There’s silence for one unbearable second, and then Buck’s voice crackles over the line, muffled and thready but there. Always there. Thank God, Eddie thinks. “Huh?”
Buck is usually the one in charge of saying something off-the-cuff when he picks up the phone. And then Eddie will say Hi, Buck, and Buck will say Hi, Eddie and get back to whatever it is he needed to say, unperturbed. “Someone peed in my backseat,” Eddie sighs, rolling his window back up so he can hear better. They have to be down, usually, when he’s by himself. The whipping of the wind manages to loosen some sort of invisible noose cuffed around his neck, whatever’s been making him feel suffocated and hollowed out. Eddie’s alright with being trapped for now, stuck inside of the familiar four walls of Buck’s voice. “My last rider today. He was really drunk.”
“Oh,” Buck coughs out, like he’s holding back a laugh maybe for Eddie’s sake, but it doesn’t really work. Something similar to relief skitters down Eddie’s spine, settling down near his tailbone. “That’s, uh, geez.” He clears his throat, swallowing down the rest of his laugh. Eddie can imagine the twist of his mouth, a peek of pearly white coming out to bite down on his bottom lip. “How even–did he just like, whip it out or something–”
“You don’t wanna know the specifics,” Eddie interrupts before Buck can let his imagination run wild, a shiver running through him at the not distant enough memory. “I had to perform black magic to get the fuckin’ smell out.”
Eddie turns right, the road long and winding before him, seemingly endless. If he had to choose one thing to miss about El Paso, maybe it’d be the sunsets. They were always so orange, almost angry in their vibrancy, setting alight all the buildings and the roads and the yuccas. “Sorry,” Buck says, and he has the audacity to sound genuine. “If I were your passenger, I’d at least have the decency to not do it on your seats.”
“Ah,” Eddie says, cranking up the shitty AC that doesn’t blow nearly hard enough, undoing the top button of his shirt. The driver’s seat will probably don a permanent sweat stain in the shape of his body soon. “‘Preciate it, bud.”
There’s the scrape of a chair against wood on the other end, an exasperated groan.
“Old man knees,” Eddie says.
“Fuck off,” Buck huffs, but there’s no trace of heat behind it. “One to talk, I can hear your bones when you sit down.” There’s some shuffling, a puff of breath. “I could,” Buck corrects himself softly, almost like Eddie’s not supposed to hear it.
Eddie swallows, dryness creeping up his throat in one fell swoop. The road keeps winding, the sky darkens to something more burnt and final, contrails making pretty patterns in it. “Hey,” Eddie speaks up after a beat. “Chris hugged me today.”
“That–” There’s a pause, and then the shuffling stops. “Shit, Eddie, that’s great.”
He sounds so pleased about it that Eddie can’t help but smile to himself, rubbing over an aching spot in his chest, tender like a damp spot of soil.
“Mhm. Thanks for, uh, getting me out of my head.”
“No biggie,” Buck says, and Eddie can picture the boyish up-down flop of his shoulders as he shrugs, his no big deal, just doing what I do shrug. He’s probably ducking his head too, though, blinking and looking off to the side like he’s trying to make himself smaller.
Eddie shakes his head even though Buck can’t see him. “Yes biggie. I know it’s not all fixed, but. You really helped a lot, Buck.”
Silence, then clinking. He must’ve sat down for coffee, probably his second of the day. It’s early enough in LA for it. Something constricts inside of Eddie’s chest then, like a big old iron fist clenching at the cage of his ribs. “Okay,” Buck acquiesces, so gentle Eddie barely hears it. “What are you doing? Anymore rides for today?”
“No,” Eddie says. “I’m driving over to Red Sands.”
“I guess it doesn’t technically exist, it’s not regulated. It’s sort of what people call that giant desert area in the East—you know Hueco Tanks?”
Yeah, Buck probably knows about every state park in existence. it just seems like something he’d be into. “Yeah, it’s not too far from there.”
The East side off of Montana Ave, Eddie remembers. He and Shannon used to drive out around Hueco Tanks in his beat up truck to get away from the city, park it, watch the sky. Maybe fuck on the truck bed under a blanket if it was dark enough, but that was neither here nor there. He’d look up and he wouldn’t feel so trapped for once, those precious minutes of stillness and quiet, the sky endless and all-encompassing. He didn’t know shit about constellations, so he’d make stuff up just so Shannon would laugh and bury her cold nose into his neck.
“Why’re you going there?”
“See the stars,” Eddie says. The sun continues to retreat farther, hiding itself away, and everything blazes red.
“Oh,” Buck says kind of wistfully. “Feeling sentimental?”
Eddie used to hate the sand. The desert, it just stretched on for miles and miles, that boring, ugly sand. He doesn’t really mind it now.
“Looks just the same,” Eddie says as he slows down on the road. Red-orange sand, dunes, small hills, sagebrush and yucca. There’s a couple of people zipping over the sand. “White guys love to come out here and ride their ATVs.”
Buck snorts. “I bet they do.”
Eddie wishes, with a sudden blinding ferocity, that Buck were there with him. He could picture it, even, Buck riding one of those eyesores over the blazing red sand dunes, the mostly reformed adrenaline junkie that he is.
“Wait,” Buck says suddenly. Eddie can hear him set down his mug. “Let me tell you what to look out for in the sky.”
That aching feeling intensifies tenfold, unrelenting. No matter how hard Eddie rubs at his chest, he can't work out the knot.
“Hm. Oh! You should be able to see Jupiter with your naked eye tonight. Mars, too.”
“Got it,” Eddie says, digging his knuckles into his ribcage. It hurts something fierce, but he keeps nudging. “I definitely know what those look like.”
“You can’t miss ‘em,” Buck insists. “You’ll know them when you see them. Trust me.”
Well, Eddie has never had any reason not to. “Sure,” Eddie says. “Yeah, just call me Galileo.”
Buck huffs and then laughs in that way he does that calls Eddie lame without actually saying it. “Man,” Buck says suddenly, forcefully, like it’s bursting out of him. “I really love you.”
Eddie swallows, the ache spreading down to his stomach, stale water trickling from a leaky ceiling. “Hm?” he asks, even though he heard Buck loud and clear.
“I didn’t.” There’s silence. “Mean to, uh.”
Eddie blinks at his steering wheel. “So you don’t love me?”
“No! Uh, yes? Uh, no, I just meant. That.” Eddie wishes he could see whatever face Buck is undoubtedly pulling right now. “That felt weird.”
Eddie doesn’t want to think about why he doesn’t like that. “Why?”
“Maybe, I-I don’t know, because. We don’t really. Say it, I don’t know.”
“Friends love each other,” Eddie says, and it doesn’t feel quite right.
There’s more silence. Eddie feels wrong-footed all of a sudden, cold sweat on his brow. Man, I really love you. Of course Buck loves him, that’s—of course he does. Eddie already knew that. Of course. But it hits him then, like a horse kick to the chest, how they don’t really say it. They just do it.
Man, I really love you, it knocks him right upside the head.
“Yeah,” Buck says after what feels like an eternity times two. He sounds muffled and far away again, and Eddie wants to tell him to speak directly into the microphone, maybe get him to say it again with even more certainty and veracity, but that’d be asking too much. “Yeah, they do.”
The desert stretches on for miles. The wind whips. The ATVs sparkle under the last dying rays of sun. Man, I really love you.
“Yeah.” Eddie swallows, keeps rubbing at his chest that must be caving in. “I love you too,” Eddie says, and it feels too raw. “For the record.”
Buck laughs, more of an exhale of air than anything else. “Yeah. Yeah, good to know.”
Eddie is able to see Jupiter that night. Mars, too.
