Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  He was choking. He struck his ribs with his fist, and his face worked with the effort to find muscles that didn’t exist deep inside his chest. I could let him die, she thought. It would be easy. But before she had even completed the thought, she leaped to her feet and grabbed him from behind. She made a fist with both hands just below his rib cage, and yanked. The man made a weak gagging sound. She yanked again. This time a chunk of chicken flew from his mouth and landed wetly on the floor. She let him go, and he staggered around, coughing. He doubled over in the corner and took two, three deep and ragged breaths, then collapsed onto the couch, his face gleaming and red and dripping with sweat.

  “Grazie,” he said.

  “What in hell are you doing in my house?” Anita yelled. The man looked at her another second, then turned away, wiping his face with his hand. She bent over and picked up her plate and the fallen drumsticks, then put them in the kitchen. She cleaned up the food he had choked on with a wad of paper towels. When she came back to the living room, he was still breathing heavily, and she stood in the middle of the room, her hands on her hips, watching him.

  “Come on. What are you doing here?”

  He shrugged and crossed his legs, then laid his hands down over his knee. It was an easy, elegant gesture, like draping a coat over the edge of a chair. He smiled weakly. “I am Bernardo,” he said. He had some sort of accent.

  “Oh, that explains everything,” she said.

  “I am hungry.” He shrugged again.

  “What are you doing out here? We’re in the middle of nowhere.” She looked out the window at the police tape, flapping in the breeze. “You came to look at the crash, didn’t you?”

  He nodded, uncrossed his legs and smoothed out his pants. It was a ridiculous gesture. They were covered with stains. She shook her head, then went to the kitchen and brought back a folding chair. She set it directly in front of him and sat down. “Where do you live? Do you live in town?”

  “Ah…no,” he said.

  “Where do you come from?” She spoke each word distinctly.

  “Italy.”

  “When?”

  He paused, and his eyes glazed over for a moment. He was thinking his way around the question. “A couple months. I come for business, but it is no good.” A lie. She noticed that he was wearing scuffed loafers and thin white socks that had been torn.

  “So where have you been staying?”

  He pointed behind him with his thumb. “In the woods. Like you say, I see the plane, and I stay up on the hill.”

  “And you’ve been eating what, bark?”

  He shook his head and pointed toward the kitchen.

  Anita turned, then looked back at him. “You’ve been eating here?”

  “No car, I go in. But you are here anyway.”

  “Yeah, here I am.” She sighed. “Look, I’ll be honest with you. I can’t give you much. This is a lousy time for my husband and me.”

  He nodded.

  “And we don’t have time for you, frankly.” She stood up. “I can offer you a shower and something to eat. Then you’re out of here, all right?”

  He nodded, surprised. “Yes.”

  “You’re awfully polite, for a thief.”

  “I only have…bad luck.” He crossed his arms and leveled her a gaze that seemed almost a challenge. She didn’t take it.

  “The bathroom’s in here, off the kitchen. And I can wash those clothes for you.”

  He had no answer to this, and she left the room to get his towel.

  * * *

  He undressed in the bathroom and handed out his clothes. As she carried them to the washer, she noticed that the shirt was made of silk. She also noticed that it didn’t look like he’d been wearing it for months. Of course, he could have gotten it anywhere. His heavy steps echoed in the bathroom and she heard the water go on.

  When Paul came home, Bernardo was still in the shower and Anita sat at the kitchen table with a magazine. He looked weary and disheveled and slumped into a seat across from her.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey. What a day.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Oh, you know. I watched this guy, and after that I followed him, and I got to see him buying pot from a hippie kid out of the back of his VW. I got pictures and everything. It’s all very exciting.”

  “So what now?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what Ponty’s going to do with the pictures. Give them to whoever hired us, I guess. He said I did a good job.” Paul smiled, and for a moment she warmed to him again. It was good to see him taking pleasure in something, anything.

  “I mean, what now for you?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “So I can have the car back tomorrow.”

  “Sure.” His face clouded suddenly and he blushed. “Oh, no. I do have something I have to do.”

  “What is it?”

  He stood up and went to the sink, where he filled up a glass of water. “Oh, nothing. Just another little job I’m supposed to be doing.”

  She could tell he was lying. He leaned against the counter, drank and looked at the floor. Then he looked up again. “Hey, who’s in the shower?”

  “Another man.”

  He grinned a little, but uncomfortably, as if he were in on the joke. “Yeah,” he said, “so it was a very interesting day. I sort of like the job, which—”

  “Don’t you have any reaction to that?”

  “What?”

  “There’s another man in the shower.”

  He turned toward the bathroom door and squinted at it. “Well, you were kidding, right? You’re flattening some pants or something?”

  “I’m what?”

  “You know, flattening stuff. With the steam. I’ve seen you do that.” Then the water went off, and the sound of two footsteps—thud, thud—drifted into the kitchen.

  “Hello?” Bernardo said. “Hello? You have my clothes?”

  “There’s a robe on the back of the door,” Anita called out to him. “Put that on.”

  “That’s my robe,” Paul said, astonished. “Who’s the guy?”

  “This guy,” she told him. “He just walked in and stole some food. I caught him. I told him he could take a shower.”

  Paul’s eyes narrowed. He looked at the bathroom and back at her. He brushed his hair out of his face.

  “You need a haircut,” she said.

  Bernardo’s face appeared in the doorway. He looked at Paul first, then found Anita. “My clothes not finished?” His eyebrows were close-set and thick, and his wet hair lay flat on his head.

  “No. Take the robe.”

  “A little small.” He closed the door and she heard him fumbling behind it. Then he stepped out. The robe barely covered his belly, and he stood before them like a great plush toy, clearing his throat.

  “Hello,” Paul said.

  “I am Bernardo.” He made a little bow, and turned to Anita. “You don’t tell me your name?”

  “Anita.”

  “Anita,” he said, as if it were the name of some delicious food he hadn’t eaten in a long, long time. “Thank you very much.” He cleared his throat again and raised his eyebrows at Anita. “You say I can eat?”

  “Help yourself,” she said. “You know where it is.”

  * * *

  They set him up on the couch for the night with a couple of pillows and a blanket. Anita left their bedroom door open a crack in case he thought to walk off with anything. He had repeated his story for Paul—came to America a few months before for a business deal that fell through and had been hanging around Marshall ever since, looking for work, finding food where and when he could—and now she asked him what he thought the real story was.

  “What,” he whispered, “you think he’s lying?”

  “Of course he’s lying. Somebody who doesn’t have anything to eat doesn’t just walk out here to look at a plane crash.”

  “Oh, I don’t know…”

  “You’re too trusting,” she s
aid. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s not a matter of trust.” He turned over on his back, and in the moonlight folded his hands behind his head. “It’s just that I’ve seen some weird stuff, is all.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said.

  He didn’t speak for a moment, and she thought he might let it go. Then he said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  From the silence came the sound of Bernardo’s snores in the living room. She regretted saying it, but it was out. “I didn’t mean anything. You just shouldn’t believe everything people say.”

  And this time he did let it go, but something of it stuck, and she remained awake long after he had fallen asleep, listening to Bernardo. She hated snoring. She remembered staying up late reading when she was a little girl, bristling at her father’s snores. Usually it stopped before she wanted to sleep, but sometimes she would have to get up, walk into their bedroom, and roll him over herself. Somehow she thought of snoring as self-aggrandizing and pompous. She felt the same way when people wouldn’t stop coughing. It wasn’t necessarily anything a person could control, but it bothered her anyway.

  * * *

  The next morning she found Bernardo standing in the corner of the living room in his clean clothes, staring at the plastic garbage bags over the hole. He had his back to her and his hands on his hips.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  She thought she’d surprised him, but he spoke calmly. “How this happen? This hole?”

  “The crash. Part of the plane hit it.”

  He turned, surprised. “Part of the plane?”

  “One of the engines. It came off. That’s apparently why the plane crashed.”

  “Hmm.” He looked up again at the hole, then out the window, toward the woods. “And outside? Something broken here.”

  “That was our shed.”

  “Shed.” He didn’t seem to know the word.

  “Like, a toolshed. We kept garden tools in there, mostly.”

  “Ah!” He whirled around. “I can fix. The hole, the shed. In Italy, I build my own business.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I do it free. For food.”

  She looked at her watch, which she was in the habit of wearing to bed. She had slept late, and Paul still hadn’t gotten up. “I don’t know, Bernardo. You’ve been a fine guest, but we want to be alone, all right?”

  “I don’t bother—I fix up the shed, then I sleep there.”

  “No, please. No.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but held himself back. He nodded and turned again to the window. “I go now?”

  “If you would. I think we’ve been generous enough.”

  Bernardo took one last look around the room and left. Anita stood very still for a while, and when he appeared in the yard she watched him walk: around the garden, to the edge of the woods. He stepped over the police tape and disappeared between two trees.

  When Paul came out of the bedroom, she was dressed for work. He yawned and pushed his hair off his face. “Hey,” he said.

  “Don’t you have to go to work?” she said.

  His face was blank for a second. “Oh, yeah. Not until later, though.”

  “Well, I have to go to the bank.”

  “Right.” He leaned toward the living room. “Hey, where’s the guy?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “I told him to leave. He wanted to fix up the house for food.”

  Paul stroked his chin. “Well…”

  “No, Paul. And we have to get the insurance people out here to look at it.”

  He shrugged and scratched his stomach, then stood in the kitchen, looking around, as if there was something there he had come in to get.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Oh, sure,” he said, and picked up his keys from the table. “Off to work.”

  * * *

  Before the bank opened, she called the insurance agent, who told her with uncharacteristic sobriety that their policy specifically excluded damage done by falling aircraft. “Also missiles,” he explained. “It’s in case of a war.” He told her that this clause was actually fairly common. “You might want to try calling AirAmerica,” he said. “I heard about a couple of old ladies in Louisiana who got a huge settlement from an airline because a crash dumped all these bodies into their yard.”

  She hung up and watched Kathy, the head teller, unlock the bank. An old man was waiting outside and she held the door for him as he tottered in. The old man entered the roped-off teller line at the far end, and followed its labyrinthine path to the front. Two tellers were talking to each other and didn’t notice him. Kathy called him over to her window and shot the tellers a look.

  Anita picked up the phone and brought it to her ear. The dial tone was grating and unnerving, and she found herself searching her desk calendar for Larry Hutton’s number. Then she found herself dialing it. After the first ring, she panicked, took the receiver away from her ear, and held it over the cradle. She heard the second ring tinnily, from two feet away. Then she brought the receiver back to her ear again. Someone picked up.

  “Hello?”

  I could still hang up, she thought. It isn’t too late to hang up.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Larry Hutton?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Hutton, this is Anita Beveridge. I’m calling from First Marshall Bank.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m calling…I’m calling about Sasha.”

  Immediately the line went quiet. “Mr. Hutton?”

  “What do you want?” He was angry now. “I just got back from the kid’s funeral.”

  “It’s not…I’m very sorry. It’s not bank business. It’s me. This is a personal call.”

  “I don’t think I’m interested in hearing what you have to say,” he said.

  “Wait, please, I…Mr. Hutton, I live on Valley Road, where the crash happened. I was with Sasha. When he died.”

  Again, nothing. She heard him breathing on the other end, and went on. “I was outside when the plane crashed. My husband and I saw it. We ran…I ran into the woods, and he was the first person I saw. He was alive. I…he talked to me.”

  “He was alive?”

  “Yes, he—”

  “Jesus Christ!” he said. “They said it was immediate! They told me everybody…”

  “They didn’t know. I didn’t tell them. I’m really sorry.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “He told me about you. He said I should tell you he was here.”

  “Oh, God,” he said quietly.

  Her vision had begun to blur, and when she brought her hand to her face she found tears. She pulled some tissues from a drawer and pressed them to her eyes. “Look,” she said, “I want to meet you. Let me buy you lunch.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Really, it’s on me.”

  “I think I just want to stay home. It’s been a long week.” And then, suddenly, he changed his mind. “No, no,” he said, “I’ll go. I’ll go. I want…I ought to know more, I guess.”

  “There isn’t much more.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. This afternoon?”

  They made plans to meet at the coffee shop on Weir, the one she’d gone to the morning after the crash. She told him what she looked like, and he wrote it down. When she put the phone down, she looked up to find Kathy, behind her teller window, staring at her.

  * * *

  He was late. She drank all of a cup of weak coffee and picked at her lip. If she had her choice, she thought, she would go back and undo their move to Montana entirely, stay at the bank in Tuscaloosa, save up for a house. Maybe there, where Paul at least knew his way around, he would have wanted a baby. Maybe it was the weather here, the land that cultivated his apprehension: unforgiving snow and dry air, every beauty an intimidation, every wildflower brittle and covered with spines. She looked out at the mountai
ns the river passed between: there they were, keeping an eye on everyone. No wonder people were suspicious.

  She and Paul simply weren’t taking here, like his garden. Every spring she told herself that the summer would make all the difference, that it would take off the chill she felt year-round, would ease the fatigue she got from hunkering down. But here it was, almost September, and she felt no different. Either they would have to tolerate the dank desiccation of this place another year, or they would have to go someplace else, home maybe. Paul would say it wasn’t home anymore, but neither was this.

  “Hello?”

  He was standing before her, a serious-looking dark-haired man with rimless eyeglasses and a high forehead. He had a tan and a flannel shirt, which he wore fully buttoned and tucked into his pants, as if it were a dress shirt. “Are you Anita?”

  “Mr. Hutton.” She half stood and he waved her down. “Larry,” he said and pulled out a chair.

  When they had settled themselves, he said, “Well. I was expecting somebody older.” He was probably about thirty-five, and he sat very, very still. She imagined she could see a little of Sasha in him, something in the sharpness of the nose, and the recollection made her look, automatically, away.

  “I want to thank you for coming,” he said. “I was a little upset on the phone. But he meant a lot to me, Sasha did.” He reached for a menu and spread it open on the table before him. “I want you to tell me whatever you can.”

  “Sure,” she said. “There isn’t much.”

  He nodded. “I understand.” He ran his hand absently over the menu, as if it were in Braille. It was a thin, dignified hand, scarred, she guessed, from work. “He was my brother Arthur’s kid. He and his wife…they’ve been having problems. They were going to try and work things out, you know, and I had told Sasha he could visit anytime. So he was going to come out here for a couple of weeks. They got him off school for it.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Well,” he said. “I was in Bellevue for the funeral.” He shook his head. “I think they’re done for, after this.”

  “Oh.”

  He managed a sad smile. “Why don’t we get something to eat?”

  They ordered sandwiches, and she found herself staring at him as he ate: he moved like a spy, bringing the food to his lips with strange precision and economy. He dabbed his lips after every bite with a purposeful manner that didn’t seem, to her surprise, even slightly artificial. It embarrassed her to eat in his presence. When they finished, they sipped coffee and stole nervous glances at one another, until finally she took a deep breath and began talking. She stared at the tabletop as she told him, and her fingers clenched around a balled-up napkin, which she squeezed each time she thought she might cry. When she was finished, she looked up and was shocked to find his face full of sympathy. He looked like he was about to reach out and gather her into his arms.