On a hunch she gunned the car after the now-vanished lights, then swung left onto Sangamon Avenue. She rolled down the window to hear an echo of sirens. They were headed out to the west edge of town, where the Auto Zone and discount grocery and Farmer’s Service Co-op gave over to a new subdivision of little square houses, like a child’s blocks, before the monotonous fields began.
Was it a fire? Josie couldn’t tell. A fire was of no use to her. No, she saw the string of winking lights clearly. They were turning into the vast concrete apron of empty parking lot around the FS Co-op. She cut behind the shopping center to the service road that ran along the edge of a stray cornfield. This was far enough away that she felt inconspicuous, although she could still see. They were police squads all right, three of them. She felt an unmistakable sexual tickle, God, what kind of freak was she becoming?
She left the engine running for the air-conditioning but turned the headlights off and stepped out of the car for a better look. To one side of the Co-op were big above-ground ammonia tanks, a smaller tank for kerosene, and a row of tractor tires, man-high, bags of mulch and peat moss on pallets, straw bales under a tarp, and piles of gravel and landscaping stone. Now that the squad cars were here nothing seemed to be happening. She could see a group of men standing around in the headlights, although her view was obscured and she was too far away to hope to make anyone out. It had to be almost ninety degrees still, and wet-blanket humid. Sweat felt a half-inch thick on her skin.
Then two figures emerged from the far corner of the building where they must have been crouching behind the ammonia tanks. They ran toward the cornfield, almost straight at her. She was too paralyzed to move, and they didn’t seem to notice her until they were almost upon her, and then the one in front skidded to a stop and the one behind cursed and nearly piled into him. When the first boy lifted his face she said, “Moron? Is that you?”
It was so dark out there she couldn’t guess how she’d recognized him. Maybe it was the bulk of him, and the way he ran, heavily, with his shoulder tight and muscle-bound. “Josie!” he yelped, and the boy behind him said, “Shaddup, will ya?” in a loud whisper.
“What are you—”
But Moron had her by both arms and was half-lifting, halfpushing her ahead of them, across the road and into the cornfield. She was still sorting out her first surprise, and to be bundled along like this, to be enveloped in so much large and hot-smelling flesh, was an extraordinary thing. The corn was nearly head-high, a good crop year everybody said, not that she could ever remember a bad one. Corn just couldn’t help but grow here. The wide green leaves slapped her face. The boy she didn’t know was muttering curses.
When they were a few rows in, Moron loosened his grip and she said, more curious than anything else, “What is this, huh?”
Moron bent over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. “Man, I suck. No endurance.”
The other boy said, “I am going to kick Podolsky’s ass big time. What a limp dick.” Josie recognized him now, a kid with bad skin and long, weedy hair who hung out at the losers’ table in the school cafeteria.
Moron said to her, “We were messing around in there and this guy Podolsky was in the car outside and we set off the alarm and he freaked.”
“Oh. What were you looking for?”
“Just stuff. I thought maybe they’d have some tires that’d work on my truck.”
“Don’t tell her anything. Jesus Christ.” The longhaired kid was crouched down in the cornstalks, peering back at the Co-op. “They’re still out there. I don’t think they saw us.”
“How’s Taco Swill?” Josie asked Moron, for something to say.
“Oh I quit not real long after you did. I got on at Plastic-Pak. It pays a ton better and I don’t have to wear a stupid hat.”
“Yeah. I got another job too.” She was wondering what she ought to do about her car. Over the sound of the engine she could hear the tiny voice of the radio behind the sealed glass.
“So what are you doing here? This is too weird.”
She couldn’t invent anything that made sense, so she mostly told the truth. “I heard the sirens and followed them to see what was happening.”
“Yah?” She couldn’t tell if he disbelieved her or if he’d just run out of things to say. He was quiet, peering through the thick-planted rows. Even hunkered down he looked absurdly large and visible, like an elephant trying to hide behind a picket fence.
“Well,” said Josie, “I should probably shove off now. You boys take it easy.” She stood up and started back toward the road.
“Whoa whoa whoa.” Between the two of them they hauled her back down. “That’s not a good idea right now,” Moron explained.
“Yeah, why don’t you stick around for a while,” said the long-haired boy. “Until things sort of chill out. Then maybe you could give us a ride home.”
“You want me to be your getaway driver?” She giggled. It sounded like the sort of thing she might expect to do in this, her new reckless life.
“It’d just be giving us a ride.”
“See,” said Moron, “Ronnie, he’s seventeen, that’s still juvenile. But I’m eighteen so I’m an adult offender. I gotta be more careful.”
“Did you guys actually steal anything?” Josie asked, beginning to take an interest.
Ronnie dug in his back pocket. “Just some bean inoculant they had up by the register. Little bags of it.”
“That is so ridiculous.”
“Hey, it’s not like we had time to browse around.”
“I wish the dumb cops would figure out the party’s over.”
“You don’t think they had video cameras in there, do you?”
“Bean inoculant. You got a promising career in crime.”
“Fuck you.”
It was as hot as the inside of a black box. Even the blurred quarter moon was gassy and hot. Something like locusts, except louder and more metallic-sounding, were making a racket in the weeds at the side of the road. Josie tried to see what the police were doing. The squad cars hadn’t moved. The red lights flared and pulsed over the empty lot. Mitchell Crook was there. She could just feel it. He was talking seriously into a radio, his dark eyebrows bent together in concentration. So close, no more than a hundred yards away. The one place she wanted to go and the one place she couldn’t get to. Everything was hopeless, she was a hopeless fool. Of course he would have a girlfriend, it was ignorant to think he wouldn’t. A grown-up girlfriend with a butter-scotch tan and flippety hips and perfect fingernails, someone just as impossibly beautiful as he was. Moron and Ronnie were having an argument about corn.
“It’s supposed to be ‘Knee-high by the Fourth of July.’”
“That was before hybrids.”
“So, Fourth of July was last week. It could have grown. It’s like, ‘As high as your fly.’”
“Clever. Maybe you could be a farmer. I always figured you for the 4-H type.”
Josie said, “Hey, I think the cops are leaving.” She watched forlornly as one car sped away, its flashers extinguished now. The other two squads loitered for a while longer, then car doors slammed. Their headlights were like spaceships turning and hurtling through a black void, speeding back into town.
“Boy are they dumb,” Ronnie gloated. “I don’t think they even looked around back.”
“They were just too awestruck by the devastation we left behind us.”
“Shaddup, OK?”
Josie straightened and tried to uncramp her legs. “So where do you guys live?”
“Oh, we don’t have to go home right away. We could hang out for a while.”
“Sure.” She didn’t care what she did anymore. None of it mattered. They piled in together, Moron in the passenger seat and Ronnie in the back, and they said nice car, just to be polite, although she could tell they didn’t think much of it, a dinky little Toyota, a girl’s car. They went through her CDs and they seemed to think she had at least a few decent ones. They blasted the air cond
itioner but put the windows down to feel the artificial breeze their motion made. Josie thought how bizarre it would be if Tammy or anybody else she knew saw her cruising around with these guys. She’d never live it down. Moron was about twice the size of any normal human being outside of the World Wrestling Federation. And Ronnie was just … Well, she’d rather be her fucked-up idiot self than poor pit-faced, skanky Ronnie on the very best day of his life.
But here they were, motoring along, all goofy and full of fun. Moron said they should stop at Ronnie’s brother’s so they could get a couple of six-packs. Yeah? said Josie. She already felt drunk on nothing at all. When they got the beer she drank one just for thirst and didn’t feel a thing. It was long after eleven, too late for her to track down Mitchell Crook and do her usual twisted stalker thing, so she might as well enjoy herself some other sick way.
“This has to be the most boring-ass town in the world,” said Ronnie. He was trying to light a cigarette but his lighter was empty and the little wheel ground itself dry.
Josie said, “I’m looking forward to Y2K. Everything either shutting down or blowing up.”
Moron said, “You know all the Russian nuclear missiles? They could go off at midnight New Year’s Eve. The government just about admitted it.”
“Yeah, but Springfield’s not important enough to have its own missile.”
“My shit lighter just went Y2K.” Ronnie threw it out the window. It skittered away, as insubstantial as tinfoil.
They were driving past St. John’s Hospital, one of the few places in town with its lights still on. There was a row of corridor ends blazing away and the dimmer glow from the rooms themselves, their curtains mostly open, empty, since this was Springfield, after all, and few people even got sick in interesting ways. It was the same hospital where she had been born, although she didn’t like to think about that. The doctor said, It’s a girl, and her father said, Oh. If Abe had daughters instead of sons, would he still have loved them?
Josie wiggled one hand and Moron popped the top on a new beer and gave it to her. She said, “Seriously. What do you think’s gonna happen when we hit good old Y2K? Anything?”
“God I hope so. I don’t think I could stand another thousand years like these last ones.”
“But what?” she persisted. “How? All right, the missiles, that’s one thing.”
Moron cranked the music up so loud the speakers buzzed. “Fiona Apple, totally great. If you figure—”
“I have to turn this down, OK?”
“—that everything has computer chips in it now, I mean, how many chips do you think are in this car? And those satellites that control phones and ATMs and the stock market and airplanes and television and weather and shit? They’re gonna drop, splat. Burn big holes in the innocent bystanders. Civilization as we know it hits the tank. Then it’s every man for himself. The strong will live and the weak will die. But don’t worry. I’ll be watching out for you.”
“Thanks,” said Josie, unsure what he meant, or if he was joking. He was giving her a strange look, as if there was something they’d already agreed about. Then Ronnie said, “Hey, pull over, would ya?”
She found a space at the curb and Ronnie got out to stand at the back of the car. “What’s he doing?” she asked, and then, “Oh.”
The taillights showed Ronnie’s thin, nearly flat behind, his old slick jeans hanging in folds. Josie thought he could at least have found a bush or something. He hiked his jeans back up, but instead of getting into the car he took off running down the block.
“Now what?” She was getting a little tired of Ronnie.
“Oh, he’s just goofing.” Moron stretched out his arms in a big fake yawn, letting one of them come to rest, as casual as a felled tree, around her shoulders.
She wasn’t imagining things. He was trying to hit on her. Oh no, icky. Ronnie opened the back door. “Miss me?”
“You mean you were gone?”
“Ha ha. I got eight, count em, eight.”
“Eight what?” asked Josie. She was starting to feel the beer, all the little stupid-making bubbles in her head.
“Let’s not hang around, huh? Step on it.”
“What is he talking about?”
“He means he keyed a bunch of cars and we should probably not be here right now.”
Josie tried to give Ronnie a meaningful stare but her eyes weren’t following orders. “You scratched their paint? What did you do that for?”
“Is she for real?”
The two of them were yukking it up and high-fiving, like they’d accomplished something important, and she couldn’t believe she’d ended up with two people even more pathetic than she was. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “And I’m not doing it in the street.”
“We could go to Denny’s,” suggested Moron. “Yeah. Patty melts.”
As much as she didn’t want to be seen anyplace with them, it seemed like a good idea to get out of the car. Maybe she could ditch them at Denny’s, then drive by Mitchell Crook’s apartment so the night wouldn’t be a total loss. Her bladder, once it had announced itself, was cresting dangerously. She had to put the car in reverse to get out of the space. “Excuse me,” she said, waiting until Moron removed his arm. In the backseat Ronnie sniggered.
At Denny’s she sat on the toilet and thought: This Is Your Life. Your life is a public bathroom. Sticky floor, smelly smells, ghosts of bodily fluids, yellow flourescent lights on yellow tile. She flushed. Down the tubes. It was too bad she wasn’t serious puking drunk, just to top things off. As it was, she was stuck somewhere between sober and dry-mouthed fuzzy, with a little riff of headache playing at the back of her skull. In the yellow mirror she poked at her teeth and combed her hair. She looked hideous. She looked like Bride of Moron.
She was hoping to slink back to the car, but Moron, who’d been using the pay phone, was waiting for her. He was parked right next to the ladies’ room door like a dog tied up outside a grocery. “Hey, I’m sorry if Ronnie’s being uncouth.”
“No biggie.”
“I’ll beat his ass if you want.”
“Look, I really have to get home now. My mom freaks if I’m not in by midnight.” This was true, although it never kept her from staying out as late as she wanted.
“Yeah?” He actually drooped. His enormous shoulders lowered as much as his overdeveloped muscles would permit, and his chin fell. He wasn’t such a bad-looking guy, he would have been normal-to-cute if he didn’t do peculiar things to his hair and dress like a goon in all that camouflage stuff and the sleeveless flannel shirts. She didn’t think he had many girlfriends. Everyone was too scared of him. “Well, stay and get something to eat. I’m buying.”
“Thanks. Not hungry.”
“A Coke or something. Besides”—he brightened, as if he’d found a compelling argument—“there’s still all the beer in your car and we can’t bring it in here.”
That did seem sort of important, or maybe she was too addled to think it through. “All right, how about you get your food, then I drop you and Ronnie and the stupid beer off on my way home. Deal?”
“Sure.” He was happy that he’d gotten her to agree. She was aware that he hoped to make her keep agreeing to things, like a salesman. Ronnie was slouched in a corner booth, stinking up the air with cigarettes. Josie did a quick reconnoiter. Nobody she knew in the place, thank God, just an old dried-up farm couple who looked like they’d been stranded there for the last week and a man in a cowboy hat who was studying yesterday’s newspaper a page at a time. Not until two or three in the morning would it turn into the Night of the Living Dead, a ghastly overlit graveyard filled with all the after-closing drunks and the guys who’d just finished beating their wives.
Ronnie seemed almost pleased to see her. He blew a smoke ring in her direction. “Hey, what’s your name?” he demanded, which she took as a sign of friendly interest.
“Josie.”
“What kind of name is that? That’s a name you give to a cow.
Josie the Cow.”
“And Ronnie’s a name you’d give to a pile of bull.”
He stared at her with his little cracked, red-rimmed eyes. In ten, twenty, thirty years he would never look like anything but the tragic result of inbreeding. He smacked his palm flat on the table and hooted. He had decided she was funny.
Josie drank two Cokes and swallowed an Advil she found at the bottom of her purse, and Moron and Ronnie worked their way through patty melts and fries with gravy. She was beginning to feel steadier, more cheerful, as if sometime in the future this would all make for an amusing anecdote. When they paid and walked out to the parking lot, the heat closed around them once more.
“This is really sucky weather,” she complained. “It makes you hate having skin. OK. Where do you want to go?”
“To Podolsky’s so we can beat his chicken ass,” said Moron.
They directed her to one of the little blocky houses on that same western edge of town where they’d been before, a neighborhood that no one she knew lived in, a place where some portion of everyone’s household goods ended up in the yard: kids’ Big Wheels, plastic coolers, rugs hung over porch rails. They must think she was a spoiled little rich girl, which she guessed she was, actually. “End of the line,” she said, pulling up in front of the Podolsky residence.
Ronnie got out. “Have to make sure he’s home.”
Josie sighed, because Moron wasn’t budging and was this night of the giant fuckup ever going to end? “I really really have to go home,” she said, politely fuming.
“Yeah, sure.” Nothing short of a crane was going to get him out of the front seat. The bicep closest to her had a blue barbed wire tattoo around the meatiest part of the muscle, like it was holding a package together. He said, “I liked it when we worked together. You were always nice to me.”
Wide Blue Yonder Page 8
