Wide Blue Yonder by Jean Thompson Page B

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’senemy, 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