Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “You riding trains?” the younger one asked him.

  “Trains? No.”

  The man nodded. “You’re not from around here.” The formality from outside the gallery was gone now.

  “No.”

  “You mean that about your son?” He turned in his seat and faced Bernardo through the grate. “You have a son here?”

  “He does not know I come to see him. A surprise.”

  The cop nodded, then looked back at his partner, still in line. “Why don’t you go now? If you can keep out of trouble.”

  “Go?”

  “Yeah. Get out and disappear?” He reached for the dashboard. Something clicked and the locks on the doors popped up.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m letting you go. It’s no big deal. The gallery guy, Dale. Calls every time a bum looks in the window.” He shook his head. “A faggot if I ever saw one.”

  A bum? The cop was silent a moment while he looked in the deli window. “Officer Puhl doesn’t really want to bring you in. He just wanted you out of Dale’s hair, you know?” He opened his own door and stepped back to open Bernardo’s. Even in those two steps Bernardo could see the swagger, a sort of proud, sexual manner that at once repulsed and fascinated him. The door opened and a plume of air pushed into the car. Compared to the air inside, it was fresh, a profound relief.

  “Hurry it up. Puhl doesn’t give a rat’s ass if I do it, he just doesn’t want to be around to see it.”

  Bernardo stepped out tentatively onto the pavement, still unsure that he was free. He looked back at the young policeman.

  “Go ahead.”

  He went. He walked around the car, past the door of the deli. He looked in and saw Puhl looking back from the counter. His eyes followed Bernardo and Bernardo nodded once at him. Puhl turned away.

  The police in Italy would never waste their time with something so insignificant, he thought. They wouldn’t let themselves be used by a fool the way these men had. For some reason he was reminded of the cellular phone (which seemed to have vanished from its corner), and thought of it as part of a larger picture of waste that was drawing and erasing itself around him. He had exiled himself into a country of sad proxies.

  He also understood that he could never disappear here. He felt like the pea under the mattress—his presence in Marshall so insignificant as to mean nothing to anyone, yet the cause, already, of more commotion than he would have thought possible. Reggio had been so popular with tourists for so long that he had forgotten: nothing sticks out like a foreigner in a small town.

  And that’s what he would always be here. But Marshall was all he had, and for whatever reason, it had just been given back to him. A second chance. He unfolded the torn-out phone book page and reread the address. Somewhere in this town was a part of him, something no one could know, could understand, the way he did. That was a start.

  He found a bench in front of a coffee shop and sat there to rest. Teenagers walked in and out, the cuffs of their jeans dragging along the ground like mud flaps. How the girls would laugh in Reggio! He wondered if these kids had jobs, who would hire them if they did. Grocery stores? Movie theaters? Or maybe they all worked in coffee shops like this one, and visited each other all day long.

  Of course he’d have to get a job himself. Could he start a restaurant? Work in one? A market was out of the question here—it had taken too many years to find all the things he sold at the old market. How would he find them in Montana? He wasn’t about to go sniffing around the American West for Italian meats and cheeses. Everyone around him looked like frumpy Swedes.

  He considered just how far he had gone carving out his little niche in Reggio. He had been comfortable, if not perfectly happy. He was never lonely. He spent most of each day doing exactly what he wanted. He thought of Paula: why had her company seemed like such a burden to him?

  Nothing had ever seemed so burdensome as leaving his burdens forever.

  He leaned his head back against the plate glass window of the coffee shop, exhausted and miserable. The air was getting cold. If Antonio and Lila didn’t take him in, he would soon freeze in the night, like a stray dog.

  * * *

  And then somebody was sitting next to him. He’d heard a car parking in a nearby space and heard this person shuffle across the sidewalk to his bench, and felt the boards sag as the person sat down. He got the feeling he was expected to speak, but he didn’t. He heard a little throat-clearing: it was a woman.

  “Excuse me, you look like you need to be someplace else.”

  Not the comment he expected. He looked up. She had gray hair and a small round face. Something gleeful and strange twitched in her eyes.

  “You give a ride?” he said.

  She slapped her knees, excited. “I knew it! I was driving along—very slowly, I drive slowly for safety, though it seems I’m the only one in this town who does—and I saw you there and thought, that man needs to get somewhere! That man needs to move!” The woman was dressed in a long black skirt and a red cardigan, and a white handbag hung over her arm.

  “I go see my son.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing to do. Amelia Potter. You know, Potter Pencils?”

  He shook her hand. “No.”

  She looked at him with suspicion, then understanding. “Oh! You’re not an American, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re from…let me guess…France!”

  “Italy.”

  “Well, I was close, wasn’t I.” She leaned toward him, as if to disclose a secret. “The one thing everyone in America has in common is that they’ve used a Potter. The name Potter is just about synonymous with pencil in these parts.” She giggled. “And that’s my family. Potter.”

  “Ah.”

  “And I’ve got a car now! Uncle Sam sent me his first check this month, and I thought, what better way to celebrate being an American than getting my own car? And I passed my driver’s exam.” She elbowed Bernardo, as if this was a little private joke between them.

  He noticed that they were facing a car—a squat compact whose previous paint job showed through a fresh coat of red. He could make out a few words and symbols in black, a number of scratches and dents.

  “This is your car?”

  “Isn’t it a beaut?”

  “Beaut?”

  “Beautiful! Isn’t it beautiful!”

  He nodded. “Very nice.”

  “I owe the people of Marshall more than a few rides!” she said, suddenly loud. “And now I’m paying them back for their kindness! So tell me where you want to go.”

  He didn’t understand her, and he wasn’t a person of Marshall, at least not yet, but he dug into his pocket for the phone book page he’d torn out. “Do you know Speedway?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “I want to go…” He unfolded the page. “Two-one-one-oh. This carpet store. My son work there.”

  “Well, you must be proud.”

  He shrugged, nodded.

  She was smiling at him conspiratorially. “Well? Hop in, hop in!”

  * * *

  Amelia fussed. She fastened her seat belt, then took it off and smoothed out her skirt and sweater, then put it back on. She tucked her handbag under the lip of the seat, patted it. She rolled down the window, adjusted the side mirror, rolled the window back up again, sighed heavily and rolled it back down and readjusted the mirror and rolled it back up. She adjusted the rearview mirror, said “Oops,” adjusted it again, peered into it, touched her hair, nodded to herself, and readjusted the mirror.

  “Buckle up! Buckle up!”

  She had to go through her bag to find her keys, then restowed it under her seat and put the keys in the ignition. She started the car, then looked over her shoulder. “Ohh…” she said. “Tell me how close I’m getting, okay?”

  Bernardo craned his neck. A large pickup had pulled in behind her, leaving about an arm’s length for her to maneuver. He noticed that the back seat of the car had been
pushed down, and the entire rear section was filled to a considerable depth with cardboard boxes full of pencils.

  “Maybe a meter.”

  “Metrics!” Amelia shouted. She backed up carefully and skillfully, put on her turn signal, and pulled out into traffic. “Now, what is your name, sir?”

  “Bernardo.”

  “Bernardo. Now, I’ll bring you where you want to go, but since you’re new in town there are a few things I want to show you.” She turned to him and frowned. “You are new in town, then?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. “Oh, good. Have you been to the courthouse? The Red Horse Wilderness? Have you been to see the river?”

  “No.”

  She eased onto a side street. “Well! Then we have a few things to do. And we’ll eat lunch at the Sandwich Barn, my favorite place. Do you like sandwiches, Bernardo?”

  “In Italy, I make sandwiches many years.”

  “Wonderful!” She flashed him a brilliant crackpot grin, and made an unexpected left turn down a hidden street. At the bottom of it was a large brick building, and beyond the building flowed a river, wide and swift. He hadn’t had any idea a river ran through town, let alone one this big. Then he remembered seeing it from the plane, twisting between mountains, how it seemed to flow out of its way to hook through Marshall. The sight instantly filled him with calm, and he realized how scared he was of what was to come, of meeting Antonio.

  “Beautiful,” he said, as she pulled into an empty space in a large, freshly paved lot.

  “I’m so glad to hear you say that.” She pointed. “This used to be a train station.”

  He’d meant the river. “But there is no tracks.”

  “Oh, no. The trains stopped running here years ago. There are still freight trains, but they’re on the other side of the river.” She pointed again, and he could see another brick building in the distance, its tower barely rising over a jumble of telephone wires. “They run from here through Butte and to Billings.” She shook her head, but her eyes shone. “But the passenger trains are gone.”

  “In all the movies,” Bernardo said, “there are many railroads.”

  “Everyone drives now.”

  Bernardo leaned into the windshield, to see the brick building’s tower. High above, where a bell should have been, was a red glow that he could see came from a Coke machine. “What is this building now?”

  “Hunting club. They let you go in and look around, but it isn’t worth it. There’s a lot of ugly carpet and the walls are covered with dead animals.” She made a face. “Carpet! No offense to your son, but do you know what’s under there? Marble! Imagine what it took to get marble to Marshall!”

  They got out of the car and stood at the river’s edge. In a section near the bank, where a small island diverted current away from them, the water was calm. Fish rose to the surface, leaving concentric circles in their wake.

  She took him back downtown, to the courthouse, where Paul had dropped him off earlier. Amelia told him the building was designed by a man named Gibson, who also designed the Museum of the Arts, the post office, some buildings at the University. They drove past them all, and she pointed out the granite chevrons on the corners, the jagged corbels two bricks thick under the eaves, tall windows packed with tiny panes—the architect’s trademarks. They were sturdy-looking, functional buildings. Afterward they skirted town to the south, drove under the highway and rails, and watched as the city gave way to condominiums and half-built neighborhoods of identical houses, and these to small ranches, where horses walked around eating grass or trotting along lengths of fence. When the trees became dense, she turned onto a gravel road and into a small parking lot, where several cars were parked. They got out and walked on a well-worn trail for several minutes, Amelia so full of energy that, even in her stockings and pumps, she put a considerable distance between them. They came to a ridge that looked out over a narrow canyon, along the bottom of which ran a creek. It reminded Bernardo of the ridge he had camped on after the crash, and the creek, white below him in the sunlight, gleamed like the plane’s cracked and scattered bones.

  “What way is that?” he said, pointing back over town, which was visible to them beyond the slope of the hill they’d climbed.

  “North.”

  “That is called the…”

  “That’s the Salmon Wilderness, there. And that mountain is Elk Mountain, because it looks like an elk’s back.”

  He was as far from the crash as he could be in this valley, and still see where it happened. “This is a beautiful place.”

  “It goes on and on.” She was smiling, a smile utterly without guile. She looked youthful now, though he knew she must be his age.

  He said, “Do you think…it is too late for a new life?” Not because he needed to know. He thought he did know. But he wanted her reaction, wanted to see something he said register on another person’s face.

  She turned to him, her eyes full of dismay at the question, full of delight at giving her answer. “Oh, of course not!”

  “I am almost old,” he said. “I am sixty-five. This is when people stop to work?”

  “Oh, sooner, these days.” She swept her hand through the air, as if lecturing the canyon. “People are so lazy, they have so much. People don’t know loss. They think when something bad happens it’s the end of the world.” She touched his shoulder. “You know, I used to be so confused, Bernardo. They had me put away for it. But I’m your age, and I’m pretty much all right, and I just learned to drive.”

  “So you not confused now?”

  “Well, sometimes. A lot of the time, I guess.” She grinned. “But not right this minute.”

  * * *

  Perhaps he had been living his life wrong all along, he thought walking back. Perhaps the disaster that dropped him here was not the point, and the point was his survival. It was possible there was no one who had ever beaten such odds. It was possible he was the luckiest man in the world. What to make of that?

  They ate sandwiches at Amelia’s favorite restaurant. Bernardo had an Italian hoagie. It wasn’t too bad, considering, maybe a little mild. He was halfway through before he realized he had no money.

  Amelia laughed when he told her. “When you get going on your new life, you buy me a sandwich.”

  They drove to an ugly part of town she called the Strip. All the buildings were low and dingy, and he saw no people walking. When they passed a side street, he noticed they were on Speedway.

  “My son work here?”

  “Oh, yes. A little further now.”

  “I don’t like so much.”

  “Well,” she said, “you can sure get what you’re looking for. There’s hardware, and books. And a boot shop.” She pointed.

  Bernardo said nothing.

  “You seem nervous, Bernardo.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re going to see your son.”

  He wiped his palms on his knees. “I don’t see him a long time.”

  She signaled and turned into a parking lot. A long, flat building housed a row of stores. He thought she was stopping to buy something until he saw the sign, on the roof above a set of double glass doors. “Patti Floor and Wall.”

  Well. This was it, then.

  “Is this going to be a surprise visit?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She pulled the car into an empty space, halfway across the lot from the store, then turned off the ignition. From the pile in back she produced a small box.

  “You can write down your new life!” she said, as if the thought of his new life filled her with the same excitement her own might. His hands felt thick and damp. They throbbed. With one he accepted the pencils.

  “This is the only thing that I have.”

  “Good thing it’s pencils,” she said, and when he didn’t move, “Time to go.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, and made himself open the door. “Thank you. I never find without you.”

  They shook hands. “Friends!
” she said in a near-shout. “You’ll see me around, of course.”

  “Goodbye.”

  She hunched over and offered him a small wave, and he returned it. When he shut the door, she pulled out and steered carefully away toward the road. He stood and watched her pull into traffic, and followed the car until it was out of sight.

  He walked across the parking lot. Inside was probably a young salesman, who would have to run and find his boss. And Bernardo would wait, smelling the new carpet, barely able to stand from the fear. But he pushed open the door and found a middle-aged couple near the door, their heads over a sample book, and at their side, holding it, a man their age, the top of his head black, whorled with gray hairs, and this man looked up, smiling. “Hello,” he said, and looked back down.

  “Antonio.” The word a current across his tongue.

  His son looked up again, tilted his head like a dog’s, deciding whether to wag or run. The professional smile still stretching crookedly across his face, but the eyes clear and astonished.

  “Antonio, sono Papá.” And now the couple looked up, and together, slapstick, turned their heads from Bernardo to his son.

  Antonio crouched and set the sample book on the floor, his eyes never leaving Bernardo. He stood, took a step. “Papa…”

  And tears, rising in him like a sweet wind. Why? Had he expected anything different?

  “Sono vivo,” he said to his son, I’m alive. “Sono vivo, sono vivo.” He couldn’t stop saying it, even as Antonio ran to him and took him into his arms, as if it was a surprise to him, as if he had never noticed it before. I’m alive.

  The following epilogue was omitted from the original edition of this novel; it is presented here as a bonus for eBook readers.

  Epilogue

  The man had the whitest hair she had ever seen. He was looking out the window at their plane, at the hopelessly gray day. He was taller than she by more than a foot, in his sixties, handsome, and he wore a gray herringbone suit. Five minutes passed before he noticed her beside him, and then he turned, smiling.