Nearer Than The Sky

by T. Greenwood

  Ike jumped down off the barstool and reached into the front pocket of his little-boy Levis. He pulled out two quarters and laid one in the palm of Benny’s outstretched hand. He kissed the other quarter and held it up to the light. “For luck against Minnesota Skinny here.”

  I smiled, but my head was still pounding.

  Benny picked a song, and Sheila came out of the kitchen. She was retying the red canvas apron around her waist, careful to make sure she wasn’t covering up her belly button. Her navel, she would say. That black hole of a belly button was the key to her tips, she said. And halter tops were God’s greatest gift to waitresses. I don’t think it was her navel that the customers were looking at, though. She wiggled her hips while Andy Gibb’s soft voice crooned. She didn’t know the words, but she sang along anyway. Sheila had been working at Rusty’s since January. She was Eddie’s cousin. She was eighteen, only six years older than me, but I couldn’t imagine how in six short years I might metamorphose into that. I couldn’t imagine that a halter top would ever have anything to halt on my chest.

  Ike racked the balls and I found the best cue leaning against one of the booths. I couldn’t wait until I had enough money to buy the Spalding cue. I chalked up my hands on the pyramid of white chalk by the men’s-room door and then waited until Ike was happy with his rack.You never break while your opponent is still standing on the other side of the table. Ike had a friend who got knocked out cold because someone didn’t wait. The thirteen ball hit him square between the eyes before he dropped. When I leaned over to shoot, it felt as though I’d been hit in the back of the head with a cue ball instead of by our kitchen floor.

  I hated to break. I didn’t have the same sort of power as a regular-size person. But Ike had taught me exactly how to use the strength I did have, and how to set the cue ball just off to the right or the left of center. I didn’t get any balls in, but it was a good break. The balls weren’t all bunched up together like they sometimes were when I broke.

  Ike was the best pool player in the whole bar. He’d been playing on these tables since before Daddy even owned Rusty’s. But the thing I liked about Ike was that he never let me win. He played against me just like he played against Simon or Eddie.

  Ike sank four balls and then missed the fifth. “I’m not going to do you any favors letting you have the easy shots,” he said, leaving me nothing to shoot at.

  “Come on, Ike,” I said.

  The way to win at pool is the same way that you win a chess game.You have to set things up, to be able to look ahead, to see what will happen to the balls after you make the first shot. There are some people, like Ike, who plan the whole game out before they even shoot.

  I had solids, the little ones, and Ike had me surrounded. Finally, I saw how I could probably get the two ball in the corner pocket if I squeaked it by the eight ball. One slip, though, and the eight ball would go flying into the side pocket. It was risky, but I didn’t have too much of a choice. I recited my little voodoo-Hail-Mary-birthday-wish in my head and shot. Once you see it, you need to shoot. Go with your gut, and follow through. The ball went right past the eight ball and down the table to the pocket. It looked like it might not go in, but then it rolled softly into the corner.

  “Sweet!” Sheila’s voice was pure Red Dye #2 and cherryflavored.

  “Thanks,” I said, and tried to concentrate on my next shot. I stared at the table, and all the colors and balls started to make me feel dizzy. Almost carsick. Benny put his quarter in and selected 5050, the theme from Rocky. The music pounded in my ears, and I leaned over to make a shot and couldn’t see the balls anymore. The edges were fuzzy, and my ears were filling with heat and liquid and pounding.

  “Indie?” I heard Daddy’s voice swimming to me.

  “Go get some ice.” Rosey’s hand felt warm and soft on my shoulder. The other one swam through my tangled hair, touching the place where bone had met linoleum. “There’s blood in her hair.”

  They helped me to sit down at one of the booths, and Benny sat across from me.

  “That is some terrible bump. What happened?” Rosey was rubbing my back in small motions, circular and soft. I could have stayed like that forever, with my head down on the cool table and Rosey’s hands on my back.

  “You got an egg on your head?” Benny asked.

  I nodded and felt the ice numbing the bump. Daddy brought me a glass of ginger ale with a straw. I sipped and felt the bubbles making the edges sharp again.

  “What happened?” Daddy asked.

  I thought about the red piggy bank, about the pool cue I wanted, about Ma and Lily being gone for a whole week. I remembered the way my skin felt on the cold linoleum and the smell of silver spray paint and the sparkle of sequins. I thought about what would happen if I told Daddy what Ma did. About the way Ma’s voice would sometimes explode in the night after Daddy came home. About the way their voices rolled like thunder under the floor, through the crack under my door, and into my bed as I lay trying to sleep.

  “I fell out of the swing,” I said. “I went too high.” And I could see myself for a moment in the backyard, swinging on the metal swing set we got from the catalog. I saw the way the mountain peaks magically appeared as I rose above the tree line. I felt the pinch of metal chains on my fingers and felt gravel in my knees.

  “Why didn’t you tell anybody?” Rosey asked. “You could have a concussion.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s just an egg. I’ve had plenty of eggs before.” I could keep the thunder quiet tonight. I could hush the rumbles with my words.

  I don’t know what I expected. I guess I imagined that they’d be wearing rubber suits, masks. I imagined them being enclosed in yellow. But the man from the environmental toxicology testing firm looked like he could have been a cable man, a meter reader, or someone who might dig a hole in the backyard for a pool. He pulled up into the driveway in a pickup truck and came up to the door. I could hear him wiping his feet on Ma’s bristly green doormat before he knocked.

  I opened the door and he said, “I’m here to get some soil and water samples?”

  “Come in,” I said.

  “The radon guy will be here later this afternoon, but I can do some checks for asbestos and take some X rays of your walls.”

  I tried to picture what he might see inside these walls, what cancers might be lurking underneath the paint and paper.

  “X rays?” I asked, motioning for him to come into the kitchen.

  “For lead,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  He walked to the sink and turned the tap. Water rushed into the sink. “Does your water come from a well?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well then, I’ll just take some soil samples.”

  “No, you better take some of the water anyway.” If I left out one check, Ma would never come back and I’d be stuck here. “Better safe than sorry.”

  “Sure thing,” he smiled. “Can’t be too cautious. I’ll just be a couple of hours. Then we’ll send the samples to our lab. We should know in a couple of days what your problem here is. I’d like to suggest the long-term radon test over the next ninety days or so, though. That’ll give us a better reading.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I’m not going to be here for that long.” The mere thought of staying inside this house for the next three months made me feel dizzy.

  “Don’t you live here?”

  “No. It’s my mom’s place. I’m getting it tested for her.”

  “Well, in that case, when Kirk gets here just let him know you want the short-term test. He’ll need to get into your basement to put the charcoal canisters down there. In a couple of days we should be able to get a reading. It won’t be quite so accurate as a long-term test, but if you’re in a hurry . . .”

  “That sounds fine. What time will he be here?” I asked. “I need to run some errands.”

  “Probably around two or three. You want me to lock up when I go?”

  “That’ll be great.
Help yourself to the coffee, and the door locks when you shut it,” I said. I knew Ma would have a fit if she knew I was leaving a stranger in the house, but the less time I spent there the better.

  “And how do you get to your basement?” he asked. “I can look for asbestos down there.”

  “There’s a bulkhead in the backyard,” I said, pointing through the kitchen window. “It’s not a full basement, just sort of a root cellar.”

  Rosey’s address was on the east side of town. She and her family used to live down near the creek in a big house, but after José died and her children left home, she must not have needed so much space anymore. Ma had been invited to José’s funeral, but she didn’t go. It was Daddy who called me to tell me. He drove all the way out from California to attend, though he said it would have been worth it just to have some of Rosey’s tamales. The Jiminez family’s roots went deep in Mountainview; nearly three hundred people went to the funeral.

  I turned onto her street and found her house among the identical square adobe cottages like Legos in a row. I parked the car across the street and walked slowly to her front door. I probably should have called, but for some reason I felt nervous, as if I might not go through with it unless I were standing right at her front door.

  She had a small porch that was still decorated for Halloween: plastic bags of leaves with jack-o’-lantern faces, witch decals in the window, and a string of papery ghosts. A cat stared out at me from the windowsill. Its mouth opened and closed in a cry. As I was about to knock, a dog started to bark and I jumped. It yelped as if it were being strangled, and I worried for a moment that it might appear and attack my legs.

  “Shhh,” a voice said, and Rosey’s face peeked through the curtains above the cat. Her eyes stared at me blankly for a moment; then she smiled, and I could hear her scurrying to unlock the door.

  “Indie!” she cried, throwing open the door and reaching up to hug me. She was so little, her head pressed into my chest. She pulled away from me but continued to hold my elbows. “Aren’t you a pretty sight for these tired eyes! Come in, come in. I just made some menudo.”

  I followed her into the tiny house. It smelled wonderful; the air was thick and spicy. Green chiles and cilantro. I could hear the pot bubbling on the stove.

  “What are you doing home?” she asked, motioning for me to sit on the love seat next to the window.

  “Ma’s been sick,” I said.

  “Oh no, your poor mama,” Rosey said. “Is she in the hospital?”

  “No, no,” I said, petting the calico cat as it crept cautiously across the back of the sofa behind me. “She’s in Phoenix with Lily. She’ll be coming back up here soon.”

  “So much traveling isn’t good for a sick woman,” Rosey said, shaking her head. “You tell her when she gets home to call me and I will bring her my tamales.”

  “I will,” I laughed. The cat settled next to me and began to purr.

  “My tamales are good medicine.”

  Ma would never call Rosey. Ma almost never went into Rusty’s. For the longest time Rosey and Sheila and any of the other waitresses could have been the same woman for all Ma was concerned. It wasn’t until Benny died that she finally met the woman who fed us and made sure the bumps on our heads were taken care of.

  “I went to Rusty’s to find you yesterday,” I said. “How long ago did you leave?”

  “Oh my goodness, over a year now. New owners changed the menu. Not so much Mexican food anymore. Besides, they took Zeus down. How could I work without Zeus?” she laughed. “I was going to find something else, and then José passed on, and . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About José. Was he sick for a long time?”

  “Oh no. It came suddenly. A heart attack. He just came back from swimming in the creek with my granddaughters, my nietas. Took a sip of lemonade and fell down. No pain. That’s all. He was an old man.”

  “I wish I could have come home for his funeral,” I said, and reached for her hand.

  “Your Daddy was here, that’s enough. I don’t need you coming from three thousand miles away for a funeral.” She stood up and clapped her hands together. “Now, we eat some menudo.”

  I followed her into her kitchen and watched her as she ladled bowls full of the strange soup. She was wearing a floral housedress and an apron. She seemed to have shrunk a little, as if the stories she told me when I was little were true—that when women grow old they become smaller and smaller until they turn into mice and scurry away. I imagined her black hair now turned silver becoming whiskers. Her wrinkled skin turning gray and soft. The tip of her nose turning pink.

  I never would have eaten half of the things that Rosey served at the bar if I’d known what they were, so Daddy had a policy of eat before you ask. And usually, by the time I finished eating, I didn’t care anymore what had been put into the pot.

  We ate quietly. The chimes on a clock in the living room announced the half hour like the chimes of church bells.

  “How is your Peter?” she asked, reaching across the table and squeezing my arm.

  I smiled. Peter and Rosey had met only once in all these years, but she had liked him. Everyone always likes Peter. She had even given him her special recipe for pan dulce. For weeks after that Peter perfected his yellow and pink frostings, offered them to me like small treasures stolen from some other place and time.

  “You still being stubborn?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “No wedding? No babies?”

  “No wedding. No babies,” I smiled.

  She frowned. “Who will take care of Indie when she gets old then? When she gets sick? Look at all you do for your mama. What would your mama do without you?”

  “I guess I’ll worry about that when I get old and sick,” I said, trying to laugh. But the menudo turned from liquid to a rock in my stomach.

  “Your face is full of worry already,” she said. She reached for my empty bowl and went back to the pot on the stove.

  “No more,” I said. “I’m stuffed.”

  “You have a worried face,” she said, shaking her head. “Just a little more and then you tell me what you are worried about.”

  I knew better than to turn away her offer. I even helped myself to another warm flour tortilla.

  “I used to the make them homemade, but now they sell them at the Smith’s down there where the Foodmart used to be. I know it’s lazy, but they taste almost as good as mine,” she said, dipping her tortilla into the soup.

  “They’re good,” I nodded.

  “Is it your mama that worries you?”

  “No,” I said. “She’ll be fine. She always is.”

  “You’re still mad at her,” Rosey said, shaking her head.

  “Since you were a little girl. I can see it in your face. It’s making lines by your eyes, all that anger.”

  “I’m not mad. I’m just irritated.You know?” I tried not to think about the way my eyes looked tired, had looked tired for so long I couldn’t remember my old face anymore. “I came all the way here and now I’m at the house by myself, waiting for her to come home. She doesn’t need me.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to be needed,” Rosy said. “If somebody always needs you, you never get anything done.”

  I chuckled, relieved, and dipped my tortilla into the soup, swirling it around and around the last piece of tripe.

  “That’s not it though,” she said. “You think you can fool me by changing directions like that.” She shook her finger at me and then reached across the table and touched my face. “Always talking around things, this one. Never get to the point. That’s your way, no?” She pointed to the motions I was making in my bowl. “Always talking in circles instead of getting to the meat.”

  Later, when the radon man came up from the cellar and handed me the box he’d found stuck in a crevice in the dirt wall, I thought about what she’d said. Always talking around things. Never get to the point.

  I sat down at the kitchen table a
fter he’d left and stared at the box. It was unopened, from a medical supply company in Phoenix, addressed to the nursing home where Ma used to work. The postmark was more than twenty years old. When I peeled back the packing tape and let the hundreds of packaged syringes spill onto the Formica tabletop, I considered her words. Always talking in circles. But what she didn’t understand is that sometimes the center lacks clarity, and it’s easier and less painful to move along the periphery. And besides, circumnavigation is sometimes the only way to return to where you started.

  The needle dream begins with the sound of doors softly closing. Imperceptible, if I were to press my hand against my good ear. But my hands are at my sides, and I am stubborn, and I am standing at the foot of my bed listening to the doors closing.

  Through the night window, I see the shadows of animals in the backyard. I see the outlines of thieves. They are hiding in the cushions of the old couch, behind sunflowers, illuminated only vaguely by the bright star sky. The only thing that separates me from the backyard jungle junkyard is the pane of glass and splintered window frame. And the only thing that separates me from the other terrible thing is this sound of closing doors.

  Tonight, Lily made dying sounds in her sleep. She could have been one of those animals from the yard, growling and hissing. A coyote or a wolf. Through my wall, I could hear Ma hushing her to sleep. I could hear the motion of her hands making circles on Lily’s skin. A water glass being set on the nightstand. The creak of a window and a small breeze blowing across her forehead. With my ear pressed against the wall so hard I could almost fall through into the other room, I could hear Ma shh-shhing her. Singing, It’s okay, baby. Mama’s here. It’s going to be just fine. I pressed my ear so hard I could feel my heart beating in the wall. And for a moment, I thought they might be able to hear too. I fell asleep on my knees to the sound of my heart in the walls and Ma’s lullabies to Lily.

  But now, I am standing at the foot of my bed. Still but trembling. My heart has escaped from the walls and found itself quickening in my chest. But this time I have memorized the maze of this house. I have written its paths on the back of my eyes. I know the intricacies of corridor and door, corridor and door. I know where the wallpaper has faded from my pressing my ear against these walls to hear what’s happening on the other side. And knowing this, it’s easy to find them.