by S. A. Hunt
Keys were in the Blazer’s visor. He pushed them into his pocket.
Inside the trailer, it was sweltering, even though Marina was going around opening all the windows. Sweat already rolled down his back and collected on his upper lip. Air conditioner hadn’t been on all day. The light in the stove hood was on, throwing a soft glow over the oven, and that dug at his mind as wasteful, but he wordlessly turned it off. He wandered from room to room, opening windows and turning off lights. The night-light in the bathroom was plugged in. He unplugged it. Still enough daylight to see. The fan in the bedroom window was going, a rattletrap piece of shit sucking hot air out of the backyard. He turned it off. A Glade plug-in in the bedroom smelled cloyingly like birthday cake. He unplugged it and, after resisting the urge to throw it out the window, dropped it in the wastebasket in the bathroom. The DVD player under their bedroom TV flashed 12:00. He unplugged it too, and decided to unplug the TV as well.
So much shit in this house sucking up power for no good reason, plugged in and unused.
This made him think of the girls. They were hiding at the mall because of the power bill, he knew. He usually let them hide. But he was so pissed about being laid off when he came home—a bright, hot, shaking, petulant anger—that by the time he’d doubled back and walked around the mall for a while, it had sublimated, burned itself out into a low simmer, the kind of dewy born-again clarity you have when you climb out of a sweat lodge. It was a pretty day. Lots of pretty girls out. How can you stay mad with the wind in your face and the Queen between your knees?
He found the power bill slipped into a stack of junk mail on the kitchen table. Marina stood at the sink drinking a glass of water. Carly sat on the couch, watching some inane bullshit on TV. $179.45. Last month, it was $152.72. What the hell are we using so much power on? He tried to remember how often they used the air conditioner the previous month.
“It’s that security light outside, love,” said Marina, over her shoulder. She hugged herself with one arm, talking into her glass as the rim rested against her lower lip. “It’s old as Jesus himself and runs all day and night.” Santi leaned over the table to peer through the blinds into the front yard. Mounted on a power pole by the fence was a stark blue lamp that hummed and shimmered venomously. It was there when they moved into the trailer twelve years before.
“That can’t be it,” he said, letting the power bill plop onto the table. “It’s just one light. Besides, ain’t that a city light? How are we paying for it?”
“It’s on our property, baby.”
He wanted to turn the TV off, but he knew it was one of the few things that kept Carly from wandering the streets like a cat in heat, and the last thing he needed was a litter of kittens.
The crap that his daughter watched astounded him with its inanity. Shows about people that compulsively ate paint and collected their toenails in jars. Wop teenagers in New Jersey with bleached hair and Cheeto-orange tans. Fat white trash from the Midwest. A family of midgets. He snorted laughter, an airless scoff. It’s all so stupid. A slow flash of adrenaline rippled across his chest. Marina finished off the water and washed the glass out in the sink, and put it in the dish drain to dry.
When she turned around, Santiago was standing directly behind her. She twitched but said nothing. “I love you,” he said, his big hands sliding into place over the knobs of her shoulders.
A subdued, vulnerable affection came into her eyes. “I love you too, Santi.”
His Kegel muscles twitched. He was getting an erection. He could feel the blood pooling in his penis, hardening it like an overinflated tire, tightening the crotch of his Wranglers. “We’ll get through this,” he said reassuringly. His smile was tight, and it didn’t reach his eyes. “We always do.”
“Yes,” said Marina. She was relaxing.
“My love.”
“… Yes?”
“You weren’t at the mall to buy bikinis, were you?”
Scccrrrrrrrratch. Fingernail on a coffin lid.
“No, Santi.” Marina looked down at his chest. “We weren’t. I’m—”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“I’m sorry.” The corners of her mouth drew down deeply. “I knew you would be mad at me when you saw the power bill, and I didn’t want to be home for that.”
“I don’t care,” he told her. “I don’t care you were at the mall.”
She gazed up at him, confused.
“I know why you were there. I don’t care. I’ve always known where you were going. It’s human nature to run away from pain. Can’t blame you for that. Part that pisses me off is that you lied about it.”
“I wanted—” She glanced away, breaking eye contact. “Well, I wanted to—”
“You wanted to what?”
“I was afraid you would—”
Santiago glanced over at Carly. Her eyes were glued to the TV screen. She was completely oblivious.
Turning back to his wife, his hands glided softly up the slopes of her shoulders to cup the hinge of her delicate jawbone. The lobes of her ears rested on his index fingers. Sccrrrrrrratch.He kissed her, a reaching, gulping kiss. His dick was a hot, pounding iron bar.
To his mild surprise, her hands found their way to his hips, and she kissed him back. His tongue flicked across the back of her teeth. He pulled away, the echo of her soft, pillowy lips still on his. He could smell the powdery candy-like scent of her foundation, and the bacon-grease feel of her lipstick lingered on his mouth.
“Afraid I would what?” he asked.
“… Afraid you would hurt me.”
“Amor, if I wanted to hurt you, I would hurt you any old time. I don’t need a crazy power bill to do that.” His thumbs caressed the blade of her jaw and settled across her trachea, thumbtips against each other. He squeezed gently and the affectionate look in Marina’s eyes immediately fled, replaced by mild alarm.
“Santi?” she asked, but it was the last word she could manage as his hands tightened around her throat.
Her face faded to a rich red. Sccrrrrrrrratch.
The sensation of choking Marina was so invasive, it was almost sexual. His penis twitched again, an involuntary, convulsive movement. His heartbeat drummed in it, a hot slim pulsation against his zipper. He reveled in the exquisite quality of her face, the curves of her cheeks and jaw soft and brittle and transient, dark liquid sloe-eyes staring at him in confused horror. Her heart struggled to push rhythmic blood past the pads of his thumbs.
Marina’s hands bunched his shirt into fists. She gulped for breath. He interrupted it, pressing his mouth against hers, and he kissed her again. No wind came from her nose.
She tried to twist away, but his hands locked her in place. Marina’s hands fluttered around the countertop behind her—her ass was jammed hard against it—feeling the edge of the cupboard behind her head, knuckles rapping against the toaster—but there was nothing in reach. She found a dishtowel and whipped it against the side of his head, but it had no effect. Santi was squeezing so hard, his biceps were trembling. Marina’s mouth was wide open in a terrified O, her eyes glassy and huge, the only sound coming from that black pit a thready rattle: kkuuuhhkkk, kkuuuhhkkk.
“I’m so tired,” he told her darkening, almost-purple face. The gap where that one canine tooth used to be was filled with her pink tongue. “I give and I give and I give, and all you do is take.” His lips drew back in a rictus of fury. “Well, I don’t have anything to give you today. What are you going to take now?”
“Daddy?” asked Carly.
His daughter stood behind him, her purse in one hand.
“What are you doing?” Carly’s posture was low, knees bent, fight-or-flight, eyes huge, mouth slack. He could smell the fear rolling off of her in coils of girlsweat. It smelled like snakes and Magic Markers.
“Nothing,” he told her. His erection pressed hard into Marina’s belly. “Go watch TV.”
“L-Let go of Mama,” Carly told him.
“Go watch your goddamn TV.”
>
“I’m telling you, Daddy. Let go of Mama.”
Scccrrrratch. Santiago did just that. His hands sank slowly to his sides and Marina gasped air as if she’d just come up from a pearl dive. She doubled over, barking great ragged croup-coughs.
“You’re telling me?” He stepped toward Carly. “Or what?” he asked, voice rising. “How about you just do what the hell I tell you for once?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his own right hand float up and point imperiously at Carly’s face. “Go watch your stupid-ass shows and mind your own business.”
She pulled something out of her purse. A can of Axe body spray?
He took another step toward her and she abandoned the purse on the table, clutching the aerosol can in both hands like a pitcher getting ready to hurl a fastball.
Marina recognized the can in her hand. “No, Carlita!”
“What are you g—” he started to ask, and the can came up at the apex of her extended arms. Carly sprayed him in the face, a clabbery stream that ripped wetly across his hairline.
Shock was his first reaction, followed by confusion. It didn’t smell like Axe body spray. What it smelled like was cheap salsa, or maybe sriracha. His nose burned. “What the hell?” he asked, his forearm coming up to slick some of it away. Instead of clearing his eyes, however, he only painted a streak of feverish pain across his forehead. His hands were rust-orange. Orange juice? Battery acid? The liquid trickled downward, breaching the walls of his eyebrows, and when it seeped into the sensitive flesh of his eyelids, he understood what it was: pepper spray.
BEAR SPRAY, he read on the black can in his daughter’s hand, six seconds too late.
2 MILLION SCOVILLE UNITS.
Dear sweet titty-fucking Jesus!
A foul cloud of pepper fog filled the kitchen with choking heat. Carly and Marina both started coughing, her mother’s purple face greasy with sweat, Marina dry-heaving and gasping. Santiago didn’t notice, because his head was full of pitchfork-toting devils from the hottest alleys of Hell. As soon as the Mace reached his eyes, razor blades sliced across the whites of his eyeballs. The scream that burst out of him was an atavistic, unfiltered expression of terrified agony, a shriek from a dying pterodactyl. He collapsed on his knees, covering his eyes with both hands. “Fuuuuuck!” he bellowed in a broken, high-pitched howl, his forehead pressing his knuckles into the linoleum floor. “Fuuuuck!”
“God oh God,” his wife chanted frantically. She poured water from the tap, gagging. “Here, Santi”—cough, cough—“roll over.”
He did so. Marina poured the water on his eyes. It didn’t help. The water spread the Mace to every corner of his face and made things worse. It was in his ears. The superheated screws being driven through his eyeballs didn’t let up; they kept winding deeper until he could feel them penetrating his brain. His eyeballs were chestnuts being roasted over a roaring bonfire, and any second they were going to explode, crack-crack like M-80s. Sizzling eye-goo all over the kitchen.
Rolling over onto his hands and knees, Santiago pounded his head on the floor in a panic, bump, bump, bump, skull against linoleum. His brain felt like Jell-O bouncing flaccidly inside his skull, but nothing compared to the cosmic glory of the torture in his face. Maybe if he knocked himself out, he could sleep through the pain.
“Milk!” said Carly, coughing.
“What do we need milk for?” Marina wrenched the refrigerator door open. “We don’t have any milk!”
“The guy at the cop store”—Carly wheezed, coughing—“said milk would help. Here!” She snatched up the last of her smoothie, pulled off the lid, and flung it into her father’s face.
The relief was immediate, but it wasn’t enough, only tepid calamine on a radiation burn. Santiago tasted blueberries. He crawled across the floor and scaled the cabinet to the sink. Opening the sink tap, he stuck his face under the cold flow, but all it did was wash off the smoothie. The pain remained and only intensified.
Infuriated, Santi grabbed the microwave in both fists and hurled it across the room. Both women screamed. A window shattered and the microwave hit the kitchen table with an incredible BOOM!, sliding off onto the floor. Santiago’s hands crabbed across the counter until he found something else: the toaster. He jerked the cord, ripping the wires out of the plug in a burst of sparks, and fired the toaster in the direction of a woman’s voice.
A hollow metallic noise. Carly grunted.
Whipping a drawer open, Santi rummaged through a pile of utensils. The first thing he did was run a finger down the blade of a filet knife and cut it open. He swore incoherently, grabbed something else, and threw an ice cream scoop, knocked the corkboard off the wall. Coupons and takeout menus scuffled through the air. He threw the pizza cutter. More glass broke. The front door opened and he heard his wife and child run outside. Santi pushed away from the counter, rammed his hip into the table and knocked over a chair, and walked into the edge of the half-open door, a hammerblow to the eyebrow. Stars fizzled in his head.
As he shoved the screen door out of the way and staggered onto the front porch, he heard the Blazer’s doors clap shut, and even through the pain he couldn’t help but giggle madly.
“I got the keys, bitch!” Santiago shouted. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere!”
With no rails to stop him, he walked off the edge of the porch and flopped facedown on hard, dry clay like Wile E. Coyote, winding himself.
Every square inch of his head felt like it’d been dipped in lava. Santiago belly-crawled across the dusty yard toward the side of the trailer and made his way along the underpinning until his groping hands found the garden hose spigot. He twisted it, the tap opened, and the hose fattened. He followed the hose out to the pistol sprayer, leaving a trail of curse words, and lay on his back, blasting himself in the face. Ice-cold rubber-smelling water ran up his nose, choked him, gushed under his eyelids. He held his nose and tried to keep his eyes open to flush them out.
That familiar scrape down the bowl of his skull. Scrrratch.
Take me out on the road, Santi.
He released the sprayer handle and the water stopped. He gasped for breath and the heat came right back, causing his eyes to reflexively lock shut again.
Take me. Let’s go.
“Urrrgh! I’m gonna kill both of you!” He wrestled his shirt off and continued to spray himself in the face. A slow lightning bolt spread throughout his sinuses, like his brain was getting too big for his head, pushing his eyeballs out, and he couldn’t help but open them.
First thing he saw through the haze was Carly’s terrified face. His wife and daughter got out of the useless Blazer and fled on foot. He let out a hoarse roar and blood trickled out of his nose, salty copper on his tongue.
Snow-white hair shagged virulently across the back of his hand like bread mold growing in a time-lapse video. That same cracking feeling in his head, a walnut in a vise, now spread through his arms as if they were getting longer, the bones telescoping. His knuckles crunched. Veins under his skin rolled as the muscle behind them rippled. His fingernails were longer, sharpening into points.
What the hell?
Strange, horrifying, this phenomenon—yet somehow familiar. God, it hurts so much … it hurts even more than the Mace. Is this happening again?
(Again? It’s happened before?)
—Yes, baby boy, I’m in here waiting. We’ll run the ridge again, haha, hoho—
Faint memories flickered in the dark behind his eyelids, of standing in the desert with other men. Yellow eyes glinted in the night. Someone kicked off a pair of underwear and they’re all naked—
Disgusted and frightened, he opened his eyes again to get away from it, just in time to see Marina pull Carly away, mesmerized horror on their faces. Santiago screamed—or perhaps he thought he screamed; the scraping noise in his head occluded even the constant snore of traffic out on the highway.
Sunlight rekindled the heat in his cheeks and eyes. Soundtracked by the sound of a claw being dragged down a blackboard, he w
ent back to spraying himself in the face with the hose.
—They’re getting away, Santi. You can catch them if you just get up! Catch as catch can!—
Been a few times when Santiago wondered if the voice talking in his head, the voice coming from the motorcycle, was the Virgin Mary. Impossible—the Virgin Mary wouldn’t be having him do things that left him covered in blood when he came back to his senses. Would she? The shapes he saw in his dreams, the beasts he ran with now, was that part of God and the Holy Mother’s plan?
No, not possible.
Sometimes he wanted to tell her to shove off, whoever she was. But her voice was a fine wine, silky and hot and slick, the atavistic taste of some blind primal urge, like masturbation or the purest fury—sang to you in the moment, and when you opened your eyes again, it was all over with, leaving you with a sense of bewilderment, shame, and sometimes awe at what you’d just watched your other self do. Nights spent in the sweaty skin of another were just nightmares in the cold light of the morning, half-remembered, spliced-together film reels that played in hiccups and jumps. Memories drifted across the floor of his mind like leaves, like pieces of a horror movie he’d seen a long time ago.
Talons he’d seen curling out of his fingertips were nothing but a trick of light, right?
Right?
Every time he fell under her spell, it punched a hole in his brain. And that motherfucker was straight-up Swiss cheese these days. PTSD from a war he’d never fought in. Ever since the first time this happened, on a jaunt out into the desert on some kind of deranged vision quest.
Peyote had unlocked these weird sensations, these fleeting glimpses of savagery. Not long after buying the Royal Enfield, he’d been talked into some shrooms by one of the boys, and he didn’t remember anything else of that first night except getting on the motorcycle and leaving the clubhouse. Woke up the next morning naked next to a campfire on windswept hardpan, the motorcycle standing guard over him like a horse in some old-timey Marlboro ad.