“I think I should tell you. I’m sort of going out with somebody.”
“Yah?”
“You probably wouldn’t know him. He’s older. He works nights. What are you—”
Ronnie and another boy were getting into the backseat.
Moron said, “Podolsky, you are dead meat.”
“I figured you’d be OK. And here you are OK, see?”
Ronnie said, “Podolsky, this is Josie the Cow. Josie the Driving Cow.”
“So you guys up for this?”
“Yeah, you ready to squeal like a little piggie and run wee wee wee all the way home?”
“Sit on my face, would you?”
“Excuse me,” said Josie. “Everyone should get out of my car now.”
“We got to go see some guys,” explained Ronnie.
“So call a cab.”
“What’s her problem?” asked Podolsky. He was older than the other two with his hair cut down to bristles and a hollow-looking face. He was wearing cheap wraparound sunglasses. He was creepy. “Let’s step on it.”
He was sitting directly behind her and she had to turn around to look at him. “Hey, this is my car. I don’t even know you. So don’t tell me what to do.”
They ignored her. Ronnie said, “Unless you want to use Mo’s truck.”
“Everybody knows Mo’s truck.”
“What do you think, you want to drive?”
“No, let the cow do it.”
Josie turned to Moron, trying to speak calmly. “What are you guys doing?”
“We just need the car for a little. It’s cool.” He put his hand on her bare knee and squeezed.
She tried to get out then, get out and walk away, but Podolsky said no no, in a mean-joking way, and pulled her back into the seat. For a moment her vision tilted and went flat, planes of black and white skating away. She kept thinking she hadn’t explained herself well enough.
“Relax,” said Moron. “It’s just driving, you can do that. You’re a good sport, you know? Most girls aren’t.” He turned around to the backseat and Podolsky handed him something.
“Is that a real gun?”
“Yeah, you want to hold it?”
“Say, Bonnie and Clyde, could we get this show on the road?”
Josie put the car in gear and started back to the highway. It didn’t look like a real gun. Even when she had big red bullet holes in her it would not seem real, none of it. The only things she could think to do were dumb things you saw on TV, like wrestle the gun away from him or crash the car into a tree. They passed the FS Co-op where a hundred years ago she and Ronnie and Moron had hidden in the cornfield. She was so crazy tired and it was so hot. Maybe this was the end of the world. Maybe it snuck up on you.
They told her where to go, down all the normal streets where normal people lived, asleep in their normal boring beds. There was almost no one else out. Stoplights changed color at empty intersections. They were quiet, mostly, except for Ronnie bouncing up and down, babbling about somebody else she hoped she’d never meet who was also a chickenshit. Once she looked up to see Podolsky smirking at her in the rearview mirror. In spite of the sunglasses she could tell.
“Yo, big man. What you gonna do later?”
“Don’t know.”
“Gonna do some fucking?”
“Maybe.” Moron shrugged. He wasn’t looking at her, as if Podolsky had embarrassed him.
He still had the gun in his lap, an ugly gray stub of a thing, just laying there like it was nothing, like it could go off and shoot something, shoot her for no stupid reason at all, oh goddamn them. She was going to be raped and murdered and tomorrow night a local newscaster with bad hair would announce the discovery of her body in some very undignified place.
Get a grip, she told herself. “Who is it you’re going to see?” she asked brightly. The advice of all the girl magazines. Be a good conversationalist. Take an interest in his hobbies.
“Just some guys that owe us money.”
She wondered if they were a gang, if they qualified as one. They were driving up to one of the public housing complexes, barrackslike buildings set in dirt that just barely supported grass, superbright streetlights in the parking lot turning everything into hard-edged shadow.They told her to pull up on a side street.
“See anything?”
“You better hope they don’t see us first. OK now, Elsie—”
“Josie.”
“Whatever. You’re gonna take a lap through the parking lot, real slow and normal-like. Pretend you’re on your way home from cheerleading practice.”
“I’m not a cheerleader,” she muttered. The parking lot looked like a photographic negative, all that staring light and black shadow. Moron leaned forward. The gun leaned forward with him. The car moved, even though she had forgotten how to drive. There was something wrong with the parking lot. It was too bright, too easy to see things. Podolsky’s breath rasped over the back of her neck. She tried to hold on to each thought in case it was her last, and it came to her that all this was happening because she had fallen in love, because she had wanted to burst out of her old life and so she had. You didn’t know what that meant until you did it but now here it was.
Ronnie said, “Is that—” and Podolsky said, “Shit man!” and noise exploded all around her and she was dead but then she wasn’t because things kept happening. Somebody was screaming, the way guys screamed, loud and hoarse. There was another car, a big Jeep-like thing coming at them head-on, and Moron grabbed the wheel and spun it and Josie floored the accelerator and they bumped over the curb into the street. It had not occurred to her that whoever they were shooting at might shoot back.
“Go, get out of here, shit!” The car was so full of them flailing around that it was hard to tell if they were moving at all but she guessed they were. The Jeep was right behind them, its headlights high and white and blinding in the rearview mirror. Something popped and cracked.
“Are they shooting at my car?” she demanded, incredulous.
“No, they’re shooting at us and the car’s in the way. Don’t stop for stop signs. Christ, where did you find this stupid-ass bitch?”
Moron had the gun pointed out the window, trying to aim it, but he was having trouble getting turned around. It served them right for wanting her car; it was way too small. “What did you do to them anyway?”
“Just shut up.”
“Oh fuck me. Fuck me to death.”
The gun went off right in her ear and the car got away from her and she lost track of the deep lights back there somewhere.
“I think I got em.”
“You got jack, man.”
Something smelled horrible. It was her own sweat. Ronnie said, in an almost normal voice, “Hey, where did they go?”
They all looked. The street behind them was empty. “Those pussies,” said Moron.
Now they were all laughing, like this was the funniest thing. Since they weren’t dead, she wanted to kill them.
“Man, they couldn’t shoot for shit.”
“Niggers. What can you say.”
“Sharp-looking ride, though. I like that real dark window tint. Very cool.”
“Hey sugar britches, that was some lousy driving,” said Podolsky, knocking her affectionately on the back of the head.
Josie said, “Are those flashers back there?”
Like she had to ask. They were three or four blocks away down the dark tunnel of the street, closing fast. Podolsky swore.
“Pull over at the alley.”
When the car stopped they bailed. All three doors opened and out they flew. “Hey take your dumb beer,” she called after them, and Ronnie doubled back to scoop it up.
“You guys really stink,” she said, but by then they were gone, running lickety-split between two apartment buildings, Moron bringing up the rear, trying to get his big legs working.
Josie sat and waited for the flashers to reach her. She flipped the hazard lights switch to show that she was a law-abiding dri
ver. She checked her mouth for beer-breath. She regarded her feet, surprisingly normal-looking in her old Nikes, as if they’d been off on their own, doing ordinary things all this while.
The squad car pulled up behind her and sat there, calling in her license plate, she guessed, her virgin car that had never even had a traffic ticket before. She put both her hands on the wheel where they could see them. The liked for people to do that, she remembered.
And when someone got out and tapped on the window and she opened it, the hot night poured back in. There was a flashlight shining on her and not until it was lowered and her eyes had adjusted could she see anything. Then, considering all the things that had already happened, not only that evening but in her mind for weeks and weeks, it was perhaps not so strange for her to say what she did, as if all their previous conversations had been real ones: “Oh, you grew a mustache.”
Desperate Remedies
The lawyer, a younger, sleeker version of Ed Pauley, was explaining things with the practiced ease of a man who got paid for talking. His words shaped themselves as if he bit them off a bar of silver. His office had the same prosperous high gloss to it, everything substantial and well ordered. The carpeting yielded softly to the foot. The double-paned windows gleamed, holding back the blasting heat. The silent air-conditioning chilled the air so deliriously that Elaine could have drunk it.
This was Frank’s lawyer, or one of them. Not the divorce guy but someone else. It almost felt as if they were getting divorced again, both of them sitting in upscale office chairs and wearing their game faces. Frank was looking especially unlovely these days, she couldn’t help uncharitably noticing. Puffy and soft, like a very well-dressed stuffed animal. His jowls were piling up above his shirt collar. He listened to the lawyer with that expression of bland seriousness that men used for such occasions. Women always felt they had to keep making animated, interested faces. She had learned not to do that, thank God.
“Power of attorney,” the lawyer was saying, “is the instrument people use to safeguard their interests in the event they become incapacitated. Of course, that assumes the individual is capable of making a rational decision to delegate that power.”
“Rational,” said Elaine. “I suppose there’s room for interpretation there.”
“Yes, fortunately, or we’d have to lock up all the Cubs fans.” The lawyer showed his expensive teeth. Lawyer humor. Elaine and Frank bent their mouths politely. Elaine tried to catch Frank’s eye: Is this guy any good? Frank wouldn’t look at her. “Now you have two options here. The preferable one is to have your uncle agree to sign over to you a durable power of attorney. Durable means he can’t change it. The alternative is a great deal more expensive and time-consuming, and that’s having a court appoint you as his guardian of person and/or guardian of estate.”
Elaine shifted uncomfortably in her comfortable chair and waited for Frank to say something. She had a urinary-tract infection, something she thought you only got from sex. She couldn’t get over the unfairness of it. Honeymoonitis, they used to call it. An unwelcome thought with Frank in the same room, or anywhere in the same county, for that matter. She was hoping the meeting would be over before she had to humiliate herself by running to the ladies room.
The lawyer was Frank’s idea. It was the way he liked to resolve things, it was that marble-in-the-maze process again. The law was the maze, and you dropped people in the top and they came out the right slot at the bottom. She was filled with foreboding as to what this might mean for Harvey, but she had to keep reminding herself that she was only here by Frank’s negligible courtesy. She had no standing in this. That was the legal word, standing.
Frank said, “Assuming he’s too out of it to sign over power of attorney, how does guardianship work?”
“You would file a petition to have a court hearing. There would be a report on your uncle’s condition by a physician who has examined him.”
“Except the whole problem is he doesn’t want to see a doctor.”
The lawyer said that this could probably be arranged through court order. “Well that seems like the way to go,” announced Frank. “Resolve the situation right then and there.”
Elaine couldn’t keep out of it any longer. “Unless you ever want him to see a doctor again.”
“I’m sure the professionals know how to handle these guys.”
“What, the sheriff shows up and holds him down while somebody injects him with elephant tranquilizers?”
“Who said anything about elephant tranquilizers?”
“You know what I mean.” She addressed the lawyer. “There has to be some better way than coercing and traumatizing him.”
“The court might view his refusal to seek medical care for a serious condition as prima facie evidence of incompetence.”
“Unless he has a genuine phobia about doctors.”
The lawyer tented his hands, beginning to get interested in the legal subtleties. “There’s a great deal of interest these days in the legal rights of the mentally ill. Americans with Disabilities Act, you know.”
Frank said to Elaine, “You want him to go blind, is that it?”
“Right, Frank. That’s my secret agenda here.”
“All of a sudden you’re what, the Social Work Queen?”
Now they’d gone and done it. Dogfighting in public again. The lawyer gazed serenely out the window, blind and deaf to any unseemliness. Elaine decided to just let it go, resist the temptation to answer back. She tried once more to shift the pressure off her bladder. You couldn’t hope to keep up your end of an argument when you had to pee so badly.
She had called in to her gynecologists’s office for antibiotics. She couldn’t remember having to do that before, she was always the picture of rude good health, she sailed through her visits to plague-ridden India without so much as a sniffle. The nurse had been almost too sympathetic. Ah well, you’re at the age where you can expect that sort of thing to start happening.
Not what she wanted to hear at all. She wanted someone to tell her it was the fault of the hot weather and its attendant risks of dehydration, a simple climatological phenomenon. Instead she was at the age where you could expect all sorts of increasingly unpleasant things to start happening: wrinkles, softening teeth, the surgical removal of body parts. She tried to have a sense of humor about this whole getting old thing but she didn’t, not really. She tried to arm herself with wisdom and serenity and common sense but none of it worked. She couldn’t even take proper satisfaction in Frank’s looking so lousy because it reminded her too clearly of a time when he (and she) had not, and was this what life would be from now on, a series of mean little triumphs based on vanity and fear?
By the time she returned her attention to the conversation, it had moved beyond her. “It’s called a guardian ad litem,” the lawyer was saying. “An attorney appointed by the court to represent your uncle during the proceeding. It’s pro bono work; we usually get the younger people do to it.” He turned his hands palms up, to indicate the negligible weight of young attorneys. “And that guardian ad litem is required by law to sit down and talk with the client and determine what they want and to represent their interests. So it’s not your automatic slam-dunk type of situation.”
Frank was busily taking notes, just to show her how firmly committed he was to following through on whatever awful legal procedure they had been talking about. If she kept objecting, it would only make him more determined. The lawyer said, “I should ask if there are any substantial financial assets involved here.”
“Hardly. Unless he has bags of dimes hidden under his bed.”
Elaine stood up. “I’m afraid my parking meter’s just run out.” She shook hands with the lawyer, who barely had time to rise out of his chair, and nodded to Frank. Baby steps to the door, then she practically galloped down the hallway. She didn’t care what either of them thought of her.
When she came out of the restroom and headed for the exit, she was surprised to see Frank standing just
inside the glass doors waiting for her. “So what do you think we ought to do about him?”
Was he actually asking her advice? “I don’t know,” she said warily. “There’s probably no ideal solution.”
“Maybe we could find a nursing home that would let him watch the Weather Channel.”
“Could we not talk about nursing homes just yet?”
Frank gave her an unfriendly glance but subsided. He rubbed the back of his neck and squinted through the glass. The sun reflected off every surface: automobiles, street signs, glinting particles in the sidewalk, so that the light seemed to be in constant, hectic motion. “You believe this weather?”
“Yeah. It’s like the planet’s moving closer to the sun.”
“I can’t wait to get to Aspen. You know what they have there? Actual snow.”
Elaine sighed. “I don’t suppose you want to hear about your daughter.”
“Go ahead. Make my day.”
“She’s not sure she wants to go with you. Actually she’s sure she doesn’t.”
“Since when does she know what she wants about anything? The kid’s got some kind of disorder. She doesn’t talk, have you noticed that?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“Everything’s ‘Yeah,’ ‘Unh-unh,’ or ‘I dunno.’ What kind of future is she going to have if all she can do is make these retarded noises? Is she doing drugs?”
“She says she isn’t. I don’t know.” Elaine felt the strangest sensation then. As if she was watching a movie she thought she already knew and suddenly the film wobbled or jumped and she and Frank were still married. None of the last five years or more had happened and they were having this conversation over breakfast coffee and she was going to have to remember to send his shirts out. They spoke of their daughter in voices that were exasperated but fond. They had aged so gradually, day by day, that they hardly took notice of it. In this other movie, other life, she would not have remarked upon what seemed to be a hair crisis on Frank’s part, but then, it was probably Teeny’s idea to have him get this peculiar stiff brush cut so you wouldn’t notice all the encroaching pink scalp. She caught a whiff of something pungent and aromatic, some product probably designed to stimulate hair follicles, and took a hasty step back from him.
Wide Blue Yonder Page 9
