Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  The alternative was to leave him alone until his eyes got so bad he’d be groping around on his hands and knees to find things. They’d left him alone for too long already, they being herself, Frank, the community of souls. Elaine looked out at the beautiful day and the crazy little potted garden and the ragged summergreen grass that Harvey still cut with a hand mower. Why did any of it ever have to change?

  Josie said, “You can tell him he’s going to some sort of weather convention.”

  “And then what, tie him down? I don’t think so. He needs to be able to cooperate.”

  “Well, doctors treat babies and vets treat animals all the time without their cooperation.”

  “Your uncle is neither a baby nor a stray dog.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Let’s try for constructive suggestions, all right?”

  “Like nothing I say would ever be any good. Thanks a lot.” Josie turned to go inside and let the screen door whack shut behind her. Elaine stayed where she was for a time. Always one of them was tinder while the other struck the match.

  When she did go back in the house, Harvey was seated on the couch. His usual spot; you could tell from the broken-down springs and the pattern of food stains, like another kind of map. Josie was standing between Harvey and the television, a chocolate chip cookie in each hand. “Ready?”

  She’d draped an old wool muffler, something she must have found in a closet, over the top of his head so it covered one eye. He looked ridiculous but docile, like those pictures of dogs dressed up in hats and sunglasses. Now she was the one comparing him to a dog. Josie brought one hand and its cookie very gradually forward until he reached for it. “Great! Now where’s the other one?”

  She fussed with the scarf, rearranging it, then repeated her drill with the other eye. When Harvey had a cookie in each hand and was trying to get both into his mouth at the same time, Josie smiled at her mother, sweetly smart-ass. “I’d call that cooperation.”

  Elaine went to see what she could do about the kitchen. She filled the sink with dish soap and scrubbed everything in the cupboards, then started in on the cupboards themselves with the last of some Spic and Span she found under the sink. The stove would be another day’s work, but the inside of the refrigerator could have been worse. At least he had actual food in there. As she was tackling the floor, washwater soaking through her front in big damp patches, she heard Josie’s breezy laughter. Of course, it wouldn’t occur to her to be in here doing something useful. Her knees were wet. She really shouldn’t have worn anything nice.

  Finally the kitchen was subdued. The rest of the house would have to wait until next time, or maybe she could get a cleaning service to come, if she paid them extra. Josie and Harvey were sitting next to each other on the couch, watching the screen intently. “Hey Mom, did you know they might name a hurricane after Harvey? Cool, huh?”

  “That was on the television?”

  “No, he told me.” Josie flipped her hair off her shoulders in a way that Elaine found irritating, although she usually managed not to say so.

  “Really, Harvey? Would you like that?”

  He only blinked his cloudy eyes, not looking at her, and pushed the last of the cookies into his mouth. She persisted. “I think I’d probably like it. All the excitement. Special coverage, I bet.”

  Josie giggled. “Hurricane Mom.”

  Very funny. “So Harvey,” Elaine angled herself to stand in his line of vision, such as it was, “could we come back and see you sometime soon? We could go to the park, have ourselves a real picnic.”

  He leaned forward, hands on his knees, to take in the details of the Local Forecast for the four-thousandth time. How could anybody stay fixed on this stuff day in and day out? The temperature puttering up or down, wind shifting by inches. Wouldn’t it be better to look out the window and be surprised once in a while? Harvey belched mildly. She had not really expected an answer from him. She packed up the sandwich wrappings and empty soda cans. “Josie?”

  “Bye, Uncle Harvey. It was great seeing you.” Josie kissed him on top of his shiny head. Elaine noticed, and wished she had not, that the old man had an erection.

  Elaine led the way to the car, Josie dawdling. “Hurry up, I have to get back to the store.” She felt irritated in complicated ways. She had imagined herself bestowing her generosity and good intentions on Harvey, imagined his simple gratitude. She had imagined that she would fix him somehow. She was irritated at Josie for frisking around and playing the favorite (if she only knew the effect she had!), and at Harvey for not being fixable. She couldn’t decide exactly how to worry about him, what might happen to him, or perhaps what he might take it into his head to do.

  Once they were driving away Josie said, “What did he do before the Weather Channel?”

  “I have no idea. He didn’t really talk to you, did he?”

  “Sure he did. You were in the kitchen. They had this thing on about famous hurricanes, and he said, ‘Harvey’s on the list.’ I said did he mean the list of hurricane names, and he said yes.”

  Elaine wasn’t sure what to think. Everything would be so much easier if there was some way to get through to him. “I don’t suppose he said anything else.”

  “He said, ‘It’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the little dog.’”

  “What in the world?”

  Josie shrugged. “Don’t ask me.” She reached for the radio, then thought better of it and slumped back in her seat. “What happened to him anyway, or was he always nuts?”

  “He had a nervous breakdown.”

  “What exactly does that mean? Is it like a computer crashing?”

  Elaine glanced over at her, but Josie was peering through the windshield, her forehead puckered and serious. Perhaps they could manage an actual conversation. She said, “I wasn’t there. It was a long time ago. Your father was just a kid too, so this is what they told him and he told me. Harvey had a job driving a taxi. I know. Imagine. He must have been in his late twenties then. He drove the cab to St. Louis and ended up at the police station there, saying he was lost. Crying and blubbering. No clue that he’d driven a hundred miles. Couldn’t remember where he lived. So your grandpa had to go to St. Louis and bring him back, and when he didn’t calm down or get better they sent him to the hospital at Manteno and that’s where he stayed for twenty years.”

  “No way.”

  “I don’t know what they’d do for somebody like Harvey now. Back then it was electric-shock therapy and big doses of thorazine. I don’t imagine the family went to see him much. It wasn’t encouraged. Then …” Elaine sighed. She felt as if she were recounting the history of an old sad war. “Times changed. The big push was to deinstitutionalize, that was the word, mental patients. Put them back in the community and make counties and towns responsible for their care. Except they didn’t get any care. Harvey’s one of the lucky ones. Your father’s family bought him a house. A lot of them just ended up walking the streets.”

  “Yeah, but what happened to him?” Josie demanded.

  Not having listened to a word she’d said. Let it go, Elaine told herself. Trust your daughter to let you know when you were being a total bore. “Your father’s folks just said he was always weak in the head. That’s the way they talked.”

  The car was quiet then. Elaine thought of other things they might talk about, conversations that, in some ideal world, you might imagine having with your nearly grown daughter. What things made them happy and what things made them afraid. Advice about college, boys, the future. And how you seldom realize you are making a choice, an important turning down some forked path, even as you are trying to be watchful of that very thing. Like trying to see a clock’s hands move or trying to catch yourself growing older. Maybe you could see it from outer space, but not close up. Maybe only after you lived a life could you stand back and see its shape and pattern, everything you’d been staring at all along, like those magic eye prints that were so popular a couple years back.
Here was knowledge or happiness or desire, whatever it was that knit everything together, here was your name written smaller and smaller, good-bye, good-bye …

  There was traffic making itself known. She had to come back to the moment, get busy with the mechanics of driving. Josie sighed and her hand spider-walked toward the radio knob. As if there were any subtle way to start that particular music. Elaine opened her mouth to say something exasperated. The dashboard light blinked on and stayed lit.

  The Criminal Mind

  Friday afternoon and LAX full of people in a hurry to get everywhere in the world. At peak times the airport achieved the population of a small, restless city: business drones with cell phones, packs of slow-moving, cool-walking teenagers, parents herding kids, skycaps pushing wheelchairs loaded with the apprehensive elderly. There were Taiwanese whose hand luggage consisted of plastic shopping bags, Israelis, Filipinos, sunburned Germans who always seemed to be hefting sports equipment, Indian ladies in saris. Snatches of unknown languages, Russian maybe, or Portuguese. Rolando Gottschalk, heir to all the Americas, liked the big airport. It was one place that even his improbably named and ancestored self might be inconspicuous.

  He was leaning against a wall, contemplating one of the security checkpoints. The lines were long and travelers were shifting luggage straps from shoulder to shoulder, crowding into one another with no place to go. Although the weather in Los Angeles was summer-perfect, there was fog in Seattle, there were high winds in Phoenix and thunderstorms over the Great Lakes. There were delays and cancellations, everything backing up, people getting fretful. The five no six security types at the checkpoint were hollering at everyone to step here and stop there and raise your arms, and wasn’t it great what a cheap coat and tie and an ID badge could do for your ordinary dirtbag’s sense of personal power and self-worth.

  Rolando picked up the flight bag at his feet and joined the stream of passengers rounding the turn from the ticket counter and slowing as they hit the pileup at the checkpoint. He managed to walk without making any actual forward progress. Echoes bounced and splintered on the tile and glass surfaces. There is a quality of light that is only found in airports, glass reflecting glass reflecting sky. The shrill sunlight bored into his skin layer by layer, warming him, making him sleepy and easeful. He felt like a snake, a magnificent coiling snake, filled with danger and hot blood.

  Directly ahead of him was a vacation-bound family, Mom and Pop and three mid- to pint-size kids, distracted and squabbling about who had the tickets and who had to go to the bathroom. Rolando increased his stride so that without rudeness he entered the checkpoint line before them. He was, at this moment, the least memorable traveler in the airport, a thin young man in a windbreaker and dark work pants, thin mustache, green eyes a little too close together in his brown face. When he reached the X-ray belt he placed his flight bag neatly on its side and stepped through the archway. Nothing metal or suspect in his clean, anonymous pockets. On the other side he paused to remove his windbreaker. Behind him Pop was emptying a noisy river of keys and coins into a tray. One of the kids was acting up, whining, and Mom was saying, “Of course you want to go see Grandma,” and Pop was emitting a little cloud of peevish exclamation points like a cartoon, and it was the easiest thing in the world (the irritated security guard repositioning the family’s mountain of carry-ons), for Rolando to drop his windbreaker over their camera as he bent to retrieve his flight bag.

  Moving neither quickly nor slowly he sought the thickest part of the moving crowd. At the first restroom he entered a stall to examine the camera, a Canon with many desirable features, and placed it in the flight bag. He flushed and washed his hands and made his usual looking-in-the-mirror face, a stone-cold dead-eyed gaze that did not acknowledge the thing he most hated about his reflection: his peanut-shaped skull and kinked red hair. At a snack bar he purchased and ate a slice of pizza and then, when he felt his heart slow to normal resting rate, he retraced his steps and sauntered past the checkpoint. Heartbeat was the clock that never misled you. So that when he walked out through the baggage claim doors and something in the brassy exhaust-tinged air made his pulse quicken he decided that contrary to his plan, this would not be the best place to acquire a vehicle and instead took his usual bus home.

  He was superstitious in these private, idiosyncratic ways, unlike his candle-lighting German-Irish-Mexican mother, who sometimes confused the characters in her telenovelas with the saints, unlike his long-vanished Jamaican father who, it was said, had believed in mojo and those voodoo deities in charge of sexual function. Rolando collected smooth pebbles, which he got to know by touch. (Even now he was fingering one caught in the seam of his left front pocket.) He had never owned a calendar and there were times he could not have said what day of the week or even what month it was. He preferred it that way, so as not to lose his own rhythm, that heartbeat clock. He believed that as long as he never flew in an airplane his life was safe. He regarded fivedollar bills as unlucky and avoided receiving them in change. He loved the sun, and on a day like today, when it rode the sky for many hours, he knew that things were working toward some unknown but beneficial end.

  After stopping at the home of an acquaintance to dispose of the camera, Rolando approached his own residence on foot. Except for a time in Silver Lake he was too young to remember, he had lived all his twenty-two years in El Este. With his oddly constructed and pigmented face, he could be made into anyone’s enemy, an outsider anywhere. Even among Mexicans he ran the risk of being mistaken (and beaten) for a Guatemalan or Samoan. But he was most at home here, in the little pastel houses and tiendas and baleful asphalt. He was more Latino than Black and more Black than Anglo, although the moment you looked at him any of those ways, you began to have doubts.

  As soon as he walked in his front door the phone rang. He answered in a flattened voice. “Hello?”

  “Rolando?” Ascending plaintive female screech. “Where you been?”

  “Busy.”

  “All week? Don’t give me that. Why you don’t come around like you said?”

  He looked over the room for something to distract or fortify himself but found nothing. The place was a shithole. That was why he was leaving. “I’m busy with I’m gonna be out of town for a little while.”

  “Out of town where?”

  He picked a name. “Texas. San Antone.”

  “You not going no place without me. Your worthless self promised. Or was that just your dick talking? Lando! You listening to me?”

  He held the receiver away from his ear and searched for a cigarette. The phone sounded like a bee in a glass jar. When there was a pause in the noise he said, “It’s just some business I got to take care of. It’s nothing personal to do with you.”

  “Business. Your only business is making nasty-ass trouble for me and everybody else. Hear me good. Don’t you come sniffing around once you get back. Not if you was to come crawling. Shit-head. This is it, finito. Bum voyage.”

  She hung up. Rolando sighed. He was going to have to leave before she changed her mind and started in pestering him again. He would have to tell his mother something too, once she got home from work, and she would not be so easy to handle.

  If you say to anyone, Tell me your story, there is always a starting place. Rolando was not in the habit of talking about himself, but if something could have crowbarred the words loose, he would have begun with, I had three older brothers. The fathers of the brothers were men named Sergio and Jesus and so they had turned out more or less normal-looking. From an early age they took to pounding on him. It was amusing to them to see how easily he could be made to land on his diapered bottom and squawl, like a superior sort of toy. When he was a little older they invented elaborate routines and strategies to trip him up and send him tumbling down stairs or into unyielding objects. When it came to something basic, like hitting, their efforts were thorough and varied. They employed flat-handed slaps to the back of the head, knuckles to the ribs, a thumb that hooked you just und
er the chin, the sudden wrench and pop of a twisted arm. It didn’t help that his mother defended him and doted on him and punished the others for his every bruise and blood letting. The brothers had long ago moved on to their own forms of trouble, but from them he learned lasting lessons of guile, silence, speed, and vengeance.

  From his growing-up years he learned other things. That the evil-smelling ditch behind the garage was an excellent place to practice feats of balance and acrobatics. He knew the wealth of tastes available at the corner store, dulces and gumballs and red-hot potato chips and Nehi flavors, and the melting in the mouth when you had a craving for one certain thing. How to make a gun that shot bottle caps, with considerable impact, out of a sanded piece of wood, a nail, and rubber bands. How to ride double on a bike, how to latch on to the bumper of an accelerating car in order to prove skill and bravery. Pussy. You din’t even half-try. Screw you fuck face, screw you puta mamma. They loved the way those words filled up their mouths. Other boys learned that while the standard insults were acceptable, they must not call him Nigger Lips or Brillo Head, not unless they wanted to risk an all-out attack in which the standard rules of combat did not apply.

  He was secretive, solitary, on the edge of every group. He kept his eyes open for opportunities, he prided himself on his perfect, better-than-twenty-twenty vision. It was amazing, the number of people who never really noticed anything or took proper precautions. It was also a matter of pride that he had never actually been arrested, although he had been asked many times by the police to justify his presence on the streets, his identity and his intentions, as part of a public safety policy that protected certain neighborhoods from the people who lived in them. From time to time he worked at one or another small job, but for the most part he was engaged in the acquisition of certain items of personal property from careless individuals. It was a way of getting by; he couldn’t remember ever feeling guilty about it. A kind of harvesting, wherein people with too much of things, money that might go sour or bad, were relieved of its burden.