Sierra Stern

Blue Boys

From the highway, Zippy’s Fuel N’ Food looks like a mirage, or an oasis. Behind it, the orange silt desert is flat for miles until the earth creases into a red wedge of raised rock, like a folded paper yawning itself flat. Behind that, is the end of California.

Built as though for a postage stamp, Zippy’s vast parking lot is a blue rectangle of negative space. In the center is Zippy’s itself, an ornate, lofty building with cement spires and geometric domes, red winds having glazed Zippy's bleached clay bones a powdery, sun-baked pink. At a certain time of day, you can’t look at it without going half blind from the smooth clay reflecting the desert sun. My manager told me Zippy’s used to be a mosque, though I’ve never met a Muslim within a hundred miles of Barstow.

Before Zippy’s, the decorative green qubbas that bloom from the roof used to be white. My manager once told me that in the Islamic tradition, vaulted domes like ours are essentially portals to heaven. He asked me if I figured they still worked, if Zippy’s might be a holy place. When I asked him where he got all that about mosques, he said his girlfriend just knows these kinds of things. The one time I met my manager’s girlfriend, I watched her whiten her teeth behind the counter with baking soda and lemon-lime Squirt.

There is something pious about the Mojave, maybe because desert light has weight and thickness, not just that eggshell-colored spectral gunk they have in other places. With the heavy afternoon purple bleeding through the windows, the maybe-once qubbas are dark and unknowably deep.

“Sir?”

I straightened, stunned to formality. I had never been called “sir” at my place of work. To be sure, Zippy’s is about as nice a gas station as you can find, the parking lot almost half electric charging stations, with the better part of one store aisle devoted solely to trail mix. It’s a gas station you patronize for the ambience, and the clean restrooms, and because there is nowhere else to stop for miles. Still, people most often address me with a clipped cough, or by my given name, which, after being gummed and chewed by desert patrons these past four years, has eroded into a hard, round shape.

I dropped my gaze, letting the qubbas fall out of view. I found, on the other side of the counter, a pack of delinquent-looking boys.

Their shirts fit loose around the torso and long around the arms, paired with bunching brown pants that moved in the silken shift of a curtain, and with so many pockets. In the nineties, I’d bought pants like that, and my parents forbade me to wear them. It was important that boys like me wore clothes that fit. Tightness and leather and movement and pockets would make me look black, and we were Haitian. My parents were ultra-aware of the difference, and part of the difference were those monstrous, cystic pockets.

I noticed, also, that their skin was blue. A hand the color of daylight dropped onto the counter in front of me. I frowned at the papery nails, grimy at the tips with a faint silver sheen.

All kinds of people live in the desert. In my just over thirty years of desert-dwelling, I’ve seen the unrelenting sun stain people red, orange, and purple. Plus the lighting inside Zippy’s has a way of greening everything. I checked my arm under the fluorescents, half-expecting an indigo cast over myself, a desert trick, but the blueness hadn’t spread to me.

I watched the hand lift, slowly, uncovering a black plastic lighter covered in thorns and roses.

The blue boys fixed interested eyes on me. There must have been seven or eight of them, all different heights and sizes.

“I’m returning,” said the one at the counter.

“We don’t sell these colors,” I said. I laid my hand atop a plastic table top display.

“Maybe you’re thinking of a different store,” I added.

The boys were stone-faced, unmoving.

“I’m just trying to return, sir. Gotta return to get back.”

I nodded, thinking I knew a desert-talker when I saw one. Mixed in with the slow-talking dialects of the Mojave, there are a handful of people whose linguistic quirks were more circumstantial than regional, formed in reaction to loneliness or just plain heat. The occasional trucker will come by the store who speaks about himself in the plural: “We’d like a Slim Jim, thanks.” Sometimes they mean them and their truck. I watched one split a jerky stick with the pavement, laughing at the feisty ghost of a once-owned dog. My manager has a certain amount of desert-talk in him too. He ends nearly every other sentence with the question “right?”, and he won’t go on until you reply “right” right back. With desert-talkers, it’s best to play along, for your sake and theirs.

So, I nodded. “Gotta get back,” I repeated.

The boys mimicked me earnestly, like we’d reached an understanding.

“Let me look it up in the system. Can I get your receipt?”

“I don’t have one.” The boy tucked a blue bottom lip under bone yellow teeth.

“That’s alright. Do you have the card you used for the transaction?”

“No, sir.”

I stood up taller, taking the lighter in my hand. The cold plastic bit at my palm. I sparked it, producing a dull dwarfish flame. The blue boy twisted a diamond stud between his fingers, hunching up his shoulder to meet his pierced ear. The whisper of an indigo mustache marked him older than he seemed.

“It’s half-dead,” I said.

The blue boy looked on wordlessly.

“Look, I really can’t issue a return. I could give you a refill.”

“We don’t have any money, sir.”

“That’s fine.”

The boys watched as I pumped the plastic lighter full with butane, my freebie for the day. I’d have to remember not to take a soda from the cold aisle at break.

I dropped the lighter into the boy’s waiting palm and he shrank back, the tail end of his reverent, “Thank you, sir,” swallowed by the horde.

“Yup. Anything else?”

Another boy approached the counter, wearing a navy durag. He set down a silver keychain of a laser cut and engraved showgirl silhouette.

“What Happens in Vegas…”

“We don’t sell these here,” I said.

The boys shifted uncomfortably, knocking together like bowling pins. They fell into rushed whispers. “You ask him.” “Man, I don’t wanna ask him.”

A blue hand clamped around my wrist, sending ribbons of unnatural cold up my arm. Before I could yank myself free, the hand let go.

“What is this?” I asked, eyeing the boys fearfully.

They looked at each other, a wordless conferral.

“Is that your car?” asked the boy in front. He stared through the sliding doors to my gold sedan. A blast of hot wind skimmed spores of dust off the top.

“It’s not worth anything,” I said quickly.

“It drives?”

I nodded, and the boy angled his back to me, a black wall of distressed hoodie filling my line of vision. The blue boys talked to one another in low, careful voices. I fixed my gaze on the raunchy keychain. A bit of writing etched into the showgirl’s cocked heel read:

Le Cirque Resort and Casino

I knew Le Cirque from road signs and from my grandfather, who lost his house gambling on the Vegas strip and got it back as compensation after proving that decades of salt-mining had seasoned his blood. “You are pressure cooking my heart,” he accused my grandmother, who had left him when the money was lost and returned once his lawsuit was generously settled.

I glanced at the lot out front, empty, save for my own car and an unpiloted chrome ice cream truck parked at pump number four. It had been there all morning, since I’d pulled into work, gleaming like a second sun in a pile of sugary blue antifreeze. I hadn’t time nor cause to investigate. Once, a boat was left stranded in Zippy’s parking lot for two weeks before it was mysteriously rescued. A similar thing happened with a local school bus. On summer days, it was best to fold my hands in a tent above my brow and walk the shortest, straightest path to the shaded employee entrance.

“Where’d you park?” I asked them. Le Cirque was not nearby, not even almost.

The murmuring ceased and a dirty look was thrown my way.

I frowned. “Where are you boys from?”

“Vegas,” they said, tugging at their clothes impatiently. I wedged my thumb between my hip and waistband, a routine unsticking.

In truth, the most harrowing part of working at Zippy’s happens even before I’ve punched in for the day. On oppressively hot days such as this one, I run from my car as the morning sun licks me raw and the blacktop spits up tar and heat. Drag your feet, and you may lose your shoes to the asphalt as it teethes your soles into a gummy polymer sludge. Step lightly and quickly, causing no fuss and making no problems. It is a heat insupportable to human life, suppressive and deadly.

I checked the boys for wiltedness, but they were solid. Their blue skin carried a slight sheen, like a cake hardened in the freezer.

“Did you walk?”

I wondered if the boys had suffered big losses like my grandfather, if they’d lost their car gambling and were now in need of a new ride. The blue boys couldn’t have been older than teenagers, and kids aren’t allowed in Le Cirque, not past the lobby. I held up the keychain. “How’d you get this?”

“Listen sir, we’ve got a lot to return,” said one boy, impatiently.

All at once, a dozen blue hands reached for pockets and rummaged around, emerging as taut fists. The blue boys derived an order in their wordless style of organization, and soon a small pile of pocket-sized items had accumulated in front of me. The last boy set down an aluminum cola bottle, half empty and black as steel.

I broke up the pile with my index finger, finding novelty watches, single-serve liquor bottles, and a gift card for Cracker Barrel, all cool to the touch.

“What’s all this?” I asked the last boy. A glacial wound ate at his collar bone, a tack-sized hole with glassed edges, just big enough to stick a straw through and have it come out the other side. He shrugged, and I fixated on the wound.

“We’re returning.”

“I don’t think I can help you,” I said, straightening my polo — Zippy’s green. “Without proof of purchase or the card used to make the transaction, I can’t help you. We don’t carry these things here. I’m fairly certain these goods are stolen.”

“Nobody fucking takes us serious,” he said, and with that the boys snatched back the goods.

As they filed out the sliding door, my eyes caught on the icy lacerations that pocked their backs. I took in the distress of their clothes, some of which reflected fashion, but an indeterminable amount of which seemed to have been inflicted by violence. The wind lifted their baggy pants, moving up through their legs and out from their sleeves like a ghostly possession.

The Mojave does not suit restlessness. My grandmother, who lacked a gambling spirit, taught me this during the years she lived at our house while my grandfather sorted himself out. She had no qualms being hours late, and when we were all set to leave our house for a dinner, or a baptism, or a graduation, she would stand in the doorway, her shriveled almond face behind the torn old screen, watching the wind. “I won’t walk through dust. We’ll wait for it to settle,” she said. While my father and I made the biannual pilgrimage to Le Cirque to rescue my grandfather from himself, my grandmother sat at the kitchen table with a cup and a candle and spoke to the Iwa spirits. My grandmother’s Vodou was democratic in nature. She and the Iwa would discuss my grandfather dispassionately until the spirits reached a majority vote. Then she would wait by the door to deliver my grandfather his sentence, which she doled to him without pleasure, a solemn intermediary between my grandfather and the vindictive Iwa.

I ran to the entrance, the sliding doors bumping open. A gusty wave of ovenous air seared the exposed skin of my forearms.

“Hold on,” I said. The boys came to a militant stop.

The blue boy with the blue durag twisted the showgirl keychain around his thumb. A glinting reflection sliced at my eyes.

“What do you need?” I said.

Blue faces spun toward my gold sedan. Unlike Zippy’s, my car is a natural desert entity. Squint your eyes and it disappears into a roadside sandbar, a tactical vehicle in its own right.

From beneath a sheath of dull silt, its coat shimmered.

It took fifteen minutes to close up Zippy’s, with the blue boys assisting with the mopping and emptying the garbage. They refused to touch the merchandise, even the expired milk bottles, which I collected into a winking black bag and took out myself.

I weighed the implications of locking up early. The distended bladders that would have to empty themselves on the side of the road and the cash that would be useless at the gas pump —hot urine steam and lethal middle-of-nowhere strandings. But it was no use guilting myself. With my Zippy’s polo damp against my back, I climbed into the driver’s seat, the horizon faraway and bright, like a new world.

The boys were good sports about doubling up in the backseat. They didn’t seem to mind sitting on one another’s laps, and the smaller boys crouched on the carpet in between bundles of blue legs. The gangly one with the peephole collarbone joined me in front.

“AC’s broken,” I said, clutching the molten steering wheel with a wad of tissues in each hand. I rolled down all the windows and looked back at the boys, who were perfectly still.

“Le Cirque?”

They nodded. I twisted in my seat and turned the ignition. The radio jumped to life.

“Do you mind?” said Collarbone, deferentially. I shook my head.

Collarbone had expansive tastes. He listened raptly to basketball interviews, raunchy radio comedians, and Christian radio. The one noise he wouldn’t tolerate was ad breaks, which he skipped with a cold jerk of the knob, changing the station.

“Are you from out there?” I asked. “Vegas?”

They nodded.

“How’d you get out here with no car?”

“Hitched a ride,” said one, sending snickers rippling through the backseat.

“Yes sir,” said Sir. A blue smile flickered in the rearview mirror. “We hitched a ride.”

After some time, the blue boys slept, fogging the windows with the cool frost of their breath. Only Collarbone sat awake, jamming his fingers into the air vents.

“Are we close?” he asked.

It was dead black outside. On the far side of the two-lane highway, the level road faked a dropoff of unknowable steepness.

“Almost,” I said. “Yes.”

The car devoured miles of road, leaving a trail of absolute darkness. When hazy light colored the sky in front, I knew we were nearly there and looked at Collarbone. The colors of the city streaked and smeared in the darks of his eyes. He twisted the radio dial with padlock precision and a local Vegas station spat gravelly burlesque-pop through the speakers.

Thirty minutes prior, Collarbone had mashed the volume dial, smothering a grainy Christian rock song. The sun sank low and I knew just how Zippy’s would look at that moment, yellow-gray with dancing ribbons of fluorescent pink, like the sliced-open belly of a salmon.

“Off this exit,” he instructed and navigated us to a gas station half the size of Zippy’s, a peeling poppy yellow all over.

The boys slunk onto the tar.

I filled my tank and watched people watch them. A tanned little girl in the back of a Camry leaned over the front seat. A man colored like a bag of coins, with copper skin and nickel-silver hair, locked his pickup and stalked towards the store, keeping burning eye contact with the window. I broke from my car and hustled after him.

The place was a dump compared to Zippy’s. A weak promise of air conditioning whistled from the ceiling. The boys were at the counter, returning a pair of sunglasses.

The coin man hovered in the aisles nearby, pretending to contemplate a bag of chips as he eyed the boys. I felt protective of the boys now, and took a place in line behind them, feigning interest in a candy bar. I could just see the cashier behind Collarbone’s head. She nodded with perfect understanding and didn’t look the least bit disturbed. I recognize, when I see one, a master of the desert.

As the boys walked past, the man reached out a pennied hand to touch the midnight gossamer of Collarbone’s hair. Collarbone glanced at him coldly, but kept walking.

In the car, I asked if he was alright

“Rude as hell,” he noted grimly and punched on the radio.

“Off this exit,” Collarbone said now, and in my rearview mirror the boys straightened and stretched.

The blue boys consumed Vegas in sips as though wary of intoxication, or poisoning, the pebble of the moon and the smoked out stars sprayed everywhere like pill dust. On my first trip to rescue my grandfather, my eyes drank up so much light that my head blew a fuse and burst. On the drive home, my grandfather and I knocked our heads in tandem against the cold window glass, nursing fraternal twin headaches.

We left the car in guest parking, just a couple blocks behind the hotel. Drunken tourists lassoed the boys in for pictures, pressing twenties into their hands like the roadside showgirls had trained them to do in exchange for a photograph. The boys considered these circumstances thoughtfully.

“Being so nice for what,” said one. The others nodded.

They knew the way to Le Cirque, the best way, cutting through two other resorts to get there. We passed over the hypnotic casino carpets, watching a man in navy slacks and a white dress shirt get dragged onto the glittered black tile, away from that maddening rug.

Seeing the blue boys, he shouted, “They’re fucking kids, bro. I’m a grown-ass man, and you’re telling me I can’t be on the fucking carpet? Fuck that.” He shoved away from his detainer. “Don’t fucking touch me, man.”

I pulled at my Zippy’s polo where my sweat had rendered the fabric thin and porous.

“What the fuck are you wearing, bro? Zippy’s?”

The boys kept their heads down, and I followed suit. We made for the exit, and one of the boys looked up at me.

“Don’t listen to him, man. You’ve got your own thing going on.”

The blue boys were home. Any novelty they derived from the city came from their new sidewalk celebrity. I noticed the slight seize of their shoulders as we stepped into the desert cold, like cats afraid of being thrown by the skin of their necks.

This was Vegas as I knew it too, not lively, but undead. The Strip buildings piped with laser beams and neon tubing — darkness as the exception and not the rule.

We embarked on a crawl of the local drugstores, which were grander than they had any right to be. The cashiers in the city were older and pinker, but for the most part they pretended that the boys were of a natural color and condition. With each return, I became sure that I had done right by Zippy’s.

At last we reached Le Cirque. It wasn’t as I remembered – the plush wallpaper was replaced by floor-to-ceiling screens advertising magic shows, restaurants, and luxury stores. The hanging chairs were gone too, replaced with vintage candy-red conversation pits. The floor was hard resin over wood, sticks of petrified hay and gilded peanuts suspended beneath our feet. If Le Cirque had looked like this two decades before, my grandfather would have been safe from its allures – his conceptions of luxury were wrapped up in fine fabrics, pink marble, and games that warranted a table, a dealer, and oil-brown liquor in a martini glass.

The boys made for the store, a small alcove left of the checkout desk. They walked in a procession behind the holder of the keychain, who was short and muscled.

Before my grandfather’s big loss, he had a series of small to medium losses from which it was important that he be rescued by my father – and me, if I had the day off from school. Back then, the lobby of Le Cirque was blue velvet with red stone pillars and gold-framed funhouse mirrors, with woven chairs roped to the ceiling, where I took up dutiful residence until my father stalked past me, heavy with impotent rage. My grandfather tottered close behind, giggling nonsense, mushy black eyes dripping tears.

In my twenties I feared one day becoming someone like my grandfather, the kind of person to chase an oasis until it crumbles into the sand at my feet, but I never did. Money never burns hot in my pocket. Luxury doesn’t turn a winking eye my way. The seductions of Le Cirque were plastic, jewel-toned and diamond-cut only behind a curtain of dust.

The boys returned from the store with a gift for me – a white, size large t-shirt and their picture money.

“Keep that,” I told them. “That’s yours.”

“Nothing’s ours,” said one. “That’s the point.”

They walked out the door, and walked in the direction opposite the car. Not sure if I was meant to follow, I trailed them from ten steps behind, pulling off my Zippy’s shirt in favor of the new one that read, in red letters, “King of the Big Top.”

We moved away from the glittering centerfold of the city, passing weed emporiums and sex stores.

“Home?” I asked. I didn’t know where that was for the boys – maybe at a real circus, whatever that would entail, or, though I hoped not, a beeping laboratory at a government institute.

“Not yet,” said Collarbone. I realized that, perhaps selfishly, I had pictured Le Cirque as our final destination.

We walked until I could see houses in the distance, squat and pale, finally stopping at a liquor store.

The blue boys turned to me and Collarbone handed me the gunmetal black bottle.

“We’re not allowed,” said Collarbone, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know their rules. They slept like normal boys, but maybe they were something like vampires, unable to go certain places, and invincible most of the time.

Inside, the liquor store was unextraordinary and highly fluorescent. I checked the price of a coke in the drink aisle and approached the check-out counter. It was unattended, the entire store was, so I laid down a five. A television loomed over the desk, screening a saturationless security feed. On the wall beneath was a collage of pictures over which somebody had scrawled on a piece of yellow painter’s tape, “WATCH OUT”.

I barely recognized them at first, but after a few seconds, I made up my mind about it. There on the wall were the blue boys, black.

I walked out to the parking lot. The bottle, after all it had been through, deserved to be recycled. Its final resting place would be the blue bin outside my apartment.

The boys, who had migrated to the curb, eyed me gratefully.

“Sorry about that,” said Collarbone. “Got busted there a couple times. Then a final time.” He rubbed his wound in a gentle, polishing motion. Shimmering dark splotches stained the ground at his feet — blood, or motor oil, or cola.

“What now?” I asked.

“Now, we’re cool,” said Collarbone, extending a hand. I let him fold up my palm in his, his blue skin thickening the blood in my fingers with an icy squeeze.

“Can I do anything else?” I asked, and the boys said no.

They clapped me on the back (“Thanks, man.” “Appreciate it.”) and began to shed their clothes. As they cast off the bulky fabrics, their blue skin took on more of that frozen sheen, like the mirrored surface of a skating rink. Collarbone’s wound crumbled at the edges and the blue boys’ skin cracked and fractured. I looked to their faces, finding their eyes jammed shut and blue lips parted in agonizing euphoria.

Before long, blue skin fissured into slush and a sound like the shudder of a speeding car rattled the lot. The human-sized heaps of blue snow collapsed and misted, blanketing the parking lot in a fine, crystalline powder.

And just like that, there were no blue boys. I called a ride service for a lift to my car – it wasn’t the sort of neighborhood you walk in alone – and drove home, the sightless desert a matte, warming black.

For an hour or so the radio choked on static, until I came to a large quarry town and it came alive in a gasping breath. The desert news:

An archaeological site outside Barstow was reopening. 20,000 years ago, the site was a soft marsh where people fell through the ground and became buried-alive fossils.

A weather advisory for record heat.

Outside Vegas, a group of teenagers were hospitalized after a hit-and-run, by an ice cream truck of all things. The boys, who had pocketed goods from a local liquor store, ran from the manager’s gunfire into the street, where they were hit. The boys were critical but stable, some sustaining bullet wounds, and many remained in a limited state of consciousness. Police followed the ice cream truck on a slow-speed chase for two hours when they were finally able to arrest the driver at a closed Zippy’s Fuel N’ Food and take him in for questioning. Both the store manager and the driver are in police custody.

Their families were worried sick but the boys are awake now. Soon they’ll be released to return home, though for a while it seemed like they might not make it.

“Gotta return to get back,” the blue boys had said.

When my grandmother forgave and took back my grandfather, they moved back to Haiti and built a big house in the wealthy, high-up part of the country. Gray all over, they keep to themselves, mostly, though they invited my parents home, building their exact house in miniature right next door. I visit sometimes – when Zippy’s can spare me. My parents have offered me a house too, built for one. I tell them maybe, but, in truth, Zippy’s needs me.

The desert has many rules, some of which my grandparents learned, though they never put their heads together to figure out the whole of it. Know when to wait, and, when necessary, to act. Know an oasis when you see one, whatever it may appear to be.

See, the implicit duty of a Zippy’s employee is to care. The desert knows this, and it chooses me. It chooses me.

Sierra Stern is an English major from Los Angeles, CA. She is shocked to be a runner-up for any kind of contest and is thinking of entering the Zack and Cody Danimals Sweepstakes to see if she can ride this thing all the way.