Meteors in August

by Melanie Rae Thon

  “You won’t believe this,” she said. “You will not.” Her hair had dried in twisted strands and shook like a head full of water snakes. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.” She saw Daddy standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking like his own ghost. “Mercy me, Dean, you are going to broil wearing that flannel robe in this heat.”

  “Mind your business, Arlen,” he said.

  “How dare you tell me to mind my business? I saved your life, Dean Macon, and I could have just kept to myself.”

  “Please,” Mom said, “not again.”

  Daddy sat down on the last step and tightened the belt of his robe. I was glad he stayed clear of the wind of the fan. He had the weeklong smell of sickness. When I took him the breakfasts he didn’t eat or the suppers he barely poked, I left the tray on the nightstand and slipped out of the room as fast as I could. Mom refused to sleep with him though he begged not to be left alone in the dark. At first she pretended it was accidental: she fell asleep in the chair in his room or on the couch downstairs; but now she slept in Grandma Rose’s room every night, and I didn’t blame her. Still, I believe I would have slept on the floor before I slept in the bed where a woman died.

  “I think it was a two-seater,” Arlen said.

  “What?” said Mom.

  “The plane. I’m telling you about the plane we saw go down in the lake. It was such a little thing, like a piece of folded paper. It circled wide at first, real high, a kind of loop-the-loop. Then it started spinning, tighter and tighter, heading straight for the water. We all sat on the beach—laughing and clapping. We thought it was a show. Any minute we expected the pilot would pull back. But all of a sudden, there wasn’t a sound. The engine stopped dead. The wind stopped too, and the plane fell out of the sky like a bird with a bullet in its belly. Dead duck. Hit the water like a duck too, that flat splat. It sat on the surface for a couple of seconds, bobbing; then it sank so fast I thought I’d had a dream and none of it had happened.”

  I looked over at the stairs to see how my father was taking it, but he was gone. This past week he’d gotten so quiet it scared me—no more clomping or banging, no more yelling or snoring. He was slipping out of the world, it seemed to me, and I wondered if you stopped hearing a person before he disappeared for good.

  “Well?” Mom said.

  “Well, what?”

  “The pilot, did he get out?”

  “Now, this is the truly strange part, if you ask me. I swear on my dear mother’s grave I saw someone swimming away from the wreck. Les and the boys just laughed at me. They said the crash would have knocked him silly; he didn’t have time to get out, and even if he did, he’d be in no condition to swim from the middle of Moon Lake to the shore. They said I saw driftwood or a piece of the plane rocking on the waves, but don’t you think I know the difference between a man and a piece of wood?” She laughed. “Well, sometimes it’s harder to tell than others, but this time I’m sure: there were arms moving. There were legs kicking. Someone’s alive and we should find him before he’s not.”

  “Did you call the sheriff?”

  “That worthless dog? He’s barely moved all week. Won’t wear his badge either. Sits in his office, panting from the heat. Brokenhearted over Myron Evans, I hear. You’d think they were sweethearts. Anyway, I tried to get Les to drive around the east shore, just to see, but he said I was on the verge of one of my hysterical fits and he was taking me home. He thinks I’m in my room, right this minute. He locked the door himself, thinks I’m sitting on the bed waiting for Dr. Ben to come give me a tranquilizer. That man could have been a fine horse doctor the way he can put a person to sleep. Whatever ails you, he thinks the best cure is to knock you out for a day or two. Never mind. You know how I escaped?” She was getting the giggles, and I began to think Uncle Les might have been right about that hysterical fit. “I climbed out the window and slid down the rain gutter. Me. Forty-eight years old. Spry as a girl. Young heart.” She gave my arm a slap. “Bet you couldn’t slide down no rain gutter, Lizzie.”

  “Don’t give her ideas,” Mom said.

  “Anyway, somebody’s alive,” Arlen said. “I hope they find him in time.”

  I believed her at first, but as soon as she told us how she escaped from her room, I began to think my uncle Les had had a good idea calling the doctor. She thought Jesse was alive too—for days—even though we’d all seen his eyes flung open, wild with surprise. We’d all seen Nina breathing into him, the only one who thought to call him back, but it was hours too late. And we’d all seen the sheriff wrap him in a sheet after the doctor said, “Been dead since two o’clock.” It was well past five. Still Arlen didn’t believe it, and Les had to hold her back when Caleb Wolfe drove away with the soaked sheet making a dark spot on the backseat of his car. At the burial she wailed: Take my baby out of that box. Reverend Piggott waited for her moaning to stop before he said: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust … And then, raising his hands to God, Weep not for him who is dead, nor bemoan him; but weep bitterly for him who goes away, for he shall return no more to see his native land.

  My grandmother dreamed of water the night she died. “I was caught in an eddy,” she told my mother, “spinning in the cold river. My head was about to go under, but I woke before the water could suck me down for the last time, and I’m still alive.”

  Grandma Rose must have known how close she’d come to the rocks, that they waited for her on the other side of her closed eyelids. But my mother said, “Hush now, hush now,” and pulled the knotted sheet from her crippled hands. When my grandmother slept at last, Mother slipped away.

  In the morning, my mother found Daddy in Rose’s room and almost scolded him for waking her. But he was on his knees, his head resting on her bed, quiet, so quiet. He had uncovered the old woman’s feet and was staring at them. He caressed one, touched her toes with his fingertips, so tender, full of awe, as if he touched the feet of Jesus. “I had a dream,” he said. “I saw her swirling in dark water, but I couldn’t reach her, you see? I didn’t get here in time.”

  23

  EVERY NIGHT Daddy called me to his room. And every night he asked me to read the paper, the Rovato Daily News, just the parts about the plane crash. I did, despite the fact that Mother had forbidden it. She didn’t like my going to his room at all. She said, “If we stay away, maybe he’ll take a bath.” That was all she had to say concerning my father.

  For a week he’d barely eaten enough to keep a chicken alive; now he ate everything I brought him and asked for more: biscuits and honey, bacon and runny eggs that dribbled down his chin, pork chops and gravy and heaps of mashed potatoes. It seemed he thought it was his duty to eat enough for himself and for that boy from the plane who might be lost in the hills above Moon Lake.

  Three days passed, and the divers still hadn’t found a trace of the plane. This confirmed Father’s old fear of Moon Lake, and his belief that there were trenches so deep a man might never be found. But on the fourth day the Rovato Daily News printed a strange letter that made Daddy weep until he heaved. That ended his days of feasting. He was so weak he let Mom take him to the bathroom. She didn’t bother to shut the door, and I watched from the hallway as she stripped him, her kindness swift and silent. She washed his hair and scrubbed his back, brushed his teeth as if he were her child. When he stood, shivering and naked, he held a towel in front of himself and said, “Don’t look at me.”

  Mother said, “I wiped the shit off my mother’s ass for eight years. You think you can break my heart like she did, old man?”

  Daddy sat down on the edge of the tub. “He killed her,” he said. “He killed my girl.”

  This was the letter:

  I am a friend of the boy who flew the plane into Moon Lake. He has asked me to write this letter so that you will understand and hopefully forgive what he done. Yes, he is alive, but a long way from here where you won’t ever find him. There’s a girl in that plane, Gloria Zykowski, and she is not alive but my friend
says please get her out and send her home. He knows he did the wrong thing but there is no changing that so please don’t think it will do any good to find him and punish him. It won’t. That girl is dead. He rented a plane in Calgary and filed a flight plan going north but they made a wide circle south to Moon Lake where you saw them. He did not mean to kill her. He loved her. He wanted to marry her but she’s only sixteen and her father said no, so my friend, Roger Skeba, that’s his name, came up with this plan to fly the plane into the lake and swim away. No one would be looking for them way down in Montana. He figured it would be just like they disappeared. Looking back it’s easy to see it was a stupid plan but he didn’t mean any harm to her. They were going to get married and live in a town where her father would never find them. He said it was going to be like they was born again, that’s what he said, but it didn’t work out that way as you already know.

  Sincerely yours,

  A. Friend

  Now, of course, a lot of people thought that letter was a hoax, some crazy kid playing the meanest kind of joke imaginable; but the next day the Rovato paper tracked down a story from a Calgary newspaper: a small plane, supposedly heading north, had disappeared on August 9. Sure enough, the missing people were Roger Skeba, twenty-four, and Gloria Zykowski, age sixteen.

  We were still taking bets on it—somebody reading about the missing plane in Calgary and the crash in Moon Lake might have put the stories together for his own amusement. It was hard to believe anyone would down a plane in a lake on purpose, even a fool for love. Of course Arlen believed it and felt vindicated: that was no wood on the water.

  Mom made me swear not to aggravate my father with this crazy speculation; but the next night when I took him supper, he begged me to read the paper and I couldn’t refuse him any more than I could have refused a dying man a sip of water.

  A dozen men were on the job now, trying to find the plane, but that kid must have had a good eye because he aimed straight for the deepest crevasse of Moon Lake. From the sky, he must have seen the place where waves darken, where green rolls over itself, a froth of white, then black. “I told you,” Daddy said. “They might never find her.” His eyes began to tear. The evening sun burning through the curtains made the room close and hot, but Daddy hugged himself and shivered, a chill in his blood as he sank to the frigid depths, stones tied to his feet.

  “Fish big as men, peering in the windows, looking at her, I saw them. And she’s cold, Lizzie, she’s so cold. I saw her last night, right there.” He pointed to the window. “She said, ‘I can’t see, Daddy, the water’s too dark. The water’s in my eyes.’ But she stared at me. She saw me. She blames me.”

  My father believed his water dreams.

  “Please,” I said.

  He pounded the bed with his fists. “No. I won’t believe it. I won’t believe she’s dead till I see her face.”

  People were looking for that boy, but he’d vanished like a vapor off the water, leaving no tracks and no scent. Father wasn’t the only one who took it personally: there was a fervor to the search, as if Roger Skeba had stolen each man’s daughter. Some folks swore that Red Elk must have guided the boy over the mountains. Who else could have done it? The old hatred flared. But no one went after the big Indian. They’d seen him leap into a burning building and survive. They knew they didn’t have a chance with such a man.

  On the seventh day the men working the lake dropped a line and hit metal. It took all afternoon to get it hooked up, and it was almost dark by the time they dragged the plane off the bottom of the lake and hauled it to the shore.

  But it wasn’t too dark to see the girl slumped in her seat, still strapped tight by the belt. The men stared at her through the windows, their eyes wide as fish eyes, and they were afraid to open the door, and they were afraid to touch her and know her name.

  We wouldn’t have heard the news until the next day if Arlen hadn’t come flying into the house, shouting her fool head off, the joyous bearer of bad tidings. Daddy jumped out of bed and started pulling on his pants while Mom stood in the doorway, arms crossed, shaking her head.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

  “Looking for that boy,” said my father. “We oughta lynch that boy for what he did.” But already he was swaying, his muscles flaccid from days in bed. He had to sit down before he fell on his face.

  “You’re in no condition to chase after anyone. Besides, that boy’s long gone.”

  “He killed my baby.”

  “No, Dean, some other girl, just a stranger.”

  But he didn’t hear her. He rocked on the bed, clutching at his side. He looked as if someone were squeezing the breath out of him. “It hurts,” he said, “here—and here.”

  Mom whispered to me, “Call Dr. Ben. Tell him to get here quick.” She sat down next to Daddy and held him while I went downstairs to make the call. Arlen was halfway down the block already, going from house to house spreading the news about the girl and telling her own story over and over, saying she’d seen that boy swim away from the wreck, and if Les had only believed her for once in his life they might have caught him. Yes sir, he’d be in jail this very night, and if he’d lived till the trial, they might have seen some justice done. That poor girl.

  Dr. Ben appeared at the door in twelve minutes flat. For once he understood there wasn’t time to spare. By then Daddy had curled up on the bed with a pain that shot from his groin to his shoulder. Mom was sure he was having a heart attack, that’s how his father had died, sprawled on the floor at fifty-two.

  Dr. Ben pressed and poked, shook his head, poked again. I thought the worst, but all that feeling and head shaking only meant that Dr. Ben didn’t have a clue. “It’s not his appendix,” he said, “I know that, and his heart sounds fine—to me.” He put the stethoscope on Daddy’s chest again. “Yes, yes, I think so, it’s fine, just fast, that’s all, from the pain, I suppose.” The doctor didn’t instill great confidence in me. I wondered if his hearing was good enough to listen to a man’s heart. “I’ll just give him a shot,” he said, “a little something to get him through the night.” I remembered Arlen calling Dr. Ben a horse doctor for the way he doled out tranquilizers.

  “I’ll check on him in the morning,” the doctor said. “Call me if there’s a problem.” Daddy moaned; he didn’t think he’d last till morning. Dr. Ben filled the syringe, jabbed my father’s butt, patted Mom on the arm and said, “There now, he’ll sleep straight through. Don’t you worry.”

  But we weren’t worried about him sleeping; we were worried about him waking up. The shot did its work: Daddy’s fists uncurled. Still, I wasn’t convinced Dr. Ben had done the right thing. I’d seen my father bring a hammer down with all his might and smash his thumb. I’d seen him cut his leg nearly to the bone. In times like those he swore until I thought his head would spin off, but he never let out a whimper as he did tonight, a helpless animal cry. That’s how I knew this was different. And that’s how I knew this was bad.

  I grew up trusting this doctor. He was always old, his eyes filmy, his hands soft, his hair white and so thin the pink scalp showed. He’d taken care of me and Nina when we’d had everything from chicken pox to poison ivy. He stitched my head when I fell on the ice, and he did a pretty good job except that no hair ever grew in that one place behind my left ear. He was slow, but if you could just hold on, he’d come to your house no matter how late you called or how hard it was snowing. A child with a fever was the most important business in the world to him. But I didn’t trust him now. Maybe he’d tipped into senility. How could he look at my father and not be afraid the man would die in the night?

  Something else nagged at me and made me wonder about the doctor. I knew he couldn’t do everything. I remembered Mother holding Nina’s head on her lap. My sister cried and cried. She had just been to see Dr. Ben. She kept saying, “He won’t do it, Mama. He won’t do it.”

  And Mom said, “Maybe he can’t.”

  “He won’t,” Nina said, “that
’s all. He says it’s wrong.”

  “We’re going to have to tell your father. He’ll know soon enough.”

  “Wait, please, just a few more days. I have to think. Maybe Dr. Ben will change his mind.”

  He didn’t change his mind, though, because in a few days Nina was gone. At the time, I didn’t understand what the doctor had refused to do for her, but I knew now. He wasn’t always right.

  Even the tranquilizer wasn’t strong enough to hold Daddy down for long. My mother and I watched as dreams tossed him. His eyes stayed closed, but his body raced up hills and down ravines, splashed across rivers in the dead of night. He was looking for that boy. He meant to kill him with his bare hands. Mother stayed to see him run, and I went to my room.

  I opened my window wide, not wanting anything between me and God. I thought of Mrs. Graves. In times of trouble, she’d told us, we mustn’t try to change things, only understand them. She’d understood why God gave her daughter a deformed baby, and I could see where it had led her. My mother was right about using your own head sometimes. I wasn’t willing to trust God any more than Dr. Ben if it meant Daddy might die.

  That night, I struck the second bargain of my life with God: I begged Him to take the pain from my father’s body and put it into mine. I thought of Job with those sores from the top of his head to the soles of his feet; I knew how bad it could be. I took a deep breath and felt the first pinch in my own chest. I waited for more. I longed for it.

  I closed the window halfway. The house was quiet. A breeze from the mountains felt almost cool and the leaves of the maples in the yard rustled like praying hands. I took this as a sign.

  In the morning I felt a dull ache in my bowels, a throbbing in my head. I believed my prayers were answered, and that God in His infinite mercy was bringing my affliction on slowly so that I could bear it. I trotted down the hall to Daddy’s room, expecting to see him sitting up in bed, smiling, his big hands folded in his lap. And I would sit beside him, suffering and holy. In my purity, I wouldn’t stoop to reveal the reason for his recovery.