The Freak Observer

by Blythe Woolston

  I don’t know who arranged for the beer, but there it was, an aluminum keg on a stump. The sun was starting to drop behind the mountains, but it wouldn’t be full dark for hours yet. The creek running through the clearing was bone-shocking cold, but it felt good when I splashed my face and arms.

  Out of nowhere, things had suddenly improved.

  After the second cup of beer, my shoulder didn’t hurt so much anymore.

  I sat on the tailgate of Abel’s truck with Esther. She was drinking too but a lot more slowly. We didn’t talk. Esther always had kind of a gift of silence. She never said much, and she never made me feel like I had to say anything either. It’s sort of uncommon, the ability to be quiet.

  By the time the moon came up, I had a pretty good buzz. Some of the kids decided to go into town, so I caught a ride down the road and had them drop me off near home.

  Nobody was there when I got to the house.

  Mom was at work.

  I had no idea where Dad and Little Harold were.

  It didn’t really matter.

  I took a shower and some aspirin and went to sleep.

  I didn’t dream at all.

  I was the luckiest girl in the world.

  . . .

  “How did you spend your summer vacation?”

  I spent the morning doing housework at home and afternoons working like a machine at Cozy Pines. Then I spent the nights out in a bunch of different hidden places along the logging roads drinking beer and being as normal as I could figure out how to be.

  Mostly, I got there with Abel and Esther.

  I never really understood how beer and bonfires fit in with the rules they had to follow. The closest I ever came to asking was one night when Esther and I were sitting on the hood of the truck watching the stars come out.

  “Star light, star bright,” I said.

  “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.’ And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars,” said Esther.

  I pointed to the brightest light in the sky and said, “That’s Jupiter. It’s a planet.”

  “In the Bible, it’s a star,” said Esther, and she smiled and took another sip of beer.

  She looked happy. She was happy. There was no good reason for me to make her unhappy, and insisting that the Bible had it wrong or asking questions about her home life and her parents would probably have done just that. So I let it go.

  I doubt that Abel and Esther provided all the details to their dad, but I didn’t go out of my way to tell my mom and dad exactly how I was spending my time either.

  It wasn’t like we were the first kids to get drunk in those places. Our parents probably had keggers there twenty years ago. This isn’t a deep mystery or new development. They probably figured we were safer at a campground or some logging road than we would have been on the highways.

  There were some driving miscalculations, to be sure. I thought it was kind of fun when someone got high-centered or backed up too far and dropped a wheel off the edge of the road. There were always enough of us that we could work it out. It feels pretty cool, actually, to be working with people and to be able to move a rig back up on the road.

  Of course, we were out on the highways too.

  . . .

  That, actually, was the one thing my parents would have been hard-assed about, drinking and driving on the highway. It isn’t an irrational concern, and honestly, I avoided it.

  I have no death wish. I do not think I am bulletproof. Since the bike wreck, it is pretty clear to me that mistakes happen. So I was cautious. But I was also happy to have a life of my own. I liked seeing people. I liked drinking beer and being out in the woods. And I really liked having something to look forward to when I was washing dishes at Cozy Pines because, without that, the job would have been even worse.

  Then, in late August, the sun turned red behind a skin of smoke. There were fires in Idaho. It was the break we had been waiting for all summer, and Dad needed to go.

  “Good-bye, Dad, make lots of money and don’t get caught at the wrong time in the wrong place.”

  I never really said that. It’s too real, the chance that a guy, a crew, will get caught when a fire blows up when the wind shifts.

  All the guys on the fire lines carry shelters now. That’s what they call those flimsy little tube tents of shiny foil— shelters. When the fire is coming, it’s time to scrape a bare spot in the mineral soil and climb in. The shiny surface is supposed to reflect the heat. As long as you don’t move, as long as you stick your nose in the dirt and don’t try to run when the fire starts to roar overhead and blister your skin, and as long as the fire doesn’t steal the air right out of your lungs, the fire shelter is supposed to keep you safe. The guys make jokes about baked potatoes. I say nothing about baked potatoes when I say good-bye to Dad.

  A fire could take off right here at home, of course. If it does, we get the hell out fast. That is all. No heroic stand with a gravity-feed garden hose from the creek. I don’t have it in me. I saw a deer once that had been caught in a fire. It was rigid and black and something pink—brains? blood?—had boiled out of its nose after the burning was done.

  I have no interest in dying like that. I have no interest in dying at all.

  . . .

  I don’t think Little Harold had been in the shower for a month. He smelled like a hot puppy rolled in angleworms and trout slime. He was very brown, even after I got the dirt washed off. Dad didn’t take the whole sunscreen thing very seriously.

  It was fun to be with him again, to tickle his skinny ribs and watch cartoons on TV with him. The last few days of summer slid by like that: work, home, the smell of burning forests, and a red cherry sun floating through the sky.

  Sometimes I learn something new before I even get to homeroom. There are these glass display cases that clubs and teachers use to advertise their particular obsessions. For example, there is the giant bottle full of fruit flies. First, there were only two and now—Oh! The flymanity!—crowds living off corpses. It’s a zombie-apocalypse movie but with fruit flies.

  Today I notice a new display.

  “??? Are you REALLY ready for SEX ???”

  It’s an interesting question. I don’t have a condom in my pocket. I no longer have a friend-with-privileges.

  “??? Am I ready for SEX ???”

  Um, No. That’s the answer they want, but not the reasons.

  The case is filled with old kitchen and housekeeping stuff. A metal dishpan filled with china teacups and a cast iron frying pan, the kind of iron you had to sit on a wood-stove to heat, a washboard. . . . A washboard? What is the message here? Does sex lead to time travel or what? Have sex, spend the rest of your life so deep in the past you have to wash underpants by hand. There is a big cockeyed baby doll propped in the corner. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life changing diapers? And washing them with a washboard? Only if you’re married. That’s the point. Somehow, being married will make the cockeyed baby and the laundry and the cooking and the dishes and the diapers so much fun.

  This is the sort of time when Corey used to say, “Take a moment to pity the stupid.” I hear his voice in my head. I miss him.

  . . .

  By the third week of this school year, the routine was clear. I rode the bus to school. I got off the bus and went to my classes. I got back on the bus and went home.

  I still had my job at Cozy Pines. No more weekday shifts though; I couldn’t get there on time. It was just going to be weekends and holidays for lucky me.

  Then Friday came around, and I was sitting on a tailgate watching the river current. The water looked thick and ropy as melted glass. I could feel the cold seeping through my jeans. I had a little slice of time I thought belonged to me, j
ust to me, between school and work on Saturday.

  I heard the tires squeal.

  I heard a blunt thud.

  Sometimes I wonder if I really heard that sound, the sound of the truck hitting Esther. Could I really have heard that sound, separated from the rest of the crash? Or did my memory just make that up, to help me try to understand the sequence of events? Do I just remember a blunt thud because I think there ought to have been one?

  . . .

  There are infinite universes, and each has its observers. A Freak Observer pops into existence as a self-aware entity that makes its universe orderly. Do you ever wonder why time doesn’t run backwards? Do you ever wonder why gravity is always on? Freak Observer. Freak Observer. Freak Observer. We owe it all to the Freak Observer. At least I think we do.

  This is my universe, and I am bound to observe it.

  I have watched babies—both my Asta and Little Harold—discover the world. For weeks they just look and look. Sometimes they cry. They eat and they get their diapers changed. Then they find their hands. It’s an amazing thing. They go cross-eyed from concentration. They stare so intently at their hands. One hand touches the other. They get the hand into their mouth, and they are so intense. Honestly, I have seen teenage boys having sex, and they aren’t even so intense as babies who are figuring out that they have hands . . . and mouths . . . and the world.

  So I have seen how observers are born into the world.

  And I have seen how an observer dies.

  I have to find a poem for English class. The whole class does. We have all been turned loose in the library on a scavenger hunt, an Easter egg hunt, and we are supposed to bring poems back. Song lyrics don’t count. There was much griping about that little point.

  I don’t know why Ms. (Heartless) Hart hates the librarian, but apparently she does. She shepherded us all through the halls and into the library. Then she disappeared.

  Today there are people in the library who are never in the library. They just want to get this over with quickly. They swarm the help desk. I’d say “like maggots,” but they are noisy and calling out for poems about beer and suicide and vampires and baby deer. Maggots are pretty quiet, in my experience. I am quiet like a maggot. I don’t even ask for help. I pretend that I’m working on poetry, but instead, I’m writing about noisy maggots.

  . . .

  I haven’t spoken to my dad for a long time. We have nothing much to say. He tells me no stories. I ask him no questions. We don’t smile.

  Tonight, though, I said, “I need a poem. A poem about stars.”

  He got up from the kitchen table and went to the shelves in the living room. He doesn’t search around. He goes right to the place on the shelf and pulls out a little book. He opens it and hands it to me:

  Stars at Tallapoosa

  The lines are straight and swift between the stars.

  The night is not the cradle that they cry,

  The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.

  The lines are much too dark and much too sharp.

  The mind herein attains simplicity,

  There is no moon, no single, silvered leaf.

  The body is no body to be seen

  But is an eye that studies its black lid.

  Let these be your delight, secretive hunter,

  Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever mingling,

  Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic.

  These lines are swift and fall without diverging.

  The melon-flower nor dew nor web of either

  Is like to these. But in yourself is like:

  A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight,

  Flying and falling straightaway for their pleasure,

  Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold;

  Or, if not arrows, then the nimblest motions,

  Making recoveries of young nakedness

  And the lost vehemence the midnights hold.

  —Wallace Stevens, Harmonium, 1922

  My dad doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t help me read. He doesn’t explain anything.

  He doesn’t have to, I guess. I have never seen the ocean, so I’m not really sure about sea-lines, but I have seen the stars. And they aren’t really like dew or webs or what I guess a melon-flower might be. They are stars. I know that starlight travels in a straight line for longer than my whole life to reach my eye—but my eye being here is purely accidental. If I blink, that light is gone forever.

  That has to be good enough.

  . . .

  So I read the poem in Ms. (Heartless) Hart’s class. She calls on me near the end of the period. If I had a longer poem, it would have been cut in half by the bell. As it is, she asks me a question, “What does that mean, Loa?” She never asked anyone else that question. Everyone else got a round of applause for being able to stand up and make the sound of words. I did that. It isn’t good enough.

  So I answer, “The stars shine, and it doesn’t matter if we see them or not.”

  The bell rings.

  Ms. (Heartless) Hart raises her voice, “Loa. Where did you get that poem?”

  “From home,” I say. I hand her the photocopy with the bibliographic citation—as required by the assignment.

  “I can’t give you the library research credit.”

  I say nothing. She bent the rules for the mouthbreathers who brought song lyrics, but she can’t bend the rule for having a dad who reads poetry. Understood.

  For just a moment, she’s looking me in the eye. I pretend I can see right through her retina into the flabby jelly behind it. I don’t flinch.

  . . .

  When the snow comes, it’s the light and not the cold that lets you know.

  My dad says that snow is how you know if you are a kid. If it makes you happy, you’re a kid. It’s that simple.

  But maybe it’s not. I remember the first time snow made me cry, and I was very little—only in the first grade.

  It came in the night, while I was sleeping. I’m pretty sure my mom and dad both knew. They needed to keep the house warm. They kept an eye on the weather. They might have known it was coming because Ed the smiling weatherman told them it was coming—or they might have seen how the clouds were acting. But I was little. It wasn’t my job then to keep the fire going. The only weather reports that matter were the ones my mom dished out with breakfast, “Eat your oatmeal. It’s going to be cold today,” or “You are going to be hot as a monkey in that stupid sweatshirt.”

  I woke up, and the world was white. So what? It happens. Snow happens. But when I went downstairs, Mom said there wasn’t going to be any school. Silly Mom. It was only Wednesday. Wednesday is library day. Wednesday is a school day for sure.

  Mom said, “No school.”

  I cried.

  It was Wednesday. Library day. I needed to swap my books in. Wednesday is library day. She was wrong. I was right. I found my own boots. I zipped my own coat. I was right. It was library day.

  I opened the kitchen door and stepped out onto the porch. I couldn’t go any farther. The snowbanks were in my way.

  Mom grabbed my arm and dragged me into the kitchen.

  “Harold,” said Mom, “You deal with this.” She pointed at me.

  Dad came to the doorway. He looked at me. He looked at me a long time.

  “OK,” he said. “You wait here.”

  I waited in the kitchen. I was still crying, but I was being quieter about it.

  “C’mere,” Dad yelled.

  I went out the door. He had his snowshoes. He picked me up and put me on his shoulders. I remember that he did that, but I don’t remember how it felt. I wasn’t crying anymore. I was happy. I was going to school.

  We went across the creek and through the woods. It’s shorter to the highway that way than it is if you follow the road.

  But when we got to the highway, it wasn’t there. All there was was snow. I know it was the bus stop, but there wasn’t any highway. There weren’t any cars. Dad just stood there
with me on his shoulders. It was so quiet. I could hear trees breaking under the snow. I knew then that the bus wasn’t going to come. So I cried.

  I cried all the way home.

  When we got there, Dad put me down and told me to go in the house.

  Mom wiped my nose and took off my coat.

  I just stood there in my boots and snow pants. I sucked each breath in a long sniff and let it out in a wail.

  My mom wiped my nose again and put her warm hands against my face and tipped my head so we were looking at each other eye to eye.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “If you don’t stop crying, you are going to make yourself sick. And you’re making the dog sad.”

  Dad came in. I turned my bawling self toward him. After all his effort so far, I still expected him to fix it. I still thought there must be some way to go to school.

  Dad walked right past me and opened the closet under the stairs. After a little rummaging and swearing, he pulled out a cardboard box full of yellow books. Then he pulled out another. He put them close to the heating stove.

  “Read these,” he said.

  So I did. I read National Geographic for five days straight. I didn’t know what the hell I was reading about most of the time. I mostly just looked at the pictures. I learned though. I learned a girl can ride camels across the desert in Australia. I learned that tulips have tiny seeds, and Newton was a silver-haired man interested in rainbows. And I learned that there are stars in the sky that I can’t see.

  . . .

  I’ve been going to the library during lunch and whenever else I can make an excuse to be there. I look for information on two problems. Problem 1 is the Freak Observer. What is it really? Is it a real thing or just a fairy tale of physics? At this point, I don’t have any confidence in my understanding. Problem 2 is getting rid of The Bony Guy. Honestly, there is squat-all on the library shelves that is useful to me, but the Internet helps.

  Today the focus is Problem 2, subpart A: dreams.

  It’s hard to find useful stuff about dreams. I have to dig through a lot of crap about what things “symbolize.”