He kept his eyes shut and felt around for the couch. The Weather was talking so he knew exactly where he was. The air whistled with cool. He grinned out loud. When he sat down on the couch, Fat Cat thumped into his lap. Man In A Suit said, Record heat continues in the central plains, midwest, northeast, and southeast. But inside it was perfect. He petted Fat Cat. Even his fingers were happy.
Local Forecast must have fallen asleep. He woke up but he kept his eyes closed. He had such a funny dream. It was about the Army, where he’d never even been. In his dream the Army gave him a medal. It was for fast running. He forgot Yoo Hoo was still there. She said, “What are you doing with those glasses still on? How can you see anything at all?”
She lifted them off his nose. His eyes were still screwed shut. “Look at me, Harvey. I have to show you how to turn the air conditioner on and off. In case you get too cold. Right here. Harvey! It’s important.”
Local Forecast opened one eye. She showed him On and Off. Sometimes she acted like he didn’t know anything.
“I cleaned the bathroom and brought you some supplies, toilet paper and Comet and stuff. And kitty litter. You definitely need kitty litter. Now I want to talk to you about something else. Are you listening? Are you hearing?”
He pointed to his ears. He had closed his eyes again but he could feel her looking at him, deciding things. “Fine. I’d like to take you in for a checkup. Just your basic physical. How long has it been since you’ve had one? Never mind. I’d almost rather not know. I promise no one will hurt you.”
He wondered if she lived anywhere she would be going back to soon.
“And an eye exam. I’m very concerned about your eyesight. You might not even notice because it’s a gradual thing. I’m hoping there’s something they can do about it. We’ll see what the doctor—”
no no no no doctor no no no doctor run bad word feet bad smell hot hot run no no no no
Desperate Diseases
Josie couldn’t decide if it would be better to be the victim of a crime or to have him arrest her. There were advantages to both. It was sexier to be the arrestee. A girl gangster, tough and sneering, being manhandled into the back of a squad car. Oh yeah? Make me, copper. A cigarette dangling from her pouting crimson lips. He would have to handcuff her. There would be this incredible dynamic between them, an initial antagonism that masked their smoldering … nah, no good. Cheese-o-rama. This is your brain on love. Every lame MTV video and bad movie she’d ever seen was infecting her. Anyway there were consequences involved in acquiring an arrest record, plus she didn’t really want to take up smoking.
So what was she supposed to do, pay somebody to mug her? Join the force? Tammy said, “What if he’s gay?”
“Oh thank you. Thank you very much.”
“Seriously. He’s too perfect. If he’s not gay, then he’s every gay guy’s fantasy.”
She never should have said anything to Tammy. Too late. She’d wanted to show him off. So she’d driven Tammy to the Super Pantry where, if you parked and pretended to use the pay phone sometimes around three-thirty in the afternoon, you might be rewarded with a brief but unobstructed view of Officer Crook, sauntering into police headquarters across the street.
Sometimes he was already in uniform, sometimes not. He didn’t wear anything gay, just ordinary shirts and jeans. Tammy was full of shit. There were probably gay cops somewhere, but not in Springfield. The M was for Mitchell. Mitch. She knew that from the phone book. He drove a black Acura with a sunroof, license plate KCX 767. None of the things she could find out about him were any help. He was still sealed up inside his beautiful self.
“So how are you supposed to hook up with him, assuming he even likes girls?” Tammy was acting like it was so hysterical but Josie could tell she was impressed with him and trying not to be.
“I followed him home one night,” Josie admitted.
“Stalker!”
Try every night last week. She was beginning to think he wasn’t much of a cop, not to notice her. A couple of times he stopped at a sports bar she was afraid even to enter lest her arrest fantasy come true. But most often he just went home. He lived in an ordinary apartment building, a place for people who didn’t care where they lived. That was sort of disappointing but maybe he had it fixed up nice inside. She tried to figure out which windows were his but everything was curtained over and blind. So she’d sit for a while longer in the parking lot, watching bugs that were as stupid as she was battering the false moon of the sodium-vapor streetlamp. The air at midnight was just as thick and humid as it was at noon, worse, almost, because the black choked you. She would drive home feeling she had begun something terrible, reckless, and greedy that would come to no good end.
There wasn’t room in her now for anything but love. It weighed her down, it fought to burst out of her. She was truly miserable, and at the same time she was exalted. She couldn’t believe that no one noticed. At night in her bed she made love to her fingers, calling forth every scrap of him, every image that was no longer a memory but a picture of memory, and the more the actual fact of him receded, the harder she urged her body, until it seemed that when she made herself come, she had somehow embraced him. At other times she knew very well that a love that fed only on itself was unreal, unwholesome. Something had to happen.
She was sick from the heat and sick from desire that went nowhere. You couldn’t forget about the heat for a minute. One of the hottest Julys on record, they said. The air conditioning at home wasn’t working right; it couldn’t keep up with the temperature and poured out a thin tepid soup. So that both awake and asleep she felt gritty and dragged out. She slept as late as she could and most days she woke up to an empty house. In the kitchen there would be a coffeepot burned down to sludge and a note from her mother: Hi Sunshine, don’t forget whatever tedious thing she was supposed to do around the house. Have a great day! Sunshine. Her mother was not being sarcastic. She was incapable of such a thing. But how could anybody look at her crazed and hangdog self and think Sunshine? And what was Mitchell Crook doing at this exact same instant?
Tammy said she should just forget about it.
“How old do you think he is anyway?”
“I don’t know. Twenty-one or -two.”
“Try twenty-six.” Tammy had a jolly look on her face.
“Like you know shit about him.”
“Fine. Have it your way.” Tammy went back to picking at her eyebrows in the mirror. She was thinking of getting one pierced and was trying to decide if she had the right bone structure to carry it off.
Josie thought that Tammy was somebody she could see herself not being friends with someday. Sooner or later they would have some really gorgeous fight and all the little things that irritated them about each other would burst into flame. “All right,” Josie said. “Give.”
“I asked my brother if he knew any fag policemen.”
“No more gay stuff, OK?”
“I asked him if he knew anybody named Crook and he said there was a Crook a year ahead of him. So I found him in Kent’s old yearbook and he was Class of ‘91. Do the math. At least twenty-five and probably twenty-six.”
That was Springfield for you. There was no such thing as a handsome stranger. Everyone had already been discovered and colonized. Twenty-six. Some of the air went out of her. That meant when she herself was thirty, he would be almost forty.
“So anyway, Miss Jailbait, unless he’s some kind of child molester—”
“Just shut up, all right?” It was a matter of pride now. If this was really love, it didn’t matter. Besides, it wasn’t that he was too old. It was that she was such a little underaged twerp and no one would ever take her seriously.
Her new job was a big improvement simply because the place was about two months away from going out of business. So she got off work early almost every night and could prowl the streets, looking for love. The restaurant was called Beefeater’s. The conceit was that diners were in Merry Olde England. When she was in the m
ood to think that such things were funny, Josie imagined opening a restaurant with the daring concept of eating right where you actually were. A purely Springfield ambiance. It would be called Abe’s, and decorated in a corn and soybeans motif. The menu would feature food that could be eaten with the hands.
The cook at Beefeater’s had a cough that sounded like it came up from the bottom of a coal mine, and his feet were giving out or maybe it was his knees so he spent most of his time drinking coffee at the break table. The steaks had names like the King’s Ransom and the Queen’s Fancy and he screwed them all up so bad the joke was the little flags saying RARE or MEDIUM were going to be replaced by ones labeled E. COLI and BURNT COW’S ASS. The manager was a pimp. The dishwasher would probably turn up on America’s Most Wanted someday. Josie handed out menus to the few customers dim enough not to have gotten the word yet. “Was everything all right?” she asked them as they paid their bill under the fake heraldic banner that marked the cash register. “Come back and see us again soon.” Smiling her most delighted, innocent smile and would life ever offer her an opportunity for anything but screaming irony?
Her mother said, “I can’t believe you’re at work until all hours. So why don’t you tell me what you do instead?”
“Mom, it’s summer.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Just because it’s summer I’m not going to worry about you? Let me remind you
That You Are Still A Minor And As Long As I Am Responsible For You oh, did her mother ever say anything that wasn’t a completely canned speech? Every time she opened her mouth Josie imagined an audience of chairs springing up before her, like her Women In Business meetings.
It was Sunday morning, one of the few times neither of them had to be someplace else and so they were stuck in the house together. Her mother had fixed some runny scrambled eggs that neither of them really wanted, in an attempt to make it a festive occasion. Her mother was wearing another of her print caftans. She had about twenty of them. Josie thought they were like carrying a sign that announced: I Have Let Myself Go. You could still see where her mother had been pretty, in the arch of her eyebrow and the way her hair swept back from her forehead in a smooth dark curl. But the skin underneath her eyes and chin looked muddy and stretched, and if she, Josie, ever put on weight like that, so her arms jiggled and her boobs stuck out as square as a drawer in a file cabinet—
“—asked you a question, Miss.”
“Come on, Mom.” She acted bored, which could always disguise her not paying attention. “I just hang out with kids. We do stupid stuff like go to the Super Pantry. Drive around. It’s not like there’s anything to do.”
“There’s enough for you to get into trouble. Whatever you’re doing it better not be something you don’t want me to catch you at. Now listen up. Your father and Teeny want you to go with them to Aspen the end of August and I think it’s a good idea.”
“Well, I think it’s a completely rancid idea, Mom!”
“You just finished telling me there’s nothing to do here.”
“I’d rather be bored than tortured. Besides, I have to work.”
“It would be the week before school starts. You’ll have to quit anyway.” Her mother was logical at all the wrong times.
“They don’t really want me to go. They just want to be able to say they spent money on me so I owe them something. Besides, Aspen’s full of women who wear fur coats with cowboy boots and guys—”
“Have you ever been there?”
“—guys with fake hair and big turquoise rings. I’ve seen their pictures. All their friends are like that, rich and awful. They sit around and drink and think they’re so hilarious. Besides, Teeny’s gross.”
“Yes.” Her mother sighed. “She is that.”
“She’ll make me fetch and carry all her stupid hats and sunglasses and I’ll have to go shopping with her at horrible boutiques that sell shiny jumpsuits and leopard-print sweaters and she’ll try on these horrible expensive tacky clothes and ask me how they look—”
Her mother was laughing and trying not to. Laughter was spurting out of her closed lips in little snorts. “All right. So much for Teeny. But your father would still like to spend some time with you.”
“Sure.”
“Come on, baby. I’m trying to be a good custodial parent here. Don’t sabotage me. It won’t kill you to spend a week in a fancy condo with mountain views.”
“You’re forgetting the views of Dad and Teeny acting like total cow flop.”
“Now that’s just mean.”
“Last time I went over there for dinner, Teeny played her exercise video the whole while and Dad stayed in the bathroom for forty minutes.”
“Your father isn’t that good at expressing his feelings.”
“Because he doesn’t have any. How about what I want to do, doesn’t that mean anything to him?”
Her mother began to look very patient. “Maybe if you invested some effort with him. Changed your attitude.”
“Why is it always me that has to do stuff? Huh? Why don’t you ever tell him to invest some effort or change his attitude? Does he get some kind of special lifetime credit just for being around when I was born?” They were going to make her do this, go on the vacation from hell and waste her last free week, a thousand miles away from Mitchell Crook who didn’t know she was alive.
“As a matter of fact he does. And so do I. That doesn’t mean parents are perfect. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to do our part. But we are your—what? What is that face supposed to mean?”
“Why do you always talk like that? Why do you always think you know everything? God. You don’t know fucking anything.”
“That’s enough of that kind of talk.”
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” But the splendid anger that had propelled her was already trailing off, and her mother was giving her a saddened, superior look.
“All right,” she said. “Thank you for your elevated and mature contribution to the discussion. I think I’ll let you talk to your father yourself about Aspen. I can’t imagine he’ll really want to take you anywhere.”
The caftan billowed and frumped its way out of the room. Stupid stupid stupid stupid.
Abe was a great father. Even when he was president he’d make time to kiss the boys good night. Mary said he spoiled them. Two of them died. Little Eddie and Willie. They died of things like scarlet fever and typhus or something else that nobody died of anymore. It was terribly sad. She sent her sadness across the years. She always felt it reached him somehow, just as his wisdom and suffering reached her.
Maybe she should go ahead and die. Or almost die, so they’d feel sorry for her. She knew it was a childish way of thinking, but her whole idiot self was turning into a mess of impulses and shrieking nerves, and if someone had proved to her that in her next life she would come back as Mitchell Crook’s dog or Mitchell Crook’s parakeet, anything that was allowed to look on him awake and asleep and remember, dimly, that she had always loved him, she would have said yes, gladly, let me die.
Since she was not dead she did things like call his apartment on nights she was certain he was at work. So she was a stalker. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t deal with, now that she had absolutely no pride. It was a sickness, the following and the calling. A secret sickness that she only pretended to want to cure. How weak, degrading, shameful it all was. Once she had said these things to herself she was free to go ahead and do what she wanted. She always blocked her phone number in case he had Caller ID or some other kind of police superscanner. The phone rang four times before his machine picked up. “Hi, Mitch here, I’ll get back to you.” Plain and simple. Eight syllables. You could have set them to music. The sound of his voice was a drug that she only allowed herself every so often. And once when she’d miscalculated and he answered with a breezy hello, she dropped the phone as if it burned her. The actual fact of him was just too overwhelming.
Some nights she drove out to Lake Springfield, just to
depress herself further. It was a tame sort of a lake, with a soft mud bottom and water the color of tea. There were fish in it, sure, people caught them and ate them, even though there was supposed to be some disease you could catch from swimming in it. There were places kids went to drink beer and mess around. She and Jeff had done that, plenty of times. She heard he had a new girlfriend. She guessed she was glad he wouldn’t be hanging around pestering her, but there was something irritating about it also.
She drove through all the places she imagined police might patrol. The public housing complexes, the crumbling, deserted edge of downtown with its welding shops and gaping warehouses. The mall where scuzzy kids her age hung out in packs, and the truly awful liquor store that looked like it got robbed about once a week. From time to time it occurred to her that it was genuinely dangerous to be in such places. She took pride in this. It made her feel she was finally accomplishing something. And when a black guy in an old rattletrap car pulled up next to her at a stoplight and said, in a bored voice, “Hey, you want your pussy licked?” Josie only said, “No thank you,” and drove on.
She almost never saw a cop car. You’d think there was no crime here, along with all the other things they didn’t have. She certainly never saw Mitchell Crook. She had no idea what beat or territory he covered, which was what kept her from doing something like burglarizing her own house and calling 911.
Then one night, in the gasping middle of the heat wave, when the lead story on the local news had been the death of six hundred chickens after a poultry farm’s cooling system failed, her luck changed. She’d gone into Blockbuster to kill some time when sirens started up, a whole howling chorus of them. Everybody else in the store looked around for a startled moment, then went back to flipping through the videos. But Josie was out the door and across the parking lot in a dead run. She could still see the taillights and revolving flashers at the end of the street, about to be swallowed up by darkness.
Wide Blue Yonder Page 7
