Wide Blue Yonder (35 page)

There had to be a way to get up there. He walked around the base of the scaffolding and flexed the muscles of his mind. They’d made it difficult, it was plain they didn’t want anybody up there grooving with the horse, but they also had not reckoned with the likes of
Porque
. He took a running start at the metal pole, bounced off, owowowow, tried again, wrapped one arm around the pole and hung there, balanced the tip of the tip of one toe on the smallest bump of metal, not much more than a hinge, holding on, scrabbling around, inching his way up to another toehold. High overhead was the metal grid they must use for a platform, and half a ladder hanging down, just out of reach. He closed his eyes and went for it.

Then he must have hurt his head because a wind was blowing through it and his mind felt quiet. His eyes opened to darkness. He thought he was falling, he flailed and kicked and braced himself for the impact. But he was only sprawled on his knees on the metal platform, his hands wrapped around its edges. Once his eyes cleared, he saw the horse stretched above him, enormous and silent.

Up close like this he could see the glossy paint on the horse’s hind legs, its imperfections, the places where the color bled out a little, and from here it was hard to recall that vision of power and beauty that had made him go to all this trouble in the first place.

So he sat on the edge of the platform and let his legs dangle out in the air, and everything below him was small and remote and he felt cold, which surprised him,
cold
not being one of those things he had thought about lately. He had to wonder where in the hell he was. He was riding a paper horse forty feet up in the air, he was in the country of night, he was entirely lost.

If he scootched around on the platform, he could see in all directions. There was a lip of brightness on one horizon, something he connected with possibilities both hopeful and dangerous. Empty paved road below him, crisscrossing with another road some distance ahead, and another road beyond that, and on this farther road a car no larger than a speck was traveling, a grain of light burrowing into darkness. It occurred to him that someone must be driving that car, and maybe they were alone like he was, and at this very moment they might be looking up at him, at the black horse. But could they see him from so far away? He hollered at them—”Hey!”—but the sound fell away into the dead night air. As he watched, the headlights traveled over the edge of the world and vanished.

It was all so quiet. Even the crickets had stopped. He couldn’t remember
quiet
. Was it a place you had to go, somewhere he hadn’t been in a while, like daytime?

He didn’t like the quiet in his head so he started humming, just sounds that came when you pushed your voice through your open mouth. If he didn’t keep the electricity going, other things would try and screw with him, and he had forgotten why he was sitting here with his ass hanging out on this dizzy ledge. What was the deal? Too many things too weird. A bad taste was crawling up his throat. The horse was no help. And here he’d had such a good feeling about it. Its mouth opened just wide enough to say,
You fucked up big-time, bato
. Which he knew was the truth, straight from the horse’s mouth ha ha. He was pretty sure he had been
driving a long time, he thought something must have been chasing him although he couldn’t see it now but he tasted it in the back of his throat and the horse said
You are one messed-up moreno
. He looked down at his wrists and hands and yes, it looked black, moreno skin all right, which was probably why it was trying to itch itself off.

The only song he could remember was
Las Mañanitas,
the birthday song, so he sang it loud enough to drown out the horse’s sly whisperings and the pictures that came along with the whisperings. Was it his birthday? His birthday was in June July August one of those, it was dangerous to open his mind in that way so anything could get in. But here he was, a child, hardly able to reach the table when he sat at one of the chairs. It was his birthday and he was crying because the cupcakes his mother bought at the store were frosted pink and his brothers were making fun of that. Pink was for fags, he was such a little fag. I am
not,
he said, but he didn’t know what a fag was or how not to be one, and he couldn’t stop crying. Oh look, fag baby’s crying, what a little snot nose. His mother hollered at them and chased them outside to play their swaggering games.

Why did he have to remember anything, why that scrap of himself? It only told him that he had been unhappy. He hummed and sang louder now because the horse was pointing out to him that he was small and ugly and filthy and of no consequence, a moreno fag, an accidental man, a world-class loser, a joke, a fool. Singing, was he? Right now they were making up songs about him, the kind you got a good laugh from. Here they were, a chorus of ghosts. Here was a face the color of bad meat with snakes of yellow hair. Its rotten mouth opened to sing to him,
oh, feliz, feliz cumpleaños, happy happy happy
.

He screamed and held on tight to the metal grid as if a strong wind was trying to blow him off. And indeed, the horse that had
turned out not to be his friend after all was telling him he might as well jump. What was the point of sticking around for more of this bad shit? Jump and let the mess inside of his head spill out. But it was only more ghost-talk, designed to make him weak and confused, and he knew where it was coming from so he took the gun and shot the horse four times through its painted eyes.

Then he climbed down the ladder and dangled by one arm until he worked up the nerve to drop to the ground.

Back in the car he felt tired, the way you did after a fight, and he was conscious of all the places in him that had bruised or torn. Why did he have to bust himself up so bad? Was there a way to make the electricity stop or no just for his head not to hurt his life not to run away from him?

He drove toward the lights, which were now close enough to start unraveling into separate lights. He thought there was a good chance that day was in this direction, maybe sleep too, he never slept anymore, unless you considered the times he must have slept as he drove, but he didn’t count those because they were not truly restful. And it must have happened again, because one second he was only thinking about this town and what he might find there, food, he hoped, and now here he was admiring the sidewalks and grassy lawns—and then once again, because the next
instant
a woman was screaming like an alarm, scared the shit out of him, where was he? The racket was so loud he couldn’t see. His hands had a grip on something. Cellophane? It made a crinkling noise and damned if it wasn’t a package of pink cupcakes. How amazing was that? He broke off a piece of the frosting and put it in his mouth. It tasted pink, it made his tongue curl up all sugar sick. The woman—girl? a girl’s face—was hollering “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot me!” What a thing to say, she must be some nervous type, until he noticed that he had the cupcakes in one hand, the gun in the other.

Well, maybe he should shoot her. There was no good reason to
do so, but there was no good reason not to. The smallest movement or not movement of one finger. How much holy power lived in this one muscle, how easy it was for his enormous brain to direct it one way or the other. Shoot not shoot. It was turning into one of those aggravating things. What was this place anyway? He looked around and saw rows and rows of cellophane food, lots of lights and mirrors and trashy stuff in the aisles and big refrigerator cases full of beer and shit—did he want a beer? No, he wanted orange juice! He didn’t see any, so he asked the girl, nicely, he thought, if she would just stop her noise long enough to help him find some. She had short red hair and a sort of piggy face and she was blubbering, squeezing out little tears. It was a simple question, where was the orange juice, didn’t she work here, hey! She was deliberately not understanding him or not paying attention.

He got right up next to her with the gun but he’d forgotten the cupcakes, now wasn’t that silly, so he shoved them into his mouth one-handed and all that sugar exploded inside him in a wave of shaking energy. His stomach cramped and threads of sugar nerves ran up and down his body. He was going to throw up no yes no. The girl’s mouth was open but no sound was coming out because of the roaring in his ears? because she’d used up all her screams? She wasn’t pretty, not really, but up closer to her like this his body couldn’t help but get the way you did around a woman, which was a different kind of electricity.

She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were closed and she breathed huff huff huff. Because he felt the need to make conversation he said, “You have pretty hair.” It was, it looked like copper feathers. When he reached out to touch it, it sifted through his fingers. Her eyelashes were the same color, little pale spikes. She had drawn blue crayon lines around their edges. All her crying and carrying on had smeared them so they looked, oddly, like an extra pair of eyes.

Just to see what it felt like, he put his hand on her skin where it met the top button of her shirt, wiggled his fingers around underneath. Her skin was cold. He walked his hand down to the cold nipple at the end of her breast then stopped, curious. There was something jumping around under his hand. Her heart trying to squeeze through the skin. He squeezed back. A sound came out of the girl, eeee, like she was one of those toys you had to press in the right spot.

They were standing up and then all of a sudden they were toppling over, knocking down the racks of cigarettes and small things breaking. What the fucking hell? She must have fallen, pulled him down. It took them a long time to get to the floor. She was underneath him and her arms were around his neck which surprised him because she had not seemed like a friendly person and then her eyes inside their ragged blue lines opened.

They were blue too though not as much and they weren’t crying now. They blinked once, slowly. She said, “You got to promise not to shoot me.”

He searched around in his head for something to say. He didn’t even have the gun in his hand anymore, it had landed down somewhere by his foot and he had to kick to reach it.

“Promise. Come on.”

He pretended to say something but he was just stalling, because he was worried about the sequence of things you had to do in order to be with a woman in that way, and here he’d thought he was hard but he wasn’t anymore, shit! Well that was just great.

“I bet you like scaring people. You do stuff like this a lot? Rob places and stuff? Is it exciting?”

All the while she was talking he kept trying to get a better grip on her, the pillowy parts that yielded to his hands and the unexpected hard parts like her knees. “Hurry up before somebody comes in,” she whispered, and what did she think he was trying to
do? It was like the thing between his legs had been electrocuted dead. Her face from this close up was pink and bumpy and her nostrils were like caves.

“What’s the matter, huh? Are you shy or something? I didn’t think you were but maybe you are. What’s your name anyway?”

His name was out there somewhere with the rest of him. He was
Porque,
no he was someone else who did not want to be remembered and all he wanted to do now was get loose from her but her hands kept pestering him. The electricity was pouring out of him as sweat—then the door opened and the girl started up screaming again and he had to dive for the gun and wave it in the face of an old white man with a very surprised look—then he was back in the car again not driving. The car had brought him on its own to water, a flat gray lake with the sun rising over it. The actual sun. So here’s where it had been all along. The sky was gray cloud and the sun behind it was small and red. He was thirsty so he got out and bent down at the edge of the lake to scoop up water with his hands. It tasted gray. He thought he had a fever, he was burning up from the inside. It was burning through his skin, it was making his thing shrivel up not to worry about that now. He just needed sleep. That was the ticket. He could sleep like crazy.

So he got back in the car and reclined the seat and waited, okeydokey for sleep.

It wasn’t happening. His eyes were white hot because the sun was burning holes in them. And he couldn’t keep his hands from tearing up his skin and he’d hurt his back again and there was fever deep down in his bones where he couldn’t scratch. He heard traffic starting up somewhere in the distance. Time was slowing down and moving in an ordinary way just when he would have liked it to speed up and forget a lot of new things like
how he had shamed himself with that girl and wasn’t even a man anymore. He needed not to be thinking these thoughts hurting these hurts every minute his head was getting fuller and fuller of negative power like electricity gone bad. Was there no place either inside or outside his head that he could go to make it stop?

He gave up on sleep and sat behind the wheel of the car going nowhere. Once he got out and walked along the edge of the lake to stretch his legs but he didn’t feel invisible without the darkness. There was a man fishing on the other side of the lake who seemed to be looking straight at him. He thought about going to talk to him, ask him if he’d caught anything, just a friendly conversation, except right then the man packed up and left in a hurry, well screw him.

God, he was hungry. He could eat a fish raw not really. Almost that bad. He found some corn chips on the floor of the backseat and he ate them even all mixed up with backseat fuzz. Then he walked around some more because his bones felt restless and he needed to calm himself because you had to remember the way the plan worked the plan the plan everything in the world fitting together like a great turning wheel that depended on him.

But his eyes still burned like he’d never see sleep again and his head had begun to feel lopsided from thinking too many of the wrong kind of thoughts and he didn’t trust this lake. It was too quiet, not even a bubble breaking its surface. Was something hiding down there, holding its breath? Water was always dangerous in that way, it came in under doors and through the cracks in your head, reminding you of things, and if he turned his back to it, would slimy arms reach out to strangle him? Now wasn’t that foolish, but just to make sure he waded into the lake and put his head beneath the water to look around.