Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  Someone was coming out of the bar then so he walked away fast without looking back. Victor hadn’t touched him but he was shaking from letting everything out and his hands hurt and were going to keep on hurting for a while and he’d been a fool to think there would be any such thing as a new start or a new skin for him and next time he was just going to drink alone.

  Although Victor didn’t know what his car looked like and it would probably be a while before he was saying much, Rolando decided it would be better not to be driving right now. He checked his clothes for blood, didn’t see any, walked four blocks, still didn’t hear sirens. One Mexican beats another one up, it wasn’t like anybody much cared.

  He squatted in a drainage ditch behind a tract of houses until it was dark. The ground was still as hot as bread crust but it felt almost good, he was so tired, he could have stretched right out on the ground and slept. He should have felt good about whipping Victor’s sorry ass but he was back to empty again where none of it mattered.

  He took a roundabout way back to his car, past a park with kids playing softball, he guessed they did most things at night here, league play with regular teams, red-and-white against blue-and-white. Parents in the bleachers rooting them on. Him and his draggy-ass clothes didn’t fit with this scene but he kept it cool, just sauntered past, stopped and drank from a water fountain, smelled his own nasty smell when he bent over. The car was just where he’d left it. One of the keys he’d lifted was to the back of the time-share condos and that’s what he needed right now, a rabbit hole.

  He drove past the condos, didn’t see lights. One master fit all the back gates. He picked an end unit, let himself in all slick and smooth. The pool was dark and glassy and when he leaned over it he saw reflected stars and only then did he look up to see the sky the way he’d always imagined it here, blue like the first and only color in creation, stars blasting away like crazy.

  Rolando knew the feel of an empty house. He worked on the sliding-glass patio door with a thin, flexible metal blade he had found useful for such purposes. The lock snicked open and he stepped inside, listening. The air was stale, thin, unbreathed, nobody home. One of those metal lollipops in the front yard advertised security, but nothing was wired so he paid it no mind. A field of pale carpeting stretched out before him, with other looming pale shapes that were furniture. He had to wait for his eyes to adjust, then he soft-footed into the room, trying to get a sense of the place. All set up with lamps and glass coffee tables and pictures on the walls and beyond a kitchen stocked with everything you’d need except food. Not even ice cubes.

  Finally he found a box of crackers in a cupboard and washed them down with tap water. The tap groaned as if no one had used it for a time, but the water ran cold. Upstairs, two bedrooms with the same stripped-down hotel look to them. He didn’t want to use the lights so he bumped around in the dark, running his hands through drawers and closets and underneath mattresses. All the places you might expect to find something left behind, some spilled crumb of wealth. Nothing. Not even a radio you could walk off with. The place was useless, every brick and board of it spoke of money but they made it so an ordinary person couldn’t touch it, you had to be a bank or at least somebody bankers shook hands with. He was so tired his mind kept shorting out, he should blow the whole place up except once you started thinking that way, you might as well blow up the world.

  There was a bar of pink soap in the bathroom, so he stripped down in the dark and stood under the running shower. His knuckles were all bruised and torn and they stung where the water hit. The soap was full of perfume, by God he was going to smell rich if nothing else. He dried himself with his shirt and lay down naked on one of the bare beds, with the streetlight shining through a crack in the curtains.

  He fell asleep once without really meaning to and then he woke halfway fighting Victor all over again, his own hoarse shout in his ears. Then he lay awake for a long time.

  He remembered where he was but when he tried to put together how he came to be there he couldn’t follow one because with another. Because he had driven east instead of north or south and because he had seen Nacio on the street but he was leaving something out. Because he had come away from what passed for his home and that was because of a lot of things. Or maybe he had it wrong and there was no because, even if you went back to the very beginnings of his befucked life and you might as well enjoy yourself by raising hell.

  Because was everything you couldn’t see, the world going about its business that had nothing to do with you, who were you anyway, empty man in an empty house. The world had its important work of. Of. Something. Getting the sun up and down on time. The bastard sun so hot here, cooked you like bacon, but how cold the water in the pool when he jumped in. Cold and silent. Once you got beneath the surface you couldn’t hear a thing. Fish lived in silence, silent bubbles rising up, circles in the water.

  Then he was awake and it was bright day, light falling across the room in a yellow stripe, but it wasn’t light that woke him. It was the sound of a door closing downstairs.

  Stupid ass fuck shit Christ. Trying to get his pants on at least. Somebody down there making leisurely rummaging noises. Tap of shoes on the kitchen floor. It came to him that they didn’t know he was in the house. Out in front there was a red car at the curb. Whoever it was, they thought they belonged here, driving right up to the front door.

  If they went around back, he could get out through the front, but the bedroom didn’t face the patio and he couldn’t see. How many were there, more than one? Hide or run? They might not come upstairs but if they did it was too small, he’d have his back in a corner, and if he ran, the weight of the duffel would slow him. Why had he left the gun in the car, mother fuck. Downstairs the air conditioner came on, whoosh and push of machinery. Nothing else. They might be gone. Barefoot, quiet as quiet, except for the sound of his heart jumping through his ears, a clock gone crazy.

  At the top of the stairs he listened, nothing, started down one creeping step at a time. Three more steps and then the door, the goddamned door. He reached the landing and swung around and she was right in his face, the woman, and she screamed, a ripping sound.

  She was square in the way, blocking everything, he couldn’t get out back or front except through her. Even scared like this she held her ground, a tall woman no longer young, dressed in red, red mouth, red fingernails, everything about her fancy, her twisted-up yellow hair and the gold at her wrists, fancy and loud. “Who are you, what do you think you’re doing here?”

  You had to admire the way she came back at him after her first fright. He might have tried to shove her aside or even hit her but she was only a woman so he opened his mouth instead, tried to look sheepish. “Ah, sorry, I was working out back, came in to take a little rest, you know?”

  “Working where? How did you get in here?” Cold-eyed, like a witch. She had a handbag the same leather as her narrow shoes and she clutched at it, he wanted to tell her he didn’t care about her stupid money, she should just back off and he’d be on his way. But she was used to bossing people, you could tell. “Do you work for Carpetmaster? Answer me. Is that how you got in here? They are supposed to be bonded.”

  “No, lady, I clean the pool”—the moment he said it he regretted it—“and the door was just open.”

  “What’s in the bag? What did you take?”

  “Nothing, it’s just my stuff.” He shrugged and shifted his weight. He couldn’t believe his bad luck in this town. The woman tightened her red mouth.

  “And what if I had been the Kirbys? Do you think they would appreciate your roaming around upstairs? Using the toilet? I don’t think so.”

  “All right, sorry, I go now.”

  She had a little phone in her hand and was punching in numbers. “You stay right there.”

  “No, hey, be cool—”

  Rolando reached out, tried to grab the phone, but she held it behind her. “Don’t come any closer or I’ll scream.”

  He would have la
ughed at her if he hadn’t been so exasperated. She was so full of righteous meannness and up close he could see where her red mouth was leaching away into powdery wrinkles and her eyes were blinking ninety miles an hour, like being mad at people was her job and she loved the work. When he took a step toward her he saw alarm in her face for the first time, like it was just occurring to her that there might be people in the world who didn’t give a shit about her and her orders. She backed up into the living room and the front door was clear but he had to get that phone. She was making noise now, shrieking like some kind of bird, a big red bird with flapping wings.

  “Sshh,” Rolando told her, as if keeping his own voice low would quiet her. She kept on hollering. “Shut up, Christ!” She had the phone held up to her face and was screaming into it. He hadn’t laid hands on her but she wouldn’t stop her racket. He caught her by the wrist. “Give me the damn phone!”

  She hauled off with her free hand and raked him across the face with those long red nails. It hurt like poison and the anger rolled through him and he was on her in an instant, stupid bitch, cracked her flat-handed across the jaw.

  She staggered but didn’t fall. Her yellow hair had come undone and a part of it was sticking out wild on her neck, making her look more than ever like a witch, bruja. She wobbled around on her stupid shoes then they broke or something and she got the sofa between them and was hobbling out the backdoor, her big red ass rolling away.

  Cursing, he ran after her, hauling his duffel. She was screaming again and now he was crazy to shut her up, she was calling like there was somebody out there who could hear her. But instead of running for the back gate she turned around and leveled her big hand with its rattling gold, pointing at him. “You’re not going to get away with this, Mister! You are going to lose your job and go to jail!”

  All he’d done was sleep, since when was that a crime? You couldn’t argue with people like this, ignorant of everything, taking it for granted that she could order him around, dress herself up like a whore and spend her days being useless, and so it was not entirely surprising that he should run at her and push her the few feet to the pool’s edge, where she fell in like a rock.

  He had to laugh. She rose up all dripping and wrecked and she was still making her noise but it was full of water now. “You dirty little—hoodlum!”

  “Hava nice swim!” He waved and shouldered the duffle but once his back was turned she lunged after him and caught him by the ankle. He tried to kick loose. The duffel made him top heavy and it pulled him over and he landed hard, half-in and half-out of the water. Hit his tailbone on the cement deck, it hurt like hell, while his duffel rolled into the water. The woman laughed and splashed away from him to the pool’s far end.

  “You think that’s funny?” Rolando screamed. “You playing some kind of stupid bitch game here?” He felt crippled. He had to crab-walk along the edge of the pool to reach the duffel. It was floating but its bottom half was soaking through, all his money washing away, stupid whoring cunt. He flopped into the water after it, which made the woman begin screeching once more.

  He reached the duffel and hauled it out and then he started after her, not wasting words this time. The water here was waist-deep and he had to slosh through it, it was taking a long while to cover the little distance between them. She was half-swimming, half-running as best she could, so that they did a kind of cartoon, slow-motion chase, at least until she reached the ladder and tried to climb out. That was when he caught up to her and grabbed her by her wet hair and dragged her back down.

  She kept making noise even underwater, you could hear it. Her throat opened and let out a stream of noisy bubbles. The color had mostly washed off her lips. Strings of sticky red trailed away from the corners of her mouth. Her hands slapped at him. His own hands were reflected crooked through the water and it wasn’t until then that he saw he was choking her. He had not thought to do it but now that he was he hung on like he was some kind of machine built only for this purpose. He sent the pain in his spine traveling through his arms and hands and fed it into her skin so that she would be nothing but a bloated bag of pain. Her clothes were weighing her down. She kept trying to kick or struggle or scratch him again but she couldn’t get to him. The anger was burning through him in a crackling wave, filling his head with jumpy light. It blew out everything but the holding on so that it might have been a long time before he realized she had stopped moving.

  Her face was the color of bad meat, a dark mottled red, and her eyes had rolled back so they were almost all white and some of her yellow hair was caught in her mouth, like something thick she had spewn up.

  It made him sick, touching something so ugly. He tried to wipe his hands on his wet pants. Turned his face to stare up at the sky, which was as bright and evil hot as ever. He heard a buzz of traffic, neither very near or far away.

  The pain in his back gripped him. He couldn’t even run, just hitched along, looked back once before he got out of the gate but his eyes weren’t working right either because all he saw was a mess, a kind of floating mess in the water. The wet duffel was heavy, he had to half-drag it, bad, very bad shit, a dead bruja.

  The car was where he left it and down the street an old lady in a pink bathrobe was walking an even older poodle dog and she gave him a curdled look. With any luck she couldn’t tell one Mexican from another, couldn’t see the flapping wetness of his clothes. He threw his duffel in the trunk, didn’t even allow himself to think the car wouldn’t start right up and it did.

  Then he was on the highway with the bastard sun in his eyes and his back on fire but at least he was out of there. He kept flicking glances in the rearview mirror but there was nobody and nothing in the world behind him and not much ahead. Once he got past the first few highway signs it was bone bare. Every so often a car passed him going the other way, and a couple of times he caught up to trucks or some old couple in a slow-moving van plastered with stupid tourist stickers. Other than that it was as if the road was unspooling new before him as he drove. His wet clothes rubbed and scraped until his skin felt wormy cold. The rest of him was turned inside out with shaking and thirst. He felt for the pebble in his pocket but it was gone, washed away.

  He woke up without being aware he had slept, and found he was still driving, that some part of him had kept the car pointed on the road while the rest of him went far away. It swerved as if only now that he had come back to himself would things go wrong. He wrenched the wheel the other direction. He was going way too fast, the speedometer needle said red, red, red, and the land and sky flew by in strips and patches. For another moment he was not driving the car but riding it until he remembered to remove his foot from the accelerator.

  From then on he kept more of his mind anchored, enough to do the work of driving, although not enough to think about anything that happened back there. He had to stop once in the middle of an empty stretch of road to let the engine cool and to take a piss. Amazing that he still had enough water in him for that. The ground was so bare and hard-packed that nothing of his stream soaked in. Overhead, the thinnest scrim of clouds was outlined against the impossible sun, not enough to shade anything, while the only object on the endpoint of the horizon was a line of accidental-looking brown hills. A car passed without slowing, leaving a stinging sound in the air. Aside from that, there was nothing to show that anything in the world was alive. His dull brain considered this. If the Big One hit out here, or say it already had, how would you know it?

  He stopped once more for gas in one of those mean little desert towns but wasn’t paying attention to distance and so Phoenix surprised him, creeping up on him with its snarl of freeways and traffic. He bore down on the wheel and once more rode the car through it until there was highway again. And then his mind spun away into the pale sky and somewhere he must have gotten food because there was a food taste in his mouth, bits of beef and salt, but for his life he couldn’t have said how he had come by it.

  Then it was dark and he stopped the car until it
was light again because he thought if he drove in the dark, he might lose even the horizon. When the sun came up he aimed toward it but he had gotten on some different, smaller road now that wasn’t going straight in any direction. He would have been lost except lost meant there was somewhere in particular you were going.

  The radio didn’t work. Or else he was somewhere the radio didn’t go. He played the tape because it was noise, and because those angels sang Ohh like it was a whole entire language. He tried to sing along with them, beating time on the steering wheel, and laughed because he sounded like a damn goat. Then the dude came on, the one that wanted to be his best friend, and his voice was like chocolate syrup pouring over clean snow.

  “Weary? Confused? Anxious? The chaos of our times affects us all. The barriers in the mind reflect the barriers we place between ourselves. Imagine instead, one self that contains all selves. One will that joins the forces of all wills together. All our energies focused on the great work before us. I’m talking about nothing less than the physical manifestation of that which we call God.”

  More angels. He tried another chorus with them. His voice spiraled away like water going down a drain. He was beginning to smell again and his mouth tasted like sin. He figured he must look pretty funky too, because he stopped once for gas, falling out of the car practically bent double because of his back, with a cracked grin on his face from those fine fine angels. And a woman standing at a pop machine saw him coming and double-timed it back to her car, rolled up the windows and locked the door. The grin wasn’t even for her; he had forgotten there was anybody on the other side of his face. Just to see what she’d do, he sauntered toward her. She couldn’t peel out of there fast enough. Adios, darlin! He jumped up and down waving, then turned around to see two men watching him from inside the gas station, arms folded across their chests. At that moment he also became aware that he was not wearing shoes and had not been for some time and his feet were as tough and battered as hooves.