When the Stars Begin to Fall

by James Lincoln Collier

  I wished Dad would come home with the truck so we could go out looking for her. Mom ought to be doing something. She didn’t have a car, but she could be trying to find out where Dad was, to tell him. Or she could be phoning around to people to see if anyone had seen her. Or she could call the police. Do something, instead of just sitting there drinking coffee and worrying. That was the trouble with Mom: There didn’t seem to be much to her.

  I finished up the garbage and carried the can back to the house. Helen still wasn’t home. I hosed the garbage can out so it wouldn’t stink. Then I went up to my room so as to be where Mom couldn’t start asking me questions. All my schoolbooks were still in my locker at school where I’d put them at lunchtime, but I was supposed to be writing a report on the ecology of the Adirondacks, which I knew a lot about anyway. So I started on it.

  But I couldn’t concentrate. The longer the day went on, the more I worried about Helen. Why wasn’t she coming home? It began to grow dark, and still she didn’t come. She always came home by supper time. There wasn’t much else for her to do. I told myself that she was just messing around somewhere, and tried to concentrate on my report. Then I heard Dad’s truck drive in and stop. The door slammed.

  Maybe Helen had got a ride home with Dad. I jumped up and ran to the window. It was just Dad. He took his toolbox out of the back of the truck and carried it up to the barn. Then he came back down to the house and went in. I jumped up and went downstairs. Mom was still sitting at the beat-up blue kitchen table drinking coffee. Dad was standing in the middle of the kitchen. He said, “What do you mean she’s run off?”

  “They called from the school. She was crying and ran out of school. Harry went looking for her, but he couldn’t find her.”

  “Crying?” Dad said. “What was she crying about?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom said. She looked like she was about to cry herself.

  Dad looked at me. “What’s this all about, Harry?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think she was pretty upset about something.”

  Mom started crying. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, Frank.”

  Dad sat there for a minute, frowning and thinking. Then he said, “It probably wasn’t anything. Nerves or something. Let’s eat.”

  Mom tried to stop crying, and wiped her eyes with a tissue.

  “No, Frank, something’s wrong. It isn’t like her. I just know something’s wrong.”

  “You’re making a big thing out of nothing. She probably had some trouble with her boyfriend. It’ll all blow over. Let’s eat.” He sat down at the table.

  Mom stood up and faced him. “Frank—”

  “Stop worrying. She’s probably made it up with the guy already, and she’s fooling around with him and forgot the time. She’s sixteen. She isn’t a baby. So what if she’s ten minutes late.”

  “Please, Frank, please.”

  He sighed. “All right,” he said. “All right. Come on, Harry, let’s go find her.”

  We weren’t going to find her. By now I knew that she’d run away. Where, I didn’t know. But I knew that she wasn’t around Timber Falls anymore. I didn’t say anything; I just got my jacket, and we went out into the truck. Dad started the engine. “Where does she usually hang out?”

  “Mostly everybody goes to Teddy’s Pizza Parlor,” I said. Helen went there sometimes, I knew, but she usually didn’t have enough money, not unless she could borrow some. We drove into town and stopped at Teddy’s, which was between the hardware store and the liquor store. “See if she’s in there,” Dad said.

  I didn’t want to because everybody in there would know who I was looking for. But I couldn’t argue with Dad, so I got out of the truck and went into Teddy’s. Charlie Fritz was there, sitting at a booth fooling around with a couple of guys. He looked at me, but he didn’t say anything. I turned around, went out, and got back into the truck. “She isn’t there,” I said.

  “Where else is she likely to be?” he said. “Who’s her boyfriend? Maybe she’s over at his house.”

  “She doesn’t have—She isn’t going with anyone right now,” I said.

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend?” he said. “A girl that pretty doesn’t have a boyfriend? What about her girlfriends?”

  “I don’t know, Dad,” I said, “She doesn’t have too many friends.”

  ‘That can’t be right, Harry,” he said. “She must have friends. She’s pretty and smart, she ought to have lots of friends.”

  “She doesn’t have too many friends,” I said.

  “I don’t understand that,” he said. “I just don’t understand it.”

  He didn’t know anything about Helen. He didn’t know anything about who she was, or what she did, or what her life was like. What could I say to him? How could I explain to him that the whole time Helen was in elementary school she stank? How could I explain to him that everybody we knew thought we were trash?

  We drove around town for a while, looking into the stores that were still open, and then we drove home. Dad didn’t say very much but just looked straight ahead all the way home.

  FOUR

  After Helen had been missing for two days, Dad went down to the cops and told them about it. They put in a missing person report and told him not to worry, teenagers were always running off and usually came back by themselves. When Dad came home, he told Mom, “It’s just a phase or something. She’ll come back. Give her a few days of missing her meals and she’ll come back.” Then after that he seemed to forget all about her.

  But Mom didn’t. She moped around the house worse than ever. She could hardly get herself to cook—all she’d do was open some cans of stew or something and heat it up on the stove. I could tell that Dad didn’t like it, but he didn’t say anything. She even stopped watching TV. Mostly she sat at the kitchen table in her bathrobe drinking coffee. At night she just picked at her food.

  “I can’t stand watching you pick at your food like that,” Dad said. “Stop worrying, she’ll come home soon.”

  To tell the truth, seeing Mom so low all the time got on my nerves too. Once I went into Helen’s room looking for a pencil, and I caught Mom sitting on Helen’s bed, holding Helen’s sweater in her hands and smelling it. “My poor baby,” she said when I came in. “I’m so worried about her.”

  I was worried about her too. I knew that she didn’t have any money, because she hadn’t had enough for lunch the day she ran away. She hadn’t taken any clothes either. They were all still in her room where she’d left them. How was she going to live with no money and no clothes?

  I wondered where she’d gone. Farther downstate, I figured—Rochester, or Albany, or maybe even New York City. I’d been down to Rochester on a school trip to see a science exhibit that one of the photograph companies there put on, but I’d never been to New York. Helen had been to New York once on a school trip; they saw some Shakespeare play and spent the night in a big hotel. When she came back, she was all excited about New York—how big it was and how many people there were there, and the wonderful things that the stores were packed full of. She couldn’t get over the stuff in the shop windows—books and records and cameras and clothes and hi-fis and silverware, anything you could think of. So she might have gone to New York. You could hitch there in a couple of days. But what would she eat while she was hitching?

  I really missed her. We used to fight a lot, but when you got down to it, she was the only person I had to talk to. We talked about Mom and Dad a lot—about Mom being sick all the time, and Dad not having a regular job, and us being poorer than everybody else. We talked about why we never saw our relatives. Dad’s brother lived out in California, and he had children that were our cousins. We knew what they looked like, because we’d usually get a Christmas card from them with a photograph on it. There were two girls and a boy, and they were eight, eleven, and thirteen. We wondered what they were like, and what their life was like in California. Mom said that Dad’s brother did real well—he was a foreman
in a printing plant out there and made a lot of money. Dad said that was okay if you didn’t mind being regimented, but it wasn’t for him.

  Mom’s parents lived in Binghamton. They were our grandparents, but we never saw them, even though it wasn’t more than a couple hundred miles down there. We never got a Christmas card from them, and Mom didn’t talk about them very much, and not at all when Dad was around, so we didn’t know much about them. But once I heard Mom talking to them on the telephone—I don’t know how I knew it was them, but I knew. Afterward Mom cried and cried. Mom would talk to Helen about them more than she did to me. Helen said that our grandfather was sixty years old and was a carpenter. The whole thing was, they didn’t like Dad, Helen said.

  So we didn’t know much about Mom’s parents, but we didn’t know anything at all about our other grandparents, Dad’s folks. He hardly ever said anything about them at all. Once when we drove out into the mountains and he was in a good mood, I asked him where they lived.

  “Out in Oklahoma,” he said. ‘They were mean and I never got along with them. My old man put me to work in the fields when I was fourteen, and I ran away after that as soon as I could.” But that’s all he would ever say about them.

  Helen and I talked about things like that a lot, but one subject we didn’t talk about was being trash. We just didn’t say anything about it to each other. I wouldn’t have minded talking about it, but Helen didn’t want to. Every time I started to get into it, she would say that I was exaggerating or something. She would admit that we were poorer than most people in Timber Falls, and that our house was junky, but she wouldn’t admit that everybody in town thought we were trash. The reason why she didn’t have any boyfriends, she said, was that she wasn’t pretty enough, or didn’t have the right personality, or didn’t have nice clothes. Each time it was something different. After a while I stopped trying to talk to her about it.

  Even so, we talked about most things, and we did a lot of things together. When Helen was in the third grade, and I couldn’t read yet, she would read me stories in bed when we were supposed to be asleep. She’d come into my room with a library book and get into bed with me, and read to me in a low voice so Mom and Dad wouldn’t know we were awake. I really liked that, having somebody to snuggle up to; and I’d listen and get sleepy, and finally I’d doze off and Helen would say, “You fell asleep again, Harry.” And I would say, “No, I didn’t, I just closed my eyes.” Then she would make me tell what had happened in the story, and of course I couldn’t, and she would say that she wasn’t going to read to me anymore. But she always did.

  When we got older, we used to play cards in the afternoon when there wasn’t anything else to do. We played go fish and old maid mostly. For a while we had a Monopoly set. I don’t know where it came from. It wasn’t whole: we had to use buttons for the pieces, and there wasn’t the right amount of money, but we played it anyway. Sometimes the game would go on for days, and of course, we always ended up fighting. I don’t know what happened to the Monopoly set. After a while it was gone.

  Sometimes on the weekends, if Dad wasn’t around giving us jobs, we went bike riding. Helen got her bike first, when she was around eight. Dad said bikes were a middle-class luxury he couldn’t afford, but Helen begged and pleaded with Mom, and finally Mom got Dad to get Helen a bike. It was a beat-up old Schwinn that he’d got used somewhere. Helen found some paint out in the barn and painted it. She painted the fenders blue and the frame red and the seat yellow. I sat in the barn watching her. By the time she was finished she had blue and red and yellow all over her—her hands, her face, her ears, her hair. She thought the bicycle was beautiful, and so did I at the time. I was only about six then, and it seemed to me just the smartest idea to paint the bike different colors. A couple of years after that Helen got a better bike. It was a bike somebody’s kids had got too big for, and they gave it to Helen. I guess they felt sorry for her. So Helen gave me her bike, and now it was my turn to paint it, and I made it all green, which was the kind of paint there was most of in the barn.

  After that we took bike trips. I was maybe nine or ten, and she was twelve. We would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If we had any money, we would buy Cokes and Devil Dogs or boxes of cookies. Then we would ride out to this place we knew of, where there was a stream coming down from the mountain. The road crossed over the stream on a little bridge, and down from the bridge in the woods a little way was a grassy place by the side of the stream. You couldn’t see it from the road. We would go in there and be secret and tell each other what we were going to do when we were grown-up; and we would eat our lunch, and swim if it was really hot, for that mountain stream was pretty cold even in the middle of summer.

  Then after a couple of years Helen began going to high school and got interested in guys, and we didn’t do stuff together so much. But I remembered all the things we did. It made me sad to think of them, and I wished Helen would come back.

  Having Helen run off like that just made the talk about us worse. The kids at school were curious, and they kept coming around and asking me where she had gone and what she was doing. Even the seniors and juniors kept asking me, guys that I hardly knew and that had never paid any attention to me before.

  They’d come up to me and say, “Hey, White, I heard your sister ran off to California.” Or they’d say, “Hey, White, I heard somebody saw your sister down in New York hanging around Times Square.” Or they’d say, “Hey, White, I heard your sister got busted for drugs.” They were hoping to find out something really bad about her. It didn’t matter what it was, just as long as it was something bad.

  I would answer, “It’s none of your business.” If it was some guy older than me, he’d tell me to watch my mouth, but he’d go away because he knew he shouldn’t be asking private stuff like that. If it had been somebody else’s sister, everyone would have been shocked and afraid to bring it up in public. But with us it didn’t matter: it was just what you would expect.

  So I stayed away from people as much as I could. But the whole thing made me more determined than ever to show everybody in Timber Falls that we were as good as they were.

  I planned that I would go over to the other side of the river and look for the pollution pipe on the next Saturday. Dad would have work for me. He always did on Saturday. But he usually went off somewhere himself, so I’d be able to get away.

  That was the way it worked out. He told me to get started on another garbage pit, which would be four feet deep in the middle, and ten feet across. So I went out right after breakfast with a shovel and a pick and began digging. It was going to be a pretty day—a warm spring day with a fresh, new smell in the air, and with birds swooping across the fields and through the woods, gathering twigs and grass for their nests. It would be a nice day to go exploring along the river. I dug away for a while, working up a pretty good sweat. Then I heard the truck start, and I tossed down the shovel and went back to the house, just in time to see the truck pull out of the driveway. I went into the house and made myself some lunch, for I figured I’d be gone until the afternoon. There was some sliced American cheese in the icebox, and a dish of cold string beans, which were pretty good in a sandwich if you put a lot of mayonnaise on them. Mom was watching TV, but she came out to the kitchen to see what I was doing.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “Out to look for birds,” I said.

  “Be sure to work on the garbage pit,” she said, “or you’ll get in trouble with Dad.”

  “I will,” I said. “When I come back.”

  She looked at me, mighty sad. “You’re a good boy, Harry. I hope you’ll always be a good boy.” I knew she was thinking about Helen.

  “I’m not so good, Mom,” I said. I put the sandwiches into a paper bag.

  “My poor baby,” she said. She was still thinking of Helen. “I can’t understand what made her do it.”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I said.

  “Did she ever say we were treating her
badly?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “She never said anything like that.” How was I supposed to tell the truth?

  “It makes me feel so bad to think of her out there someplace all alone.”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “Be a good boy, Harry,” she said.

  I didn’t usually bother to hitchhike into town, because people who knew who I was wouldn’t pick me up in case I had cooties. But this time I tried it so as not to waste time, and a stranger came along and took me into the town.

  The Timber River ran alongside the town about a quarter mile from the main street. Back in the old days, when there was a lot of logging in the Adirondacks, the river had been used for floating logs out to the sawmills. Timber Falls had grown up around the sawmills as a lumbering town. Actually there weren’t any real falls there—just some rapids where the river ran down a steep slope below town. A road ran up each side of the river—a pretty good concrete road going out to the carpet factory on our side, and a beat-up old blacktop road running along the other side, where there were some dairy farms. To get to the old blacktop road, you went over the railroad tracks and then crossed the river on an old steel bridge painted silver.

  So I did that; and when I got to the middle of the steel bridge, I stopped. I stood there, looking down at the river through the steel supports, feeling the sun on my back. There was stuff in the river all right—streaks of green, and patches of oil filled with wavering rainbow colors. The colors were pretty, but not if you knew what was causing them. If you knew, they were ugly.

  I walked across the bridge and came to the blacktop that ran along this side of the river. The blacktop was all busted up because the farmers who lived farther out ran their tractors and harvesting machines along it. They weren’t supposed to, but they did, and they broke up the blacktop pretty quickly.

  I began to walk out along the blacktop. Along the riverside there were some trees, and along the other side, open fields, some of them filled with last year’s corn stubble, some of them black dirt where the farmer had already plowed for this year’s corn. After a bit the road veered away from the river, so that there was maybe a hundred yards of woods between the road and the river. You couldn’t see the river at that distance, and you couldn’t hear it either.