A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 2

  It’s not an easy thing for a man to have a wife who’s a better basketball player than he is. I’d like to think my 3-point shot is more dependable than Lu’s, and maybe I’m a better ball handler, but only because I’m closer to the ground. Outside those two areas, though, every comparison is strongly in her favor. She’s taller than I am, just as fast, a creative passer, runs the court better, and has a deadly jumper from anywhere inside 15 feet, along with a couple of devastating spin moves in the low post. She makes up for the supposed female lack of upper body strength with her long arms and a great pair of hands. She’s also an infinitely smarter player than I am, with marvelous court vision and an almost magical intuition for what’s going to happen next, which in turn allows her to make things go the way she wants them to. Plus she’s 15 years younger than I am.

  I met her on a basketball court in San Francisco, in fact, and fell in love with her the first time I guarded her, or rather failed to guard her. Partly it was the authority and grace of her game, but also I discovered that the old defensive admonition to “put a body on him” acquired a whole new dimension when him was a her, even a her as long and lean as Lu. At that time, though, Lu was the girlfriend of Kermit the Bus Driver, who had introduced her to our regular Sunday morning game. I admired her hopelessly for a year of Sundays – among other superiorities, Kermit the Bus Driver was a much better player than I am – before Kermit decided to move to Seattle, where bus driver health benefits were better, and Lu declined to accompany him. I never asked why. She continued to attend the Sunday morning games, and, to my surprise, our basketball friendship blossomed into something more. I was particularly attracted to her level-headedness and businesslike approach to life, which I thought complemented my own rather scattershot methods. I’m still not sure what attracted her to me – possibly she’s got a thing for body hair, or maybe she thought she needed a little more cynicism and weirdness in her life. Or maybe it was just that she was beginning to sense that she wasn’t a girl any more, she wanted babies, and I was the only male in sight who seemed interested enough to make the required commitment. I recently saw somewhere that women can read, in the faces of men, which ones will make devoted fathers. I’m not saying that’s what Lu read in my face, however.

  Though she’d survived in San Francisco for years, Lu was never really happy in the city. Her father had been a Pennsylvania coal miner. While he spent most of his life hacking out a poor living in the gloomy cities a couple of thousand feet under the ground, his family lived in a small town on the surface, where his three kids grew up roaming the deceptively picturesque hills in the sunshine far above his head. Lu had a deep need for open skies and clean air, doubtless acquired by watching her blackened and weary old man emerge from the narrow tunnels every evening to receive, in summer at least, his brief ration of daylight. Alone among her siblings she’d made it to college, and later migrated to San Francisco, looking for excitement. There she’d found Kermit the Bus Driver and later me. But San Francisco, though it certainly wasn’t Newark, was too gray and dirty and had too many buildings for her taste. She regularly dragged me with her on long backpacking trips to the mountains, ignoring my city-boy grumblings. On one or two occasions we camped not far from the little mountain town of Mildred. A couple of years went by, and one day Lu, browsing the Internet, saw a listing for a social studies teacher at Mildred High School.

  By the time we moved to Mildred, about four years ago, some fault lines were opening in our marriage. For one thing, despite our move to what Lu considered prime child-rearing country, the babies did not immediately arrive. By then Lu was in her late 30s and getting seriously worried. As for me, after a year or two of marriage the level-headedness I had originally admired in her had begun to look more like a rather boring predictability. By that time, in fact, about the only place she could ever surprise me was on the basketball court. Except of course for the sudden outbreak of her Christianity, which struck like a sort of eruptive skin condition, causing her to welcome Jesus into her life, into our lives that is, become very active in Mildred’s small but spunky Presbyterian congregation, sometimes pray out loud at embarrassing moments, devotedly visit the lame, blind, halt, and sick, and give away large portions of our small income to various deserving causes and sometimes to less deserving (in my opinion) individuals. Accompanying and perhaps not unconnected to her sudden religious fervor was what I considered an unrealistic increase in procreative pressure – the sort of stress that can have unpredictable effects on the performance and behavior of a man in his mid-50s.

  The affair of the basketball team stretched things to near the snapping point. Though Lu had taught math in San Francisco, there had been no job for her when we’d moved to Mildred, and time had soon begun to lie heavy on her hands. She’d been able to land a part-time job on the morning shift of the PetroMall, a combination gas station, convenience store, and gourmet deli that sat at Mildred’s only real intersection, between the main highway and one not so main. In the summer she folded and reshelved sweatshirts there and made sandwiches for busloads of German tourists. In the winter there wasn’t a lot to do other than chat with the deli manager, Antonio, and the other guys who manned the counter. But that left her free through all the long afternoons. I don’t know what she did with her time. There was the church, of course, and I know she hung out a lot with Janet Blythe and the glamorous Myrtle Bench, both of whom taught at the high school and so were sometimes free in the late afternoons. As far as I could tell, though, all they did was gab and drink too much coffee.

  In any case, I was too busy to pay much attention. When I moved from the urban educational jungle to Mildred High School, my contract, along with teaching history, economics, psychology, and study skills, had included coaching boys’ basketball. I also had volleyball in the spring, but nobody was very interested in that. Basketball, however, was taken quite seriously out there in the desert. Lu stood it for one season, watching my spirited but anarchic team rushing fruitlessly up and down the floor, before she brushed me aside and offered herself to Javier Shivwits, as basketball coach, that is. Javier Shivwits, although his main focus was on turning Mildred High School into an academic training ground for Ivy League colleges, was by no means blind to the role of athletics in fashioning the well-rounded high school transcript, and he accepted her offer immediately, trying to soften his betrayal by pointing out that at least that part of my paycheck wouldn’t be leaving the family.

  In a way I wasn’t unhappy that Lu had found a project. On the other hand, it was more than a little humiliating to be replaced by her, especially when the team, which had played like a pack of psychotic greyhounds for me, immediately began to win. Not to mention that our positions had now been switched 180°. She was busy in the afternoons, while I found myself wandering the windy winter streets of Mildred without much to do. Of course, for a teacher there’s always grading; and sometimes, indeed, I would take my stack of papers to Stirling’s and sit there sighing with my green pen and a cup of coffee, getting the gossip from Patty Milano when she didn’t have too many customers to deal with. But I didn’t really like going straight from the classroom to my homework. More to the point, now that Lu was busy all afternoon, her friend Janet Blythe, Mildred High School’s Visual and Performing Arts teacher, was free. Sudden surplus of free time; mid-50s; unforeseen termination of athletic career, in which replaced by wife; performance anxieties occasioned by advancing age and failure to impregnate wife; declining interest in wife’s too-familiar, ingenuous body; unforeseen proximity to attractive Visual and Performing Arts teacher with dance training. You may connect the dots.

  I’m going back over this history in order to explain why Lu felt it desirable, even a year after the end of my modest adventure, to accompany me on my weekly visits to Hathwell, California, where Janet Blythe had recently gone into hospice care. We were scheduled to take a festive dinner down there on Christmas Day, in fact, the day after the appearance of the strange lig
hts in the night sky over Mildred. Lu didn’t officially know what had gone on between her friend and me, but she knew it involved physical attraction, and in keeping with her very literal worldview she was uncomfortable at the thought of the two of us alone together in a room with a bed, even a hospital bed.

  You might think she wouldn’t be very anxious to visit this particular person; but if you’re a real Christian, what better opportunity to practice the Christian virtues of forgiveness and charity than to visit your husband’s terminally ill suspected ex-mistress on her bed of pain? There might even have been a certain satisfaction in visiting the ex-mistress with your husband’s squalling, drooling baby son slung over your shoulder. But knowing how seriously Lu took her moral precepts, I doubt that she would have allowed herself that particular pleasure.

  On that Christmas morning Lu and I lay in bed late, huddling together in somewhat wary companionship and watching the room gradually fill with the gray light of the late sunrise. Both of us like to sleep with the window wide open, which can make it hard to get out of a warm bed on winter mornings, and this morning there was no hurry anyway. Plus we were reluctant to disturb Mervyn, our decrepit old cat, who had recently taken to sleeping between us again, now that various of his organs had begun to shut down. Albert, too, was sleeping in, exhausted by all the excitement and his unusually late bedtime.

  “Father MacGill seems to be taking those heavenly lights a little more seriously than I would have expected. He’s usually more hip than that.” I was provoking her, of course, knowing it was a mistake but unable to resist. The Reverend had spent a few minutes at the midnight service in an impromptu speculation on the possible spiritual significance of such celestial fireworks. I knew Lu had also been excited by the lights, appearing as they had on Christmas Eve. It was the kind of sign that she would be unwilling to accept as accidental. I could feel the friendly double-bed atmosphere leaking away as I explained why I was sure the lights had been nothing more than a couple of meteors, or fragments of a single meteor, and wondered out loud why someone as rational and level-headed as Father MacGill could let himself go off on a supernatural excursion over them. As I’ve already mentioned, Lu’s religious trip is a bit of a sore point between us; but I’m not sure why I feel this need to crush her upbeat spiritual imaginings under my secular hobnails at every opportunity. I attribute some of my insistence to a distaste for the current resurgence of religious formulations that involve the bombing, beheading, cleansing, segregating, enforced pregnancy, or even just marginalizing of people who don’t share them. Although Lu herself is the kind of person who, if she finds an ant in the bathroom, carries it outside on a square of toilet paper to start a new life somewhere else. Mainly, though, I just find it annoying that so many people, including my own wife, seem to prefer convoluted heavenly interventionist scenarios for everyday events that are either completely random or have simple, natural explanations. My sober reasoning never sways Lu in the least, however. It only annoys her, and our marriage would undoubtedly be healthier if I could just quit trying to bore holes in her faith. But I only occasionally exercise that kind of restraint.

  “Well, maybe,” was all she would concede, getting out of bed probably sooner than she would have wanted to and rearranging the blankets over Mervyn. She slipped her bathrobe on hastily in the icy air and padded away to get Albert up.

  While Lu was at church for the second time in 12 hours, Albert and I battled over his breakfast. He sat in the highchair, still in his loungewear, and gestured spasmodically with the spoon I’d given him to practice with, like a vigorous but erratic symphony conductor. He didn’t like his pureed apricots that morning, for some reason, and he kept staring at me pointedly, then kicking his polar fleece legs and banging the heels of his pudgy hands on the tray of the highchair. Watching him, I wondered, not for the first time, where he’d come from – how something as alert and focused as Albert could have emerged from the void on the other side of conception. The genetic answer was simple enough: He looked like Lu, fortunately, and even his brown eyes, nominally inherited from me, had more than a touch of her superior directness. But the mere tracing back of the biological coding seemed wholly inadequate to explain the conundrum of his arrival. There’s somebody new in there, I thought, staring into his eyes, the eyes of a puzzled but shrewd and determined little animal. A quick learner. I wasn’t sure he belonged to the same species as his parents.

  “Resistance is futile,” I told him. “You will be assimilated. That is, you will become human, like it or not.” He yelped and tried to fling the spoon across the kitchen but released at the wrong time, causing it to slam vertically into the floor.

  When Lu got back, we packed up the moveable feast in the cooler and a lot of shopping bags, then loaded it all into our rickety Honda Civic, along with Albert and all his bodily necessities. We left Mervyn curled in the cave I’d constructed for him out of his old fake-fleece-lined bed, with a blanket for a roof and a heating pad on the floor. We didn’t like to leave him alone all day, because we had to turn his heating pad off, fearing that it would burn him up and the house down while we were gone. I’d created the cave because it was hard for him to haul himself up onto the bed. His rickety old frame didn’t generate much heat any more, which is probably why he now preferred to sleep between us, deep under the blankets, despite the risk of being crushed by rolling bodies and the carbon dioxide concentrations that must have risen to frightening levels as the night wore on.

  I could never take the southern route into or out of Mildred without remembering the first time I’d driven it, by now almost 10 years ago. It was on one of our earlier camping trips, and we’d spent a few days traveling from one National Forest campground to another, each with its eccentric superintending couple planted for the summer in lawnchairs in front of their RV under the giant Ponderosas, with an American flag displayed on the awning. Even for an ex-Brooklynite it was all pleasant enough, hiking up to remote mountain lakes for skinny dips during the hot days and making avid love in our double sleeping bag in the intense stillness of the cold June nights. But for some reason the unspectacular strip of two-lane asphalt that carried us into Mildred one afternoon triggered something special in what Lu even then, before her Reawakening, would have called my soul. We had rolled down out of the forested hills onto the flat valley floor, which was dotted with smug black cows, each with its ominous yellow ear tag, and carpeted with the sort of unearthly green that makes you appreciate why cows like grass. We coursed along the highway toward the little town that huddled miles away against the dark western hills. Clouds of blackbirds, which in San Francisco would have been lining the phone wires like grumpy commuters at a bus stop or panhandling the Safeway parking lot, continually sparked up out of the watery ditches on both sides of the road and settled down again behind us like cooling black flakes. We could hear the chatter of that noisy crowd even over the highway wind. And there was the glitter of sunshine on the trembling sequins of aspen leaves, the huge sky and sweeping wind, the corral of mountain slopes that encircled the vast valley floor criss-crossed by thousands of hurrying birds – the spring busy-ness of the place.

  And the clouds. In San Francisco we saw a lot of what the meteorologists are pleased to call stratus – featureless gray ceilings of cloud that as far as I’m concerned are really nothing more than a kind of high fog, stretching to the ends of the earth in all directions. In the Eastern Sierra the clouds are a whole other topography, endlessly changing, growing and withering, evolving on a swifter time scale than the stodgier earthly version they embellish. They’ve got their own ranges of crouching foothills, distant aloof ridges and mysterious canyons, and mountains that glide over the desert dragging gray cassocks of rain and snow. But with clouds you can watch the tectonic processes operate, instead of having to take the geologists’ word for it – whole geographies, sequences of landscapes erected and leveled in an afternoon. I was smitten.

  Today’s clouds were fair-weather clumps that hove up in
flocks over the western mountains and rode out over Nevada like hurrying pedestrians, throwing sharp-edged shadows on the smooth desert floor. We drove up over the rim of mountains and then wound our way down the other side, admiring the sweep of the enormous desert valley that lay to the east of Mildred’s cozy little bowl. Albert rode quietly in the baby seat. He had briefly vented his rage at being stuck in the back and then gone to sleep. We continued southward, with the wall of mountains on our right sharp and clear in the morning sun, but becoming progressively hazier ahead of us, so that at the limits of our vision they were merely flat bluish silhouettes. On our left the desert spread in long, gray-green slopes, rising 10 miles away to low hills and a set of black volcanic slagheaps. Other, bigger ranges brooded out there, low on the horizon, behind the mystery of great distance.

  “Was there a sermon this morning?” I asked Lu. It seemed to me that in my childhood church-going days the minister had sometimes cut us (and presumably himself) a break on Christmas and either eliminated the sermon or made it a short, optimistic one. But no, Lu told me, a bit smugly I thought, there had been a rather long one this morning. Father MacGill must have stayed up all night writing it, inspired by the celestial lights. If there were two lights instead of the one from the Biblical story, he’d told the congregation, and if they’d reprised the trip to the east in only a few seconds, instead of however many weeks or months it must have taken the Three Wise Men to follow the original on their camels, perhaps that was in keeping with the faster pace of modern life and the need for extreme measures to capture the attention of a world habituated to streaming movies, Google, X-rated video games, and computerized special effects. Father MacGill was too hip to try to draw any direct parallels with Gospel events. The lights might or might not have portended anything special, but at the very least they provided a useful reminder that God still had plenty of tricks up His sleeves, which gave us room for hope that it wasn’t too late, that humanity might yet be deflected from its evil ways, ample evidence of which could be seen in the newspapers, even on this Christmas morning. Even in the parking lot of Mildred High School on Christmas Eve, he’d added disapprovingly.

  “What did people say?” I asked her.

  “They seemed interested. At least everybody was talking about it in the coffee room.”

  “I’m really pretty sure they were meteors,” I said, trying to take a soft line.

  But Lu had been fortified by Father MacGill’s refusal to dismiss the lights as some mundane natural phenomenon. “I know you say that. But what about the way they moved so slowly and hovered? Meteors don’t do that, as far as I know. And it did even look like they might have landed up on Devil’s Table. Matt Matawan was already headed out there after church to see if he could find anything. I think he thinks they were alien spaceships.” She laughed a little bit, but not too hard.

  I thought about the two lights, one green, one white, lowering themselves slowly toward the dark plateau of Devil’s Table. Matt Matawan was my fellow teacher, the math and science guy, so it wasn’t too surprising that he’d be out there on the desert looking for physical evidence. But he was also a strong churchman, and one of those scientists who believe that everything, including science, is properly – in fact, inevitably – directed to the service of the Almighty. What he’d really want to find out there would be physical evidence of some kind of miracle, whether of the science fiction or the spiritual variety – that’s what would make him happy. I’m not saying miracles can’t happen. It’s just that I’ve never heard about one that I didn’t think somebody had just dreamed up, out of their own wishful thinking, or that couldn’t be explained by normal physical processes. People are always looking for signs and patterns, and so they read anything they want into the natural phenomena. The grieving figure of the Virgin Mary formed from a random drip of chocolate. Come on. I’ve noticed, while sitting on the can, that practically every tile on our bathroom floor seems to have some kind of face on it – animal, human, demon – formed by the random splatters of ceramic glaze. One of them even appears to be a bearded individual who I could probably identify as Jesus if I wanted to, except that he’s wearing a cowboy hat. I suppose Jesus can wear any kind of hat he wants, but why would he choose our bathroom floor as a place to manifest himself? I have to admit that I accept the scientific explanation of meteors without ever having actually ridden one of them in from outer space and had it vaporize under me in the upper atmosphere. But that scenario just seems to fit comfortably within the boundaries of everyday experience. Why invent a miracle to explain a traffic accident or a successful trip to the grocery store?

  My view of the universe is not dry as dust, and it’s OK with me if there are a few things we can’t explain. Lu’s slant, I knew, would be more like Father MacGill’s: she’d prefer to interpret the lights as a sign from God. For that reason, she probably hoped Matt wouldn’t find anything out on the desert except maybe a silvery effulgence emanating from the tangy sage leaves and a thread of incense in the air. I let it drop. I was certain the excitement would die down in a couple of days.

  Hathwell is an odd little town, drowsing at the foot of the mountains about halfway between the two more prosperous metropolises of Bone Ore and Fetlock. In gold mining days the town was a lively place, a rude county seat sweating with avarice and sin, but it had fallen on hard times when the gold veins played out. The county offices had moved to Fetlock, which in the 20th century had grown into the main staging area for backpackers, hunters, and fishermen in the summer and fall and skiers in the winter. Hathwell’s stately 19th-century county building had stood empty for many years before going through successive incarnations as a millionaire’s hunting lodge, a Congregationalist church, a real estate office, and finally the hospice that now occupies it. It’s a rather pleasant place, despite its current melancholy function, with high-ceilinged rooms and wood paneling and tall windows of wavy glass looking out onto grassy lawns and huge century-old trees.

  Janet was taking her daily exercise, shuffling down a long hallway in her slippers next to the rolling intravenous hanger, as if it were a skinny walking companion, but she got back into bed as soon as we showed up. At that point the hospice was still allowing her to wear her own nightgowns, rather than those immodest backless hospital things, but I think she was a little shy of being seen anyway, even by me, or especially by me.

  She’d lost a lot of weight, which made her dark, steady eyes look even bigger, but her skin still had the supernatural smoothness that had lured me in a couple of years ago, when we’d first met by the groaning copy machine of Mildred High School. Her hair was growing back, but now it was ash blonde and curly, instead of dark and straight and thick. I doubted there would be time for it to grow long again.

  It hadn’t occurred to me when we were putting the Christmas dinner together, but now all the stuff we unpacked from the cooler and our two or three shopping bags seemed like an affront. The look in Janet’s eyes as she watched us laying out this spread was unreadable, but her gaze certainly held no interest in food. That left us in the uncomfortable position of tucking away this huge meal in front of a starving person, almost as though we were flaunting our healthy appetites. She accepted a glass of cranberry juice and took a couple of sips to make us feel better. While we ate, sitting uneasily in the hospice’s straight-backed visitor chairs and trying not to appear to be enjoying the food too much, she occupied herself by dandling Albert and cooing at him, holding him under the armpits and jouncing him up and down, to his great joy. I wondered if she’d ever thought about having kids. She was an interesting and attractive woman, but somehow she’d never been able to fashion a long-term relationship. Notwithstanding our physical intimacy, Janet had always been completely opaque to me. After what, if it wasn’t lovemaking I thought was at least pretty good sex, she would lie on her back as though paralyzed, staring unhappily at the ceiling, speechless and unresponsive, while I stroked her stomach hopelessly, trying to intuit how I’d failed her. Her focus no
w on Albert, I thought, was stronger than it had ever been on me, no matter what physical transports she’d been treating me to. She lifted him with her hands under his fat biceps, asked him questions, smiled into his little Lu-replica of a face. He smiled back. I watched her slim hands, feeling a kind of guilty repugnance now that her smooth, elegant body, with which my own had once exchanged such intense sensations, had traveled to this very different place – the zone of needles and tubes, perpetual nausea, exhaustion, emaciation, enemas, and even less enjoyable “procedures”.

  To soothe my own discomfort, I told her about Mildred’s heavenly lights.

  “Do you really think something landed out there?” she asked me. “Aliens infiltrating Mildred.” She laughed, but I could see she was intrigued by the idea.

  “Meteors” I said. “It’s the simplest explanation. Occam’s Razor.”

  “But maybe not the best one,” she said. Lu was watching our interaction curiously. She mentioned Father MacGill’s sermon about the lights, and Janet latched right onto it.

  “Why not?” she said. “Occam’s Razor my ass. You logical positivists are a lame bunch. You don’t want to leave us anything but greasy nuts and bolts.” She smiled at the drooling Albert again. I reminded her that I was a history teacher, a romantic humanities person, and that Mildred’s main rational science type, Matt Matawan, was probably out on the desert at this moment in his all-terrain vehicle, sifting the volcanic sands for Martian scat. Looking into her steady gaze, I wanted to deny the boring image she was forcing on me, to tell her what an enigma I thought she was, for example, a riddle that was only deepened by the trip she was now embarked on. But I didn’t want Lu to think I knew Janet well enough for her to be an enigma.

  “Matt Matawan just wants to be department head,” Janet said. “He likes being the center of attention.” That didn’t seem reasonable to me. The Mildred Science Department consisted of Matt himself, teaching physics and chemistry, and Tucker Wing, who taught the bio classes plus Driver’s Ed, and coached the two-member fencing team. It wasn’t much of a power base.

  “He seemed quite sincere. And excited,” Lu said.

  “He’s always excited. It’s the excitement that matters to him, not what’s actually going on. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong in this case.”

  Janet’s harsh judgment on Matt Matawan surprised me a little. I was even a little jealous that he’d entered her consciousness enough for her to have an opinion. Although she’d been somewhat invigorated by this conversation, we could see that she was fading. She handed Albert over to me and sank back onto her pillow with her eyes closed. So we packed up our baby and our guilty repast and took our leave, making as many hopeful comments as we could about small things in the very near future: that the night wouldn’t be too cold, that she would sleep well, that it would be sunny again tomorrow. She nodded, and even smiled when Lu took her hand and asked if she could say a prayer. She continued smiling, with her eyes closed, while Lu prayed and I stood by uncomfortably. It was the only acknowledgement anyone made that Janet’s situation was out of the ordinary.

  We drove north without saying much. The mountains had already blocked the setting sun, casting a deep shadow over the road, but out to the east the desert was still glowing. Two converging contrails cut across the black mass of the mountains, and the low sun threw their long shadows onto a higher layer of feathery cirrus.

  I’ve never spent a night in a hospital, unless you count the couple I spent on a cot next to my mother’s bed after her cancer surgery, and I was finding it difficult to imagine what Janet was experiencing physically. I was sure she was lying on her back in the hospital bed with her eyes closed, just as she had after my most strenuous erotic ministrations, but with pleasure now replaced by pain in her nerve endings. The connection between those two very different physical states puzzled me. It seemed odd that they could both be part of the same lifetime; and yet, mulling over what I knew about Janet, I thought I could sense the subterranean flow that bound them together

  It was almost dark in the tall pines by the time we started up the winding road toward the pass, cruising very slowly. Unlike most of the natives, who generally drive like maniacs in their rush to cross the vast distances between points of human interest in this part of the world, I prefer to keep my personal tally of crushed animal bodies as low as possible.