A Million Heavens (22 page)

Reggie's next song was ready. He started by messing around on the harmonica—warming up, putting some cracks in the quiet—but soon it was time to earnestly compose so he shucked his shirt and picked up the guitar. He had no idea how many songs were in him. Reggie cracked his fingers and began playing. He knew what was coming but it sounded different hearing it on the air than it sounded in his brain, as if the songs were made of an element that enlivened upon contact with oxygen. He was enjoying writing songs again, and would've been doing it whether or not he was rewarded. He hadn't asked for any of the luxuries the afterlife was showering on him. His inclination was to feel bribed, kept, but these were concepts from the world of the living. Of course he was kept. Reggie's earlier refusal to read a book or drink a cocktail had made no difference, and his acceptance of the afterlife's hospitality made no difference. It wasn't a bribe. Reggie was giving the songs away. Nothing he received meant anything, only what he gave.

On her way to the agriculture building for a repair call, walking out around the Natural History museum and then past an acre or so of pepper plants, the next song arrived. Cecelia had been taking her time getting to the building, knowing she was going to go all the way over there and climb stairs and locate the classroom and interrupt the class all for no reason, because there was no way she was going to be able to help—she never could—and she heard it, another song. It seemed to grow out of the wind and quickly became louder than the wind. She smelled the peppers and heard the notes. This song was running the same course as the last, arranging itself, getting organized, but this one was coming together much faster. There was no need for Cecelia to hum. She was already getting the gist of the melody, and could already tell it was unfamiliar. Another song. Cecelia felt the same apprehension, the same spark
of joy. Something impossible was happening. Cecelia racked her brain. Maybe Reggie had played the songs while she was asleep sometime and her subconscious had kept them buried until now. But Cecelia had never slept around Reggie. Not once. Maybe what was happening was akin to when mothers lifted pickup trucks off their children. Cecelia missed Reggie so badly she was having an adrenaline rush of the spirit, doing the extraordinary. Maybe the songs weren't being given to her, maybe she was taking them. She felt sweetly defeated. She was living proof that nobody knew anything.

Inside the building, she found 209 and knocked on the open door. The professor was wearing dress shoes and ratty jeans and looked familiar to Cecelia. He looked more familiar than someone would from seeing them around campus, but she couldn't place him. He had his phone hooked up to the A/V cabinet. His images were appearing on the computer screen but nothing was coming through the projector. Cecelia nodded at him confidently, hearing parts of what he was saying but mostly hearing the song, looking at the professor's phone but also looking out at the waiting students, who didn't seem to be rooting for or against Cecelia.

She touched a couple dials under the cabinet, staying down there for what seemed like long enough. When she stood, she said, “The projector isn't responding at all. That's not a positive sign.”

The professor didn't seem disappointed. He thought it might be the phone's fault. He seemed resigned to malfunction in general. Suddenly Cecelia remembered why he looked familiar. He'd come to the vigils for a few weeks, back at the start of them. That was it. There'd been one night in particular that he'd sat close by her. He'd dropped out. He'd dropped out like all the rest would eventually. At the most recent vigil, two days before, there'd been only a dozen people. The high-strung painter was still sticking it out, but it was only a matter of time for him. The haughty guy with all the pins on his coat was unreadable, a threat. The guy who always hid behind sunglasses even though it was night out and was always playing with a pen—Cecelia hoped he'd be the next to go. There were the middle-aged fat women with their reassuring expressions who seemed to
believe that everything wrong with the world wasn't really wrong, that it was all part of some convoluted grace. There was the pretty girl in her thirties and her young boyfriend. Who knew what they were doing? They were trying to prove something to each other or using the vigils as part of their dating or something. The woman seemed rich, from her car and her clothes. Cecelia didn't know why someone with a cute boyfriend and a new car would spend her time in a parking lot. None of the other vigilers had as much right to vigil as Cecelia had. They would all fall away, just like the redheaded hippie woman with the tacky earrings and the weightlifter dude.

“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.

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.

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 reading 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
.

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.