Wide Blue Yonder (7 page)

Directly ahead of him was a vacation-bound family, Mom and Pop and three mid- to pint-size kids, distracted and squabbling about who had the tickets and who had to go to the bathroom. Rolando increased his stride so that without rudeness he entered the checkpoint line before them. He was, at this moment, the least memorable traveler in the airport, a thin young man in a windbreaker and dark work pants, thin mustache, green eyes a little too close together in his brown face. When he reached the X-ray belt he placed his flight bag neatly on its side and stepped through the archway. Nothing metal or suspect in his clean, anonymous pockets. On the other side he paused to remove his windbreaker. Behind him Pop was emptying a noisy river of keys and coins into a tray. One of the kids was acting up, whining, and Mom was saying, “Of
course
you want to go see Grandma,” and Pop was emitting a little cloud of peevish exclamation points like a cartoon, and it was the easiest thing in the world (the irritated security guard repositioning the family’s mountain of carry-ons), for Rolando to drop his windbreaker over their camera as he bent to retrieve his flight bag.

Moving neither quickly nor slowly he sought the thickest part of the moving crowd. At the first restroom he entered a stall to examine the camera, a Canon with many desirable features, and placed it in the flight bag. He flushed and washed his hands and
made his usual looking-in-the-mirror face, a stone-cold dead-eyed gaze that did not acknowledge the thing he most hated about his reflection: his peanut-shaped skull and kinked red hair. At a snack bar he purchased and ate a slice of pizza and then, when he felt his heart slow to normal resting rate, he retraced his steps and sauntered past the checkpoint. Heartbeat was the clock that never misled you. So that when he walked out through the baggage claim doors and something in the brassy exhaust-tinged air made his pulse quicken he decided that contrary to his plan, this would not be the best place to acquire a vehicle and instead took his usual bus home.

He was superstitious in these private, idiosyncratic ways, unlike his candle-lighting German-Irish-Mexican mother, who sometimes confused the characters in her telenovelas with the saints, unlike his long-vanished Jamaican father who, it was said, had believed in mojo and those voodoo deities in charge of sexual function. Rolando collected smooth pebbles, which he got to know by touch. (Even now he was fingering one caught in the seam of his left front pocket.) He had never owned a calendar and there were times he could not have said what day of the week or even what month it was. He preferred it that way, so as not to lose his own rhythm, that heartbeat clock. He believed that as long as he never flew in an airplane his life was safe. He regarded fivedollar bills as unlucky and avoided receiving them in change. He loved the sun, and on a day like today, when it rode the sky for many hours, he knew that things were working toward some unknown but beneficial end.

After stopping at the home of an acquaintance to dispose of the camera, Rolando approached his own residence on foot. Except for a time in Silver Lake he was too young to remember, he had lived all his twenty-two years in El Este. With his oddly constructed and pigmented face, he could be made into anyone’s
enemy, an outsider anywhere. Even among Mexicans he ran the risk of being mistaken (and beaten) for a Guatemalan or Samoan. But he was most at home here, in the little pastel houses and tiendas and baleful asphalt. He was more Latino than Black and more Black than Anglo, although the moment you looked at him any of those ways, you began to have doubts.

As soon as he walked in his front door the phone rang. He answered in a flattened voice. “Hello?”

“Rolando?” Ascending plaintive female screech. “Where you been?”

“Busy.”

“All week? Don’t give me that. Why you don’t come around like you said?”

He looked over the room for something to distract or fortify himself but found nothing. The place was a shithole. That was why he was leaving. “I’m busy with I’m gonna be out of town for a little while.”

“Out of town where?”

He picked a name. “Texas. San Antone.”

“You not going no place without me. Your worthless self promised. Or was that just your dick talking? Lando! You listening to me?”

He held the receiver away from his ear and searched for a cigarette. The phone sounded like a bee in a glass jar. When there was a pause in the noise he said, “It’s just some business I got to take care of. It’s nothing personal to do with you.”

“Business. Your only business is making nasty-ass trouble for me and everybody else. Hear me good. Don’t you come sniffing around once you get back. Not if you was to come crawling. Shit-head. This is it, finito. Bum voyage.”

She hung up. Rolando sighed. He was going to have to leave before she changed her mind and started in pestering him again.
He would have to tell his mother something too, once she got home from work, and she would not be so easy to handle.

If you say to anyone, Tell me your story, there is always a starting place. Rolando was not in the habit of talking about himself, but if something could have crowbarred the words loose, he would have begun with, I had three older brothers. The fathers of the brothers were men named Sergio and Jesus and so they had turned out more or less normal-looking. From an early age they took to pounding on him. It was amusing to them to see how easily he could be made to land on his diapered bottom and squawl, like a superior sort of toy. When he was a little older they invented elaborate routines and strategies to trip him up and send him tumbling down stairs or into unyielding objects. When it came to something basic, like hitting, their efforts were thorough and varied. They employed flat-handed slaps to the back of the head, knuckles to the ribs, a thumb that hooked you just under the chin, the sudden wrench and pop of a twisted arm. It didn’t help that his mother defended him and doted on him and punished the others for his every bruise and blood letting. The brothers had long ago moved on to their own forms of trouble, but from them he learned lasting lessons of guile, silence, speed, and vengeance.

From his growing-up years he learned other things. That the evil-smelling ditch behind the garage was an excellent place to practice feats of balance and acrobatics. He knew the wealth of tastes available at the corner store, dulces and gumballs and red-hot potato chips and Nehi flavors, and the melting in the mouth when you had a craving for one certain thing. How to make a gun that shot bottle caps, with considerable impact, out of a sanded piece of wood, a nail, and rubber bands. How to ride double on a bike, how to latch on to the bumper of an accelerating car in order to prove skill and bravery. Pussy. You din’t even half-try. Screw you fuck face, screw you puta mamma. They loved the
way those words filled up their mouths. Other boys learned that while the standard insults were acceptable, they must not call him Nigger Lips or Brillo Head, not unless they wanted to risk an all-out attack in which the standard rules of combat did not apply.

He was secretive, solitary, on the edge of every group. He kept his eyes open for opportunities, he prided himself on his perfect, better-than-twenty-twenty vision. It was amazing, the number of people who never really noticed anything or took proper precautions. It was also a matter of pride that he had never actually been arrested, although he had been asked many times by the police to justify his presence on the streets, his identity and his intentions, as part of a public safety policy that protected certain neighborhoods from the people who lived in them. From time to time he worked at one or another small job, but for the most part he was engaged in the acquisition of certain items of personal property from careless individuals. It was a way of getting by; he couldn’t remember ever feeling guilty about it. A kind of harvesting, wherein people with too much of things, money that might go sour or bad, were relieved of its burden.

But he had begun to chafe at his old routines. There was a narrowness in his life. He felt he had never really decided on a course of action, only drifted into things. He had cloudy dreams of all the places he had never seen, all the lives it might be possible for him to live, once he broke free from his origins. He had been saving up money bit by bit, fifteen hundred dollars. Counting it out felt like flexing a muscle. He had a sense of possibilities, of unknown currents in himself. Anger had been his only fuel and power, the thing he could most easily lay hands on and call forth. But what if he possessed other qualities and strengths, previously unsuspected? If he could not change his face or his history, he might yet breathe a different air.

He might surprise them all some day, him, Rolando Got Jack, target of a thousand jokes and fists. He might return with his
pockets full of wealth, as wise and smooth as one of his mother’s brown saints. Anything could happen.

But first he had preparations to make. That evening, after his mother had finished disbelieving his story about San Antonio, he stepped out into the street. Paused to get a cigarette working. Children called out to each other in the rose-tinged dusk. Traffic noise, never very far away, crested and receded like the ocean. Although the air had cooled, the pavement still smelled hot. There were other smells too, something balmy or fruity, with a faint underlay of stink. The things they put in the air nowadays, the sweet was probably just as bad for you as the stink. He walked to the end of the block, nodding to people sitting out on lawn chairs, people walking dogs, and although none of them individually was anyone he expected to miss, he would miss the whole of them.

On the avenue the night would just now be getting underway, the cars cruising slow and soft through the wash of lights and music, the sidewalk busy with sellers of CDs and silver and T-shirts, doorways propped open for a glimpse of the ruby-lit darkness inside, and everywhere the beautiful, beautiful girls … But he steered clear of all this and hiked on as far as the small, nearly grassless park. Two younger boys were playing basketball in a circle of streetlight that lit them like a stage. He had never been much of a player, but he loved the tart sound of the ball on cement and the boys’ excited, swaggering voices. And the view from the park’s little rise, the pink smear of freeway lights and beyond them the distant mountains, black except for the small trails and constellations of brightness, like an upside-down universe. He would miss all this too. It disconcerted him to discover such feelings in himself, soft places that sent out eddies of confusion just when he needed to be straightforward and clear.

He caught a bus on Whittier, transferred downtown, and disembarked in a neighborhood that had often suited his purposes.
Quiet, but not so much that a pedestrian would attract undue attention. In Los Angeles it was often a very suspicious thing to be a pedestrian. Nice houses, these. Little bungalows with red-tile roofs, brass gadgets on the front doors, fishponds, somebody’s idea of a statue. A place he wouldn’t mind living himself, if not for his prejudice against any wealth that could not be carried by hand. He strolled past the car he had already picked out, a sky blue Ford product with enough of the new worn off it so that people might have grown relaxed about things like alarms. His heartbeat was so sweet and steady, you could have used it to keep time to a waltz.

These things were not difficult, given the proper equipment, experience, and opportunity. A final look around. Pop the lock, strip the wires, fire it up, and go. They never knew what hit them. Out on the boulevard and merging with the traffic, a model citizen obeying all vehicular laws. Oh, he was slick. He sang himself a little slick song as he fooled with the radio. Half a tank of gas in it. These folks were absolute princes. He could tell they were the kind to have excellent insurance. He wished them well. Thirty-eight thousand miles on it, practically new. He took further inventory. Box of Kleenex. Change caddy with a handy roll of quarters. If he’d called Avis and told them what he needed, he couldn’t have done better.

There was a nice tape player, with auto-reverse and a lot of settings that would be fun to fool with. Already he had begun to think of it as his car. Groping around, he found a single cassette in the console, homemade by the look of it.

He popped it in and weird shit started coming out of the speakers. Chimes and flutes and bird noise. And here he thought these people had taste. He was disappointed in them, he was personally saddened. He reached to eject the tape. That was when the angel choir started up.

Layers of sound so beautiful it made him see colors, white and candy-cane pink and sunburst gold. The angels climbed stairways of luminous chords. His heart climbed with them. Crazy! They were just singing Ohhh, but like nobody’s business.

Then the voice started. A man’s voice, welcoming and easy, the voice of your best friend. “Life,” it said, “can seem complicated. We all know the feeling. Worries about work, health, relationships, money. Worry on top of worry. Times we feel we hardly have room to breathe freely, let alone relax, clear our minds, and focus on what’s important to us. For the next hour I’d like you to join me in a journey toward harmony and greater self-knowledge. Remember, you are not alone.” The angels sang a little riff. “When the world swirls with formless chaos, when fears and troubles mount, remember that forces for peace and understanding are all around you. You are a cell in the body of God. You are a cell in the body of God.” The words echoed and reechoed. The angels were going nuts. “You are a cell in the body of God. You are a cell in the—”

Rolando punched the eject. New Age crap. Great production values, feel-good bullshit for people whose biggest problem was how to pay for their tennis club membership. Man, he was glad he lifted their car. He should go back and burn their house down so they’d get a feel for what real trouble was. Real was his nose twice broken, so much for breathing freely. Real was the tattoo on his right shoulder, a snake coiling around a rose whose petals dripped blood. Real was a lifetime of jobs like the one at Planet Chicken, clearing away half-chewed lettuce and cigarettes put out in coffee cups and worse. Real was the deck stacked against him since before he was born. If there was such a thing as the body of God, then he was an abscess, a tumor, a stinking boil.