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“Lupe,” Jess says, “I want you to know, if it comes down to it, I’m giving you permission to eat me.”
“Jesus Christ, Jess, it’s been like twenty minutes.” Jess doesn’t respond. Sometimes, when Lupe gets ridiculous like this, it’s best to just ignore her until she wears herself out. And she has important information to impart, here.
“Not my brain, though. That’s how you get kuru.”
“What brain?” Lupe retorts, which Jess finds to be a little mean spirited. Sure, it had been her idea to head into town for a late-night beer run, and her truck, and her driving that had spun them off the road into a snow-filled ditch, but that was about all of the situation you could reasonably blame her for.
“I’m gonna go push again,” Lupe announces, which Jess is confident will prove to be just as useless as the other half dozen times they’ve tried, but she bends down to unlace her boots nonetheless.
They only have one decent pair of weatherworthy shoes between them because Lupe, who hates wearing boots, decided all she needed to sit in the truck while Jess ran into the bar and grabbed some drinks was a pair of loafers. Jess doesn’t bring it up, because she’s being a good sport about this whole thing, but if Lupe had worn her boots like Jess had told her to, they could just walk back the eight or so miles to her house.
Lupe pulls on Jess’s boots. Jess makes her take the time to lace them up, because if she doesn’t, she’ll get snow down her ankles and the boots will get wet and they’ll both be fucked.
She watches Lupe exit the truck and circle around to the back, wading through the snow. She struggles for a bit, pushing at the tailgate, but Jess doesn’t feel the truck so much as budge.
Lupe comes back, climbs into the cab and slams the door shut behind her.
“We’re stuck,” she announces miserably.
“Temporarily,” Jess adds, in a way she hopes comes across as reassuring. She offers, not for the first time, “Do you want me to walk and get help?”
“No,” Lupe blurts out immediately, looking genuinely distressed. She doesn’t want to be left alone in Jess’s stranded truck, in the pitch black, in a place she is wholly unfamiliar with.
“Okay,” Jess agrees. “Are your hands cold?” She has no gloves. Jess has no gloves, either, but she doesn’t need any because she’s tough.
Lupe scrubs her hands on her jeans.
“Some,” she admits, and holds them out expectantly. Jess takes them in her own, cups them other and blows hot airs into the space between Lupe’s palms. She rubs blood back into Lupe’s fingers, and then she makes Lupe cross her arms and keep her hands in her armpits.
“Did you hear the Cardinals catcher got drafted?” Jess asks her.
“I did, yeah,” Lupe laughs. She’d heard it that morning, when they read it in the paper together, like they always did, Lupe putting her finger on the headline to mark her place while she waited for Jess to catch up with her, so they could read the really good stories at the same time.
“Keep it coming,” Jess says, “If they draft enough of them, maybe we’ll get another season.”
“Fuck, Jess,” Lupe chastises, but she smiles just a little when she does. Jess knows, she’s watching for it very carefully. It wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but Jess isn’t a very nice person.
“You don’t think we’ll get another season?”
“I didn’t think we’d get a first season. Still pissed at Shaw for throwing the championship.”
“No you’re not.”
“No I’m not.”
Lupe can’t stop shivering, and Jess is starting to feel sick about it. She can’t keep the engine running indefinitely, has to save gas. But still. She feels like there’s something she could do. She thinks on it for a minute, and then leans diagonal past the steering wheel.
Jess reaches under the seat and pulls out a square tin of saltines. She lifts the lid, fishes out the wax paper bag of crackers inside. It’s mostly crumbs and pieces, but there’s a couple mostly-whole ones left. She passes them over to Lupe.
“Here. Or you can save them for later, with your Jessloaf.” Lupe rolls her eyes.
“You’re still not funny, you know.”
“I know. Lemme borrow your lighter.” Lupe takes it out of her pocket, passes it over.
Jess leans across the bench seat to take it, and to open up her glove compartment, from which she grabs one of her Farmer’s Almanacs. 1938. Not a bad year, all things considered.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she promises Lupe, and she takes the tin and the lighter and the book and hops out of the truck.
She climbs up the bank to the road, drops down to her hands and knees and digs past the snow to the gravel of the road. She takes a few large handfuls of the tiny rocks and dumps them into the tin, until there’s a layer at the bottom a few inches deep. Then she stands up, brushes off her pants, and slides back down the bank to her truck.
She climbs into the bed and sits down, cross legged, cold metal bleeding through her jeans. She sets the tin between her legs, starts tearing out pages of the almanac and crumpling them up and setting them in. The last one, she takes the lighter out and lights one of the corners, waits until it catches, and drops it on the other pages.
Jess keeps the fire going for a while, feeding it pages one at a time, until she’s about a third of the way through her almanac, and the tin is nice and hot. She lets the flame die down. She wafts the smoke away. If she suffocates Lupe to death, she’ll kill her.
She grabs the tin with the sleeves of her coat, hops out of the bed and knocks on the driver’s side door with her ass until Lupe leans over and lets her in.
She makes Lupe turn sideways so her feet are propped up on the bench seat between them, back resting against the door. Jess puts the hot tin in her lap, and then shrugs off her coat, tenting it over Lupe’s torso to keep the warm air close to her.
“Tell me when that gets cold again, yeah?”
Jess has never been very good at keeping track of time, but she figures it’s about half an hour later when Lupe nudges her foot against Jess’s thigh and says,
“How old were you when you had your first kiss?”
Jess smirks. She loves it when Lupe is nosy about her.
She knows the answer to the question right away, but she pretends to think about it for a minute first, because she knows, deep down, that she really ought to be more chagrined about her answer.
“Fourteen,” she says, finally, with more than a bit of good natured hemming and hawing.
“Was she pretty?” Lupe asks.
“Sure,” Jess agrees easily. “She was going steady with my brother, at the time.”
Lupe barks out a laugh.
“McCready, you fucking dog.”
Jess pretends to hang her head in shame.
“Yeah, well. I couldn’t have fucked it up too bad. They got married, six months later.”
Lupe keeps laughing.
Jess waits. She won’t ask Lupe outright, but she knows that if Lupe wants to answer for herself, in exchange, she will.
“Sixteen,” she says, after a beat or two. The corner of her mouth turns up, so Jess knows it’s a good story. Because of that, she goads Lupe on.
“And?”
“My hair got stuck in her earring,” Lupe admits. “Ripped out a big chunk.” Jess guffaws.
“Smooth,” she compliments. “Real smooth.”
“Fuck off,” Lupe grumbles, sinks lower into her coat. She’s waiting for Jess to dangle another story in front of her, so she’s got an excuse to tease it out, and so Jess starts running through options in her mind.
By midnight, by Lupe’s watch, the snow is coming down hard. They can’t sit in the truck with the engine running while it snows like this, Jess explains, because the snow will clog the tailpipe eventually and kill them with carbon dioxide. Or monoxide. Jess can’t remember which. There’s no point in going out periodically to scrape the tailpipe clean, either, because every time Jess opens the driver’s side door, she’d be ruining the work the heat would be doing.
So instead, Jess sits in the bed of the truck and scrapes snow and watches Lupe through the rear window, backlit in the dim running lights of her truck’s cabin.
Sometimes, Jess feels almost blinded by the intensity of how wonderful Lupe is. It feels greedy, to keep her to herself. Jess is plenty good at cutting things up into a million pieces, fighting for scraps. Growing up, it was all she ever did. She’s not so used to having them for her very own.
Lupe smiles at her, through the glass. They’ve got a game of tic-tac-toe going in the condensation, even if Jess would hold that the only reason Lupe’s winning is because her fingers are too numb to think strategically. Lupe draws her X.
Chalk another round up to Lupe, then. Jess tips her cap good manneredly, and then turns to check the exhaust again. But by the time she crawls down to the tailpipe, Lupe’s shut off the truck. When she looks back to Lupe, she’s got the door of the cab cracked open, leaning out just a little. She’s got cracker crumbs all down the front of her shirt.
“Come back inside, okay?”
Jess is making a very concentrated effort not to fall asleep, but that’s a very difficult thing to manage in a dark truck in the middle of a snowy night with Lupe’s feet on her lap and her doing that little nasally breathing she does when she’s right on the brink of slumber.
“You can go to sleep, you know,” Jess tells her, even if she’s already part way there. “I’ll keep watch.”
Lupe shakes her head a little and tries to push herself up a little and says, in a half-cracked voice,
“How long can people survive in the woods?” Jess thinks on that.
“Eighty, maybe ninety years. Especially if you’ve got a good food source.” She waggles her eyebrows, because she thinks she’s clever, and she rests her hand on Lupe’s ankle, tucks the denim tighter around her sock so less cool air sneaks up her pant leg.
“I mean,” Lupe tries again. “How long can people survive lost in the woods?”
“We’re not lost. I know exactly where we are” Jess says. “Lu, I promise. Go to sleep, and as soon as daylight breaks, I’ll go find some sticks and dig us out. I’ve done it plenty of times before.”
“Fine,” Lupe says. She rolls her other ankle around meaningfully on Jess’s lap. She wants that side tucked, too. “But next winter, we’re staying in Texas.”
“Like fuck we are,” Jess returns. “You seen the shit kind of weather they’ve got down there?”