Wide Blue Yonder (17 page)

Josie coaxed Harvey through the menu and determined that he wanted a Dixie Belle sundae with caramel and fudge and pecans. That sounded good, but as punishment for being such a loser she ordered herself a virtuous plain vanilla cone. Mitch got a chocolate cone and he paid for all of it even though Josie got her own money out. “It’s OK,” he said, and at least he didn’t look mad anymore, just sort of detached and bored, well sure. The big first date, an ice cream social with her barmy uncle.

They found a booth and sat down and Josie tried to get Harvey to tell her what he was doing walking the streets, but Harvey was giving all his attention to the ice cream. Harvey eating ice cream wasn’t a thing you wanted to watch up close anyway.

Josie was sitting next to Harvey, and Mitch was across from them. She thought dismally that he hadn’t even wanted to sit next to her. Harvey lapped and slurped. Mitch studied the ceiling tile with minute attention. He was as beautiful as ever, and as far away.

Josie reached into her bag, fished out a small blue notebook with its cover fraying away. All she found to write with was an eraserless pencil:

I’m sorry you’re mad. I didn’t know what else to do with him.

She pushed it across to Mitch, who read it without changing expression. Then he picked up the pencil.

I’m not mad.

Josie wrote back,

Sure.

Mitch studied this, still not looking at her. Wrote:

I’m not. I just don’t know what’s going on here. It’s like all of a sudden you changed your mind and didn’t want to do anything. What’s wrong with him anyway, is he some kind of mental?

I don’t know, my mom helps take care of him. What do you mean, do anything?

Whatever you wanted to do tonight.

You mean, go back to your place so you can ravish me?

He scribbled and flipped pages one-handed, his ice cream cone melting down.

Thanks. That makes me feel like a complete creep. Maybe I just don’t understand girls. I had this one girlfriend who

Here a line was scratched out.

never mind but she was really weird. I don’t want to get involved in anything weird again. So don’t talk like, I know you don’t know me real well but I am not some kind of

He shook his head, couldn’t come up with the word, pushed the notebook away. Josie took the pencil, still warm from his hand, and bore down hard enough to make grooves in the soft paper:

SORRY. I was trying to be funny. I really really want to be with you but this is all kind of SCARY.

Mitch read this, then closed the notebook’s cover and handed it back to her, and she wasn’t sure if she’d made things better or worse. Harvey had finished his ice cream and was blinking at the brightness of the ceiling lights, one eye weeping a little. Josie felt bad that she’d made him take the hat off just so she wouldn’t be embarrassed. She was the most selfish useless bitch in the world.

“Come on, Harvey, let me clean you up.” She swabbed at his face with a paper napkin, which he permitted. He was docile, pre-occupied with sending his tongue around the corners of his mouth to catch the last of the ice cream taste. She felt Mitch watching her.

“He’s really just a big sweetie.”

“Yeah, he seems pretty …” Again he struggled for a word, gave up.

“And he’s a weather expert, aren’t you, Harvey? Ask him a weather question.”

“Weather question?”

“Yeah, like how hot it’s going to be tomorrow.” Josie widened her eyes at him, “Come on, play along.”

Mitch did so, a little stiffly. Harvey addressed the tabletop. “Fair, highs in the mid to upper nineties, less humid. Southwest winds, five to fifteen miles per hour.”

“It’s his thing,” Josie explained. “He’s always got the Weather Channel on.”

“Jeez. You’d think …”

“What?” Josie prompted him.

“Wouldn’t that drive you crazy?”

They both sniggered, trying not to. Harvey ignored them and petted his rose. They were awful. But at least they were laughing together. In another minute they would have to get up and leave
and they’d be back to nerves and silence and the whole slippery future, or maybe they didn’t have one. Why couldn’t she just enjoy this moment without dread or regret, why couldn’t you make your whole life up out of those moments, why weren’t they enough? That was all she ever wanted. To make one perfect moment count for everything.

They were outside again in the black, dreaming night, Harvey shuffling between them. “Let’s take him home, OK?” Josie swallowed a yawn. It was late, or at least it felt late. She got Harvey into the car and settled the straw hat on his head.

She gave Mitch directions to Harvey’s house. “Thanks for the ice cream,” she said, formally.

“You’re welcome.”

“And for helping me with him.”

“To serve and protect. That’s our motto.” He didn’t take his eyes off the road but he smiled, and she began to think, in an anxious way, that maybe things weren’t yet over between them.

She walked Harvey to his door. Between the gaps in the curtains she saw the TV screen’s deep blue, the Weather Channel doing its thing in the darkened room. “Now promise me you won’t go wandering around anymore at night,” she scolded uselessly. She should probably tell her mother about Harvey’s nocturnal activities, except it would inevitably lead to a discussion of her own. She was aware of the car’s headlights on her, and of Mitch watching her, and of having to walk back to him in the lights’ glare and maneuver her way through all the hazards of her own wild hopes.

Harvey’s rose still held its petals, although the stem was now in three pieces. It must have been some tough variety grown especially for supermarkets, like tomatoes. Josie opened his front door, sighed. “Turn on a light so you don’t hurt yourself.”

“I’m getting married.”

He’d only whispered it, and the next minute he’d closed the door behind him, and Josie was left blinking at it, wondering if she’d heard him right. He was nuts. Absofuckinglutely. It probably ran in the family, this was probably how she’d end up some day, walking the streets in a crazy lady’s hat, flagging down police cars and declaring her undying love.

She walked carefully back to the car, got in. “Well …”

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking, maybe we could try this again some other time.”

“If you’re sure …”

“Yes,” Josie said, and once the word was out there in the air it seemed to grow round, hang in the air like an inflated balloon. She said again, stronger now, “Yes.”

“Yes not tonight, or yes later?”

“Both.” She liked the sound of herself saying it, the boldness of it. “Tonight got all screwed up. But I still want to.” She let the back of her hand rest, almost carelessly, against his crotch.

He drew a long breath and they started in kissing and she thought maybe she’d change her mind and they’d do it anyway, right there in Uncle Harvey’s driveway. But he disengaged himself. “Boy.”

“I’ll say.”

“Do you like the mustache? You never said.”

“It’s totally great.”

“You think so?” He tilted his head to catch his reflection in the rearview mirror. “You don’t think it looks faggy?”

“Absolutely not. You should keep it.”

“One of the guys at the station was giving me a hard time about it being faggy. But I think he’s full of it.”

They drove back to the restaurant and her car, which sat in the empty parking lot like a reproach, and she kissed him again, almost
impatient to get the good-bye part over with. When she’d already gotten out of the car she turned around to tap on his window.

“I’m not gonna be working here anymore. So if you need to find me …”

“Give me that notebook.” He scribbled on the inside cover. “That’s me.”

“So I should just call you?”

“Let your fingers do the walking.”

When he’d gone she looked down at the number she already knew by heart. It seemed he ought to know she’d called him dozens of times, even though she’d been careful not to give herself away. He should have just figured it out. She kept shoving back down the thought that maybe he was a guy who didn’t figure out a lot of things you might expect.

S
omewhere out in the desert, after he’d long since lost track of the days, the tape began talking back to him.

God, Rolando hated the desert. If there were any desert guys back there in his ancestral soup, they’d been elbowed out by guys who came from jungles or the tops of big snowy mountains. He wasn’t built for this place, he had no use for it. Zero. The sun, his friend, betrayed him here, became a horrible swollen ball of pain. He kept driving east, speeding to get through to something else, because you knew as a true fact the desert didn’t go on forever. But it had a way of fucking with your mind so you started thinking maybe it was everything and everywhere, had swallowed the rest of the world into its big blank self.

He’d never been here before. He’d never been much of anywhere. But he’d liked the idea of the desert, which he must have put in his head from some old cowboy movie and never got around to changing. He had imagined stars as thick as silver stitching in a deep blue night, cactus flowers, painted cliffs. Thunderstorms riding in twenty miles ahead of you, so that you watched chains of lightning, yellow and red, ignite the horizon. Room enough to walk for days (somehow he had pictured himself walking), until your soul rose right up into your skin and then into air and left you pure.

He had thought there would be more out here somehow. More of anything. There wasn’t even sand. Just bare scrub dirt with some kind of tough ground plant poking up here and there like a half-grown beard. There were probably rattlesnakes—he would have liked to see a rattlesnake—but you couldn’t tell from the car. Every so often there would be some butt-ugly little town strung out along the highway, trailers and sheet-metal roofs and giant antennas and maybe a corral with a heat-stupefied old horse in the middle of it, and then Rolando would feel a shuddering relief that whatever else was wrong with his life, at least he didn’t live here.

That first night he drove almost to Palm Springs, then pulled over at a rest stop to sleep. When he woke up it was cold, and the first white morning light was cold also, and he slapped at his wallet and his duffle bag in reflexive panic. The money still there. At the bottom of his pocket, the flattened pebble welcomed his fingers. But some other dread held him as if below the surface of water while he struggled to get free, and it was more than waking from his muzzy sleep in a strange place with a thick taste in his mouth and a crust in his eyes. Something else was missing and it wasn’t his gun or his money, it was himself. As if he’d been emptied out by anger and motion and darkness and fear. He was weighed down by absolutely nothing. He was free to go anywhere, be anyone, and maybe later that would feel good but not yet.

So he drove on into Palm Springs, past irrigated fields as green as Easter grass, and a line of distant powdery mountains. Palm Springs. A place where rich people played golf and tennis in clothes bought only for those purposes, and everyone had a swimming pool, and everything was air-conditioned and easeful. It was summer now and the rich would be elsewhere he knew. Still, ideas, speculations, possibilities began to tumble and click in his head, in a recreational sort of way.

He found a gas station with a minimart and breakfasted on coffee
and packaged doughnuts. He brushed his teeth in the John and tried to clean himself with the soap in the dispenser and paper towels but that was so unsatisfactory he decided he’d rather stay funky. He bought cigarettes and an orange soda for later when it got hot. He leaned back against the car and let the smoke draw into his lungs and along with it there was the sensation of heart and nerve and will returning. Some of whatever had drained away in the night was filling again.

The morning, the day, was like money in his pocket, his to waste or spend. He drove past suburbs of large and undoubtedly well-guarded homes, condo villages, streets lined with palm trees, the useless-looking downtown with stores where the rich could pretend to need things like ski jackets and fancy dog food and expensive furniture painted to look beat-up. It was still early, the sun was tangled in the shadow of buildings, the air was clear but with a glowing edge of heat. How all-out weird it was to be in a place you’d never seen before, where you couldn’t take anything for granted, weather, streets, faces. It was part of being his brandnew, This Space-Available self, he figured.

Next to him at a stoplight a Latino guy was driving a step van, half-blue and half-green with a wavy squiggle in between. The guy looked over and Rolando nodded. He was dressed all in white, like he worked in a hospital. The light changed and they scooted along together for another few blocks, stopping and accelerating in unison. After the second light they struck up a shouted conversation.

“Que onda, ese?”

“Que onda, vato? You following me?”

“Naw man, just cruising. Where you goin?”

“Work, where else?”

“Yeah? Where you work?”

He shouted something Rolando couldn’t hear. “What?” he mouthed back and the driver reached up and slapped the roof of
the van. Rolando craned his neck and saw that the blue-green was supposed to be water, and the letters on the side read
OASIS POOL SERVICE
.

The van signaled for a left turn and the driver waved goodbye. But Rolando dropped behind him and turned also. They passed into a district of winding roads, big houses set on lawns, if you could still call them lawns, arranged with cactus and boulders, brick-colored gravel raked into designs, clay pots at the front doors filled with blazing pink or red flowers. The van turned at an alley and parked and Rolando pulled up behind it. The driver got out and stood waiting for him, a little warily. He was a young guy with a broad, square face and burnt-brown skin.

Rolando, all casual, pulled out a cigarette. “Smoke? Hey, I just wanted to ask is it a good job, you like it OK?”

The driver reached for a cigarette, accepted Rolando’s light. “It’s not bad. Boss is a jackass.”

“Jackass, that’s just another name for boss.”