15. "OH TIME ENOUGH WHEN THE BLOOD RUNS COLD ..." *

At a truck stop in a hellhole called Cabazon, Solitaire had once come close to having a nervous breakdown.  In 1969, driving through the night with her cat Stokely from Tucson to LA to confer with a divorce attorney after four delirious days of marriage in Puerto Vallarta to someone named Raul, she had lost her inner compass and become disoriented.  Attempting to appear composed, she walked blindly into the next truck stop, sat at the counter on a revolving red leatherette stool and fought down an insistent urge to scream.  Instead, she went to the pay phone on the wall and rang up her friend, Rosy, a psychiatrist in Brentwood with whom she was planning to stay.

"If you think you're having a nervous breakdown," he said, "you're obviously not.  I suggest you order a piece of cherry pie, then find a room where you and Stokely can spend the night, and drive the rest of the way in the morning."

"Why cherry?"

"All that cornstarch tends to have a calming effect, slows the metabolism."

So Solitaire had the cherry pie and Rosy was right;  it was so egregiously disgusting with its cornstarch center and cardboard crust that it brought her to her senses. But it had been a near thing.

Now, some thirty odd years later, as she and Em sped through town on the I-10, past casinos, dinosaur parks, slots, pin ball and bingo parlours, she glanced over at Em and saw to her surprise that a river of ruby red blood was spewing from his left nostril.  The color, which was the color of burgundy in a crystal goblet with sunlight streaming through it, was achingly exquisite -- as though it were being pumped straight from Em's heart.

Pulling into a ramshackle roadside eatery next to a gas station, she tried to extract Em from the car, whereupon his legs buckled and he fell to his knees beneath a tattered palm, the lifeblood pouring into the sand where he knelt like a wounded matador, unable to rise despite their combined efforts, until a grizzled, baggy-eyed trucker loped up, grabbed Em under the arms, hauled him into the coffee shop and shoved him into a booth, at which point the waitress, whose name tag identified her as "Kelly Jean," took over.

With folded arms she sized him up and said, “That’s quite a gusher you got there, Mister.“  She shoved a fistful of paper napkins into Solitaire’s hand.  “Press down on the top of his nose while I get some ice.”

Solitaire had never, except in films, seen an oil gusher, but the pumping action, the vigour and volume, seemed metaphorically accurate.

For what may have been twenty minutes or eternity, Em, who was on a blood thinner called Coumadin, continued to bleed until Solitaire feared he would hemorrhage to death through the nose in the middle of the Mojave Desert.  Kelly Jean, meanwhile, brought them bags of ice, glasses of iced-tea, egg-salad sandwiches, and a relentless re-supply of napkins.  The ice leaked and the blood dripped and before long their booth looked, as Em later said, like the Battle of the Bilge:  little wads of bloody paper and balls of scarlet Wonderbread converged, covering the surface of the formica table and floating like soggy islets in a pink-tinted lake of Lipton’s shoaled with repulsively rosy mashed-up egg yolks.  At last, the blood flow slowed and stopped, presumably clotting and scabbing over at the source, and with many expressions of gratitude, they went on their way, Em clutching a fresh sheaf of napkins thrust upon him by Kelly Jean in farewell.

They drove towards the California-Arizona border with the sun sinking behind them. Solitaire glanced frequently over at Em, who was dozing, his head against the rest and angled toward his wife, a halo of grayish-brown curls rusted by the sunset.  He blew in and out with a kind of snuffly sound and each time he exhaled a bubble of blood slid forward just to the entrance of his nose, peeped out, and then, while her own breath hung fire, was sucked back inside like the tide.   In the course of time and repeated iterations, each nostril became delicately framed with a thin ruby crust. 

When they reached Blythe on the state line, it was still light, which was too bad because Blythe was one of the eyesores of the North American continent, beating out even Cabazon and Parker and Bullhead City – well, maybe not Bullhead City -- by a slim but quantifiable margin. 

 Solitaire had hoped they would reach Phoenix by nightfall, but obviously they were not going to make it. “I suppose we ought to spend the night here,” she said, eyeing Blythe with aversion through the dust-caked, insect-strewn windshield.

“Anything but that,” said Em.  “Let’s push on.”

By the time they reached Quartzite, the last streaks of turquoise had gone from the sky and night had dropped like a stoned crow.

 It was palpably black and noisy as hell, fences twanging, gates banging and the wind gusting and whooshing around; only the stars were silent and cold as ice chips in the whirling firmament.

The car’s headlights barely penetrated the darkness. “Where in hell are we?” she said.

“’I think we are in rat’s alley where the dead men –‘”

"Belay that!" she said.

A dim light bulb swaying on a power line threw shadows across a flapping wood sign that read :

                                    Quartzite Yacht Club & Grill

                                           Guest Acommodations

A second sign, depending by a chain from the first, announced:

                                                No Vacancy

Solitaire felt a wave of relief when she saw that sign.  In the first place, the so-called “accommodations” were actually small, grimy aluminum house trailers that bucked and whinnied in the gale.  She thought the interiors were sure to be a dismal, dangerous, sand-swept mess, with giant Mojave rattlesnakes coiled around the base of the toilet bowl, whiling away their winter hibernation in a semi-stupor while they sleepily digested a two-foot-long rat that had carelessly strayed within the radius of the rattler’s heat-seeking apparatus.  That’s if there was a toilet bowl, which she doubted. 

Secondly, she had a very bad feeling about this “Club;” she thought they were in a Coen Brothers movie and that something untoward and unspeakably horrid, like being stuffed head-first into a wood chipper, was bound to occur.

           

“Back to Blythe?” she squeaked.

Em grunted.

They pulled up in front of a Worst Western motel on the main street and Solitaire, who feared the desk clerk would think they had been on a killing spree and deny them a room, opened the trunk and tugged a clean shirt out of Em’s suitcase, but he would have none of it.  He said he would shower before he went to bed but right now he just wanted to eat because they hadn’t eaten since they left the ship and that was about ten years ago and he was ravenous, damn it, ravenous.

So they walked into the lobby in their blood-splattered clothes (Solitaire, too, had splotches of blood on her pale blue t-shirt) and the desk clerk, whose batteries had burnt out many moons ago, regarded them with his dead eyes that did not flicker even when Em gave their names as Mr. and Mrs. C. Barrow. 

Solitaire laughed and Em said, as he always did, “I like a woman who laughs at my jokes.”

“You’ll have to pay in advance,” the clerk said.

“As a reward,” Em added, “I’m going to wear my Ralph Lauren windbreaker so I won’t embarrass you in front of the town toffs.”

They walked next door to a steak house, where Solitaire was so affected by the blow-back of burnt Herefords, that she literally staggered.

“How about Chinese take-out?” she said.  “They always have terrific egg-drop soup in these remote villages.”

                       

“I have to replenish my blood supply.”

Em had a steak the size and heft of a proverbial catcher's mitt, preceded and followed by several Bombay Sapphire martinis (who said they weren't sophisticated out here?) and Solitaire, after careful perusal of the sacrificial offerings on the menu, ordered a baked potato.

"It certainly is busy here," Solitaire observed to the waitress, Margie-Jean.

"Of course it is," Margie Jean said, looking surprised.  "It's the weekend of the Rattlesnake Wrangler's Tournament."

"Tournament?"

"Sure, folks come from all over and they go out in the desert and see how many rattlers they can wrangle and they put them in a burlap sack and tomorrow night they milk the venom and --"

"And where do they keep them?"

"Mostly in their rooms.  They're supposed to keep them in their trucks, but it gets awful cold out there."

"Do they ever escape?"

"Not too often."

Pets Welcome

The atmosphere in the motel room was, despite the proximity of the desert, suffocatingly fetid, suggestive of snakes slithering about in the rank, mildewed undergrowth of the swampy shag rug.  

Em, still fully dressed, was splayed out on the disgusting quilt.  Unable to find a thermostat, Solitaire telephoned the clerk, who said they didn’t use the AC during the winter “season,” but that the swamp-cooler was operational.  She flicked the switch and a large metal box high in the wall behind the bed thundered into action, rumbling through the room like a Soviet tank through Red Square.  The dry-wall partitions shook and crackled ominously, followed by a snowfall of plaster .  Em sat up abruptly.     

“Is it May Day?’  he asked, brushing patches of paint and plaster dust from his navy blue Ralph Lauren windbreaker.

                       

Around midnight, another massive nosebleed occurred.  Once a deep sleeper, now a non-sleeper, Solitaire, lying rigid, wide-eyed and fully dressed on the bed, detected the onset as an Icelandic farm dog sniffs out a forthcoming volcanic eruption.  She could actually hear Em’s blood begin to gurgle like magma through his sinuses during a gasping hiatus in the swamp-cooler’s respiratory system.  She ran to the bathroom and fetched a small ragged towel, ignoring a hand-printed sign on the mirror that read, rather touchingly:
                                   "PLEASE DO NOT WIPE YOUR BOOTS
                                   AND BIKES WITH OUR TOWELS."

To which reasonable request, someone -- presumably an irate biker -- had scrawled in reply:

                                   "oh yeah -- how about my ass?"

              

 “Good thing I replenished my blood supply,” Em observed.

“I would have said just the opposite,” Solitaire replied.

She was up and out with the car loaded before five a.m.

 It was bitingly cold and beautiful, the air so clear and the light so luminous, hovering delicately on the horizon, that one could count every skeletal power pole all the way across the crystalline sands back to the vanishing point.  Or was she the vanishing point?

“What about breakfast?”  Em said.

“What about it?”

"It's free."

"Have you seen it?"

Around midday, in heavy truck traffic and blowing dust, she started steering over to the right, looking for the highway exit ramp that would take them north to Scottsdale.

“What are you doing?”  Em frowned.

“Looking for the exit to Fifty-seven.”

“What for?”

“I’m taking you to the Mayo Clinic.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Em –“

“Forget it.  Just take 10 to El Paso and don’t stop ‘til you pull into our garage.”

“Em,” she said in her most persuasive please-darling-be-reasonable voice, “you’ve got to see a doctor.”

“Not now!” he replied in his most recalcitrant save-your-breath unreasonable voice .  “All I intend to do now is to get into bed – my own bed.”

And so they drove south, dodging dust devils and strips of peeled rubber and clumps of tumbleweed down the I-10, past Tucson, branching towards Nogales on the I-19, into the arched Spanish entry at Tubac, and through the wrought iron gates that led to their garage.

Em stripped off his clothes, showered, and changed into a clean T-shirt and shorts whilst Solitaire kept up a running prayer that his clotted nose would not unclot.  He fell asleep instantly.  Two hours later she woke him to say that she was going to see her mother, who seemed to be hysterical about something, and then she was going to stop at the neighbor’s to collect the dogs.  She would be back in exactly one hour and a half.  Meanwhile, he was to keep his cell phone with him at all times and if he had to leave the bed he was to take it with him.  “Promise me!”

“I promise,” he said, adding, “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

Returning on the stroke of five, Solitaire walked into the bedroom to find Em lying face down and immobile on the floor beside the bed.   “Oh my God!  My God! “ she screamed and ran to him, certain, in the stillness,  that he was dead.

“I’m okay,” he said in a quiet voice.   “I’m alive. “

He was only half right: he was alive, yes, but not okay.

“The cell phone fell on the floor and I was reaching for it –“

Within twenty-four hours, he was in the ICU at the Mayo Clinic, having been dispatched there by ambulance.  

As the paramedics lifted the gurney into the back, she took Em's hand and he looked down at Solitaire and smiled. 

“Aloha,” he said.