Wide Blue Yonder (40 page)

“Oh, right, who was that running around here, your evil twin?”

“Run around where, where am I?”

“This is my uncle’s house, he lives here. He’s trying to sleep, so keep it down.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in a smaller voice, “Yeah, but where? This place have a name?”

“Springfield, Illinois. United States of America. Planet Earth. Ring a bell?”

“You’re shittin me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is Illi … noy near Detroit, Chicago, one of those places?”

“Chicago’s
in
Illinois, but Springfield’s the capital.” Like he would care. She watched him narrowly. He was a lot calmer. They were even having a conversation, sort of, something that had not happened before now. Was it some kind of trick? “Where did you think you were, huh?”

“Din’t know where I am.”

“Well why not?” Josie asked reasonably. “Where did you come from?”

He muttered something. “I can’t hear you.”

“L.A.”

“L.A., California?”

“Ya.”

“You weren’t watching the road signs?”

“Don remember.” Very small.

She was getting a creepy rush. The hairs on the back of her neck were rising as if she’d gotten a charge of static electricity. “Why don’t you remember stuff?”

“I don feel so hot.”

“Well you don’t look so hot. You don’t remember busting in here and screaming and shooting things and trying to rob us?”

Even wedged on his side as he was, he managed to shake his head.

“Bull, you don’t.”

“My head’s killing me.”

“Yeah, we hit you pretty hard.”

“You hit me?” He was outraged. Then he began sniveling. “Tie me up … beat on me …”

Josie looked at him, disgusted. He was such a wimp all of a sudden. It was so weird. “Hey, really, tell me what you remember.”

“I gotta scratch my nose.”

“Later.” There were more noises from outside. Josie went to the window. One more police car. And, as she watched, her father arrived, brakes tearing up the pavement and the car’s tires all mashed against the curb. Her father got out and started waving his arms. The police didn’t seem nearly as excited. They let him stomp around and carry on and give orders and they probably said Absolutely, Mr. Sloan, they’d get right on it, or some other polite way of ignoring him. Her poor old clueless Dad. Always trying to be the most important person in the room. Even when, as now, there was no room. Because he took himself so seriously, no one else did. Because he made so much noise, he never heard anything else. And he’d never figure it out, his whole life was like some trick mirror that didn’t reflect anything straight on. She felt sorry for him, mostly since he was the last person in the world who would think anyone should feel sorry for him. And
because that was sad and awful, and because she knew that, in his own dorky way, he was worried about her, Josie pulled the window shade aside and waved to him. Hi, Dad! Dad, hi! He saw her and his arm shot up right away. Then, more cautiously, his fingers uncurled in a wave.

The tied-up bundle at her feet was bumping and thrashing around. “Just let me out of here, OK?”

“Unh-unh.”

“Maybe I was drunk or sick, something. I’m all right now, I don hurt you.”

“And what if I let you loose and the next minute you’re Mr. Screaming Maniac again? Besides, you can’t leave, the police are watching the house.”

“You called the police on me?” Something in Spanish, curse words, probably.

“Not exactly. It’s complicated.” Oh boy was it. Everything about to crash and burn. Her parents, Mitch, Harvey, school, the rest of her life. Not one thing that wasn’t bad and going to get worse. “Look, what’s your name?”

“Rolando Gottschalk.”

Josie couldn’t help it, she busted out laughing. “That’s a name?”

“Shut up.” He struggled against the ties. His clothes were so ragged, Josie was afraid they’d shred from the friction. Then he stopped, tilting his head from one side to the other. “Whad you do to my hair?”

“Your hair? Nothing, I wouldn’t touch that nasty mess.” Which reminded her, she needed a shower in the worst way.

He was quiet now, his face turned away. He was silent for so long that Josie said, “Hey, Rollo …”

“Rolando.”

“Don’t die on me over there.”

“Think I’m already dead.”

Josie waited, but he was curled up with his face turned away from her. “Well that’s different. Why do you think you’re dead?”

“Don remember my hair growing.”

She thought about this. “It’s not the kind of thing you really pay a lot of attention to.”

But he was done talking. Fine. She decided to take a shower before somebody broke down the door or shot her or both. If she kept the bathroom door open a crack, she could make sure he wasn’t gnawing himself loose. She peeked into Harvey’s room. He was asleep on his back, mouth open as if sleep had seized him in the middle of a surprise. A trail of wet silver at one corner. She wouldn’t be able to keep him safe forever, or even for very much longer. The police would come in, one way or another. No one would listen. They’d already made up their minds about Harvey, about her, and about her bad behavior, which had now crossed some unforgivable line.

Thank God for hot showers. They revived you, made you feel you weren’t whupped yet. Josie pulled her wet hair back with a rubber band, scrambled into clean underwear and jeans and a black T-shirt that she thought made her look tough. She picked up the gun from the back of the toilet and held it up to the mirror, pointed it this way and that and tried on some expressions that went along with that sort of thing. Recklessness had brought her this far, recklessness was all that remained to her. She had fallen in love in a desperate, impulsive way because she believed it was the only way to do such things. She had been—she leveled the gun straight ahead—trigger-happy. And maybe that meant you ended up in a blind alley with one shot left, like in the movies and songs, but what else was there besides an ordinary fucked-up life?

Even with all the horseplay she’d been quick, she’d hardly been in the bathroom five minutes. The gunman who no longer
had his gun (she found it difficult to think of him by an actual name, let alone such a peculiar one) was still curled up on his side, looking like he’d invented bad moods. The Weather Channel, which she hoped she lived long enough to never watch again, was showing pictures of the retreating hurricane. It was finally moving up into New England and pooping out, leaving the state of North Carolina to the insurance companies. Everything in the world a giant disaster.

This time when she lifted the window shade she saw her mother and father standing toe to toe on the sidewalk, acting out a perfect pantomime of one of their arguments. You never. You always. Well you. No you. She dropped the shade and backed away. It was probably safer inside.

Behind her on the floor the gunman said, “Driving.”

“What?”

“I remember driving.”

“Well, I could have told you that. Your car’s right outside.”

He groaned. “What kinda car?”

“Red Camero with Kansas plates.”

“Kansas,” he said, like he wasn’t sure where that was either.

“You just couldn’t be more messed up, could you?”

“Leamme alone.”

“So you’re saying you have, what, amnesia? I didn’t think that was a real thing.”

Just when Josie thought he’d stopped talking again, he said, “It’s like when you know you seen a movie but you forget what it’s about.”

Josie looked at him, feeling curious in a repulsed sort of way. “You do a lot of drugs or something?”

“Maybe. I don know. Remember … somebody talking to me all the time, this stupid-ass mean stuff … except sometimes it was me talking … and things was happening …”

“What things?”

“Bad things.”

For the second time Josie felt that static electricity prickle of hair on her neck. “You did some bad things, huh?”

“I guess so. Or maybe, it wasn’t me. Like I was inside myself and outside too.”

Josie wished someone else was there, so they could trade significant looks. He was psycho. And she wished she could give his creepy self another knock on the head, but she wasn’t cold-blooded enough. Plus he actually seemed sorry about things, not that people always weren’t, once they got caught. At the end even Darth Vader had turned all sad and regretful about going over to the dark side, which she’d thought was just ridiculous.

Another peek through the window showed her how large the crowd had grown. In the kitchen she looked out the backdoor. She was pretty sure there was a squad car idling in the alley, just a couple houses down. She felt light-headed, sweaty. She got a Coke from the refrigerator and carried it back in, the gun in her other hand. He hadn’t moved. “You want something to drink? Coke, water?” She thought the situation required her to be a hostess, sort of.

“Just tell me what day it is.”

“Friday. Oh, I bet … What do you need, month, day, year? It’s the seventeenth of September, 1999. That make a big difference to you?”

“I missed my birthday.”

“Yeah? When is it?”

“Ten August.”

“Well, Happy Birthday.” No response. “August, that makes you a Leo, right? I’m Aries. They’re both fire signs. If you’re into that stuff. I don’t take it very seriously, but I think it’s interesting.”

“Yeah. Fascinatin.”

“I bet your horoscope says, ‘Conditions are excellent for making new friends.’ Ha ha.”

“Go ahead an shoot me so I don hafta listen to this.”

“I wish horoscopes really worked. The ones in the newspaper are so lame, they never get it right.” The Coke had a metallic taste, or maybe that was just her mouth gone dry, from fear, from not being able to stop talking. “The old-time astrologers, the ones who set everything up, they had to go by the stars they could see. But now we have these telescopes and we know there’s a million million stars out there, and how do they figure in? Aren’t they all exerting some kind of influence of gravitational pull? Even from light-years away. How would you calculate that, what kind of horo—”

More commotion outside. Josie ran to the window. Of all the sights she didn’t expect to see on this day of freaky sights. She hollered for Harvey and had just enough time to reach the front door.

“Rosa! Rosa!” Josie couldn’t keep herself from jumping up on her like a puppy. Harvey was rubbing sleep out of his eyes and smiling his wacky blissed-out Rosa smile, Rosa happy to see him too, and it would have been a real nice reunion except for half of the Springfield police force out on the lawn and the psycho tied up on the living room floor.

Rosa saw him and shrieked and said, “
Dios Mío,
” and something that clearly meant who in the world is that? “
Bandido,
” said Josie. Rosa was staring at the gun in her hand. “Oh, it’s his, I took it from him. And what’s this?” A bullhorn? Had Rosa been deputized?

Rosa took a cautious step into the living room and spoke to the gunman. He answered in Spanish. Then Rosa again. Then him. A regular conversation. Josie tried to follow the back and forth of it. Rosa, stern and skeptical. The gunman, sullen and injured-sounding. Harvey touched Josie’s arm.

“Does she know him?”

“No, they just speak the same language.”

“He should go away so we can eat breakfast.”

The Spanish conversation stopped. The gunman addressed them. “The
señora
says you can untie me.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I promise her I don make no trouble.”

“She doesn’t know you like we do.”

“It’s so I can get myself cleaned up.”

“Now that I might believe,” said Josie. Rosa was already flicking bread crumbs from the couch, gathering ceramic fragments of coffee mug, and making indignant noises. Josie felt a little bad about the uses to which they’d put her good skillet. “Did you tell her about breaking in here and carrying on and shooting things?”

“I tell her the truth, I’m a poor lost man, I don remember nothing. Hey, my nose still itches.”

“Tough.”

“All the bad stuff happen to me, it’s on account of this ghost. A ghost was after me. The
señora
says it goes away now.”

Unsure what to make of this interesting information, Josie asked what kind of ghost, who was it, but he just muttered into his beard and complained about his nose again.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Josie got a Kleenex from the bathroom and, with shuddering care, applied it to his nose. It was harder to touch him now that he was acting more like a human being. His eyes fixed on hers, furious and humiliated. “There, how’s that?”

“Turn me loose, you’re not doin it right.”

“Don’t be such a baby.” She gave up on him, took another peek out front. There was a TV news truck there. Unbelievable. They were actually hoping somebody would get shot.

Harvey and Rosa were fooling around in the corner. Harvey kept trying to walk his fingers up Rosa’s neck and she kept
slapping his hands and scolding him in between giggles. Josie couldn’t believe them. Was she the only one who cared that they were under seige here?

“You guys, we seriously need to decide what to do. Harvey!” She had to tug at his elbow. “You know what those men were here for? You know what this is all about? They want to cart you off to some crazy farm, because you won’t have this simple, dumb operation so you won’t go blind. Blind, do you get it?” She waved a hand in front of his face. If she started crying one more time, she was going to lose her last ounce of self-respect. She never should have let things get this messed up. She’d tried to help and only made everything worse. She never should have come here in the first place, why stop there, she could unfurl her life like a roll of carpet, follow every bad decision back to the one before it. Never should have picked a giant fight with her mother, never should have fallen so willfully in love, never should have thought she was anything special, looked down on anyone, mouthed off, made snotty judgments, hurt people. She should just take a step outside, salute, and shoot herself in the head. Send the news crew home happy.

Rosa was speaking in her soothing voice. She wished she was Rosa. Rosa always knew the right thing to do. If something was dirty, you cleaned it. That simple. Cleanliness next to godliness. Maybe she could follow Rosa around, scrub floor tiles on her knees with a toothbrush, ruin her hands with bleach. Atone for her sins. She was losing it. Brain cells starting to strobe and wink out.