So it was the night Glen informed us of a fire in the sky. It was a Glen thing, and therefore suspect, but how cool if true! For a few delicious moments we assumed that was what he really meant, that a great blaze from above was going to end the world, until he went into his lecture on space debris and the coming to earth of some in a shower called the Leonids. Meteors is what he meant, after all. Not the Apocalypse, but good enough. Mom drove us out to the Knoxville Highway to find us a place to watch the meteors. At some later time she would honk three times to tell us she was there with the car to take us home.
Glen settled down in the night grass, lying on his back, looking up into the billion billion stars. The trees on three sides of the highway pull-over stood still and gray in the darkness, but now that I’ve said “gray” I have to add that they were also stone black below and luminous coppery silver above, where they fronted the sky. The fourth side was a wall of stars. Glen’s head rested on the palms of his hands, the long gray stalks of the mountain grass poking up beside his elbows and knees. He was silent. He was happy. I could tell though it was too dark to see his face very well. I wasn’t sure he was looking at the sky, or at me, or at Vince—who was teetering along the curb like an Olympic balance beam contestant—or if he was looking at anything at all. Enough light issued from the stars that I could see his smile and the outline of his body. It seemed strange to me that a kid who wanted to see the stars so much, who’d made such a point of being there in time for the show, would be lying down on the grass, rather than standing up with me, closer to the sky, on the slope of the mountain, as near heaven as you can get around here. The minute I thought that, though, I realized how silly it was, to count a few inches in the face of the immensities between us and those points of light.
If one actually fell, if a meteor fell out of the sky, it would annihilate us all in the same second.
A little breeze came, and the dark and light and the leaves and the grass stirred around us like millions of decks of cards shuffled by invisible dealers. When the breeze was right you could hear sounds, sometimes human voices, sometimes the stirring of animals, from the purple-blackness below the hill, where there were a few farms and long stretches of forest. The lights of the farms made the surrounding emptiness that much darker.
Tilden was singing in the blue darkness. Tilden had a nice voice, but it was the sort of thing you’d never say to him. If you mentioned he had a nice voice he’d know you had heard him, and the fiction, shared wordlessly, tacitly among us, was that Tilden’s singing was private and inaudible, heard only by himself. He made up the tunes, I think, or if he didn’t, he was listening to a different radio station than the rest of us. It was a shame. He sounded good, but we already anticipated running with a crowd in the midst of which one never sang to oneself.
The point of honor that night was to be the first to see a shooting star. “November, the Leonids,” Glen said, a night when the sky would fill with shooting stars like a battle scene in a space movie. I saw one as soon as we parked, but Glen said it didn’t count because it was too early and it wasn’t a Leonid but a plain old meteor. There was no use arguing with Glen when he’d made up his mind about something like that.
I looked at him lying belly up in the grass.
“You happy?”
“What?”
“Are you happy, Glen?”
“I guess so. You?”
“I’d be happier if you counted my meteor.”
“It counts as a meteor but not as a Leonid. I thought I explained that.”
“Why do you get to decide?”
Glen shrugged. That’s just the way it was.
Vince said, “What are you girls talking about?” and squeezed in between us, so our skinny boy bodies were wedged together like sardines in a can.
“I was just asking why Glen gets to decide everything.”
Vince thought a minute and said, “Because he’s smarter than me and Tilden doesn’t really care. That just leaves you bitchin’ and moanin’ like an old woman.”
I took his point and turned my attention to the stars. Restless Tilden started chasing lightning bugs. I could feel the sudden cold where his body left the proximity of mine. The three of us were lying on our backs with heads resting on our hands. We weren’t the only people to know about the meteorites, so every now and then a car ground into the pull-over, sweeping the stars away with its headlights. As our eyes readjusted, we listened to the conversations of the newcomers, couples, mostly, taking the excuse of scientific observation for a night together in the woods. The boy-girl couple just up the hill from us had gotten there before we did, and were a little bored, and were beginning to play with each other, and giggle, and admonish each other, “Watch the sky, now.” A white van pulled up below with a bunch of kids in it, older kids, maybe college kids. They were drunk, but sweet and happy. One big kid flopped down into the grass beside Glen. I don’t think he knew he was there; I think he thought Glen was a natural feature, a gray swelling out of the gray rock of the mountain. He liked it that way.
We hoped that when people died they became part of the mountain, and never quite left the scenes of their lives. That’s why the mountains were so big. They keep growing and what they grow with is us. We liked that.
I looked up again at the twinkling dome. Mom taught me to wish on a star once, but I forgot the exact procedure. Glen would know. I figured he was wishing a lot harder and a lot more than me anyway. He was one of those people who had an emptiness in him that wasn’t meanness or sin or anything like that, but just strangeness, as if he hadn’t figured himself out yet. Of course he would be wishing for something I couldn’t comprehend. Maybe he was wishing to be a girl so he could have Vince the way he had him that night at the camp-out. I was still trying to figure out how all that might work in the life before us. Me, I was actually pretty content as I understood things. Vince claimed victory on every field and Tilden lived in a world of his own making. None of us would answer questions like, “Are you happy?” when we thought they were serious, so there was no use asking. We were all right.
A car approached, hesitated, went on higher up the mountain. A big hoot-owl went at it down in the darkness, who-who-ing in a way which would have been scary if my pals hadn’t been with me.
Some of the voices coming out of the night were more familiar than others. We heard a couple of Coach’s boys, a couple of the younger footballers. We would have joined them, maybe, had Glen not sunk down in the grass like he was a tortoise trying to find a shell to hide in. They were just JV’s from the middle school, but Coach’s influence had reached down to them, and they would be particular about whom they ran with, and cruel to those they didn’t.
I was about to say, “I’m getting bored,” when, almost at the limits of visibility, Tilden’s arm shot out straight, pointing at the sky. I looked up at the glimmering remnant of a meteor’s trail. I was about to remark on how interesting that was when another came, and another. I admit I thought we weren’t going to see anything. It wasn’t until other people gathered in the darkness, looking up expectantly into the star-bowl, that I realized the Leonids were not a Glen Copland invention.
People around us were saying “Ah!” I looked up again at the dark sky slashed with white trails of flame. Ten, twenty, forty, a storm of falling rock transformed into a lace of pale fire. Glen lay on the ground with his arms open, welcoming the shooting stars. Without moving my head, I could see the fire trails appearing low in the east, but mostly I was looking at Glen, his arms held up like that. I’d seen that gesture before, in a book or a slide show, or maybe a sleeping bag on the side of a mountain. Glen had taken the sky as his lover. The gesture was too knowing: I didn’t think the sky was his first.
“Glen?” Vince said.
“Yeah?”
“Doesn’t this just make you come in your pants?”
Glen’s arms collapsed onto his chest, his hands contracted into fists. He bent in the middle a little, lifting his back off the turf.
He let out this spluttering wheeze which is what happens when a good one catches you off guard. He seized a deep breath, and then his belly-laugh belled out over the mountain silence—strange how silent it was, when the meteors were so like fireworks you expected explosions mid-air—and you could see the shadows of people turning to look at him, but you knew it was all good, that the sound was somehow exactly right, Copland holding his belly, his eyes mere slits now, tears streaming from the corners, as the shooting stars blazed and went out, blazed and went out.
“I swear to God, Silvano,” he said when he could catch his breath.
The couple just above us might have come to see the shooting stars, but they were doing something else now. The little flashlight they brought to look at the star map had gone out. One could hear her low moans as he fumbled about in her shirt, under the loosened top of her jeans. That was the last November when sex was still funny to me.
The meteor flashes slowed a little over the ridge, but if you looked east they were still coming like a fake-out bomb attack, all fizzle and no bang, beautiful, the way artillery must be if you know it will never hit its mark. I didn’t know if you were supposed to be afraid or not, but the comparisons I made in my imagination to cannon and artillery made me apprehensive.
“What if it did?” I said out loud. “What if one of those things actually made it to the ground? Glen? What if it did?”
Glen took a minute to consider this. He sat up. I could see the sticks and leaves clinging to the back of his gray sweatshirt. Finally he said, “That would be so goddamn beautiful.”
IV
I was already in the water, already up to my neck in Green’s Pond when Vinny comes striding out of the woods buck naked, his shorts and T-shirt wadded in his hand. Vince was growing blond hair under his arms and in a line up from his dick toward his belly button. You could see the down fluttering a little in the wind, almost invisible, but not quite, for a person who was really looking.
“Hey, Arden?”
“What?”
“You playing with yourself down there under the water?”
“No.”
“Let me see your hands.”
I raised my hands to show I was not playing with myself, or had at least left off doing so. Vince nodded, acknowledging it was, therefore, safe to come in.
“I know something cool,” he said. He shuddered a little as the first frigid water hit his balls. He’d forgotten the clothes in his hand, and tossed them backward toward the shore without even looking where they might have landed. They hit a dry stone a few inches off shore. He was miraculous that way.
“What?” I said.
“We’re going to have a new teacher. First thing in the fall.”
Fresh hires were rare in our district. They had to be Christians, but not too vocal about it. They should go to covered-dish suppers but not make altar call more than once a year. It would help if they were local, though over the years “local” had expanded to include most of western Carolina and eastern Tennessee. They should be female, unless they were a coach. Married men were sometimes considered, but it struck the citizens as peculiar when a grown man would settle for what the district had to pay. This time all the signifiers were aligned. We were among the first in the know because adults were always talking in front of Coach’s kid like he was one of them.
It gave us a thrill to sneak into the school office, sashay casually past the Teachers’ Assignment Board, and discover that our new teacher’s given name was Nancy. Teachers’ first names were as taboo at that point as names of sexual organs. We whispered them one to another like guilty secrets. The name “Nancy” seemed wonderfully old-fashioned; amid the throng of Dianes and Karens and Susans in our class, there had never once, from kindergarten on, been a Nancy. It was an old lady’s name, an Edwardian girls’ adventure novel name, and that’s what we expected that hot and crabby day after Labor Day when we began our sixth year of elementary school. “Old Lady McWhirter” already nestled comfortably on our tongues.
It was a waste of malice, for Nancy McWhirter was younger than any of our parents, younger than some of our older sisters. Her car still bore an Appalachian State University student parking sticker. She cut her brown haircut at a severe angle across her forehead, maybe a little over-styled, but very adult, and with a sophistication meant to belie her youth. Those in the know recognized the cut as one girls got when they meant to be taken for professionals.
Sixth grade is not as hard on teachers as some. But Nancy was new, and different from us in ways that opened her up to opposition that a local could have avoided. She did better than anybody could expect. Some of the girls hated her instantly; many took her on as model and confidante. Most of the boys were gaga. I was, I know, in my way. Our boy Tilden, however, was miles beyond the rest of us in being smitten with Nancy McWhirter.
A crush made me elaborately polite, over-enunciating my words as though courtesy and clarity were the way to a person’s heart. Tilden was more old-school. He blathered and drooled and tripped over his own feet. Tilden was annihilated. Tilden was in real love, a different love from mine—which was, now that I think of it, really an advanced form of ass-kissing. He took love the way a boxer takes a blow to the gut, with a single oof, and then the kind of silence only produced by a man who thinks the next sound must be singing. Vince and I were the only ones who knew how bad it was for him. As we became adolescents, our ability to smooth the real emotions from our face had become almost eerie. Tilden moaned when he thought no one was listening. He purred like a sleeping cat. He sang songs from the radio deep under his breath, and when we asked him what he was doing he inevitably answered, “Nothing.” Tilden in love was odder than ordinary Tilden, which was odd enough, and even his best friends didn’t know what to do for him.
Mom made me swear a solemn vow not to make fun of Tilden over his affections, and after initial disappointment, I saw her point. We were reticent about Nancy McWhirter around Tilden. This allowed him to think nobody knew how his heart was cloven in twain. This allowed him to act out his drama in a state that he, endearingly, assumed was totally invisible.
For a month or so, Tilden walked forth in a cloud of cologne, with his hair combed, with all the buttons of his shirt inserted in their proper buttonhole. I don’t know who was giving him advice on matters of fashion. One of those old Arrow shirt ads, maybe. His dad was a sharp-dressed man, but Tilden’s style turned out to be his own, a little more casual than his dad’s subtle, autodidact preppie. Eventually the waves of cologne went away, and Tilden became merely well-bathed, an example to us all.
I don’t know how Tilden got over Nancy McWhirter. Maybe he never did.
One of Miss McWhirter’s first innovations was to replace Anne of Green Gables in the syllabus with a “classic.” Sixth graders had been subjected to Anne of Green Gables time out of mind. Parents were used to it. Administrators felt safe with it. Students sighed and accepted it as an inevitability. Store rooms were stacked with well-thumbed copies poised to be used again. The way was paved, the gates wide open for Anne of Green Gables. Why, everyone wondered when the change was announced, couldn’t people just go along with the plan? But Miss McWhirter was new and smarter than everybody, as the new usually are, and she was having none of it.
I didn’t know what a classic was, but I knew my mom was bent out of shape by it. Somebody organized a big meeting at school one night, and Mom and Dad went and had their say. Rickenbacker Elementary had not stood one block from the town square for sixty years to have a brand new teacher from out of town change the syllabus just because she thought kids should have exposure to the greatest literature in the world. Wiser heads than hers had steered a course between violence and suggestibility and arrived at the perfect scholarly menu: bland, but, in some demonstrable way, nourishing. The parents of the girls were especially upset about losing Anne of Green Gables. I haven’t read it to this day, but I gathered the hero was a girl, or that some heroic part was played by a girl, or a girl dies
or something, and it was real important for girls to have suchlike role-modeling at that time in their lives. This alone was enough to throw me into the classic camp. Miss McWhirter was persuasive, and just as the leaves were turning yellow and red, we found on our desks bright blue copies of the Iliad of Homer. In the center of the bright blue was the black silhouette of a studly warrior in a plumed helmet, about to hurl a javelin. We had to file up to the front of the room to get our copies. As he did, every single boy examined the cover, stopped, and briefly assumed the position of the midnight warrior, invisible javelins aimed at the playing field outside the windows. The girls might have looked glancingly at the cover, but they did not, not even one of them, Amazon themselves in a like manner. This gained a place among the puzzlements of my youth. Did girls get together and vow not to react to the warrior if the boys did? Did they all pick their books up upside down and fail to notice the warrior was there? I posed the problem to my mom, and she said, “Boys and girls are different,” as if that weren’t the one fragment of information I had already.
Had I known what the Iliad was about, I’d not have been so neutral an observer; I’d have been at school shouting down my own parents. The book was great. Even if it was a poem, it was amazing, the best movie ever, except you could go back to your favorite parts again and again. The men were all strapping adults, but with an exposed edge to their passions, a petty persistence to their grievances that any eleven year old could recognize and admire. It’s practically a manual on how a middle school boy should conduct himself.
The price Miss McWhirter paid for victory was that she agreed to use a kids’ version of the poem, one with a lot of the gore left out. This ended up having an effect opposite to the one intended, for as soon as we discovered there was a more brutal version, we launched ourselves down to the library to find it, or scoured the shelves for our parents’ old college texts, to read the original, guiltily hidden under blankets in the watches of the night, in tree houses, garages, all such places of seclusion that sixth graders have access to. Consider for a moment the phenomenon of American schoolchildren sneaking around trying to get surreptitious glimpses of Homer. I think Miss McWhirter had it planned from the first. She had that look on her face of one who was inviting you to a violin recital, and we all made the faces, but she alone knew it was actually a demolition derby, and we’d have our coats off shouting in five minutes. These Greek guys were all the time getting spears through their viscera and falling down into the dust, lamenting their lost youth. It was, as I said, amazing.
The Falls of the Wyona Page 4