1082 words. 5 min read.
Old-town Playa Hill smelled like one of those travel plazas you’d find down by the interstate; the stink of burning gas, hot rubber and melting tarmac. It had never been a particularly pleasant smelling part of town, but this was a new low. The smell, combined with the continuous thumping noise of a couple hundred gas-guzzling generators, gave Alec a debilitating headache.
There had been brief outages all summer, but nothing like this. The whole plateau had been without power for nearly seventy-two hours now. This kind of heat, with no respite, it had a way of nestling itself deep into your spinal cord. Everything felt heavy. Dirty. Thick.
“We have to get out of the sun,” Alec moaned from the backseat of the multicolored Toyota.
”You’re not in the sun,” responded Curtis, before he spit another sunflower-seed shell into a blue, off-brand, Solo cup.
“You know what I mean.” Alec said. “At least turn the AC on for a little bit. I’m roasting back here.”
“If I turn the AC on, I have to turn the engine on. If I turn the engine on, I am wasting gas. If I am wasting gas, I won’t have enough to get you back up the Hill. If I don’t get you home, mom is going to kill me. If mom kills me, I won’t be able to teach you about the way of the world.”
I wish Curtis would not talk down to me so much, Alec thought. But then again, all his other teachers had done so too, and most of them would whoop him as well. Curtis never did, so maybe his brother was a better teacher than he gave him credit for. Sandra handed Alec a little battery powered fan from her perch in the passenger seat.
“Here, you can use this for a while.” she said, softly.
Oh, sweet, sweet Sandra. If it wasn’t for her, Alec probably wouldn’t have even come along on this “mission”, as Curtis liked to call them. Alec didn’t really understand what this particular one was meant to accomplish. “We need to run an errant for mom,” was all Curtis had said, and Alec hadn’t felt like leaving the house, but at least now he got to be close to Sandra for a while. From the back seat he could just see the beads of sweat disappearing into her tank top and her cut off jean shorts. How he wished he could be one of those drops sliding down her soft, perfect skin.
He had gotten lost in that explicit fantasy when he realized she was looking straight at him.
“Give it back if you’re not gonna use it,” she snapped as she snatched the fan out of his hands. How long had she been looking at him? Hopefully not long enough to notice the bulge in his basketball shorts.
They had been sitting down the street from a strip mall and Curtis hadn’t taken his eyes off the dentist’s office on the far end. By staring at the symbols next to the cartoon molar above the door, Alec had deduced it was a Korean dentist. Or a Thai one maybe? He had enough trouble with English, so these strange symbols were like hieroglyphics to him. It wasn’t until after they held him back for the third year in a row, in 12th grade, that they made him see a doctor. They had told him he was dyslexic, and he had gotten a note to show all his teachers. After that, most of them were much nicer to him.
At the airfield, his boss, mister Sanderson, had made sure to put all the supplies he needed to clean the bathrooms in bright, differently colored bottles. That way he wouldn’t accidentally mix the ammonia with the bleach and knock himself out. This had only happened once, but he was pretty sure that this was the result of a prank that Stevie and Juan had pulled on him. He was dyslexic, not colorblind.
“Son of a bitch,” Curtis yelled. He reached for the binoculars in the middle console, tipping the contents of the Solo cup into Sandra’s lap.
“Eeeeew, Curtiiiis” she moaned, flicking the chewed up shells off her bare legs, only to have them land on her naked toes. She shivered and tried to sink even further into the car’s bucket seat.
“There is definitely someone in there,” Curtis said as he peered through the binoculars. “How the hell did they get past us?”
“Maybe they used the rear entrance?” Alec responded.
“What do you mean? What rear entrance?” Curtis bellowed, now focussed solely on his little brother in the back seat.
“They have a little lot for employees in the back. Missus Li always let mom park there when there were no spaces left in the front,” Alec explained.
“Who the hell is missus Li?” Curtis said.
“That’s her shop, in the corner. She was the lady who did mom’s nails, every Thursday, when she was still leaving the house. She would take me along, so I wouldn’t get square eyes from watching TV all day,” Alec rambled. He did that, when he was nervous. Curtis was definitely making him nervous.
“Come here you dumb mother-” Curtis yelled as he swung at the young man in the back seat. Alec realized that he had given his brother too much credit a moment ago when he had told himself he never hit him. This wasn’t the first of Curtis’ outbursts, although it was something that had happened more frequently in the last few years. After dad had left, and mom had stopped leaving the house. Come to think of it, this had happened a lot and for a long time.
“Babe, leave him alone,” Sandra intervened.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Curtis said as he settled back into his seat.
“You never asked me,” Alec responded.
Curtis closed his eyes for a moment, and when he looked up, his and Alec’s eyes met in the rearview mirror.
“You’re right. I should’ve asked you,” he sighed.
The Toyota crawled into the alleyway behind the strip mall giving Curtis a good view of the employee parking lot. A silver, older model Mercedes, which must be the dentist’s own car, was in the only spot reserved for the dental office. The rest of it was claimed by a blacked out SUV sticking out behind a beaten up We-Lug box truck.
