A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  Mayor Cabrera hung an OUT TO LUNCH sign on the lobby door. He went to his car, passing the sad teenagers, and pulled out of the lot. He drove to the feed store and got what he needed from inside, waving a quick hello to the owner but keeping moving, and then he drove across town at exactly the speed limit and parked along the curb in front of his sister-in-law’s house. He rolled up the windows for no reason. His sister-in-law’s mailbox was leaning to one side in a way that seemed precarious. Factions of weeds were jutting up all throughout the yard, looking like scorched bouquets. Part of Mayor Cabrera was afraid to go inside and face his sister-in-law, but now that he’d committed to doing it he could already feel his shame dissipating. The shame wasn’t from making a mistake, it was from lacking the fortitude to fix it.

  Mayor Cabrera rose from the car and opened his trunk and threw the bag of chicken feed over his shoulder. He marched up to the door, lightheaded but certain, and knocked. After a minute he knocked again. She was home. There was no car in the driveway, so Cecelia was gone, but her mother had to be home. The kid had a car and the parent didn’t. Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law had sold her car about a year ago, to a man who lived outside town and bought used cars for no purpose except to collect them. He didn’t scrap them for parts or fix them up. Mayor Cabrera thought he heard something inside the house, but no one came to the door. He tried the knob and it wasn’t locked, so he pushed the door back a little and called out.

  “Who is it?” his sister-in-law asked. She wasn’t alarmed, and the matter-of-factness in her voice was familiar to Mayor Cabrera. She’d never been alarmed, in the old days.

  Mayor Cabrera found his breath and announced himself. He called out his first name, Ricardo.

  After a silence, his sister-in-law said, “The mayor himself? Gracious, what an honor.” She told him he better come on in, if he was sure he had the right house.

  “I’m just looking for a spot to set down this feed,” he said.

  He ducked to get the bag through the doorway. He could hear the TV now. The scent of the place was familiar. It didn’t smell clean but it smelled wholesome, like old, simple things. Mayor Cabrera paused in the hallway and looked through a half-open door into what had to be Cecelia’s room. It was her room, he remembered. There’d once been a crib in it. Now her bed was made and a Rubik’s Cube sat on her pillow. The walls were bare. A guitar was lying across the desk, next to a tape recorder.

  Mayor Cabrera walked through the living room, nodding hello as casually as he could, and let the bag come down and meet the kitchen floor. He could see the chickens scratching around back there, out the window, working their necks. He’d heard about the birds from his sister-in-law’s neighbors, a young couple that had moved out of Albuquerque because there were too many rules and regulations and now seemed to be rethinking their decision. The chickens looked healthy enough, he supposed, or at least they looked the way chickens usually look. Mayor Cabrera stepped back into the living room and leaned over to perform a stiff hug, his sister-in-law sunk into a wheelchair, then he took a seat on the couch. She didn’t really need a wheelchair, did she? There wasn’t anything particular wrong with her legs. Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law had him framed in an airtight smirk. He asked her if she always left the door unlocked and she said locking the front door was Cecelia’s department.

  His sister-in-law was skinny, but Mayor Cabrera had prepared for worse. She wasn’t any skinnier than the skinny sister who worked at the gas station. Not that she looked healthy. Her hair was like straw. Her hands seemed heavier. She was the same person, though, the same defiant glint in her eyes. She held the remote for the TV poised, but didn’t change the channel. A show about the movies was on. People were waiting to give their opinions. Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law was looking at the TV, but she wasn’t paying attention to it. She was trying not to look at Mayor Cabrera, trying to leave the ball in his court. He wondered if she had any idea Lofte was in trouble, any idea she was a woman in decline living in a town in decline.

  Mayor Cabrera asked how Cecelia was doing and his sister-in-law said she wasn’t around much. She had her classes, of course, but she’d invented a bunch of other ways to stay away. She’d taken a job on campus. She was in a band, though it seemed like maybe they’d broken up. Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law didn’t blame her daughter. She didn’t blame her one bit for steering clear of the house.

  “She’ll come back to you,” Mayor Cabrera told her.

  “One day she’s going to drive over to Albuquerque and never come back,” his sister-in-law said. “She’s smart enough to get tired of walking back into this house with me waiting on her. Forget Albuquerque, she’s going to drive down into Texas, or worse.”

  Now on the TV they were showing pictures of actresses from ten years ago and then the same actresses today. Everyone was agreeing they looked better today.

  “You should’ve been around,” said Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law.

  “I know it,” he said. “I’ve handled things about as badly as possible.”

  “There’s no one else to talk to about the things I want to talk about.” Mayor Cabrera looked right at her. “I’ve wasted a lot of time,” he said. He and his sister-in-law were breathing the same close air.

  “Who used their time real well and who didn’t is not something I want to talk about.”

  “A debacle, I think they call it. The last bunch of years.”

  Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law shook her head, as if in bitter disagreement with herself. She looked him square in the face. “I miss her so much,” she said.

  “Just as much as the day of the funeral sometimes.”

  “And I have a hard time remembering her face.”

  “I try to forget it but I can’t.”

  “There was no way around missing her but you didn’t have to make me miss you too.”

  “You reminded me of her. I didn’t want to get over her. I just wanted to pout.”

  “I know the reason. It’s no excuse.”

  “I handled things badly.”

  Mayor Cabrera was being sincere and it felt good. Absurdly overdue. He wondered, if it weren’t for Dana, if he’d have ever been moved to fix any of this. He’d found out he could fall in love again. He’d found out there was hope for him.

  Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law improved her posture, using the armrests of her wheelchair to get settled. Mayor Cabrera noticed that one of the rubber handles of his sister-in-law’s wheelchair was chewed up, and he remembered that handle. He realized it: this was his wife’s old chair. He couldn’t remember letting his sister-in-law have the wheelchair, couldn’t recall how she’d ended up with it. He didn’t recall a lot from the months surrounding his wife’s death. He wasn’t angry. Whatever was going on with his sister-in-law, it wasn’t her fault. She was off-course, like him.

  “Do you remember how she used to eat corn one kernel at a time?”

  “I do,” said Mayor Cabrera. “I used to cut the kernels off the cob with a knife.”

  “She was so picky and organized. It was the opposite when we were kids.”

  “I never let her cook,” Mayor Cabrera said. “She’d take too long. We’d have both starved.”

  “She was the opposite when we were little.”

  “If I let her do dishes, she’d be in there till midnight, holding bowls up to the light.”

  “You spoiled her. You were lucky you got to do that.”

  Mayor Cabrera thought of his dead wife’s tiny, soft hands. They’d felt like cats’ paws on his chest. He put his leg up on the coffee table, showing he was going to get comfortable. “These years have been a pile of crap,” he said. “It helps to say that.”

  Mayor Cabrera’s sister-in-law clicked her cheek. She didn’t say anything at first and then she said, “Next time you go to the cemetery, I want you to take me.”

  Mayor Cabrera hadn’t been to the cemetery since he’d become mayor. He nodded and reached out and touched his sister-in-law’s big cold hand.r />
  “We’ll make it soon,” he said.

  CECELIA

  It was eleven in the morning and she was parked on a side street in a fancy neighborhood. The driveway she was observing had been empty and without action for forty-five minutes. Cecelia didn’t have one of Reggie’s songs in her head, and she decided to leave the radio off and exist in silence for a little while. If she wasn’t going to hear music of Reggie’s, she didn’t want to hear whatever some DJ was going to play.

  Cecelia couldn’t miss a class doing this. Or work. She couldn’t be noticed as absent from anything. Cecelia could see the red tile roof of the house above the pale wall that enclosed the yard. The wall would provide Cecelia plenty of privacy.

  Every ten minutes or so a car rolled past on the main drag, mostly women on cell phones guiding glimmering sedans down the center of the street. The houses around her were in clashing styles—Tudor, French Chateau, ranch houses, even an occasional Southwestern spread with all the outdoor fireplaces. Nate’s family’s house was in some Spanish style. A carpet of lush grass covered the neighborhood. If you saw green lawns in the desert you were either in a cemetery or an exclusive part of town. Here came another one, another woman on a phone, this one in a little coupe. Cecelia couldn’t tell their ages. They were older than her but they weren’t old.

  Cecelia pulled her tickets out and took another look at them—heavy and sharp-cornered and with a shiny red stripe down one side. Nate and his band had booked their first gig already, and he’d left two tickets for her in an envelope up at the A/V booth. The tickets had been printed by a local version of Ticketmaster. Thus Poke Sarah’s Thruster would never sell out, but to be safe you could go to a kiosk and get tickets in advance. These had come from the kiosk on campus. The bar was called Antivenin. Cecelia and Reggie and Nate had played there a few times. Cecelia had to hand it to Nate for not wasting any time. His band had a set list, probably composed mostly of Reggie’s songs, and now they had a gig, and he hadn’t even neglected to taunt Cecelia.

  A woman stumbled by up on the sidewalk, yanked this way and that by a dog with bulging muscles. The woman wore a jogging suit and her hair was done. Cecelia bet the dog cost more than Cecelia’s car was worth. If you were an artist you weren’t supposed to care that other people had money, and that was more proof that Cecelia was not an artist. Not like Reggie had been. Reggie’d had vision, while Cecelia’s cobbled-together songs were always blatant and derivative. Reggie hadn’t harbored uncharitable thoughts, and all Cecelia could think was that the people in this neighborhood were dense and shallow and didn’t deserve anything they had.

  A car turned down the side street Cecelia had parked on. She tensed a moment, but the car pulled into a driveway four or five houses up. Another one of these women. This one was wearing a short-skirted business suit. She loaded her arms up with grocery bags, leafy vegetables sticking up out of them like in a TV commercial, and made it to her front door without ever getting off her phone. She had dropped something and it had rolled to a stop under the back of her car. Cecelia watched the woman disappear into the house and then she waited a minute before cranking her ignition. She watched all the warning lights come alive in her dashboard. All fluids were low. Every gasket was worn. Her exhaust was toxic and her belts loose. Her upholstery sagged. Her tires were bald. And of course she knew she had a blown brake light.

  She rolled around the corner so her car would be out of view, then shut the engine back off. She was feeling customarily cheated in the big picture, but at least she was going to do something to allay that feeling. She’d been playing by rules in a game that rules rendered pointless. She’d been faking something that now she felt genuinely, a disregard for consequences. The rules of the universe were off if Cecelia had access to Reggie’s unknown songs and the rules of Cecelia’s life were off now too. She still wasn’t hearing a song, was still living in quiet as she had been since yesterday, and a fresh loneliness was building in her.

  Nate was at school and his dad was at the restaurant and his mom was off doing God-knew-what, whatever she’d always been doing when Cecelia had gone to Nate’s for rehearsal. Cecelia got out of her car and took a gas can from the hatchback. She cut through a few lawns and came up to a side gate, opened it, slipped inside. The gas can was heavy but Cecelia knew it would be light on the way back. She rounded the house. There it was, that hacienda-style barn, that red-roofed play garage.

  A rabbit hopped in the grass not far from Cecelia, startling her. It was grazing on the succulent blades.

  “How’d you get in here?” Cecelia asked it.

  The rabbit only looked at her.

  “Might want to back up,” she told it. “Friendly advice.”

  Cecelia opened the door of the barn. The doorframe was strung with little wooden skeletons, a repellent to evil spirits. The skeletons weren’t going to work on Cecelia. She was flesh and blood. She looked up and saw the hot tub still hanging inside, waiting up there. She thought about the great number of enemies Nate and his family must have. Cecelia paced the inside walls, dumping gasoline in sloppy glugs. It was getting on her sneakers and jeans, but she had a change of clothes in her car. These sneakers and jeans were putting in their last day of service. It wasn’t easy to use all the gasoline. She had to do three laps. She loomed in the doorway a moment and then lit a match and watched the flame flare.

  THE TEACHER

  He was a vegetarian who owned a pampered goat for the purpose of making his own cheese. He had a shop in his backyard that he’d converted into a creamery and he’d turned his flowerbeds into herb gardens, and the cheese he made he donated to a program that fed the poor. The wolf had left his goat alive.

  After the attack, the goat’s demeanor softened, as if she’d been taken down a peg. When she had milk she was generous with it. She quit butting the fence posts. She was still fed as well as a human, and now when the teacher arrived with her supper she ambled right over and nestled her head into his palm. Of course the goat had a limp now, her hind legs chewed up as they were. Of course she wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the backyard anymore, grazing all night on elk grass, nothing but a short fence separating her from the wild desert.

  SOREN’S FATHER

  He had a cot in the room. The clinic called it a bed but it was a cot. He didn’t use it. He sometimes roughed up the bedding before morning so nobody would know he stayed in the chair all night watching the red tail-lights disappear into the Southern flatlands. He wondered how many of the cars were the same ones night after night, and how many of them had started their journeys somewhere other than the desert and would wind up somewhere other than the desert.

  It was at night that he thought of Soren’s death, and he could never think a minute past it, like thinking of the end of the world. Soren’s father wondered if his son’s face would pinch or broaden the moment before he passed away, if his eyes would pull open briefly or if any light he saw would emanate from a place no one could see until they were going there. He wondered if the room would grow perfectly silent, Soren’s breath gone, before the machines began sounding off. To not be in the room when Soren came to, when he blinked himself conscious and tried to jerk away from his monitors and probably cried out with confusion, to not be waiting for him when he returned, would be terrible, but to not be in the clinic when his son expired, the thought of that locked up Soren’s father’s chest.

  He looked out the window at the straight road that led into the greater dark. It was the time of night—too late even for the night owls and not yet early enough for anyone else—where several minutes could pass without a car and the cars that did appear were probably on the road because of bad news.

  DANNIE

  She was going to try. She was going to make a grand effort with Arn. She packed water and a piece of fruit and a stick of lip balm, then she put on a bikini and over that a big sweatshirt and sweatpants, gathered a warm hat and gloves and good sneakers. She positioned the telescope. She located the big rock shaped li
ke a totem pole, the one with the scrappy, twisted pine growing from the top of it, and to the left of that was a wide spot in the trail where Dannie had often seen hikers take rest breaks. Dannie focused the telescope and secured it against the banister and kept it in place with a couple heavy bookends plundered from the trucker’s stuff in the extra bedroom. She tightened the wheel that held steady the height of the tripod.

  Arn was napping. Dannie had less than an hour to get out there. She wrote a note, telling Arn what time to look and stressing that he not bump or jostle the telescope. She taped the note to the top of his alarm so he’d hit it with his hand when he reached to stop the buzzing.

  She got in her car and sped away from town, checking the clock in her dashboard and watching for signs, and eventually she found a spot where she could access the trail, a small parking area with a single exposed picnic table. She got out of the car and felt cold, and that’s how she wanted to feel. When she took off her sweats, she wanted her skin alive with goose bumps. When she removed the bikini, she wanted her flesh to sting.

  She hiked steadily and without thinking, slightly uphill, losing her breath. Prickly pear stands lined the trail, their fruit still hard and green. Tiny birds flitted this way and that. Dannie was getting there. Though her feet were starting to hurt, she was making good time. The trail was full of stones that looked like they belonged on the bottom of a river.

  Dannie drank some water. She adjusted her bikini bottom. She was rounding a bend in the trail that she recognized from the telescope. She had to cruise downhill about a quarter-mile and she’d be there. She’d be to the totem pole rock. She’d paced herself correctly. She had ten minutes, plenty of time.

  When Dannie turned the last corner, the big totem rock was right where it was supposed to be. The sun was where it was supposed to be, striking its last pose before it sank away. Dannie’s resolve was right there in her chest, where it belonged. The old man wearing a windbreaker and white Velcro sneakers was not where he was supposed to be. Dannie didn’t know where he belonged, but he didn’t belong on her bench-like outcropping in the middle of her wide spot in the trail. Dannie stopped a few yards from him and put down her satchel, thinking he might take the hint and move on, that he might understand it was someone else’s turn to have the bench. He didn’t, though. He sat there. Dannie sighed, like she was so glad to have found a place to rest, and the old man kept looking blankly out toward the sun, which was all color now and no brightness. His hair was of a different generation, that parted, water-combed style. Now that it was the real gusting winter, Dannie saw about one hiker a week on this trail, but here was this guy. She didn’t know what to do. She had a few minutes, but they were melting fast. Arn was going to wonder why such pains had been taken to allow him to watch Dannie stand next to an old man on a trail.