Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  No pickup.

  Not a soul.

  I walk all the way around the block, back to 183, but no Hernandez.

  The wind and the empty streets have taken him.

  It’s as if he’s never been there.

  As if he’s someone I imagined.

  at smitty’s, i ask my dad how the Skype call went. Okay, he says. It’s always a question of balance; you never know what will come. But now he won’t have to think about it for three or four days. If you’d had a quarrel with her, would you have dwelled on it? I ask him. Does it bother you until the next time you talk? I think of how I get whenever I argue with someone. It disturbs my work, everything, in fact, if there’s any background noise humming in my head. No, he says. Not really. With the exchange now successfully behind him, he finishes off a sausage and two tender slices of brisket. I skip the sausage but eat three slices of brisket and half a bag of saltine crackers.

  Afterward, we head into the shop next door where three rusted horses in mid-stride decorate a sign saying: Ranch Style. On the door, a sticker promises old-fashioned ice cream, and my dad wants to know if I’m still the world’s fastest ice cream eater. Glancing around the spacious room filled with cowboy boots and postcards, with its plank floors and high ceiling, my dad suddenly remembers the place. This used to be the cinema, he says. He would come here on Saturdays in his bare feet and watch films for a quarter. Behind a glass counter in the center of the shop, a slouching plus-size girl asks what she can do for us. Do you sell ice cream? my dad asks. Sure, she says, and walks lazily toward the back of the shop. Along the back wall is the old-fashioned ice cream parlor, tall stools with red vinyl, vintage Coca-Cola ads, electrical cords on the floor. It’s dark, and she paws around for the switch, the light snaps on, just enough to see the ice cream in their tubs. There was a power outage, the girl says, but she doesn’t seem to view it as a hindrance as she scoops our ice cream. There’s nothing else to do but shovel it into large paper cups with a ladle, as if bailing water from a boat. She takes her time. My dad, who wants an ice cream soda, gets his Dr. Pepper in a plastic bottle on the side. We sit in the semi-darkness at one of the small metal tables. Usually he lets me win, but it’s the first time he’s not the actual World’s Fastest Ice Cream Eater. He gives up halfway through his. When we leave, he brings the still half-full soda bottle with him.

  morning is the best time of day to approach the sky. Roy has settled on my lap. Underneath him is my notebook. I ought to write in it, assemble my thoughts on paper while my dad is still sleeping, but I’d rather sit here and stare at the horizon. Each time the light changes, the prairie color shifts along with it, in long, calm, golden strokes. The jagged clouds that glide across the sun, the landscape that transforms into islands of violet. I am painted with the same brush, transparent, engulfed, dissolved, lost until nothing of me remains. When I come to myself, I have the hiccups.

  We go to bed late every night, 2:00 am, sometimes even 3:00. He’s up again at 10:00 am. Not once has he needed to rest or nap during the day, which would be normal enough when you’re nearly eighty years old.

  Do you never need a nap? I asked yesterday when we returned from our excursion.

  The question appeared to surprise him. As if he’d never considered that one could sleep during the day. Sometimes at the office, he said. If I am working a lot. Then he might put his legs up on the desk and rest his eyes for a few minutes. Ten or fifteen minutes is usually enough, he said.

  Now I can hear him whipping eggs. After we’ve eaten breakfast, we ride up to Ginger and Ben’s. On the way we stop at a Walmart to buy more socks and underwear and the change of shirt he didn’t have room for in his suitcase. Inside the store, we stand staring across the endless aisles, momentarily disoriented at its vastness. You can see the curvature of the Earth in here, my dad says.

  To our left is an entire procession of motorized scooters, so those who are overweight or have trouble walking can get around the store faster. We use our two legs and wander in a daze among eggs and swimwear and sneakers. What had we come here for? Oh, yes. Socks and underwear. Somewhere behind me I’d lost sight of the past, and also my dad. I’m looking at something, huge toys they appear to be, packed into cheerful boxes. Undead Apocalypse, it reads in slimy green letters on a plastic-wrapped gun.

  Pumpmaster, it says on a gun with a pink handle.

  Assault Rifle, it says on the kind of machine gun you see in gangster movies.

  Shelf after shelf stocked with rifles, guns, and life-sized hand weapons.

  My dad appears behind me.

  Are they real?

  Yes, of course.

  They look like toys, I tell him.

  He knows at once where I’m headed. To the extreme, as he sees it, it’s the European in me, the Scandinavian, the Dane, who believes that the world can get along on weak tea and polite conversation.

  They are just ordinary rifles and guns, he says, just as he did that day we sat with Gloria and I asked questions about the Civil War. Normal shotguns that are dudded up a bit, he says. Hunting guns or not, I think it’s clearly a bad idea to sell gangster and zombie-killer weapons along with butter and parsley and underwear. He’s always ready to defend the right to bear arms, and I’m always ready to muster my Scandinavian indignation; we’ve been stuck in these positions ever since I was old enough to form an argument in English. He speaks of the Constitution as if the Founding Fathers carried it down from the mountain. Like Moses with the Commandments, carved in stone. George Washington in a burning bush.

  But the times have changed, I say. It’s not applicable anymore. They couldn’t possibly have meant that citizens should have the right to run around shooting each other?

  Oh, he says. Are you really that naïve? Do you really believe that citizens are the threat? That they are the ones you should defend yourself against?

  A memory pops into my head, of a guy with strange, lackluster eyes who visited the house in the forest in upstate New York where I wrote last year. At that point there was a state of emergency in Boston, a terrorist on the loose, we followed the news, and a group of us began to discuss gun laws in the kitchen. In one of the pauses where the guy wasn’t wandering restlessly around outside the house rolling joints, he materialized with wide pupils and asserted that people needed guns not to protect themselves from each other, and here his eyes glowed palely: We need them to protect ourselves from the government. The notion was completely new to me, I would even go so far as to call it a Copernican Turn. My trust in the system is so ingrained that it’s never even occurred to me to nourish such distrust that I should acquire guns. After all, it was the Danish state that paid for my education and not, for instance, my dad.

  Since then, I’ve learned that the deep-rooted fear of being overtaken by a tyrannical government, a fear I consider especially American, actually originated in England. But the reality has changed since the days when some sheep farmer in Yorkshire needed to protect himself from the king’s men. Even the idea of running background checks on anyone who purchases a weapon, to find out if there’s anything that could be problematic, like mental illness, that kind of thing, my dad does not perceive as an attempt to protect citizens but to control them, to have something on them. The information is used for obscure purposes, he says, but just what he doesn’t make clear, his pronouns skate this way and that, and multiple times I have to ask: Who are they? The government, he says, the administration.

  I’m even less clear. It’s the same old frustration as when I was fifteen and seventeen and twenty-one, the tempo, my eagerness to make myself understood and my anger at not being understood, it leads me to barren spaces. White as a desert, black as a night. What was I actually trying to say? Where are the words I need? I can’t even remember them in Danish.

  It’s all determined before language. It’s not about arguments at all but emotions. How one feels about a cloud of dust approaching in the distance. How one feels about knocking on a stranger’s door. Are they goi
ng to ask for directions, or will they invade your home? I need my own language. When discussing subjects that are determined before language, I need in the very least to position myself at the spot where it originates, on the edge of the bubbling swamp, ready with my little fishing net.

  When we reach the register, I’m so exhausted that I can’t even think of anything to compare my exhaustion with.

  we teeter on the edge of the sore subject. In the car it’s forgotten. The roadside is lush with wildflowers. Mostly the blue ones mixed with dots of yellow and red. My dad doesn’t hold grudges, and I find it difficult to maintain one with someone who doesn’t even notice it. Lady Bird Johnson was the one who cared for the flowers, he says. I know the bluebonnets, I say, but what are the red ones called? Indian heads, my dad says. I tell him there must be a more politically correct name. That’s what we’ve always called them. Are they the ones people call Indian paintbrush? I ask. I like Indian heads better, my dad says. It fits with bluebonnets …

  We’ve eaten all of Ben’s pancakes. Ginger clears the table, and Ben goes out to the garage and returns with a clumsy-looking shotgun that he sets on the table with a clunk, along with a heavy rifle that’s equally rusted and ugly, which he also sets on the table.

  It’s from Poppa’s store, Ben says, smiling his little fox smile. He explains that a Texas Ranger had come into the store one day and laid them on Poppa’s counter, saying: The man who own’d these won’t needem no more.

  I hold the shotgun, not exactly a precision weapon. It’s about as nifty as an antique clothes iron. My dad picks up the rifle and squints along the length of the barrel. The man whose back is so practiced at curling over stacks of papers, whose fingers are so practiced at producing eraser shavings, claims he was once a pretty decent shooter. His first air gun was also from Poppa’s store, given to him as a four-year-old by his favorite uncle, Bud, a Red Ryder BB gun that was advertised on the back of comic books. The uncle had tinkered with the compression mechanism a bit and lowered the air pressure, but my dad didn’t notice.

  We go to the garage to see what else is in Ben’s gun cabinet. I quickly lose interest in the Texas discipline of men standing around gun cabinets discussing weapons, losing myself instead in the unique collection of tools, camping equipment, arrows, and a hand-painted sign: men and fish are alike. when they open their mouths, they get in trouble.

  After the rifles the vegetable garden. I can’t think of anything more pacifistic than long, straight rows of green beans. As Ben points out crops, the sun covers us like a heavy blanket. A thick buzzing from a microscopic insect life wells up beneath us. It’s so hot that I can barely focus.

  See that big ol’ bushy green one over there? That’s dill. It saves you some for the pickles.

  My dad tells him how I feel about pickles.

  Can you take some seeds back with you? Ben asks, I got a package in the garage. He’s already headed through the open garage door to find some cucumber seeds.

  The heavy sun has driven us to the other side of the house. We stand under the overhang gazing across the dried-up riverbed as the horizon swells and shifts. A strangely glowing darkness rolls toward us out of the north. It appears as if the horizon is retching, some kind of sick, dark-blue-black heaving creature.

  What is it?

  Ben says: I’m afraid it’s a Norther …

  A Texas Norther. I don’t know what it is, but there’s apparently no time for explanations, only to run inside and grab our things. Ginger wants us to spend the night. My dad looks at me, and I, not knowing what awaits us, say I’d rather go home if that’s possible. My dad tells Ginger and Ben that we’ll try to make it to Lockhart by driving before the storm hits. On the other side of the house, the sun still shines with the brilliant glow of doomsday. We run, to get back to our origins, wind whipping our hair, and then we’re in the car, my dad sets out, and Ginger and Ben wave in the rearview mirror. When we reach Highway 71, the first raindrops strike the windshield like ripe plums. Soon we can no longer count them. For a few long minutes the rain turns into hail. Flocks of black birds swirl around above us, searching for an opening in the sky. But there’s no place to slip through.

  The windshield wipers can’t keep up, the tin can rattles, but for some reason we’re thrilled. We’re in the middle of a Norther! We feel powerfully alive, there’s still some daylight, we’re on the highway, and there’s no telling up from down. We even discuss driving around Lockhart to stock up on sparkling water and imported beer. But then it grows dark, totally dark. We’ve exited the highway by now, and there’s no light on the narrow country roads. We’ve made this trip so many times that we believed we could drive it with our eyes closed. Now that all we can see is our own headlights flickering through a fat curtain of rain, we’ve begun to doubt. We push through a tunnel of water. Maybe we’ve driven into a field? We thought we were driving on Silent Valley Road when suddenly the headlights flash on a sign toward San Marcos. A truck passes us blasting its horn, and it judders the car so badly that my dad nearly loses control. God damnit, he says, squeezing the wheel with all his might. This is really uncomfortable. Each time it thunders, the vehicle clatters uncontrollably. It feels like scales falling off a fish. We’ve driven at least fifteen miles in the wrong direction and need to find a place to turn around. We no longer have any idea where the road is, but every now and then the landscape is illuminated in a blazing flash, like a photographic negative.

  •

  We don’t even count to one before the thunderclap follows, and the ground shivers below us. For a moment I think we will perish here, together in the darkness beneath a crackling sky as we attempt to find our way back to my father’s birthplace. The irony is palpable; it belongs to the kind that sounds better on paper. Right now, our sense of humor is gone. Then we see the sign to Roger’s Ranch, which means we’re back on Silent Valley Road. A flash of lightning darts across the sky. Not down to the ground, but across, from one side of the windshield to the other. Did I really see that? A zigzag-sparking arm reaching out with a terrible beauty before disappearing?

  Did you see that, Dad?

  I did see it! he says. It looked like a cloud attacking another cloud!

  When we’re finally back at the house, neither of us snaps on the light. Neither of us feels the urge to speak. I make tea in the dark, and my dad pours himself a glass of Scotch. As soon as the cork is free, a smoky aroma that I find quite pleasant wafts across the room. We sit in our separate rocking chairs in front of the big living room window, quietly, he with his tumbler and me with my mug. Ice cubes clink between thunderclaps, his throat-clearing, the reflection in his eyeglasses. The fury of the elements outside. We sit that way for some time and stare out into the sparkling darkness.

  the variations seem endless. The gentle way the landscape has shifted toward the recognizable. The placement of the water holes is a calming sight. The house on the hill. Tractors, trucks. Enough space to let machines rust in the sun. Hundreds of black cows scattered across the luminous prairie like seeds on a bird table. Lazily chewing their cuds under the slanting rays of the sun. I squirrel it all in with my eyes to store it somewhere in my body or soul, something to nourish me when I return home to the narrow streets of Copenhagen.

  time, my dad’s favorite subject, has gradually also become mine. When I was fifteen, I did not understand why the film 2001: A Space Odyssey disturbed him so much; I never made it past the human apes at the beginning without falling asleep, and his assertion that life was over in an instant always seemed to be greatly overblown. It sounded like something he and other middle-aged people made up when they no longer saw their lives spread before them like a vast grassy meadow. But now. Now I can I see myself as an old woman who soon, in the next scene, will lie in a large bed imagining a younger version of herself such as, say, the person I am now.

  In recent years, time has begun to sneak into our conversations. Last we discussed time was, as I recall, a few months ago via Skype. But maybe that w
as only a moment ago? Maybe it was while I sat in the strangely immobile darkness with my broken leg having lost all sense of time.

  The conversations usually begin the same way. He grows thoughtful, and then he says something along the lines of, time is really not understood at all, we really haven’t understood time. Mostly to himself.

  When we Skype, I sit with a notebook, my old habit of trying to clutch every morsel whenever I finally have him to myself. I’ve asked him if he’d ever written anything about time. He said that he’d tried to write something once but didn’t get very far. That would be on my old Unix files somewhere.

  I wrote in my notebook: Unix.

  He said that the experience of time is connected to the experience of being here right now, and he aired the theory that we humans maybe aren’t living in the same now. We experience the world moment by moment, he said, but maybe my moment is different from other people’s moments. I watched him on the screen.

  I mean, I’m here and now at this particular moment, he said. And you’re there at this particular moment. But maybe your now is different than mine.

  It sounds a bit scary, he said when he saw my face.

  It would explain a lot, I said.

  Right. He laughed, it was a conciliatory laughter. It would explain a whole lot.

  In a sense you are talking to ghosts, he said a moment later. But they are completely functioning ghosts. The others’ present, was his point, simply lay in another time.

  It sounds a bit crazy, he added.

  But I didn’t think it sounded crazy at all. On the contrary, it made absolute sense. Talking to ghosts, I repeated. For a moment I considered using it as the title of the book.

  one of the last evenings, when we’re sitting outside after dinner, night sneaks in without notice. Just as suddenly, the stars appear in the sky above us. They glow so fiercely I have to lean my head back, but I get so dizzy I have to grab the tabletop. My dad is convinced they glow brighter here in Texas than anywhere else. I don’t know why, he says. Nor does he know why he spent his teenage years sitting in the dark in Poppa’s store reading astronomy books. Back then he’d had no idea how unusual it was. It’s ironic to think about now. He ought to have used the opportunity to talk to Poppa more. He ought to have used the opportunity to go outside and gaze at the nighttime sky more.