Rain Dance

by Rebecca Johns

She felt the hairs on her arms standing up in the heat like cactus needles, pricking and frying under the Mojave sun, jealously drawing the water out of her skin. What a place for the Saab to break down, she thought, squinting at the distant arrow of the interstate and fanning herself vigorously with the roadmap. The sky scorched the bottom of the thin clouds, brown like cookies ruined in the pan, and the burning kitchen smell of the air rose around her, hot air getting hotter in the standstill. And he wasn't helping much. He swore at the steering column with his lips drawn and tight, spitting venom that only he could hear, and in the dry heat the air between the fizzed and sparked. Their few words expanded and filled up the car, stretching their seams to the limit and threatening to expose their tender breaks and bruises.
"You had to take a trip into the desert in August." Rob bit at the words. "August."
Sandra wanted to ignore that. "You didn't have to come, you know. I'd have been just as happy without you."
He got out to put water in the radiator‹barely missing getting his face boiled by the angry steam‹and mashed his foot into the front bumper, bruising his toe. The sight almost made her glad. He wasn't the only one having a lousy time, she thought. But he got back in the car and locked eyes on the windshield, a used-up Superman trying to bring his laser vision to bear on the smooth, unmarred glass. It seemed like forever to her before the car cooled down enough to head cautiously for the next town and first service station. Rob targeting the heat gauge one minute, then the windshield, seeing as little as if the whole world were encased in lead. Here was her hero. They didn't argue then, but they didn't talk either. The sun was hard on their eyes.
They used to talk. Sandra had met Rob not long after her first post-college publicity job took her to Los Angeles from Chicago more than five years ago. He was a lawyer‹not much of a surprise, really, with his stiff tailored suits and movie-star hair‹but he had made her laugh with his stories of the people he'd known and the crazy things he'd seen, and he professed his love only two weeks after they met. He'd grinned crazily at her and asked if she wanted to run away with him to Norway, and she'd smiled and said no, but she'd move in with him if that was okay, and they found an apartment in Malibu and lived happily ever after. So she thought.
"Arizona's coming up," she said.
"I know," he snapped back. He never looked at her. They had come so far, but they never got out of California. She saw buildings up ahead along the highway.
It wasn't much of a town. Only the strip of businesses along the interstate was open, where the last sleepy travelers were emerging, looking angrily at the sky and swearing at themselves for not getting an earlier start. Nearing ninety-eight degrees already. But away from the interstate strip the town huddled down into itself, a cluster of creaking brick and wood buildings painted pastel or white and peeling. The streets were nearly deserted; the only signs of natives were the ones they put up outside: "If You Think It's Hot Here..." read the billboard in front of the First Methodist Church. There was a closed bank, a small market and a Ford garage hoarded behind houses with rickety porches and earthquake-rattled foundations, boxes without treasure buried in sand. "God," Rob said, a crocodile's grin on his face. "Who on earth would live here?"
By the time he pulled up into the driveway of the Ford garage, the engine was beginning to hiss steam again. It would probably cost a fortune to fix, if they could fix foreign cars here at all. "Cool Inside" read the sign on the glass, and it seemed the whole town had read it, or what there was of a town. Half a dozen chairs circled the TV set against the far wall, and half a dozen nocturnal old men in work greens or denim sat there watching, not smiling, not breathing. Sandra almost laughed. They all looked the same to her: round-eyed, whiskery, skittish like lemurs holed up during the daytime.
"We're looking for a mechanic," Rob said impatiently, and was already turning around when one of the men said:
"Well, then, you come to the right place," and the rest chuckled low. He was angry and frustrated, and probably couldn't have told Sandra the number of people in the room.
He's always angry about something lately, she thought, always against the world. He had been like this long before the night she had suggested this trip.
About four months before, Sandra had made a fatal mistake. One night Rob was recounting at length a story of how he was planning to defend a two-time crook being charged with conspiracy to murder‹a big case for him and a big chance in his firm‹and he went into great detail about the process and the defendant. He was excited and animatedly pacing the living room when he let it slip that personally, he thought the guy was guilty.
Sandra was astounded. "How can you?" she asked breathlessly, turning around to face him. "How can you defend someone you think is guilty of trying to murder someone?"
He stood mute, still for a moment, a stiffness creeping across his shoulders. "It's my job," he said simply. He seemed confused by her.
"Your job." She didn't have an answer for that. She felt ill, looking out their window at the beach.
He launched back into his story, slower this time, leaving out more details, watching her back. Sandra couldn't bear it. Then she said what she shouldn't have: "I think the law business is a terrible bore. I'm going to bed."
As soon as she said it and walked out of the room, she wished she could have taken it back. But it was said, it was done; it stood between them in their apartment like a ghost haunting the rooms. Rob never came to bed that night, or the next, and there was bitterness in his voice ever since then. The future was lost in it.
At one time she had thought about marrying Rob, the whole business. He had saved her from a time when love was a thing not possessed, a time when she had curled up into herself, and he made her whole and alive. But their lives had separated like the spilled insides of an egg. He read the paper and she pretended to work, but the ceiling was their trap door; the things that had first drawn them together, like politics and music and adventure, had grown smaller in time, pounded by desert sun and air until only the dunes were left, inching apart week after week. Her head was full of them.
So she thought of going east, anywhere else for a while, and when she brought it up he lifted his head for only a minute. "Sure," he said. "If that's what you want." A miserable victory. The trip was a disaster, more silence and anger, and his impatience about the car was annoying and distracting her, so she didn't see the mechanic walk in at first. He was wiping oil from his hands with a blue rag and tucked it into his pocket as he came into the room.
"Now, John, remember to put one foot in front of the other," said the man who had first spoken, a man with two heavy creases around his mouth and a terrible smile.
"You aren't funny, Bill," said the mechanic slowly. Bill grinned bigger and turned back to the TV.
John reached out to shake hands. "I'm John Madera, the mechanic here. What can I do for you folks?" Rob didn't seem to notice his outstretched hand, so Sandra took it. He wore overalls instead of the work blues she expected, and was younger than the men watching television, perhaps forty, but unlike them he had left himself exposed; all the water was evaporated from his thin, sharp face, and she thought she could see his bleached-white bones rising from under the burned and brittle flesh. His lips were chapped and flaking, his eyes hooded deep in his face, pulled back from her scrutiny. She caught a glimpse, just a hint of what bubbled quietly there, but shook it off quickly, like it was a far-off image her mind had created.
Rob came to life and explained the problem with the Saab, and the three of them went outside to look at the car. John uncapped the radiator and watched the liquid splash out. "It's corroded," he said. "Look at that color." Neither of them knew what color it was supposed to be in the first place.
"We can get you a new one in about a day," John said. "If you leave the car here, you can get a room back up at the Days Inn."
She could see Rob working his jaw, his thoughts deep down. There was a time when she could have read what was there, but his face was all dust to her now. "Okay," he said, revealing nothing to either listener. "What time can I come get it?" Madera shifted from foot to foot, looking at his cracked, sandy boots, stuffing his big hands uncomfortably in his pockets; Sandra suspected he might be trying to con them into spending more, he was so shifty and uneasy.
Just then the mechanic looked straight at her, and his expression was a plea, almost, as if under that dry, prickly face was a stream waiting to be divined. Sandra caught sight of his eyes unhooded for just a moment, before the dust settled back down. They were blue. And there was something there, something honest and childlike, a feeling in her forehead she couldn't name.
"Round about nine," Madera said slowly. Nothing had happened after all.
"Fine. See you tomorrow," Rob said.
"Nice meeting you, ma'am," Madera said, and his gaze followed Sandra to the door.
"Thank you," she said.
"Damn." Rob groaned as they trudged back up the hill, wiping their necks with sunburned arms. Sandra watched the ground as she walked, but all the earthquake cracks were filled in with sand, buff and tan, giving back the glare.

The Days Inn had cheap rooms and plenty of air conditioning, which soothed them both momentarily. Showered and relaxed with what passed for cable TV, they managed words. "Talk about one-horse," Rob said, pulling back the curtain and letting enemy sunlight in, glinting in shards off his face. "Are you happy?" he said bitterly. "Now we're stuck in the middle of nowhere."
"Me?" she twitched, and her wall came up. "I didn't break the damn car!"
"Well, this trip was your idea." His voice was so calm, even when he was being unreasonable.
She let it pass. Again. He was angry and tired. There was a long pause. "Rob," she said, carefully taking the edge out of her voice, "You know I'm sorry, about what I said about your job‹"
He spoke around her. "Did you see those old guys in the garage? Man! Could you imagine spending you entire life in this burg?" His laughter broke over her like a mirror.
Sandra squinted at him but didn't answer. John Madera lived here, maybe for his whole life, but she couldn't imagine much of anything these days. Something deep down in her watched and waited, a tectonic restlessness. Earth grinding against earth. "I'm going out to the pool," she said.
"Are you crazy?" he said. "It's at least one hundred degrees out there, maybe closer to one-ten. You'll burn in fifteen minutes."
"Maybe so." But anything was better than in here with him, where she could cut herself on his voice. She preferred to take her chances with the sun.
The pool had a view of the town and the border mountains in the distance. Arizona. Would they ever get farther than this? She pressed her feet to the concrete patio like she could have conjured an accelerator there. If they could just get out, get away, maybe he could ease up for just a minute and let her see the man that used to be there. Where he used to be green and blue like sky and forest he had watered down and become neon. Fake. She felt the sound on her tongue, just another four-letter word.
The painted bottom of the pool brought the mechanic's eyes back to her. So blue. When you could see them. She wondered how long he had lived there, what kind of a family he had, what life was like for someone who had lived his life in this town. There was something about him she couldn't place. He was a shy baby brother looking at her like she had an answer for all his pain. And yet he was at least fifteen years older, maybe more. Well, it was none of her business. She had enough worries with her own life. So she took a lap across the pool and looked out at the ring of mountains in the east, waiting, like rows of jagged teeth.
By the time she went back inside Rob had placated some of his laughter with bad sitcoms and old cartoons. So the two of them sat in silence for the rest of the day, and fell asleep with the lights on.

In the morning they went back to the garage to wait for the car to be finished. Rob wiggled his left leg in anticipation, twisted his Stanford class ring on his finger. "Stop it," she said. "You're making me nervous."
John came in, wearing the same dusty look, the same dirty coveralls he was wearing the day before. Sandra found she had the urge to brush him off and send him in the house to change his clothes. Now why, she thought, would I feel motherly toward a middle-aged man? She marveled that he never seemed to get oil on his t-shirts, though dirt coated everything else. John took them out to the garage to see what he had done to the car. Something about him turned impatient, a slight jump to the muscles that wasn't there before, and when he opened the hood, his smile was as wide as that of a child bringing home all A's. "Only two hundred dollars," he said proudly.
"Two hundred?" Rob gaped. "Two hundred for what?"
"Two hundred seems more than reasonable to me," Sandra said. "He did it so quickly and on a foreign car."
"For the new radiator," John said. "Look."
"Sandra, remind me never to listen to you again when you come up with one of these stupid schemes."
"Stupid? You‹" She turned away to keep from saying any more.
John was smiling at them. His eyes came out from hiding, but only Sandra saw. Blue‹a shocking, immortal blue that made her itch, feel the dust. Though he looked in her direction, he didn't seem to see her; his gaze was long ago.
"My wife and I used to fight like that."
Rob pulled her back in. "I was just saying that this was a bad idea."
"Well, the next time you come up with something, Einstein."
"That was before my boy left town."
"My pleasure. Next time we go to Palm Springs."
"You've been to Palm Springs a hundred times."
"So I'll make it one hundred and one."
"He said he just couldn't stay."
"I wanted to get out of Los Angeles."
"We're definitely out now."
"It killed my wife when he left."
They stopped. Rob and Sandra looked at the mechanic. "What did you say?" she asked.
Bill called from the other room. "John, are you telling these folks your life story? We told you a hundred times, no one's interested in your blabber." He came in from the front room, pointed his finger at his forehead and twirled it around. Crazy? Sandra thought. Childlike, maybe.
She could see the earthquake start in John's face. The rumble was slow at first, under the skin, shifting the bleached bones just a little. Then the vision ravaged him, sent shock waves through his whole body, and brought the well to the surface, just enough for her to see the shimmer on his eyes, almost like a mirage. But he released no water to soothe his damaged face. The cracks widened a bit more, his life straining against the backs of his eyes. If she had looked any closer she could have watched his story flicker there like an old western on playback, but he pulled back in and shaded himself again, before she saw. Yet the stirring she had witnessed there got under her own skin.
She paid the two hundred herself and thanked the mechanic, shaking his hand warmly. He brought out the mother in her, with his guarded looks. She went out to meet Rob to go back to the hotel and pick up their things. "Coming?" he asked. She banged the door shut without a word.
When the car was loaded and the hotel bill paid, she looked out again at the ring of mountains to the east, and felt the life begin to rumble underneath. She'd get there someday‹but not yet. She got behind the wheel of the Saab herself. "What are you doing?" Rob asked angrily. "This is my car!"
"We're going back." Then she added quietly, "I'm moving out."
He got in the passenger's side and said nothing. Superman was dead, long live Superman. They drove toward the west, leaving the rusting town to fry in the August sun, buried and forgotten by pirates. All the way through the burning Mojave Sandra kept her eyes on the horizon, but all she saw was blue, and the knowledge that things weren't finished here. In the east, over the mountains, the air began to stir. Storm clouds gathered, ready to spill out over the parched and greedy earth. The first drops splattered to the ground and were swallowed up as quickly as they fell.

Rebecca Johns is a magazine writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. Aside from freelancing for the beauteous people at Conde Nast, she is currently sitting on a sizzling horror novel. If there are any editors out there, call her.