Wide Blue Yonder (10 page)

Since she was not dead she did things like call his apartment on nights she was certain he was at work. So she was a stalker. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t deal with, now that she had absolutely no pride. It was a sickness, the following and the calling. A secret sickness that she only pretended to want to cure. How weak, degrading, shameful it all was. Once she had said these things to herself she was free to go ahead and do what she wanted. She always blocked her phone number in case he had Caller ID or some other kind of police superscanner. The phone rang four times before his machine picked up. “Hi, Mitch here, I’ll get back to you.” Plain and simple. Eight syllables. You could have set them to music. The sound of his voice was a drug that she only allowed herself every so often. And once when she’d
miscalculated and he answered with a breezy hello, she dropped the phone as if it burned her. The actual fact of him was just too overwhelming.

Some nights she drove out to Lake Springfield, just to depress herself further. It was a tame sort of a lake, with a soft mud bottom and water the color of tea. There were fish in it, sure, people caught them and ate them, even though there was supposed to be some disease you could catch from swimming in it. There were places kids went to drink beer and mess around. She and Jeff had done that, plenty of times. She heard he had a new girlfriend. She guessed she was glad he wouldn’t be hanging around pestering her, but there was something irritating about it also.

She drove through all the places she imagined police might patrol. The public housing complexes, the crumbling, deserted edge of downtown with its welding shops and gaping warehouses. The mall where scuzzy kids her age hung out in packs, and the truly awful liquor store that looked like it got robbed about once a week. From time to time it occurred to her that it was genuinely dangerous to be in such places. She took pride in this. It made her feel she was finally accomplishing something. And when a black guy in an old rattletrap car pulled up next to her at a stoplight and said, in a bored voice, “Hey, you want your pussy licked?” Josie only said, “No thank you,” and drove on.

She almost never saw a cop car. You’d think there was no crime here, along with all the other things they didn’t have. She certainly never saw Mitchell Crook. She had no idea what beat or territory he covered, which was what kept her from doing something like burglarizing her own house and calling 911.

Then one night, in the gasping middle of the heat wave, when the lead story on the local news had been the death of six hundred chickens after a poultry farm’s cooling system failed, her luck changed. She’d gone into Blockbuster to kill some time when
sirens started up, a whole howling chorus of them. Everybody else in the store looked around for a startled moment, then went back to flipping through the videos. But Josie was out the door and across the parking lot in a dead run. She could still see the taillights and revolving flashers at the end of the street, about to be swallowed up by darkness.

On a hunch she gunned the car after the now-vanished lights, then swung left onto Sangamon Avenue. She rolled down the window to hear an echo of sirens. They were headed out to the west edge of town, where the Auto Zone and discount grocery and Farmer’s Service Co-op gave over to a new subdivision of little square houses, like a child’s blocks, before the monotonous fields began.

Was it a fire? Josie couldn’t tell. A fire was of no use to her. No, she saw the string of winking lights clearly. They were turning into the vast concrete apron of empty parking lot around the FS Co-op. She cut behind the shopping center to the service road that ran along the edge of a stray cornfield. This was far enough away that she felt inconspicuous, although she could still see. They were police squads all right, three of them. She felt an unmistakable sexual tickle, God, what kind of freak was she becoming?

She left the engine running for the air-conditioning but turned the headlights off and stepped out of the car for a better look. To one side of the Co-op were big above-ground ammonia tanks, a smaller tank for kerosene, and a row of tractor tires, man-high, bags of mulch and peat moss on pallets, straw bales under a tarp, and piles of gravel and landscaping stone. Now that the squad cars were here nothing seemed to be happening. She could see a group of men standing around in the headlights, although her view was obscured and she was too far away to hope to make anyone out. It had to be almost ninety degrees still, and wet-blanket humid. Sweat felt a half-inch thick on her skin.

Then two figures emerged from the far corner of the building where they must have been crouching behind the ammonia tanks. They ran toward the cornfield, almost straight at her. She was too paralyzed to move, and they didn’t seem to notice her until they were almost upon her, and then the one in front skidded to a stop and the one behind cursed and nearly piled into him. When the first boy lifted his face she said, “Moron? Is that you?”

It was so dark out there she couldn’t guess how she’d recognized him. Maybe it was the bulk of him, and the way he ran, heavily, with his shoulder tight and muscle-bound. “Josie!” he yelped, and the boy behind him said, “Shaddup, will ya?” in a loud whisper.

“What are you—”

But Moron had her by both arms and was half-lifting, halfpushing her ahead of them, across the road and into the cornfield. She was still sorting out her first surprise, and to be bundled along like this, to be enveloped in so much large and hot-smelling flesh, was an extraordinary thing. The corn was nearly head-high, a good crop year everybody said, not that she could ever remember a bad one. Corn just couldn’t help but grow here. The wide green leaves slapped her face. The boy she didn’t know was muttering curses.

When they were a few rows in, Moron loosened his grip and she said, more curious than anything else, “What is this, huh?”

Moron bent over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. “Man, I suck. No endurance.”

The other boy said, “I am going to kick Podolsky’s ass big time. What a limp dick.” Josie recognized him now, a kid with bad skin and long, weedy hair who hung out at the losers’ table in the school cafeteria.

Moron said to her, “We were messing around in there and this guy Podolsky was in the car outside and we set off the alarm and he freaked.”

“Oh. What were you looking for?”

“Just stuff. I thought maybe they’d have some tires that’d work on my truck.”

“Don’t tell her anything. Jesus Christ.” The longhaired kid was crouched down in the cornstalks, peering back at the Co-op. “They’re still out there. I don’t think they saw us.”

“How’s Taco Swill?” Josie asked Moron, for something to say.

“Oh I quit not real long after you did. I got on at Plastic-Pak. It pays a ton better and I don’t have to wear a stupid hat.”

“Yeah. I got another job too.” She was wondering what she ought to do about her car. Over the sound of the engine she could hear the tiny voice of the radio behind the sealed glass.

“So what are you doing here? This is too weird.”

She couldn’t invent anything that made sense, so she mostly told the truth. “I heard the sirens and followed them to see what was happening.”

“Yah?” She couldn’t tell if he disbelieved her or if he’d just run out of things to say. He was quiet, peering through the thick-planted rows. Even hunkered down he looked absurdly large and visible, like an elephant trying to hide behind a picket fence.

“Well,” said Josie, “I should probably shove off now. You boys take it easy.” She stood up and started back toward the road.

“Whoa whoa whoa.” Between the two of them they hauled her back down. “That’s not a good idea right now,” Moron explained.

“Yeah, why don’t you stick around for a while,” said the long-haired boy. “Until things sort of chill out. Then maybe you could give us a ride home.”

“You want me to be your getaway driver?” She giggled. It sounded like the sort of thing she might expect to do in this, her new reckless life.

“It’d just be giving us a ride.”

“See,” said Moron, “Ronnie, he’s seventeen, that’s still juvenile. But I’m eighteen so I’m an adult offender. I gotta be more careful.”

“Did you guys actually steal anything?” Josie asked, beginning to take an interest.

Ronnie dug in his back pocket. “Just some bean inoculant they had up by the register. Little bags of it.”

“That is so ridiculous.”

“Hey, it’s not like we had time to browse around.”

“I wish the dumb cops would figure out the party’s over.”

“You don’t think they had video cameras in there, do you?”

“Bean inoculant. You got a promising career in crime.”

“Fuck you.”

It was as hot as the inside of a black box. Even the blurred quarter moon was gassy and hot. Something like locusts, except louder and more metallic-sounding, were making a racket in the weeds at the side of the road. Josie tried to see what the police were doing. The squad cars hadn’t moved. The red lights flared and pulsed over the empty lot. Mitchell Crook was there. She could just feel it. He was talking seriously into a radio, his dark eyebrows bent together in concentration. So close, no more than a hundred yards away. The one place she wanted to go and the one place she couldn’t get to. Everything was hopeless, she was a hopeless fool. Of course he would have a girlfriend, it was ignorant to think he wouldn’t. A grown-up girlfriend with a butter-scotch tan and flippety hips and perfect fingernails, someone just as impossibly beautiful as he was. Moron and Ronnie were having an argument about corn.

“It’s supposed to be ‘Knee-high by the Fourth of July.’”

“That was before hybrids.”

“So, Fourth of July was last week. It could have grown. It’s like, ‘As high as your fly.’”

“Clever. Maybe you could be a farmer. I always figured you for the 4-H type.”

Josie said, “Hey, I think the cops are leaving.” She watched forlornly as one car sped away, its flashers extinguished now. The other two squads loitered for a while longer, then car doors slammed. Their headlights were like spaceships turning and hurtling through a black void, speeding back into town.

“Boy are they dumb,” Ronnie gloated. “I don’t think they even looked around back.”

“They were just too awestruck by the devastation we left behind us.”

“Shaddup, OK?”

Josie straightened and tried to uncramp her legs. “So where do you guys live?”

“Oh, we don’t have to go home right away. We could hang out for a while.”

“Sure.” She didn’t care what she did anymore. None of it mattered. They piled in together, Moron in the passenger seat and Ronnie in the back, and they said nice car, just to be polite, although she could tell they didn’t think much of it, a dinky little Toyota, a girl’s car. They went through her CDs and they seemed to think she had at least a few decent ones. They blasted the air conditioner but put the windows down to feel the artificial breeze their motion made. Josie thought how bizarre it would be if Tammy or anybody else she knew saw her cruising around with these guys. She’d never live it down. Moron was about twice the size of any normal human being outside of the World Wrestling Federation. And Ronnie was just … Well, she’d rather be her fucked-up idiot self than poor pit-faced, skanky Ronnie on the very best day of his life.

But here they were, motoring along, all goofy and full of fun. Moron said they should stop at Ronnie’s brother’s so they could get a couple of six-packs. Yeah? said Josie. She already felt drunk
on nothing at all. When they got the beer she drank one just for thirst and didn’t feel a thing. It was long after eleven, too late for her to track down Mitchell Crook and do her usual twisted stalker thing, so she might as well enjoy herself some other sick way.

“This has to be the most boring-ass town in the world,” said Ronnie. He was trying to light a cigarette but his lighter was empty and the little wheel ground itself dry.

Josie said, “I’m looking forward to Y2K. Everything either shutting down or blowing up.”

Moron said, “You know all the Russian nuclear missiles? They could go off at midnight New Year’s Eve. The government just about admitted it.”

“Yeah, but Springfield’s not important enough to have its own missile.”

“My shit lighter just went Y2K.” Ronnie threw it out the window. It skittered away, as insubstantial as tinfoil.

They were driving past St. John’s Hospital, one of the few places in town with its lights still on. There was a row of corridor ends blazing away and the dimmer glow from the rooms themselves, their curtains mostly open, empty, since this was Springfield, after all, and few people even got sick in interesting ways. It was the same hospital where she had been born, although she didn’t like to think about that. The doctor said, It’s a girl, and her father said, Oh. If Abe had daughters instead of sons, would he still have loved them?

Josie wiggled one hand and Moron popped the top on a new beer and gave it to her. She said, “Seriously. What do you think’s gonna happen when we hit good old Y2K? Anything?”

“God I hope so. I don’t think I could stand another thousand years like these last ones.”

“But what?” she persisted. “How? All right, the missiles, that’s one thing.”

Moron cranked the music up so loud the speakers buzzed. “Fiona Apple, totally great. If you figure—”

“I have to turn this down, OK?”

“—that everything has computer chips in it now, I mean, how many chips do you think are in this car? And those satellites that control phones and ATMs and the stock market and airplanes and television and weather and shit? They’re gonna drop, splat. Burn big holes in the innocent bystanders. Civilization as we know it hits the tank. Then it’s every man for himself. The strong will live and the weak will die. But don’t worry. I’ll be watching out for you.”

“Thanks,” said Josie, unsure what he meant, or if he was joking. He was giving her a strange look, as if there was something they’d already agreed about. Then Ronnie said, “Hey, pull over, would ya?”

She found a space at the curb and Ronnie got out to stand at the back of the car. “What’s he doing?” she asked, and then, “Oh.”