The Music of What Happens(37)

“Think of it as a challenge,” I say as the relentless heat chills my body.

“Huh,” Jordan says as we pass through the fence and step onto the desert sand. “What do you mean, a challenge?”

The air actually sears your lungs when it’s like this. It’s thrilling. “Before refrigeration most people just didn’t settle here. The white men back in the pioneer days? They didn’t stop. Went right on to California as if this was uninhabitable. So if I can thrive in it? Then nothing can stop me. Makes me feel powerful.”

“Huh,” he says again, and suddenly as we walk he flexes his biceps. I glance over, unsure if he’s serious or not. He’s not laughing, and I’m like, All right. There ya go.

“I can do this,” he says.

I pull off my shirt and flex. “Yes you can. We can totally do this.”

He stops walking and turns toward me. He takes off his shirt, and suddenly we are both bare-chested. There’s something kinda hot, kinda primal about his coat hanger shoulders and flat chest. I can’t explain it; I just like it. I avert my eyes but smile, so he knows I’m with him. He smiles back. He takes a few deep breaths and I breathe with him, like we are in the midst of a workout, almost.

“All right,” he says, spotting a patch of cacti about twenty feet ahead. “Prickly pear ho!”

I laugh. The air scalds the inside of my nose. “Prickly pear ho,” I say. “Sounds like a really unpopular prostitute.”

He giggles. “You’re actually funny,” he says.

“Thanks, I think?”

It turns out we need the T-shirts for our hands, because we didn’t bring gloves and the green prickly pear plums grow right on the cacti, often right next to needles. I jab myself trying to grab a piece of fruit, and a dot of blood pearls on my left forefinger.

“Ouch,” I say.

Jordan uses his shirt-covered hand to steady a cactus leaf, and I slowly, carefully grab a green plum and crack it off.

“One,” Jordan says, and he bends over, already winded. Even though it’s a dry heat, my eyelids start to feel wet. “Shit. That’s a lot of pasta.”

I lead us to a cactus plant that has multiple bulbs on it, and now our biggest issue is that we have nowhere to put the prickly pears. Jordan makes a bowl out of his shirt, and I start to pile them in there. Soon we have ten, and we’re walking farther from the car in silence, the desert totally abandoned. We’re like two ancient foragers; I kinda love it.

We strip another cactus of fruit, and I’m loading up his shirt bucket, and I’m watching as Jordan’s face gets red. Then redder. I laugh a bit, because it’s all a bit extreme and dramatic. I mean, yes, it is seriously hot out here; I can’t take the convection-like heat too deep into my lungs. But we’ve only been out for about ten minutes, and we’ve been walking slowly. But as I head toward a big brush of green cactus covered in green and purple bulbs, Jordan stops walking and bends over, putting his hands on his knees.

“I can’t …” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “We can go back.”

“No,” he says, and his breathing is rapid, like way too much for the situation. “I can’t. Get back to the car. I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and sweat pours down his forehead, and I mutter “Shit” under my breath.

“I’m so stupid. I shouldn’t. I’m not like you. I can’t …”

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.” I put my arm around him and let him lean on me. We are maybe five minutes from the car, and I realize that I should have been more thoughtful. I could do this all day, but Jordan is obviously different. It didn’t really occur to me. With Betts and Zay-Rod, we’re competitive with each other. Even if they got tired, which they wouldn’t this quick, they’d never show it because it would be seen as weakness. But Jordan is leaning hard, and his legs feel like they’re trembling, and suddenly I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.

“Let me sit,” he says, and he’s definitely hyperventilating, which is making this worse. If he’d stop taking in so much oxygen, I’m pretty sure he’d be fine.

“Where?” I ask. Below us the ground is pebbly and covered in cactus detritus. Doesn’t look like a place you’d want to sit. He starts to sit and I grab his midsection. “Come on,” I say.

He looks at me. I give him the most empathetic look I can, given that my inner thighs feel like they’re burning from the heat. First I grab his shirt basket. He doesn’t resist. Then I turn from him and lean over. “Jump on,” I say.

“What? No,” he says. I’m too tired to argue, so I just stay in position, and he takes a deep breath, slings his skinny arms over my shoulders, jumps up, and wraps his feet around my calves.

I laugh a little as I adjust to the weight. “Didn’t take much to convince you, I noticed.”

His breathing has slowed and I feel like I can hear the smile in his voice. “Desperate times,” he says. I can feel his breath on the top of my head, and it’s a weird sensation because it’s actually way cooler than the temperature.

My soaked quads start to quiver when we’re about a hundred feet from the car. I step through the opening in the fence, and I decide that I’d rather really work for twenty seconds than labor just a bit for a minute. So I take off.