A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  “What I do is, every time I get five hundred dollars I drop it in the safe.” The gas station owner pointed to the back room.

  “We’ll do it every three hundred,” said the skinny one.

  She was more talkative than her sister. She was notably skinny, and the quiet one was thin to a normal degree. They dressed about the same, with white T-shirts and chopped hair.

  “Can we bring our dog?” the skinny one asked. “A phone number for a thug is one thing, but the dog would be more…”

  “Preventative,” said the other.

  “That’s the sort of thing I’m going to leave up to you,” the gas station owner said. “I’ll have to tell Mayor Cabrera you think he’s a thug. He’ll like that.”

  The gas station owner lowered the blinds. He came out from behind the register, as if to give a tour, but everything in the shop was in plain view.

  “Make sure the oldest dairy stuff is at the front of the case. It’s mostly chocolate milk and half-and-half, which takes a while to spoil.”

  “Question,” said the skinny sister. “How come no energy drinks?”

  “I don’t know,” said the gas station owner.

  “Sunglasses,” the other sister said.

  “Yup,” resounded the skinny one. “Put a rack right in that corner. We’re in the desert, after all.”

  The gas station owner thought of his rucksack, almost fully packed. He hadn’t considered sunglasses. He was enjoying the preparation a bit too much, getting packed and rested. He was getting ready to test himself, not go on vacation. And if he were being strict he would’ve left his whole future to the elements, would’ve severed ties with the known world, which would’ve meant leaving the station untended. He was giving the station a fighting chance to survive his absence, he told himself, only because that was better for everyone—these girls, the failing town—not because he cared about the place.

  “This is embarrassing,” he said. “I forgot your names.”

  “Don’t worry about our real names. We’ve been Dewey and Binky since we were this high.”

  “Do you have a nickname, Mr. Fair?”

  “Well. Shade Tree.”

  “Because he’s tall,” said the regular-sized sister.

  “Probably other reasons,” replied the skinny one. “Nicknames say a lot.”

  “I can’t wait to have a child,” said the regular-sized sister. “I can’t wait to nickname that little sucker.”

  Back at home, the gas station owner returned to his rucksack. He was taking a knife, a knife he’d sharpened to the point of being almost too sharp, a knife that if it rubbed enough against its leather sheath would slice right through. He was bringing jerky, dried fruit, nuts, coffee. He was bringing water, many layers of clothing, toilet paper, lip balm, sunscreen, lighters and matches, a hat he’d bought special, a compass, a watch. He was taking a notepad and a pencil, to count the days. He was bringing both a thin hotel room Bible and his bulky Manhattan Project book. He was not taking a shotgun. This was foolhardy, he knew, but he wanted everything to fit in his sack. He was taking a .38 revolver. He did not want to take cash, but probably he would. It seemed like it would sully the endeavor, cash, but probably he would take some. The desert never played by rules or stood on ceremony, and the gas station owner wasn’t going to either. He wouldn’t leave his station unmanned. He wouldn’t set off unarmed or without money. What mattered was getting into the center of something he’d spent his life dawdling on the edge of.

  MAYOR CABRERA

  He arrived early and Dana shooed him out to the balcony. This had happened before. She didn’t want him to see her applying makeup. She didn’t want him to stand around and look at her in her jeans and T-shirt. She was in the shower now. Mayor Cabrera could hear the water.

  The balcony was tiny. You had to maneuver yourself around the door to get out there. You had to scrape your belly on the doorframe. No room for a table, not by a long shot. There was a pretty stone hill to look at, spiked with sapling evergreens. Mayor Cabrera did not understand why if you were going to bother constructing balconies, if you were going to draw balconies into your blueprints and procure the materials and burn the man-hours, why you wouldn’t make the balconies two feet bigger and then a couple could sit out here with a place to put their drinks.

  Mayor Cabrera heard the water cut off and then a few minutes later heard clinking sounds from the kitchen. Dana always prepared a snack plate to put near the bed. Mayor Cabrera could picture the look on her face as she sliced up the fruit. He very suddenly felt dizzy and reached his hand to the railing. The balcony felt high up, a lot higher than two stories. Usually, by this stage, Mayor Cabrera was like Pavlov’s dog. He should’ve been at full ready by now, and he was not. He wasn’t experiencing a hint of readiness. He felt snuck up on and disoriented and wanted off the porch.

  He entered the condo and crossed over the cushy rug in the den and leaned in the archway of the kitchen. Dana paused in her cutting but didn’t turn to face him. The kitchen smelled like melon and there was a tiny window through which could be seen a vast canyon view.

  “None of this seems in season,” Dana said.

  “No?” said Mayor Cabrera. “Well, it’s the desert. The only thing that’s ever in season is chile peppers.”

  “Where do cantaloupes come from, anyway?”

  “Cantaloupes,” said Mayor Cabrera. “I guess I have no idea.”

  Dana resumed her slicing, rising onto the balls of her feet for leverage. Mayor Cabrera examined the back of her, and when it did nothing to help him he looked away. Dana had a bunch of liquor bottles on a high shelf above the window. Mayor Cabrera knew most of the bottles had likely been gifts from clients. Dana only drank gin. He didn’t want to ask her about her Christmas, didn’t want to know who she’d spent it with. He hoped just with her mother in Abilene.

  “What is that thing?” he said.

  Dana turned her head to see what he was pointing at. “Oh, that’s a holder for glasses. A glasses rack.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Eyeglasses, not drinking glasses. It doesn’t work, though. The glasses fall off.”

  “You’ve got a lot of glasses,” said Mayor Cabrera.

  “Fourteen pairs.”

  Dana set the plate she was working on aside and cut into something new. The new smell was stronger, earthy and cloying.

  “A kid I used to tutor gave it to me. It doesn’t work for glasses but I put mail under it.”

  Mayor Cabrera knew Dana had been a tutor for years, all through her twenties. She’d been to a few years of college. She’d told him she’d preferred tutoring girls because the boys always liked her too much. They always showered and put on good clothes for the sessions. She’d had to buy baggy sweat suits to wear. It was math she used to tutor. The sound of her voice seemed like it might be helping Mayor Cabrera with the lack of anything happening in his pants. He felt something, he thought.

  “How come you didn’t finish college, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I don’t mind. I never even got close. I went to three different colleges for a year each.”

  “I didn’t know three.”

  “If you count that community college.”

  “I didn’t get to go at all, so…”

  “You didn’t miss much.”

  “No?”

  “You can read, right?”

  “Passably.”

  “And you can drink beer, even when you don’t feel like it?”

  “Now that I can do.”

  “That’s all it is.”

  Dana pulled out a cheeseboard and a small pewter tankard that contained honey. The view out the window was a brush of shadows now. Mayor Cabrera heard the heat kick on.

  “I always wanted to work in a high rise,” Dana said. “People always run that down, working at a big company in a cubicle, but I think it sounds nice. Elevators and casual Fridays.”

  Mayor Cabrera adored every part of Dana. Her elbows and h
er heels. He didn’t care what she’d looked like twenty years ago. He adored her now. He could not understand what was wrong with him. His lower half was dead. He felt sweat breaking out under his clothes.

  Dana said the lid of the cocktail shaker was stuck and asked Mayor Cabrera to pull it apart. He closed the space between them but instead of reaching for the shaker he pressed himself against Dana. He had nothing to press with, nonetheless she shuddered, her knife blade sunk into a strip of mango. Her head tipped back into his chest. She held the knife as though she were steadying herself with it, the blade static there in the flesh of the fruit.

  The scent of her hair alone should have been enough. Her little waist in his grip alone. The suppleness of her ear against his whiskers. But none of it was. Mayor Cabrera felt thoroughly fed up with himself. He knew it was a lost cause. He knew that to keep trying would be swimming in quicksand. This had never happened to him before. Dana was everything and the only thing he desired.

  His thoughts quickly switched to protecting her feelings. This wasn’t her fault, of course, and he didn’t want Dana to feel inadequate. She was nothing of the sort. She would handle this sort of problem like a pro, Mayor Cabrera knew, smooth it over, but it would hurt her pride. Mayor Cabrera had to invent some emergency, some pressing mayoral business that had slipped his mind. The little kitchen window showed only darkness outside now and his nose was full of foreign fruit and Dana’s shampoo. He’d say he needed to rush back to Lofte and he’d act annoyed about it, which would be easy because he was annoyed. He was not going to wait around to see if Dana bought any of it. He was going to pay her and get his coat and get the hell out of there and catch his breath. People had emergencies. Emergencies were a fact of life.

  In his car, headed south, Mayor Cabrera had to face it: he did not want to be a client of Dana’s anymore. He didn’t want to be a client because he wanted to be more than that. He wanted her body but he wanted the rest too. He wanted Dana to be his and no one else’s. He wanted her in her jeans without makeup. He wanted her scarfing greasy McDonald’s instead of pressing her lips against a dripping plum. He wanted to watch TV with her, take up jogging with her. He wanted all her gifts to come from him. Mayor Cabrera let up on the gas pedal. There was nobody behind him. He felt rushed in his mind and didn’t want to rush down the road. What he was considering was nuts. He squeezed the steering wheel and then honked the horn a half-dozen times, trying to loosen things up in his head. He wanted to know all Dana’s problems, but he didn’t want to become one of her problems. He was entertaining a fantasy and trying to convince himself the fantasy could be reality. There wasn’t an ounce of wisdom in Mayor Cabrera. He was trying to ignore all the roadblocks, and there were plenty. For instance, where would they live? There was that. They wouldn’t live at the motel, now would they? Would she be willing to quit her job, to give up a client list that, at her age, would be impossible to recover? Did Mayor Cabrera have enough money, enough prospects, for the both of them? Would she want to be with someone of so little accomplishment? Sure, Mayor Cabrera was a mayor, but he was destined to be the mayor that finally killed off Lofte. Dana might laugh at him. She wouldn’t laugh, because they’d known each other too long, but she might not take him seriously, might let him down easy. It was a well-worn way to be pathetic, falling in love with a professional lady. Mayor Cabrera had told himself he’d set their appointments at once a month because he didn’t want to get used to Dana, didn’t want her to lose her allure, but that had never been the danger. The danger was this, falling for her, and it would’ve happened no matter how often or seldom he saw her. Normally when he drove this road in this direction, the sun was rising and Mayor Cabrera was gladly exhausted. This time, dawn was far off and if Mayor Cabrera was exhausted it was with himself. His life was off course. He’d taken a bad exit thousands of miles ago. He’d tried to fashion himself into a loner. He wasn’t a loner and he wasn’t really a mayor. He’d been an uncle and a brother-in-law and he’d once been a hell of a husband. Now he was nothing. Now he was desperate.

  CECELIA

  Picking her way through the music building, changing batteries and locking up A/V cabinets that professors had left wide open, Cecelia saw Nate’s name on the rehearsal space schedule. Space 4. Noon. This was something he’d mentioned from time to time—pursuing a minor in music in order to gain access to the university’s rehearsal facilities. He had a perfectly good place to practice—that plush garage behind his house—but he had to go and lay claim to scarce rehearsal space at the school. That was Nate. If he ever thought about other people it was in terms of what he could take from them.

  Cecelia strolled herself over to the student union and picked at a muffin, killing time. She flipped through the school newspaper, skimming a story about an African prince that would be attending University of New Mexico. She stood at the windows that looked out onto the field where the band practiced. No band today. Football season was over. Instead, some kind of intramural flag rugby game. It looked like something from a college brochure. Cecelia watched the people collide with each other, watched them laugh, watched them arch their backs as they ran to avoid having their flags pulled off, watched them drink sloppily from a big orange cooler.

  She returned to the music building. The card in the slot outside rehearsal space 4 said Thus Poke Sarah’s Thruster, and from inside there was noise. Cecelia peeked in the window, knowing that no one inside would spot her because she didn’t care if they did. Apathy was her camouflage. Nate was behind his drum set, banging on it, an obnoxious look on his face. He was keeping the beat exactly. He always could do that: hold the beat like a metronome. The song they were playing wasn’t one of Reggie’s. Cecelia had never heard it.

  The guy on bass and the guy on guitar looked like brothers, the sort who bicker constantly but never want to be apart. They didn’t seem like anything special. There was another guy, on keyboards. He was the talent. He had on a loose-fitting ski cap and no shoes. He didn’t have to think about what he was doing, didn’t have to contort his soul. Yes, they were a band. No denying it.

  Cecelia didn’t want to stick around long enough to hear them play one of Reggie’s songs. She felt as though she’d gotten a bead on an enemy, and she wasn’t sure if hearing Nate and his minions tromp around on the hallowed ground of Reggie’s imagination would add fuel to her fire or discourage her. She was shrinking her soul, and discouragement was an indulgence. She backed away from the studio door as if children were sleeping behind it and descended onto the main walk, blending herself in with a late-day stream of amiable young people who were filled, each and every, with vague intentions of making themselves better. Cecelia hid among them, walking how they walked. Her intention was to be worse, and so far what she’d accomplished was stealing twenty-five dollars and mouthing off to a cop. She needed to escalate her tactics. She needed to reach a darker height. If she couldn’t, then she was as feckless as any of these girls in their ballerina shoes or these soft-eyed unshaven boys who’d never have it in them to do anything despicable. Cecelia had enemies and now she was learning how to be an enemy. This herd of kids Cecelia was walking along with, all hats and fancy cell phones, was on its way nowhere.

  SOREN’S FATHER

  Soren’s birthday came and went. He was a year older. He was aging, at least on paper. Soren’s father had not bought his son a gift. The bike he’d bought him for Christmas was still at home, in the utility closet behind the washer. He hadn’t gotten Soren a cake or even a card. He hadn’t mentioned the birthday to Gee. One of the nurses had stopped by and asked if Soren’s father wanted the staff to do anything, to gather and sing or bring up balloons, but he’d declined. Soren had missed his own birthday, and Soren’s father had to entertain the possibility that he might miss another. The two of them could be sitting in this same room with the same expressions on their faces a year from now. That wasn’t out of the question. It very much was the question. Soren could be in a coma a year from now and he could be in a coma
a year after that.

  Soren had been skinny before but now his legs were sticks. He’d gotten taller but weighed less than before the coma. Soren’s father hadn’t done a pushup in ages and his arms were feeble. He and his boy were shrinking. Soren’s father wondered how many birthday cards had come to the clinic for Soren. Maybe none. Maybe the only strangers still interested in him were the vigilers, and there were only about twenty of them left, the true believers, the zealots—or at least they wanted to be those things. Soren’s father had sold off another lunch truck, to the same guy who’d bought the first one. He didn’t like having a truck sitting outside the clinic waiting for him. Maybe he didn’t want to resume his route. Maybe he’d been sick of driving that fucking truck. Maybe he’d been sick of smoking cigarettes, sick of the smell of heat-lamp beef tips. Maybe he wanted to blow the cash from the trucks taking Gee out to fancy dinners. Maybe thinking about the future, tomorrow or next month or next year, was the most futile thing a person could engage in.

  Soren’s father stood at the window of the clinic room looking out at the expanding desert instead of looking at his son, who’d had a haircut that day and didn’t look right. The haircut made him look older and dopey, and he was young and sharp. Soren’s father gazed out past the quadrant of the parking lot where the vigilers always sat, missing them a little despite himself, looking forward to Wednesday and their mute company. There was an auto body shop and a cell phone store. There was a vacant lot beyond the interstate where a hot-air balloon crew was sitting around munching on apples, waiting for tourists. Above everything was a blue sky, a sky the precise color of a pickup Soren’s father had owned when he was young, back when a blue sky meant something.

  REGGIE

  He sat on the bench at the piano, the gashed upholstery pinching the backs of his legs. He did not feel bound by time. He was free of the burden and crutch of seconds and centuries. He sat on the bench, his feet resting on the pedals instead of on the cold ground and his hands resting in his lap. There was no dust whatsoever on the piano. The air in Reggie’s tiny chamber was the purest he’d ever breathed. Reggie removed his shirt, something he’d often done when he wrote songs back when he was alive. He folded the shirt and rested it up on top of the piano.