Wide Blue Yonder (20 page)

Then he was on the highway with the bastard sun in his eyes and his back on fire but at least he was out of there. He kept flicking glances in the rearview mirror but there was nobody and nothing in the world behind him and not much ahead. Once he got past the first few highway signs it was bone bare. Every so often a car passed him going the other way, and a couple of times he caught up to trucks or some old couple in a slow-moving van plastered with stupid tourist stickers. Other than that it was as if the road was unspooling new before him as he drove. His wet clothes rubbed and scraped until his skin felt wormy cold. The rest of him was turned inside out with shaking and thirst. He felt for the pebble in his pocket but it was gone, washed away.

He woke up without being aware he had slept, and found he was still driving, that some part of him had kept the car pointed on the road while the rest of him went far away. It swerved as if only now that he had come back to himself would things go wrong. He wrenched the wheel the other direction. He was going way too fast, the speedometer needle said red, red, red, and the land and sky flew by in strips and patches. For another moment he was not driving the car but riding it until he remembered to remove his foot from the accelerator.

From then on he kept more of his mind anchored, enough to do the work of driving, although not enough to think about anything that happened back there. He had to stop once in the middle of an empty stretch of road to let the engine cool and to take a piss. Amazing that he still had enough water in him for that. The ground was so bare and hard-packed that nothing of his
stream soaked in. Overhead, the thinnest scrim of clouds was outlined against the impossible sun, not enough to shade anything, while the only object on the endpoint of the horizon was a line of accidental-looking brown hills. A car passed without slowing, leaving a stinging sound in the air. Aside from that, there was nothing to show that anything in the world was alive. His dull brain considered this. If the Big One hit out here, or say it already had, how would you know it?

He stopped once more for gas in one of those mean little desert towns but wasn’t paying attention to distance and so Phoenix surprised him, creeping up on him with its snarl of freeways and traffic. He bore down on the wheel and once more rode the car through it until there was highway again. And then his mind spun away into the pale sky and somewhere he must have gotten food because there was a food taste in his mouth, bits of beef and salt, but for his life he couldn’t have said how he had come by it.

Then it was dark and he stopped the car until it was light again because he thought if he drove in the dark, he might lose even the horizon. When the sun came up he aimed toward it but he had gotten on some different, smaller road now that wasn’t going straight in any direction. He would have been lost except
lost
meant there was somewhere in particular you were going.

The radio didn’t work. Or else he was somewhere the radio didn’t go. He played the tape because it was noise, and because those angels sang Ohh like it was a whole entire language. He tried to sing along with them, beating time on the steering wheel, and laughed because he sounded like a damn goat. Then the dude came on, the one that wanted to be his best friend, and his voice was like chocolate syrup pouring over clean snow.

“Weary? Confused? Anxious? The chaos of our times affects us all. The barriers in the mind reflect the barriers we place between ourselves. Imagine instead, one self that contains all selves. One
will that joins the forces of all wills together. All our energies focused on the great work before us. I’m talking about nothing less than the physical manifestation of that which we call God.”

More angels. He tried another chorus with them. His voice spiraled away like water going down a drain. He was beginning to smell again and his mouth tasted like sin. He figured he must look pretty funky too, because he stopped once for gas, falling out of the car practically bent double because of his back, with a cracked grin on his face from those fine fine angels. And a woman standing at a pop machine saw him coming and double-timed it back to her car, rolled up the windows and locked the door. The grin wasn’t even for her; he had forgotten there was anybody on the other side of his face. Just to see what she’d do, he sauntered toward her. She couldn’t peel out of there fast enough. Adios, darlin! He jumped up and down waving, then turned around to see two men watching him from inside the gas station, arms folded across their chests. At that moment he also became aware that he was not wearing shoes and had not been for some time and his feet were as tough and battered as hooves.

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.

R
osy 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.