Wide Blue Yonder (2 page)

Breathing through his mouth and his lungs filling up with pain. Legs on fire. But was he running to something or away?

“Harve? Wait for me.”

Ed pushed his cart double-time to catch up. “What’s this, a race?”

Local Forecast was looking straight at the green cans, so he put some in his cart.

“I sure as heck hope you have a cat.”

He kept talking alking alking alking, but Local Forecast wasn’t listening. School came before the Weather, he was sure of it. And other things had happened in between. Were they in a book too?

He put some more things in his cart, gave the checkergirl money and she gave him money back. Brown pennies; he turned them so the Lincoln heads all faced the same direction, then he put them in his pocket. He walked down the going-home street, trying to get his mind around a thought that was like a stone in his shoe. It was about Football Ed turning into Old Ed and time marching on.

Back home. He dumped his groceries in the kitchen and turned up the sound on the Weather. Red Woman was standing in front of a map of India, a place that didn’t interest him much because it was always hot and always the same flat green-blue. The only really good weather was Local. He got the book for School down from its shelf. It was sticky maroon leather with white letters on it:
THE BULLDOG
, 1949. There was a cartoon bulldog shouting through a megaphone. The book flopped open to one page, like it always did, and he lifted it up to his nose to see.

It was a boy in trackandfield clothes. His arm was hauled back and there was a whaddyacallit. Javelin. He was throwing a javelin on a black-and-white day in 1949. Local Forecast studied it, then rearranged the book on the coffee table so that the javelin was going west to east, the way the Weather traveled.

The boy in the picture had shiny hair and a smile that lifted up one side of his mouth. His bare arms and legs were ropey with muscle, pointing in all directions, like he was trying to scramble out of his clothes. Local Forecast rapped the top of his bald head with his knuckles. Knock knock. He unzipped his pants and regarded his legs, all fattypale and sad. Look at that. But there was the name under the picture: H
ARVEY
S
LOAN
.

So the boy in the picture was the old Harvey, who was really
young. And he, Local Forecast, was the new Harvey, who was really old. No wonder he got so confused. The boy in the picture was aiming the javelin at the farthest point he could see, which was 1949. Somehow it must have kept going and going, because it found him everytime he opened the book. This old-young Harvey must have wondered how everything would turn out. “It’s OK, really,” Local Forecast told him. “We’ve got a house now, and Fat Cat, and the Forecast comes on every ten minutes.”

But there was more to it than that, he knew. He was leaving things out. He knew he was and it made him feel guilty. It was a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living God no no no no southeast winds five to ten miles an hour barometric pressure twenty-nine point eight six and falling.

There were other people in the book too, Football Ed and pretty girls. If you made a book of them now, they would all be old. He knew what came after old.

After old, they closed the book on you. That’s the story of my life, people said. Everybody had their own book. Beginning, middle, end of story. Then Uh-Oh. That’s what people said. Not that anybody ever came back to tell about it, except maybe Jesus and he didn’t stay very long. You probably weren’t allowed to come back. It was a terrible thing.

All the storybook of his life he was afraid. He forgot why. He was just a scairdy. They’d tried to beat it out of him. It was a terrible thing to no a terrible no no.

He stood up, forgetting that he had his pants undone, had to stop and hitch them up. What if it was all just another kind of forecast, a prediction nobody checked up on?

He kept very still. The television chattered away. What if it was just them trying to boss everything? The way they had it set up, Heaven sounded like more School, and that was if you even got in. In Heaven you still had to be you. Oh, he was tired of he. Of
trying to remember and trying to forget. It all weighed you down so. He hadn’t led a good life. Box of snakes no no no no patches of heavy dense fog, visibility less than a quarter of a mile.

Say you could forget even about forgetting, once your poor old leaky body quit on you. He was something clear and cold, like the jet stream, his mouth full of blue roaring. Whambang! Or just a little ruffle of wind over warm Pacific water, wind that pulled the water right up into it. Then something gave it a push and it meandered toward California. Stopped to spit snow on the near side of the Sierras. Sailed right over the Rockies, really something now, a genuine System, leaving green tracks all across the map. It tore up a chunk of eastern Colorado and sent a whole plateful of lightning rattling down on Nebraska. Why, it might even end up in You Are Here, setting off sirens, then raining itself out somewhere over the Ohio valley.

He didn’t see why it couldn’t be that way. Everything explained in terms of wind and water and temperature. Pure and simple. He wanted to tell the young man in the picture that a great many sad things would happen but that it would turn out all right. He wanted to tell his old man self the same thing. He wanted to catch that javelin at the end of its perfect rainbow arc. All you had to do was concentrate.

But later that day, watching the southwestern sky turn the color of steel and the dogwood leaves show their pale undersides in the shrilling wind, he wasn’t so sure. He was still afraid. And would there still be Weather, if he wasn’t here to watch it?

T
here were places like Springfield that used to be important but were now only good for being state capitals. Josie Sloan enjoyed saying this about her hometown, in the way you can enjoy a grievance. It was a dump of a place that thought it was hot because it had the governor and a batch of blowhard legislators that the truly braindead voters of Illinois had elected. Nothing ever happened here and you could die of boredom a dozen different ways. You could spend your days roaming the aisles of the Dollar General, stuffing your cart full of depressing ticky-tacky, or you could marry one of the local oafs and have baby races with all the other oafettes, or you could wipe down the sticky counter of the Taco Bell for the twentieth time so the same fly could keep landing on it, like Josie was doing right now.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon and nobody was ordering tacos or nachos or watery sodas. Moron, which was actually the nickname he preferred, was scraping down the grill and kicking up grease smells. Bonnie was on the phone with her loser boyfriend for one more of their extended love chats. The fly circled fatly around the room, as if it was bored too, and landed on one of the
Star Wars Phantom Menace
posters. She hated
Phantom Menace.
She was never even going to see it. Outside the glass and concrete-made-to-look-like-stucco box, a steady stream of traffic went nowhere. She was seventeen, with nowhere to go.

Bonnie hung up the pay phone in the vestibule and came back inside, looking dreamy and smug, the way she always did at such times. “How’s Curt?” Josie asked for politeness’ sake.

“He’s great. We’re gonna rent a garage for him to work on the Camaro—he decided on the color. Candy-Apple Red.”

“That sounds awesome.” Bonnie never seemed to realize when Josie was making fun of her, and in truth Josie lost track of things herself. Because even though Bonnie had buck-teeth and an ass like an upholstered chair and Curt was prime oaf material, the two of them were happy, pathetic but happy. Josie thought there was something stingy and separate about herself that would keep her from being happy in any of the obvious ways.

Bonnie ambled over to the heat lamps and checked her lipstick in the metal reflection. Moron was belting out some hip hop song about death threats and the Internet, wa boom, wa boom, wa boom. Josie would get off work in two hours, unless while she wasn’t paying attention she’d already died and gone to hell. Taco Hell.

Bonnie poured herself an iced tea and wedged one hip against the counter. “Stick a fork in it.”

“Yup.”

“At least the Prince of Darkness left early.” This was the manager. Even the jokes were nothing new. Bonnie said, “So …” as a kind of invitation.

“We’re still broken up and it’s going to stay that way.” Josie shoved a stack of napkins in the dispenser so that it was impossible to draw out less than ten or fifteen at a time.

“Who’re you going out with now?’

“Nobody.”

Bonnie tilted her head but didn’t get to say anything, because right then the door opened and two little kids with their hands full of grubby change came in. So Josie didn’t have to hear one more
time how hot Jeff was and other of Bonnie’s opinions. She didn’t hang out with kids like Bonnie and Moron at school, they weren’t really her friends. They were Taco pals, that was all. Bonnie and Moron and their crowd were the lumpen, low-expectations kids, while Josie and her friends were crammed full of expectations: SAT scores and college, the school newspaper, plays, sports, things that looked good next to your picture in the yearbook or on those college applications, what a bunch of nasty little tail-chasing careerists they all were.

Josie went back through the kitchen, pretending they needed more sauce packets, and sneaked into the walk-in refrigerator. She sat down on a cardboard box of lettuce and started counting,
one two three,
up to the hundred or so that she figured she could get away with before she had to get back. A hundred wasn’t enough time to even start thinking about all the fucked-up things she had to deal with: Jeff, how many weeks months years she’d feel bad about him,
ten, eleven, twelve,
her scummy job, which took her all the way up to
forty, fifty,
her mother,
sixty,
her father,
seventy,
her father’s nincompoop wife,
eighty, ninety,
the rest of her life, a big fat zero. She was only a dumb kid in a dumb town and there was nothing special about her even though she pretended there was. She was stuck here with everybody else in the everyday everything.
One hundred.
Josie stood up and headed back to the front counter for another round of fast food fun.

Half an hour before quitting time, the sky framed in the glass windows was piling up clouds like a stack of dirty mattresses. Moron and Josie pushed the door open and tried to smell rain in the air. Moron was bummed because he had his motorcycle. “Shit. Figures. The one day this week I bring it.” Moron’s real name was Jason. He had slick, dyed black hair and subscribed to body-building magazines and he was supposed to graduate this year but hadn’t wanted people getting the wrong idea about him.

“Maybe it’ll hold off,” said Josie. “I’ll find out.” She put a quarter in the pay phone and dialed. He picked up on the first ring.

“Local Forecast.”

She pictured him sitting on the sloping corner of his old couch, which was exactly the color of canned tomato soup, his knees pointed at the television. “Hey, Uncle Harvey, it’s Josie. Can you tell me when it’s gonna start raining?”

“At three forty-five
P.M.
Doppler radar indicated a line of strong storms extending from Beardstown to Carlinville, moving northeast at thirty miles an hour. Tornado watch is in effect for Tazewell, Mason, Sangamon, Menard, and Logan Counties until seven
P.M.
”

“That sounds pretty heavy.” Josie did some quick wind speed and distance calculations. They could just make it, she figured. “How are you, are you excited? Make sure you go down in the basement if it gets really bad.”

“Persons in the watch area can expect wind gusts up to fifty miles an hour, torrential rains, damaging lightning, and possible hail. Conditions are favorable for tornado formation. Be prepared to seek shelter.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Thanks, Uncle Harve. I gotta run. Be careful, OK?”

She hung up and Moron asked, “Does your uncle work for a TV station or something?”

“He’s really my great-uncle,” said Josie, not wanting to get into a discussion of Harvey just then. “Come on, we’ve got to be ready to punch out the second that clock turns.”

She drove home through streets that were alive with wind: stray bits of trash skittering across the pavement, flags snapping, trees trying to turn themselves inside out. The western sky was dark and swollen but the rain hadn’t come by the time she pulled into her garage. Her mother wasn’t back yet and the house was
dark. She left it that way, liking the feeling of gloom as she walked through the downstairs. In the kitchen the answering-machine light was blinking, probably her mother, so she ignored it. Five o’clock in the afternoon and there was that eerie nonlight you imagined a total eclipse would be like. Thunder rolled out of the sky’s open throat.

Josie rummaged in the refrigerator. The beam of light made the room even darker. More thunder. She closed the refrigerator, fished a joint out of her backpack, and stepped out the kitchen door to watch the show.

The first brittle lightning showed above the treeline. It was going to be a great, ripping storm. She felt almost happy standing there, she felt careless and dramatic, like someone in a movie. The first rain spattered down, a few unserious drops.

“Hey, jose.”

She yelped. His face was a pale circle, floating toward her from the back of the yard like a balloon. “Jesus
Christ,
” she spat, furious at being so scared. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s such a stupid thing to say.” She crossed her arms. The lightning was really starting to rock. He stopped a few yards away from her and just stood there, looking pathetic. “Well, you better go now.”

“I walked.”

“One more bright idea.”

He didn’t say anything. “You are such a pussy,” she told him. He’d set her up. Totally. She stared at the joint she wouldn’t get to smoke now. The rain started in so hard and fast that she had to raise her voice. “Hurry up, get inside.”