Wide Blue Yonder (34 page)

“Said head dead. Red bed fed jed med zed.”

“No, come on, Harvey, talk to me. I really want to know what it was like. Growing up. Were they mean to you?”

“Daddy was mean.”

Again, the surprised eyebrows. Josie said, “What did he do, how was he mean?”

“I was ornery bad. I had it coming.”

“Bad? You? I don’t believe it. Was Frank bad?”

“Frank didn’t go in the basement.”

“What was in the basement, Harvey?”

He put his hand up to his mouth and pinched his bottom lip. “Don’t remember.”

“It’s OK, Harvey. You can say whatever you want, they’re all gone. They can’t hurt you.”

“Badbadbad.” He was doing the head-shaking thing again. “Cold front warm front pressure pressure pressure.”

“All right, shh, never mind. Just relax. I’m sorry.” She felt rotten about persisting as she had. She wondered about people who did this for a living, doctors and therapists who were always asking questions and trying to pry your mind loose. There was something unfair and dishonest about it. The stuff inside your head should just stay there. People deserved their privacy. Except, it went without saying, Mitchell Crook, who deserved to be subjected to some exquisitely painful Vulcan mind-meld or government experiment.

Rosa was getting ready to leave. She’d made them a ham salad from the breakfast leftovers and boiled potatoes and lima beans to go with it. Everything neatly laid out in foil-covered dishes. Josie went into the bathroom so the two oldsters could smooch farewell. They were so cute. Where did Rosa live, who did she go home to? Josie had a feeling that whoever it was, Rosa walked in the door and started in all over again cooking and cleaning.

Nighttime. She and Harvey were left alone. Harvey went out on the front porch probably to moon about Rosa. Josie watched a square of window turn from royal blue to black. It got dark so much earlier now. You went along thinking it was still summer, with acres of daylight. Then you took a look around and here it was September. Josie felt a chill. Time was gathering speed, leaping and bounding along with or without her. Her life and everyone in it going on without her.

She knew now that she wasn’t going to embark on any fabulous
grand adventure, wasn’t going to run away from home any farther than she’d already gone. She was too young, too broke, too chicken. If she had been serious, she would have left right away, vamoosed, not kept hanging around waiting for people to find her and apologize, entreat, arrest, or whatever they were going to do to her. It was time to give it up.

She supposed she’d have to call her mother. Get some assurance she wasn’t going to get packed off to some desert juvie prison. Not that Utah was such a bad idea, compared to going back to school and facing everybody’s cheap gossip. Her mother was going to put her through hell. Cry at her. Josie would probably cry too, why not. After that, she didn’t know. They probably still loved each other because you couldn’t help that, but they didn’t trust each other. Now that was screwed.

As for Mitchell Crook, she had no idea. She was either going to have to do something truly horrible to him, or else get used to the idea of the two of them walking the same streets, ignoring each other.

Maybe in the morning she’d call her mother. Right now it was too late, and in spite of lying around all day she was tired and she felt too low to decide if calling was a good idea or a bad one. The Weather Channel was still talking about Floyd, which was turning into the world’s biggest hurricane, or at least the longest. It seemed like the Floyd show had been on all week. More than fifty people had died. Whole towns were underwater. Floyd was a Category Four hurricane. If you watched enough of the Weather Channel, you learned these things. There was a Hurricane Gert, but she was out in the ocean. Harvey would be the next one, if they didn’t run out of hurricanes.

There was some kind of commotion outside. Josie assumed it was the neighbors, who were always carrying on in some excess of good or bad feelings. But then she heard Harvey’s voice in the middle of it, stuttering and protesting.

What in the—

Things started happening. The door flew open with a whump and Harvey backed in with this
expression
. Josie said, “Hey—”

She never got the rest of it out. A man’s head appeared in the door, with a face that might have been a mask, it was so smudged and wild. She didn’t scream until the rest of him was inside and even then it was more of a yelp, just surprised.

Oh, he had a gun. He waved it around in an irritated fashion. Josie was still on the couch, Harvey was flat against the wall. Zero time had elapsed. It was like when you stub your toe and it takes a moment for the pain to travel up your nerves to whatever actually felt it. Waiting for the import of whatever this was to hit.

Then it did, and she screamed again and got her legs moving underneath her but the man with the gun was way ahead of her. He pushed Harvey toward the couch and Harvey fell on top of her.

Harvey’s knee was in her face. She said, “Uff,” and tried to get untangled, but Harvey was making sounds like he couldn’t breathe and the man with the gun was yelling, “Shut up, shut up!” Funny since he was the one making all the noise, not funny, she finally got herself out from under Harvey and tried to see if he was hurt. She realized that she was still screaming and that was why her ears hurt.

“Shut up!” the man yelled again. So she did. Josie and Harvey sat side by side and stared. She had never seen anything like him. He had a misshapen pillar of nappy red-brown hair, a greasy shirt unbuttoned on his dark, greasy chest. His teeth were bared, on display in the middle of his wildman’s beard. His eyes strobed. He looked nasty mean. Josie realized she had wet her pants.

Harvey was still clutching on to her, but at least he was breathing again. The front door was still open. The man with the gun didn’t seem to notice. He was rubbing at his scalp with the hand
that held the gun, like he was scratching an itch with the gun barrel.

Josie cleared her throat. “So what do you …” Her voice sounded geeky. “What do you want?”

“I can’t sleep!” he shouted.

Josie and Harvey held hands. She was too afraid to look at him, she might even laugh. The sound of the television reached her ears, the jingle for the car dealership you heard fifty times a day,
You’ve got a fri-e-end at Feeny’s
. It had been playing all along. She said, “Well, that must feel terrible. That must—”

“Shut up!”

At least Harvey was quiet, wasn’t screeching or blubbering or losing it. She clutched his hand harder to steady him or maybe herself. She had to stop herself from running straight out the door like a deer jumping through a window. Deer did that because they always went toward darkness. Someone had told her that. The door was a perfect dark oblong of night. She would run and run with her heart bursting and then the shot would bring her down, bleeding out in clean snow. Stop that.

The gunman noticed the door then, as if he had heard her thinking. He slammed it shut. “Your money or your life!” he shouted, waving the gun around. Then he stopped and looked confused. None of them seemed to know what to do next.

“We don’t have a lot of money,” Josie said. “Of course, you’re welcome to it.” Aiming for a soothing, reasonable tone. “It’s in my bag. I forget where I put it. Oh, and I gave my uncle some for groceries. I don’t know if there’s any change. Probably. Is that thing loaded?”

Then she ran out of everything at once: air, wits, words. It was like exhaling and not breathing in.

The gunman kicked the pile of her clothes and other belongings on the floor next to the couch. A lipstick shot out and rolled
lopsidedly across the room. “What money, where’s the goddamn money?”

“Oh …” Josie had to think. “Over there.” He began dumping out her backpack, which was sort of embarrassing, chewing gum and tampons scattering all over the place, not to mention the Kleenex farm she kept in there. Then he found her wallet and instead of opening it like a normal person, he shook it by one corner so that bills and coins sprayed out of it. He was undersize and scrawny, no taller than herself, and if he wasn’t armed and crazy there would have been no reason to be afraid of him. She could smell him, a burnt smell, hot and corrosive, like metal with an underlay of stink. Every so often he reached out and clawed at his own skin, his ribs under his shirt or the back of his neck, as if a rash were eating him alive. He stooped to gather up the money, all the while keeping his eyes on the two of them, Josie and Harvey, and showing his teeth as his lip twitched and curled. He was small and itchy and confused, but Josie knew that here was a face you could match to all the meanness of the world, all the newspaper headlines of cruelty and vicious ignorance: the nail bomb piercing the baby’s skull, the slaughtered cattle, the beaten child, the poisoned river, the mass grave. All the things you kept in the nightmare part of your brain. The stranger’s hands on your skin, your body reduced to its liquid parts.

With an effort she managed to lasso her mind back where it belonged, right here right now, sitting on the couch and holding Harvey’s hand. The upholstery was so beaten-down and slick and the springs so overwhelmed that she had to brace herself to keep from jackknifing into the folds of the cushions. Harvey, incredibly, seemed intent on the television, where a happy family, Moms and Pops and Sis and Bobby, basked in the sunshine of full insurance coverage. Then the gunman’s strutting legs appeared, blocking the screen. He was screaming something she
couldn’t understand, like her brain had so many holes in it right now that words slipped through. But no, it was some other language he was being mad in.

Josie managed to shout over him. “Slow down! I can’t understand you. U-N-D-E-R-S-T-A-N-D?”

He stopped his noise and gave her the funniest look, like he was the one scared of her, or of something that was sitting right behind her. Then he growled. Actually growled. She’d never heard such a thing before. This guy was stone crazy. The gun flapped around in his hand like a live thing he barely had control of, oh if she was going to be shot let it be for some reason! Not just because all the evil of the world was busting out through the seams. She closed her eyes and waited for what would come next.

N
obody could catch him because he was moving beyond the speed of superinvisibility. All he had to do was touch his foot to the pedal and he was instantly disappeared. This was on account of electricity, the red electricity of his mind. He was
Porque,
he was
Because
. He carried a universe of boiling possibilities in the box of his skull, he
was
the universe, vast and charged and shooting off sparks in all directions. Even on those occasions when he left the car, no one could see him unless he allowed them to, unless he slowed himself down. Jam those brakes! It amused him when mere people gave him the big-eye stare, or hollered, or wanted to fight. Then he was gone again, zipwhip! like electricity, which could jump in and out of wires whenever it wanted.

It was night. It was always night. Something had happened to day that he couldn’t figure out. There would come a time when his mind would be wired hot enough to bring the sun up as easy as one of these fancy push button windows. It was night and the road was dark, with dark air rushing over and around him. Darkness held him so smooth and slick, he hardly felt himself moving. Through the windshield, he saw ropes of greasy lightning drop from the sky. Or no. It was just the hair hanging in his eyes.

He felt silly when he got things mixed up like that. And his hair smelled bad. When he tried to push it aside, his fingers were confused by the woolly feel of it. Now that he was turning into pure brain power, a lot of stupid body stuff wasn’t working right. His eyes played tricks on him. His skin crawled with rashes and terrible burning sensations; he rubbed and scratched and scraped like he was a snake trying to shed. Sometimes everything inside him squeezed up tight, and he had to force his breath through the metal in his chest. Sometimes he threw up blood, which was what the electricity looked like when it came out. It was the price he paid for being what he was. The electricity whispered to him that soon he would be able to leave this itchy, funky shell of himself behind and live in his own exalted air.

The road was dark, but the headlights stayed straight. The red car always found the road. He loved this goddamn car. It should have a name, like a horse, Diablo, or maybe just Red. Horses were smart fuckers. Loyal too. When you were wounded, parched with thirst, they nudged you toward the water hole. They rode into battle with you, they made tracks up and down mountains just to reach your side.

And wouldn’t you know it, all he had to do was think
horse,
and here one was.

Or at least a picture of one. It was a black horse and it was standing on three legs with the other leg pawing the air and its neck rearing back and its eyes blazing and its whole righteous self ready to kick ass. He supposed it was possible that he was thinking about horses because of the picture, which might have been there all along although he just now noticed. It really didn’t matter which, it just went to show you that there was a plan, an enormous, elegant, glittering design in everything he thought and saw and did.

He stopped the car to stare at the horse. The picture was way up in the air, a billboard. It was selling something in a bottle, whiskey maybe. Letters he couldn’t read. Reading was one of those things he had decided would take up too much brain space.
Floodlights shone down on the picture. Now that he was out of the car he could see the metal scaffolding that held it up, all looming and dark beyond the circles of light. It stood in a field full of whatever it was that grew in fields. There was a noise teasing his ears, little chips of sound. Ears one more majorly fucked-up body part. But no, it was a real noise, although it took him a moment to put a name to it. Crickets! Such an incredible thing for his mind to provide him with crickets, not to mention this soft night with its swarm of stars overhead, and the amazing horse.