thumb sliding in to rest delicately between the gate of his teeth. He became aware of sweat spreading damp over his forehead, filling the hollows of his eyes and the dip at his lower back. He ran a finger idly beneath his collar, pulling his tie loose another inch and sending the knot askew.
A grassy field of wetland sprawled out from the road on Marty’s side, reaching for the blue salt of the Gulf. The water shimmered in scattering bright beads, the sun hitting it just right, and all of a sudden that light was spreading hot over the marshland, sending up great plumes of yellow-pink lemonade fire. He could have almost blinked it away, letting it play itself out in the kaleidoscopic vision of his semi-frequent drug touched daydreams, but then he sees her, the girl in the flowered overalls standing silhouetted by the flames, the little white jumper the exact same. (Do you believe in ghosts?) He hadn’t been sure if she’d been real the first time, and now he was sure she wasn’t. Couldn’t be. Wasn’t real even as the grapefruit fire licked hot over her little pristine set of overalls, burning them to brown sugar. Her flaxen hair catching in the heat wind and crisping black. Wasn’t real when the fire crawled up her pale arms, engulfing the slightly waving hand in a burst of sandalwood solar flare.
Nauseated, he slammed his eyes shut and dragged air through his nose, well greased routine for most instances of his narco affliction coming back to touch him. In and out. And again. The radio was a siren’s wail of black static. He jerked his head towards the passenger window and stayed that way for several moments, thinking he could smell the acrid salt, that burning saltines smell of torched marshland. Burning hair, baked pork stinking chocolate brown under his eyelids. He chanced cracking his eyelids open and immediately fixated upon the scrolling yellow line of the median, stretching out before them like a sun basking snake, endless, an ouroboros of cyclic destruction. Yellow. He closed his eyes again and pulled his lips flat over the line of his teeth, trying to dismiss the rotten feeling in the pit of his gut that corroded the lining of his stomach away like rust. Rust.
“Rust?”
Rust kept his eyes sealed tightly shut and nodded with the slow, plodding, up and down movements of a dashboard bobblehead to show that he was listening.
“You fuckin’ car sick or somethin’?” Marty asked in that irritated way of his when he didn’t want to deal with something, but did so anyway out of some convoluted sense of moral obligation.
Yeah. Yeah he was. More or less. “…Pull over Marty.”
“Are you gonna puke? Don’t you dare fuckin’ puke in this car. I swear to Christ, Rust-”
“Fuck man. Pull over!”
Rust stumbled out into the burning bright and was curling in on himself with all the grace of a fried earthworm until he was retching hot green Robitussin and the smooth beige of too strong coffee, mixing together into that sick cicada color and soaking deep into the parched Earth. When it stopped he blinked away sweat and tears that were burning pepper peach into his eyes, wiping it away with the back of a shaky, sweat-slick hand. The midday sun was like a hand burning into the back of his neck, and it took him ten beats too long to realize that there was a hand there. Marty. Grip too light and saying things to him.
“You’re probably de-high-drated or some shit. Heat-stroke maybe.” Marty says knowingly, in his best ’my wife is a nurse alright? I know this shit’ voice.
The hand disappears for a moment, then returns feeling almost cool compared to the sun and a plastic thermos full to the brim of water is being waved in Rust’s face. Marty sits back on his haunches looking up and down the empty coastal road. “You okay?”
“Yeah. “ Rust says eventually in between cold blue gulps of water. “Shit, yeah. M'alright.” He holds the half empty thermos against his forehead for a minute.
“You want some hot tomales? There’s a stand few miles down the road by the water.” Marty asks conversationally, something apologetic and fatherly in his tone, as though Rust hadn’t just emptied his guts out all over the overgrown wilderness. Gentle, as though he were a child to be coddled until he forgot about whatever ailed him. Rust thought about the collection of spicy tamale ingredients rolling around in the leftover emptiness of his stomach and fought the urge to dry heave. Paprika. Cayenne. Black pepper. He’d never quite been able to handle spicy food since those four blackout years, crawling over his life like a solar eclipse. Wore his stomach lining down to tissue paper they’d said. Too much acetaminophen in the cough syrup. The liver killer. It was all just too green. Hot, sick green burning a hole right through him.
He swallowed air. “You fucking serious with that shit?”
“Well, Yeah. I’m fixin’ to get me some. You can eat whatever the fuck you want. I think they have a fruit stand. Sweet Tea. Cold shit. Whatever you think is worthy of that thousand-yard stare of yours. But I want some hot fuckin’ tomales.”
They go when Rust is slumped back into the car seat like a trashed marionette, tie finally undone, pulled free and coiled loose at his dust shrouded shoes like a roadkill rattlesnake. The cold water bottle sits planted between his spread legs, sending soothing Alaska into the meat of his thighs while the hot Earth rumbled out beneath them.
He closed his eyes again.
~=+=+=+=~
Marty loads up his hot tomales with shredded yellow and white cheddar cheese. Coleslaw was slopped thick on the side and peppered with black sesame seeds. They looked a little like ants. But they could have been black stars. He bought Rust a sweet tea packed stiff with ice cubes and a pint of fresh picked strawberries towering in their small green carton. Marty waved away his money with a flapping hand and stiff shake of his head.
“You can buy tomorrow if you want.” Marty says, shoveling big, cheesy bites of red and yellow into his mouth. Yellow was ash and aluminum, and red looked too much like something else. Rust looked away. The ocean breeze was cooling. Fresh like that earth smell in a stone cellar. It felt good.
“Thanks Marty.”
The strawberries tasted sweet like the wallpaper of the Hart’s kitchen. The red wasn’t as bad as it should have been. No copper like new pennies, just candied sweetness. They tasted white, like the flesh was on the inside, thick with spring flowers and safeguarding the ringing laughter of little girls.