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But she was taking them, wasn’t she? Well, if Da
It was into this careless world of unasked or unanswered questions-not only of an Asian variety, but including some longstanding secrets between the cook and his writer son-that a blue Mustang brought them all to their senses (albeit only momentarily) regarding the fragile, unpredictable nature of things.
ON SATURDAY MORNINGS in the fall, when there was an Iowa home football game, Da
That Saturday it was bright and fair, and Da
Da
Max was a fanatical collector of posters, stickers, and sew-on insignia, all advertising brands of beer. The kid had given dozens of these to Joe, who had Yi-Yiing sew the various insignia on his jean jacket; the stickers were plastered to the fridge, and the posters hung in Joe’s bedroom. It was fu
What Da
“Mr. Angel!” Da
Several of the apples, placed as slalom gates, had been squashed flat in the alley. Da
Da
“We crashed, trying to get out of the way-the Mustang was coming right at us,” Max said. “It was the blue Mustang-it always goes too fast,” Max told Da
“You’ve seen the car before?” Da
“Yeah, but not here-not in the alley,” the boy said.
“Go get the Pajama Lady, Max,” Da
“I couldn’t see a driver. It was just a car,” the boy said-still not moving, except for the shivering. Probably the sunlight had been reflecting off the windshield, Da
“Some teenager, I’ll bet,” Da
“There was no driver,” Joe insisted. Later Max would claim to have never seen the driver, though he’d seen the speeding blue Mustang in the neighborhood before.
“Pajama Lady!” Da
The cook had sat up in bed beside the drowsy Yi-Yiing. “Who’s ‘Pop,’ do you suppose?” he asked her.
“I’m guessing that I’m the Pajama Lady,” Yi-Yiing answered sleepily. “You must be Pop.”
Quite a commotion ensued when Yi-Yiing and the cook learned that Joe had fallen off his bike and there’d been a car involved. Max would probably take to his grave the image of how fast the Pajama Lady ran barefoot to the scene of the accident, where Joe was now sitting up-rocking back and forth in his father’s arms. The cook, with his limp, was slower to arrive; by then, Youn had interrupted her novel-in-progress to see what was the matter.
The elegantly dressed dame at the farthest end of the alley-her trash barrels had been knocked over by the vanishing blue Mustang-approached fearfully. She was elderly and frail, but she wanted to see if the boys on their bicycles were all right. Like Max, the regal old woman had seen the blue Mustang in the neighborhood before-but never the driver.
“What kind of blue?” Da
“Not a common blue-it’s too blue,” the old dame said.
“It’s a customized job, Mr. Angel-I told you,” Max said.
“You’re all right, you’re all right,” Yi-Yiing kept saying to Joe; she was feeling the boy all over. “You never hit your head, did you?” she asked him; he shook his head. Then she began to tickle him, maybe to relieve them both. Her Hong Kong pajamas this morning were an iridescent fish-scale green.
“Everything’s fine, isn’t it?” Youn asked Da
No, everything isn’t “fine,” the writer Da
“Are you taking a run, Pop?” Da
COLBY WAS THE COP’S NAME. “Officer Colby,” the cook kept calling him, in the kitchen of the Court Street house-perhaps in mock respect of that other, long-ago policeman in his life. Except for the bad haircut, the young Iowa City cop in no way resembled Carl. Colby was fair-ski
The hood ornament was either the original mustang or-according to a hysterical housewife in the parking lot of a supermarket near Fairchild and Dodge-an obscene version of a centaur. Other witnesses identified a nonspecific but clearly out-of-state license plate, while a university student who’d been run off Dubuque Street on his motorcycle said that the blue Mustang definitely had Iowa plates. As Officer Colby told the cook and his writer son, there were no descriptions of the driver.