Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  Then there was the cat. It kept stalking her as she lay there, swishing its tail in a low, angry arc. It would stop, gather its feet beneath it, and launch itself on top of her. Sometimes this happened when Josie was awake, but more often she was asleep when Fat Cat clobbered her, scrambling to find purchase on her legs or back, digging in with its claws, landing with a hiss and a thump when she finally dislodged it. Like her biggest problem right now was a cat.

  She couldn’t stay at Harvey’s forever. She couldn’t go home. It wasn’t home anymore. It was time to quit sulking and leave. For somewhere. Her new life was waiting for her, starting just outside the city limits. All she had to do was get off the couch.

  Of course it was scary. She had never imagined leaving alone.

  She wanted to call Mitchell Crook and tell him she would never talk to him again. She wanted something horrible to happen to her so that he would feel very bad. She was aware that these were childish imaginings, and that she was just hanging around brooding and rehearsing her pitiful fantasies because she was too cowardly to do anything for real.

  She even thought about calling her mother, pretending she was somewhere else, telling her she knew about her underhanded Utah scheme. In this fantasy her mother was alternately heartless and scornful or else abject, begging forgiveness that Josie did not grant. Josie tried on both versions, one and then the other, until even her anger felt flabby. There was something about lying on a couch for a week that took the edge off of it.

  Meanwhile, the Weather Channel cycled through its own boring routine: forecast, ads, forecast, ads, interspersed with the hurricane stuff. Footage of galloping surf, people sleeping on cots in gymnasiums, rooftops poking out of floodwaters. She supposed she should feel a lot worse about the eroded beaches and homeless pets and million billion dollars washed away, get as excited as Harvey did about the whole thing, but as sad as it was, it was still only television.

  It wasn’t so bad at Harvey’s. Just slow. They watched the Weather Channel and ate things like Raisin Bran and lunchmeat sandwiches and pork chops and canned corn and a very good chicken casserole that Rosa had made for them. Rosa! Harvey’s girlfriend! Now that was a surprise. Josie wished she’d taken Spanish instead of French. Who could you talk to in French, waiters? She would have liked to ask Rosa just how the two of them, her and Harvey, got started.

  She was discovering other things about Harvey. He talked to himself, he was always talking to himself, she came to realize. You just couldn’t hear him most of the time. Little breath sounds, clicking of tongue and teeth, head-shakings. A private conversation that only once in a while surfaced into speech. Just yesterday morning he had come in from the backyard, stomping and blowing and muttering. “What is it, Harvey?”

  He had one of his homegrown plants in one hand, a coffee can with a sprouting carrot top. But something had uprooted it, dug a trench in one side and broken off some of its green hair. “Backwards world”? Was that what he was saying? No, “bad word squirrels.”

  Was he crazy? She didn’t think so, if you meant crazy like people who thought they were Jesus Christ or the CIA was poisoning their drinking water. He just lived in Backwards World. A place where you didn’t have to worry about the stock market or AIDS or cheating boyfriends or anything else crummy. Every day was a new sky and a new start.

  But she was alarmed about his eyes. She could tell they were bad and probably getting worse. He bumped into door frames and cupboards. When he reached to pet Fat Cat, he stroked the air around it before the creature arched its back to meet his hand. Sometimes, if she stayed quiet and didn’t move, Josie thought he forgot she was in the room. To see the television screen he practically knelt in front of it, cocking his head from side to side, as if trying to work some remnant of vision around the cloudy lens of his eye. Did he not care he was going blind, did he just pretend it wasn’t happening? She wanted to grab him by the shirt buttons, get right in his face, tell him she didn’t know what.

  Josie found herself almost wanting to call her mother, just to have somebody she could share these worries with. Of course, her mother’s solutions sometimes made things worse, as witness the Utah fiasco. Her mother couldn’t stand the thought of problems, the way some women couldn’t stand a messy kitchen. She got the urge to Do Something. Her face took on this dauntless, enterprising expression, like she was the submarine commander in an old war movie, giving an order to ram the battleship head-on. But then her mother hadn’t figured out what to do about Harvey either.

  The next time Rosa came back, Josie tried to talk to her about Harvey’s eyes. Rosa seemed to be there a lot, more than you’d expect a cleaning lady with a regular day. Maybe she was just keeping watch on Josie, although she didn’t seem to be holding a grudge about it anymore. She showed up bright and early, as always, her little pink sneakers making time across the wooden floor. Josie peered over the back of the couch. “Buenos días,” She knew that much of the lingo.

  “Buenos días,” responded Rosa, pronouncing it like a real Spanish person would. She went straight into the kitchen and put on the big coverall apron she kept hanging by the stove. Harvey was already there and Josie joined him at the kitchen table, waiting for Rosa to make them coffee. He had this goofy expression on his face, like Rosa was a Weather Channel celebrity who had come by to sign autographs.

  It was actually a little embarrassing, having somebody wait on her like this. You weren’t used to it. Her mother hadn’t done anything of the sort for years, except once in a while when Josie was sick. The whole idea of having a servant was so snobby. But Rosa didn’t seem to find it demeaning or anything. She even made you feel like there was something feeble and useless about you for just sitting there while she managed everything so splendidly.

  She wondered if Rosa had lived a hard life, the way she imagined Mexican people did. Not that she really knew that much about them. But they had a different standard of living down there, she was pretty certain. They were all Catholics so they had big families they couldn’t support, which was why they all came here. Sometimes Josie wished she was Mexican or black or somebody else who had a more interesting background and a legitimate reason to be pissed off about life. Anyway, Rosa didn’t look like she was actively suffering or being oppressed. She had wrinkles, sure, but her skin was shiny brown and her hands weren’t knotted up like a lot of old people’s, and of course you couldn’t keep up with her once she got it in gear.

  Rosa served up coffee and ham steak and some kind of cinnamon pastry she must have brought with her. Harvey ate it all down with his usual enthusiasm and lack of table manners. If it bothered Rosa, you couldn’t tell. Maybe she liked seeing her cooking appreciated. Josie drank coffee and nibbled on a pastry. The one good thing about being miserable was that she never had much of an appetite. She hoped she was at least losing weight.

  She waited for Harvey to finish eating and for Rosa to scrub his face with a dishrag, the two of them giggling and carrying on. They were shameless! Then Harvey went gallumphing off to the bathroom with his stumpy flapping comical walk, and she and Rosa were left alone.

  “How about I help you with the dishes?” Josie asked, stacking plates. Sometimes she talked even though Rosa couldn’t understand, because it seemed less dumb than pointing and making faces. Rosa said something that had señorita in it and shooed her away from the sink, like maybe she did get it. “Say, Rosa?”

  Rosa looked up without stopping her serious battering of the dishes. Josie cleared her throat. “Harvey,” she said, pointing first at his empty chair, then in the direction he had gone. “Harvey, OK?”

  So far so good. Next Josie put her fingers up to her eyes and looked through them, spectacle-style. Swiveled her head back and forth, like she was hunting blindly for something.

  Rosa had paused over the sink and was watching her the way you did a movie when you weren’t sure if it was supposed to be funny.

  Now what? She really needed verbs. “He has cataracts and if he doesn’t get them tak
en care of, he could go blind,” Josie said, basically giving up.

  Rosa said something in Spanish, like she was trying to meet her halfway. Maybe if the two of them kept jabbering at each other for the next ten years they could eventually batter down the language barrier. “Well, I’m just glad you like him so much. They say there’s somebody out there for everybody. That’s kind of a scary thought.”

  Josie retreated to the couch and spent the day in her usual weepy lethargy. Mitch probably hadn’t even noticed she was gone. He was a total pig. She was in love with a pig. At lunchtime Rosa brought her a mug of chicken noodle soup and an egg salad sandwich. She could get used to this servant thing, she guessed. Rosa cleaned the floorboards you wouldn’t have thought needed cleaning. Harvey did some strange calisthenics routine in front of the television, pumping his arms up and down and bending to wiggle his fingers at his toes. The cat declared a one-sided truce and perched on the back of the couch with its tail tickling Josie’s feet. Rosa sang a Mexican song while she cleaned and Harvey joined in, making his sounds instead of the words, and Rosa pretended to hit him with the broom. It was like visiting your grandma and grandpa, sort of, if they were both a little wacked.

  Josie didn’t have much experience with grandparents. The ones on her mother’s side had expired in a nursing home in Kansas City, and she’d only been to see them once or twice when she was little. She retained a brief impression of their twin wheelchairs and unhinged jaws and fretful questions, and her mother speaking very loudly, as if she could bully them into better health.

  Her father’s mother had died before Josie was born, and her other grandfather—Harvey’s brother, of course—had long since succumbed to some old war wound. It was strange that a war could take so long to kill you. They gave Grandpa Frank a big send-off with a bugle and flags. The VFW was there, standing at attention in their blue peaked caps, and even though Josie had been only nine years old she knew there was something very sad about it. Not just that Grandpa Frank had died, because after all everyone had expected that, but because these old men trying to keep their faces fierce, his comrades-in-arms, were now the only ones who remembered him the way he was when he was young. Oh, and Harvey. He must have been there, hadn’t he?

  Josie tried to recollect. Her mother and father, taller than they used to be. Her mother wearing black and shushing her, which had to do with showing respect even if you didn’t particularly like the dead person. It was harder to tell how her father felt. Except for when he was angry, his lid was always on tight. Like it would be such a terrible thing for him to cry at his own father’s funeral. If she was in charge of the world, she’d fix it so men cried the same way women did, then they couldn’t go around acting like you were this weak inferior creature. Anyway, she honestly couldn’t remember Harvey being there. Had they kept him away, been afraid he’d embarrass them?

  Grandpa Frank was always too sick to be a real grandfather. He was strapped to an oxygen tank and when he spoke his voice was all air. He looked sort of like Harvey did now, except Grandpa Frank’s face was more caved-in. He slept in a hospital bed so he could crank it up and drain the fluid out of his collapsing lungs. You were not allowed to play with his medals or with the German helmet with the dark stain that was supposed to be blood or the brass uniform buttons with the German eagles or the rose-colored German money or the eyeglasses that folded so cunningly in half and fit into the soft leather case. Josie was not sure why it had been necessary to take so many things from the Germans. She understood it was good they had lost the war, but collecting souvenirs made it seem more like some big dumb football game.

  Later that day she asked Harvey about the funeral. A little nervously, in case it was a painful memory. “Uncle Harvey? You know when your brother, Frank, died? My grandfather?” She thought it was a good idea to remind him who she was from time to time. “Did you go to the church and the cemetery?”

  “Frank whupped the Germans.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Were you there when they buried him? They played taps and they gave my dad a flag.”

  “Mycountrytisofthee.”

  Well, it had been worth a try. But Harvey wasn’t through with the train of thought that had been set in motion. “Frank was Daddy’s favorite because he wasn’t weak in the head.”

  They were sitting on the back porch watching the blue jays dive bomb the bird feeder. Behind them in the house, Rosa was winding down her day, putting the finishing touches on Harvey’s laundry. Josie waited to see if Harvey was going to say anything else. He looked his usual placid self, except his eyebrows were rounded in mild surprise, as if what had come out of him was an unexpected belch. Josie said, “They told you that, didn’t they. The weak in the head part.”

  “Said head dead. Red bed fed jed med zed.”

  “No, come on, Harvey, talk to me. I really want to know what it was like. Growing up. Were they mean to you?”

  “Daddy was mean.”

  Again, the surprised eyebrows. Josie said, “What did he do, how was he mean?”

  “I was ornery bad. I had it coming.”

  “Bad? You? I don’t believe it. Was Frank bad?”

  “Frank didn’t go in the basement.”

  “What was in the basement, Harvey?”

  He put his hand up to his mouth and pinched his bottom lip. “Don’t remember.”

  “It’s OK, Harvey. You can say whatever you want, they’re all gone. They can’t hurt you.”

  “Badbadbad.” He was doing the head-shaking thing again. “Cold front warm front pressure pressure pressure.”

  “All right, shh, never mind. Just relax. I’m sorry.” She felt rotten about persisting as she had. She wondered about people who did this for a living, doctors and therapists who were always asking questions and trying to pry your mind loose. There was something unfair and dishonest about it. The stuff inside your head should just stay there. People deserved their privacy. Except, it went without saying, Mitchell Crook, who deserved to be subjected to some exquisitely painful Vulcan mind-meld or government experiment.

  Rosa was getting ready to leave. She’d made them a ham salad from the breakfast leftovers and boiled potatoes and lima beans to go with it. Everything neatly laid out in foil-covered dishes. Josie went into the bathroom so the two oldsters could smooch farewell. They were so cute. Where did Rosa live, who did she go home to? Josie had a feeling that whoever it was, Rosa walked in the door and started in all over again cooking and cleaning.

  Nighttime. She and Harvey were left alone. Harvey went out on the front porch probably to moon about Rosa. Josie watched a square of window turn from royal blue to black. It got dark so much earlier now. You went along thinking it was still summer, with acres of daylight. Then you took a look around and here it was September. Josie felt a chill. Time was gathering speed, leaping and bounding along with or without her. Her life and everyone in it going on without her.

  She knew now that she wasn’t going to embark on any fabulous grand adventure, wasn’t going to run away from home any farther than she’d already gone. She was too young, too broke, too chicken. If she had been serious, she would have left right away, vamoosed, not kept hanging around waiting for people to find her and apologize, entreat, arrest, or whatever they were going to do to her. It was time to give it up.

  She supposed she’d have to call her mother. Get some assurance she wasn’t going to get packed off to some desert juvie prison. Not that Utah was such a bad idea, compared to going back to school and facing everybody’s cheap gossip. Her mother was going to put her through hell. Cry at her. Josie would probably cry too, why not. After that, she didn’t know. They probably still loved each other because you couldn’t help that, but they didn’t trust each other. Now that was screwed.

  As for Mitchell Crook, she had no idea. She was either going to have to do something truly horrible to him, or else get used to the idea of the two of them walking the same streets, ignoring each other.

  Maybe in the morning she’d ca
ll her mother. Right now it was too late, and in spite of lying around all day she was tired and she felt too low to decide if calling was a good idea or a bad one. The Weather Channel was still talking about Floyd, which was turning into the world’s biggest hurricane, or at least the longest. It seemed like the Floyd show had been on all week. More than fifty people had died. Whole towns were underwater. Floyd was a Category Four hurricane. If you watched enough of the Weather Channel, you learned these things. There was a Hurricane Gert, but she was out in the ocean. Harvey would be the next one, if they didn’t run out of hurricanes.

  There was some kind of commotion outside. Josie assumed it was the neighbors, who were always carrying on in some excess of good or bad feelings. But then she heard Harvey’s voice in the middle of it, stuttering and protesting.

  What in the—

  Things started happening. The door flew open with a whump and Harvey backed in with this expression. Josie said, “Hey—”

  She never got the rest of it out. A man’s head appeared in the door, with a face that might have been a mask, it was so smudged and wild. She didn’t scream until the rest of him was inside and even then it was more of a yelp, just surprised.

  Oh, he had a gun. He waved it around in an irritated fashion. Josie was still on the couch, Harvey was flat against the wall. Zero time had elapsed. It was like when you stub your toe and it takes a moment for the pain to travel up your nerves to whatever actually felt it. Waiting for the import of whatever this was to hit.

  Then it did, and she screamed again and got her legs moving underneath her but the man with the gun was way ahead of her. He pushed Harvey toward the couch and Harvey fell on top of her.

  Harvey’s knee was in her face. She said, “Uff,” and tried to get untangled, but Harvey was making sounds like he couldn’t breathe and the man with the gun was yelling, “Shut up, shut up!” Funny since he was the one making all the noise, not funny, she finally got herself out from under Harvey and tried to see if he was hurt. She realized that she was still screaming and that was why her ears hurt.