Wide Blue Yonder (25 page)

Josie swam up the length of his body and licked at his ear. “I just would like it better if you remembered something special about them. If they were”—she hesitated—“passions.”

“You’re funny, you know?” Mitch reached over, his eyes still closed, until his hand found something friendly to light on, her left breast. “You don’t have to worry about them. They’re history. Finito.”

“What about the weird one?”

“The what?”

“You said you had this really weird girlfriend once.”

“Do you remember everything I say? Jeez. She was the one who always wanted to do stuff with the handcuffs.”

Josie would have liked to ask more about this, but thought better of it. “Who was the last one? Why did you break up with her?”

“She kept asking me questions, in bed. All right, all right.” Josie was prying his hand loose. “Her name was Marilyn and she works for the Department of Revenue and I met her in a club and we went up to Chicago a few times to see a ballgame. Enough?”

“What did you like about her?”

“I don’t know, lots of things. She had great teeth.”

“That’s how you talk about a horse. God.”

“She was a good dancer. She had a sense of humor.”

“This is really hard for you, isn’t it? Trying to come up with reasons you liked to fool around with somebody.”

“Why do I need reasons? She was a nice girl. Is a nice girl.”

“So why did you break up with her, really?”

Mitch stretched out on his back and examined the ceiling for a long, thoughtful time. “We didn’t actually break up. More like we tapered off.”

Josie rolled over on her stomach, tangling herself in the sheet.

Her hair fell over her face like a tent, so that even with her eyes open she couldn’t see him, didn’t have to look any farther than the intricate dark gold tangle. “I don’t want to be just another nice girl.”

She felt the sheet being peeled away, very gently, fold by fold. “But you’re the absolute absolute nicest.”

She wished they could go places together. At first it was thrilling to have a secret, to hide from everybody and laugh at how they were putting one over on the rest of the world, people who would never have anything worth hiding in their whole dull lives. Then as time went on and no one discovered them, they began to feel a little foolish, even irritable.

She had thought maybe they could go to the State Fair, just walk around together, no big deal. But even that hadn’t worked out. Of course Mitch had to work extra shifts to help with the crowds. He stood at an intersection right outside the fair entrance, directing traffic and giving directions to all the senior citizens and other lame types. Officer Friendly. It was annoying sometimes, the way he could be such a perfect cop. Like it was easier for him, a relief, when he could put on that badge and a serious face.

Josie brought him a lemon shake-up and hung around waiting for him to take a break, which he kept saying he was going to do but never did. She’d worn a new white blouse that rode up above her navel and her favorite red shorts and she knew she looked good, too good to spend all night sitting on the curb in the dark. Finally she told Mitch she was going to walk around the fairgrounds by herself and he said OK, sure, when he should have told her to wait, he’d find a way to come with her. Josie stomped off in a mean mood.

The fair was pathetic. It was so Springfield. You only went to it in the first place for laughs. All the 4-H kids hit town with their
stock trailers full of sheep and hogs and goats and champion steers. They brought electric fans and cots and coolers and radios, like they were going camping, like this was what they lived for the rest of the year. And it probably was. It told you something about the place when you saw people spritzing hair spray on a hog. She’d seen them do it.

Then there were the country kids her age from Pana or Tallula or Mt. Pulaski. They were either totally into farming, clumping around in their work boots to appraise the new combines, or else they were the hoodiest things. The girls always looked like they were trying to win the blue ribbon for sluttiness. But Josie was almost jealous of them, the couples who lurched along the midway arm-in-arm, those hood boys and the girls with their punked-out orange or purple hair, their tacky black nail polish and black leather that they wore in spite of the soupy heat. At least they weren’t alone.

She’d wanted to do all the corny fair stuff with Mitch, the Ferris wheel and the Tilt-A-Whirl and the grandstand with its awful yee-haw country music show. She would have made him buy her a steak-on-a-stick and vinegar fries and elephant ears and all the other sinful greasy food you craved because you could only get it once a year. They would have strolled through the carny games as she was doing now, and the disgusting criminal guys who ran them wouldn’t dare leer at her, but would be intimidated into allowing Mitch to win—they had it all rigged, everybody knew that—and for laughs he’d get her a prize, an ugly flourescent-colored teddy bear that they would give away to an appropriate small child.

Josie bought a corn dog, just to have something to do. She was already tired of walking around by herself, but she wanted Mitch to think she was having a good time without him, maybe even make him worry a little. There was a big carved wooden statue of
Abe near the main entrance, fifty feet tall, Abe the Railsplitter, she guessed he was supposed to be, in painted wooden coveralls and suspenders. It wasn’t one of her favorite Abes; the face was carved in big flat ax strokes so he looked like some kind of distorted caricature, Abe as rendered by the Japanese, perhaps. Still, she thought she could go hang with him for a while, commiserate about the unfairness of the fair and everything else.

“Hey, loser!”

In spite of herself she turned her head.

“Yeah, you, Sloan! You’re the only loser I see.”

It was Tammy and another girl from school named Lauren, and a boy Josie didn’t know, a tall skinny kid with hair that looked like he combed it with a SaladShooter. Josie couldn’t decide if she was glad to see them or not.

“So what’s your loser self doing?”

“Same as you guys. Taking a walk on the wild side.”

Tammy gave her a funny look, like she was about to make one of her sideways remarks, but she just said, “Hey, this is Evan. He’s from Arizona.”

“Yeah?” asked Josie, mildly interested.

“We’re gonna show him the butter cow. He thinks we’re making it up.”

Evan said, “Butter cow,” like even saying it was supposed to be funny. He shook his head so that his hair seemed to be taking off in all directions.

“Come on,” said Tammy. “You aren’t doing anything else are you?” Like she had to be reminded. They trudged off together, back up the hill to the Dairy Building. Lauren and Tammy had their heads together and were giggling about something, probably her. She didn’t trust Tammy anymore. It wasn’t that they’d had a fight, more like they’d forgotten why they were ever friends in the first place.

Evan wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”

“Manure,” said Josie, not bothering to sound shocked or apologetic. She didn’t think she liked Evan very much. But then, at the moment she didn’t much like anyone. There was a crowd in front of the Dairy Building. They had to stand around swatting mosquitoes and listening to two old women complain about how the fair had gone steadily downhill every year of their whole dissatisfied lives. Tammy and Lauren were still carrying on and Josie almost walked away then, left everybody to snigger and gossip and bitch about the same things forever and ever, but she was already in line and you couldn’t go to the fair without seeing the butter cow.

It stood in one of the glass cases in the big chilly room, a life-size, pale yellow, sculpted cow, perfect in every detail. It had butter hooves and a butter tail, pointed butter ears and a baglike udder with butter teats. Its expression was one of perfect tranquil buttery stupidity.

The crowd stood at a respectful distance, like they were art critics and this was Michaelangelo’s
David
. “Wow,” said Evan. “You guys weren’t kidding.”

“We don’t have that much imagination,” said Tammy.

“Yeah, but why do this? How did they get the idea in the first place?”

“God, I don’t know. They’ve just always had one. It’s what makes the fair the fair.”

“The origins of the butter cow are lost in the mists of history,” Josie intoned. “We worship it because our ancestors did. We need no other reason.”

They all looked at her like she was an old-time comedian telling jokes in a stupid accent. Evan said, “So what do they do with it once the fair’s over? Does somebody get to eat it?”

She should have left right then. They weren’t her friends, not
really, they were going to make a game out of ignoring her or worse, but screw them, she wasn’t going to be run off. She followed them out of the Dairy Building and back through the midway to the Beer Tent where they hung around pretending they might get served. Josie wished she had a beer, a lot of beer. It was getting to be that kind of piss-on-everything night.

Evan said he had somebody’s Arizona ID, but it didn’t much look like him. Tammy said forget it, the whole place was narked, probably every third guy was a cop. She rolled her eyes Josie’s way and traded amused mouths with Lauren. So Tammy had probably told everybody in the world. Not that she knew the half of it. None of them would ever know anything real about her.

They wound up sitting on some picnic tables at the edge of the grounds, just beyond the hokey Ethnic Village, where you could try and pretend you were in Greece or Mexico or Nigeria, assuming they all used the same brand of paper plates. Evan said, “So this is where the action is. How happening.” He was from Phoenix and was here visiting some relative and he was just too cool.

“You should come back for the hog-calling contest.” Tammy yawned.

“Or Senior Citizen Day. Or Republican Day.”

“That’s just about every day here.”

Evan kicked at the splintered edge of the seat, trying to knock a chunk of it loose. “We got these great clubs in Phoenix. This guy I know gets us in. He’s a dealer, so he gets in everywhere. I saw the Frantic Flattops last month.”

“Totally awesome, dude,” said Josie, meaning to be sarcastic, but as usual nobody got it.

Lauren said, “Seriously, My brother’s got some pot. We could get a little.”

“Yeah, maybe later. It’s too hot to even move.”

As if talking about the heat made it crowd in closer, the air seemed to resist their breathing. Josie wondered if Mitch was worried about her yet, or if he was even thinking about her at all. Probably not. He was too busy serving and protecting the whole entire town.

Evan said, “What’s that over there? Through the trees.”

“Oh, that’s another stupid Abe Lincoln statue. We’ve only got about a hundred.”

“He is one ugly honky.”

“Why are you saying ‘honky’?” Josie asked him. “It’s not like you’re black.”

Evan gave her an indifferent look. “That’s just something you say, honky.”

“Then it doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means he’s still ugly.”

“Yeah, like anybody important ever lived in Arizona.”

“What’s with you, Sloan?” asked Tammy. “You PMS-ing?”

“God, that is so ignorant. Whenever somebody wants to be superclever, they say you’re PMS-ing.”

“Well, excuse me. I guess you’re just being a jerk.”

Josie saw the three of them shifting their weight, sharing private smiles, getting ready to have some fun. She said, “What most people don’t realize about Abe Lincoln is, he was a soldier. In Black Hawk’s War, the Indian war, of 1832. He joined the militia and was elected captain. One day some poor old Indian wandered into camp. And the soldiers were ready to shoot the guy when Abe got in front of the guns and told them not to. He never could stand people ganging up on somebody.”

After a moment Tammy said, “You were always weird, Sloan. I mean that sincerely.”

“Thank you.”

“And you have a sense of humor like an alien.”

“I am an alien. I’m from Planet Arizona.”

Lauren hopped down from the picnic table. “You guys, I want some ice cream. Let’s try and do one fun thing, OK?”

The others got down too. Josie stayed where she was. “You coming, alien?”

“I like it fine right here.”

As they were walking away, beneath the strings of pink and yellow lights, she heard laughter floating back and one of them saying, “totally spastic.”

Josie sat there a while longer, communing with her sore heart. She walked back to the intersection where she’d left Mitch but another cop was there, an old guy who looked at her cross-eyed. She didn’t dare ask him anything.

She went on home and the next day Mitch said, “Yeah, they called me to help out on a traffic stop. So how was the fair?”

That’s when she got the idea about her father’s house. It had a pool and a hot tub and a killer stereo system that was totally wasted on her father and Teeny. They could watch the big-screen TV and eat all her father’s mail-order cashews and do it in about ten different beds. It was pathetically easy to fool Teeny. You could sell her tickets to home movies.

Mitch took some convincing. “What do you want to go over there for?”

“Because it’s something different. Because it’s not the car or your place.”

“And they don’t mind if you bring guys over?”

“Well, I didn’t tell them that. Come on. Wait till you see their house, it’s like a resort or something.”

“So they must be rich.”

“I don’t know. I guess.” Josie shrugged. She didn’t like thinking about her father’s money, and here Mitch thought she was trying to impress him. Maybe she was, in some sick way she hadn’t realized.
“I don’t live with them. I don’t even see them real often. It’s not like they give me anything.”

“Yeah, but I bet there’s a stock portfolio somewhere with your name on it.”

Finally she got him to say he’d do it. Her father and Teeny left around five. Josie spied on them from the corner, just to make sure. Even hunched down as she was in the front seat, she got a good look at them, Teeny decked out in one of her peculiar metallic dresses, like she was going to the Academy Awards instead of some tugboat in Joliet, her father unsmiling in a coat and tie. Why did it always take people so much work to have any fun?