A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  Arn was back to sleeping in his truck bed, and it wasn’t so bad this time of year. It wasn’t freezing or hot. Arn didn’t feel safe sleeping under his topper, but people weren’t safe anywhere. Bad luck and aliens—if they wanted you, they’d find you. Arn had a membership at a YMCA in an Albuquerque suburb so he could shower. He sat out at the pool sometimes. There were tan lifeguards in bikinis, but they didn’t do much for Arn. The weight rooms were full of fathers. They were all faking being good fathers like Arn was faking being a regular guy who wanted to stay in shape. Not one person Arn saw seemed genuine. Now and then he shot hoops, only when he found the courts abandoned and could shoot in solitude. Just like at the church compound back in Oregon.

  Dannie wasn’t going to come for him. She wasn’t going to have a change of heart. She’d probably found another kid to play around with. Arn knew the only reason he was still in New Mexico was he was hoping Dannie would come. Normally he would’ve quit this job by now. He would’ve been in the next state, Texas or Oklahoma. He had no energy for going back on the road, same as he felt no energy for the brown lifeguards in the red suits. New Mexico had been the first state he had not felt lonely in. Dannie had been his friend. Whatever else they may have been or not been to each other, they had become friends. There wasn’t a way for Arn to win except to know her again. Whatever cheap motives he’d had at the start, they’d died off. He’d had an ally and had lost her. He missed her skin and the way she rested one fingertip on her chin when she was about to explain something. He wanted to push his forehead against her cheek.

  Arn turned a page of the huge poetry book and the next page was blank. There were no more poems. Arn closed the book and slid it to a far corner of the metal desk. Arn hadn’t known what any of the poems were about, but he’d enjoyed them. The poetry book was the only book in the observatory that wasn’t work-related, that wasn’t a radio manual or a history of space encounters. Arn had finished the whole thing, one thin, crinkly page at a time.

  Arn saw now that he had been hoping all this time that someone was after him, the cops or a private detective or the enraged family of the man he’d slugged with the bat. He’d needed someone to be after him. On the run, he didn’t have to admit anything about himself. He was a deceitful orphan. That’s what he’d been afraid of being and that’s what he’d become. He’d had to keep moving, in part, to not get caught in his lies. They were lies of omission mostly, but you could get caught in those too. He had told Dannie she’d been his first, and that he’d never been to California. He’d acted unfamiliar with bars, unfamiliar with drugs. This was the part he’d played with all the women. Mystery was all he had. And false innocence. He didn’t have a self. Everything around him in the observatory was clean and hard, the buffed concrete floor and the metal desk and the molded plastic chair. Nothing had been chasing Arn, and it had chased him far enough. He went to the middle of the room and got down flat on his back on the floor. The concrete felt good against his arms and legs. Everything sounded different when you got down low and still. It reminded him of the vigils he’d been going to with Dannie. He wondered if she was still going to them. Arn was going to miss the boy, the way one missed peaceful places one had only seen in pictures. Some time in the past months Arn had learned that he could be still without hiding. You could just be where you were. He tapped his fingers on the concrete. The aliens were talking around us. They were holding lively conversations just beyond the reach of human surveillance.

  Arn was trying to get fired so he’d be forced to leave the area, but he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t have the guts to simply quit. He was sabotaging himself, turning the machine off every night. The machine kept a record, of course. If the owner bothered to check, he’d know right away. But the guy probably wouldn’t fire Arn. He’d have a talk with Arn, something like that. He’d write Arn up, as if this were a real company with real policies and protocols. The owner’s main concern would be that they’d missed a transmission.

  MAYOR CABRERA

  A shop that sold musical equipment had been going out of business and he had bought five cases of those space-age tiles you could nail up that were supposed to soundproof a room and improve the acoustics. The guy who owned the shop hadn’t been one bit upset that it was going under. The guy had a brand-new tattoo, still under a bandage, and he kept lifting a corner of the bandage and admiring what was hidden underneath. Mayor Cabrera didn’t believe the squares could really soundproof a room, but they might dull sound, and Mayor Cabrera could make sure never to rent out the unit right next door. There were thirty rooms and he couldn’t recall the last time they’d rented more than half of them at one time.

  It took him almost three hours and a whole canvas sack of roofing nails. His forearm was numb. The hotel room looked like it belonged on a UFO. Mayor Cabrera was doing the only other thing he could think of for Cecelia. Her car, and now this. He didn’t know how to be an uncle. He had no experience with it. He was trying to help her and he was also trying to win her over. She had thanked him, about the car. He’d seen her in town and she’d only spoken to him a moment but he’d sensed a softness toward him. She was like her mother. She could talk herself into being bitter, but it wasn’t in her heart. Mayor Cabrera put surge protectors in all the sockets and lined up some music stands against the wall. He dragged the desk out and brought in a big amp. Mayor Cabrera was working on a baggie of jerky and he had a couple more tallboys in his cooler. He was no longer the mayor of Lofte. He’d informed the board and they’d drawn up paperwork and he’d signed it. There would be a special election. Until then, the lawyer was in charge. Mayor Cabrera wasn’t Mayor Cabrera anymore. He was just Cabrera. Cabrera. The next time they held a council meeting, he wouldn’t be there. He was Ricardo Cabrera, private citizen.

  He filled the closet with bottles of water and cans of ginger ale, fruit roll-ups, bags of popcorn. He dragged the mattress outside and then the box spring and when he went to move the bed frame he saw something underneath, on the floor. It was one of those magnetic travel chess sets. He opened it and it had all the pieces, all thirty-two. He knew what he’d do. He’d teach his sister-in-law to play chess, whether she wanted to or not. Most of their life together was in the past, but not all of it. Some of it was waiting for them, time waiting to be spent. They were family. They would play chess. Once she knew what she was doing, Mayor Cabrera would get a regular set, carved of wood, with pieces substantial enough to work around in your palm as you parsed out your next move.

  Mayor Cabrera had once gone to Sun Studios in Memphis with his wife, and it hadn’t looked much better than this hotel room now did. They had a control room at Sun, but other than that it was about the same as this place. Mayor Cabrera began gathering his supplies and tidying up, the extra tiles and his beer cans and such, and was struck with a pang of pure fear. He couldn’t stall about Dana anymore. All the amends were in progress. There was nothing standing in his way now. He was a brother-in-law again and was becoming an uncle again and he had to find out what he was going to be to Dana. He deserved her as much as he ever would and she’d either want him or she wouldn’t. Nothing could make him pathetic now. He felt able to weather a hardship with dignity.

  THE WOLF

  The wolf scrambled up the loose rocks and out of the gully. He had returned to the house of the older woman and the girl, the house where he’d once heard the songs. The wolf stopped at the edge of the property and listened hard, as if trying to hear the drifting of clouds. The temperature was dropping. The wolf could feel it in his snout and behind his eyes. There was no space between the wolf and the sheer cliff of his ill mind. His saliva tasted like paper and his paws were stones.

  A hard twig was barbed into the wolf’s side and he yanked it and then paced toward the chickens. The wolf pressed his muzzle to the fence and the chickens did not hustle about. They kept going about their pointless business. They weren’t afraid. They felt nothing for the wolf, considered him harmless. The chickens were skinny and the
ir beaks and feet were the same color as their feathers. They stood with heads high, almost haughty. They were waiting for the next idiot scuffle to break out, for seed to be scattered. When death arrived, as it was about to, they would greedily scuffle over that too.

  The isolated homesteads. The outposts of the outposts. What he’d done to the chickens had provided the wolf no solace, nor did he feel regret. The wolf had made the chickens thin air, had given them unprofaned existence, and they’d given him back nothing. He’d gained no knowledge. If there existed a more potent apprehension it could be found only in a human, not in a human’s lesser companion. The wolf now peered out from a thicket of soft weeds, spying on a mother and a baby. The house was a box of sticks but the porch was grand. The wolf couldn’t see the baby but it was there, wrapped down in the cradle. The mother made tender, distracted clicking sounds in her cheek. It was dawn, the world yellowing. The mother rose and stepped inside the house without shutting the front door. She could see the cradle from where she stood, the wolf knew. The mother was recovering from injury and the baby was a baby.

  The wolf broke from the thicket, crossing the dirt road and halting at the mailbox. He couldn’t see the baby but now he could smell it, fatty and scrubbed. Like he would’ve in his old life, the wolf washed the base of the mailbox with his urine. If he took another step closer to the baby he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. Before he knew it he would have the soft infant in his hard jaws, its limbs flopping as the wolf galloped into the wilderness. He kept his haunch against the post. He wanted the mother to come back out to the porch so he might be able to flee but she was brewing tea. The wolf smelled cut pine and tobacco and the knees and elbows of the baby. He couldn’t back away and tried not to move an inch closer. The wolf wondered if he was mad enough now, devoid enough of instinct, that he could be blamed for his actions. Innocence was a silly human notion, but guilt had been around always.

  The wolf realized his teeth were bared. He had never in his life tasted human blood. The wolf tried to imagine where he would take the baby, what would happen to it since he was not going to eat it, and of course its unavoidable end was to be ripped asunder by buzzards whose profession was hunger and who didn’t distinguish a human baby from a roadside possum. The wolf put his belly to the ground. He was trying to outrace fate but he was going in circles. He had known it all before and forgotten it all before. He could remember being healthy and somehow could remember being even more ill. The baby would not help nor hurt the wolf. The baby was beside the point. The reason to take it was the same as to not take it. The wolf was playing games—taking pets, subsisting on flying insects, waiting around for fixes of music. Making vows. It was not the wolf’s job to protect anything. The wolf was afraid he might push the mailbox over. The mother was still inside, feeling secure on a whim as humans always did, and she was right this time; the wolf was not going to harm the baby. The wolf wanted to believe that every last hope for peace had not expired in him. He pushed himself back from the mailbox as if dragging a loaded sled and then raced, stumbling, into the borderless abyss that had to be his true home.

  CECELIA’S MOTHER

  Whether she wanted coffee or not, each morning she put on a kettle of water. As she ran water in the kettle she got to look out the back kitchen window and see her chickens getting about their business, and early in the morning was the only time she enjoyed them anymore. She got to stand near the warming stove. The kettle was something to wait on, a ritual. And when the kettle started whimpering she would wait still, until the sound grew urgent.

  This morning she pushed close to the window and saw no movement, heard no impatient clucking. The ground outside was blanketed white. The rest of the desert was correct, but in Cecelia’s mother’s fenced enclosure the ground was a downy carpet. The feathers were spread evenly, as if a giant had fixed up a place to sleep for the night. Cecelia’s mother pulled the door open but she could only make it down the first step. She didn’t want to tread on the feathers. She was marooned on the steps. It was like looking at art, or something more important than art.

  By now everyone knew the wolf wasn’t killing out of hunger. He was killing to settle a score Cecelia’s mother could not fathom. Cecelia’s mother had begun to believe that the wolf had passed her over, like in the Bible when all those people painted their doors with blood. Cecelia’s mother knew that the chickens had been working against her. She had secretly begun to hate them. If her chickens were tender for some ancient, animal debt, she wasn’t going to begrudge the transaction. Some chickens became nuggets; hers had been raised to a higher calling. She wanted to laugh at these thoughts, standing alone on the steps, because they were stark and even silly, but she had no laughter to give.

  Something was wrong with Cecelia’s mother, but at least she knew it and at least she was working her way out. She wasn’t crazy. She missed the chickens. She’d let go of them weeks ago in her heart. She hadn’t tossed and turned last night, which was unusual. She’d had dreams, and they’d been empty. Her dreams had been hollow eggs. She hadn’t heard a ruckus out back of the house and she hadn’t heard Cecelia leave this morning. She remembered the day she’d bought the chickens, one of the last times she’d walked to Lofte’s little downtown to go grocery shopping. She’d had her backpack with her, and was planning to grill steaks and panfry something green. On her way she’d passed the little Redding property and had not felt like cooking but had definitely felt lonely and the chickens were in the front pen for ten dollars each and Cecelia’s mother had made a bad decision because she had the right to. She’d saved the chickens’ lives. The Reddings were getting out of the hobby and Cecelia’s mother got in. She could have company like everyone else. She could have something going on. She could do something Cecelia wouldn’t approve of. She’d come home with live chickens she meant to keep alive rather than dead steaks she meant to put over a fire. She’d never had a pet in her life, probably another reason she’d bought them. It wasn’t nuts to have some chickens. It was only nuts to have chickens if you were nuts anyway, without the chickens.

  Cecelia’s mother looked at the fence from one end to the other, still standing on the back step with the kitchen door wide open, and she saw no breach. The fence was perfect. She realized that there was no blood, not a drop anywhere. The sky in the distance, above the peaks, was stained red. That’s where the blood had gone—far off, high above. Cecelia’s mother stood there wondering whether she would rake the feathers up. That seemed disrespectful somehow, to rake them up like leaves. Maybe she could pick them all up with her fingers and drop them in a big sack. She could leave them alone, let the wind carry them off a clutch at a time. She didn’t know if she wanted anyone else to see this. This was hers, not Cecelia’s or the neighbors’ or her brother-in-law’s. She stood there, her kettle starting to make its noise.

  SOREN’S FATHER

  There was an open lot not far from the clinic where hot-air balloons launched. The sky was clearer than it had been. Soren’s father watched several balloons take shape and cling to the ground until they no longer could and then float out over the flatlands, and now he watched the crew struggling with a lavender vessel that must’ve had a leak. They could get it only so full before it listed and collapsed.

  The nurses had not been permitted to throw out Soren’s father’s mail, but they’d kept it from him in a canvas laundry bag. They said he had to be the one to empty the bag down the trash chute. There hadn’t been near as much mail since the nurses had been stewarding it as back when Soren had first fallen into his coma. The mail didn’t nearly fill the bag, but was only something in the bottom that caused the bag to swing when Soren’s father carried it to the end of the hall. He watched the envelopes tumbling into the dark, glimpsing return addresses in New Hampshire, Utah, other places.

  He returned to his son’s room and stood at the window. His eyes traveled from the lavender balloon, which had been cleared off and was being examined by young men with ponytails, to his own ref
lection. His face was inches away. He was wearing a sweater he didn’t recognize. It was the color of hazel eyes. Gee had told him he wasn’t brave, as if anyone was as brave as she was. He wasn’t a coward, but he knew what she’d meant. He wasn’t kind and he had no friends. He wasn’t kind or trusting and the worst thing about other people was they were those things. He’d seen the same folks every day at the factories and warehouses, knew their orders by heart, but he’d never known one thing beyond what they liked to eat. He’d had customers and a couple employees and a wife who’d gotten to know him but whom he hadn’t truly known, a wife he’d never had a fight with, that he’d never cried in front of. Soren had come along and made all that moot. That’s what Gee had meant about using Soren as an excuse. Soren’s father was worse now. The warmth in his life was frozen and sitting still was his business. He had a space to be alone and he’d defended it against the nurses and doctors and against Gee and he’d even been cold to Soren’s piano teacher, the poor woman. There’d been a cousin Soren’s father had been close with as a child who’d died when they were both in their twenties. Soren’s father didn’t know why he was thinking of him now. He couldn’t remember if that cousin had been a genuine friend or just a family member about the same age whom he happened to get along with. He couldn’t remember why they didn’t stay close once they weren’t children anymore. Soren’s father had been sitting in this room for a long time and he saw that he hadn’t been hoping properly, not with a live heart, not in a way that meant anything.