So Much Blue

by Percival Everett

  “I preferred the monosyllabic routine.”

  “I call a spade a spade.”

  “Careful.”

  “So, what now?” he asked.

  “Good question. I suppose I have to break a sweet young woman’s heart.” I had an urge to drop something, anything, into the water below, but I had nothing.

  “Come on, let’s go have a drink,” Richard said, slapping me on the back.

  “No, I need food. I haven’t had anything since I didn’t eat lunch.”

  He looked at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Really. No drink?”

  I shook my head.

  “She must have some pussy.”

  I caught myself before I could become angered by his remark. Instead, in my head I heard Victoire’s whispered “Je t’aime” and saw her green watercolor. “You have no idea,” I said.

  “Tell me, does she make you feel younger? Is that part of this?”

  On the face of it this was a reasonable enough question. I thought about it. “No,” I said. “In fact, I feel older. I would have to, wouldn’t I? But the thing is, I don’t care. She doesn’t care. She really doesn’t. So, I don’t care.”

  “How moving.”

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  House

  Linda was a little surprised that I was not returning to my studio to continue working after dinner. She asked if I wanted to watch a movie and I said if she wanted to, which was as good as a no. I did however switch on the television news while she was performing her evening stretches.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Look at the weatherman,” I said. “Is there really anyone that color? He’s orange.”

  “Tanning bed,” she said. “You’re watching the news? You never follow the news.”

  “Hey, I know what’s going on.”

  She laughed. She bent over at her waist, grabbed her ankles, and appeared to try to kiss her knees.

  “We need to talk about something,” I said.

  She came back up. “Sounds serious.”

  “It is.”

  Will burst into our room. “It’s April,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

  We hurried downstairs after him to find April sitting on the toilet. She was leaning over, in obvious pain and distress.

  Linda knelt beside her, “Honey?”

  “She’s sick,” Will said. “I heard her crying.”

  “Are you cramping?” Linda asked.

  I could see blood on her fingers and on her thighs. I pulled Will away and closed the door most of the way. “You go on to your room,” I told him. “Everything’s under control.”

  Linda came to the door and looked at me. “She’s burning up.”

  “Should we give her some Tylenol?”

  “Mommy,” April said. She only used that word when she was afraid.

  “I’m right here, baby.”

  “There’s so much blood,” April said.

  “I see, honey,” Linda said. “Take deep breaths.”

  April cried out softly. I could just hear her.

  Linda came back to the door. “There’s so much blood,” she said. “Something’s wrong. I think we need to take her to the emergency room.”

  “No,” April said.

  I pushed open the door and looked at her face. “I think that might be a good idea,” I said.

  “Did you tell her?” April asked me.

  “Tell me what?”

  I looked at April. I had the fleeting thought that her letting the secret out was orchestrated, but as quickly decided that couldn’t be.

  “I was trying to tell you just now,” I said.

  “You promised,” April said.

  Linda was staring at me, her hand flat on top of April’s hair.

  “You were going to break your promise.”

  Linda looked back down at April.

  “I’m pregnant.” April didn’t look up, but down at the bit of bloody toilet paper in her hand.

  “You’re what?”

  “Pregnant,” April repeated.

  Linda shot me a deadly look and then looked all around, assessing. She pushed April forward and peered into the toilet, let her back down. “You’re having a miscarriage.”

  “I’ll take her to the hospital,” I said.

  It was as if I was not there at that moment. Linda stroked the child’s hair. “It’s going to be okay.”

  April cried.

  Linda looked again at me and I understood that I was to leave the room. I closed the door. Will was in the hallway, scared to death.

  “Is April all right?” he asked.

  “She’s okay, son,” I told him. “Go into your room and watch a movie or something.”

  “But she’s okay, right?”

  “Yes. Woman stuff. Okay?”

  Will walked off and into his room.

  Linda came out of the bathroom. Frankly, she scared me by the way she was looking at me. “You knew about this?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I was trying to tell you when Will walked in.”

  “How long have you known?”

  I hesitated, then whispered, “April made me promise not to tell.”

  “I’m her mother!”

  “Yes, right. I wanted to tell you, but she was so insistent.”

  “Did you take her to the doctor?”

  “No, she said she had it under control.”

  “Those were her words?”

  I felt cold inside. “I don’t remember her words, but that’s what I understood. She only told me because I said it would remain a secret. I didn’t know what was going on until she told me. I’m sorry. She was opening up and I was so worried about betraying her.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “I was respecting my daughter’s privacy.”

  “I am her mother,” Linda said, forming each word distinctly. “I’m supposed to know about these things.”

  I looked at the closed bathroom door and moved away to the bottom of the stairs.

  “She didn’t want you to know.”

  “What if she had said she wanted to kill herself? Would you have told me that? I’ve got to go back in there.”

  “Is she all right?” I asked.

  “I can’t believe you. What, did you get off on the fact that she was confiding in you instead of me?”

  I had never even thought of that, but in hearing it I did recognize that I had gotten some good feeling from being secretive, complicit with her. It also occurred to me that Linda was angry because she had not been the chosen confidant. But I said, “I’m sorry. I never thought of it like that. I just wanted her to be comfortable.”

  “Is she comfortable now?”

  “Are you suggesting that I’m the cause of what’s happening now?”

  She ignored my question.

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  Linda went back into the bathroom and closed the door.

  I glanced into Will’s room and saw that he was sitting on the edge of his bed, playing a video game. I then went to the kitchen and put on water for tea. I sat at the table and waited. I wasn’t certain for what I was waiting, but I was waiting. Waiting seemed like the correct, the right, the prudent thing to do. I heard Linda move April back to her room and I regarded just how quickly the locus of safety had shifted, just how quickly April had allowed her mother to assume her role as mother. Just as quickly Linda had closed me out. And rightly, I imagined, as I obviously did not know how to help. Still, I felt that my part in all of this had been engineered. But that was okay. As long as my little girl was safe, it was okay. It didn’t matter whether she hated me for betraying her secret. She was okay. It didn’t matter that I now had to face Linda’s rightly shaped anger. April was okay.

  Linda came into the kitchen and sat at the table opposite me. If she had been a smoker she would have been lighting one. She looked at my tea.

  “I made a pot,” I said.


  She looked at my face and then out the window. She wasn’t shaking her head, but she was.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, again. “How is she?”

  “She’s still cramping.”

  “Does she need to go to the emergency room? Do you want me to pick up anything at the pharmacy?”

  She shook her head. She yawned. She often yawned when she was nervous, confused, or angry. And now she was all three. “I’m taking her to my doctor in the morning.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said.

  “I’m glad you approve,” she said. She laughed mockingly. “You wouldn’t know a good idea if it slapped you in the face.”

  I knew right then what it was like to be slapped in the face. “Linda, I know I fucked up. I really was just about to tell you when Will came into our room. She made me promise.”

  “So, what? She made you promise.”

  “I wasn’t trying to keep it from you.”

  “How is Will?”

  “He’s shaken up, I think. He was playing a game and I didn’t disturb him. Does she still have a fever?”

  “Ninety-nine point three. Not high.”

  “Still a fever.”

  “I gave her some ibuprofen.”

  “Are you going to forgive me?”

  Linda didn’t answer that question, didn’t look again at me. She got up and left me at the table.

  I looked across the dining room at a small canvas of mine. There was no blue in it. It was often pointed out that I avoided blue. It was true. I was uncomfortable with the color. I could never control it. It was nearly always a source of warmth in the under painting, but it was never on the surface, never more than an idea on any work. Regardless that blue was so likable, a color that so many loved or liked—no one hated blue—I could not use it. The color of trust, loyalty, a subject for philosophical discourse, the name of a musical form, blue was not mine. And by extension green was not mine. In fact, in Japanese and Korean, blue and green have the same name. As blue as the sky is, the color came late to humans. The reds, browns, and ochers that I used so much were the colors of the cave dwellers, but they had no blue on their walls. I sometimes hated blue. I could not stand to see the Prussian blue in the waves of Hokusai. For that reason, for my disdain of the color, I knew it was important, that my dislike of it was a function of fear and that fear, like all fear, was a function of lack of ken. I looked at the shadows in the room, shadows full of blues. Cobalt, cerulean, ultramarine, emerald green, Guillet green. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about the intensity of cobalt. He was crazy, you see.

  1979

  Richard drove with me leaning into the windshield or out the window on the lookout for potential holes where we might bottom out. It was slow going, but it seemed preferable to proceeding in a hurry and breaking down altogether. For the first time Tad and Carlos got to look at each other in the backseat.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Tad asked.

  “I’m nobody,” Carlos said. “Same as you.”

  “Who is this guy?” he asked his brother and me.

  “Like he said.” I looked back at them both.

  “Where are we going?” Tad asked.

  “The airport,” I said.

  Richard looked over at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid my passport is at the hotel. Sorry.”

  I studied the rough lane in front of us.

  “I didn’t want to lose it,” Richard said.

  I touched my back pocket and felt my passport still there. He was right of course.

  I’d lost my watch of all things, right off my wrist, and hadn’t noticed. I glanced back at Tad. “Do you have your passport?”

  “Yeah, I have it.”

  “We just drive into town, grab your passport, and drive to the airport. We’ll look less suspicious if we have our bags anyway.”

  “We’re in so much shit,” Tad said.

  “What are you talking about?” Richard asked.

  “They’re going to catch us.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “We go back into the city and we’re fucked,” Carlos said. “There’s a damn revolution going on if you hadn’t noticed. And I’ll wager the whole place is on fire by now.”

  I turned my attention back to the road. “It’s getting hard to see.”

  “How far until we’re on the next road?” Richard asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re going so slowly. I just don’t know. It looks completely different coming back.” I turned to Carlos. “Do you know just where we are?”

  “Not really. Everything looks the same out here to me.”

  “Stop the car,” I said to Richard.

  “What?”

  “Stop the car.”

  He did.

  “Get out,” I said to Carlos.

  He stared back at me.

  “If you don’t know anything, then you’re of no help. We don’t need you. Get out.”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  I pointed the .45 that the Bummer had handed to me at him. “Get out of the fucking car.”

  “Okay, maybe I do know where were are. Roughly.”

  “Hell, I know roughly,” I said.

  “Just another couple of miles and you’ll be back on the road to San Salvador. Then I can get you to town. I know a lot of the soldiers. So, can I ride with you?” He relaxed and fell back into the seat.

  I faced the front.

  “Sorry about the passport,” Richard said.

  “It is what it is.”

  “I need to piss,” Tad said.

  Richard gave me an exasperated look and stopped the car. We all got out and relieved ourselves. The just-fallen night was dead still and quiet. Fog was forming in patches down on the surface of the lake, but above us the sky was clear. I looked at the brush into which I was peeing and wondered just what else could go wrong. I had not yet seen a snake and imagined that one might show up now and bite me on my penis. Everything was so absurd. I recalled the punch line from a joke: “You are going to die, Kemosabe.”

  I took over the wheel and we moved on. Since I couldn’t see the dangerous holes very well, I drove faster than I should have. In about an hour we made a left onto the smoother but not much more developed road. It was a relief.

  We drove on and veered onto a still better road. There was no traffic at all until I spotted a couple of taillights ahead of us. They were not moving.

  “Stop,” Carlos said. “Turn off your lights.”

  I did both as quickly as he said it.

  “What is that?” Richard asked. “A checkpoint? Well, we don’t have anything to worry about.”

  I could hear Tad behind me, muttering, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Turn around,” Carlos said.

  “Are you crazy?” Tad said.

  I looked back at Carlos.

  He looked me in the eye in a way he hadn’t before. “We go back about a half mile. There’s a dirt road that goes around this. It’s not bad. Goes through a tiny village that’s not even on the map.”

  “What do you think?” I asked Richard.

  “Go around it,” Tad said.

  Richard nodded.

  I drove back and turned up a steep road that seemed to lead in the completely wrong direction and then it curved back. Things then became really confusing as the road started switching back down a mountain road in the pitch darkness.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I asked Carlos.

  “Yes, it’s a twisty road, but it comes around back to the highway.”

  The road became very narrow. I couldn’t see clearly but I knew there was a steep drop off the right side. That was when we met headlights.

  “What the hell?” Richard said.

  “What is that?” from Tad.

  “I think that’s a bus,” I said.

  “Shit,” Richard said. “Can we get by him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The driver of
the bus was out and walking toward us. I started to get out of the car. “Carlos, let’s go.” I needed his Spanish.

  The driver was a short, wide man, built like a refrigerator. We met him in the mix of our headlights. He pointed at the Caddy and spoke rapidly.

  “He says you have to get out of the way,” Carlos said.

  “Ask him how I’m supposed to do that.”

  Carlos did.

  The driver became more animated, pointed at his bus and then at our car. He spoke again.

  “He wants us to back up.”

  “Why doesn’t he back up?” I wasn’t trying to fight with the man, but I was afraid to try backing up.

  “He says he cannot back up the bus, that you can see better backing up a car. You have to back up.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  A couple of people stepped out of the bus and fell in behind the driver. Two young men. They looked frightened. The driver turned and said something to them. Then they yelled at me, looking no less frightened, but now threatening.

  “They say we have to back up,” Carlos said, as if I needed a translation at this point.

  “All right, all right, tell them I’ll do it.”

  We returned to the Cadillac and got in.

  “We have to back up,” I said.

  “Fuck that,” Tad said.

  “Don’t have any choice. He might decide to just push us off the road if we don’t do it.”

  I looked behind us and saw only darkness. The bus rolled to us and the driver honked his horn. I put the Caddy in reverse, but the backup lights didn’t improve my view at all.

  “Look out on that side for me,” I said to Richard.

  He leaned out his window. “Shit! It goes straight down.”

  I tried to hug the side of the mountain on my left, so much so that I scraped the side of the car, tore off the driver’s side mirror. The noise was alarming. It became clear that the bus was not going to pass on the outside, so I drifted back to the right. Back some thirty yards we found a wide place. Carlos and Richard kept yelling at me that I was right on the edge.

  “Then move to the left of the goddamn car,” I shouted. “Put all the weight over here.”

  The bus climbed the wall of the mountain a little to get by us. Its light raked the side of the Cadillac and then it was a dark rattle beside us, actually brushing us once. Tad let out a short squeal. I leaned against my door, trying to will the car to stay where it was. Then it was over. The bus was only taillights behind us.