Their screams intermingled across the night.

The one on top of him—the brunette—had no clue of his distress and, bless her heart, she kept at him, oblivious that rather than pump and grind, he had begun to buck and kick. The blonde beneath him had a front row seat and suffered no such illusions. She scurried out from under him and took cover behind the bedside table which they had already knocked onto its side.

“What the hell is your problem, man?” she wanted to know.

“I can’t feel my heart,” Jack shouted. He’d let go of the brunette’s sweat-slicked hips to grab hold of his own chest, which he kneaded like balls of dough. “This is not like last time. This time, I’m afraid it is for real.”

Finally, the brunette ceased with her fucking. She remained astride him, her head cocked to the side.

“Are you playing with us?”

“I assure you,” Jack panted, “this is far from funny. Don’t worry…this happens all the time. But never like this.” He kept one hand fast at his heart, while the other pounded against the mattress. “I can’t feel my legs. Jesus Christ, I can’t feel my legs.”

The brunette looked to the blonde, but the blonde had been thrown for as much a loss. Neither moved from their vantage.

“Am I too much for you, baby?” asked the brunette. She spoke in much the same pitch as when they met: her, slinging dollar bourbons at the sports bar on the far side of town, and Jack with a pocketful of blow. She lowered her lips to an inch from his. “Do you need me to take it a bit slower?”

“This happens all the time,” he said. His throat shriveled to jerky. His right hand shook like palsy. “You have to believe me, I’m going to be fine.”

He said it as much to them as to himself, yet he convinced no one in the room. His mind raced. Was it the little blue pill he’d swallowed? He’d only taken it because all the liquor and the little bit of coke might have… He’d insisted upon guarantees. To get both those women had been no easy feat, and he’d hate to have wasted the opportunity. It could have been a combination of the three, combined with the rigorous athleticism of the two women who were either younger than he, or even older. He had no earthly idea.

He took comfort that his left arm did not ache. For the left arm to ache meant he could be menaced by a heart attack. But this was not a heart attack, this was that thing…this was another of his fits. This was all in his head.

The brunette dismounted, then quickly quit the bed. She braced herself against the wall, as if she might be all that kept it from crumbling to the ground. She bit her lower lip and looked frantically from left to right.

“Should we call 9-1-1?” she asked the cowering blonde. “Should we call an ambulance?”

“I…I don’t know…”

“No doctors,” Jack squealed. “This…it happens all the time. We just have to let it pass…”

But Jack wondered if that were true. Certainly, it happened all the time, but how had he gotten better in the past? Why, Summer had been there for him. That time in New Orleans, when things had gotten out of control with the crank and Summer held him down and poured flat champagne through a funnel down his throat until finally he quit writhing. Or back in the early days, when she’d insisted he snort Tylenol PMs up his nose before he’d become unhinged. Or the time in Columbia when she played Jerry over and over and ran her fingers over his sweaty head until finally he’d settled.

“I just need…” He could hardly manage the words. “If you wouldn’t mind rubbing my temples for me. I think that would do the trick.”

Neither girl would go for it. The blonde tiptoed around the overturned bedside table to fetch her shirt, then her britches, and finally her jacket. She held them across her chest, as if to preserve any dignity which may remain.

“Please don’t leave,” Jack gasped. “Please, please…please do not go…”

The brunette began collecting her things. She kept her wide eyes on Jack, still convulsing on the bed, should he sprout wings and spit fire.

“Are we just going to leave him here?” she asked the blonde.

“I’m not sticking around,” came the answer. “This ain’t the first time some old guy’s had a heart attack while we was…you know. Last time, the cops had me jammed up pretty good over it and it took all I had to keep my name out of the papers. No way, man. If my parents found out—”

“I can’t feel my legs,” Jack moaned. “I need someone to call my mother. I need to tell her I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything…”

Said the brunette, “I left my car at the bar…”

“I’ll drive you.” The blonde had already dressed. She jangled her keys and was halfway to the door. “Let’s get out of here before this guy dies on us.”

“Please stay.” Jack’s right hand flopped like a fish at his side. “You can have more cocaine. I’ve got plenty. If you stay with me…Jesus—”

An eruption again at his chest, at or around his heart. His heart. He should have gone easier on it, he reckoned. With no Summer to peer over his shoulder, maybe he’d tinkered a bit much with the blow lately. What he wouldn’t give to go back in time and hold off a little, maybe pass on the last couple lines. Maybe snorting the boner pill had been a bad idea. Perhaps, if he just took a minute to breathe…

The two women swapped glances with each other then, as if they had both thought of it at the same time, and set upon his discarded blue jeans. The blonde rifled through the pockets and the brunette searched the floor. When they found no contraband, they set upon his chest of drawers, then the flat surfaces upon his desk. They found it tucked inside one of his cowboy boots.

“Have as much as you like,” Jack said. “Just please come lay at my side and sing into my ear. Do you know ‘Ripple,’ or ‘Sugar Magnolia’? Even ‘Box of Rain’ will do in a fix. You don’t understand, it’s all in my head…”

Neither woman gave the slightest shit about Jack or his maladies. With the sack of blow firmly in their hands, they gathered the rest of their clothes and made fast for the front door. Jack lay in the bed long after they’d left. He stared at the ceiling until finally his breathing returned to normal.

“See?” he said to the empty room. “I knew there was nothing wrong with me.”

 

THE DUDE who opened the door owned the house. His name was Rawlin and he played in a shit band somewhere in town. This meant there’d be plenty of girls around, and where there was girls, someone would want to party.

“Come in, come in,” said Rawlin. He had a young Vincent Price quality to him that Jack admired. In the living room, a small semi-circle of co-eds had spilled off the couch and onto the carpet. He said to the girl who’d come in with Jack, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Her name is Carmen,” said Jack. “She’s with me.”

“Is she…” Rawlin looked her up and down.

“Cool? Hell yeah, she’s cool. You don’t have to worry about anything. She doesn’t know a lick of English.”

“Really?”

“She’s Mexican,” said Jack. “Can you believe when I found her she was cleaning motel rooms on the edge of town?”

“At the StarLite?”

Jack put his arm around Carmen, who didn’t understand a thing they said. He nestled his nose deep into her hair.

“She’s the best thing to ever happen to me.”

That much was true. He’d freaked out one night and gotten a room outside of town because he was certain the trailer was no longer safe. He’d gotten complacent. He’d grown lazy. They were watching the trailer and he packed everything, then checked into the StarLite. The next morning, he heard the manager shouting outside his door, so he’d lit out the bathroom window, only to find out the old man had been yelling at housekeeping because they couldn’t get nothing right. He shouted up and down how it was no fair, he’d given them fake social security numbers and fake papers and the least they could do was mind him when he needed minding.

There had been no question for Jack. He’d never been more in love. He marched up the steps to the second floor and took the little Mexican girl by the hand and never looked back. He’d pointed his finger into that manager’s fleshy chest and said she wouldn’t be coming back. He could take that job and shove it.

But neither Rawlin nor anybody else in that house cared about Jack or Jack and Carmen or none of that, what they cared about was the shit. Jack’s shit. He pulled out an electric blue box of mints.

“Is this that stuff we heard about on the news?” asked Rawlin. “That shit is serious, man. I heard two kids in Arkansas killed themselves taking this shit.”

“They always make stuff sound worse on the news.”

“I read on the internet that a guy tried to bite off another guy’s face after he took one of these.”

“Again: you can’t believe everything on the internet.”

“I know,” said Rawlin. “I can’t wait to try some.”

Jack had stepped on it to hell and back. The kids coming up those days didn’t know real MDMA from dog shit. He cut it with some shit speed from Sam Tuley’s boys. Sometimes, he cut it with shit he bought in gas stations. If folks spun out too often, he’d relax the cut. Let folks go bonkers. Let them talk it up. Soon enough, he’d whack it again.

“They’re calling it Apocolypto,” Jack told the underclassmen in the room.

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s the end-all, be-all.” Jack thumbed open the tin of mints to reveal a pile of capsules filled with sky blue powder. He laid them end to end across the coffee table. He dropped out four more pills than Rawlin had said he wanted, so he fingered them aside. “Oh wait,” he said. “You guys only wanted eight.”

Before he could slip those four back into the mint tin, Rawlin stopped him.

“I’ll buy those four from you too,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “The frat boys down the road said they wanted them for the weekend.”

“Fuck the frat boys,” said Rawlin. “I’ll pay more.”

Jack loved the sparkle in Carmen’s eyes when money came this way and pills went that. She’d abandoned poverty and shit weather and a poor end of the stick to cross deserts and swim rivers and now she’d fallen in with a man of Jack’s caliber. He imagined, to her, it must be like winning the lottery.

Overcome with emotion, he took her by the hand.

“If you’ll excuse us…”

He barely got her to the passenger door of the shitty Honda before his hands and lips were upon her in a flurry. He could not get enough of her. His thirst would not be slaked. Finally, in a fit, he told her they should be married. He told her he wanted her to father his many children.

“Jack?”

Behind them stood a hippie dude wearing white boy dreadlocks. He hadn’t slept well in a good, long while from the looks of him. He had a sadness for the ages in his deep green eyes.

“Can I help you?”

“My name is Dario…”

Like that was supposed to mean something. Jack shook his head.

“You probably know me as Crunch.”

“Ah! Crunch. Good to see you, old pal. How have things been?”

“Uh…I don’t know, man.”

“Don’t worry about her,” said Jack, nodding his head to Carmen. “She can’t speak a word of English.”

Crunch kicked rocks. “Have you heard from Summer?” he asked.

Jack could lose his shit. The nerve of this guy asking after a girl while Jack had another on his arm. He always thought there something about Crunch that begged for a jab to the face. However, the current political climate in East Texas said there could be a good chance Crunch had a gun, or worse, a cellphone camera. So Jack took a deep breath and counted one, two, three.

“Not a word,” said Jack. “But she’s got a nasty history of taking off for long periods of time without any notice. It’s not outside of her character.”

Crunch nodded. “You know, the past couple of months, she used to say things. She’d get really high and talk shit.”

“Like what kind of shit?” Jack’s fingers tightened around Carmen’s waist.

“Mostly stuff about you. She talked a lot about her Jackie. About what we should do if she were to suddenly disappear one day.”

“Is that a fact?”

Crunch nodded again. “She was real worried about you. She made us all promise that if anything ever happened to her, we should take care of you.”

“Take care of me?” Jack swallowed coke draining down the back of his throat.

“Yeah,” said Crunch. “She really loved you and said we’d need to look after you. Said we were to help you with anything you might need.” Crunch’s eyes flickered to Carmen, then back to Jack. “She’d be so happy to see you’re doing just fine on your own.”

They nodded goodbyes, then Crunch stepped back up the walk toward the house. Jack watched after him maybe a moment longer than necessary when Carmen put her head on his shoulder.

“Cansado,” she said.

“Me too.” He led her toward the car. “I feel like I could eat a horse.”