Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  So he drove on into Palm Springs, past irrigated fields as green as Easter grass, and a line of distant powdery mountains. Palm Springs. A place where rich people played golf and tennis in clothes bought only for those purposes, and everyone had a swimming pool, and everything was air-conditioned and easeful. It was summer now and the rich would be elsewhere he knew. Still, ideas, speculations, possibilities began to tumble and click in his head, in a recreational sort of way.

  He found a gas station with a minimart and breakfasted on coffee and packaged doughnuts. He brushed his teeth in the John and tried to clean himself with the soap in the dispenser and paper towels but that was so unsatisfactory he decided he’d rather stay funky. He bought cigarettes and an orange soda for later when it got hot. He leaned back against the car and let the smoke draw into his lungs and along with it there was the sensation of heart and nerve and will returning. Some of whatever had drained away in the night was filling again.

  The morning, the day, was like money in his pocket, his to waste or spend. He drove past suburbs of large and undoubtedly well-guarded homes, condo villages, streets lined with palm trees, the useless-looking downtown with stores where the rich could pretend to need things like ski jackets and fancy dog food and expensive furniture painted to look beat-up. It was still early, the sun was tangled in the shadow of buildings, the air was clear but with a glowing edge of heat. How all-out weird it was to be in a place you’d never seen before, where you couldn’t take anything for granted, weather, streets, faces. It was part of being his brandnew, This Space-Available self, he figured.

  Next to him at a stoplight a Latino guy was driving a step van, half-blue and half-green with a wavy squiggle in between. The guy looked over and Rolando nodded. He was dressed all in white, like he worked in a hospital. The light changed and they scooted along together for another few blocks, stopping and accelerating in unison. After the second light they struck up a shouted conversation.

  “Que onda, ese?”

  “Que onda, vato? You following me?”

  “Naw man, just cruising. Where you goin?”

  “Work, where else?”

  “Yeah? Where you work?”

  He shouted something Rolando couldn’t hear. “What?” he mouthed back and the driver reached up and slapped the roof of the van. Rolando craned his neck and saw that the blue-green was supposed to be water, and the letters on the side read OASIS POOL SERVICE.

  The van signaled for a left turn and the driver waved goodbye. But Rolando dropped behind him and turned also. They passed into a district of winding roads, big houses set on lawns, if you could still call them lawns, arranged with cactus and boulders, brick-colored gravel raked into designs, clay pots at the front doors filled with blazing pink or red flowers. The van turned at an alley and parked and Rolando pulled up behind it. The driver got out and stood waiting for him, a little warily. He was a young guy with a broad, square face and burnt-brown skin.

  Rolando, all casual, pulled out a cigarette. “Smoke? Hey, I just wanted to ask is it a good job, you like it OK?”

  The driver reached for a cigarette, accepted Rolando’s light. “It’s not bad. Boss is a jackass.”

  “Jackass, that’s just another name for boss.”

  “You got that right.” The driver opened the back of the van, began unloading nets and hoses and jugs of chemicals. “Look, I need to get started before people call the office complaining cause there’s a dead dog or something in their pool.”

  “Dead dog, you find that kind of stuff?”

  “Brother, you don’t want to hear about all the things you can find floating in water.”

  Rolando put out his cigarette half-smoked and pinched it carefully back into the pack. “See, I just got into town. I’m looking around for work.”

  “They’re not hiring.”

  “Yeah, just got in, trying to get to Phoenix but I got a bearing going out. Garage says it wants three-fifty. Man!”

  “Try the Chicken Shack.”

  “No, I got to earn more than that. How much you get, seven, eight an hour? That’s what I need. Cleaning pools, I bet that’s big here. I bet I could get on somewhere. Maybe I could hang with you today, help you out, learn the ropes.”

  “What, I’m supposed to pay you?”

  “No, man, I’d be like, your apprentice. Just for today. If I get in your way, kick me out.”

  Rolando planted himself square and easy while the driver, who he judged was not an automatically friendly person, made up his mind. His heartbeat clock keeping perfect time. He wished he had another cup of coffee. He wished he was floating on his back down a big cool green river, looking up at these same clouds, smoking weed. And probably because he wasn’t anxious about asking his favor, was willing to let it go either way, the driver shrugged and said, “So where you from?”

  Rolando said he was from San Ysidro and his name was Javier, lying out of habit and policy, and the driver introduced himself as Nacio. Rolando hopped right to it, loaded himself up with equipment and enthusiasm. Nacio unlocked a back gate and opened it onto a high-walled patio with a sort of desert-style garden and big lounge chairs, all real nice. There was a pool in one of those blob shapes and a trickle of waterfall coming out of a fake rock on the wall. Everything here was still in shadow and almost cold, so that he was glad to exert himself wielding the skim net and the vacuum as Nacio directed. He pushed a broom this way and that, made everything spiffy. What a trip. He was Javier from San Ysidro, and for all anybody knew, Javier was a hell of a guy. “This is like some easy shit.”

  “Wait till you do another fifteen.”

  “I can do fifteen standing on my head.”

  “Yeah, let’s see you stand on your head once it heats up to onehundred twenty. It’s dry heat, everybody says. So’s the inside of an oven dry.”

  They had been speaking in Spanish, but when the white man came out of the house, Nacio switched to English. “Good morning, Mr. Buchanan.”

  “Morning.” Buchanan was a smallish man in a blue terry bathrobe with a bit of mouse-colored hair all rumpled from sleep. He retreated back into the house then almost immediately reappeared.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. B., we’ll be out of here in a jiff.” Nacio motioned to Rolando to gather up the equipment. When they were back in the alley Nacio said, “He likes to swim naked.”

  “What, you hang around watching?”

  “Walked in on him one day. Man, if I had a body like that, I wouldn’t even shower naked.”

  They worked through the morning, cleaning, draining, scrubbing, and Rolando busted his ass being a good little pool boy and entertaining Nacio with stories he made up or misappropriated about his life as Javier, wild stories about racing cars and knife fights and fucking two girls at once, and Nacio told him he was full of shit up to here. By eight o’clock it was already what he would have called hot back home, and by nine he was sweated dry, a rock had more juice in it than he did. He went through the orange soda right away and Nacio laughed at him because he was drinking water from the cooler every five minutes. The sky was all sun: yellow, hateful, flat.

  There was a whole block of condos where nobody seemed to live—time-shares, Nacio said, but the management company kept the pools up, and Roland jumped into one of the pools, clothes and all. That felt good, it almost felt like being clean, and his clothes dried in about ten minutes and he was ready to do it again. Because he was helping they were getting things done fast, and Nacio said if they pushed it for another hour they could quit for the day. Another hour would probably kill him, and they’d put on his tombstone: Here lies a sorry fuck who died busting his hump for free. But he kept going out of stubbornness, and when Nacio pounded him on the back and said, “We got to toughen you up, boy,” he said, “Yeah, your mother don’t have no complaints.” He’d done his share of muscle work, he lifted free weights and shit. It was just the bastard heat.

  All the houses they worked at had lots of glass in back, you could see right into them, and
even as he was making a mental list, which places seemed more or less accessible, more or less inhabited, he was imagining himself inside looking out. They probably had giant refrigerators in there, stocked with orange juice and beer and iced tea. At one condo where the air conditioner cranked as loud as a jet engine, a woman sat at the kitchen table wearing a wool coat that looked like an Indian blanket. A blanket! She was writing something on a piece of paper, a grocery list? Needing more stuff for that holy big-ass refrigerator. And she looked up once and stared right through him, which was about what you’d expect from people who let somebody else do their sweating for them. Rolando wrapped a water-soaked bandanna around his head to keep his brain from frying. The sun turned the cement as bright as pain made visible. When he was the guy on the other side of the glass, he was going to invite everybody in for lemonade and beer.

  Nacio was in a good mood about getting done early and bought him lunch. They sat at a back table with an older guy named Victor and drank beer and watched the races from Hollywood Park on the bar’s little television. God bless walls and roofs and floors, he was never going to take them for granted again. Victor was a big bull-chested guy with gray showing up in his chin whiskers. He worked for Caltrans and he said nothing was hot compared to tarring roads out on I-10. The crews mostly worked at night but once in a while they sent them out to burn in hell. He could handle it, heat never bothered him, he was a goddamn armadillo.

  Rolando figured this was the way they bragged around here, who could boil his balls off and not feel it. It was a small town, he’d already taken the measure of it, and there probably wasn’t much to talk about besides how hot it was and who got to carry Bob Hope’s golf clubs last week. He felt a lot better now that he was out of the sun and had a beer to take his thirst away. There was nothing for him to do until night and he was content to sit back and listen to the other two talk. They were easy not to pay much attention to. Nacio had a girlfriend who was giving him a hard time and Victor had a wife and three kids and a girlfriend who was giving him a hell of a good time, if you could believe even half of his noise. Rolando let a moment of sweet sleep take over behind his closed eyes, jerking awake when Victor said, “So what are you, Puerto Rican?”

  All the ease inside him vanished. Even before he opened his eyes he felt Victor’s belligerent curiosity beating down on him like another kind of sun. He said, keeping his face frozen, “Yeah, the old man was. My ma, she’s from Jalisco.”

  “I figured. I knew a Rican guy once who was damn near black.”

  Rolando said nothing. The words stayed out there long enough for everybody to walk around and look at them from all sides. Then Victor said, “No offense, man. It’s kind of a hobby of mine, figuring people out. Like when you can see a dog’s got shepherd and beagle and maybe a little coyote thrown in. I just find that interesting.”

  “Yeah. Interesting.” On the table before him, a five-dollar bill, that ugly bad-luck face staring up at him.

  “Me, I got some Apache. The warrior bands that outfought the U.S. Cavalry for five years.”

  The other two were waiting to see how big a deal he’d make of it, no offense, man, he was going to find Victor’s hot girlfriend and make her do things this ignorant piece of stink never imagined and then he was going to do the same to his wife and she’d put out a litter Victor wouldn’t know what to make of and then he was going to find Victor out on that highway and see how he liked the taste of boiling tar, no offense. He said, “Apache? I thought they killed all of them.”

  “Naw, there’s lots left. The Mescalero, those were Geronimo’s people. That was my one great-grandmother, a pure-blood Mescalero.”

  “So what’s the other seven-eights, those Bullshit Indians?”

  Victor decided this was funny. Ha ha, he laughed, and Rolando smile and asked what his girlfriend’s name was.

  “Angela. Sweet Angelina. She’s wild for it, she wants to do it in all these crazy places. Once we did it in the truck, practically right out on the street. Last time we did it in the shower.”

  “The shower,” scoffed Nacio. “Very tame.”

  “Yeah? How about, she wants to do it in a earthquake.”

  The other two whooped at this. “What, you got her hooked up to an earthquake machine? ‘Honey, get on over here and catch a little five point two action.’”

  “No, but you do it enough, you got better odds of catching the next big one.”

  “Explain to me why you want to have your dick out when the damn roof comes down on you.”

  “I don’t. It’s just this idea she got, she thinks we could put it in the Guiness Book of World Records or something, that we were screwing in the biggest earthquake in history. Hey, I don’t mind humoring her.”

  Nacio said, “I got no use for earthquakes. Times I can’t sleep, that’s what I think about. The Big One.”

  “Funny, that’s Angelina’s name for me. The Big One.”

  “There’s no Big One coming, that’s bull,” put in Rolando, just because he didn’t want to hear any more of that talk from Victor.

  “Don’t tell the girl. Break her horny little heart.”

  Rolando said he’d left his cigarettes in the truck and Nacio gave him the keys. Rolando reentered the heat, which was enough to stagger you, slow-walked to the van, opened it and retrieved his cigarettes, slow-walking and quick-fingered, his heartbeat dead level, detaching two of the keys from the ring and pocketing them, and when he got back to the table they were still talking about earthquakes.

  Nacio said when he was a kid in Sonora there was a big earthquake, an evil time. If Victor’s girlfriend didn’t have all her brains between her legs she wouldn’t think earthquakes were some kind of fuckfest opportunity. He was just a little guy, barely walking, his nose and his ass always running but he’d never forget it. Sky everywhere there was supposed to be buildings. Stinking smoke in the air. People dead, dogs pawing through the ruins, use your imagination. They laid some of the bodies out on the beach because there was no other place for them and the tide came in and washed them out to sea. He’d never stopped thinking about those lonely dead, the shame of it, how the living had failed them. Not even a cross raised over their heads. They’d gone to sleep in their own beds and then they were dead in the ocean where they never thought to be. He was glad he lived in a hot place where those water ghosts couldn’t follow.

  “Ghosts,” said Victor. “You ever see one?”

  “Just because you can’t see something don’t mean it’s not out there. Can you see gravity?”

  They watched the television and the horses flying round and round and money being won and lost. Then Victor said For Christ’s sake, you couldn’t worry about earthquakes because there wasn’t one thing you could do about them. If one had your name on it, so long. Besides, the Big One was going to hit up north, everybody knew that. Rolando reminded him of the Northridge quake, and there was some useless discussion about fault lines, a topic none of them knew anything about but each of them had an opinion on. Rolando thought Nacio was right, earthquakes were nothing to mess with, and bigmouth Victor was right, if they happened, they happened. In places like Japan and Hawaii they had earthquakes in the ocean. Giant walls of water rose up and swept everything away. Like something in the Bible, one of those times God smote people down. Smote. A word you didn’t hear too often.

  People used to believe that, the smoting stuff, people like his mother still did. Get Him pissed off enough and he trashed the place. Everytime there was anything fucked up, fire or flood or hurricane, his mother said it was a punishment. Now that she was too old to have any normal fun, she’d gotten religious. She was always trying to get a better deal out of the Virgin with her little altars or the time she spent on her knees. A bunch of crap. Race-horses didn’t pray to win races, they just ran harder when the whip came down, and that was life.

  The sun was as red as a torch when they came out of the bar. Victor was on the loud side of drunk. “Ange-lina,” he called. “Light that fir
e, baby, I’m coming!”

  Nacio said, “Yeah, she probably appreciates the warning.”

  “Funny guy. Very funny. Guy.”

  Nacio told Rolando he hoped he got his car fixed and see you around, which he wouldn’t, waved, and drove off. Victor and Rolando were left out on the quiet street. There was dust in the air and the sun turned it to lurid pink.

  “Hey, Angela wouldn’t have a friend, would she?”

  Victor stared at him, squinting through the sunlit glare to get the idea straight in his head. “You mean for you?”

  “Yeah, or maybe, she likes new and different things, she wants to try some black Rican dick herself.”

  That was all the warning he gave him, and Victor was as drunk as the pig he talked like, but he was a big man and wasn’t going down easy. He just swayed when Rolando caught him under the chin, swayed and got his arms working, but he was slow and among the many things he knew nothing about was boxing, using his hands. Rolando drove his knuckles right up into Victor’s nose. Victor screamed and the blood looked almost black in the inflamed light. He tried to get Rolando in a bear hug but Rolando danced away and got in another head shot, forget about trying to hurt these big sacks of shit in the body, it didn’t work. “Come on, chief, over here!” Got him right over the ear and then he tried to kick the legs out from underneath him, except Victor’s legs were like fucking trees, he’d need an ax to drop him.

  Victor had a mouth full of blood but he was still talking, spitting through it. Did nothing ever shut this guy up? “Crazy fuck, what’s a matter with you culero, I kill your nigger ass.” He was bent over trying to protect himself and still taking blind swings when Rolando tripped him up and finally put him on the ground, yanked Victor’s arm and used it like a handle while he stomped his ribs, heard bone crack, the air leaving Victor’s chest in one leaky whoosh.