Wide Blue Yonder (11 page)

The taillights showed Ronnie’s thin, nearly flat behind, his old slick jeans hanging in folds. Josie thought he could at least have found a bush or something. He hiked his jeans back up, but instead of getting into the car he took off running down the block.

“Now what?” She was getting a little tired of Ronnie.

“Oh, he’s just goofing.” Moron stretched out his arms in a big fake yawn, letting one of them come to rest, as casual as a felled tree, around her shoulders.

She wasn’t imagining things. He was trying to hit on her. Oh no, icky. Ronnie opened the back door. “Miss me?”

“You mean you were gone?”

“Ha ha. I got eight, count em, eight.”

“Eight what?” asked Josie. She was starting to feel the beer, all the little stupid-making bubbles in her head.

“Let’s not hang around, huh? Step on it.”

“What is he talking about?”

“He means he keyed a bunch of cars and we should probably not be here right now.”

Josie tried to give Ronnie a meaningful stare but her eyes weren’t following orders. “You scratched their paint? What did you do that for?”

“Is she for real?”

The two of them were yukking it up and high-fiving, like they’d accomplished something important, and she couldn’t believe she’d ended up with two people even more pathetic than she was. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “And I’m not doing it in the street.”

“We could go to Denny’s,” suggested Moron. “Yeah. Patty melts.”

As much as she didn’t want to be seen anyplace with them, it seemed like a good idea to get out of the car. Maybe she could ditch them at Denny’s, then drive by Mitchell Crook’s apartment so the night wouldn’t be a total loss. Her bladder, once it had announced itself, was cresting dangerously. She had to put the car in reverse to get out of the space. “Excuse me,” she said, waiting until Moron removed his arm. In the backseat Ronnie sniggered.

At Denny’s she sat on the toilet and thought: This Is Your Life. Your life is a public bathroom. Sticky floor, smelly smells, ghosts of bodily fluids, yellow flourescent lights on yellow tile. She flushed. Down the tubes. It was too bad she wasn’t serious puking drunk, just to top things off. As it was, she was stuck somewhere between sober and dry-mouthed fuzzy, with a little riff of headache playing at the back of her skull. In the yellow mirror she poked at her teeth and combed her hair. She looked hideous. She looked like Bride of Moron.

She was hoping to slink back to the car, but Moron, who’d
been using the pay phone, was waiting for her. He was parked right next to the ladies’ room door like a dog tied up outside a grocery. “Hey, I’m sorry if Ronnie’s being uncouth.”

“No biggie.”

“I’ll beat his ass if you want.”

“Look, I really have to get home now. My mom freaks if I’m not in by midnight.” This was true, although it never kept her from staying out as late as she wanted.

“Yeah?” He actually drooped. His enormous shoulders lowered as much as his overdeveloped muscles would permit, and his chin fell. He wasn’t such a bad-looking guy, he would have been normal-to-cute if he didn’t do peculiar things to his hair and dress like a goon in all that camouflage stuff and the sleeveless flannel shirts. She didn’t think he had many girlfriends. Everyone was too scared of him. “Well, stay and get something to eat. I’m buying.”

“Thanks. Not hungry.”

“A Coke or something. Besides”—he brightened, as if he’d found a compelling argument—“there’s still all the beer in your car and we can’t bring it in here.”

That did seem sort of important, or maybe she was too addled to think it through. “All right, how about you get your food, then I drop you and Ronnie and the stupid beer off on my way home. Deal?”

“Sure.” He was happy that he’d gotten her to agree. She was aware that he hoped to make her keep agreeing to things, like a salesman. Ronnie was slouched in a corner booth, stinking up the air with cigarettes. Josie did a quick reconnoiter. Nobody she knew in the place, thank God, just an old dried-up farm couple who looked like they’d been stranded there for the last week and a man in a cowboy hat who was studying yesterday’s newspaper a page at a time. Not until two or three in the morning would it
turn into the
Night of the Living Dead,
a ghastly overlit graveyard filled with all the after-closing drunks and the guys who’d just finished beating their wives.

Ronnie seemed almost pleased to see her. He blew a smoke ring in her direction. “Hey, what’s your name?” he demanded, which she took as a sign of friendly interest.

“Josie.”

“What kind of name is that? That’s a name you give to a cow. Josie the Cow.”

“And Ronnie’s a name you’d give to a pile of bull.”

He stared at her with his little cracked, red-rimmed eyes. In ten, twenty, thirty years he would never look like anything but the tragic result of inbreeding. He smacked his palm flat on the table and hooted. He had decided she was funny.

Josie drank two Cokes and swallowed an Advil she found at the bottom of her purse, and Moron and Ronnie worked their way through patty melts and fries with gravy. She was beginning to feel steadier, more cheerful, as if sometime in the future this would all make for an amusing anecdote. When they paid and walked out to the parking lot, the heat closed around them once more.

“This is really sucky weather,” she complained. “It makes you hate having skin. OK. Where do you want to go?”

“To Podolsky’s so we can beat his chicken ass,” said Moron.

They directed her to one of the little blocky houses on that same western edge of town where they’d been before, a neighborhood that no one she knew lived in, a place where some portion of everyone’s household goods ended up in the yard: kids’ Big Wheels, plastic coolers, rugs hung over porch rails. They must think she was a spoiled little rich girl, which she guessed she was, actually. “End of the line,” she said, pulling up in front of the Podolsky residence.

Ronnie got out. “Have to make sure he’s home.”

Josie sighed, because Moron wasn’t budging and was this night of the giant fuckup ever going to end? “I really really have to go home,” she said, politely fuming.

“Yeah, sure.” Nothing short of a crane was going to get him out of the front seat. The bicep closest to her had a blue barbed wire tattoo around the meatiest part of the muscle, like it was holding a package together. He said, “I liked it when we worked together. You were always nice to me.”

“I think I should tell you. I’m sort of going out with somebody.”

“Yah?”

“You probably wouldn’t know him. He’s older. He works nights. What are you—”

Ronnie and another boy were getting into the backseat.

Moron said, “Podolsky, you are dead meat.”

“I figured you’d be OK. And here you are OK, see?”

Ronnie said, “Podolsky, this is Josie the Cow. Josie the Driving Cow.”

“So you guys up for this?”

“Yeah, you ready to squeal like a little piggie and run wee wee wee all the way home?”

“Sit on my face, would you?”

“Excuse me,” said Josie. “Everyone should get out of my car now.”

“We got to go see some guys,” explained Ronnie.

“So call a cab.”

“What’s her problem?” asked Podolsky. He was older than the other two with his hair cut down to bristles and a hollow-looking face. He was wearing cheap wraparound sunglasses. He was creepy. “Let’s step on it.”

He was sitting directly behind her and she had to turn around to look at him. “Hey, this is my car. I don’t even know you. So don’t tell me what to do.”

They ignored her. Ronnie said, “Unless you want to use Mo’s truck.”

“Everybody knows Mo’s truck.”

“What do you think, you want to drive?”

“No, let the cow do it.”

Josie turned to Moron, trying to speak calmly. “What are you guys doing?”

“We just need the car for a little. It’s cool.” He put his hand on her bare knee and squeezed.

She tried to get out then, get out and walk away, but Podolsky said no no, in a mean-joking way, and pulled her back into the seat. For a moment her vision tilted and went flat, planes of black and white skating away. She kept thinking she hadn’t explained herself well enough.

“Relax,” said Moron. “It’s just driving, you can do that. You’re a good sport, you know? Most girls aren’t.” He turned around to the backseat and Podolsky handed him something.

“Is that a real gun?”

“Yeah, you want to hold it?”

“Say, Bonnie and Clyde, could we get this show on the road?”

Josie put the car in gear and started back to the highway. It didn’t look like a real gun. Even when she had big red bullet holes in her it would not seem real, none of it. The only things she could think to do were dumb things you saw on TV, like wrestle the gun away from him or crash the car into a tree. They passed the FS Co-op where a hundred years ago she and Ronnie and Moron had hidden in the cornfield. She was so crazy tired and it was so hot. Maybe this was the end of the world. Maybe it snuck up on you.

They told her where to go, down all the normal streets where normal people lived, asleep in their normal boring beds. There was almost no one else out. Stoplights changed color at empty intersections. They were quiet, mostly, except for Ronnie bouncing
up and down, babbling about somebody else she hoped she’d never meet who was also a chickenshit. Once she looked up to see Podolsky smirking at her in the rearview mirror. In spite of the sunglasses she could tell.

“Yo, big man. What you gonna do later?”

“Don’t know.”

“Gonna do some fucking?”

“Maybe.” Moron shrugged. He wasn’t looking at her, as if Podolsky had embarrassed him.

He still had the gun in his lap, an ugly gray stub of a thing, just laying there like it was nothing, like it could go off and shoot something, shoot her for no stupid reason at all, oh goddamn them. She was going to be raped and murdered and tomorrow night a local newscaster with bad hair would announce the discovery of her body in some very undignified place.

Get a
grip,
she told herself. “Who is it you’re going to see?” she asked brightly. The advice of all the girl magazines. Be a good conversationalist. Take an interest in his hobbies.

“Just some guys that owe us money.”

She wondered if they were a gang, if they qualified as one. They were driving up to one of the public housing complexes, barrackslike buildings set in dirt that just barely supported grass, superbright streetlights in the parking lot turning everything into hard-edged shadow.They told her to pull up on a side street.

“See anything?”

“You better hope they don’t see us first. OK now, Elsie—”

“Josie.”

“Whatever. You’re gonna take a lap through the parking lot, real slow and normal-like. Pretend you’re on your way home from cheerleading practice.”

“I’m not a cheerleader,” she muttered. The parking lot looked like a photographic negative, all that staring light and black
shadow. Moron leaned forward. The gun leaned forward with him. The car moved, even though she had forgotten how to drive. There was something wrong with the parking lot. It was too bright, too easy to see things. Podolsky’s breath rasped over the back of her neck. She tried to hold on to each thought in case it was her last, and it came to her that all this was happening because she had fallen in love, because she had wanted to burst out of her old life and so she had. You didn’t know what that meant until you did it but now here it was.

Ronnie said, “Is that—” and Podolsky said, “Shit man!” and noise exploded all around her and she was dead but then she wasn’t because things kept happening. Somebody was screaming, the way guys screamed, loud and hoarse. There was another car, a big Jeep-like thing coming at them head-on, and Moron grabbed the wheel and spun it and Josie floored the accelerator and they bumped over the curb into the street. It had not occurred to her that whoever they were shooting at might shoot back.

“Go, get out of here, shit!” The car was so full of them flailing around that it was hard to tell if they were moving at all but she guessed they were. The Jeep was right behind them, its headlights high and white and blinding in the rearview mirror. Something popped and cracked.

“Are they shooting at my car?” she demanded, incredulous.

“No, they’re shooting at us and the car’s in the way. Don’t stop for stop signs. Christ, where did you find this stupid-ass bitch?”

Moron had the gun pointed out the window, trying to aim it, but he was having trouble getting turned around. It served them right for wanting her car; it was way too small. “What did you
do
to them anyway?”

“Just shut up.”

“Oh fuck me. Fuck me to death.”

The gun went off right in her ear and the car got away from her and she lost track of the deep lights back there somewhere.

“I think I got em.”

“You got jack, man.”

Something smelled horrible. It was her own sweat. Ronnie said, in an almost normal voice, “Hey, where did they go?”

They all looked. The street behind them was empty. “Those pussies,” said Moron.

Now they were all laughing, like this was the funniest thing. Since they weren’t dead, she wanted to kill them.

“Man, they couldn’t shoot for shit.”

“Niggers. What can you say.”

“Sharp-looking ride, though. I like that real dark window tint. Very cool.”

“Hey sugar britches, that was some lousy driving,” said Podolsky, knocking her affectionately on the back of the head.

Josie said, “Are those flashers back there?”

Like she had to ask. They were three or four blocks away down the dark tunnel of the street, closing fast. Podolsky swore.

“Pull over at the alley.”

When the car stopped they bailed. All three doors opened and out they flew. “Hey take your dumb beer,” she called after them, and Ronnie doubled back to scoop it up.

“You guys really stink,” she said, but by then they were gone, running lickety-split between two apartment buildings, Moron bringing up the rear, trying to get his big legs working.

Josie sat and waited for the flashers to reach her. She flipped the hazard lights switch to show that she was a law-abiding driver. She checked her mouth for beer-breath. She regarded her feet, surprisingly normal-looking in her old Nikes, as if they’d been off on their own, doing ordinary things all this while.