Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  Rolando tried to will himself back to sleep. He was too tired to answer back or argue with her foolishness. His spine jolted as the bus ground through its cycle of gears. He kept losing his balance in the seat, had to brace himself with his elbows so as not to slide into the woman. She was singing a Bible song, softly, but in such a way as was meant to be overheard: Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, so why not any man?

  Always it was some voice breaking into his silence. Always he had tried to ignore it or shout it down. His own voice convinced no one. He had no outside words for his inside self. The song wasn’t so bad, he decided, or maybe it was the singing itself, breathy and damped down, but ready to tear loose if you gave it enough space. He might even have sung along if he knew the words, and who the hell Daniel was. He was a lion guy, he gathered that much. Like Siegfried and Roy.

  Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel. He was at a big Las Vegas—type stage show where the lion was made to float overhead on a cloud of pink smoke. Our Lord Baby Jesus wore a white tuxedo with glitter in his hair. The angel girls were there, belting out the song. They did a little shimmy dance. Everybody booed and hissed when the Devil came out in black tights, stomping up and down and scowling. He never even laid a glove on Our Lord Baby Jesus. Bolts of holy lightning knocked him flat. Wrestling was always such total bullshit. Even in the middle of his dream, Rolando had to laugh.

  But he woke up sad. The woman was gone, maybe she had only changed seats, but she felt gone. Her song was gone. It was one more lonesome thing. The bus was still moving, like he’d already died and gone to hell and hell was a Greyhound going nowhere. The darkness was turning grainy. Morning out there somewhere.

  Could any man be saved? Had he ever in his life known anything besides meanness and fear? They had been the fuel that propelled him, and now he had used them up. Simple fact. End of the damn line. He touched something on the empty seat, paper. He brought it up to his face but it was too dark to see.

  Mile after mile, he waited while the light grew. First he could make out the pictures, the cross and the crown, with a number of energetic lines to indicate radiance. Two hands emerging from a rainbow cloud, palms up in heavenly welcome. Then the words. He read that Jesus Christ had died for him and for all sinners, was buried, and rose again from the dead. And that if he turned away from sin and invited Jesus into his life to become his personal Savior, and placed trust in Him alone for his salvation, and read his Bible every day to get to know Christ better, and talked to God in prayer, was baptized, worshipped, fellowshipped, and served with Christians in a church where Christ was preached and the Bible was the final authority, and told others about Christ, then he would be born anew.

  He started in praying right then and there. He prayed for the bus driver and the people in the seats ahead of him, who kept turning around to look at him. He prayed for everyone still asleep in the houses along the highway, and in the cities and towns and farms both ahead and behind, everyone who was grieved in mind or body, everyone lost, forgotten, heartsick, burdened, tangled up in hatred as he himself had been. Everyone and everything, prisoners in their cells, soldiers fighting in cruel wars, fishermen at sea and the fish beneath the waves, all that hungered or thirsted or labored. He had reached out in darkness and found light. He pointed himself at the sunrise like an arrow, and Jesus loosed the bow.

  Hurricane Party

  There was lemonade tinted pink with a bottle of maraschino cherries, and a white-frosted angel food cake with a bride and groom on top, and that was for Harvey and Rosa. The old kitchen table was covered with a pink tablecloth; garlands of paper flowers and paper butterflies hung overhead. Someone, probably Josie, had gone to the party store and brought back a dozen pink flamingos, palm frond hats of the sort favored by village idiots, some painted coconut heads and other tropical touches. That was for the hurricane, even though Harvey was really only a tropical storm.

  They were all crowded around the television, watching the Weather Channel and rooting for the winds to strengthen. But they peaked at a measly 50 miles. The storm dodged Tampa and dumped its rain on the Everglades and Miami before it crossed the peninsula and trundled out to sea. Elaine explained to Harvey that this was actually just as well, since the Everglades needed the rain and nobody farther north did, on top of the misery of Hurricane Floyd. “You wouldn’t want anybody to get hurt, would you? Of course not.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was disappointed. He was wearing his postsurgical dark eyeshade, leaving his face half-masked. He and Rosa sat next to each other on the new couch, a wedding present from Elaine. They seemed a little shy about all the fuss. Someone had put two of the silly hats on their heads and heaped the brims with paper flowers for wedding crowns. If not for that, they might have resembled those dour nineteenth-century husbands and wives, staring down the camera for a formal portrait. Elaine hoped that once everyone left them alone, they could be a happy, loving couple. There were such things as loving couples, weren’t there?

  It had turned into a fairly large party, most of it Rosa’s family: Lorena and her mother and father, hermanos y hermanas, tíos y tías, and probably some cousins thrown in for good measure. A dozen small brown children ran in and out, inventing games with the coconut shells and trying to feed bits of the turkey in mole sauce to Fat Cat. A group of husky men in open-collared shirts slapped Harvey on the back and offered marital advice.

  Harvey’s side was represented more meagerly by herself and Frank and Josie and, in an effort to pad things out, Ed Pauley. Elaine nibbled at one of the powdered-sugar wedding cookies that Lorena’s mother, Nereida, had baked. Everything had happened so fast. Their own private hurricane. Elaine felt like one of those cartoon characters shown clinging to a lamppost in a high wind, feet blown out from underneath them.

  “Mom?”

  Josie waved a hand in front of her face. “You in there? You look totally spaced.”

  “I’m fine, Sunshine. Just trying to catch my breath. This is quite the fiesta.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s not every day Grandma gets married.”

  Rosa had been a widow for almost thirty years. Elaine learned this, and other interesting facts, during the ceremony at the courthouse. (Everyone had agreed a church wedding would be pushing their luck.) Harvey had worn a gray tweed sports coat and a red tie purchased for the occasion. He was awkward but respectable in his new clothes. He could have been a retired farmer. Rosa had a much-frilled blue dress and a corsage. Elaine and Frank were there as witnesses, as were Nereida and her husband, Jorge, a short, serious man who looked as purely Indian as if he’d been on hand to greet Cortés.

  Harvey had needed only a little prompting to get the words out of his mouth in the right order, while Rosa tackled English syllable by syllable. The justice of the peace presided equably, as if he had seen stranger things, and even managed to imbue the proceedings with some of the grandeur of the law. Nereida took pictures with a disposable camera and confided in Elaine that they had been concerned because Harvey was not Catholic. But Rosa had told them that he was very devout in his own way, even if he was unable to receive the sacraments, and that at her age, God made allowances. Elaine said that she was glad it would not be a problem. She had mostly been concerned with getting Harvey through the ceremony before he could make any embarrassing announcements. That, and his surgery the next day. Theology hadn’t been one of her big worries.

  Josie said, “All the women look like Rosa, but different sizes. I was talking to Lorena, she’s awesome. Did you know she didn’t speak English until she was ten years old?”

  Elaine agreed that this was remarkable, although she was unsure if Josie meant that Lorena spoke very well considering her late start, or that there was some shocking deprivation involved here. As if she sensed them talking about her, Lorena turned and waved at them from across the room. Her hair was piled up and curled on top of her head in a glamorous fashion, and she
was looking very pretty in a lace blouse and short black skirt. Elaine said, “I’m going to ask her if she’d like to come work at Trade Winds. I could use her.”

  There was a moment when Josie might have been thrown off balance by this, but she came back from it. “Really, sure, she’d be great.”

  Elaine couldn’t tell if Josie felt some tinge of jealousy or displacement. “You know, if you ever wanted …”

  “Nah. Not the business type.”

  “Maybe once you see the dye works.”

  Because Josie was coming with her to India. It would mean she might as well forget about school this semester, and she wouldn’t graduate with her class in June, but none of that seemed as important as it once had. Elaine was thrilled she was going. That she’d agreed to the trip, that she even seemed excited about it, was more than Elaine could have imagined only a few days ago. They would have time together and conversations that would not have to be arguments. They would have all of India, its dust and flowers and river of faces. She would present it all to Josie, watch her be amazed.

  It would be just as well to get Josie away from here for a while, even though her mysterious uniformed true love didn’t seem to be in the picture anymore. Not that Josie had said anything about him, nor had Elaine asked. But the climate between them had shifted in some subtle way. Instead of her usual sullen silences, Josie had been determinedly cheerful, as if to demonstrate how over it all she was. And even if Elaine wasn’t quite ready to believe that, she had to consider the possibility that Josie might finally be growing up.

  Perhaps Josie would decide to tell her everything. But even if she never did, Elaine wouldn’t feel obliged to say anything. She felt a tenderness toward Josie’s secrets, perhaps because she no longer had any of her own.

  Well, she was going to have lunch with Bob Kellerman. That didn’t count as a secret, and it was only a lunch. But it was something new, someone new. A small exploration of possibilities. It made her feel she wasn’t entirely old and used up yet.

  And she was getting her new car next week. It had a sunroof and a killer CD player. She could drive around with the windows down, belting out old rock and roll. Silly how happy that made her, as if she’d bought into all those car commercials promising luxury or fun or cute families or the freedom of the open road. The all-American crass materialistic etcetera. She didn’t care. Happy was good.

  Frank and Ed Pauley were having a conversation in one corner of the kitchen. Elaine went over to them and stood until they were forced to break off their talk about municipal bonds or whatever it was they found to say to each other, and acknowledge her. “You boys aren’t mingling.”

  “I don’t speak Spanish,” Frank informed her.

  “I’ll get you some language tapes.”

  Ed Pauley smiled and turned his glasses from one of them to the other in a way that made Elaine wonder if he’d heard them, if he might be going deaf. Frank hoisted his lemonade, stared at it as if he wished it were something else, then lowered it without drinking. Elaine said, “We have you to thank for all this, Ed.”

  “Me? How do you figure?”

  “You told me we should be worried about Harvey. You were right.”

  Ed regarded “all this”: the cake and shrieking kids and flamingos and dressed-up ladies gossiping in Spanish over the sink, and shook his head to disclaim responsibility. “Now you know I didn’t do anything.”

  “You got the ball rolling.” He’d been the starting point, the first sequence. But because that was nothing you could say, and because Ed was smiling his deaf smile again, she said, more loudly, “We’re getting the roof fixed next week. Frank is, I should say.”

  “Hey, don’t mind me. I just pay the bills.”

  “That roof’s been bad for years.”

  “Next week. They can’t get started any sooner.”

  “And something ought to be done about this kitchen. Don’t you think they deserve better?”

  She dared him to say no, right there in the presence of the funky linoleum and weeping paint and lopsided stove. But he surprised her by agreeing. Perhaps he didn’t want to look cheap in front of Ed. A little while later, as Elaine was tidying up the discarded plates and napkins, Frank came up to her and said, “I really didn’t want to see him locked up or anything like that. I’m glad things worked out.”

  “Did you mean that about the kitchen?”

  “Sure, why not. We’ll make it a damn showcase. Put it in magazines.”

  “That’s very nice of you, Frank.” Meaning it, or trying to. Frank being expansive always made her cautious.

  “What the hell. You know how much the nursing home would have cost?” He swatted at one of the butterfly garlands, which was drooping low. “I don’t suppose she married him to get her green card, anything like that?”

  Elaine might have chided him if she hadn’t had the same unworthy thought. Along with wondering if they’d only gone along with the marriage in order to provide Harvey with a caretaker. But she didn’t want to always believe the worst about people, herself included. She said, “I don’t think so. Rosa’s been here such a long time already, and besides …”

  She was distracted by Josie, who was standing in front of Harvey and Rosa, coaxing them to open a bundle wrapped in tissue paper. They’d already received a number of gifts, items both useful and decorative: a gold-scrolled picture frame, a set of linens, a microwave, an electric knife-sharpener, a clock that announced the hour with bird calls, a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks, and dish towels trimmed with rickrack. Josie was shifting her weight from one foot to the other in a swaying half-dance, and she was explaining something Elaine couldn’t hear, using her hands to fill in the gaps between English and Spanish. She looked cheerful, unself-consciously beautiful. Rosa was shaking her head in protest, and the others were laughing, and Harvey had perked up, was trying to bite Rosa’s ear, getting all tangled up in the hats and eyeshade. Cries of encouragement from the crowd. They were a nice family; Elaine supposed they all had some loose tribal connection now, which pleased her. Rosa opened the package and shook out a white satin nightgown, very fine and lacy, and a matching robe.

  More laughter and cheering. Rosa hid her face. Frank and Elaine looked at each other, then glanced into the bedroom, the neatly made-up bed and its plain chenille spread, where Harvey and Rosa slept as man and wife.

  Frank said, “Do you wonder …”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

  The Wide Blue Yonder

  Rosa wanted them to go to Mexico. She wanted him to see it with his new eyes. She showed him on the television when the map came on. She said: See? See? Mexico was brown, like Rosa. The map floated just above the screen. His eyes still didn’t work quite right. Things weren’t always where they should be. Sometimes smears of rainbow dazzle crept into the corner of his vision, and at night the darkness was fuzzy. But other times it was like a window opening up.

  He was trying to learn Rosa-talk. ‘Sky’ was see yellow, ‘blue’ was a zoo. He wanted to talk to her about Mexico. How did you get there, and what did you do once you arrived? Was Mexico a place that had good or bad weather? You never heard that much about it, like it was too far down on the screen for anyone to see.

  Rosa-talk was like a different channel on the television. You didn’t always get good reception. A lot of the time it was Ya ya ya. Other times it almost came together. He had to let his ears slip down into a different place. Then watch Rosa’s face and how she moved around the room. She said: She was old now, but Mexico was where she had been young. If he came with her, he could imagine her when she was a little girl, a young bride, pretty, she hadn’t always been such a dried husk. What use was an old woman? All you could hope for was to keep yourself clean and pray for mercy. But her heart was still red and Mexico was her heart.

  He said: Rosarosarose … I’ve never been anywhere. How do you start?

  The girl said they should do it. “It would be like a honeymoon. You could ride on an air
plane, would you like that? Oh don’t worry, everything will be right here when you get back. What do you think, you could fly through a cloud. In the real sky, not the one on the dumb TV.”

  Off we go, into the wide blue yonder

  “Now where did that come from? Did you hear it on a commercial? But it’s wild blue, Harvey, it’s the Air Force song.”

  Off we go, into the wide blue yonder

  Flying high, into the sun

  “All right, have it your way. Wide.”

  Da da da, dumpity dumdum dumdum

  “You have kind of a nice singing voice, did anyone ever tell you? I bet my mom would help you buy the tickets if we asked her.”

  It would be his first and last trip. Would he see the ocean? Did the Air Force sell the tickets? Did the sky want you up there? Did Rosa know which direction? What did the map look like from that high up?

  He was excited, thinking about it. You Are Here was going Someplace Else. He ran up and down the back porch stairs just to let off steam. Some of Rosa’s friends would go with them. He liked her friends. They had names like hurricanes: Alberto, Carla, Eduardo, Juana. They took him and Rosa for rides in their car sometimes.

  It would be his first trip because he had never taken one before, and it would be his last because you didn’t live forever and forever was right around the corner. He could tell. The window opening in his eyes seemed to look inside as well. Some mornings he didn’t feel like he’d woken all the way up. Some nights his sleep was thin and foggy. Different parts of his body announced themselves like clocks, like the new one in the kitchen that said robin oriole song sparrow meadowlark. Except his clock said knees neck heart breath. Then, sooner or later, the clock stopped. Off we go!

  Oh don’t be scairt. Nothing can stop the U.S. Air Force. It beat the army hands down. He flew loop the loops in the wide blue yonder. The air was as clear as water. At night when he couldn’t sleep, he reached out his hand to Rosa. Rosa was like a map you could touch. She stirred and spoke to him from her dreams, in a kindly cross voice: Ya, go to sleep, baby, baby, let Mamma sleep. Love was a more, a more, a more. When he stretched his hand over the Weather screen, it covered everyone: Rosa and Fat Cat and the girl and Yoo Hoo and Frank Junior and Football Ed and Lorena and Ramon and Juana and all the names ever invented. Everyone he loved was underneath the same sky.