26
Behind rain clouds the sun looks like a giant daytime moon. The heat wave ignores the rain and refuses to leave. Holding old umbrellas, the elderly move through their daily tasks purchasing food from vendors and trading crystals they once worshiped for YCL, all the while worried — heads looking up, then left, then right, then down again and at their feet trudging through the muddy streets.
The truck drivers don’t care about the sky or sun because they can get more work done in the rain. They dress in slick green rain robes. They wear crystals around their necks that dangle so low under their work shirts the chain links knot in their chest hair. Their heads are hooded by their rain robes and they drive fast. Tires spin smooth spitting water backward, the rain glistening off metal hoods, doors, the roofs of the trucks that enter and leave the mine a dozen times daily.
Senior driver, Skip Callahan, drives shirtless. He wears a yellow crystal headband instead of a green necklace. He has plenty of chest hair. Today, he’s the lead truck in a line of ten making its return trip back into the mine. The first produced a few blue crystals, one green, lots of yellow, and a half of a dark red looking thing, all of it dumped in a field for workers to sift through. Men from the city once told Skip they’d be interested in buying the mine and Skip told them to get fucked. He slapped a fat face belonging to a politician named Sanders who rubbed his cheek while three others stood stunned. Skip knows other mine workers are potential sell-outs because of their personalities. They’re willing to sell to save themselves from some unknown crushing. The sky thunders and the rain falls faster from cracks of lightning.
Skip loves the rain. He loves to work. He blasts the radio — a country song picked up via a city signal with lots of banjo and violin — and smokes cigarettes he rolls himself. His truck is immaculate. On both driver and passenger side floors is a square of torn cardboard he replaces when muddied. The glove box contains homemade cleaning supplies that slosh inside mason jars and a spiraled branch of dirty cloths covered in engine grease. The wind pulls the rain to the side as his truck bounces down the road. In the pale light, royal disc of sun above, two hands gripping the steering wheel, he grins white teeth.
Last night Skip sat in the dark of his bedroom with his hands balled up against his chest, an all too common crippling depression. His mother, who was extraordinarily healthy for her count (such skin), recently died from a truck accident. The villagers stood around slack jawed and terrified (that’s going to happen to me one day) and watched her expel colors while Skip came running down the street, slowing as he saw the damage. He was told by a teenager that she was “hurt” in an “accident” and Skip thought he could help her, that maybe she had sprained a wrist or bruised a hip, anything but zero. He tried pulling her from the truck but that made her body worse, bend in unimagined ways, colors gushing from her chest. People winced and turned away. Since the accident he’s found it hard to function outside of work. Work is his everything now. In the bedroom, Skip tried to concentrate on an image that made him feel joy and that was driving. There, he could move his hands. Using two flashlights, he created headlights on his bedroom wall and pushed his right foot forward into a pillow.
He drives, cigarette in his mouth, a long turn downward, foot resting on the brake pedal. He squints through the rain and sees two shadows in the distance, small and blurry, and so low to the ground Skip thinks they’re either turtles or rocks. But as the truck straightens out from the end of the curved road, he notices it’s two animals, dogs maybe, running directly at him. He tosses his cigarette out the window. The left side of his body gleams with rain. He extends his foot into the brake pedal. Too hard and the tires will dig up the hard crust the hot rain has created. The driver behind Skip flashes his lights and another in the pack blasts his horn. Shitheads, thinks Skip, and tries to slow the truck more but the front tires lock and skid.
He eases off the brake as the two dogs enter the headlights. He turns the wheel to the left, toward the towering wall of dirt, and the trucks behind follow in a motion smooth and centipede like. Skip is having difficulty seeing through the windshield. The combination of heat and rain and truck speed turn the headlights into smeared pearls. His CB radio crackles with hey bud-e, we-with, you, every-thing okay, up-there-hey-oh-what-is-dat-whoa-um-Skip-easy-there-Skip-care-full.
Ugly is the sky above the wall.
“What,” says Skip into the rain-slashed windshield. He hits the wipers bar up but it’s already all the way up.
Out the passenger window a dog runs past, legs caked in mud, tongue out, exposed teeth. One eye looks yellow, the other black. Keeping up with the dog is a child on all fours. A girl in red shorts. Blond hair cascades the length of her arms. She’s incredibly fast and combined with how fast Skip is driving the dog and the girl blur past.
“Stop it or I’ll —” says Skip, momentarily looking into the side mirror to see them vanishing into the rain. Then he concentrates back on the road and says, “Holy mother wow was that what,” before driving the final section of the road down.
He reaches the bottom of the mine. The drivers circle around his truck. Crisscrossing headlights illuminate mine workers who wear black shorts, no shirts, and jog with wheelbarrows dirt-brimmed with crystals. Tonight’s late-night undocumented batch will be sold to the city and used for engagement rings, special occasion earrings, displayed in New Age yoga studios, given to the hospital-sick for positive energy. They have their own crystals, but they don’t have these crystals. Some will be sold to parents for their children who play a game called Lyfer, trade the crystals back and forth in a test of who can maintain closest to a hundred, the brightest colors worth extra. They hurry between the ringing bells of classes to lie about what they hold behind their backs and to trade furiously as teachers watch. Skip listens to the roar of truck engines shifting gears as he tries to comprehend what he just saw.
Ken Horgan, a rat-like man whom Skip has seen several times bleeding from the head after work shifts, rolls his window down. His neck turned back and up, eyes squinting in the rain, he says, “Whole-e-shit. Was that a werewolf?”
Skip drives a loop around the trucks. Gas pedal floored, the truck buckles through shifting gears. He heads back up and out of the mine on the road he just descended. Ugly is the sky coming over the wall. Skip wants to help because he is a person hardwired to help. He couldn’t help his mom. Tires roll over the hand-prints over paw-prints. Ken Horgan says from the pit of the mine, standing in the rain with eyes like a rat being flicked with water, “COME BACK AND TELL ME WHAT THAT WAS SKIP I’VE NEVER KNOWN A HALF DOG PERSON BEFORE LET’S HAVE DINNER AND TALK ABOUT IT BUDDY.”
Halfway to the house they stop because Hundred has something in his paw. He’s been running on three legs. Remy, covered in mud, sits in the road and cradles him in her lap. The rain lets up to a spit. Steam places the village in a cloud and the lower half of the city disappears. She pulls out a triangle of dark crystal from his paw. Blood splatters across her fingers in a Z. His eyes break as his spine twists. Remy tries to say something like, “stop” but it comes out as “hop.” He runs from her arms with impossible strength and Remy follows until they both enter the house.
“Hey, hop it.”