Northern Lights

by Tim O'Brien

  He tried Harvey’s counting trick. He kept his head deep in the bag. He counted slowly until he was bored and still not asleep. He got to eighty-one and decided it was a bad trick that never worked because it was not supposed to work, making the staying awake boring and fruitless and not helping anyway.

  He considered putting his head out to test the blizzard. He could not hear it but he knew it was there. Once in the night he had looked and it had frightened him and he’d decided not to look again until daylight.

  Then he wondered if it were day.

  He considered taking a look, then decided to give it more time. He tried remembering some fresh songs to sing. If they’d only talked. He could think of a million things to say now. He would say things about Grace. That would be one subject. He could talk about Grace for a year or even two, describing parts of her waking dreams and talk and talk. And ask about his mother. That would be something magnificent to talk about. He would just listen and drink coffee politely and hear his father talk on and on about his mother. Then they would reminisce about the scrapes together. Maybe taking an hour apiece, each could say what he was thinking when they’d argued about this and that; the old man could say: I got angry because you did this, and I was thinking that, and I wish this, and I wished that, and we agree on this, the time was mid-afternoon, it was July, no … October, the bomb shelter was being built, I thought we should have it, you thought it was crazy, Harvey was out there working, you were watching television, I finally died, the shelter was finished, though. He would pay close attention. He would change that. He’d never really paid attention, always hoping the old man would change when instead he ought to have paid better attention to why he hadn’t changed and wouldn’t and didn’t.

  He twisted, lay on his belly and cradled his head. He was hungry. He tried counting again and gave it up at sixty.

  He considered again taking a look at the blizzard. For all he knew, down deep in his goose-down bag, for all he knew the blizzard was over and it was daylight and all was in a thaw. It was a nice possibility. Nice idea, he thought. Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

  The air inside the bag was bad.

  Time stretched, then dissipated and took on excruciating importance and then disappeared entirely, less than important, non-existence and false.

  Except for his toes he was warm enough.

  His tooth was all right.

  His legs ached but it was from immobility and not the cold.

  The important things were all right. He was dry, the most important thing. He’d kept the snow out. His chest and back and legs were all warm.

  He had to pee. It had been a long while. Stretching, contracting, tricky time.

  He knew he had to leave the bag. Knowing it, he waited, letting his bladder percolate with the anticipation and concentrating on the coming pleasure.

  He played a guessing game, guessing if the blizzard had ended, guessing if it were day or night or one of the transition times, guessing how many hours or days had passed since various points in the past, all warped now.

  He waited and let the fluid push like gravity. Almost as a ritual, he thought for a moment each about Addie, then Grace, then Harvey, and jumbled together his father and old Jud, stopping suddenly in the quick realization that, taken together, they were the only names he knew, just a clutter of other junk faces.

  The bag air was rotten. He smelled himself. When the blizzard ended, he decided firmly, he would have Harvey build a fire and they would boil water and wash themselves. Rinse away all the frozen sweat. Then, if any instant coffee were left, then they would drink hot coffee and things would be much better. It made a nice thought. Clean and hot coffee and a nice fire and some sunshine. It was another nice idea.

  He heard a gurgle somewhere, and he listened, thinking maybe it was a sound of melting and thaw, or a change in the blizzard, or daylight. He listened closer and heard it again. It was fluid. A sobbing sound. He listened and it grew louder and changed into the sound of Harvey’s cough.

  Perry crawled out of the bag. He was surprised at the daylight, a bright white blizzard, beautiful with white boiling snow that was perfectly lighted.

  He zipped his bag shut, waded a decent distance away from the crumpled cabin, stood with his legs apart and anchored, and urinated with long pleasure. As if tidying up after him, the blizzard whipped clean snow into the steaming hole. He removed his mittens in order to force up his zipper. He felt better. He steadied himself and muttered consoling helpful sounds and waded back to the chimney and thought about what to do next. He did some exercises, talking to himself about staying dry and taking care, easy does it. Jumped like a jumping jack, flapping his arms high and clapping his mittens together, side-straddle-hop. He hopped to Harvey’s sleeping mound: “Up and at ’em!” he shouted. “Up and at ’em!” He had to bellow. He stopped and listened: the wind, the wind … “Harvey! Gotta get up! Buddy! Old buddy buddy! Up and at ’em as they say! Get that old blood circulating, up, up, up! Come on, Harv! Toro! Toro! Up and at ’em, Toro! Hi ya, hi ya!” It was spectacular boiling white daylight. “Up, up, Toro!” he called, getting Harvey out of his bag and walking him round and round the homesteader’s tombstone chimney. “Easy, easy,” he consoled. He walked Harvey around the broken chimney. Later, he thought, he would build a fine fire and they’d warm up and rest on the hearth. Get to someplace warm, get to where he could think. A dazzling, dazing lightness, illumination as if the snow itself were a source of inexhaustible light. Harvey clung to his arm and Perry led him around the stone chimney. Harvey held tight and Perry led him. Perry led him. Round and round. Harvey’s grasp was tight, and his head was low, and round they went.

  “What time is it?” Harvey asked from his hollow.

  “Don’t know. You all right?”

  “Sick.” Harvey’s voice came muffled by his bag and the covering snow and phlegm. “Bronchitis, I don’t know. Pneumonia.”

  “Just lie still, Harv.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “It’s not what you think. If you lie still and sleep you’ll be fine.”

  “I know exactly what it is.”

  “Be still.”

  “It’s bloody pneumonia, that’s exactly what it is.”

  “Go to sleep then.”

  Indecently low, through sheets of snow and beyond the wind, he saw the moon. Propped against the chimney, his eyes and ears and nose out of the bag, he was looking at the storm, but he saw the moon. Inside the bag it stunk but outside there was the clean smell of the moon.

  “Hey, Harv!” He shook Harvey’s bag. “The moon! You can see the moon.”

  He giggled.

  “Harv, just take a look at this.”

  Amazing. Science was confounded, for the moon was its own source of light. Reflecting and illuminating nothing, an internally fired, softly silver globe. Indecently low, below the clouds, below the tips of the trees and below the storm. Even without his glasses, Perry saw it clearly. He tried to wake Harvey to show him, but Harvey was sick and sleeping and lost.

  Perry remembered.

  “I want a bomb shelter built,” the old man said from his bed. “About standard size, serviceable and square and nothing very fancy. I want it for you and Harvey as much as for me. People will talk but they’ve talked on and on anyway, and more talk will just keep them lubricated, don’t worry about it. Put it right on the lawn, right in front if you want.” The old man’s eyes had that blank red glow of prophecy. Failed prophecies mostly. Perry himself, a failed prophecy. He remembered.

  “We’ve got to do it,” Harvey said.

  “Not me.”

  “The old man’s dying and you won’t help build a crummy bomb shelter?”

  “No.”

  Harvey paled.

  “It’s gone too far,” Perry tried to say. “He’s … okay, he’s not crazy. I’m not saying that, Harv. But just look at it. He’s dying and he wants us to build him a bomb shelter. Now is that right? Does that make s
ense?”

  Harvey was just a kid. He looked away. “The old man’s dying.”

  “I know.”

  In the morning Harvey started digging. October, and the earth was already tight. Perry watched from inside. The death-watch was on. He watched from the kitchen window, watching through gauzed curtains that had hung for years. Some rotten luck. Harvey used a spade and wheelbarrow, just a kid, patiently digging as the day got late and the old man lay upstairs ringing a spoon in his spit bucket. An old signal. The chiming rattled down the stairs to the kitchen, persisting until Perry left the window and reluctantly pursued the chime to its source. Crazy and sad. The old man did not look as if he were dying.

  “Goddamn Russians!” he hollered.

  “You all right?”

  “Goddamn Russians. I was saying it years ago.” He dropped his spoon into the spit bucket and waited for the final shrill chord to ring to its end, inspecting Perry top to bottom.

  It was October, and the radio was playing.

  Perry shrugged and grinned. The old man did not look as if he were dying. Burnt outdoor health covered him like a cosmetic. “You hear that?” He pushed up in bed. His hair was full and bushy and still speckled partly black. “It’s coming,” he said loudly, “and I been saying it for years. The world’s going in the big Russian blowout, you hear that?” He reached down for his silver spoon and pointed it at Perry. “You think I’m crazy now?”

  “I never said that, never.”

  “You believe me now?”

  Perry shrugged and grinned. The old man did not look like death. Clean shaven and strong in his undershorts and bare chest, lying with the window wide open and no blanket.

  “You think I’m mean and crazy?” Oddly, the old man smiled.

  Perry grinned again and shrugged. It was hard to believe the old man was dying. He straightened a pillow and partly closed the window. Harvey’s digging sounds came through clearly.

  The old man lay back. “Well. Guess this’ll show them.”

  “What?”

  “This,” and the old man gestured towards the radio.

  “Oh.”

  The old man inspected him gravely. Then he shook his head. “You aren’t out there digging, are you?” he said.

  “No.” Perry couldn’t stop from grinning.

  “You think … No.”

  “Comfortable enough?”

  “Did I ever teach you anything?”

  “Yes,” Perry said.

  “I tried to teach you about things.”

  “I know it. I know.”

  “I tried to teach you everything I know.”

  “I know.”

  The old man shook his head. “And you aren’t helping with my bomb shelter.”

  Perry grinned. He could not shed the ghastly mistaken grin. Tragic and distorted and unmeant.

  He wanted to hear the old man’s thoughts, but the old man was talking about the world blowing up. A bomb shelter.

  Perry remembered.

  “I’ll bring up some supper soon.”

  He went to the living room, turned on television and let it blare out afternoon quiz gaming and spot bulletins. He turned the volume high to dull the old man’s chime. Beat the bucket, old man. Perry grinned sadly. Kick it, old man.

  Harvey came in at dusk. Perry made sandwiches and they ate without speaking. The house was cold and womanless with its dark-stained pine timbers and hardwood floors and yellow-gauzed curtains without origin, no origin except what was locked in the old man’s brain, unspoken origins and locked-up secrets and thermostats kept to sixty on January mornings.

  “How’s it going?” Perry said.

  “You want to help?”

  Perry grinned. He didn’t mean it and he couldn’t help it.

  Harvey went upstairs to look in on the old man. Silently, Perry listened. There were those secrets between them. He wanted to hear, listening and cleaning the sandwich plates. The kitchen was lighted white. It was empty. The floor tiles glistened. The refrigerator was white. There were murmurs up the stairs, Harvey was moving around in the old man’s sickroom, the timbers creaked. He imagined they were talking about fishing. An apt subject for them. Not really talking, he grinned. No one ever talked, not in the rugged house. Fishing. The time they saw the wolves, a whole pack of them together, all caught in the deep snows behind Pliney’s Pond. Smiling in their knowing ways for many years. Perry started on the dishes. Comfortable work. At last Harvey came down the stairs and took out two extension cords without a word, thereby accusing, and Perry suffered with his head bent fixed over the dishpan.

  Perry remembered, one of those lasting nightlong images.

  Cold October, and Harvey’s hole was shadowed by four bare electric lights dangling from birch trees. The forest all around him, such a cold night, and the already grieving boy digging a monumental bomb shelter.

  Clucking, Perry wandered the house. He stayed awake and away from the old man’s sickroom, kept the television loud, wondered if the old man could hear, thinking: another distortion, for he cared. Harvey out digging the old man’s bomb shelter and instead they should be together, reading at the foot of the sleeping man’s bed, whispering over him and talking with him whenever he awoke, tying up conversational ribbons that had been fraying for years, finishing thoughts while there was time, learning titbits of the old man’s life that hadn’t before come out, plumbing the old man’s last reservoirs for whatever was left, tertiary recovery, learning about the stack of photographs in the attic, learning who the bright-pictured faces were, learning about the old man’s photographed gray navy battleship, learning about the pictured woman’s face, listening in on the man’s last dreams and forging brotherly communion out of the deathwatch. Instead of a bomb shelter.

  Simultaneously, Harvey’s spade struck a rock and the old man’s bucket chimed. The chord carried Perry outside. Harvey steadfastly dug into the yard.

  “How’s it going?” Perry asked.

  The spade struck and lifted and deposited hard soil into the wheelbarrow.

  “How’s it going there?” Perry asked again, and again the spade thumped into the yard.

  “I can bring out hot chocolate. How would you like that?” The spade hit a rock. Sparks in the hole, a fire in the hole. The four dangling electric lights swung with leaf-empty branch shadows, the forest all around them, how long had it been going on? Blanched, grieving Harvey struck and lifted and struck again. “Hot chocolate. I’ll go get it then. You just stay here, all right? I’ll get it and bring it out.”

  Perry hunched over the stove, blending sweet milk with syrup, clucking at his warm work. Fall was always a nice season. The Arrowhead forests and the clean air. He carefully poured the hot chocolate from pan to mug, put a napkin on a saucer, put the mug on the napkin, put cookies on the saucer, put everything on a tray, carried it out to Harvey’s night dig. “Some hot chocolate for you. I’ll just put it here till you’re ready for it.” Perry put it down far enough from the hole to be free of dust and dirt. “All right?” he said. He watched the spade rise and fall, then he turned and took a few steps, then turned again. “Don’t forget and let it go cold.” He turned again, stopped again. “We can talk when you come inside. How will that be, then?” He turned once again, seeing them imagining the rise of the spade, its downwards electric arc, sparks of the breaking splintering shattering mug, the full-expected explosion of hot chocolate and glass and tray and saucer. And he turned and saw Harvey’s aggrieved spade wet with sweet milk. “Yes,” Perry said, “then we’ll just talk when you come in. It’s all right.”

  It went on that way while the old man died. Perry remembered.

  Jets scrambling over Miami Beach, trawlers in the Caribbean, an address by the President that began: Good evening, my fellow citizens and the old man rang with his spoon in the spit bucket, as though celebrating his insight. This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba chiming in doom like a vindicated
and vilified prophet while Harvey’s spade thumped in the October soil. Within the past week unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purposes of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere although the old man insisted it was the whole world coming to ruin as he banged his silver spoon in the spit bucket, calling out.

  The bomb shelter arose from its hole. The walls were standard two feet thick. The great body of the shelter hulked underground and only its flat top actually emerged, the roof coming just to Harvey’s breast. A stainless-steel air filter climbed like a chimney from the center of the roof. In the sunlight, the shelter was bright white and in the shade it turned gray. It was a center of gravity in the yard, with the grass sloping towards it from all directions.

  “I see Harvey’s got it done,” the old man said sternly.