A Million Heavens (31 page)

Dannie saw the billboard for the Owl Café and then she saw the exit and blew past it. She wanted to be in her car. There was something way out ahead of her on the horizon, either low clouds or lofty mountain peaks. They were as far off as her eyes could see, in another state or another country.

He walked his sister-in-law out to his car and she lowered herself down into the passenger seat without any help. Mayor Cabrera got them going north on the old Turquoise Trail. His sister-in-law was wearing an actual outfit, a blouse and pants that matched and a coat and shoes that went together. She'd made some effort with her hair. Mayor Cabrera could tell by the way his sister-in-law looked around at the scenery that she hadn't been up this way in a long time. She placed her hand on the dashboard, bracing herself, and Mayor Cabrera slowed down. When they were young, she'd have been egging him to go faster. She and Tam and Mayor Cabrera had spent so many hours in a car, in his old El Camino. They'd burned a whole summer chasing around the state to sites where aliens had been spotted.

At the cemetery they walked at a measured pace, browsing the tombstones.
Some of these people had lived in the Old West, Mayor Cabrera thought. The Old West had not been so long ago. Mayor Cabrera asked how his sister-in-law's chickens were doing, which was a way of asking if she was worried about the wolf. She said she couldn't bring the chickens in at night because of the mess they'd make. She hoped there were enough of them to look out for one another, or at least raise enough racket to wake her. She seemed resigned to leave her chickens to fate, which Mayor Cabrera decided to take as a sign of sanity. She seemed a little embarrassed about the chickens, in general. If she could be embarrassed, she was rejoining the human race.

They came to the tombstone they were looking for. Mayor Cabrera had decided not to put dates on his wife's stone. He didn't want her hemmed in that way. There was an engraving on the stone of verbena, her favorite flower. There was a weed the landscaping crew had missed, leaning against the stone like a drunk against an alley wall. Mayor Cabrera reached down and plucked it.

His sister-in-law's cheeks looked blanched, out in the chilly breeze. “Things have never felt real,” she said, “without her here to see them.”

Mayor Cabrera knew what she meant. The moment he was in now didn't seem all that real. “We used to be the best people we knew,” he said. “We walked around with that. The knowledge that we were fun and tough.”

His sister-in-law's lips became a hard line and then she said, “I remember. I remember how I was.”

The sun found its way out of the clouds and Mayor Cabrera saw that they were standing in the shade. He hadn't visited his wife's grave in forever but the feeling was nonetheless familiar, the uncertainty about what to feel, about whether he was there for himself or Tam, whether that mattered. Maybe it was good to feel confused. Maybe some people didn't feel anything at the cemetery, and that had to be worse.

“I remember,” his sister-in-law repeated. “But it was easy back then.”

A small noise issued from behind them, a throat-clearing, and they turned to see an old man approach a nearby grave. He pulled a newspaper out from under his arm and rested it in front of the stone. It wasn't
yellowed or stiff, the paper. It looked like today's paper. The old man removed his hat with a shaky hand. He didn't seem to notice anyone else was around, and Mayor Cabrera and his sister-in-law, in order not to disturb him, grew still and quiet.

He was in ninth grade but was almost six feet tall and had strapping forearms. Each morning he came out before he left for school and fed his rabbit and stroked its ears back. It wasn't a normal rabbit, nor even a jackrabbit. It was some European breed with long hair and a permanent frown that the boy's mother had rescued from a defunct circus. The rabbit looked like a wizard. It had taken the boy's mother one day to realize she didn't want the rabbit inside the house and two days to realize it would make a poor pet. By then, the boy was attached.

When the boy came out, still chewing his last bite of cereal, he saw the buzzards all around and knew what had happened. He didn't know what had happened, but he knew the rabbit was dead. He couldn't see the cage from where he stood because it was tucked against the side of the house in a utility shed that was really only some sheets of plywood. The buzzards had not dared inside. They were building courage. The wolf now knew everything about the boy. The wolf, by this time of morning, was hiding somewhere on the edge of the wilderness. He was hiding but he wasn't worried about getting shot or captured. He was worried because the songs were coming less often and he needed them more and more. The girl in the house with the chickens was failing him. The wolf would have been relieved, somewhere inside him, to have the humans corner him, the same as the pets were relieved in their souls when they saw the wolf's eyes before them.

The boy, the rabbit's owner, was always alone at the house in the mornings because his mother worked early, and for once the boy was grateful for this. He went in and got the shotgun and the paper bag of shells. The paper of the bag was stiff and rough, like it had been rained on and then
dried out. He sat himself on a stack of vinyl siding and aimed the shotgun and put even pressure on the trigger. Then he quickly fired the other shell. Then he reloaded. He was so close to his targets, he didn't have to use the bead at the end of the barrel. Each time he shot a pair of buzzards he had to wait for the rest of them to resettle. They would scurry a short ways, flapping and stumbling, wanting to get to safety but not wanting to forfeit their spot in the chow line. The boy didn't want to see the rabbit yet. He wasn't going to school. He was excusing himself. He shot twice and waited, shot twice and waited. The sun ascended shapeless and white. After a half-hour, there were more buzzards, not fewer. Some of them had lost interest in the hidden rabbit and were poking at their dead brethren. The man who lived on the next property came over to see what was happening. When he realized the boy's pet was dead and the boy was almost out of ammo, he allowed the shooting to continue. It was a sight. The yard looked war-torn. The shot buzzards were fifty low, tattered flags from fifty defeated little forces.

In time, the boy had to go look. He saw. The rabbit had beaten its head against the bars. The boy had been right that the cage was sturdy enough to keep out any predator, but he had not counted on an animal that would scare the rabbit to death just to do it. The wolf hadn't wanted to eat the rabbit, only to torture it. It was a lot for the boy to take in.

The man from the next property sent the boy inside. He agreed that the boy didn't need to go to school that day. The man got his pickup truck and tossed every last buzzard in the bed, so he could haul them out in the desert and dump them. He couldn't believe how light they were. Each bird weighed about as much as an apple. He had a tarpaulin cover for the bed and he stretched it on, to keep the rest of the buzzards at bay. He wondered if all the live ones would follow him when he drove off, a grim cloud. He got the rabbit out of its cage and rested it on the seat of his truck, and then he grabbed a shovel. He was going to dig a grave for the rabbit, and the buzzards he was going to dump on the side of a little-used road, to show them what it felt like.

He finally answered one of Gee's calls and she told him before he could even say hello that she was only interested, at this point in her life, in getting swept up in a person, and that with Soren's father she had been doing all the sweeping. She wasn't looking to take care of someone. She wasn't misery looking for company. She had given more than she'd gotten all her life, she told Soren's father. All her life. She'd realized she'd wanted to start a restaurant mostly for
him
, to give him a partner and work to do and distraction and self-respect, and so she'd scrapped the plan. The restaurant was off. She was going to work on her memoir full time, something selfish, something for her.

Soren's father had a perverse impulse to beg her not to leave him, to say he wanted to join in on the restaurant even, but he was able to swallow it. She had never been angry with him before.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Don't be. Just be grateful. Be grateful for the time you had with me.”

“I'm that too.”

Gee exhaled into the phone. “This was the last time I was going to try calling you. I'm driving to Phoenix to see my son. Bags are packed.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Not yet.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Drive into his six-month-old neighborhood in my twenty-year-old van and knock on the front door of his mini-mansion. That's what.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” Soren's father said. “I wish you luck.”

“I can feel that it's time,” said Gee.

Soren's father was grateful to know Gee, but he was also grateful to her for sharing her intentions about seeing her son. It was good news that felt like good news. Gee could've said her little piece about breaking up with him and then hung up the phone. Soren's father felt a burning in his sinuses and realized it was the beginning of tears. He took a greedy breath to hold them back.

“There's going to be a reunion,” Gee said. “And that occasion will be
the final triumphant chapter of my memoir.”

“I'll read it when it comes out.”

“And it
will
come out,” Gee said. “I've done harder things in my life than publish a damn book.”

“Yeah, you tried to be my girlfriend.”

“I was trying to help myself at first. I thought I needed to get close to Soren or close to you. I thought I needed something, but I don't. I've fixed myself dozens of times.”

“I've never fixed myself once.”

“You don't need a whole lot of fixing. You don't need a complete overhaul. You're just a little lost.”

Soren's father looked over at his son. Whenever he was upset, it seemed to him that Soren was breathing slower, but it was only Soren's father's impatience.

“Let's say I'm lost,” he said. “What am I supposed to look for?”

“You don't
find
anything,” Gee told him. “You just be brave. You make that a policy.”

Soren's father had never thought about bravery. He didn't know what his policy was.

“We're friends,” Gee said, “and I'm going to tell you one thing before I get off the phone.”

“Okay,” said Soren's father.

“Don't use your son as an excuse.”

Gee left the line quiet a few moments. Then she said she had a hell of a drive in front of her.

She had never thought of herself as possessing nerve. She'd thought of herself as a person with endurance, a person who, if she entertained fantasies, did so in the service of her everyday stamina, but here she was pulling past the clinic, past the vigil, already in progress, and hitting the gas rather than the brake. There were only two of them left now in the parking lot,
two women, two vigilers. The piano teacher didn't feel she'd made a decision. She felt as though something had been sprung on her. She hadn't packed a stitch of clothing or even a toothbrush, but here she was cruising right past the final shadowy pair. Here she was rolling by the Mexican market with the happy vegetables painted on the walls. Here she was getting on the empty interstate and bringing her car up to a speed it hadn't achieved in ages.

She would leave her car in the garage and her daughter would have to pick it up. The piano teacher imagined the phone call and could already savor her daughter's outrage. She'd tell her daughter she was staying a week and wouldn't tell her daughter where, and then after a week she'd tell her she was staying another week. She'd have to return eventually. It wasn't a permanent escape. She would run out of money, for one thing, and that's what her daughter would be most worried about. Maybe the piano teacher would spend every penny she had and force her daughter to pay to fly her home.

She exited the interstate. The road that led into the airport was lined with towering terra cotta pots and the pots were imprinted with symbols and drawings that could have meant anything. Wherever the piano teacher ended up, she was going to buy a crappy piano that was all hers and play it just for herself, and she was going to keep it until the day she died. Her daughter would have to ship the thing home and the shipping would cost more than the instrument. The worst piano she could find. Maybe with a family of mice in it. The piano teacher felt a physical craving for her fingers against keys, felt a need to put organized noise into a cranny of the world. The piano teacher would soon be near an ocean, in a place with vines and moss and high-hung fronds, a place that appeared on the verge of swallowing itself. The piano teacher was going to listen to the noise of honest blue waves spending themselves until she couldn't remember the noise of this broken desert wind that, for once, seemed to be at her back.

During the vigils, she never heard songs. She heard only what was meant to be heard, the noise of the sand and pebbles and gravel and whatever else was slight enough to be brushed about by the wind. The gusts came from one direction and then another, as if the wind meant to sweep the world's scattered ingredients into a pile.