Wide Blue Yonder (39 page)

She said, “Frank, I think you should leave me alone right now,” and there was something in her tone that made him turn without argument and walk away.

There were more people than ever on the street, in spite of the police trying to shoo them off. Everyone in the neighborhood with nothing better to do seemed to be congregating behind the yellow tape, even though most of them had no idea what the excitement was about. A few had even brought lawn chairs and were setting them up on the grass as if they were watching a parade.

Elaine was startled to see Rosa there, a small figure pressed up against the tape by the herd of larger bodies.

“Rosa!” Elaine waved and headed toward her, and just then one of the police officers appeared in her path, telling her she was going to have to clear the area. “I want to talk to whoever’s in charge,” Elaine said. “I need that woman to come too. And you can stop calling me ‘ma’am,’ I’ve got a name.”

It took a little while for Elaine to argue him aside, then Rosa was escorted from behind the tape. There was some commotion; another, younger woman ducked under the tape and began protesting. Elaine hurried over. She must think Rosa was being arrested or deported or something.

It’s OK, it’s OK, she told them.
Está bien
. The younger one spoke English. Rosa’s granddaughter. Her name was Lorena and she was small and bright brown like Rosa and she had a pretty, scared, indignant face. “Can you help us?” Elaine asked them. “Come with me.”

It seemed that Rosa had been here earlier, trying to get into Harvey’s, had become alarmed at all the commotion, and had gone home to bring Lorena back with her. “Good, good,” murmured Elaine. She steered them over to where Frank and the police lieutenant were conferring. “This is Harvey’s friend,” she told them. “She can talk to him.”

They were not persuaded. They weren’t men who were inclined to take Mexican cleaning ladies seriously. Rosa kept a firm grip on her big embroidered purse. She looked a little frightened, but determined to hold her ground, and every so often she whispered urgently to Lorena. Frank said, “This is a joke, right?”

“Who do you think he’s going to listen to, you?”

“I didn’t know Harvey spoke Spanish.”

Elaine gave him a hateful look. “They’re close,” she told him. “They have a rapport, they communicate. Nothing you’d understand.”

The lieutenant had heard about enough. “Folks, I need you to step back and let us do our job. For your own safety. I’ll let you know if you can assist.” They were left by themselves, off to one side behind the protective barrier of a police van. Its doors were open and Elaine regarded the jumble of baleful-looking gear—helmets, vests, plastic shields, batons—on its floor. At least she didn’t see anything like tear gas, although she supposed they had that somewhere.

“Tell me she’s going to be all right,” Elaine said to Frank.

“I’ve been telling you that all along.”

“Convince me.”

Lorena touched Elaine’s elbow. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come.”

She wasn’t that much older than Josie, and she was dressed as Josie might be if she had more flair for jewelry: black jeans and a pink tank top with a collection of thin gold necklaces and three jeweled studs outlining the curve of her pretty ear. She had a trace of an accent that tilted her i’s into e’s and was serious about r’s. Elaine said, “No, I’m glad you’re here. I want you to ask your grandmother if she knows anything about a gun in the house, if she ever saw such a thing.”

The Spanish word for gun, Elaine gathered, was
pistola
. Rosa went on for some time. Lorena translated. “She says your uncle is a gentleman and an honest person and he would not hurt even an insect with a gun. And if she herself had a gun, she would use it to shoot his enemies.”

Frank and Elaine looked at each other and shrugged. Something lost in the translation. Elaine said, “Please tell her she’s done a terrific job taking care of the house. We really appreciate it.”

Frank walked away, bored by such domestic matters. Lorena conveyed the message, then told Elaine, “Yeah, she’s nuts about clean. Her and my mom both. You can’t walk across a floor without one of them tracking you with a broom. You should see our
house. Between the two of them, they keep it so clean it hurts your eyes.”

“She’s very thorough,” Elaine offered.

“We’re always telling her, slow down, take it easy. But she says she likes working. She’s so stubborn, she’s like a truck, you see her coming you better get out of the way.” She patted Rosa’s arm. “So what’s happening, why are all the police here?”

Elaine said that her daughter was inside, without going into the messy details of Josie’s situation. And that her uncle needed a cataract operation but he was afraid to have it. There had been a misunderstanding. Things had gotten way out of hand. It was all because they were concerned he could no longer take care of himself. “He’s been on his own for so long,” Elaine said vaguely, feeling, as usual, guilty. Lorena, with three generations under one roof, would think all their arrangements especially coldhearted. “But sometimes, when people get older, the best place for them is …” She trailed off. “The dementia ward of a nursing home” wasn’t something she wanted in her mouth just now.

Lorena spoke to Rosa again and conveyed Rosa’s response. “She says your uncle needs new eyes and your daughter needs a new heart because she is sick with love. And that she has been saying special prayers for them and soon they will be answered.”

“Well, that’s nice of her.” Elaine was unsure of the etiquette of thanking people for prayers. “But what does she know about my daughter?”

Another conference. Lorena shook her head. “She won’t tell, she just says she has received signs of good luck. She’s superstitious like that, all the old people are. They all believe in fortune-telling and blood-sucking ghosts and the Virgin appearing in your dreams. I don’t even try to make sense of it.”

“Excuse me, ladies.” One of the policemen got into the driver’s seat of the van and spoke into the radio, his voice too low to make
out. When he was finished, the bullhorn was left behind on the dashboard. It was white plastic, sleek and functional. It always amazed Elaine to realize there must be companies out there in the business of making things you never thought about. She reached into the van for it and held it up to her ear, as if it were a shell and you could hear the ocean, as if all the things she ought to say to Josie were somewhere inside. Then, embarrassed, she set it down again.

“My grandmother wants to know what that is.”

“It’s like a loudspeaker, they’ll use it to talk to the people in the house.”

“That’s what I told her. She wants to know ‘if it makes your voice important.’ Don’t ask me.”

“I suppose you could say that.”

Lorena said, “They’re probably scared to come out now. I would be, with all these people.”

“Harvey’s really not used to crowds.” The house was still as silent as a closed mouth. If there were any signs of good fortune, she couldn’t read them. She turned back to Lorena and, reduced to small talk, asked, “Are you in school? Working?”

“I go part-time at the U. And I work at County Market.”

“Oh, what are you studying?”

“Advertising. I figure it’s creative and you can still earn a living. Is your daughter in college?”

“She still has a year of high school.” Elaine wondered what Josie wanted to study, or do, or be. She had no real idea.

“Actually I’m in general business right now. Later you get to sign up for the advanced courses. I’m taking marketing, finance, your basic money-grubbing.”

“I’m in retail myself. It’s not the easiest way to earn a living.”

“Neither is cleaning other people’s houses.”

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. It’s just the way it is. My grandmother had eight children. My mother had five. I don’t have any yet. I guess that’s progress.”

Elaine opened her mouth to ask some other question and kept it open. Rosa, who had been standing right next to them, was now across the street. She passed over the neighbor’s lawn, not running, but moving with purpose. She still carried her embroidered purse, and in the other hand, the bullhorn.

No one seemed to see her until that very moment. The police were shouting at her, and at one another, and while they were trying to decide what to do, run after her or open fire, Harvey’s front door was opened by someone invisible. Rosa stepped inside, and the door closed again.

Lorena said, “Oh my God. Tell me she didn’t do that.”

Frank was trying to get Elaine’s attention from down the street, mouthing something she was sure she would rather not understand. She turned away hastily. “I hope they have another one of those bullhorn things.”

Now the waiting had a different, more uncertain quality. The police appeared to be stalled. No one was talking about hostage exchanges or anything else. One of the local television stations had dispatched a camera crew, which set up its equipment and busied itself with filming all the things that weren’t happening. Some of the crowd drifted away. Elaine wondered if it might be possible for her to leave and find a bathroom, and maybe a cup of coffee. Lorena had already gone to call her mother. Was it good or bad fortune that Rosa was now inside? A portent, an answered prayer? A wrench in the works? Or just another permutation in the infinite sequence of repeating combinations, resulting in the formation of a new, previously unimaginable but mathematically predictable snowflake?

Harvey’s front door opened a crack. Look, the first ones to notice
it said. Look, and all the permutations of Look, until the air was full of them. The police walkie-talkies crackled. In a panic, Elaine craned her neck, trying to see if they were ordering some sort of charge, or worse. She caught sight of the young, absurdly handsome policeman standing off by himself, his gaze, like everyone else’s, forming a plumb line to the front door, his expression … It was so strange. She knew the name for it. Sick with love. No way. Her brain was trying very hard to shut out what her eyes were telling her. No way in the—

At that moment Harvey took half a step through the open door, blinking in the strong sun, his tufts of white hair as untidy as molting feathers, half of him still in shadows. He turned as if to talk with someone behind him, unseen in the dim passageway. Then he raised the bullhorn to his mouth.

“DADDY HAD HIS PECKER OUT!”

No one was certain they had heard it. Then they were certain they had.

Their voices rushed to fill the silence like water finding a hole dug in beach sand.

T
here was a frying pan in her hand, and the hand was fisted around it. Now wasn’t that totally stupid. Oh, what had she done? Gone and opened her big mouth. Out on the front porch there was the sound of feet shifting uncertainly. Nothing to do but follow through. Josie screamed again. She was getting good at it. “He says beat it, go away, or somebody’s going to get hurt!”

They beat it. Got in their car and pulled out, fast. But they stopped at the end of the block. Josie watched them through the chink in the window shade, her small flare of courage sputtering out. She had a bad feeling that things were only just beginning.

Harvey was still hanging on to the gun by its barrel, puzzling over it. “Here, you better let me have that.” It felt heavy in her hand, slick and cold and heavy. The man on the floor coughed and moaned. She wondered if there were any bullets left. She wondered if she could shoot him if she had to. Yes, she decided. She could shoot anybody if they were going to hurt Harvey.

“We should tie him up,” Josie whispered. Why was she whispering? She shook her head and tried to get her numb self in gear. The frying pan had a clot of red-brown hair stuck to its bottom edge; she dropped it hastily. “I’ll take care of him, why don’t you go lie down? I bet you’re exhausted.”

“He sure is a noisy noise.”

“Well, he’s quiet now.”

“I whupped him.”

“You sure did. You did great.”

“I can whup the whole army.”

“Who put a nickel in you? Go lie down, try to sleep.” She watched him shuffle off. They wanted to take him off to some kind of Happy Home.

They might as well be sending a dogcatcher out after a stray.

Like it was supposed to be so easy to tie somebody up. There wasn’t any rope, but Josie found a belt on Harvey’s bathrobe and an extension cord. She was squeamish about touching him. He smelled like an empty chicken package left too long in the garbage. And what if he was only pretending to be knocked out, then he jumped up and grabbed her, like in a horror movie where nobody was ever really dead? She nudged him with her toe. His chest felt hollow, his ribs like twigs. Once, when she was younger, they’d had a cat who killed birds in the yard. Sometimes Josie had to pick them up and put them in the trash. It was the same fluttery-sick feeling of touching something smashed and unclean. Plus she had no idea about the knots, how to do anything fancy. But she got his hands tied behind his back and trussed his hideous feet together.

He groaned again. He was coming around. Josie scrambled to put the couch between them. Raspy phlegm sounds, breath fighting its way through slag. She hadn’t tied him up so he’d choke, had she? His eyes opened and he squinted at her upside-down.

“Who …” His tongue seemed swollen. “Who are you?”

“Me? That’s a good one. Who the hell are you?”

He wriggled against the cords; she was pleased to see that they held. “Shit, why you tie me up?”

“Duh! Because you were trying to kill us!”

“I never did nothing to you, turn me loose, you crazy?”

Josie waved the gun at him and he squawked and flopped.
“See? You don’t like it much when people do it to you.” She heard something outside and crossed to the window. Two police cars converged and the officers, neither of whom was Mitchell Crook, got out and hitched up their pants and rubbed their chins, talking. She wished she could just roll this guy out onto the front porch. Here, take him, will he do?

He managed to raise his head so he could look at her right-side-up. “I swear, I never seen you before in my life.”