Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “Ah.”

  Their burgers came. Bernardo stared for a moment at his. Its arrangement on the plate seemed an elaborate charade: around the burger itself lay a tasteful array of trimmings—lettuce, tomato, onion, a pile of fried potatoes—but underneath the bun, the beef was bright red, soaking the bottom piece of bread with its juices like a wound seeping through its dressing. Cheese melted over it and drooled down the sides. It was so unspectacular—so human—that he laughed out loud.

  “What?” Paul said. He was trying to add ketchup to the mix. Bernardo noticed that all around the restaurant, people had bottles of ketchup on their tables.

  “The tomato, the lettuce. It is like…you shake hands, then you fuck.”

  Paul looked down at his own plate, trying to see his hamburger from this new perspective. “Well,” he said. “You’re supposed to put them on. See?” He demonstrated, gently assembling a tower of meat and vegetables and topping it with the bun. Then he stared at Bernardo, waiting for some sign of understanding. Bernardo didn’t know how to respond. He had never felt so foreign. “Aha,” he said, and that seemed to be enough, but it pained him to feel so unwelcome and strange.

  That night they stayed in a motel just outside town. The curtains in their room didn’t close right, and a glowing sign at a gas station across the street bathed the room in lurid orange light. The burger hadn’t agreed with Bernardo, and still didn’t, but he could see the appeal. It was an impulse, eating it, and damn the consequences.

  Maybe this was what it meant to be American. Everything and everyone struck him as young—the movie, badly acted, poorly written, was a puerile and impossible fantasy; these buildings, all hurriedly constructed, were like the makeshift toys of a precocious child. Nobody intended things to still be relevant years from now. For better or worse, these people did what they wanted and it made them happy.

  And maybe, Bernardo thought, there was something to be learned from that. The incident at the visitor center was long over, but still he felt like he was falling. He said, “Paul, I tell you something,” but Paul didn’t answer him, only shifted in his bed.

  He went on. “I am in the plane. When it crash. This is how I come to Montana.”

  Paul’s breathing came to him, fast and steady, from across the room.

  “I tell you lie before. Everybody dead. I have no passport, the people come and look for me, I don’t know what I do. I come here to see my son Antonio. But he thinks I am dead. Everybody dead.” A car passed by outside, and its headlights swept the room. “I have no money, nothing, is why I am in the woods. I don’t know where I go now.”

  Neither spoke. Minutes passed, and Paul turned toward Bernardo, his face finding the stripe of orange light. His eyes flashed, and they watched each other.

  “I want to go home. But I lose everything, capisci?”

  Paul nodded. After a while he closed his eyes. Bernardo watched him for some time before he too fell asleep.

  * * *

  The next morning Bernardo woke before Paul and put on a borrowed shirt and his old pants. He opened the window to let in the cool air, and turned the heater on. Paul stirred, awoke with a frown, and got in the shower. He put on the same clothes.

  Without discussion, they began to head back toward Marshall. This time they drove down the lake’s western shore. It was late Monday morning and there were few cars. Bernardo was surprised that so much of the lakeside property was undeveloped; they passed several towns marked by signs but few buildings. One was called Big Arm. He was thinking about this strange name when Paul said, “I won’t tell anybody, if you don’t want me to.”

  Until now, he wasn’t even sure Paul had heard or understood. “Please. No.”

  Paul nodded. “Will you find your son?”

  “Maybe. It not so good between us.”

  “You can stay as long as you want.”

  Bernardo considered this. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But no, he should leave. He would be no help to Paul. “No, I go soon. You very good to me.”

  After they had passed Big Arm’s tiny cluster of houses, Bernardo saw, by the water at the end of a steep dirt road, a flat yellow building and its dock. And floating at the end of the pier was a small wooden boat with a crude-looking cross sticking up in the middle of it.

  “Madonna mia!” he said. “Stop! Stop the car!”

  Paul slammed on the brakes, and the car slid into the oncoming lane. Bernardo looked behind them and saw two black tire marks curving across the pavement. “What!” Paul was saying. “What! What!”

  “There,” Bernardo said. “On the water.” He raised his eyebrows in apology. “Sorry. No…emergency.”

  Paul shook his head, less angry than disappointed, as if some dangerous and thrilling adventure had been averted, and turned the car around. He drove slowly back the hundred yards to the dirt road.

  “Here,” Bernardo said. “Here.”

  The dirt road slanted through tall grass into a clearing, where the house and pier stood. There was also a pickup truck, the same faded yellow as the house, and a gray dog that didn’t bother to stand up as they approached. Near the dog was a small boy, sitting on an old tire around which weeds had grown. The boat bobbed on the water, smaller than the ontre Bernardo had known, but true in shape, if a little rough. Something white clung to the cross, a tied handkerchief perhaps, or a plastic bag.

  “What is it you saw?” Paul scowled. “I think this is somebody’s house.”

  “That boat.” He pointed. “It is like the boat of my grandfather.”

  Paul squinted at it, then his face brightened. “Oh! You drew that!”

  “Yes, yes.” The little boy had stood up, but hadn’t come toward the car. Paul parked it in a bare patch of dirt and they stepped out. The sun was pleasantly warm, and the smell of fish filled the air, possibly from the mud on the lakeside, which looked dark and viscous with rot. Bernardo walked up to the boy. “Hello,” he said. “Tell me please about this boat.”

  “That one there?” The boy had been doing something with a stick, peeling the bark off it in long strips, and he dropped it on the ground. He was about eight.

  “In the water. This is your boat?”

  He shrugged. “It’s my dad’s.”

  “He is here?”

  The boy shook his head. “Nope. You can go look at it if you want. Don’t get in it though.” He looked down at the stick, as if he was considering picking it up. Instead he kicked it. “Why, do you want to buy it?”

  “Ah, no. Only look.”

  The boy looked disappointed. “Well, you could hang around until my dad gets back.” He looked up the road, but nobody was there. “I helped build it.”

  “Yes?”

  The boy nodded, then ran back around the side of the house. The dog, suddenly interested, got up and followed.

  The pier was sturdy and new, and smelled strongly of pitch and pine sap. The boards didn’t creak as Bernardo walked across them. Paul followed. The boat was about three and a half meters long; the cross, two meters tall, was rough and crooked. A fetid-looking puddle sloshed in the bottom, covered by what appeared to be pale circles of mold. It looked like the builder had never really seen a swordfishing boat, had perhaps heard one described over the telephone. He looked up and saw that what he thought was a white rag on the cross was actually a little statue of Christ, impaled there with nails far too large for the purpose. The nails had begun to rust, and orange stains dripped from their heads and onto the arms and feet of the statue. Christ was dwarfed by the oversized cross, as if He had been crucified by giants.

  He looked again into the bottom of the boat and saw that the patches of mold were actually floating votive candles, surrounded by paddies of melted wax. The wax was dotted with pieces of sediment: bits of leaves and weeds, dead bugs, spiderwebs, as if they hadn’t been burned for some time.

  “It’s some kind of shrine,” Paul said.

  “We built it when my mom died,” the boy said. He had come up silently behind the
m. Bernardo jumped.

  “I am sorry,” Bernardo said, but the boy didn’t seem to get the meaning.

  “We went fishing on it some. But not much. Then Dad put on the candles and the Jesus.” The peeled stick had materialized again in the boy’s hand, and now he tossed it into the water, where it floated. “So who are you guys?”

  “I am Bernardo.” He shook the boy’s hand.

  “Paul.”

  “Caleb,” the boy said, sounding strangely adult. Then something caught his eye behind them, and suddenly he was a child again: “Dad!” he shouted, and ran along the pier, his feet ringing hollowly underneath.

  The man coming down the hill was whisper-thin and dark, and he carried a small, stained paper bag. He wore aviator-style glasses and his hair was tied into a long ponytail; his stride was long and had a horsy bowleggedness, though there was no horse around. He looked up at Paul and Bernardo and raised his hand in greeting. Then he went into the house, Caleb following, and came back out without the paper bag.

  Bernardo and Paul walked into the yard to meet him. “Hey,” he said. “You want to come in for a cold drink? I got some lemonade.”

  * * *

  The four sat in the kitchen of the house, which was surprisingly spacious and cool. Their lemonade cups sat on cork coasters on an old wooden card table. The table had been refinished, its old stains sanded and varnished over.

  The man’s name was Arthur Luca, and he had lived in the house for ten years. He and his wife had built it. The land it stood on was her birthright—her family had been Flathead Indians and had lived on the reservation their entire lives. She had died of breast cancer.

  “All the women in her family died of it too,” he told them. His voice, Bernardo thought, had a strangely resonant quality, as if it were being reflected to them across water. It was a wonderful voice. If he lived in Italy, Arthur could talk on the radio. “And Caleb and me got the house. Most of her uncles and cousins thought that was only right, but sometimes a cousin’ll come down here and give me a hard time about it. If they’re drunk they threaten me. They never do anything, though. They wouldn’t, since I was married to Ada.” He drained his glass and got up. He went to the counter and picked up a green plastic pitcher. “Want some more? I got a lot of lemons. Most people drink it in the summer, but I like it when fall’s starting. Tastes best with some smoke in the air.”

  They accepted. Bernardo said, “These men, why they are angry?”

  “I didn’t grow up here.” He sat down. “I’m a Blackfeet. Some people think it’s not fair, I get to live in this place. But I got Caleb and he’s got the right, because of his mother.”

  “I’m going to live here my whole life,” Caleb said.

  “You should go to school,” Arthur said. “Then you come back and wait on me when I’m old.”

  “I’m not waiting on anybody.”

  But Bernardo was still thinking about the boat. “This boat you have outside.”

  “Saw you looking.”

  “You build it with Caleb?”

  Arthur nodded.

  “My grandfather,” Bernardo said, slowly, to get it right. “In Italy, he catches swordfish with a boat like this, for many years. It is called ontra. This is why we look. I think I never see this boat in Montana.”

  “Sure,” Arthur said. He leaned forward, his hands flat on the table. “My grandfather was Italian. He lived in Great Falls and rode rail, stoking steam engines. He met my grandmother in Browning, and they lived there. He made a boat like that one, except if I remember right, it was bigger. He and my grandmother rowed it around on Mission Lake with my father, and they caught these gigantic brown trout in the spring with spears.” He shook his head. “Everybody thought they were nuts, trying to catch trout with spears. But he did it. He was something else.”

  “So he fish in Italy!”

  “Beats me. He didn’t ever talk about it. He didn’t talk much Italian either. He just wanted to be an American and live in Montana.” He sat back, crossing his arms. “But I guess he probably did. He was dead before I was ten.”

  Bernardo wondered if this man’s grandfather could have known his own grandfather, if they might have worked together on a swordfishing crew in the Strait of Messina. He considered the name, Luca, but it reminded him of nothing. He had known no Luca in Reggio.

  The boy got up to get another glass of lemonade, and Bernardo watched Arthur watch him. His face was full of love for the boy, and Bernardo could read his mind: What if Caleb tripped on a loose floorboard and fell, what if he banged his head on the edge of the counter? What if he cut himself slicing a lemon? He remembered watching Antonio as a boy, remembered grinding his teeth together at night with fatherly concern.

  Paul spoke up. “Caleb said you used to fish in this boat.” He tilted his head toward the pier.

  “Tried it a little. Best spots around here are on the bank, anyway. Or near it.” He smiled. “We never tried fishing with spears, though.”

  Everyone laughed, but the obvious question—what he used it for now—nobody was going to ask. There was a brief silence, then Arthur leaned back in his chair. “I’m not kicking you out or anything, but I promised Caleb we’d go do a little fishing today. I got the day off.”

  “What do you do for a living?” Paul asked, a little intrusively, Bernardo thought. But Arthur didn’t seem to mind.

  “Gift shop in Polson. We carry a lot of Indian art. I know a lot of people on both reservations, and a few on the Spokane and down on the Crow, so I spend the day on the phone, talking to artists.”

  “That sounds great.”

  “It’s not bad, yeah.”

  But it was obvious he wanted to be out on the lake with his son. Bernardo pushed his chair back. “Thank you.”

  “Oh, sure.” Everyone shook hands. As they left, Bernardo took another look at the boat, and thought that there could be no better life than to live simply, alone with one’s son, to give one’s memories form and pull them in only when needed. He wondered if someday Arthur and Caleb might light their candles and cut the rope, let their shrine drift out into the lake to burn. He hoped they would.

  * * *

  On the ride home, Paul explained how the Indian reservations came into being, how the Indians were pushed into this corner of America from every direction and given the most meager of land to live on. Bernardo had seen a lot of American Westerns; the cowboys always fought the Indians but the Indians never truly lost the way they seemed to in real life. In the movies they were always a faceless and omnipresent threat, as inevitable and mindless as bad weather or disease. That so many Americans lived now among the people they had conquered was a surprise. It revealed to Bernardo an unexpected dark side to Montana, as if its people had only let the Indians live to remind themselves of their crime’s great weight. He was not surprised to learn of the animosity between the races, and was grateful for the kindness of Arthur Luca and his son.

  After this conversation, they didn’t speak for a while. The Mission Mountains crawled past them like giant storm clouds brooding on the horizon. Bernardo recognized the pass that would bring them back into the Marshall Valley, and when he turned to Paul to remark on this, he found his chin trembling, his eyes wide and stricken.

  “Paul?”

  “All the time we were there, I was trying to change my mind,” he said quietly. A truck stacked high with logs rumbled past them, and Paul seemed lost in the noise, like a dead leaf wheeling in high wind. “About a family. I tried to see it, you know, having a son, doing stuff with him. But I just couldn’t.” He shook his head. “And I got to thinking, what does that say about my life? I mean, what am I going to do with myself? I always used to think, no, I don’t know what I want, and I kind of accepted it, and there it was.”

  He paused. So they had been thinking more or less the same thing. Bernardo didn’t know if he ought to respond. “And now?”

  Paul’s face began to crumple. “And now Anita’s leaving me! It’s just me now! And if I�
��m nothing…”

  “Not nothing.”

  “If I’m nothing, then what’s the point of going on? How can I go on without her?” He smacked the wheel with his hand. “She leaves, she takes all I know of myself with her, you know? Now all I have is a lot of bad memories and a house I can sit in and think about them!” The car began drifting into the other lane. Bernardo reached for the wheel.

  “We stop, eh? Take your foot off, okay?”

  Paul slowed the car and brought it to the side of the road. He pulled the emergency brake and turned the key. When the engine stopped, he leaned over the wheel and stayed there, unmoving, for some minutes.

  “You have a new start,” Bernardo told him. “Me too. We start together.”

  “I don’t want a new start.”

  He was at a loss. Paul’s long hair draped over his hands like a creeping mold.

  “You hair is too long.”

  “What?” He looked up.

  “You need cut. Have it off. Then thinking is not so hard.”

  He leaned over and looked in the rearview mirror. “You think?”

  Bernardo nodded yes.

  Paul brought his hands to his head and, sniffing, pulled the hair back. He stared at himself a long time. “Weird,” he said. And after a moment he started the car, and pulled back onto the road.

  part three

  16

  Paul and Bernardo sat in the darkness of the car, staring at the wide ribbon of treeless ground that had materialized in the forest. It stretched from their yard all the way to the rise before the bank, illuminated by the last of the sunlight as it receded along the horizon.

  “When did this happen?” Paul said, though the answer was obvious. He felt like he had been away for weeks, instead of days. As they watched, several deer stepped out of the trees to graze in the new clearing.