The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  Walking off the plane in Los Cabos, Alice imagined her mother hadn’t died, and that she was descending onto the tarmac right behind her. She’d whip on a pair of oversize prescription tortoiseshell sunglasses and sigh along with Alice at the feeling of the still-hot early-evening air. She’d be grateful, just like her daughter, for the pleasure of simply being warm. The land was brown, the sky dense blues, and all around were scrubby mountains looking like enormous piles of gravel sprouting clumps of scattered green. Standing still to remove her sweater, Alice noticed the sun. It hovered on the far-off horizon—a magnificent fat lady gazing on the Pacific, wholly consumed with whether or not she felt like taking a dip. As she made her way into the little airport, abuzz with whirring fans, Alice couldn’t help the irrational hope that Gus would show up behind the Plexiglas partition, waving a little sign: Senorita Green. She couldn’t keep up the fantasy, though, because if he were coming he would have been waiting. Punctuality was, surprisingly, one of his better qualities. He would have been front and center with a native tan, unembarrassed about waving.

  She was nearly certain, actually, that Cady would never have told him about their conversation. Her presence would be a surprise to him and therefore more effective. Alice began to feel that much more alone, as she was stopped at the random security checkpoint by a plump girl with light eyes who fingered a pair of underwear and spoke in rapid Spanish to her coworker before breaking up into laughter. When Alice finally asked what was so funny, the girl shifted her weight and stopped smiling. She zipped up the suitcase and Alice was free to go, free to think about how her mother would have made a joke, maybe asked to see their underwear. Charlotte traveled so often that she must have acquired an indefinable savvy that would have prevented her from being stopped in the first place. Gus would not have been stopped either, or, actually, of course he would have, because those girls would have wanted to see as much of him as they could.

  The girl with the light eyes continued to stare at her. And though she told herself she was trying, Alice couldn’t seem to look away. For a moment she thought she was having an adverse reaction to the heat or maybe the alcohol on the airplane, as the cacophony of the airport—the sunburns and pale, bloated skin, the greetings and good-byes and smells of crumpled money—everything went slow, silent. The girl’s light eyes shone like sunshine on a mirror, and the only place Alice could look was down.

  Who knows why she noticed the scrap of paper or why, for that matter, she decided to pick it up, but Alice touched her fingers to the cool tile floor. In old-typewriter font it said: palmas arriba, ojos abiertos, respirando normal. She translated for herself as best she could, reaching back to the recesses of her junior high school education. Palms up, eyes open, breathe normally. She decided it must have been from an exercise or health manual and stuffed it in her pocket, walking on. But she continued to think of the paper at her side, the girl’s light-eyed glare. It took discipline not to look back and check if those eyes could possibly have been that Pernod green.

  She was faced with walls of men. The only way to exit the airport was through a sea of them. They were hawking rides and hotels and tours and Alice felt irrationally arrogant as she strode through, convincing herself that hers was a truer and higher purpose than tourism. She made her way to the rental-car counter and agreed to rent a compact car, which was less of a car and more of a red aluminum box with wheels. As the day’s heat slightly diminished, there was a definite breeze as Alice drove away. Billboards for Sol and Tecate and promises of condominium paradises stood boldly in reds, oranges, bright yellows, and brighter than the paint were the crimson berries blooming wildly. The signs might have been unfamiliar but the sky issued no singularity. She could have been in Santa Fe, Miami, or Peru; she could have been in Scottsdale. It was impossible to imagine what lay beyond the airport’s vicinity and Alice looked for shapes in the far-off mountain ridge. She thought of the Matterhorn’s cocky thrust, the jagged Rockies and her favorite Tetons, with the man in the mountains, his profile sharp against the sky. Here in Baja the heights weren’t impressive, but she raised her eyes as far as the land rose; heights had, for some reason, always made her brave.

  And bravery was needed, for as it happened, she was not warned sufficiently of how the road down the Baja peninsula was ragged with dropoffs and hosted a seemingly ongoing drag race. The horror of speed was on full display. People drove fast. They drove drunk and fast and in big fat trucks with all kinds of people—children for sure—bouncing in the backs of pickups. Cars drove toward one another from the opposite direction on one thin single lane. Blind with momentum, drivers passed without looking, and there was nothing to do but pray. The highway, to Alice, seemed sufficient explanation for Catholicism’s great popularity in Mexico. At this velocity, on this road, faith in a greater beyond seemed absolutely crucial. Besides Bali—where Alice had visited Gus during college and where there were no lanes or any apparent rules as to how many vehicles could drive side by side—this was definitely the worst driving she’d ever seen.

  But it was thrilling, too. Though thrilling was not the right word. Thrilling was not particular enough for how the land was parched beige, and just when she was nearly lulled by its uniformity—out of nowhere, a shock of azure ocean and tall palms stunned her to the spine as she coasted a bend. Alice tried to ignore the little crosses and Holy Virgins lining the highway in uneven stakes, pointing out just how many people had met their deaths right there. There was no radio in the car and there was nothing to distract from the sheer drama of the land. And it was getting darker. Swatches of gray invaded the sky until trees became mere shadows and the mountains blended together. A later flight was the only one she could get on such short notice, and she thought she’d get a room at an inn once she arrived in town. She would sleep and find Cady tomorrow. She was proud of her foresight, pathetically proud to have left as quickly as she had. The highway continued and Alice was going forward, on the lookout for cars. She was so attuned to the distance that at first she didn’t even notice what was right in front of her: a plywood trailer being dragged along the highway containing what Alice counted as five ostriches grooving in the wind. Because the plywood came up only to their necks, when they darted from high to low, they looked like performers of that old parlor trick wherein someone stands behind a couch and pretends to descend stairs, creating the illusion by simply crouching down. They were so close Alice could see their long-lashed showgirl eyes alert, and the fine white hairs on their miniature heads. “I wonder what …” Alice began to say, but the truck slowed down and she knew she had to pass, inserting the rental in front of the ostriches and behind a huge open semi, the interior of which, Alice saw, was full of gallivanting monkeys. They swung from the ceiling—jumping and landing on the backs of strange-looking horned animals that Alice decided were billy goats. She watched in awed confusion until she had no choice but to pass them too. This was a road, according to Cady toward a sparsely populated town between the desert and the sea, but sure enough the side of the truck was pastel-painted in a circus advertisement. She was almost laughing when she came around a whip-sharp pass and she saw a herd of cattle, dense and pale against the blackening sky. Alice was in a rare positive frame of mind at a time when frame of mind didn’t happen to matter. There was no point in swerving—there was nowhere to go—and Alice simply screamed before slamming on the brakes. As her head hit the dashboard in a surge of pain, the top of the car buckled as if something had fallen from the sky, and she briefly thought something had fallen, some vulture or meteor. She did not know exactly what was bleeding but she knew it was her own blood and that it was everywhere—on her white T-shirt, on her jeans, on her unpainted toenails. She saw white flashes before her eyes and was overcome with her heartbeat, her fast and shallow breath. She heard nothing for a moment and then the noise was overwhelming. Cows were baying and moaning and the sound swelled and became so deafening that she barely could concentrate long enough to realize that she should get out of the car.


  Outside the air was cool and there were no other cars driving by. Her rental was a pug-nosed mess of red and silver with the roof dipping low. I am insured, she thought gratefully. / am the kind of person who chooses to pay the highest level of insurance. There is something to being that person right now.

  Alice grabbed her one bag and ushered herself onto a rock far enough away, and the cows seemed to follow. She pressed a sweater to her head, grateful for the gentle pressure, as the cows stood like a refugee family together all around her. As the cows kept up their noise level and swung their tails, Alice checked her body for damage, and when she found none she felt tears flowing easily and mixing with her sweat. Breath was more difficult to come by. Her head was pounding, her hair was caked with blood, but as she searched her bag for aspirin, the blood tapered off. After swallowing some aspirin and codeine without water, she touched her fingers to her forehead, afraid of her own face. While there was tenderness, and while her eyes were wet and hazy, and she hadn’t stopped coughing since swallowing the pills, she realized that she had been spared. Her fingers tingled with exalted relief, and, flush with luck, Alice changed right there among cacti and cows, used her clothes to wipe herself off, and left her bloody garments in the dust.

  The cow that Alice hit was the color of tea biscuits, and the animal lay on her side, breathing hard and with great difficulty. She was larger and paler than the others were, or maybe it only seemed that way because of her important role in the moment. She, Alice realized, was what had landed on top of the car; this cow, lying heavy on the highway, with huge ballooning udders, had been struck buoyant and had flown right up and over. Alice watched, hypnotized by her glistening flank and blood-encrusted belly, as the cow struggled for final breaths. There was violent shuddering, and Alice wanted to back away, but somehow couldn’t bring herself to move. She thought, weirdly enough, of cow farmers, of the bizarre intimacy that must develop between the farmer and the cow. She wondered how she would have behaved if Gus were beside her. Would she be telling him about the farmers and would he be laughing as they lifted the cow off to the side of the highway? Would she be consoling Gus or would she be blaming him or would this never even have happened?

  It had been quiet for so long that she’d forgotten that a car could come speeding along at any moment. She briefly forgot she was in Mexico. Everything was smeared at the edges. Alice found herself returning to her sullied clothes, and, with the illicit sensation that she was violating a stranger, she rifled through her pants’ pockets and extracted the scrap of meaningless paper.

  Palmas arriba, ojos abiertos, respirando normal.

  No trace of blood anywhere.

  Alice looked up at the stars. The air carried the scent of burned hair and cow shit, which rose from the animal like fetid spirits taking leave of the body. The cow was dead but the others were still loud and boisterous from their stance on the side of the road, expressing through sonorous moaning their big-eyed ennui. Alice realized, for the first time, that they might hurt her. She touched the dead cow’s leg, which was wet and hot, much rougher than a horse’s. Then she slowly backed up and started walking away.

  A horn blasted suddenly with lights flashing and Alice found that the codeine was indisputably in effect, for she was surprisingly calm—her head merely thrumming at a steadily declining rate. She tried to flag the truck down, but it merely steered clear of the cow and sped by, doing eighty at the very least. “August,” she said pointlessly surveying the desolation that was the dark sky, dead cow, and the others still mooing, moving up into the hills. There was a substantial moon, a scattering of stars, and other than that bit of lunar light, there was nothing visible for miles. Her father had tried to explain the desert to her when she was very young. He’d said it was like being out at sea, surrounded by nothing but water. Here, as there was both desert and sea, the land blended into the ocean as a seamless spatial expanse. There was not much going for her beyond the fact that she was alive, and she would be riding that high for a very long time. She was alive and walking. The road was as desolate as snow.

  A rush of cars. Cars where there were no cars—sudden and inexplicable traffic. Alice began yelling, jumping up and down as best she could, and five passed by before she had the late good sense to try starting the rental car. She ducked low to fit under the collapsed roof, and after a few rounds of gunning the engine for a minute or so, the wreck was inexplicably running. With an attempt to shake her nerves, she pressed down on the gas and felt, with increasing speed, her life flying away. Alice had a flash of her essential self being left there on the highway, a sleepy bovine phantom of a woman, taking a long look around. A chimera perhaps, but there they were: two ghosts, Alice and the cow, stuck in the middle of the road. Their auras issued grassy pastures, glasses of whole milk. They were left for dead but would invisibly flag down cars forever, evoking no more than specks in the distance through a couple of rearview mirrors.

  There was nothing in either direction. She felt the precise reason why she’d stayed so close to her careful father and the familiar house for all those years Gus had been elsewhere. It was the letting go she feared—the careening and falling off from some illusive center. As she drove she felt the need to hold tightly to the wheel as if the car might—if she wasn’t careful—drive out from under her.

  After miles of dark and twisting roads, of holding breath down hills, and after being distracted by glints of whitecaps in the distant ocean, the sight of a gas station was difficult to be- lieve. Clamorous music issued from a small radio; it sounded like a speed-enhanced polka. There was an attendant and a mechanic—two young men with glossy coifs with no real foreheads to speak of (brothers, she assumed), who begrudgingly opened her dented hood and poked around inside. They were neutral enough when she tried to employ her negligible classroom Spanish, but after a few moments she began to wonder if these strangers would turn menacing, if they would take her passport and money and then rape her before leaving her for dead, just like the cow on the highway. It happened. It happened all the time in every country on the planet, so why shouldn’t it happen tonight? People tore each other’s organs out. People shot each other in the face.

  Alice thought about the cow, and how, before morning, cars and trucks would bump over her lifeless body, cursing the inconvenience. Just when she was considering walking away, perhaps even hitching a ride, Alice noticed, on the other side of the building, two loitering girls—girls whose lipstick was as red and as slick as the original varnish of this rental car. That there were women here made the scene a little less threatening, but not by much. They were in tight-fitting skirts and cleavage-baring tops that stopped above their midriffs. The taller one smoked and the shorter one watched Alice, smiling a hateful smile. It was clear they were waiting for their men, but they also looked as if waiting were something other people did, and they instead were encouraged to pose like rare tropical birds. The taller one indicated Alice with her cigarette while whispering to her friend; they both laughed until Alice looked away. She felt as if this were a seventh-grade outing or a day at her mother’s best friend’s house. One summer Susan (no doubt in some attempt to quit drinking) held some kind of women-and-their-daughters spiritual retreat at her house in Connecticut, where a pair of girls whom Alice had seen at previous Susan events had apparently had just about all the enlightenment they could take. Every now and then she could recall those exact glares. The secret world of mean girls—it must be universal. It must be programmed in the genes—an intimidation technique that never failed. Alice often felt that if she could just tap into this secret world of indisputable female command, everything would be so much simpler and clearer. Kindness never meant as much when such power was close by; this feminine sway with a touch of cruelly was more elusive and voluptuous and more utterly distracting than a perfect pair of breasts.

  Alice tried to picture what her mother would do in this situation. She’d try to communicate; she’d do anything she could to charm. Alice wished Cha
rlotte were here because Alice … she was no charmer. She had nothing whatsoever to say. She tried to be inconspicuous as the shorter woman crossed her path, veering in the direction of the mechanic. Alice took comfort in the intimacy between them—a kiss on the cheek, a pat on the ass, the offhand way her long painted nails touched his sweaty brow. With affection so close by, she somehow felt safer.

  After they’d properly fleeced her, communicating clearly just how many hundreds of pesos she was to hand over in exchange for the knowledge that this wreck would more than likely get her as far as Santa Lucia, Alice returned to the driver’s seat and—white knuckles gripping the wheel—gunned on down the highway.

  The car bumped and popped along a rocky dirt road. Her head was pounding and all she knew was that she couldn’t drive another minute. She parked among scrub brush, shedding her shoes in the cool sand, and she could hear the ocean long before she saw it. It sounded like screaming, like a crowd going wild. And it looked like the end of the earth. The waves were black and silver and rumbled with the shore. Unlike her home, where the sea was restrained and patient as an old pair of hands, this water was flashy and unrelenting—not allowing for the natural impulse to admire any other surroundings. If you stepped in there was no wading; that seemed perfectly clear. These waves were a date you did not let out of your sight—not unless you were prepared to let her go.

  No one would be handing her a blanket. No one but Alice would be seeing that she made good time, that she quit checking up on the sky as if she couldn’t quite believe it was the very same one she’d always known. The sky was one thing. The sea was another—everything paled in contrast to this wild face of the ocean. The waves must have been ten feet overhead and breaking right on shore. Alice knew that if Gus were here he would have to create more chaos; he would not, even for a minute, be able to simply observe.