Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “Miss?”

  The voice took her by surprise. She righted herself, overcompensated, and groped for the floor to keep from falling. She groaned and pulled herself up straight. Then she looked at where the voice had come from.

  It was a clerk, a woman in her thirties, bent over before her with a book closed on her finger. She had a large, blurry face that stayed blurry even after Anita wiped her eyes, its wide, rounded features blending into each other like clouds. “Are you all right?” she said. “Can I help you with anything? I don’t mean to pry but it is very unusual, you coming in here like this and crying, and I don’t know should I talk to you or call the cops.”

  Anita sniffed. “Have you got a tissue?”

  The clerk produced a wad of toilet paper from her shirt pocket. “It’s clean,” she said. Anita noticed her thick, freckled wrists.

  “Thank you.” She blew her nose, tucked the tissue away into the pocket of her skirt. Her hand was throbbing. She held it up to the light, fingers spread, and saw the splinter: a tiny point of wood showed above the skin; the rest lay beneath, a shadow.

  “What’s that? You hurt?”

  “A splinter.”

  The clerk knelt, taking Anita’s hand and turning it over. Her fingers were thick and clammy, like sausages. “People think you’re green if you cry over a splinter but I happen to know it hurts like damn.”

  “It wasn’t that.” Anita gently pulled the hand away. On the floor at her feet, lying open, was the clerk’s book. It was called The UFO Cover-Ups.

  “Well then what was it? You read something disagreed with you?”

  Anita brought the hand back to her face, then grabbed the splinter with her fingernails and pulled it slowly out. She could feel her skin snapping back to fill the space it left, and only a dull ache, more like an itch, remained. There was no blood.

  “You got it.”

  “Yep.” And for that brief moment, she felt purged, as if the chemical that had been causing her confusion had left her body with the splinter. She dropped it on the floor and worked her fingers, each one individually.

  The clerk’s name was Callie (“Short for Corvallis, the town”). She led Anita to the counter and gave her a glass of cold, bitter, unsweetened iced tea, then asked where she worked.

  “I have to confess I’m a bit suspicious of those who deal in currency,” she said when Anita told her. “My brother Dick had a time of it down outside Hamilton with the feds over taxes, even though he does not participate in American Society at large. They sent out the black choppers? To monitor his activities?”

  “Black choppers?”

  “Government sends them around to check you out. If you live in town, you never see them.”

  “Actually I live—”

  “So they saw him target-shooting out back of his place, he’s got a lot of guns, you know, and they came in for a look. So he points his rifle up at ‘em, just fooling, I mean what would you do?, and they’re off like a shot. Week later they’re at his door, all over him about back taxes. You can see the cause and effect here. I mean, I can see paying out here in town to ensure the crazies don’t come into my house and kill me dead, but Dixon…”

  “Dixon?”

  “Dick, my brother. Named after the town. So you see my dilemma.”

  “Dilemma.”

  “With your job over at the bank.” She swirled her iced tea and the cubes clinked against the glass.

  “Sure,” Anita said. “Sure I do. Actually I have to be getting back.”

  “Oh, right. Well, good talking to you.”

  “You bet.”

  Outside the sun had come out, dim and cold. The street, the buildings, the cars all had taken on an impossibly solid, yet detached quality, like giant objects stacked at the edges of a room. For the first time in a long time, Anita felt like Marshall was accessible to her if she wanted it, if only she would try harder.

  “I’m staying,” she said out loud. A passing bicyclist turned. She looked both ways, waited for a space in traffic, and stepped out into the street.

  15

  Paul came to the shed on Saturday looking frantic and demanded Bernardo come with him.

  “Where?”

  “Just out. You know, away. We’ll go away for the weekend.”

  Bernardo had been drawing all morning, in a vain attempt to dispel the last traces of the previous night: he had lain awake for hours, trying to imagine his meeting with Antonio, each scenario ending with his son’s astonishment giving way to fury. “Liar!” shouted the Antonio of his imagination. And the little girl cried in her mother’s arms, fearful of the strange man who’d come to ruin them. Sleep proved no better. His subconscious got hold of his fantasies and corrupted them, and Bernardo found himself dragging his son’s family onto crashing planes or responding to their disgust for him by committing acts of repulsive violence. And as he did so he whispered that he was a gentle man, a weak man; that he couldn’t possibly be doing what he was doing: but there he was, watching his own hands exacting the terrible work. He woke gasping, starving, calmed himself by breathing steadily and tracing the walls of his shack with his eyes. Then he sat down at the workbench and drew.

  He tried to draw Montana, but he couldn’t get the knack of it. There was some kind of trick, he thought, to capturing the distinctive lack of softness the landscape seemed to have, even when it was obscured by clouds or smoke. But he couldn’t tease the lines from his pencils. Paul, entering, snapped his concentration like a power line in the wind.

  “Away?” Bernardo responded.

  “I was thinking maybe of Glacier Park. You ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, right. I guess you haven’t. It’s beautiful. Mountains, valleys, you know.”

  “Ah.” It was not an altogether unappealing idea. “We eat too?”

  “Oh, sure, you bet.”

  “I have a shower first.”

  “Whatever.”

  He nodded, and pushed his drawings into a pile on the workbench. “Okay, then. We go.”

  “Hey,” Paul said suddenly. “You’re drawing Montana.”

  “I do it bad.”

  “Let me see.” He leaned in and lifted up the corners of a few drawings. “Did you do any with the house in them?”

  The house. Bernardo remembered giving it a try once, the week before. He bent over and pulled it from some papers he had stowed on the floor. The house, looking very small at the foot of the mountains, done on a piece of lined paper torn from a spiral notebook. In retrospect, it wasn’t too bad. He handed the drawing to Paul.

  Paul’s face arranged itself into a rueful smile. “This is really nice.”

  “The paper is no good.”

  But Paul didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, no, this is great.”

  “You take.”

  His eyes widened. “You’re serious.”

  “Of course.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “Wow. Thanks a lot.”

  They set out in the car, clean and fed, around noon. Bernardo watched Paul as he drove. Obviously he had something to say, but for the moment kept it to himself. Bernardo had never met anyone so guileless, so transparent.

  Bernardo knew that Anita had been having an affair. She had made no effort to keep it from him, and if he wasn’t mistaken, even wanted him to know. She made cryptic, mumbled phone calls when he was in the house and Paul wasn’t, and several times walked to the end of the drive for her ride—the woman who picked her up usually came to the house and knocked. She came home late. Bernardo knew this game: she wanted Paul to find out but didn’t want to tell him, and Paul wanted to avoid finding out what he must certainly have suspected was true. And by now, he figured, it must all be out in the open.

  Bernardo would have none of it. He said nothing to either. His sympathies, however, were with Paul. Whatever faults she found in him, Paul was obviously loyal; it would not occur to him to be anything else.

  But as they pulled onto the freeway, and the vall
ey slid away behind them like a bad dream, Bernardo realized how tired he was of being the barrier they hid from each other behind. It was too much like his own family life, with its multiple stresses and unsteady allegiances, for comfort. The shed, the house, suddenly seemed suffocating to him, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d leave on his own accord.

  They drove for hours, through mountains Paul told him were called the Mission Range. They rose up out of the ground at the edge of a flat valley, like a city built in a desert, and Bernardo found himself thinking that if he were a priest, sent to the New World to spread Christianity, this would be the place to do it. The mountains looked merciless, gigantic, treeless; it would take only the slightest change in perception to see them as the work of a powerful God, to fall to one’s knees and worship them as such.

  It was nearly evening when they reached the park. A lot of cars were leaving, their belongings bundled into trunks and onto roofs. Paul paid at a little log guardhouse and drove along a winding road that skirted a gigantic lake. Peering into the trees, Bernardo could see little clusters of dome-shaped tents, nestled between picnic tables and large American cars.

  “What are these people doing?” he asked.

  Paul stole a glance into the trees. “What people?”

  “Back there.”

  “They’re camping.”

  “Next to the cars?”

  Paul shrugged. “Sure. People don’t go camping in Italy?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Well, here it’s a big thing,” Paul said. “It’s the great American vacation. People like to go out and rough it.”

  “‘Rough it?”’

  “You know, go to the wilderness. Live a little while without the conveniences of home.”

  “Hmm.” It didn’t seem much different from Paul’s house back in Marshall. Smaller maybe.

  Soon they had passed the lake, and began to ascend. The road they were on was flanked by a low stone wall that would probably do very little to prevent a speeding car from sailing off a cliff, but Paul seemed unperturbed by this. Bernardo couldn’t drive. All the streets in Reggio were too narrow, and they were full of holes. Besides, everything he needed was in town, or he could get to it by train. He could see that here, driving was a necessary thing. They hadn’t passed a single bus all the way up the valley, and only freight trains seemed to run on the rails.

  The higher they drove, the sparser the trees became, and the easier it was to see into the deep gorge they had left. He saw the road below, a ribbon covered with sparkling dots, and a creek that fed the lake. He had to admit, it was breathtaking.

  “This is…magnificent,” he told Paul.

  “We’re at around five thousand feet,” he said.

  “I think I am never so high.”

  Paul raised his eyebrows, but didn’t take his eyes from the road. Ahead of them, a white van appeared to be full of nuns. “They have plenty of mountains in Italy, right?”

  “In Italy, I am sea person. I never go walk on mountains.”

  They arrived finally at a visitor center, a building that seemed to combine architectural elements of both a log cabin and a filling station. Bernardo got out of the car and was surprised to find how much colder it was here. He hugged himself against it and stood on the log that marked their parking space, looking out at the not-so-distant mountain peaks. He saw a goat walking around about twenty feet from him, and he noticed that a nearby pine tree was not much larger than the goat.

  Inside, while Paul went to pee, Bernardo read the placards that explained the wildlife of the alpine environment; the trees didn’t grow much above a man’s height and the flowers were as fragile as if they were made of sugar. The van full of nuns had arrived, and the women chattered to each other with what Bernardo thought was unusual animation, for nuns.

  He wondered if Antonio came here, if this was his family’s spot for vacations, and in spite of himself looked around the visitors center for him. Of course he wasn’t there. When Paul was slow in returning, Bernardo went back outside, to take in the air, and spotted the nuns on the opposite side of the lot filing onto a path marked “Scenic Overlook.” He turned back to the visitor center and back to the nuns, disappearing now around a bend.

  Why not? He hurried between the cars and caught up. The nuns weaved past a patch of the fragile-looking flowers, through the shadow of a rock overhang, and gathered at a low stone wall, where they read from mounted metal signs. He sidled past them and leaned hard against the wall with both hands, to find there was nothing but empty air separating him from the gorge, thousands of feet below.

  It had been different in the car, shielded by the window glass and the confident puttering of the engine. Now, he was met by the awful sound of exactly nothing—the sound of falling. Something cold and powerful gripped him by the neck and seemed to pull him down into it. He gasped and thought he saw, to his left, the nuns turn their heads. Here came the ground, rising to swallow him up; there was nothing in his hands but a mile of air, shaping itself like clay against his palms.

  He jumped back, falling, and for a moment was lost in space before a patch of gravel found him. There were the nuns, gathering around him—You’ve fallen, you had quite a scare, are you all right?—and a man with a video camera. Children. They helped him up, and he thanked them, but he could not walk fast enough to get himself away from the ledge. How could they stand there, looking off into the great oblivion? Because that kind of distance could do nothing but crush a man, crack his bones like sticks, flatten a man’s heart like it was so much mud. He could not stop shaking.

  He was shaking still when he reached Paul, who leaned against the car door scanning the crowd for him. “There you are!” Paul said, but Bernardo could only nod his head and pull open the passenger door and collapse into the seat. Paul waited for an explanation but Bernardo couldn’t give him one. He wanted to leave the park, get to the lowest point they could find and stay there forever. In the end, Paul asked him nothing, and now they both had something on their minds.

  They drove back down as the sun was beginning to set, and before it was dark Paul had rented a couple of sleeping bags and a tent at a little log store at the edge of the park. This was the off-season, he explained, and they easily found an empty spot in a sparsely occupied campsite. Paul assembled the tent in the headlights’ glare, and from the other provisions Paul had gotten, Bernardo found some wood and started a fire. For the moment, it felt good to be doing something unplanned.

  They cooked food over the fire. Though it was stuff he wouldn’t ordinarily have touched in a hundred years, he found it delicious: franks and beans, cooked in their own can (“Another American tradition,” Paul told him), canned molasses bread with raisins. The smoke stung his eyes, and his knees and face baked in the dry heat.

  In the tent, they lay side by side, uncomfortable with the hard ground and each other’s nearness. Paul’s silence was broken occasionally by loud sighs and lengthy fussings in the sleeping bag, but he didn’t open his mouth. Neither did Bernardo. Somewhere nearby, some teenagers were laughing. Someone had a guitar and was playing it badly.

  “So,” he finally said to Paul. Paul stopped his shifting.

  “So, what?”

  “What you going to say?”

  “Oh,” Paul said. “Oh, nothing. I didn’t say anything.” For a few minutes he was perfectly still, then he sucked in a breath and let it out. “She’s leaving me, that’s the thing. She’s been having this affair.”

  “Hmm,” Bernardo said. He said nothing else for several minutes, then: “This man—she wants to go be with him?”

  “Yes,” Paul said. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “I don’t know. But she’s leaving.” Paul turned over, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded far away. The tent smelled musty, as if it hadn’t been properly dried out by the last people who used it.

  “You said your wife…died.”

  “Yes.”

&
nbsp; Paul said nothing for awhile, perhaps out of respect. Or perhaps he was thinking about his own wife, about her death and how that would feel. “Any kids?” he finally asked. “Grandkids?”

  The teenagers outside seemed to have gone to sleep, and there was silence now, asserting itself blankly over the ground like a fog. A car passed somewhere. Bernardo could feel the mountains looming hugely over them in the dark.

  Then: “I have a son. And a granddaughter.”

  “Are you close?” Paul asked, accepting this without question.

  “No,” Bernardo said.

  * * *

  They left the park the next morning and drove to a nearby town called Whitefish. There, they went to a movie in a dilapidated theater that looked like an abandoned frontier building. It was an action movie called Double Duty. Afterward they went to a restaurant that was decorated with lacquered fish and stuffed animal heads. A row of gambling machines lined a wall at the back. They sat in a booth.

  “I’m just getting a burger,” Paul said.

  “I never eat one.”

  “You never had a hamburger?”

  Bernardo shook his head. Paul slapped the table, and the ice in their water glasses clinked. “No way!” he said. When the waitress came, he ordered two.

  While they waited, Bernardo thought about the movie. He hadn’t seen an American movie for some time, and a lot seemed to have changed. Its plot relied primarily on extraordinary coincidence—attack helicopters, for instance, arriving just in time to save the hero—and everybody spoke in short sentences, the words clipped like shot rattling in a pan. In fact, there was barely any dialogue at all. He’d had trouble keeping up with everything.

  “The movie,” he said to Paul. “It is hard to understand.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He thought a moment. “They shoot the guns, and they talk like a gun.” He made a gun shape with his hand and emptied a couple of rounds at Paul. “They don’t talk like you.”

  “Well, you know, I’m from the South. Alabama. We talk different from your average movie.”

  “The South?”

  “The southern United States. Like, the Civil War?” He raised his arms and made his own gun gesture, this time a rifle. “Mostly, the only time you see a southerner in a movie is if he’s backwards. A hick.” He made a stupid face.