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A rust-spattered silver car sat in the junkyard, the doors ripped off and the tires stripped away. Kobra slipped through the open doorway and grabbed the steering wheel. The ripped leather seat creaked under his weight. Through the jagged hole where the windshield had been, he could see Tommy Chow Mein talking to the mechanic several feet away. It was strange to see him outside of the store, like seeing a snowman in the spring.
“My brother would love a car like this,” Kobra said, patting the doorframe. “Sleek and shiny. Cruises right down the road.”
“I used to have a car like this,” Cherri Cola said.
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. First car I ever had in the desert. It was a total rustbucket, though. I had to sell it after the brakes went out.”
Kobra winced, then climbed out of the car. They walked through the junkyard. Dry shrubs and prickly pear cactus grew among the rusty vehicles, stripped car frames, old machinery, oil drums, tires, and scrap metal. The junk was so immersed in plants and weeds that it seemed to be part of the landscape. Parked in front of the garage was a shiny green car. When the mechanic opened the door, strands of sunlight rippled across the surface.
“The engine sounded a bit rusty at first,” she said. “Took me a couple of days, but I managed to fix it up.” She climbed inside the car and turned the key. The engine purred to life with a smooth, clean roar.
“Have you taken it out on the road?” Chow Mein said.
“Yeah, I’ve gone on a few trips,” she said. She turned off the engine and climbed back out. “Just to town and back. Ran pretty smoothly. The brakes were a bit loose, but I tightened them up.”
As they discussed payment, Kobra and Cherri walked along the fence. Kobra ran his fingers along the wire, morning dew sliding down his fingertips. Then they shook hands, and the mechanic handed him the keys. Cherri abruptly cut off the conversation and hurried up to the car, where Chow Mein was opening the door.
“Hey,” Cherri said. “Kid and I are going to run a couple of errands before we head back.”
“Where are you going?” Chow Mein said.
Cherri told him. Chow Mein looked at him skeptically.
“I know you don’t like it, Tom,” Cherri said. Kobra suspected this had been a long-running argument.
“It’s not about whether I like it,” Chow Mein said. “They’ve made their decision. If they want to fry their brains out, let them do it.”
“It’s not that simple,” Cherri said. “I know everyone else has written them off, but...” He broke off. “They’re just a few miles east. I’ll go over there and get it over with. Save myself the trip this month.”
Chow Mein gave him a significant look. “Watch yourself, Cherri,” he said. “And watch out for him, as well. I don’t want any calls from his brother tonight.”
“No, sir.”
While he climbed into the car, they headed back to the Trans Am. Kobra relaxed in his seat once they were back on the road. With Cherri in the passenger’s seat, the air felt lighter, as if he had rolled down the windows and released a suffocating cloud of smoke. During the drive to the garage, by some unwritten rule, Chow Mein had taken the front seat while Cherri sat in the back. Kobra’s attempts at conversation were met with polite but stiff replies that had made him turn to the window, longing to jump out of the car.
“Man, I don’t think I could do that again,” Kobra said. “Something about him is so--intimidating.”
Cherri laughed good-naturedly. “Dr. D was intimidating when you first met him, wasn’t he?” he said.
“Yeah, but Dr. D has this...sweetness, you know? Chow Mein’s just--” Kobra hesitated, not wanting to insult Cherri’s employer. “He’s a hard-ass.”
“He can be,” Cherri said. “Do you mind stopping at the gas station? There’s one about a mile up the road.”
Kobra stopped at the gas station, where he waited outside the door, the engine running. Five minutes later, Cherri jumped into the car with a plastic bag of goods. Kobra drove until they came to an old highway exit sign. On Cherri’s instruction, he pulled off the road and drove across the plain, the Trans Am bumbling over grasses and shrubs. The goods rattled and knocked inside the plastic bag.
After a few minutes, Kobra parked in front of a shack shadowed by a Joshua tree. The shack was made of crumbling wood, with an aluminum roof that glinted in the sunlight. The open doorway was covered with a torn blanket. A mirror hung from the tree, reflecting an image of the desert like a portrait. Birds perched on the roof, and Kobra couldn’t help but think of vultures circling their prey, waiting for it to expire in the heat.
“You want to stay here?” Cherri said. “It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”
Kobra shook his head. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ve seen them before.”
Kobra followed Cherri up to the shack. When he pushed the blanket aside, his stomach grew heavy with dread. In the dim light, they stepped over an old mattress, wadded-up sheets, plastic wrappers, hunks of rotting wood, unidentifiable debris, and a stack of papers giving off a sour smell. Kobra jumped when he saw a man asleep on the couch. Cherri shook his head as if to say It’s fine. Kobra watched him as they headed to the kitchen, but the man didn’t move. His skin was reddish and leathery like beef jerky.
Cherri dumped the contents of the bag onto the table: bottled water, a hard loaf of bread, packaged food, a copy of the Battery City Times. He opened the cupboards and began to stock the shelves. Kobra noticed that he made no effort to keep the noise down.
“You think they’re going to hear you?” Kobra said, leaning against the counter.
“They’re too out of it,” Cherri said. “Surfing really zones you out, Kid. I once zoned out for so long that they all thought I was dead.”
“No way!” Kobra said. “Really?”
“Yeah! Did I ever tell you that story?”
“No. Tell me.”
Cherri unwrapped the bread, then grabbed a knife from a drawer and started hacking it into slices. “All right,” he said. “I’d been surfing for three, four days--God, I can’t even remember. I was pretty out of it. At one point it started raining, and they said it woke the rest of them up, but I didn’t move. So they thought I died while I was surfing. That happens sometimes, you know...” He winced and opened a jar of peanut butter. “So they all stood around me in a circle and prayed for me. And then they picked a bunch of flowers and weeds and threw it on the mattress.”
Kobra laughed. “Thank God they didn’t bury you, man,” he said.
“Yeah, no kidding. Then they picked up the mattress and carried to the lake and pushed it off, like one of those Viking funerals. At this point, I’m starting to come out of it. So I started moving around, and I noticed that the mattress felt kind of tipsy, like I was floating on something. I opened my eyes and saw the lake, and I started freaking out, thrashing around, and the mattress tipped right over and dumped me in the lake.”
Kobra laughed out loud. His voice echoed in the silence.
“No, it gets better,” Cherri said, laughing with him. “I swam to the shore, and they all started screaming. I guess they thought I was a zombie. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, so I started running after them. I think I chased them around for twenty minutes before they started to figure out what was going on.”
Kobra laughed until his chest hurt. But underneath the humor was a dark twinge, of a group of addicts so zoned out that they held a funeral for a living man. Kobra quieted his laughter and helped Cherri stock the rest of the goods. When the bag was empty, Cherri arranged the newspaper on the table so the headline was facing upward: Mass Blackouts in Neon District Blamed on Electrical Fire.
“All right,” Cherri said. “Let’s go see what’s waiting for us outside.”
Kobra followed him out the back door. A greyish-brown lake stretched out in front of them, the surface flat and still as the mirror that hung from the tree. Distant hills and wispy clouds were reflected in the water. Kobra sucked in his breath at the sight of so much water. He wanted to splash it on his face, fill his water bottle, but the water was murky with mud. Probably crawling with bacteria, he thought.
As if he had read his mind, Cherri stooped down and collected some water in his cupped hands. Kobra was about to warn him when Cherri hurried over to the plastic chairs scattered in front of the lake. Every chair was empty but one, which held a girl in a rough cotton dress. She was sprawled out in the seat with her eyes closed. Whitish skin peeled from the soles of her feet. Her body was covered with a flaming pink burn, as if she had pressed a searing hot frying pan to her skin.
Cherri splashed the water onto the woman’s face. She shrieked and tumbled out of the chair, then scrambled to her feet, swiping the sand off her bare pink arms. When she saw Cherri, she let out a howl, exposing a mouthful of rotting teeth. Then she grabbed him by the collar and shoved him back toward the lake.
“Hey! Hey!” Kobra shouted. In a rush of heat and fury, he darted forward and wrenched off her hands. The woman flailed and struggled like a writhing maggot. Suddenly her fist flashed out and collided with his face. Kobra shouted and staggered back, hot pain shooting through his forehead. Something warm dripped from his nose.
Cherri shouted and whipped out his gun, pointing it at the girl. Clutching his nose, Kobra yanked his gun from its holster. The girl’s eyes darted back and forth. Then she whirled around, grabbed one of the chairs, and threw it against the shack. The chair hit the rotting wood with a clatter.
“Fuck you!” she screamed. “Fuck you, Cola!”
She stormed into the shack, letting the screen door slam shut behind her. From inside came the sounds of her yanking open cabinets. Cans and boxes hit the floor. A bag of rice exploded against the window, hitting the floor with a sound like rain. Kobra looked down at his gun and realized his hands were shaking.
“Jesus Christ,” Cherri said. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
He led Kobra away with the efficiency of a soldier. Kobra jumped into the car and slammed on the gas pedal, ignoring the blood dripping onto his collar. Shouts and crashes erupted inside the shack. As he backed away, he noticed the Trans Am reflected in the mirror: growing smaller and smaller until it was the size of a beetle, then speeding off down the highway, leaving black tire streaks on the pavement.
---
When Cherri and Kobra entered the shop, they were greeted by the sound of arguing at the desk. Chow Mein fell silent and looked up. A girl in a red jacket stood in front of the desk, carrying a box of old bottles. They clinked and clanked like wind chimes when she moved.
“I see that it didn’t go well,” Chow Mein said, noticing Kobra’s bloody nose.
“Yeah, I got punched out by a wavehead,” Kobra said.
“I suppose I’ll be getting a call about this tonight,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Cherri said. “It’s my fault. I’ll take responsibility.”
He grabbed a set of keys from Chow Mein, then led Kobra into one of the motel rooms. After determining that the nose wasn’t broken, Cherri brought him a rag and a bottle of water. Kobra stood in front of the bathroom mirror and wiped the dried blood from his face.
“Kid, I’m so sorry,” Cherri said for the hundredth time when Kobra walked out of the bathroom. “I can’t believe I dragged you into this.”
“Don’t worry about it, man,” Kobra said. “I don’t think she knew what she was doing. She’s probably as zoned out as the guys that pushed you in the lake.”
“She’s the daughter of one of my old friends,” Cherri said. “I’ve no idea where her mother is. I haven’t seen her in months. Sometimes they wander out into the desert and get lost.”
“Jesus,” Kobra said. He sat down beside him on the bed. “You know, I respect what you’re doing, but--do any of them really pay attention? It looks like their brains are already half-fried.”
Cherri rubbed his face with his hands. “I’ve gotta give them a chance,” he said. “I know they probably won’t take it, but--at least they’ve got a chance. Just enough to make it through another week.”
Kobra nodded. He took a drink from the bottle that Cherri had given him, then rolled the bottle between his hands. The plastic glinted in the sunlight.
“I know you and the guys don’t like Tom,” Cherri said. He laughed a little. “It’s fine. Most people don’t, I think. But he gave me a job when no one else would. Back when I was a recovering wavehead. I’d been clean for a week, and I said, just give me a week, man. Just help me get through the rest of the month, and I’ll get out of here. And he did it. He didn’t have to do it, but he gave me a job. And now I’ve been here for seven years.”
“Oh yeah?” Kobra said. “I never thought he took risks with anybody.”
“He’s a good man,” Cherri said. “I know he’s a little rough sometimes, but--he saved my life out here. I’m never going to forget that.”
Kobra nodded again, and they fell into silence. Cherri clasped his hands together. Sunlight shone through the curtains, making a screened pattern on the carpet. Cherri bowed his head, and his mind drifted back to the mattress, the hot summer days, the white sun blazing in the sky...
At first an ache traveled down his body, like he had burned himself on the stove. The sun baked a tight layer into his skin that throbbed whenever he moved. As the sun rose in the sky, heat beat down upon him like a furnace. Sweat dripped down his body and glued his clothes to his skin. Fuchsia, the designated water girl of the day, dribbled water into his mouth. It moistened his parched tongue and ran down his throat like water creeping along the earth. But his body sizzled and burned like bacon, laid out on the hard springy mattress.
The burn spread across his body. Pain seeped through the layers of flesh, piercing deep into his nerves. His skin dried and tightened like a grape shriveling into a raisin; his greasy hair dried into straw. As the pain increased, a pinpoint of white light formed inside his vision. The light grew larger and larger, consuming everything, searing his nerves like flames until it was huge, bigger than the sun, bigger than the world, a shuddering pain that blotted out everything but the whiteness. His body was rigid as a corpse, bathed in the hot radiation.
The pain became so overwhelming that it was suddenly no more. He controlled it, condensed it, kept it trapped inside himself like a locked chest. It slid away from him as he slipped out of his body like a husk, floating freely in the whiteness. He was elevated. He was holy. He hovered in the space with no thoughts, no feelings, nothing but numbing bliss. Time had no meaning; he was suspended in the light. All he felt was his soul growing lighter and lighter, as if it were dissolving into bubbles, transcending into something higher, something indescribable...
Water splashed his face. The burns on his face seared with pain. Cherri jumped off the mattress, jerked back to reality like a fish caught on a fishhook. His skin felt tight as latex, every movement throbbing as if his skin were tearing. His clothes had hardened with dried sweat. He blindly staggered to his feet, seeing Fuchsia in front of him. A sudden rage boiled inside him, a fiery rawness from being pulled away too soon.
“Come on,” she said. “You gotta get inside. Word is that there’s a Drac squad on the loose.”
Cherri stumbled inside, cursing Fuchsia with every step. A radio murmured on the table. The rest of the waveheads were already inside, scattered across the couch and the floor, staring at him with empty eyes.
Kobra reached out and patted his back. Cherri suddenly looked up, half-expecting a throb of pain. But he hadn’t gotten high off the waves in years. Cherri smiled faintly at him, then patted his back in return. The sunlight glowed through the curtains, surrounding the shop and beating down on the sand, an all-consuming spirit.