Hot in the City
The heat was sweltering. Were it not so dark, the heat could probably be seen causing that boiling effect in the air that made the scenery wrinkle directly above the source of the heat. The whole city must've been boiling tonight, what month was this again? July? August? June? Who could remember? Right now, John Smith was finding it very hard to focus on anything other than the heat.
Too hot to sleep, that was an expression he'd grown up hearing, but he knew it was more times a lie than not, sometimes it was so hot the only thing you could do was sleep. Even now, that his whole body was plastered in perspiration and he couldn't even tell which way was up, his eyelids felt so heavy and so burnt, all he could think about was closing them, they drooped, and he blinked slowly, then opened them again, but after a while the temptation for sleep became too great and he let them stay shut.
"Johnny!"
Hmm? He grumbled as he opened his eyes again, what was that? Did he hear something? And if so, was it real, or was he hallucinating? Growing up in California, he'd often heard about people who suffered from mirages out in the heat, things you could see that weren't there.
"Johnny!"
They even had talking mirages apparently. What was that? It sounded…familiar. It sounded…like someone he knew.
"Johnny!"
"Mom?" he found himself calling out into the darkness, uncertainly.
And then the darkness was replaced with light, a bright light, a bright burning, scorching hot light.
John Smith opened his eyes in his refuge under the shade of a large lemon tree, and looked around to see where the sound was coming from. Sitting up he was able to see his mother coming towards him, and she looked fit to be tied. She was in a sleeveless dress that she wore every summer, preferably when nobody was around to look, and had her skirt hiked up to avoid treading on the dirt ground, under that she was barefoot; and her hair that she usually just tied up on her head, had been chopped off recently because of the summer heat, and it had come out of the trimming less than even. In a way, in this instance, she reminded John of Betty Compson, pretty woman. But Mama sure wasn't looking too pretty right now with that look on her face.
"Johnny Smith, you get up and get yourself home right now," she told him, "It's too hot to be out here."
Even for only being 6 years old, he knew that it wasn't going to be a whole heck of a lot better at the house either. Grunting, he rolled over onto his knees and jumped to his feet.
His mother's attention was momentarily turned to a roughly dug hole in the ground that was approximately three feet across and less than one foot deep, and next to the edge of the hole was a spade with a broken handle so it was roughly 6-year-old size.
"Johnny, what in the world is this?" she asked him.
"A swimming hole," he answered, stepping out of the tree's shade and letting his mother see for the first time how filthy he was from his excavation. Or at least, it would be when he was finished, he knew it wasn't big enough to fill in yet but he had to get out of the sun before he started digging again.
John looked up to the contents of the fruit tree and told his mother, "I want lemonade."
Mrs. Smith glanced up at the lemons on the tree that were growing despite the blasted heat; she stepped onto the lowest branch and climbed a few steps up to grab hold of one and pick it off. She jumped off the branch and landed on her feet like a cat, and examined the lemon. It was a nice size and yellow, but she stuck her nail into the rind to peel it back, took a bite of the citrus fruit, and almost immediately spat it out and tossed the rest like a baseball and commented to her son, "They're not ripe yet."
It didn't stop him from pouting like a dog and reiterating, "I want lemonade."
"Sorry, pal," she said to him, "You'll have to settle for milk when the truck comes again."
The iceman was running late that day, they'd had to drink up the rest of the milk before it went bad. It was already getting warm in the icebox, John hated warm milk, especially in hot weather. Hot milk and a peanut butter sandwich, maybe a better lunch than no lunch at all, but the whole afternoon he'd been wishing he hadn't eaten it. And he was starting to feel that way again, he grabbed at his stomach and started whining and whimpering.
"What's the matter with you?" his mother asked him.
He could barely even open his eyes, he felt so lousy, "My stomach hurts!"
"That's the heat," she said as she knelt down for him to climb on her back. He did, and rode piggyback all the way back to the house, which wasn't too far away.
The house was dark. The windows were all only opened a crack so the hot breeze could get in, but only the smallest of bugs could make themselves at home over the windowsill. The curtains were drawn, the shades were pulled down, there wasn't a single window letting any sunlight into the house on this day. Being out of the sun helped a little, but the house was still hotter than blue blazes and John knew it.
"Why can't we go to the city pool?" he asked as his mother let him down.
"It's too far away and too hot to get there," she said as she kicked the door shut and started to pull her dress up, and off, and remained standing in the front hallway in a full slip.
He tried to think of another idea, "Why can't we go to the movie house?" And like a salesman throwing a pitch, he repeated as he'd heard often before, "Top billing as always goes to 'healthily air conditioned seats at our local theater'."
"It's still too far and too hot to get there on foot," Mrs. Smith told her son as they went into the kitchen, "Your father has the car, and the buses don't run out this way anymore."
John grumbled and pouted as he sat down at the kitchen table, sinking in his chair so much his mouth was pressed against the tabletop.
Mrs. Smith went over to the sink to get a glass of water, and as she did she happened to look to the thermometer that was just about to the top in red.
"110 degrees in the shade," she said breathlessly, "They'll be wrapping the cameras in ice today, it's Death Valley all over again." She turned her head back towards her son and added, "And your father in sleeves and a coat, goggles, and grease paint, to keep the sand off him once the wind picks up at 70 miles an hour, it'll be a wonder if they don't all die on that movie lot today."
John was half paying attention to his mother, and half paying attention to the cute girl on the can of salt as he picked it up and turned it one way and another: short curls and a big bow in her hair as she clumsily held onto a huge umbrella with one hand, and in the other, obliviously and equally clumsily spilled the canister of salt out behind her as she walked in the rain. Oh to have rain right now, then it wouldn't be so hot, then his swimming hole would fill up.
His mother took the can of salt and poured a good amount of it into the glass of water and stirred it up and gave it to him to drink, for his stomach she said. He didn't fight with her, he liked salt water, he was always drinking it when he should've been gargling it when he was sick.
"I wish there was a trial we could go watch at the courthouse," he said as he sat back in his chair and kicked his feet, which were inches from the ground, "They've got fans in the ceiling there."
His mother just smiled at him and said, "This heat isn't going to last forever, we just have to wait it out."
"Can we go to a show tonight?" he asked hopefully.
She replied with a knowing smirk, "We'll see." She pushed her chair back and stood up and added, "But first of all, you need a bath."
John scrunched his face up when she said that. She pulled his chair back and picked him up and carried him off to the bathroom, halfway there she stopped for a second and said to him, "You know what, Johnny? I've got a plan."
The giant claw foot tub in the bathroom was filled up halfway with cool water, John laid back in the water and kicked his feet like he was trying to swim. So it wasn't the swimming hole, it wasn't a bad second either. His mother had already tried scrubbing his skin off until he was clean as a whistle, then she drained the tub and refilled it and had him get his swimsuit on. And he sat up when he heard his mother announcing her presence as she reentered the bathroom in her dressing gown that was tied around the waist.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said as she sashayed in, "For your viewing pleasure tonight, the bathing beauty that Mack Sennett never touched with a 10 foot pole," and she scatted a burlesque strip song as she slowly untied the belt and then yanked it clear out of the gown's loops, and continued to shimmy as she slowly inched her gown open and then shrugged her arms out of it and grabbed it in one hand and spun it around like a cat by its tail, revealing her one-piece bathing suit that did look like something left over from the era of Mack Sennett's bathing beauties. John clapped from where he sat in the bathtub and watched as his mother jiggled on her ankles from one side to the other as she pretended to take bows at the audience applauding her performance.
"Is that what you used to do in vaudeville, Mom?" he asked as she stretched her long legs over the edge of the tub and crouched down in the water beside him.
She got out a small guffaw and answered, "If I had, your father and I would be rich by now."
There was a brief silence between them before John absently started splashing his hands in the water and he asked his mother, "This is a bad summer, isn't it?"
His mother dipped a rag in the cool water and used it to dab at her face as she responded nonchalantly, "Every summer's hot, especially here in California."
"Don't remember it being this hot though," he said.
"That's because we never took you to the Mojave Desert, that's hot," she told him.
He thought about it and decided, "If this isn't hot, I don't ever want to go there."
His mother chuckled and dabbed his face with the cold rag and said, "You have it lucky, you remember those old tintypes you saw of your great grandmother?"
"Yeah."
She nodded and told him, "Be glad you never have to go through the summer in long sleeves and heavy skirts and underskirts and stockings and a corset, and button up shoes and hair clear down your back."
John let out a noise of disdain and sank under the water at that comment. His mother reached under the water, grabbed him by his hair and pulled him back up.
"And no 'healthily air conditioned theaters'," she added.
John made another dramatic noise and sank beneath the surface again.
Once John got out of the tub and dressed again, his mother called him down to the living room. She'd spread out a few cool sheets and blankets on the floor and some pillows, and told him to lie down.
"It's time for a nap," she said.
"But I'm not tired," he replied.
"Well it's too hot to do anything else," she told him.
"I don't want to take a nap," he said.
"You're either going to go to sleep or I'm going to put you to sleep for a week," she said in an empty threat. She grabbed him and plopped him down on the blankets.
"I'm not tired," he said again.
They both put their hands on their sides and gave each other an identical mocking scowling look.
"Alright," she conceded, "You want to hear a story?"
"Yeah," he said gleefully.
"Alright, I'll tell you a story," she said, and sat on the blankets Indian-style and folded her arms to her chest and said cynically, "Once upon a time there were 3 dragons and their names were I, R, and S, and they terrorized the entire free world and made life a living hell for all good people. Then one day up came three bears, a papa bear, a mama bear, and a little," she held her hand high over her head, "Baby bear. And they called in seven dwarfs, who brought with them a whole pack of Piccaninny Indians, headed by Tiger Lily. And these all banded together against the dragons, who were then hogtied, and hot tarred and feathered, and run out of town on a rail, and set on fire, and thrown off the edge of the world."
John just laughed his head off and applauded the story when she was finished talking.
"Alright, Johnny," she said, "You want a real story now?"
"Yes," he nodded eagerly.
"Alright, this time we'll read one of my books," she said as she got to her feet.
"Good," he said as he lay back against the pillows and crossed one leg over the other.
A moment later, his mother came back and lay down beside him on the floor and read the latest thrilling chapter from The Perils of Pauline. The story was exciting enough, but after a while, the heat won over and John found himself falling asleep amidst his mother's words.
That evening, John stood by the icebox chewing a piece of bubblegum as he watched his mother pile a few bottles of beer around the new block of ice that had been placed in the box a short while ago.
"I've got half a mind to kick that iceman in the seat of his pants," she said as she kicked the door shut, "Three hours late, it's a wonder the food didn't all spoil." She picked up a saucer that contained the only casualty of the afternoon, a melted half pound of butter.
"Too bad we're not making popcorn," John mused.
"As hot as it is," his mother told him, "We could probably pour some out in the sidewalk and it'd pop in no time."
John felt his stomach rumbling like a small earthquake and he felt like somebody had scooped out his entire insides from his stomach clear up to his eyeballs in hunger.
"What're we having for supper?" he asked.
His mother sighed and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, "Probably just hot dogs and beer, it's too hot to cook anything else."
John was just about to recite one of his father's jokes about 'it wouldn't matter because you can't cook anything other than hot dogs anyway', but he was interrupted when they heard a sound outside.
"What's that?" his mother asked as she looked towards the kitchen door.
John went over and put his ear to the door, it sounded like an animal or something scuffling along the outside wall, around to the front door. They'd had plenty of trouble before with tramps and drunks passing through, and it looked like this might be another such incident.
"John, go look out the window, do you see a car outside?" his mother asked.
John scrambled to the front of the house and pulled a shade up just enough to see the street outside. It was as barren as a wasteland.
"Nope, Mom, there's nothing out there," he said.
By now they could hear the scuffling, scratching noises at the front door. John turned to his mother and saw her pull a pepperbox revolver out of a drawer and quietly tiptoe towards the front door. She stood off to the side between the door and the stairs and she called out, her finger touching the trigger, "Come on in, pal, the door's open!"
The door flung open and in stepped a man in a long coat with an upturned collar, a battered hat on his head and a pair of goggles over his eyes.
"Hello, Annabel!" he got out in a wheezed breath as he threw his arms out for her.
"John!" she exclaimed in fury as she dropped the revolver and gave him a shove with one hand, "What's the big idea scaring me half to death?"
John Smith Sr. peeled off his hat and the goggles and his coat and said in a heaving breath, "I'm about dead from this heat and you think I've got time to play games? The back door was locked."
"We didn't hear you drive up," she replied.
"No," he answered as he took his coat and hat and goggles and tossed them into the next room, "It got so hot one of the tires exploded, if you can believe that." He got out an exhausted sigh and asked his wife, "How 'bout a beer?"
"None cold," she said, "The iceman was late."
"Beautiful," John Sr. said as he trudged into the kitchen, "Do you realize it was 130 degrees today? Three of our guys are in the hospital, between the three of them they must've sweat off 50 pounds. This is the worst day we've had all summer."
"Believe me," Annabel dryly remarked, "I noticed."
John Sr. took a bottle of beer out of the fridge and held it to his forehead to judge how warm it was. Without turning around he told his wife, "Gonna be murder trying to sleep tonight, we'd be better off heading to the movie house, get a couple hours in cold air anyway."
John Jr.'s eyes lit up and he looked to his mother hopefully as if to say, 'I told you so.'
"Of course," his father added, "It'd be just our luck we'd get stomped to death on the way. You know what they say about more murders occurring in high temperatures, streets will be full of people trying to get in somewhere cool. We're probably just as well off staying here where it's 105 degrees in the dark, probably what, Annabel, 102 here in the house? That's assuming you don't make this kitchen hot as blue blazes trying to cook something."
"Don't get cocky, John, you're drinking half of your dinner now," she mentioned.
John swaggered over to the sink, threw some tepid water on his face and washed off the remainder of the grease paint from the movie lot, and commented as he dried off, "Probably better off just sitting in the dark tonight and listening to whatever's on the radio…or not." Looking to his wife he suggested, "Maybe we'd be better sleeping out on the porch, have to get some breeze if there's any wind at all."
Annabel Smith noticed that despite his best efforts, her husband still had sand and dirt plastered to his clothes and skin from working on a sand storm effect for a film he was involved with.
"Go get washed up," she told him, "Dinner'll be ready when you get down here."
John Jr. found himself swiping at his eyes several times while waiting on his father. His clothes were stuck to him and his hair was wet from the heat. He started to dread eating dinner because he was sure his stomach was going to start hurting again.
"Johnny, take your clothes off," he heard his mother say out of the blue.
He didn't get it, but he did as he was told, he took off his shirt and his pants, and his mother lifted him up and had him standing in the sink. She filled a pitcher with water and told him to close his eyes and hold his nose. He did, and the next thing he knew, half of his body felt ice cold and it sucked the breath right out of him, but at the same time he got out a high pitched yelp. His mother refilled the pitcher and rinsed him down once more, then gave him a towel to dry himself with and she lifted him out of the sink and set him back on the floor.
As he got dressed again, he watched as his mother took another towel, one that she tied over her hair when she was dusting, and she ran it under the faucet, then wrung it out and tied it on her head and made it look like a turban. John giggled and told his mother, "You look like a genie, Mommy."
Annabel Smith smiled but also sighed as she said, "This is going to be a horrible night."
John sat at the table and watched as his mother took a bottle of beer out of the icebox and poured some in a cup for him. She gave him his cup and put the rest of the bottle at her place at the table, and as she sat down, her son asked, "Mama? This is a bad summer, isn't it?"
"Very bad," she answered, "But we'll get through it, we always do. You know why?" The 6 year old boy shook his head. She gave him a small, albeit miserable smile, and ruffled through his hair as she told him, "Because we're tough, that's why, we can survive anything, we can endure anything. It's going to take more than a little heat to get the better of us."
It was still hot, and dark again, everything was dark, he was still hot, his throat hurt from being dry, his tongue felt like sandpaper, his lips felt like fish scales. He could still feel a hand running through his hair.
He swallowed hard a couple times to be able to talk, his voice came out low and rough, "M-Mom?"
There were people around him, talking around him, he couldn't make out what they were saying though. He tried listening and slowly, some of the words started to be coherent. It slowly dawned on him that the people were talking about him.
"He seems to be coming around now."
"It's about time."
Wait a minute, he knew those voices.
Something caught in his throat and Hannibal started coughing, he opened his eyes and saw three familiar faces hovering over him.
"Wha-a-a-at's going on?" he slowly croaked out. If he'd been able to, he would've gasped, just saying that made his throat feel like it was splitting in half.
"How're you feeling, Hannibal?" Face asked, his voice as full of concern as the look on his face.
"I…" he tried moving and realized something didn't feel right, "What's happened? What's wrong?"
"You don't remember, man?" B.A. asked, "You was out of it."
Hannibal tried to think back to what they were talking about. Oh yes, it took a little bit, but he remembered. He closed his burning eyes for a moment as he thought back.
Every so often there came a time where the plan did not come together. This was one of them. Hannibal vaguely recalled being hit in the back of the head and passing out, and he remembered slowly coming to and feeling the ground beneath him vibrating, then realizing it wasn't the ground, it was the floor of a speeding car, that he was thrown out of and left out somewhere in the middle of Death Valley, downright insufferable place to be shanghaied to at this time of the year; especially when you were only half conscious with no water and no way to find shelter from the heat and the sun. He'd tried though, he didn't remember how but he remembered finding some shade, some small refuge from the beating down sun. He had no way of knowing how long he'd been out in that murderous heat before the others found him.
Now though, it was starting to come together why he felt weird.
"Do I even have any skin left?" he inquired weakly, jokingly.
"That depends, Colonel," Murdock said, "You talking about the red stuff or the bubbly stuff?"
Hannibal closed his eyes and murmured, "It'll all be the same in a couple days."
"Maybe not," Face replied, "I think Murdock's sacrificed every aloe plant in Los Angeles to keep you coated in the stuff."
Ah, that would explain that disgusting feeling more so than just his skin peeling off would.
"Where…" he asked, "Where are we?"
"Our place," Face answered, "I really don't think after all the time we spent in the jungle heat, there would've been anything a doctor could do that we couldn't."
A weak laugh got past Hannibal's throat, "That's true." He took in the facts that the house Face had scammed them was almost cold with the air conditioning, also, he could tell from the feel of the bed sheets that somebody had relieved him of most of his clothes, which led to the natural conclusion that it had either been to subject him to a cold bath, or an ice sponge bath, or both. And he also knew that despite his throat feeling as dry as the desert, that nothing got past his men so it went without question that they'd worked around the clock at getting him rehydrated, he could even taste salt in the back of his throat. Nothing got past them indeed.
"In any case, I think we managed to head off heat stroke before any permanent damage set in."
"I guess time's going to tell on that one," Hannibal said as he tried sitting up in the bed, "How long did it take for you guys to find me?"
"Actually," Murdock said, a hint of guilt present in his tone, "About six hours."
"That quick, huh?" Hannibal tiredly joked.
"It would've been sooner except we kind of crashed into the guys that dumped you in the desert," Murdock started to explain.
"And then they got the drop on us," Face added.
"So then the crazy fool had to come up with the plan to get us out of there," B.A. added.
"And we made sure there weren't going to be anymore surprises before we got out to the desert to find you," Murdock said.
"And even then we about missed you because you were half burrowed under a pile of sand," Face told him.
"Hmm," Hannibal tried to think back, "Don't remember that."
"You know how lucky you were, Hannibal?" Face asked, "You know what the temperature was today? It hit an all time high for the year, 120 degrees. I don't even know how you survived it."
Hannibal closed his sunburnt eyes and smiled at the Lieutenant's astonishment. The younger generations had no idea. How had he survived? Because he'd already done it before, time and again, practically every single summer, decades before he'd even met them; and it wasn't just him, in those days, everybody had to endure the heat with little to no escape from it, and for the most part, they did. He remembered the stories about the heat during filming in the same damn Valley for 'Greed' in the early 1920s, then in the Mojave Desert for 'The Wind' at 20 degrees higher than the climax of 'Greed', he could still smell the grease paint his father and the other men from the movie studio wore to protect themselves from the wind and the blowing sand.
It was the same way he'd survived Ho Chi Minh's death camp in 1971, it was how he'd stayed alive and sane in that small metal box south of the border a year ago when they found that little girl Maria. It took more than excruciating heat to get to him; the problem was the usual long waits while being trapped in that heat, that started to get to you. He'd spent his whole life fighting off mirages, he wasn't about to give in to them now. He always managed to stay on top of what was real, and what only seemed real, it was a trick he'd spent years perfecting as a youth. And yet, every so often, there were those small moments where everything just seemed so perfectly real, how could you tell what was…and what wasn't?
He closed his eyes and heard his mother's laugh, heard her calling his name as she searched for him in the blazing summer heat, even now he could feel her hand through his hair. That wasn't a mirage though, that had been real, he remembered all of it. Those memories were a large part of the reason why he'd survived everything he had; they were simultaneously a reminder of what he'd walked away from before early on in his life, and they were also his escape.
Mind over matter, that's what they called it. Every year there were millions of people who believed you could endure insufferable heat just so long as you didn't think about it. A meditation of some kind, perhaps, it was a matter of training the brain to focus on something else, some place else, anything that would work to take your mind off your current, inescapable surroundings. The real trick was in learning how to juggle; you always kept your mind on the here and now to watch for that perfect opportunity, either to strike, or to escape, but at the same time, when the body was a prisoner the mind was the only thing that could see freedom, by running away to a safer place and time, if only for a short period of time. It made the days in the jungle, in the camp, in prison, all just a little easier to endure. If you could get through one day with a little less trouble, it seemed easier to get through the next, because you knew eventually your chance would come to break away and leave the hell behind. He'd done it before, and he knew he'd have to do it again in the future, but he could always rely on it to work.
Hannibal glanced down and got a good view of how burnt his arms were, and that was through his jacket. So apparently he was going to be spending the next few days blistering and peeling before he could get back to anything resembling a normal routine. Oh well, it wasn't anything he hadn't worked through before, and if he could before, he knew he could again. His mother had gotten him through the murderous heat waves when he was a kid, and now that he was an adult, he looked to those memories to help him cope with the dilemmas he faced these days. It was merely a case of remembering that he'd endured it all before, and he could again; it was still going to take more than a little heat to get the better of him.
"Thanks, Mom," he weakly murmured before falling back asleep.