A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  “It’ll be fixed by the next time this class meets,” Cecelia told the professor. It was what she always said.

  “I’m a farmer,” the professor said. “If it was a tractor, I could fix it.” Cecelia scribbled down the serial numbers of the machines in the cabinet and the classroom number and departed the agriculture building. There was a bench on the edge of the pepper field and she sat on it. Most of the peppers were a shade of green, except one row that was bright red, the peppers as big as eggplants.

  The song was mostly assembled, mostly clear. It was an acoustic punk song. It was short and fast and there wasn’t one moment when it slowed down. Each verse was the same. The song was about the sounds a person hears while falling, about flowers with snow on them, about children asleep in their church clothes. There could be another song after this one, and another, and though Cecelia knew the songs were bad for her, she wanted more of them. It was hard to determine when this punk song ended and restarted, but Cecelia could tell. She could sense when it crossed the finish line, which was also the starting line. Cecelia sat up straight against the back of the bench. She didn’t know if she was being tormented or rewarded. The sun broke the haze, and a glare settled on each smooth pepper in the field before her, turning the world into endless blinding acreage.

  MAYOR CABRERA

  Pulling his dirty clothes out of a tall canvas bag and filling one of the washers in the Javelina laundry room, he found himself holding the shirt he’d worn on his last visit to Santa Fe. He peeled a sock off it and held it up by the shoulders. It was blue with a collar of lighter blue, with oversized buttons and a breast pocket that snapped closed. The air in the laundry room wasn’t easy to breathe and the overhead light was flickering. Mayor Cabrera set the shirt aside and filled the washer the rest of the way, extracting a mint from the pocket of some pants he must’ve worn to the diner and a pen from the pocket of another shirt. He dumped in the detergent and started the water running and then turned back to the blue shirt, lifting it and pressing his face into it. It was there, Dana’s scent—right in the middle of the chest where she’d nestled her head back into him—a clean, powdery smell but also the smell of something baked, something flaky and not too sweet. He was holding the shirt with his fingertips so he wouldn’t ruin the scent. He’d chosen that shirt to wear to Dana’s because it was stiff and made his shoulders look broad. He’d worn it up to her place a bunch of times. He’d worn that shirt the time all those bees were on Dana’s little balcony and Mayor Cabrera had called over an exterminator and hadn’t let Dana pay for it. That meant something, didn’t it, that she’d allowed him to pay for that exterminator? The visit after that he’d brought her a stuffed bee, which always sat on a shelf of her entertainment center and stared with its bug eyes out into the living room. This was the shirt Mayor Cabrera had worn the time Dana had let it slip that she wanted to go see this guy named Roderick or Broderick something who was performing in downtown Santa Fe. Dana was sheepish about mentioning the concert because it was Mayor Cabrera’s evening, his once-a-month appointment, and she was a professional, but Mayor Cabrera could tell something was on her mind and had dragged it out of her. The show was sold out but a number of tickets were being held at the venue for anyone willing to wait in line, and so Mayor Cabrera overcame Dana’s protests and they went down and got seventh and eighth in line and sat along an adobe wall that grew warm after a while against their backs. The strangers they conversed with assumed them to be a couple, and Dana didn’t say otherwise. She had stories about other times she’d seen this guy play, down on the Gulf Coast and up in Colorado. Once the doors opened, Dana and Mayor Cabrera went to the bar and then found a cozy spot off to the side. Dana didn’t want to sit and she didn’t like to be right up front either because she liked to see the audience as well as the band. She liked to see the backs of the people’s heads as they nodded along raptly. Afterward they went to a crowded diner. They hadn’t gotten home until three in the morning and Dana’s eyes had been heavy in the car, so Mayor Cabrera got her to agree to go ahead to sleep and she promised she’d make it up to him the next day, that she’d settle all accounts in the AM. But the next morning Mayor Cabrera had to get back to Lofte early and when he departed Dana was still zonked under her comforter and Mayor Cabrera snuck out without a sound.

  THE GAS STATION OWNER

  He still had not left. The girls were running the station more than capably and he was supposed to be gone. He had summoned the desert to bring its strife against him, and now he was hiding from it. He was on one knee scrubbing the back of the toilet, his bucket of cleaning supplies propped up on the closed lid of the commode. The girls cleaned the bathroom Monday through Saturday, but nobody could make it gleam like the gas station owner. Nobody else cared that once in a while a sharp-dressed woman from Albuquerque or maybe a much bigger city was forced to use the restroom at this out-of-the-way dive and came in expecting the worst facilities she’d ever laid eyes on and when she walked down the narrow hall and opened the flimsy door she fell into utter shock at the fresh tidiness. This is what the gas station owner cared about, apparently. The water in the commode was blue. The floor was spotless. An impressionist Paris street adorned the wall.

  The gas station owner moved on to the mirror, pulled the Windex out of the bucket. The gas station owner had told the girls Sunday was optional, and he was glad they’d turned down that option, because that meant he could come in. He could sit in the station like he always had—his place to be, his something to do. His rucksack had been packed for seventeen days now. Perfectly packed. It was at his house, sitting out on his closed-in porch, collecting dust. He’d had his purposeful fun for a time, taking everything out and repacking, fitting in a little more dried fruit, one more pair of socks. The pack was finished and the gas station owner was avoiding his porch. At this point, laying eyes on the pack shamed him. He had his clothes out on the porch too, the clothes he was going to wear the day he started walking, and a pair of fancy boots he’d driven into the city to purchase. It was the first time since he was a child that he’d had his feet measured. The boots had a lifetime warranty, and the pair the gas station owner had were going to meet that warranty easy because they’d never been worn outside the store. The gas station owner collected his supplies and put a new bag in the little trashcan and went and perched behind the register.

  Maybe he didn’t want an adventure, he only wanted to plan for one. Maybe he liked to stay cozy, like that kid who worked at the alien observatory had told him. He liked to be curled up warm and safe. Not only was the gas station owner no better than that kid, he was worse. At least that kid had guts. At least he didn’t have to be on his home field and get to make up all the rules. The gas station owner slid a stick of jerky out of a display and after a minute put it back. He was embarrassed he hadn’t left yet. He’d told Mayor Cabrera he was going to be gone awhile, had asked him to keep an eye on the station and on the house, and a few days later he’d run into Cabrera picking up lunch at the diner. He’d lied and said he’d postponed his excursion because the girls needed more training at the station. Like it took a whole lot of know-how. And he was embarrassed the girls knew he was still around. When he came in on a Sunday he couldn’t help but straighten shelves and clean. They noticed. They knew he hadn’t left. He had told himself he was waiting for the right day to leave, for a sign even, waiting to refine his purpose, waiting until he didn’t have a choice but to embark. The fact was, he would never fully understand until he was out there and he did have a choice.

  The gas station owner had his station for comfort and his whisky and he’d even gone back to the Bible. He didn’t know what that meant. It was a bunch of knowledge he’d mastered as a kid and then had forgotten. It was the same old Bible he’d carried to church as a tyke, still chock with floods and famine and pestilence and idols and war, full of people with conviction and people without conviction getting punished for it. The gas station owner was doing the opposite of going to church. He was re
ading scripture six days and then working on Sunday. He wanted Psalms but he needed Proverbs. How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands—So shall your poverty come on you like a prowler, and your need like an armed man.

  THE WOLF

  It was so hazy that he could not tell from the pit of the gully how near sunset was. The sky looked like a stretched old cloth. The floor of the gully was damp and the wolf kept his belly against it. He had been gnawing his foreleg all day, the skin fraying now. He could taste the blood as it quick-dried into the weightless air.

  The wolf needed to be this close to the house with the chickens so that when he heard the girl’s car he could make it to the window without missing the next song. He’d heard two of them, and the days he’d heard them he’d felt calm, but when he didn’t hear one he felt lunatic. He had to stay down in the gully so no one would spot him and he couldn’t see anything from down in the gully, couldn’t watch the chickens or watch the humans of Lofte as they kept their routines or broke them. All he saw was an occasional airplane passing overhead, leaving a streak behind it whiter than the white sky, a streak that began near the airport in Albuquerque and would end somewhere the wolf would never go even if he lived forever.

  The last time the wolf had gone to the window for a song was almost two full days ago. He needed one soon. The first song had come in the morning and the second one in early evening. If the people who lived in the house next door to the house with the chickens had glanced out their little red-tinted kitchen window they would have seen him. They would’ve reported him.

  From the gully the wolf could no longer see the chickens but he could hear them ruffling their feathers and knew when they were asleep. He could hear them bickering, pecking one another’s feet. The wolf was not going to take a chicken. He was charmed by their vulnerability. The wolf was effortlessly guarding the chickens from the coyotes, now in the thick of their thin season. The wolf did not want anything to disrupt the delivery of the songs. He wanted the older woman to stay home all day, safe, boiling water on the stove and staring out the window and sometimes weeping, and he wanted the chickens safe in the yard and he wanted the road shushed quiet with the passing of healthy cars until he heard the racket of the girl’s injured car and she was back from wherever the songs came from. He wanted to be shimmying under the window, pinned against the wall by those spiny bushes that were at once dying and growing unruly. There was a hunger in the wolf that was also a desire to starve, and the girl’s songs were all that could help. He wished he could hear them always and then he could sleep in the day and howl at night like he was meant to.

  It had been two days without a song. The sky was losing light. The wolf felt repulsed at the thought of eating, but he had the old itch for a kill. His teeth were sharp and too large for his mouth. He feared he was going to bite his foreleg hard enough to break the bone, and then he’d die stuck in this gully. His own blood was the saltiest he’d ever tasted and it reminded him that some blood was sweet. He would wait until midnight, if he could last that long. If the girl did not return by midnight with a song, he couldn’t be held responsible for whatever wickedness his longing drove him to.

  DANNIE

  Her period arrived. She had believed she might be pregnant and had not allowed herself to think about it because she didn’t want to jinx it, but she had thought about it anyway, secretly, and she had jinxed it. She stood on the balcony and watched a posse of crows milling about down where she’d planted those avocado pits, their black wings tucked against the wind like men in coats.

  She arose and put her eye to the telescope. The town was abandoned, the streets resting. There were wreaths on the lampposts. Eight of them. Dannie had sat out here one day and watched the mayor himself hang them. He had carried his ladder from post to post, had given each wreath a smack before he’d raised it. Dannie was drinking from a bottle of water, and she leaned over the railing and poured some down and it splattered on the desert ground as if on a tabletop. The water wasn’t going to sink in. It was going to sit there like a kitchen spill until the night froze it or the day evaporated it.

  She went inside, fetched her driver’s license, and left it out on the kitchen counter so when Arn awoke he would see it and discover her true age. He still thought she was twenty-nine. She sat curled up on the couch and after a while heard Arn bumbling around in the bathroom. She heard the toilet flush. She heard the noise he made when he stretched, heard him getting into some crackers in the kitchen.

  “You left your license in here,” he called.

  “I did?”

  “On the counter.”

  “Notice anything?”

  “About your license?” Dannie heard him pick it up. “The picture doesn’t do you justice. That I can notice right off. It doesn’t show how your skin is.”

  Dannie didn’t answer.

  “California,” Arn said, distinctly pronouncing each syllable.

  “Look at the date of birth.”

  Arn clicked his tongue, thinking, doing math. “I get it, you’re older than you said.”

  “By how much?”

  “You’re thirty-three.”

  “I’ll be thirty-four in three weeks.”

  “Shoot,” Arn said. “In that case, I’ve got shopping to do.”

  “Let me guess,” said Dannie. She felt hostile and made no effort to keep it out of her voice. “You don’t care. It doesn’t matter how old I am. You’re not mad that I lied. You don’t think any less of me. Everything’s hunky-dory.”

  “Well,” Arn said.

  “You don’t care, right? What a guy. Guy of the year: Arnold Avery.”

  “Should I fly into a rage?” Arn asked. “I can do that, just let me get some coffee first. Let me wake up a little and then I’ll throw some shit around and curse.”

  “That might be a nice change,” Dannie said.

  There was a long pause then. Both Dannie and Arn tried to stay still, Dannie on the couch and Arn in the kitchen. They hadn’t argued before. Dannie knew that part of her irritation was at herself for ever feeling she needed to lie in the first place. What, she was ashamed? She was afraid some dumb kid would think she was old? It had been an act of impulse, lying, but then she hadn’t been woman enough to admit it and laugh about it and it had grown into something compromising.

  Arn shifted his weight on the linoleum.

  “Let me see your license,” Dannie said.

  “It’s buried at the bottom of one of my bags.”

  “Can I see your wallet?”

  “Sure, but the license isn’t in there.”

  Dannie heard Arn walking to the bedroom, then coming back toward her. He handed her the wallet and sat close on the couch. The wallet smelled like the inside of a new car. There was nothing in it but cash.

  “When did you get this?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “What’d you do before that?”

  Arn shrugged. “Pockets.”

  “You don’t have an ATM card?”

  “My account’s only a savings account.”

  “Well, you need a checking account and you need a debit card and also a fucking credit card. If you want anyone to take you seriously.”

  Arn looked at Dannie levelly. “I don’t want anyone to take me seriously.”

  “You don’t have health insurance, do you?”

  “I never do anything dangerous.”

  Dannie folded the wallet and rested it on the coffee table and Arn made no move for it. Neither of them said anything for a few minutes and Dannie had no idea if the fight was over and no idea if she wanted it to be.

  THE TRAINER

  The coyote had been injured as a pup and had been rescued and rehabilitated by an Albuquerque veterinarian, mostly as a publicity stunt. It was decided the coyote would never survive in the wild with his lack of pack training, and so he was gifted to the high school out in Golden, whose teams were called th
e Coyotes. The coyote never snapped at anyone; in fact, children often had their pictures taken with him. The coyote lived in a spacious room adjacent to the gymnasium where weight room supplies were stored. The man who cared for the coyote, though not a paid employee, had been given the title of “trainer” by the high school’s athletic department. He did his best to look out for the coyote, but still the animal was stolen each year by the rival high school. The last time, they’d dressed the coyote up like a ballerina and put the pictures in their school’s newspaper.

  The wolf hurled himself through the big glass window of the supply room. He disentangled his legs from the flimsy blinds, stepped over an iron bar, and walked steadily toward the coyote, who retreated a step but didn’t cower. The wolf could only imagine the coyote was glad to be put out of his misery. The coyote hadn’t been taught by his elders that a coyote’s only duty was to survive at all cost.

  When the wolf tasted the blood, he saw the trainer’s life. The trainer received an amount of money each month that was meant to buy food for the coyote, but instead he pocketed the money and fed the coyote leftovers from the school’s cafeteria, the tangy pizza and country fried steak. The trainer was not mentally deficient, but he knew folks thought he was. His brother had died young. His mother was mean. The trainer was addicted to low-stakes gambling and stayed on his computer all night, blowing the dog food money and blowing an allowance he still drew from his grandmother, who loved him but had mostly lost her mind.