Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  She was up in her room when she heard her mother come home. Early, though Josie didn’t think much about it. She was reading a fashion magazine and wondering if anyone was really going to wear those stupid little head-scarf things when the door to her room pushed open.

  “You want to knock next time?”

  Her mother’s face had a cracked, off-balance look. “What did you get arrested for?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. What did you do? And don’t say ‘nothing.’”

  “Do when? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t lie to me for one more minute. I absolutely have a right to know this. If you won’t tell me, I’ll call the police.”

  “Call the …”

  “I assume they keep a record of these things. They should have notified me. I shouldn’t have to hear it from someone else.”

  “Hear what from who? God, Mom, slow down.”

  “I already called the restaurant. You haven’t been there for weeks. So don’t tell me you get all dressed up and stay out all night going to work.”

  Caught, unable to come up with words, Josie shrugged. A mistake. You had to deny everything, not just parts.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “No!”

  “I hope not, but I’m not sure I can believe you anymore.”

  “Oh, sure, but you believe some bullshit from I don’t even know who.”

  “You’re saying if I contact the police department right now and ask them to look up your name, there’s nothing?”

  When Josie didn’t answer, her mother’s face narrowed, hardened. “It’s drugs, isn’t it? This boyfriend of yours is making you do things for drugs.”

  Josie gaped at her. Then she laughed, a barking noise cut short. Her face felt numb.

  Her mother nodded. “All right, then. At least I know.”

  “You don’t know anything. I don’t believe this, you are so out of it.”

  “Then explain to me what you got arrested for.”

  “I didn’t! Besides, it’s none of your—”

  “I’m sorry, but it is very much my business. I suppose it’s my fault for not taking a firm hand. Wanting to be a pal. Well, those days are over.”

  “You’re making this whole thing up. But entirely. You are going to feel so stupid later, I promise.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you for your car keys.”

  Her mother waited, hand outstretched. “Now, unless you want me to call the police this minute.”

  She didn’t want that. And her mother had this spooky look on her face, like she might do anything, like she was almost glad to believe her daughter was a drug-crazed hooker. Josie fished in her purse and tossed the key ring over. She said, “I’m going to expect an apology later.”

  “Once I’ve had a chance to think things through, we’re going to have a talk. I just want to understand how this happened. I want to get you the help you need. In the meantime I’m going to have to ask you not to leave the house. Excuse me, I need a little time alone.”

  She left, but was back in an instant. “Unplug your phone and give it to me.”

  “What is this, jail?”

  “I’m sure we can arrange jail, if you’d prefer it.”

  Josie handed over her phone. The door closed and she was alone in the room.

  Good God.

  She was sweating and the sweat was turning cold on her. Carefully, she went to her bedroom door and cracked it open. The house was quiet. Her mother had gone crazy, it was some kind of hormonal thing, she’d always been jealous of her. Somebody must have seen her with Mitch and her mother took it from there and came up with something she’d seen on last week’s lurid TV special. It was so nuts, she was going to have to talk to Mitch and warn him, except he was already so paranoid about people finding out. And if her mother actually did call the police … There might be some record of when he’d stopped her that first night. They might even call Mitch in, ask him about her, oh shit, why hadn’t she ever told him to take it out of the computer or whatever you did? It was the only thing keeping her from laughing in her mother’s face.

  She stayed in her room until sunset, then crept down to the kitchen. The house was still quiet. Her mother was probably up in her room, chewing Valium. The kitchen phone was mounted on the wall and her mother couldn’t have ripped it out.

  But the handset was gone, unplugged. The hook where the spare car keys were kept, empty.

  This was just ridiculous. Enough was enough. She started back upstairs to try to talk some sense into her mother. She wouldn’t tell her about Mitch, of course, but she would come up with something …

  A noise from the den made her turn and soft-foot back down the stairs. Her mother’s voice, low and rapid. Josie snaked around the corner and flattened against the wall.

  At first she didn’t hear much through the closed door. Her mother’s side of a phone conversation, syllables. Yes and yes, scraps of sentences, I see, and Not exactly. Even her mother’s secrets were boring. Then she said, “I would want to make sure it’s the right place for her before we made any final arrangements.”

  Space of silence, her mother listening. “That sounds a little … You seem to put a lot of emphasis on the physical conditioning.”

  “I’d have to talk to her father first. I’m the custodial parent, but …”

  “No, I actually like the idea that it’s so isolated, it’s just that Utah is such a long way away …”

  Murder blazed up in Josie’s heart. Her mother was going to have her shipped off to some goddamn desert boot camp where they made you wear an orange jumpsuit and have encounter sessions about your issues. Expensive place for parents to dump their problem children. There was a kid last year who got sent, hijacked, to one of those camps. They came and got him out of bed in the middle of the night and threw him in the back of a van and he spent the next two months living in a barracks and doing calisthenics.

  Back upstairs, quick and quiet. The door to her mother’s room was open and her mother was so simpleminded she’d put the keys in her purse and the purse was open on the bed. Josie unclipped her car key, then went for the emergency money, two hundred dollars, that her mother kept in the bottom of her jewelry box. She glided back to her own room, shut and locked the door.

  A while later her mother knocked on it. “Go away.”

  “I’m fixing sandwiches, if you want one. Chicken salad on bagels.”

  “No thanks, just bread and water.”

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

  Josie said nothing, and after a moment her mother went back downstairs.

  She would go to Mitch’s, she’d tell him her mother had gotten drunk and threatened her or something else that would make him let her stay. It was getting so she couldn’t tell anybody anything true. Maybe she’d talk him into leaving town, running off, why not, she hated everyone and everything here except him. She began to gather things up from the closet and the bathroom shelves. It occurred to her, with a kind of nervous excitement, that this might be the last time she would ever stand in this room, in this house.

  She settled herself to wait. All she needed was a clear path to the garage and a ninety-second head start. Any goons from Utah wouldn’t be here for a few days. Her mother would have to talk to her father, for the money if nothing else, Josie figured, and her father and Teeny had decided to stay in Aspen for another week. But mostly she wanted to leave because she knew that sooner or later her mother would soften, relent, change her mind, just as she knew her mother didn’t really believe the worst of her, had only found it necessary to accuse her of the worst so she could yell at her about every single part of her life. As Josie herself wanted to seize this moment of high indignation and grievance, propel herself out the door in a passion of glorious bad feeling.

  Finally she heard the shower running, all she needed to cover the noise of the garage door opening. Josie shouldered her backpack and the carry-on bag. Thank God her mother hadn’t
put a Denver boot on her car or anything. The damn garage door took forever rolling up and down again and Josie half-expected to see her mother screeching after her wrapped in a towel, but there was nothing, only the steady lights of the house, including the one in her bedroom window that stared straight past her like a blind eye and then she put the car in gear and was gone.

  Because she was hungry, starving, really, and because it was such a smart-ass, spiteful thing to do, Josie spent the first of her mother’s money at McDonald’s. She was thinking about what she was going to tell Mitch when in the middle of a french fry she remembered. Shit! His cop dinner was tonight. He’d reminded her, she’d just been such a head case since her mother went off on her, she’d forgotten all about it.

  Why hadn’t she ever gotten a cell phone? She’d only asked her mother for one about a hundred times. Josie scattered food and food mess and peeled out. It was almost eight o’clock and if she didn’t catch him before he left, she’d have to wait in the parking lot until he got back. Well, she didn’t want that, she wanted to bust in on him all urgency and tears, which she didn’t think she could manage if she had to hang around for two or three hours.

  His car was parked in its usual spot so he hadn’t left yet, and she was just bounding up the walkway when the entrance door opened and Mitch and the girl came out.

  There was a moment when he didn’t see her even though she was only twenty paces away and so she had to scorch her vision with the sight of them. Mitch, tall and handsome in his darkest blue uniform with his collar hitched up by a tie and his face burnished from shaving. He was holding the door open for the girl and smiling down at her. She smiled back. She had great teeth, and a smile shaped like a heart. Her hair was dark red and cut in a bell that swung from one shoulder to the other. She wore a white dress with little straps and a glittery necklace and white sandals that showed her toenails, painted like pink mirrors.

  The next moment Mitch raised his head and looked straight at her. His face went slack. The girl didn’t notice anything, just kept talking away in her fake, excited voice.

  Josie couldn’t move. They kept walking toward her. Mitch didn’t seem to be able to do anything except slouch along, keeping up his end of the conversation with mumbles. He didn’t look at Josie; the girl glanced at her, but Josie meant nothing to her, that was clear enough. Josie actually stepped out of their way, while coward Mitch said Uh-huh, Yeah; she wasn’t even worth making a scene over.

  She didn’t have anything in her hands she could break or throw, so she watched them get into his car, and Mitch adjusted the mirror like he always did and made sure the seat belts were fastened and then they drove off.

  She felt how completely her own vanity and foolishness had betrayed her.

  By the time she reached her own car, each breath was bringing up sobs. She thought about killing herself but how were you supposed to do that, it was probably a lot harder than you thought. She could drive anywhere she wanted, but there was nowhere to go, not one friend she could trust, and even now her mother was probably calling all the police who weren’t at that horrible dinner, telling them to arrest her on sight for general depravity.

  Was there any place she could go where no one would find her? Only one, so that’s where she went, pulling up into Harvey’s driveway, prying open the doors to the little swaybacked garage. Pushing aside the lawnmower and ancient mess of flowerpots and milk crates and cardboard boxes until she could fit her car inside. Then she and her make-shift luggage stood at Harvey’s front door, her hand raised to knock.

  North South East West

  The tape had got into his brain somehow. It made him itch where he couldn’t scratch. When it talked to him, he shouted it down. He didn’t take no shit. He was Porque, he was Because. Things happened when he made them happen. He told the car go, it went. Stop, it stopped. Goddamn magic.

  He was higher than high, faster than fast. His head hummed with power. In Oklahoma City he set a house on fire. Because he felt like it. It wasn’t much of a house. People hadn’t lived there for a long time, he could tell when he crept inside and found a space for himself on its sour floorboards. No one lived there, but others like himself had visited. They’d left piles of things that were no longer of use, things halfway between junk and nothingness. When he was tired of the house he took up a tire iron and turned all the glass into sparkling dust. He poured gasoline on the piles of filth and set them alight. Running flames twisted and looped and popped. A furious orange mouth opened and spoke the word Fire. The heat of it drove him outside and across the street where he squatted in the shadow of a fence and watched the show. Big chunks of blazing wood hurled up in the air and came down as ash. Something inside, some pocket of grease or gas, ignited and sent up a pillar of blue sparks.

  Then it wasn’t a house anymore and the tape said: Oh congratulations, perfecto, my man. Now let’s see you do something hard, like build it back up. Or raise the dead.

  Shut up, he told it, and got in the car and made it go fast to drown out the rest of the nasty whispers. The tape gave him no peace. It put dreams in his head that were all screwed up, like they belonged to someone else. Songs he didn’t remember knowing, faces he didn’t recognize. Like everywhere in the air there were mysterious messages, and he was some giant antenna picking up all of it and he couldn’t shut it off. And this too was a power.

  He was Porque, he was Because. He used the gun to get the things he needed. People took one look at it, at him, and handed over food, money, whatever. They could tell who he was.

  In Wichita he decided he had a taste for something sweet. Not candy out of a wrapper this time, but a real bakery, the air gritty with sugar. He wanted to see pretty frosted cakes and dough made into knots and rosettes and fans. He remembered all the tastes—lemon, coconut, almond, cherry. And pineapple, although that had never been his favorite. But now he wanted that too, he wanted all the tastes in his mouth at once. He wanted it now. He drove up and down the bastard streets, getting madder and madder. What was the matter with this town, that it didn’t have a bakery? It wasn’t too much to ask.

  Finally he found what he wanted, a big window with a white white wedding cake on display. The little bride and groom dolls on top reminded him of something vague and disquieting. Voodoo? Did he really remember that? Darkness and the dark fingers stirring pieces of bone? He shook his head to clear it. Pink cupcakes, macaroons, a jolly bell that sounded when he opened the door.

  The girl behind the counter had this attitude. She pinched up her face and fussed with something so she could ignore him. There was an old party in there too, getting ready to leave with her coffee cake, and the old party also had an attitude. She looked at him and rustled her paper bag and sucked on her teeth.

  He could have knocked her flat, but instead he moved up close to the old party and gave her his best greasy smile. That got her out the door in a hurry. The clerk took a step back from him. This was annoying, seriously. He was hungry, was that such a crime?

  “Can I help you?”

  Prissy little voice. He didn’t like her face either, skinny and grudging, like everything in the glass case was her pussy and she wasn’t giving out any. The gun, riding easy in his waistband beneath his shirt, bumped up against him then, like a reminder. But then he forgot about it, his fingers tracking and smudging on the glass. “Whassat?”

  “Those are the cream-filled horns.” Boy, she was mean. It was a wonder the place was still in business. “What’s that one?”

  “Brioche.”

  He tried the word in his mouth, spit it out. “Those.”

  “Shortbread. Eclairs.”

  She was getting impatient. But there was a lot more he had to look over. Cookies shaped like chocolate leaves and cakes swirled with nuts in pinwheel patterns. Angel food. You could die of hunger before you even got all the names straight. Then he thought the hell with it, and vaulted right over the counter, scattering doilies and toothpicks and whatnot, the girl saying, “Hey—” Just that,
Hey, and she flailed against the wall and he paid no more attention to her.

  Then he couldn’t get the stupid glass open so he struggled and cursed it and finally wrestled it free and scooped up everything he could lay hands on. He filled his mouth, oh, heaven! Everything was so good! He squooshed it all together in one big creamy marshmallowy buttery nougaty taste. He’d always wanted to do this. And now he could.

  Some of the messy stuff was getting caught in his beard and his face was sticky. He had a thirst, he looked around for the girl but she was gone, well screw her. She didn’t take the coffee machine with her.

  He poured himself a cup, it was thin, not even hot, but he filled his throat with it, looked around, the place was a mess, seriously, they should get somebody in here to take care of things. The sun came out from behind a cloud and lit the cake in the window so you could see every bit of the white sugar filigree and ribbon, hard and sparkling, like you could break a tooth on it. Something about that damn cake kept bugging him. On his way out the door he grabbed the bride and groom, licked the frosting from their feet, and shoved them into his pocket.

  In no particular hurry, he drove in a lazy track around and around the city’s red brick downtown, through a meandering park and across a narrow, uninteresting river channel. He felt sleepy but jumped-up from all that sugar. A hot day, muggy, with a sky full of sweating gray clouds that reflected light in a way that made you squint. He pulled the car off the roadway and into a patch of scrubby brush. Yawning, he settled himself in the front seat with a newspaper over his face.

  But he couldn’t sleep. The air was too full of headachy heat and he was too full of sugar nerves, plus this monster fly kept trying to light on his face through the newspaper. It planted its filthy fly feet on his lip or his nose, and anytime he went to smack it the thing lumbered away just out of reach. He couldn’t even relax because he knew the next minute it would be back, making its stupid noise.