Summer was always hot but this summer was Beyond Hot. The sun rose early and set late and even after dark the heat stuck around like the last guy at a party.
The tar on the highways bubbled like black lava and would not harden into road. In the breakdown lane you saw dead armadillos, dead squirrels, dead possums and dead cats too hot to run, and dead birds too spent to flap their wings. The heat burned the grass and dried the creek beds and bleached the arroyos. The rivers and lakes evaporated to puddles. Every day the radio said: Conserve water. But nobody listened. All we wanted to do was slurp the stuff until our guts hurt. We sweat when we stood still and when we walked the air stuck to our faces like caramel. The heat blurred our eyes, stole our salt, stained our shirts and stripped the fat from our bodies. We read the news: the stock market collapsed such and such percent, the body count in the war rose this high. But the only statistic that mattered was temperature, the barometer of hell.
The college and the government closed for the summer. The campus and the capitol building became ghost towns with skeleton staff. The homeless brigade abandoned their perch on the porch beside the library and fought for seats among the stacks. Meanwhile, the politicians and the millionaires swam on rooftop pools or escaped the city outright. One lawyer said the best way to spend the summer in this town was to go to Colorado. Meanwhile, the hip kids still wore dark tight jeans and long-sleeved checkered shirts as if it were not summer in the desert, but autumn in the mountains. Nobody told them what to do, not even the weather.
Robberies, muggings, stabbings, shootings and rapes rose on both sides of the highway. The police got on television and prayed for rain, the best crime deterrent and 100% natural. People abandoned the streets and hid indoors with their air conditioners and fans. If they had none, they loitered in malls, movie theaters, anywhere with an electric breeze. Or they went for a swim. The line of cars to park at the public pools stretched two miles. The lines of people inside the park to enter the pools stretched another mile. And in the water, people stood body to body, no room to swim laps, barely enough to stay cool.
Nobody played football on the fields or ran laps around the tracks. The country clubs and the municipal golf courses were empty, the fairways the color of the sand traps, but the greens still green thanks to the miracle of irrigation. The exercisers waited until dark to hike or bike on the trails by the river and at midnight the tennis courts echoed with the ping of balls on strings.
Downtown the heat stole so much business from the bars that one owner held a Free Beer Night: Six hours of poison on the house, plus the bikini contest on the overhead screens. Three old men came for the handout. Everyone else stayed home.
It was too hot to sleep or make love, too hot to pray. Even the churches were empty on Sundays. God understood. He would not want his people to die from heat on their exodus across the parking lot. Still, the kids at the Bible camp played games in the shade beneath the pecan trees.
Dogs died in cars, even with the windows cracked. Construction workers died from dehydration on the job. Meanwhile, the grey-haired man from Dallas, whose German and Scotch-Irish ancestors settled this state hundreds of years ago, complained these immigrants were taking jobs from Americans. They swam across the river and dropped Anchor Babies and became citizens and cost taxpayers money in school and hospitals. The worst part, he said, is the bastards won’t even learn English. He yelled until his face went red and his wife said: Time to go, Honey, before you get heatstroke.
Every day we hoped for rain and every day we were disappointed. We took cold showers every morning and before bed and pretended the bathwater came from the sky.
But I didn't mind. I sweat and watched my skin go from white to red to brown and watched the world melt and wrote you letters (some on the page, more in my head) with all the heat in my heart.