Wide Blue Yonder (6 page)

Harvey’s gaze stayed fixed on the television. The map showed a bulging line of dark green, busy over Minnesota. What was it about his face that made it seem just slightly out of focus, like a television getting bad reception?

“Goodness, I hope that old storm won’t come our way,” said Elaine, just to keep up the pretense of normal social interaction. “What do you think, Harvey? Is it going to storm?”

“Ne. Ne.” His mouth full of bread and potato salad. He shook his head. Swallowed. “Frontal system over the upper Great Lakes will remain nearly stationary through tomorrow, with thunderstorm activity expected along a line from Minneapolis east as far as Detroit.”

He still hadn’t looked directly at her, nor even at his food as he
lifted the plate to get it closer to his mouth. Were they making him nervous, or were they just voices unaccountably escaped from behind the screen?

Elaine heard something scrabbling beneath the couch and lifted her feet in alarm. She’d forgotten Harvey’s awful cat. As if you could forget it for a minute, the smell and all. A claw shot out to snag her shoelace. From the corner of the couch frame a hairy tail swished back and forth with an angry beat. Perhaps the creature sensed she was a threat to the household and its grimy routine. Elaine flicked a crumpled bit of sandwich wrapper to the floor and the cat emerged to pounce on it. Then, discovering it was useless, it turned to stare at her with its flat yellow eyes. It scratched its chin with a back foot, fleas, probably, and stalked out of the room.

Harvey had eaten everything; he still held the plate, as if unsure what to do with it. “How about some more potato salad, Harvey? No? Look, I brought Josie to see you.”

Elaine motioned her forward. Josie squatted on the floor next to him. “Hey, Uncle Harvey, how’s it going?”

He raised the green plate up to the level of his chin, then let it fall. His free hand reached out to Josie and touched a stray piece of her hair. A nervous giggle slid down Josie’s throat. “Jeez, my hair looks like ass today.”

“Watch your mouth, young lady.”

“Oh you don’t care, do you Uncle Harvey? Look, he likes my earrings too.” They were dangling Austrian crystals and they caught the light in a pretty way. One slice of rainbow prism landed on his face and he smiled his crooked smile.

“Mom?”

Josie was pantomiming something, a fluttering gesture with one hand at the bridge of her nose. Did she want her sunglasses back? Elaine reached for them on the table next to her, but Josie shook her head, mouthed something. I.I.I what?

Then Elaine understood. She got up from the couch and went to stand behind Josie. Another commercial was on and she watched Harvey jerk his head toward the noise of the jingle. His eyes were cloudy, like chips of old ice. Cataracts?

He must still see things. The weather maps, colors, lights, and if he sat close enough, words on the screen. Josie was giving her an agonized look, as if there was something she should be doing. “Let’s go out on the porch a minute. We’ll be right back, OK, Harvey?”

He nodded, or at least Elaine imagined he did. She opened the screen door and stepped out into the strong sunlight, so much brighter than inside She understood that he probably kept it that way so he could better see the television. She understood why nothing in the house was either entirely dirty or entirely clean.

Josie followed her outside. “Oh man. His eyes look so
creepy”

“Keep your voice down.” Elaine paced the narrow length of the porch. There was a red plastic milk crate upended midway. She lowered herself onto it, smoothing her flowered skirt around her. She was getting too old and too fat to wear such things. She looked like a wallpapered cow. “We have to figure out some way to help him.”

“Like get him to go to an eye doctor? Good luck.”

“Just let me think a minute.” What if Harvey needed surgery? What about informed consent? Could you explain to him about hospitals, or injections, or anesthesia? How could you even test his vision in the first place?

The alternative was to leave him alone until his eyes got so bad he’d be groping around on his hands and knees to find things. They’d left him alone for too long already, they being herself, Frank, the community of souls. Elaine looked out at the beautiful day and the crazy little potted garden and the ragged summergreen grass that Harvey still cut with a hand mower. Why did any of it ever have to change?

Josie said, “You can tell him he’s going to some sort of weather convention.”

“And then what, tie him down? I don’t think so. He needs to be able to cooperate.”

“Well, doctors treat babies and vets treat animals all the time without their cooperation.”

“Your uncle is neither a baby nor a stray dog.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Let’s try for constructive suggestions, all right?”

“Like nothing I say would ever be any good. Thanks a lot.” Josie turned to go inside and let the screen door whack shut behind her. Elaine stayed where she was for a time. Always one of them was tinder while the other struck the match.

When she did go back in the house, Harvey was seated on the couch. His usual spot; you could tell from the broken-down springs and the pattern of food stains, like another kind of map. Josie was standing between Harvey and the television, a chocolate chip cookie in each hand. “Ready?”

She’d draped an old wool muffler, something she must have found in a closet, over the top of his head so it covered one eye. He looked ridiculous but docile, like those pictures of dogs dressed up in hats and sunglasses. Now she was the one comparing him to a dog. Josie brought one hand and its cookie very gradually forward until he reached for it. “Great! Now where’s the other one?”

She fussed with the scarf, rearranging it, then repeated her drill with the other eye. When Harvey had a cookie in each hand and was trying to get both into his mouth at the same time, Josie smiled at her mother, sweetly smart-ass. “I’d call that cooperation.”

Elaine went to see what she could do about the kitchen. She filled the sink with dish soap and scrubbed everything in the cupboards, then started in on the cupboards themselves with the last
of some Spic and Span she found under the sink. The stove would be another day’s work, but the inside of the refrigerator could have been worse. At least he had actual food in there. As she was tackling the floor, washwater soaking through her front in big damp patches, she heard Josie’s breezy laughter. Of course, it wouldn’t occur to her to be in here doing something useful. Her knees were wet. She really shouldn’t have worn anything nice.

Finally the kitchen was subdued. The rest of the house would have to wait until next time, or maybe she could get a cleaning service to come, if she paid them extra. Josie and Harvey were sitting next to each other on the couch, watching the screen intently. “Hey Mom, did you know they might name a hurricane after Harvey? Cool, huh?”

“That was on the television?”

“No, he told me.” Josie flipped her hair off her shoulders in a way that Elaine found irritating, although she usually managed not to say so.

“Really, Harvey? Would you like that?”

He only blinked his cloudy eyes, not looking at her, and pushed the last of the cookies into his mouth. She persisted. “I think I’d probably like it. All the excitement. Special coverage, I bet.”

Josie giggled. “Hurricane Mom.”

Very funny.
“So Harvey,” Elaine angled herself to stand in his line of vision, such as it was, “could we come back and see you sometime soon? We could go to the park, have ourselves a real picnic.”

He leaned forward, hands on his knees, to take in the details of the Local Forecast for the four-thousandth time. How could anybody stay fixed on this stuff day in and day out? The temperature puttering up or down, wind shifting by inches. Wouldn’t it be better to look out the window and be surprised once in a while? Harvey
belched mildly. She had not really expected an answer from him. She packed up the sandwich wrappings and empty soda cans. “Josie?”

“Bye, Uncle Harvey. It was great seeing you.” Josie kissed him on top of his shiny head. Elaine noticed, and wished she had not, that the old man had an erection.

Elaine led the way to the car, Josie dawdling. “Hurry up, I have to get back to the store.” She felt irritated in complicated ways. She had imagined herself bestowing her generosity and good intentions on Harvey, imagined his simple gratitude. She had imagined that she would fix him somehow. She was irritated at Josie for frisking around and playing the favorite (if she only knew the effect she had!), and at Harvey for not being fixable. She couldn’t decide exactly how to worry about him, what might happen to him, or perhaps what he might take it into his head to do.

Once they were driving away Josie said, “What did he do before the Weather Channel?”

“I have no idea. He didn’t really talk to you, did he?”

“Sure he did. You were in the kitchen. They had this thing on about famous hurricanes, and he said, ‘Harvey’s on the list.’ I said did he mean the list of hurricane names, and he said yes.”

Elaine wasn’t sure what to think. Everything would be so much easier if there was some way to get through to him. “I don’t suppose he said anything else.”

“He said, ‘It’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the little dog.’”

“What in the world?”

Josie shrugged. “Don’t ask me.” She reached for the radio, then thought better of it and slumped back in her seat. “What happened to him anyway, or was he always nuts?”

“He had a nervous breakdown.”

“What exactly does that mean? Is it like a computer crashing?”

Elaine glanced over at her, but Josie was peering through the windshield, her forehead puckered and serious. Perhaps they could manage an actual conversation. She said, “I wasn’t there. It was a long time ago. Your father was just a kid too, so this is what they told him and he told me. Harvey had a job driving a taxi. I know. Imagine. He must have been in his late twenties then. He drove the cab to St. Louis and ended up at the police station there, saying he was lost. Crying and blubbering. No clue that he’d driven a hundred miles. Couldn’t remember where he lived. So your grandpa had to go to St. Louis and bring him back, and when he didn’t calm down or get better they sent him to the hospital at Manteno and that’s where he stayed for twenty years.”

“No way.”

“I don’t know what they’d do for somebody like Harvey now. Back then it was electric-shock therapy and big doses of thorazine. I don’t imagine the family went to see him much. It wasn’t encouraged. Then …” Elaine sighed. She felt as if she were recounting the history of an old sad war. “Times changed. The big push was to deinstitutionalize, that was the word, mental patients. Put them back in the community and make counties and towns responsible for their care. Except they didn’t get any care. Harvey’s one of the lucky ones. Your father’s family bought him a house. A lot of them just ended up walking the streets.”

“Yeah, but what
happened
to him?” Josie demanded.

Not having listened to a word she’d said. Let it go, Elaine told herself. Trust your daughter to let you know when you were being a total bore. “Your father’s folks just said he was always weak in the head. That’s the way they talked.”

The car was quiet then. Elaine thought of other things they might talk about, conversations that, in some ideal world, you might imagine having with your nearly grown daughter. What
things made them happy and what things made them afraid. Advice about college, boys, the future. And how you seldom realize you are making a choice, an important turning down some forked path, even as you are trying to be watchful of that very thing. Like trying to see a clock’s hands move or trying to catch yourself growing older. Maybe you could see it from outer space, but not close up. Maybe only after you lived a life could you stand back and see its shape and pattern, everything you’d been staring at all along, like those magic eye prints that were so popular a couple years back. Here was knowledge or happiness or desire, whatever it was that knit everything together, here was your name written smaller and smaller, good-bye, good-bye …

There was traffic making itself known. She had to come back to the moment, get busy with the mechanics of driving. Josie sighed and her hand spider-walked toward the radio knob. As if there were any subtle way to start that particular music. Elaine opened her mouth to say something exasperated. The dashboard light blinked on and stayed lit.

F
riday afternoon and LAX full of people in a hurry to get everywhere in the world. At peak times the airport achieved the population of a small, restless city: business drones with cell phones, packs of slow-moving, cool-walking teenagers, parents herding kids, skycaps pushing wheelchairs loaded with the apprehensive elderly. There were Taiwanese whose hand luggage consisted of plastic shopping bags, Israelis, Filipinos, sunburned Germans who always seemed to be hefting sports equipment, Indian ladies in saris. Snatches of unknown languages, Russian maybe, or Portuguese. Rolando Gottschalk, heir to all the Americas, liked the big airport. It was one place that even his improbably named and ancestored self might be inconspicuous.

He was leaning against a wall, contemplating one of the security checkpoints. The lines were long and travelers were shifting luggage straps from shoulder to shoulder, crowding into one another with no place to go. Although the weather in Los Angeles was summer-perfect, there was fog in Seattle, there were high winds in Phoenix and thunderstorms over the Great Lakes. There were delays and cancellations, everything backing up, people getting fretful. The five no six security types at the checkpoint were hollering at everyone to step here and stop there and raise your arms, and wasn’t it great what a cheap coat and tie and an ID badge could do for your ordinary dirtbag’s sense of personal power and self-worth.

Rolando picked up the flight bag at his feet and joined the stream of passengers rounding the turn from the ticket counter and slowing as they hit the pileup at the checkpoint. He managed to walk without making any actual forward progress. Echoes bounced and splintered on the tile and glass surfaces. There is a quality of light that is only found in airports, glass reflecting glass reflecting sky. The shrill sunlight bored into his skin layer by layer, warming him, making him sleepy and easeful. He felt like a snake, a magnificent coiling snake, filled with danger and hot blood.