The Lowering Days

by Gregory Brown

  Outside now, the three young birds were playing in the snow. They hopped up to the crest of a hill, rolled down the slope, and then burst into flight, exploding in a whirl of black feathers and white powder. He had had another episode at sea today, and his sternman had somehow found the guts to suggest that maybe Lyman should take a few days off, “even see someone, you know.” Watching the birds play now, he hated them for their confidence, their unburdened ease.

  He retreated to the bathroom and closed the door. Sitting on the floor in the dark, he waited for his mouth to fill with the taste of metal. Then he almost began crying, this time in relief, when it did not. If his brain was indeed perched on a narrow ledge above a racing canyon of madness, he knew that ledge was eroding, the wind tunneling in at him intensifying. He got nervous when he was out in the world now. He ducked away from people in town, hid in the cabin of his boat at the waterfront. He had hated many things in his life, but this was the first time he had resented his birds. And he knew that this too was somehow Arnoux’s fault. It was Arnoux who had come with his apology that day at the hospital when Lyman had faltered, unable to stand without the help of a child. And it was Arnoux who had shown up in town and acted like a movie meant an end to everything. Something had broken in Lyman when Arnoux pinned him to the cement fishing pier, and it occurred to him now that the key to recalibrating his own sanity might be to do the same to Ames. Not to harm the man, not to confront him, not to ruin him, just to lower the bastard a bit.

  Buzzing with the idea of it, Lyman limped out into the yard. Knee-deep in a snowdrift, he watched the ravens hop up the hill, somersault down, and burst straight up into the air. They seemed with each run to be trying to outdo each other. They spun and they chortled. They somersaulted faster and flew higher. Their ascents grew dizzying. Lyman almost fell over, craning his neck to follow. The largest of the birds did a spiteful and somewhat brilliant thing then. It picked up a chunk of ice in its talons and took off into the sky. When the next bird finished its roll and burst into the sky, the bully released the chunk of ice. The rising birds banked to keep from being struck, tumbling back to the earth, and nearly crashed. Enraged, the lowered bird croaked loudly, as high above it the antagonist slowly rolled over in the air, showing off its back and then its belly, belting black laughter. For the first time in weeks, laughter split Lyman’s jaws too. Perhaps shock was the key. If he could tame Ames through fear, perhaps he could reset the racing clock he felt enveloping his life.

  So it was that Lyman turned further inward that winter. Like his son, he began reading about planes in secret. He never risked speaking a single word about flight out loud. He drove two counties away to do research at a library where he wouldn’t be recognized. Had books he ordered mailed to a post office box in the same town. Like anything in the world, a plane operated within a system and was operated upon by the laws of other systems—the natural laws of inertia and gravity, and the mechanical laws of aerodynamics and internal combustion. You could toy with those systems and change the end results. A sudden burst of fear, a plane that for a moment lost an engine, a landing arm that deployed midflight and sent a drag ripple through the fuselage, an altimeter needle that dropped to zero and then flicked back to life—those, he thought, might change something. So Lyman studied and waited. As he trawled back from the fishing grounds at the end of the day, schematics and emergency flight scenarios cluttered his mind. He had no more fits, and his sternman kept his mouth shut.

  At night, Lyman dreamed of a plane that rose into the sky. At its peak the aircraft turned black. It folded its wings down against its body like a raven. Then in a silent dive it dropped through the sky and fell. At the last moment it unfolded its wings and croaked back to life, returning to steel and soaring back into the sky.

  But a pressure builds with any idea kept to the self. The fits crept back, all claws and talons at having been ignored, and finally, like everyone else he had ever known here along the sea who lived with distress, defeat, or weariness, Lyman started drinking to escape his hauntings.

  On a brutally cold early March afternoon he came off the sea shaking from his first episode in weeks and went into The Fish House, hoping to silence his dark idea with a bottle. He drank two beers at a table in the back. Everything was too loud. A radio was hollering in a hockey game from up across the border. Voices coiled about the room. Each time the door opened, the massive cast-iron farm bell some fool had wired up above the hinges hammered with such concussive force he thought his skull might cave in. He couldn’t stand to be here with these people anymore. He walked behind the bar and grabbed a bottle of gin. No one stopped him. No one said a thing. He shouldered outside without paying, nearly knocking Ruston Garvey over in the parking lot. When Ruston muttered, “The fuck, Lyman,” and flipped him off, Lyman didn’t even register the slight. Dazed and shaken by the complete lack of a reaction from the other man, Ruston went back into his restaurant. “What’s the score?” he asked instead of sharing his unease. Someone answered, “Five-four midway through the second, real shootout.” Then the winter night slid on like any other.

  In his truck, Lyman cranked the heater and spun the windows down. He drove, shivering against the delightful combination of frigid air and hot wind. Five miles became ten, and ten miles became twenty. He watched the near hills go gray and the distant slopes fall purple and noted the blackening of the world by the way his headlights lit the passing road signs more brightly. Finally all was black and yellow, and a metallic glare came off both the snowpack and the road signs that ticked by with each small town. He didn’t stop until he had driven all the way around the other side of the bay and reached Bar Harbor.

  Parked at the waterfront, he stared at the same sea from which he had just fled. The pilings that held up the wharf were crisp with ice, and when the wind slashed down from the east it came over him in a scream. All about the water huge black waves rose and crashed. In the distance the Porcupine Islands churned in icy tidal froth that bubbled like acid. He shuddered to think that this same ocean was the beast on which he made his living, that it had not somehow broken and devoured him after all these years.

  Up the street, lights and music spun from some jazz bar built for rich tourists. It was the off-season, but the bar was a tight buzzing lair among the shuttered hotels, icy streets, and deadened storefronts. He felt different here, at ease. Christmas lights were still strung around stoplights and streetlamps shone blue and silver. His chest softened. His breath no longer felt like a razor blade. The world, he thought, heeling out a cigarette and hurrying into the bar, truly was a magnificent place when you were the only person in it.

  The place was all black walnut and mirrors. Instead of chairs, old oak barrels were pushed up to high tables. A tapestry of vintage license plates framed a backbar mirror that extended over nearly the entire rear wall. Not liking what he saw in the glass—this bustle of bar-goers against the dead white skin of his own reflection—Lyman looked up. He’d been hoping somewhat preposterously for a skylight in the ceiling, a glimpse of the moon, but instead saw a burnished sheet of hammered tin. The music was hard and fast, and he avoided looking at the stage for a moment longer, standing in the doorway somewhere between awe and terror, until a couple politely tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he’d like to close the door and sit down and have a drink. They were young, and Lyman realized they were being genuine, not trying to start something or whip fun over him, so he apologized for his paralysis and cut to an empty table in the corner.

  Onstage a six-piece jazz band wailed against the night and the air swung with color. A young black kid was bent back at the hips and howling into an alto sax, sending a flock of high green notes about the room. At the back of the stage a woman attacked the neck of a double bass. Sweat beaded her skin, and with each double stop and run, the room’s edges vibrated a deep yellow. Beside her a scrawny white kid was battling a giant baritone saxophone. The massive horn seemed to float in his hands. The only sign of his strain: the way
his squinted eyes jiggled as he belted out his wall of breathtaking cobalt blue. Each time the drummer bent to his kit and struck the snare, a rich orange snapped across the air. A pianist sat with her eyes closed and her head cocked in concentration, tendrils of purple and alabaster heat lifting from her hands. At the front of the stage was their leader: a young, bold trumpeter who seemed to be both battling and making love to his horn as he wrestled and wept and the world went scarlet with his story.

  Lyman watched the set with all the joy of a man who loves music but does not see it performed live nearly enough. He drank, and he hollered. Outside sleet tapped against the black windows. There wasn’t a single fisherman around. There wasn’t a single person he knew for miles. It was every bit as terrifying as it was intoxicating.

  The band broke between sets, and Lyman went to the bar. Everyone was sunk in conversation already, and he stood alone with his reflection in the backbar mirror. For the first time he felt on the outside here, and he was scared. The music dead. The colors fading. Why was he here at all? Drunk and deep into a late winter’s night. His family home alone. Not a soul aware of where he was. In the mirror he saw the couple that’d tapped him on the shoulder when he first came in. He sent a drink to them both, seeking something. Camaraderie, connection, assurance—he wasn’t exactly sure what. And when they sent back a note on a cocktail napkin that read “You can come closer,” he stared openly at them both. Under their table the woman was rubbing the inside of the man’s thigh. Her fingers pushed up dangerously high, and he imagined the man aching to be touched. The woman opened her legs a bit more, her body loose with the booze and the music, and Lyman saw shade. He watched the man’s crotch bulge powerfully, watched the woman work her knees open and closed to the soft house jazz now playing. The woman smiled at Lyman, and the man did the same.

  The staring, the drink sending, this desperate, lecherous watching—it all exhausted him. He wanted to be at home. He should have been in bed with his family around him, all of them inside the stone wall he had lovingly built so many years ago. He missed his life—the woodstove, the smells of garlic and cinnamon and lavender. He wanted to undress in the moonlight, watching Grace curled in their bed, and slip under the covers, bend his body about hers, kiss her face and breasts, whisper “I am so sorry.”

  Lyman tasted steel at the back of his mouth, bubbling up behind his molars. The musicians were about to start playing again. The woman closed her legs. The man shrugged. Lyman rose and stumbled outside. The Christmas lights were off. Even the bar seemed a black, silent pit. Fear came in a crippling wave. He reached into his mouth and squeezed his teeth, prayed, Not now, not again. But no answer came, and Lyman started his truck and drove back around the bay, repeating everything he had learned about planes in the last weeks. It was hard to tell how much time had passed. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing until suddenly, he was at the cattle gate cutting a thin metal barrier between two worlds: the state highway that rolled on through the night and the gravel two-track down which the Ames family lived. He deadened the engine. Excavated a cardboard coffee cup from the mess of gloves and tools on the floor. Out in the night he scooped a bit of snow into the cup and opened the bottle of gin he’d taken from The Fish House.

  It was two forty-eight in the morning. The moon was nearly full. He was too angry to be cold. He thought he saw a bird across the moon, just a ripple of shadow. From his childhood bedroom window he’d watched swans migrate at night. He would sit in complete stillness with a spotting scope to his eye and wait for the birds to breach the moon with their fantastic, winged silhouettes. There was something magical in all things that lived in the sky, but unlike planets or moons or the stars, the migrating birds told a story: we were there, and now we are here, and soon we will be there. But those were long-ago times, and long-ago times don’t come back again so easily. He poured the cheap gin over the snow in the cup to soften its edges. Kicked the cardboard back and hissed as the liquor seared his throat. He drank, thinking of the moon, until the gin was gone. Then he got his tools out and grabbed a metal can of diesel fuel. He had two hours until dawn, and it was dark and cold enough that no passing gossip would stop to explore a parked truck. By the blades of light silvering the woods, he began his frozen trek out to the plane barn. Months of hurt and aviation research stumbled with him through the snow. Do this, and that happens. Fail to do this, and this happens. To the west, the hills waited. To the east, the sea turned. Between them, a single, reverberating thought seemed to sweep all reason into dust: I’ll mess with it a bit, just enough to put a scare into him, just enough to bring him back down to earth.

  Sixteen

  In the morning Adam and Molly watched the sky from inside the belly of the sea captain’s dilapidated house. A storm was coming up from the east, and Molly was sad because she thought it might be the last snow of the year. Spring would bring something else. They’d been living in the house up on Loomis Hill for months, but the shrubs and flowers and weeds had long died back, and now it felt like living inside a dead thing. The cold never stopped. Her skin split and bled from the dryness. Her father tried to hide his coughing by turning into the piles of wool blankets at night, but in the cold, the unrelenting everywhere cold that had become their life, the sound cracked against every surface. Still they danced and told old stories, and still they were together. With the plants that had once so magically grown up around the rooms now gone, they could see outside so easily now. The worry was that the world could see back in.

  Today was not a bright day, but Molly had asked to take the planks down from the windows anyway. “I want to watch it snow,” she said.

  “It’s cold out.”

  “Not that cold.”

  “Not that warm either,” her father cautioned.

  “If we had a TV, I’d watch that instead.”

  “Fair point.” He moved over to the small camp stove they’d set up and stirred the contents of the small, dented pot of soup. “Just for a while.”

  Molly didn’t know the exact date anymore—sometime early in March—and her father thought she was crazy for mourning the last snow. “A last snowstorm,” he said, “is not a bad thing when you’re living off rice and dehydrated rations and using blankets for heat.” Watching his daughter’s face sadden as he looked about the house, the meadow, the woods, he understood. It wasn’t the storm, but the leaving: that’s where all the terror lurked. The real world would come with only teeth, and his heart filled with a great sadness as well. Molly had seen the maps north he’d been studying. She’d turned away in disgust, angry, sulking, swearing at him for being weak, but in the mornings she always apologized, and he caught small moments when she would stop and study them as well. “Eventually the shadow draws back,” he told her, pushing his head down to her scalp and kissing her soft, black hair. It was not just the peace she would miss in living in a world that seemed to have little to no need for human influence. It was everything. It was her father. It was their life, a life that while hard had been clear of purpose and filled with love, a life that had, perhaps for the first time since Molly’s mother left, felt whole.

  All of this was running through their minds when Molly softly said, “Dad, look.” She was pointing out the open window.

  Her father heard it before he saw it. The sound of a plane was suddenly everywhere overhead. The aircraft passed over them and spiraled out over the hills. It was dropping fast, struggling to rise, falling again as it veered through the fog toward the ocean. “It’s going down,” the man said, shaking as he stood. Molly was already heading for the door.

  “Molly, wait,” he tried to call after her, but she was gone already. “If we go,” he said to himself, “we might not get to come back.” Then he turned off the stove and crashed after his daughter.

  Dead in the air, the plane was in a glide now, slowly falling toward the sea. The man thought the pilot might be able to land at sea if he weren’t moving so fast. The storm was barely a whisper still. The se
as might be calm enough. Miles away a distress call was coming through the radio to the municipal airport. Molly watched with horror as a small speck peeled off the plane, and she knew it was a body. She ran harder, her legs twisting in the snow crusts, wet air flooding her dry lungs. She waited for a chute to open, and it did. Then the plane disappeared below the ridgeline and was gone. The ocean absorbed most of the sound, which would have ripped through the hills, ripped up the river, ripped over the entire world with its fire.

  They found the boy beside the sea, his body splayed among the rocks, the wreckage of the parachute coiled about him. The boy’s arm was severely burned. A ragged diagonal gash ran from his left shoulder down across his chest. His leg was bent beneath him at an awful angle, surely broken, and possibly dislocated at the hip. He was unconscious. A soft white dusting of snow skinned his body. He was very cold. They were two miles from any road. It was not far, though, through the state forest to the boy’s home.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she stammered, moving around the boy, bending to him, queasy with fear. The man knelt down in the snow and took out a knife, severed the parachute’s suspension lines as close to the pack as he could.

  “Kneel down and put your knees on either side of his head,” the man told his daughter. “Put your hand on his forehead. Comfort him.”