James Hynes - Next

“What’s that?” The Amazon is standing in front of Kevin again, twisting the cap off a bottle of water; there’s a red plastic first aid kit wedged under her arm. Now that he’s marginally less distracted by everything that’s happened in the last few minutes — falling, bleeding, sweating — Kevin takes a good look at her. She’s a little older than he thought — she has laugh lines, improbably enough, and a few more lines in her neck than he noticed before — but she truly is amazingly fit. Even when all she’s doing is twisting the cap off the bottle, her biceps flex under her glistening bronze skin. Sweat beads across her tight forehead and along the struts of her collarbone, and she peers at him with some sort of professional gaze, like she’s sizing him up.

“Sorry?” Kevin says.

“You said something about engineering.” She hands him the bottle. “Are you an engineer?”

“No.” Kevin’s alarmed that he spoke without realizing it. The bottle is blessedly cold in his hand, and he puts it to his lips and chugs a third of it. The shock of the cold water against his palate almost blinds him. Meanwhile the woman reaches into the truck bed again, and Kevin hears the hollow thump of a cooler lid and the liquid rattle of ice. She comes back with a bottle of orange Gatorade, which she twists open just as briskly.

“Editor,” gasps Kevin, the cold water freezing all the bones around his sinuses.

“Mm.” The woman nods with her mouth full, recaps the Gatorade, and sets it on the pavement.

“I’m an editor.” Kevin presses the cool lower half of the water bottle to his forehead.

“Okay,” she says. “Hold this.” She lays the first aid kit on top of Kevin’s jacket on his lap; it’s like the grade-school lunchboxes of his youth, only without gaudy pictures of the Monkees or the Man from UNCLE. She stands so close to him now that he can see the fine texture of her skin, but she doesn’t meet his eye; Kevin can’t tell if she’s being wary or demure. Of course, it has to be wariness — who’s demure anymore? She pops open the kit with her thumbs, reaches in, and snaps on a pair of surgical gloves.

“Wow,” says Kevin. “Is it that bad?”

“No.” She stoops to pry apart the rip in his pant leg with her latex fingers. The whitish gloves stand out on her dusky skin like she’s dipped her hands in paint. Kevin notes the Euclidean straightness of the part in her tight, glossy hair, admires its military precision.

“But I don’t know where your blood’s been, do I?” She says this abstractedly; it’s a line she’s used before. Then she looks up, fixes his gaze with her dark eyes, and smiles. “These pants are goners. Mind if I tear them a little wider to get at your knee?”

“Usually I’d expect dinner and a movie first,” Kevin says, “but go ahead.”

She smiles, but it’s a professional smile. She’s heard that one before, too. Kevin’s lizard brain begins to race. Who needs Kelly? Who needs the shopworn memory of Lynda on the railing? This moment right here, as the Amazon in latex tears his pant leg down to the middle of his shin with one sharp jerk, this is his official Austin Cute Meet. Yes, she’s formidable, and certainly fitter than Kevin — those biceps, those quads — but didn’t he used to fantasize about Sigourney Weaver in Aliens? And buff Linda Hamilton in the second Terminator? And, more recently, tough little Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica? Not to mention that the Amazon is more age-appropriate for him than Kelly or Stella or even Beth. Linda Hamilton, yeah, sort of crossed with that Latina actress he likes — not Jennifer Lopez, but the one who used to be in those John Sayles movies. She didn’t get those muscles and her brisk, no-nonsense manner from working in an office, thinks Kevin, and he remembers the first Amazon he saw today, the fierce National Guardswoman at the airport, and he wonders if this warrior priestess, dabbing the blood and grit away from his knee with a piece of gauze, might also be in the military. Wouldn’t that freak out his friends in Ann Arbor, if he ended up with a Texan, a Chicana, and a soldier!

“Am I hurting you?” She lifts the bloody gauze away from his knee.

“No,” Kevin says, so she presses a little harder. It does hurt, a little, but he’d never admit it to a woman like this. Obviously she’s some sort of health care professional — she snapped those gloves on without hesitation, and she’s probing expertly at his knee. Oh my God, she’s a nurse, concludes Kevin, this is my lucky day, not just because he’s getting his minor injury treated for free by a professional, but because she’s a nurse. Mick McNulty used to rhapsodize about nurses: among all the crummy jobs he’d held before his crummy job at Big Star Records, he’d been an orderly in a couple of nursing homes, and he used to tell Kevin that nurses made the best lovers, that they weren’t squeamish or sentimental about bodies, that they saw blood and shit and puckered flesh all day long, that fucking was just another natural function as far as they were concerned. In the years since, Kevin has realized that McNulty’s enthusiasm about the sexual sangfroid of nurses was just a variant of the male erotic mythology that celebrates the innate lubricity of cheerleaders, flight attendants, and waitresses. But on the other hand, McNulty claimed to be speaking from a deep and intimate experience of his subject.

“Get yourself a nurse, young man,” said McNulty, the Horace Greeley of guilt-free balling, and now Kevin can’t help but smile, because his inner nineteen-year-old is telling him that he’s hit pay dirt. Meanwhile Nurse Amazon is shaking up a little plastic bottle.

“Now this is going to sting,” she says, soaking a fresh piece of gauze.

But it doesn’t sting at first, it only stains his knee a rusty orange, and Kevin is relieved. It wouldn’t do to squeal like a girl in front of Nurse Amazon, but then of course his knee begins to sting like the slow burn of a hot sauce, and Kevin gasps in spite of himself.

“Told you,” she says.

“What is that,” Kevin says, as the burn creeps all the way through to his kneecap, “some sort of jalapeño marinade?”

“Actually,” says the woman as she rips the backing off a large, square bandage, “capsaicin, which is what makes jalapeños hot, is the active ingredient in some topical pain ointments.”

“It’s not working, then,” says Kevin, wincing as she presses the bandage across his scrape.

“Not this. ” She smoothes the adhesive edges down with her thumbs. “This is an antiseptic, and it’s citrus-based. It’s supposed to burn.” She smiles at him again, and her laugh lines crinkle fetchingly. “That’s how we know it’s working.”

“Mission accomplished.” The sting of the antiseptic actually seems to be making Kevin sweat more, if that’s even possible. “Plus,” he says, “my wound will be lemony fresh.”

She laughs, this time for real. Suddenly Kevin’s tumble on the bridge, his embarrassment, the citric acid burning through his patella — now it all seems worth it. He’s gotten Nurse Amazon, the Priestess of Minor Injuries, to laugh.

She snaps off the gloves as briskly as she snapped them on — no wedding ring, notes Kevin — and pitches them into the truck bed. “You’ll want to keep that clean and dry. And here.” She hands him another, clean bandage from the first aid kit. “Just in case.”

She has to stand close to him again to shut the kit on his lap. This time he catches her eye, and she purses her lips and ducks her gaze — can it be? — demurely.

“Thanks. You’ve been really great.” Kevin tucks the bandage into the breast pocket of his shirt, while she returns the first aid kit to the storage box. “You take Blue Cross?”