Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  “Anyway,” she said, “you’ll have to talk to her. Maybe she’s getting too old for family trips.” Something about her words made her pause. The notion of Frank and Teeny as family? “So. Harvey.”

  “Believe it or not, Elaine, I want what’s best for the guy.”

  “Then call off the attack lawyers.”

  “Tell me how else he’s going to get medical help.”

  “I don’t know, but you weren’t there when I tried to talk to him about it. He howled. Curled up on the floor and howled and blubbered. It took me almost an hour to get him calmed down.” It had frightened her to see him that way, his face stretched into an unrecognizable mask of dripping misery. “It was so pitiful,” she said inadequately.

  “Well for Christ’s sake, Elaine, of course he’s not going to like the idea. You can’t just give in to him.”

  That was it, of course. He thought she was soft, when the situation called for stern, manly measures. She said, “Remember that woman downstate a couple years ago who refused to go in for a court-ordered psychiatric exam and the state police surrounded her house for three weeks and cut off her water and power and blared rock music over loudspeakers? And she shot a dog, I think, before they finally took her in.”

  “And your point is?”

  “Just wondering if you really want to go that route.”

  “Nobody’s calling the state police, why do you keep saying things like that? So what do you want me to do instead? You can feel as sorry for him as you want, you can be the ministering angel of mercy, but then what?”

  “Just give it a little more time.” The sunlight was nearly liquid in its brightness, it hurt her eyes even looking out at it. She poked around in her bag for her sunglasses. She felt sad, irritated, hopeless. Frank was right. Feeling sorry for Harvey didn’t do him any good. Nothing would do him much good for very long. “Look, I have to go.”

  Frank reached for the door handle, paused. “So why are you so into this? He’s not your responsibility. Are you just trying to prove to everybody what a big jerk I am?”

  No, it’s because there are times I feel like him, she stopped herself from saying. Alone and crazy and afraid of everything. She said instead, “His house needs some work. New roof, that sort of thing. Easy enough to do.”

  “Let’s wait and see if he’s really going to be living there first.” Frank’s face had shut down and there was an end to talking. She walked past him into the staggering heat. The sun seemed not to have moved, but to have been hung up on a nail in the middle of the no-color sky. She willed herself to endure getting into her car and starting it, trying not to breathe until the air conditioner had purged the worst of the murderous air.

  Across the street at the edge of a gas station lot someone had set up a vending enterprise, a van bedecked with giant muddy canvases, the paint laid on in slabs, of animals in heroic poses: wolf howling at the moon, eagle in flight, lion rampant. Behind the van a number of American and Confederate flags were set out on tall poles. Along the sidewalk was a line of half a dozen tiny tricycles, customized with plastic handlebars and seats and streamers and plastic rosettes fastened to the spokes, all in combinations of the most painful plastic colors: flamingo, lime, orange, cerise, grape. There was something crazed and preternaturally ugly about the whole assemblage, as if it were a colonial outpost in the empire of the mad. It was so impossible to imagine people who would look on such things with admiration and consider placing them in their homes, or people who thought it reasonable to fabricate the things and expect a profit from them, who likely did earn a profit from them, that Elaine felt as if the world she had lived in up to now had cracked open in the heat and this twisted version had risen up in its place.

  She blotted her face with a Kleenex and tried to bring herself around. She waited for some of her old energy to course back into her. But the heat was against her, or perhaps it was the weakness of the body, or the image of Harvey in his perfect loneliness reaching out to pass his hands over the glowing television screen. A wave of grief washed over her, filling her eyes with salt. The dashboard warning light was on, as it had been for days, a winking yellow. Yellow, the color of danger, fear, urine, heat. She knew what the light meant now: that everyone died.

  Two days later, suitably medicated, Elaine drove to Harvey’s house with the cleaning lady she had engaged sitting beside her in the front seat.

  The cleaning lady’s name was Rosa. She worked for some friends of Elaine’s who pronounced her a “jewel.” She was a small, bright brown woman whose gray-streaked hair was pulled into a bunch at the back of her neck. She wore a flowered smock and sweatpants and her tiny feet were encased in tennis shoes that might have been designed for a child, bright pink, the shoe laces printed with red hearts. She smiled often, in an agreeable, uncomprehending fashion. With the aid of her high school Spanish and a publication called Inglés Esencial, Elaine had tried to convey the differences between Harvey’s house and the suburban palaces that Rosa was accustomed to working in: La casa de mi tío está pequeño, pero muy sucio. Small but very dirty. Rosa smiled and nodded. “You don’t have to say much of anything, just show her what you want done,” Elaine’s friend had assured her, but this seemed like something that ought to be explained. Perhaps it made no difference to Rosa what she cleaned, as long as she was paid. Still, Elaine had decided that for any number of reasons it would be better to make an introductory visit to Harvey’s before proceeding further.

  Elaine parked in Harvey’s driveway and took note that he had moved his little garden pots out of the sun’s glare and into the partial shade of the porch. “Here we are,” she sang, full of false cheer. Rosa climbed out of the car and Elaine, watching her, was relieved to see that she wasn’t visibly distressed by anything before her.

  Harvey’s air conditioner was racketing full-blast in the corner window trying to make headway against the heavy air. Condensation dripped from one edge. With Rosa behind her Elaine knocked at the door, which was shut against the heat. When no one answered she opened it and stepped inside.

  The temperature was barely comfortable, the little air conditioner laboring hard. After all, it was nearly a hundred degrees outside. The television was on, as usual, and as usual the Weather Channel was busy selling off-brand automobile insurance, chain saws, Magic Mops, Shoe Away, Zim’s Crack Creme, other products she’d never heard of. Where did they get these commercials? “Harvey?”

  He wasn’t there. Elaine trooped through all the rooms, even down into the haunted house basement. The bedroom was stuffy, since not much of the air conditioning made it back that far. She roused the cat from its nest at the foot of the bed; it showed the pink inside of its mouth in a silent hiss and flopped onto the floor.

  Should she worry about him? It was dangerous to be out in this kind of heat, everybody said so, God knows he must hear it often enough on television. Rosa was standing just as Elaine had left her in the center of the living room, like a polite museum visitor. “No está aquí,” Elaine said, trying to pantomime “not here.” “I hope he gets back soon,” she added foolishly.

  As if she had been issued some order or permission, Rosa walked through to the kitchen, where she began opening and shutting cupboards, taking stock. From beneath the sink she brought out the new plastic scrub bucket and rubber gloves that Elaine herself had bought. “No necesita,” Elaine began, but Rosa only smiled, the way one might acknowledge a politeness, and went on measuring Lysol into the bucket. After all, why would you bring a housecleaner along unless you wanted her to clean, and she certainly agreed with Rosa’s premise that you began with the kitchen in any house.

  This might turn out to be one more in a series of her good intentions gone awry, she was prepared for that, but then, how could anything bad come of cleanliness? She supposed her foolish secret hope was that, once presented with his new, orderly, enlightened home environment, rationality would begin to seep into Harvey as inevitably as water trickling downhill, and he would agree to the doctor.<
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  Elaine retreated to the living room so as not to hover and get in Rosa’s way. The television was displaying, in a graphic reminiscent of old science class films, how much sunshine the Earth received at different seasons of the year. The sun was a yellow circle that emitted a red triangle. Pulsing lines, like death rays, rose from the Earth where the triangle touched it. Fascinating. She examined what there was to examine of Harvey’s living room, aware that she was close to snooping, that it would be considered snooping with anyone normal. The room was more notable for the things it lacked than for anything in it. No family photographs, perhaps that wasn’t so strange. Nothing that spoke of ornament of any kind, except a green milk glass vase, empty, with a cracked rim. No books, apart from an ancient volume titled Abe Lincoln from Illinois, and an old school yearbook. There was a pedestal clock, its face varnished with age, long since retired from keeping time. A propeller-bladed fan so old that it was once again fashionable.

  Where did Harvey go when he needed household goods, a blanket, or a lamp? She’d never thought about it. Every Christmas they gave him things like flannel shirts and house slippers and underwear. She seemed to remember Frank once arranging to get Harvey’s washing machine fixed, and he paid the real estate taxes on the little house. But none of them, it seemed, had paid attention. Twenty-some years ago when she first met Frank, Harvey had been a big shambling stoop-shouldered man who wouldn’t meet your eye and carried on a constant murmuring conversation with the ground just beyond his left knee. Peculiar, certainly, but hardly frail. “He’s in his own little world,” Frank had explained. “He likes it that way.” And they had liked it that way too, because they hadn’t had to do anything.

  Bleach smells wafted in from the kitchen, and a sound as of road construction started up. Rosa was tackling the stove. Elaine looked out the front windows, hoping to see Harvey, but the sidewalks were empty. She could hardly leave now to go look for him, not with Rosa going full-throttle in the kitchen. She didn’t want to imagine the two of them encountering each other without some sort of interpreter present.

  The Weather Channel was showing one of its innumerable pictures of creamy sky and dramatic, horizontal sun. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand the appeal. The front door opened and Harvey stood there, blinking at her.

  He was wearing a straw hat with a big floppy broken brim, and he was eating ice cream out of a half-gallon carton. Without seeming to avoid Elaine, he steered a meandering course around her and came to stand in front of the air conditioner, still spooning ice cream into his mouth. The flavor was strawberry swirl and the container was leaking pink milk from its bottom.

  “Harvey, look, your ice cream’s melting. Let me get you a towel.” Elaine went to what passed for Harvey’s linen closet and selected the most raglike of several rags. “Is that good ice cream? It looks good. No, I’m not trying to take it, I don’t want any. Come here, I want you to meet somebody.”

  She guided him into the kitchen. At least he looked like a crazy man, in his ridiculous battered hat, mashing the ice cream carton protectively in the crook of one arm, a towel draped bib fashion around his neck. Whatever the language barrier, that much should be clear. “Harvey, this is Rosa. She’s going to help you around the house. Rosa, Tío Harvey.”

  Rosa looked up from the sink, where she was doing battle with the broiler pan. Twenty years of pork chops and grilled-cheese sandwiches had turned it as black as an old steam locomotive. She gave Harvey a measuring, narrowed glance, and without warning reached over and plucked the ice cream carton from his grasp. A waterfall of Spanish followed, the first words Elaine had heard Rosa speak, and although they passed over her without comprehension, she caught the scolding in them. Rosa produced a bowl and portioned the ice cream into it, wiping the lip clean with a dish towel. That she had found such a thing as a dish towel in the wasteland of the kitchen was itself an accomplishment. She held the bowl out to him, then peered up at Harvey, a long, critical stare. She shook her head, popped the ice cream carton into the freezer, and went back to punishing the broiler pan.

  Elaine looked at Harvey. Harvey looked back, or seemed to. In his cracked and cloudy eyes was a layer of buried light, something quizzical and alert, almost as if there were a different Harvey hiding down there behind the absurd hat and the rest of his foolishness. Elaine brushed past this notion and its oddness. “Well Harvey, what do you think? Wouldn’t it be nice to have everything clean and tidy?”

  He didn’t answer, of course, nor did Rosa look up from her violent scrubbing. How peculiar to be carrying on a normal conversation, or trying to, in such circumstances. She might as well have been barking or braying. But now she was wondering what she ought to do. She had to get back to the shop, the girl who was at the register left at noon to go to her other job and she was expecting a phone call from her clients at the Chicago boutique, who required endless assurances that everything was humming along on track for the planned product line, it was enough to give you hives. Clearly she had to leave, but did it make any sense to interrupt Rosa in the middle of such splendid industry, might she not think it was one too many crazinesses, no matter how well the Señora paid?

  “Yo—” What was the verb she needed, regresar, first person, future tense? “Voy a regresar,” I will return, she told Rosa, who bobbed her head but didn’t pause in her combat. She wielded the steel wool and scouring powder with furious concentration. Already a streak of shine was showing through. The woman was more than a jewel; she was an artist. Perhaps she looked on Harvey’s house as a sort of measure of her powers.

  Elaine got Harvey settled in his spot on the couch with his ice cream and a tumbler of drinking water, told him she’d be back soon, and drove downtown to Trade Winds. She was just in time to replace her assistant, and not long after that the Chicago call came through and she spent a good twenty minutes reassuring and flattering and promising, so that she hardly had time to worry about Harvey and Rosa and what she might have set in motion. Then the shop was unexpectedly busy with a vanload of Eastern Star ladies from Moweaqua who had picked exactly the wrong time to visit the state capital and were staggering around in the heat like parched turkey hens until they reached her refuge. Of course none of them bought anything, but they unfolded every length of cloth they touched and wanted to use the bathroom and tried on sundresses and blouses, stretching the fabric over their sweating backs. In between waiting for the indigo dye to rub off their damp underwear and agreeing that everything was much more expensive than it used to be, she tried to call Harvey. There was no answer, which was worrisome. Harvey always answered his phone in case anyone needed the forecast.

  Once the Eastern Star ladies left, she grabbed the phone again. This time he answered. “Local Forecast.”

  “Harvey? It’s Elaine, how is everything there?”

  “Danger danger extreme heat and humidity will make for high levels of danger danger danger.”

  “Is Rosa still there? What’s she doing?”

  Something heavy fell down, bangboom, and in the stinging silence that followed she heard, faintly, the blowsy saxophone music that played whenever the current weather came on. Then the phone went dead.

  She thought of the police but decided that she could get there quicker herself, flipped the CLOSED sign, no one sane would be out shopping in this heat anyway, even in India they would have stayed home, all the while thinking danger danger danger, and what had she done that she could not now undo?

  Knocking on Harvey’s door, then flinging it open. The television lay on its back, still placidly announcing record highs and heat advisories. The stand it had always rested on was upended like a bug, legs in the air. When Elaine rushed around the sofa to look for sprawled bodies there was nothing, no one. No one in the antiseptic kitchen, which, now stripped of its protective skin of dirt, looked merely small and mean.

  She stood still, listening. Over the television noise came a different sound, of drumming water.

  Christ, he’d strangled Ro
sa and now he was drowning her, or himself. Elaine ran back and pushed the bathroom door open. Steam veiled the air, hot water on a day like this, who would want such a thing, it made her sick and giddy. “Harvey? Rosa?”

  Rosa was sitting, very primly, on the closed toilet seat, her little pink sneakers lined up exactly, heel to heel, toe to toe. She held a large towel; every so often she flapped it before her, as if shooing something away. Harvey was in the bathtub. His pink, boiled-looking back was to Elaine. Rosa issued some Iberian command, hopping up to flap and point, and Harvey scooped water over the rinds of his ears.

  Neither of them took any notice of her, and after a moment Elaine retreated and closed the door.

  She wished there was someone else in the house, someone normal who spoke English, so they could marvel together. Elaine had never thought of Harvey as particularly dirty, she knew he bathed, but then, she didn’t have Rosa’s professional standards about these things.

  In the living room she righted the stand and stooped to lift the television back in place. What titanic struggle had landed Harvey in the bathtub? It was beyond imagining. She checked her watch, almost three. She had other things to do, even with the shop closed, and she was hoping there was a way to extricate Rosa before she began refinishing floors and painting walls.

  She didn’t have long to wait. The water stopped running and there was an interval of other, more muffled sounds, sloshings, openings, closings, and at length Rosa emerged, wiping her hands on a towel, pleased with herself. “Clean,” she announced.

  Harvey followed, walking soft-footed behind Rosa. The fringe of hair around his ears was water-dark and combed slick. His face was scraped and shaven, his fingernails shone like moons. He wore green pants and a thin clean ancient white shirt that Rosa must have excavated from some forgotten drawer; you could see the crease marks where the sleeves had been folded for the last hundred years. Mothball smells wafted from it.