Wide Blue Yonder
Page 16
Well, screw these guys. But he shrank into himself, pumped his gas, and paid with his head down, not looking at them as he pushed his money across the counter. When he went back out to the car he saw that it was all beat to shit as well, coated with dust from the wheels to the windows, the paint faded in patches. It looked like some kind of ugly lizard. He felt bad about that and made a point of checking the oil and coolant and pumping the tires.
He was driving as fast as he could but he wasn’t really getting anywhere. He seemed to have lost the deciding part of his mind. The sun went down behind him again, or maybe a couple of times. He liked the nights out here. They were righteous. If you could just hide in a hole all day, you could stand to live here. He thought he was in New Mexico now, or at least he remembered a sign for New Mexico, but he was embarrassed to admit he forgot where New Mexico was. His beard was growing in all itchy. The food he ate he ate with his hands. There were times he saw cops, state troopers who might pull him over just for being dark and solitary and worthy of suspicion, He kept his hand on the gun shoved between the seats and rallied some of his old cool self to glide past them and it worked, they let him be. He tried to take stock. His money was still damp, the bills limp and curling. The clothes in the duffel had turned sour from the water the witch oh kill him back oh my Christ so he went as fast as he could until he raced the dust that billowed up behind him and he was almost flying, floating in that hot blue sky.
He knew every bit of the tape by now, although he didn’t listen to the bullshit words. But he had the rest of it so cold. He could keep one hand on the wheel and with the other direct the chorus of harps and tweedling birds and his angel girls, like a conductor. Times it was hottest, he pulled over and stopped in whatever shade he could find, beneath an overpass or a concrete slab on stilts that passed for a rest stop. He was getting more used to the heat but still he found it best to stop and let the sun take charge now and then. He had just started the car up again after one such interval and the afternoon glare was as thick as if it had been laid on with a brush when something wrenched and jolted beneath him, not the car, because that kept on going, but the road itself. “Jesus Christ, what was that?”
“You know. The Big One.”
Rolando had talked to the tape so often that he didn’t find it surprising to hear it talking back. He lit a cigarette, tasted smoke. “Oh wow.”
“Right. Kaboom. There went California. Into the drink.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Yeah. Had you going there, didn’t I?” It was the man’s chocolate-on-snow voice, but whispery, as if he was telling dirty jokes.
“Very funny,” said Rolando sarcastically. “Yeah, you’re a damn stitch.”
“I didn’t mean I was kidding about all of it. Just the California part. There’s definitely something going down.”
“So what are you saying?”
There were gaps and flares of hissing static, as if the tape was going bad. “It’s the end of the world.”
“Right. Prove it.”
“Prove I’m wrong.”
“Road’s still here. Car’s still here. I’m still here.”
“Naw, man. Not really. You’re just in the habit of being alive and you haven’t noticed the difference yet.”
“You are so unfunny.”
“Like that lady. She’s busy fixing her hair, putting bread in the toaster, watching Good Morning America. She’s got no idea she’s really swallowing a swimming pool.”
“Shut up, why you want to talk about her?”
“Did I say it’s the end of the world? I meant it’s just the end of you.”
“Go fuck yourself. Quit messing with me.”
“Have it your way.”
The tape spewed out of the deck in big loops, and there was a mechanical garbled sound, and the cassette ejected, covered with its own insides, like a trick. Rolando reached for it to see if he could rewind it somehow, push everything back. Then his heartbeat clock stopped. Hung suspended. The smoke from his cigarette didn’t dissipate but stayed in its lazy curling vine shape, which seemed the more remarkable thing at that moment. When he looked through the windshield it was like it had become a kaleidoscope, everything fractured into a million needles of light, or maybe he was on a spaceship where you went so fast that time itself grew rubbery, elastic. Then his mind stopped making thoughts.
The physical manifestation of God was a yellow school bus. Rolando watched it take shape and color in a gradual, unhasty fashion, or maybe it was just the process of words trickling back into his head, yellow and school bus. It filled the entire windshield, its oversize grill staring him down, unmoving. “I didn’t mean for her to die,” Rolando said. “There was no because to it.”
“Hey, buddy?”
It wasn’t the tape talking, but a white man in a cowboy hat, peering in at his open window. “You broke down or what? You aiming to move anytime in the near future so somebody else can get by?”
Rolando saw that the car was stopped at one end of a narrow bridge over a concrete-lined ditch with a little brown water in it. The road was laid down straight as tape in a landscape of fenced and dusty acreage, pastureland, maybe, although he could see nothing grazing. He coughed to get the dust out of his throat and said, “Sorry. Let me see if I can get it to start.” He tried the ignition and the engine balked, then caught.
“Hey!” The man in the cowboy hat, already walking away, stopped and turned back to him. “Where’s this road take you?”
“In that direction? Fifteen miles to the interstate, then another sixty to Amarillo.” The man didn’t much like the look of him or the idea of him, Rolando could tell. He steered carefully around the bus, stared at by a row of curious children lining the bus windows.
In Amarillo he found the kind of motel where no one cared what you looked like.
He showered and washed his hair and shaved in the cloudy bathroom mirror. He selected the best of the clothes in the duffel and threw the rest out. He slept on the floor to try and ease his back, then got up before it was light and, leaving the blue car where it was, found another vehicle that better suited his purposes. He headed north on the freeway with a warm wind at his back, wondering just how far you had to go to leave a water ghost behind you.
Part Three
August
The Light of the World
Rosy rosy rose. Rosa rose. Local Forecast had trouble keeping names in his head, so he practiced. Row row row of rosy Rosas. He wanted to be ready for Rosa day. He never knew exactly when that was coming, because most of the time he mixed up his days something awful.
The worst of the heat broke exactly on August the First. He knew because he marked it special on the calendar. He wanted to be able to remember it. New weather on a new, first day. It was ten twelve fifteen degrees cooler, down where it ought to be in the eighties and bottom nineties. Still hot, but normal hot. There was even some pattering rain from time to time. He could take his coffee out onto the front porch and watch his plants green up and think about Rosa.
Rosarosarosa. She had little hands, as small as brown mice. They were quick like mice too. He watched them scurry in and out of dishwater. They wrapped themselves in snowy cloths and made gleaming tracks all along the floorboards. She had a brown face. He had to get up close to it to see how it worked, the sly folds of her eyelids and the star folds at each eye’s corner. If he got too close she slapped him away. She said: Ya ya ya ya ya ya.
Local Forecast let her noise roll around in his head. He wondered if it was a game he was meant to play. So he worked his mouth: Ya ya ya ya ya. She slapped at him again, but in a way that was not meant to hurt. She was kneeling in front of the bathtub and scrubbing. Local Forecast admired the way she flung up clouds of bleach smell. He was behind the shower curtain, pretending to hide. She knew he was watching her and he thought there was something prideful in the arch of her back and the way her chin pointed out ahead of her, as if she liked being watched. Encouraged, he said, very softly:
Ya ya ya.
She giggled and rushed at the shower curtain so it wrapped around him. Local Forecast pretended he couldn’t get out. The shower curtain was filmy-colored. It made everything look underwater. He poked at where the giggles came from. There was a squawking sound. He froze.
It was a sin. Unless you were married. And even then, you couldn’t get all carried away.
Everything was quiet. The shower curtain crinkled when he took a careful breath. Little by little, he unwrapped himself and stepped out of the shower curtain. The bathroom was empty except for the bleach smell. Local Forecast went galloping out the door, his heart in a rush. When ever things got too clean, she went away.
But she was still here. She was in the bedroom, rooting around in the closet. Local Forecast was always embarrassed to have her fooling with his clothes. Without him inside them, they were just saggy baggy things of no distinction. Rosa hurled them into the laundry basket as if she didn’t think much of them either. Local Forecast hung back at the door. Fat Cat stalked past him and gave him a look as if Rosa was all his fault. Local Forecast wished he could get Rosa to stop and pay attention to him again. Maybe she didn’t like him anymore. It was such a desolating thought that a sound came out of him, a bleating sound.
Rosa looked up from the laundry basket. She muttered to herself, ya ya ya, led him back to the kitchen and fixed him a tuna fish sandwich and iced tea. That made him feel better, although it wasn’t as good as the slapping and giggling.
Once he tried to follow her when she left the house but she only went as far as two corners and stood there until a bus roared up. She got on and waved him away, shoo. The bus scared him. It smelled bad. He watched it cough its way down the street and that night he tried to follow where it had gone but it didn’t leave any tracks. There had to be a street you took to get to Rosa and a street you took to get back but he hadn’t found them yet.
When they were married she could stay here all the time.
He was still eating his sandwich when the phone rang. He got up all in a hurry and answered it with his mouth still full: “Oca fucust.”
“Harvey? Do you have a cold? This is Elaine, how are you?”
He managed to swallow, though there was still some fish taste stuck behind one tooth. “Fair, light south winds, highs mid-eighties—”
“Yes, well, never mind about all that. I’m going to come see you and I’m bringing a friend who wants to meet you. So I hope you won’t get upset about it, OK?”
He put the phone up next to the television, where Man In A Suit was talking about isobars. He let it stay there for a while. When he brought it back to his ear, he could hear the listening sounds on the other end of the line. Then she said everything all over again, twice as slow and loud.
He hung up and went back into the kitchen, leaving Man In A Suit talking to himself. Rosa was in the basement, making the laundry machines run. He wasn’t hungry anymore. He didn’t see why people couldn’t just leave him alone.
Rosa went away. Then Yoo Hoo came. He sat on the couch with his hat pulled over his eyes, sulking. This day was not turning out so good. He heard Yoo Hoo come in and exclaim in her loud voice about how clean the house was. “And this is my friend Robert. Would you like to say hello to him? I’ve been telling him all about you.”
Robert said, “Hello, Harvey. Very nice to meet you.”
No it wasn’t. Local Forecast spied on them through his hat, where they couldn’t see him looking. Robert had red hair and a red mustache. He had something in his hands, a light that went on and off. He held it up to his face, one eye at a time. Robert seemed to see him watching. “Here, do you want to see it?”
Local Forecast took it in his hand. It was some kind of metal stick. He couldn’t get the light to go on. Robert said, “You have to look into it. Take your hat off and I’ll show you. Now hold very still.”
The light shone straight into his brain and held him there. He said “A-aah.” Robert was on the other side of the light, looking in.
“That’s very good,” he said encouragingly. Local Forecast felt Robert’s cool fingertips on his forehead and at the back of his neck, steadying him. “Now the other eye.”
Obediently, he let his other eye open and flood with light. The light of the world.
“What’s that, Harvey?”
“Daddy said He who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
The light shut off and he blinked. Robert said, “I didn’t quite catch it.”
“He can be a little hard to understand. He doesn’t get much practice talking.”
He still saw the white, even when he closed his eyes. Then when he opened them, everything had a ring of rainbow around it. “There now,” said Yoo Hoo, from somewhere inside the rainbow. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
He wasn’t sure yet. Robert said, “Harvey, is this where you sit to watch television? Can you see it from here?”
“No hazardous weather is expected today or tonight in central Illinois.”
“All right. How about the newspaper? Can you see to read the newspaper?”
Local Forecast waved it away. He didn’t like newspapers. He was never in them.
“And you don’t wear glasses. That’s really unusual. I’ve had to wear glasses ever since I was a kid.”
He hadn’t noticed Robert’s glasses before. They were the small kind and didn’t reflect much.
Yoo Hoo said, “I think he compensates. You know, gets used to seeing things a certain way.”
“As we all do, to some extent,” said Robert, with a smile in his voice. He liked Robert. “Harvey, I have to wonder if you used to have to sit this close to the television. You couldn’t get much closer, could you? Now I don’t want to scare you, but what if you got so you couldn’t see it at all?”
Local Forecast tried to put his hat on but they’d taken it away.
“Sometimes that happens when people get older. It’s like your eyes are windows and the glass gets clouded.”
Yoo Hoo said, “You should listen to Robert. He’s an expert.”
At windows? But he knew there was something serious that he was trying not to understand.
Robert said, “I want you to think about letting me help you. It’s not an easy thing. It’s an operation. And we’d have to go to my office and talk some more. But after everything’s over, I feel certain that you’ll see at least some improvement.”
Green Woman came on. She was talking about hurricanes. They hadn’t had any yet, but it was still early. Hurricanes were Big Weather. He was going to learn everything about them, the statistics. They came all the way across the ocean, ninety, a hundred miles an hour.
“Serious. Important.”
“I can assure you.”
“operation?”
“doctor.”
Hurricane Harvey roared and roared. Nothing could withstand him. He blew trees into toothpicks, blew the shoes right off of people’s feet, the eggs out of chickens before they’d been laid. He was merciless. Noisy too. Hrhaaahaa. The window curtains fell in a heap. A lamp went smash. Yoo Hoo and Robert ran for the door. Yoo Hoo kept trying to talk. She said, “Now, Harvey.” He roared at them and they skedaddled.
After they left him alone, he had to sit down for a while. The glass thingamajig on the lamp was broken. And he’d have to put the curtains back up before it got too bright. His eyes were his own business. They couldn’t make you do anything unless you were in the no no no hospital no no no no humidity dewpoint precipitation.
They could put you in there without you even knowing. One day you just woke up and there you were. On the inside with the outside a million miles away. He made himself sit very still and remember. His tongue fluttered around his mouth, looking for a place to hide. Your mouth was always dry in the hospital. That was how you knew they came around with the medicine. They were sneaky about it, they did it when you weren’t paying attention.
There was a chair he used to like because it held yo
u down when you might otherwise go floating off. The chair was in front of a wall and the wall stayed put right where you wanted it. The nurse said, Now Harvey. If you don’t eat your soup, you can’t have more milk. He didn’t know why you couldn’t have one and not the other. It was how they let you know who was boss. Mamma and Daddy sent him new slippers and a Christmas card. The card said Christ and his love shall redeem us all. Christ had holy light shooting out of his fingertips. The slippers were too small.
The doctor said, That’s a mighty fine card, Harvey. Now don’t you feel bad about tearing it up? Because he had. He’d called Mamma and Daddy names out loud and he’d torn up the Lord God and now the doctor was going to tell on him. The doctor would put him in the cold bath and God would make him burn in hell and Daddy there was no telling.
The doctor said Calm down. We can’t have you acting up like that, you understand? It upsets the other patients. And it’s not good for you to get yourself so worked up. You don’t want another Treatment do you? I didn’t think so.
Mamma said, Your father has something to ask you. Stand up straight and look ye forthright. Daddy sat at the table in his big chair. In front of him on the table was the white bowl Mamma used for mixing. There was a crack like a dark hair down the front, turned so that there was no way not to see it.
Come here, boy.
He was already right there, so he didn’t know where he was supposed to go. He moved his feet up and down, trying to stay forthright.
Tell me what you see on this bowl.
Crack.
I can’t hear you.
A crack, sir.
That’s right. It’s cracked. Now tell me how the crack got there.