Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  “So what’s your loser self doing?”

  “Same as you guys. Taking a walk on the wild side.”

  Tammy gave her a funny look, like she was about to make one of her sideways remarks, but she just said, “Hey, this is Evan. He’s from Arizona.”

  “Yeah?” asked Josie, mildly interested.

  “We’re gonna show him the butter cow. He thinks we’re making it up.”

  Evan said, “Butter cow,” like even saying it was supposed to be funny. He shook his head so that his hair seemed to be taking off in all directions.

  “Come on,” said Tammy. “You aren’t doing anything else are you?” Like she had to be reminded. They trudged off together, back up the hill to the Dairy Building. Lauren and Tammy had their heads together and were giggling about something, probably her. She didn’t trust Tammy anymore. It wasn’t that they’d had a fight, more like they’d forgotten why they were ever friends in the first place.

  Evan wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”

  “Manure,” said Josie, not bothering to sound shocked or apologetic. She didn’t think she liked Evan very much. But then, at the moment she didn’t much like anyone. There was a crowd in front of the Dairy Building. They had to stand around swatting mosquitoes and listening to two old women complain about how the fair had gone steadily downhill every year of their whole dissatisfied lives. Tammy and Lauren were still carrying on and Josie almost walked away then, left everybody to snigger and gossip and bitch about the same things forever and ever, but she was already in line and you couldn’t go to the fair without seeing the butter cow.

  It stood in one of the glass cases in the big chilly room, a life-size, pale yellow, sculpted cow, perfect in every detail. It had butter hooves and a butter tail, pointed butter ears and a baglike udder with butter teats. Its expression was one of perfect tranquil buttery stupidity.

  The crowd stood at a respectful distance, like they were art critics and this was Michaelangelo’s David. “Wow,” said Evan. “You guys weren’t kidding.”

  “We don’t have that much imagination,” said Tammy.

  “Yeah, but why do this? How did they get the idea in the first place?”

  “God, I don’t know. They’ve just always had one. It’s what makes the fair the fair.”

  “The origins of the butter cow are lost in the mists of history,” Josie intoned. “We worship it because our ancestors did. We need no other reason.”

  They all looked at her like she was an old-time comedian telling jokes in a stupid accent. Evan said, “So what do they do with it once the fair’s over? Does somebody get to eat it?”

  She should have left right then. They weren’t her friends, not really, they were going to make a game out of ignoring her or worse, but screw them, she wasn’t going to be run off. She followed them out of the Dairy Building and back through the midway to the Beer Tent where they hung around pretending they might get served. Josie wished she had a beer, a lot of beer. It was getting to be that kind of piss-on-everything night.

  Evan said he had somebody’s Arizona ID, but it didn’t much look like him. Tammy said forget it, the whole place was narked, probably every third guy was a cop. She rolled her eyes Josie’s way and traded amused mouths with Lauren. So Tammy had probably told everybody in the world. Not that she knew the half of it. None of them would ever know anything real about her.

  They wound up sitting on some picnic tables at the edge of the grounds, just beyond the hokey Ethnic Village, where you could try and pretend you were in Greece or Mexico or Nigeria, assuming they all used the same brand of paper plates. Evan said, “So this is where the action is. How happening.” He was from Phoenix and was here visiting some relative and he was just too cool.

  “You should come back for the hog-calling contest.” Tammy yawned.

  “Or Senior Citizen Day. Or Republican Day.”

  “That’s just about every day here.”

  Evan kicked at the splintered edge of the seat, trying to knock a chunk of it loose. “We got these great clubs in Phoenix. This guy I know gets us in. He’s a dealer, so he gets in everywhere. I saw the Frantic Flattops last month.”

  “Totally awesome, dude,” said Josie, meaning to be sarcastic, but as usual nobody got it.

  Lauren said, “Seriously, My brother’s got some pot. We could get a little.”

  “Yeah, maybe later. It’s too hot to even move.”

  As if talking about the heat made it crowd in closer, the air seemed to resist their breathing. Josie wondered if Mitch was worried about her yet, or if he was even thinking about her at all. Probably not. He was too busy serving and protecting the whole entire town.

  Evan said, “What’s that over there? Through the trees.”

  “Oh, that’s another stupid Abe Lincoln statue. We’ve only got about a hundred.”

  “He is one ugly honky.”

  “Why are you saying ‘honky’?” Josie asked him. “It’s not like you’re black.”

  Evan gave her an indifferent look. “That’s just something you say, honky.”

  “Then it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means he’s still ugly.”

  “Yeah, like anybody important ever lived in Arizona.”

  “What’s with you, Sloan?” asked Tammy. “You PMS-ing?”

  “God, that is so ignorant. Whenever somebody wants to be superclever, they say you’re PMS-ing.”

  “Well, excuse me. I guess you’re just being a jerk.”

  Josie saw the three of them shifting their weight, sharing private smiles, getting ready to have some fun. She said, “What most people don’t realize about Abe Lincoln is, he was a soldier. In Black Hawk’s War, the Indian war, of 1832. He joined the militia and was elected captain. One day some poor old Indian wandered into camp. And the soldiers were ready to shoot the guy when Abe got in front of the guns and told them not to. He never could stand people ganging up on somebody.”

  After a moment Tammy said, “You were always weird, Sloan. I mean that sincerely.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you have a sense of humor like an alien.”

  “I am an alien. I’m from Planet Arizona.”

  Lauren hopped down from the picnic table. “You guys, I want some ice cream. Let’s try and do one fun thing, OK?”

  The others got down too. Josie stayed where she was. “You coming, alien?”

  “I like it fine right here.”

  As they were walking away, beneath the strings of pink and yellow lights, she heard laughter floating back and one of them saying, “totally spastic.”

  Josie sat there a while longer, communing with her sore heart. She walked back to the intersection where she’d left Mitch but another cop was there, an old guy who looked at her cross-eyed. She didn’t dare ask him anything.

  She went on home and the next day Mitch said, “Yeah, they called me to help out on a traffic stop. So how was the fair?”

  That’s when she got the idea about her father’s house. It had a pool and a hot tub and a killer stereo system that was totally wasted on her father and Teeny. They could watch the big-screen TV and eat all her father’s mail-order cashews and do it in about ten different beds. It was pathetically easy to fool Teeny. You could sell her tickets to home movies.

  Mitch took some convincing. “What do you want to go over there for?”

  “Because it’s something different. Because it’s not the car or your place.”

  “And they don’t mind if you bring guys over?”

  “Well, I didn’t tell them that. Come on. Wait till you see their house, it’s like a resort or something.”

  “So they must be rich.”

  “I don’t know. I guess.” Josie shrugged. She didn’t like thinking about her father’s money, and here Mitch thought she was trying to impress him. Maybe she was, in some sick way she hadn’t realized. “I don’t live with them. I don’t even see them real often. It’s not like they give me anything.”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, but I bet there’s a stock portfolio somewhere with your name on it.”

  Finally she got him to say he’d do it. Her father and Teeny left around five. Josie spied on them from the corner, just to make sure. Even hunched down as she was in the front seat, she got a good look at them, Teeny decked out in one of her peculiar metallic dresses, like she was going to the Academy Awards instead of some tugboat in Joliet, her father unsmiling in a coat and tie. Why did it always take people so much work to have any fun?

  When Josie picked Mitch up he had his swimsuit rolled in a towel. She thought that was so cute.

  “Ready to get wet?”

  Mitch smiled a twitching smile. “Sure.”

  He didn’t have to be a total killjoy. He was probably only acting that way because this was her idea. When they stood at the front door and she was having trouble working the key, Mitch kept looking around like he expected some neighbor to start photographing him. Exasperated, she jiggled the latch back and forth.

  “Maybe they gave you the wrong key.”

  “Maybe I just need two seconds where I’m not being totally hassled.”

  Finally she got it open. Mitch perked up a little when she was entering the security code on the keypad. “That’s a state-of-the-art system.”

  “Oh yeah. Nothing’s too good for Daddy. So whaddya think?” Josie led him down a passageway and made a sweeping gesture.

  Mitch whistled. There was a fireplace made of enormous boulders with an oversize beam for a mantel. A red-felt pool table with a rack of balls set out at one end. An old-fashioned jukebox in one corner glowed with ribbons of flamingo and violet light.

  “Daddy’s playroom.”

  “Not too shabby.”

  Encouraged, she presented him with further wonders. The big saltwater aquarium with its blood-colored coral and nervous fish, the library, the built-in cedar closet, the twin leather sofas, and finally the pool, liquid turquoise, the water ruffling in the warm breeze.

  They floated and splashed and dried off with Teeny’s fluffy towels and fixed themselves ice cream and Kahlúa from the bottle they didn’t know she knew they kept in the pantry. She could have sneaked them a real drink but Mitch was always very serious about not drinking before he went on duty. They played hide-and-seek through the bedrooms and landed finally in the expanse of pillows in the master suite. Here they made love, although Josie was conscious of a certain distraction. It felt obligatory, rushed, even smutty, as if they’d come here for the wrong reasons. Lying there afterward, watching the evening shadows creep over the ceiling of the strange room, she was nearly melancholy. She was unprepared to feel this way, it seemed unfair that after working everything out, all the planning and coaxing and anticipating, her own self would ambush her like this. Wanting different from having. Longing from loving. Nothing ever what you expected. But thinking this way only made her restless and confused so she reached out and buried her hands and mouth in his warmth.

  She did cheer up once they went back out and had another swim and were relaxing on the lounge chairs. It was dusk and the line of lights beneath the water’s surface had a filmy, moonlike glow. The horizon was still streaked with orange and burning pink. If she looked only at a certain slice of sky and water, she could imagine herself somewhere else, anywhere in the world that was not Springfield. As they watched, a pair of swallows came wheeling and skimming low over the pool, incredibly agile, startling, alive.

  “This is heaven.” Josie sighed. And it was. The stereo was going, playing something bluesy. They were holding hands across the space between their chairs. And Mitch wasn’t acting mad or gloomy or some other way she couldn’t understand. He was just being normal and she loved him and it was a beautiful shining evening, yes, heaven. This moment. If you didn’t think about the moment before or all the moments that would follow when it would not be heaven.

  As if all it took was one bad thought to trigger the next, Josie exhaled and said, “I can’t believe school starts in what, three weeks.”

  “Well, I can’t believe I have a girlfriend who’s still in high school.”

  She swatted him with a towel for that, although she was secretly delighted to hear him say it. Girlfriend.

  “Well, if you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll take you to the prom.”

  Her tone had been the heavy teasing that she fell back on when she didn’t trust herself to say anything else. Josie waited for him to tease her back. Instead he worked his forehead around into a serious shape.

  “Hey, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  Her heart went to her knees. “Yeah?”

  “There’s this thing I have to go to. A police thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s sort of a banquet. They make awards and have speeches and stuff. It’s coming up at the end of the month and I already made the plans. I can’t get out of it, I set it up a long time ago.”

  “Well if you have to …”

  “I really do. It’s kind of a big deal. Like I said, it’s been on the books a long time.”

  “Are you getting an award?”

  “Naw, you have to stop a bullet or drag a kid out of a burning house, you know, hero stuff. But I have to be there in the dress blues and the shiny badge. I’m real sorry you can’t come with me. It’s just the way it worked out.”

  “No biggie,” Josie said cheerfully. Like she really wanted to hang out with a bunch of cops making cop speeches. But it was sweet of him to worry about her. It was completely dark by now and the pool lights made tunnels of glow in the quiet water. She stood up and drew him out of his chair, standing on her tiptoes to breathe in his ear, feeling him through his swimsuit and pulling him toward the water.

  So of course they lost track of time and it was late and they had to rush to get everything cleaned up and that was why she forgot about the stupid sheet and all hell broke loose with her mother. She didn’t tell Mitch about that part. It was so little kid to complain about your mother. And besides, some cautious instinct told her that if she let on to him about being under suspicion, he might grow alarmed, veer away, or chicken out entirely. She had to wonder if he really would get into any kind of trouble about her, if it was a big deal to anybody besides her mother. So it was illegal, she knew that, but a lot of things people did were. Most likely it was only a big deal if somebody made it one. Most likely the rest of the police guys would just give him an elbow in the ribs and make dirty comments. That would just kill him. He was so into his truth, justice, and the American way of life notions.

  Of course, there were any number of things she thought it best they not talk about. Anything that reminded him she was a jailbait kid, of course. Which meant anything that made her sound ignorant or naïve. That covered a lot of ground and resulted in her nodding along a lot and pretending to know about car insurance or limited warranties or fly fishing or whatever else he was talking about. Anything having to do with the infamous night she’d been riding around with Moron and Ronnie and that slime devil Podolsky, anything about her career as a stalker. She still hadn’t owned up to seeing him for the first time in the Taco Bell. She wondered if she ever would.

  Whenever Mitch tried to get her to say where she knew him from, Josie smiled and told him she’d spotted him on radar. It wouldn’t hurt to keep on being Mystery Girl for a little longer.

  “Once we’ve been together for a while, maybe I’ll let on,” Josie told Abe. “Love at first sight at the Taco Bell. How we met. What a hoot.”

  Abe was noncommittal. He stared serenely past his polished nose, past the empty parking lot and the exhausted, late-summer grass, into some region of history and disinterestedness that only descended on you once you’d been dead for a hundred years or more. It was just before sunrise; Josie had stayed at Mitch’s all night, or at least as much of it as she dared, enough, she hoped, for it to count as spending the night. She liked watching him sleep. He said he never remembered his dreams and maybe he didn’t have any. Josie said no way. Ever
ybody dreamed, even dogs dreamed about chasing rabbits, you could watch them twitching and woofing. Mitch said that was probably what he dreamed about. Chasing speeders. Oh you are so funny, Josie told him. Not.

  She hung over his sleeping face, watching. He breathed in and out with perfect unchanging ease. That beautiful line of his mouth, the white edge of his teeth just visible below his raised lip. His eyelashes were curled up and dampish. His dark level eyebrows, she thought she must have fallen in love with his eyebrows before anything else. She watched him so hard and so long, she imagined she could see the whiskers surfacing in his jaw. She could watch over him every night of his life and still not be able to tell what sort of movie was playing inside his head.

  She had to admit that not only was he a man, and older, and a cop, but that he was unlike her in some other important way. He lived just inside his perfect skin as if it was another uniform. There wasn’t that much space inside him for a lot of other things.

  “I really do love him,” Josie said. Abe didn’t disagree; he just let her words float out into the air by themselves, until they had a lonely sound. “I do. So he’s different from what you’d expect. Like anybody would be. He probably thinks I’m different too.” Why was she talking to some dead guy anyway, it wasn’t like she was going to hear anything she didn’t already know.

  School started next week, one more dismal thought. Maybe she could drop out, get a GED. There were lots of people who’d done the same thing, and nobody cared once they were famous. She knew dropping out wasn’t really an option, not unless she wanted to declare outright war with her parents, but high school seemed so, well, high school to her now. The cliques, the tiny gossip, the droning teachers. It would be like doing prison time. Josie yawned and headed back to her car. She was just tired and cranky. “My hair hurts, my feet stink, and I don’t love Jesus,” she announced.

  Josie crept into her house and into her unmade and rather stale bed and if she dreamed she didn’t remember it either. She woke up after noon and showered and did her nails and tried not to think about how this time next week she’d be taking an American History quiz or watching kids play gross-out with the fetal pigs in biology lab or some other dreariness.