Wide Blue Yonder (3 page)

He was happy about this, he was getting his way, but he had to act like it was no big deal, like he was so cool that he just naturally slouched his way out of a thunderstorm. While he was still in the
yard there was a giant BOOM and the sky split open with white electricity and he jumped for the door.

Josie stepped aside to let him enter, then she turned on the light, not wanting to sit in the dark with him. He shook himself like a dog. “Woo-ee!” he said, instantly cheerful.

“My mom’s on her way home.”

“Uh-huh.” He tried to smooth his hair with his hands, then gave up and went into the bathroom off the pantry for a towel. She hated how he knew where everything in her house was. She hated his stupid blond good looks that let him get away with things. He was exactly like some big dumb collie that once you petted it, forgot all about everything it had done wrong.

When he came back in she was sitting at the breakfast table watching the rain bounce off the concrete patio. It was doing that, bouncing. You could see the drops land, then go straight back up. Amazing. Jeff moved behind her chair and pretended to be watching also. She could see him reflected in the lighted window. He was looking down at her, his mouth held shallowly open. Josie bumped her chair away from him. “What?” he said.

“Go sit down, OK?”

“Jeez. Attitude.” But he flopped into a chair across from her. The wind was banging thunder around like the sky was a kitchen full of pots. It was a wicked storm. She wouldn’t be surprised if there was a tornado out there with her name on it.

He said, “Come on. Talk to me.”

“We already did that.”

“I mean ordinary, what’s-new talk, not your usual tragic bullshit.”

“Go to hell, Jeff.”

“You know what your problem is? You don’t know what you really want. You get PMS or something and all of a sudden you’re too good for me or anybody else. What’d I do that was so terrible anyway?”

“You’re a collie.”

“Huh?”

“It’s not PMS. It doesn’t have to make sense to you.”

“Good, because it doesn’t.”

“Sorry.” And she was. She used to be so crazy about him. He was her boyfriend, that was how you were supposed to feel. You were supposed to keep feeling that way but she didn’t, it had worn off. The lightning seemed to be coming from all directions. She didn’t believe this. It was like
Wuthering Heights
or something. Except that he wasn’t Heathcliff and she wasn’t Catherine. They weren’t souls bound together throughout eternity. Maybe nobody was these days. There was only the everyday everything, people grubbing for money or tedious fun, and maybe he was right and she wasn’t too good for anything.

“I just miss you, OK? So shoot me.” He reached across the table and stroked the inside of her arm. “You ever wonder what it’s like to do it in a big storm? Huh?”

“No,” she said, both to his hand and his question. But her skin was doing a treacherous, creepy sort of dance, and beneath her skin she was going crazy.

“Just for fun. It wouldn’t have to mean anything.”

“Oh, good.”

“We can do it the way you like it.”

“You always say that.”

“Come on.” He was behind her again, his hands exploring, pinching slyly.

“What about my mom?”

“No offense, but I don’t want to do it with your mom.”

She laughed and the laughing turned everything loose inside of her. Josie grabbed his hand and they scrambled into the front room, where they figured they could see if the car was coming. For some reason it was lighter in here. When she skinned off her shorts and underpants her bare self looked exceptionally naked,
moon-colored. He kept his clothes mostly on, in case they had to stop. The head of his penis kept getting tangled up in cloth and butting loose. A tornado was probably going to rip through the house and carry the two of them, still stuck together, up into the air and deposit them somewhere very public. He smelled like the towel he’d used to dry his hair, a laundry smell. The thunder passed overhead, taking its quarrel eastward. She kept slipping off the edge of the couch. It kept not fitting in right. That was OK, it was just for fun. It wasn’t really the way she liked it. Oh well.

He was so pleased with himself afterward. Good boy. She couldn’t really blame him. It was his nature to want what he wanted. To know what he wanted. “Hurry up,” she told him. “You really have to go. I’ll give you a ride home.”

He would have rather hung around and stayed for dinner and acted like everything was back to normal, but she was going to win this one. If they stayed together for the next fifty years, she knew exactly how everything between them would play out. She thought about writing a note for her mother but decided she felt too mean. When they were getting in the car he went to touch her hair, missed, and swiped her across the shoulders instead. When she turned to look at him he gave her a loose smile that was like an apology for itself.

“You’re so pretty.”

He wasn’t all bad. Not even mostly. He was just himself. She made him crouch down as they pulled out of the garage. Good thing, because wouldn’t you know it, just as she was shifting out of reverse, her mother’s car appeared, headlights bearing down on her like a charging hippopotamus.

“Shit. Stay down.” At least it was still raining hard and her windows were fogged. She opened hers just enough to wave. Her mother’s face, already angry, leaned out of the car, her mouth moving. She was saying why didn’t you answer the phone, fold
the laundry, start dinner, where do you think you’re going? Josie waved and sped off.

Jeff sat back up. “Why’ve I got to hide?”

“Because she doesn’t need to know my business.” She slid in the Paula Cole CD and turned the music up all the way. By the time they reached his house she couldn’t stand it one more minute, wanting him gone.

“So, I guess I’ll see you later.” He waited, half-out of the car.

“I don’t know, Jeff.” The rain had turned down one more notch, a gray screen with the evening light filtering in behind it. It was tired, just like she was.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t know.” Everything she did was a mistake.

His face closed down. “Fine. Be weird.” He slammed the door behind him. God she was the most fucked-up mess.

She didn’t want to go home just yet to do the Mom thing, so she kept driving through the rain-softened streets. There was a big tree limb lying on somebody’s lawn. Josie wondered what kind of tree it was. Trees were one of the million things she knew absolutely nothing about. The lawns themselves were that luminous, nearly radioactive green that you sometimes got with storm light. The gutters were loud with running water. But the storm itself was over. Everything was over except for her, Zero the Great, who would keep staggering on until she collapsed from total idiocy.

You could still drive through the cemetery even when all the historical stuff was closed. Josie figured the weather would have chased all the tourists off and she’d stand a good chance of having Abe all to herself.

It was a little embarrassing; she didn’t tell people about her Abe fixation. After all, growing up in Springfield meant you pretty much had Abe for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was like
this was Rome and he was the pope. Among Josie’s friends, who had been taken on tours of the Lincoln Home and the Old State Capitol every year from first grade on, who had been made to memorize “O Captain! My Captain” and had watched unlikely looking tall men growing chin whiskers for pageants, it was obligatory to affect a certain casual boredom regarding Abe. She understood all that. She wasn’t sure why it worked differently on her. It was just one more thing about her that was weird.

Everybody knew about Young Abe, poling his flatboat up and down the wide rivers, way before he even thought about being famous. Then there was Lawyer Abe, riding a horse miles and miles of muddy country road on the Illinois circuit, winning cases with his folksy wit. Candidate Abe, speechifying from a flag-draped platform. Then President Abe, carrying the terrible weight of the war and the entire wounded country. You saw it in every line of his face. It broke her heart. You couldn’t believe you could feel that way about history, something in a book, but it zinged her every time.

Then there was Dead Abe, who she was on her way to visit. Josie turned off of Walnut into Oak Ridge Cemetery. The fine screen of rain was still falling and the road was edged with shallow puddles. The big oak, she knew it was an oak, thank you very much, had shed patches of leaves like handfuls of torn-out hair. She drove past the monuments for Vietnam and Korea. There was one other car in the parking lot, a family with two little kids who looked like they’d waited out the storm here. They were just now getting out of the car and wandering around, trying to salvage some of their Historic Springfield day. Josie ignored them and parked at the farther end. She waited until they gave up and drove off. Then she got out and hiked over to the statue.

This was an enormous, oversize bronze bust of Abe, emerging from a rough-edged granite boulder. For years people had
climbed up to rub his nose for luck, polishing it shiny. The rest of him was all dark and gaunt. Poor man. He’d never been good-looking. They’d done the best they could with the portrait but it was still a pretty gnarly face, all jawbone and sunken cheeks. The shiny nose was a further indignity that he bore with patience and good humor. If Abe was still around, you could bet he’d have something wry to say about it. Like the time visitors came to the house to see Mary and he told them she’d be downstairs as soon as she got her trotting harness on. Mary said Oh Mr. Lincoln, and got that look on her face.

Josie retrieved the joint she’d held on to all this time and fired it up. “I know,” she said. “One more stupid idea.”

Abe just stared ahead with his usual bronze forebearance. He understood everything. He’d seen a cruel cruel war and men in numbers no one had imagined until then, dying either very fast or very slow. Brother against brother. Josie didn’t have a brother but she thought she knew something about a house divided against itself.

Josie’s mother owned a store downtown called Trade Winds. It specialized in high-end printed fabrics from places like India and Bali. You could buy lengths of cloth or you could buy it made up into tablecloths and bedspreads and napkins and pillow covers and diaper bags and kimono jackets and checkbook covers and every manner of cutesy gewgaw. It was a fun look, her mother said. A casual, country-yet-sophisticated, fun look. It made Josie want to barf. The whole house was full of printed cotton that always smelled of some faint, stale spice no matter how many times you washed it. When she was fourteen Josie had declared war by tearing down her peach-and-white-vine-printed draperies and replacing them with miniblinds. She’d done away with the peach-splatter bedspread and slept beneath a truly hideous synthetic black fur throw. She still had that thing somewhere at the bottom
of her closet. Her mother had pronounced it unsanitary, which at the time had seemed like a validation of everything she hoped to accomplish with it.

They fought over everything, and the smaller and stupider it was, the better. The ghost of her mother’s lipstick print on the rim of a mug in the cupboard. Josie’s trashy music. Her mother’s fake, plummy telephone voice when she was talking to somebody she wanted something from. Josie’s refusal to pluck her eyebrows. And so on. In Josie’s opinion, her mother was crabby from the strain of trying to pretend everything was perfectly fine, in the face of adversity they were soldiering on, they had risen to the challenge, blah blah blah. She should just give it up, admit that as a family they were basically dirt soup.

Josie’s father hadn’t lived with them since she was twelve. He’d married somebody named Teeny. Imagine. A grown woman.

The most depressing thing was how people, her parents and everyone else, wasted their lives and didn’t seem to realize it. How they settled for such pitiful scraps, attached themselves so passionately to everything that was small and dull. Her father existed only to accumulate more money. Her mother’s mission was to cover as much of Springfield as possible in smelly third-world cotton. The president of Taco Bell dreamed of the perfect taco. Abe had freed the slaves and preserved the Union. There was absolutely no comparison.

As for Josie, she would no doubt trudge through another year of high school, then go to the state university’s local campus and emerge sometime later with a degree equipping her for some as yet unknown but irritating career. A statistically normal Springfield citizen. Yet everything in her cried out against this, kept insisting in the face of all common sense that she was meant to be something extraordinary, splendid, remarkable, live the kind of life that hadn’t been invented until now.

The sky was beginning its long decline toward evening. A little sun leaked out from beneath the rolling edge of cloud and lit Abe’s nose with somber glory. “Tell me I won’t grow up to be exactly like everybody else.”

Abe didn’t answer back, which was another of his truly excellent qualities. Josie finished her smoke and scuffed over to the car.

Only June, and the summer was already settling into a bad pattern. Life with Mom and Taco Torture. She had to work every day that week. When it wasn’t busy it was very slow. Time was a five-hundred-thousand-pound monster, lifting one giant foot an inch at a time. After the lunch rush the Prince of Darkness had them doing things like scraping gum off the bottom of tables and polishing all the unpolishable aluminum in the place. “Time to lean, time to clean,” he kept saying, just for meanness. He was a fattish young man who wore sleeveless undershirts beneath his corporate button-downs. Little tributaries of sweat snaked down the bulging geography of his neck. His hair was receding in a weird pattern that left a point in the exact center of his forehead, just like the old pictures of Satan. “Sloan! You call that clean?”

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Josie blandly. She considered quitting. It was the kind of job that you imagined yourself quitting from day one.

“I pity the guy you marry, princess. Pay attention here. First you take your little hand and wrap it firmly around the sponge. Then you apply your basic elbow grease, like so. No, your highness. Allow me. You don’t want to wreck your manicure. What’s that color, huh, Slacker Sapphire?”