“Might be.” Ruth ran her hands up the metal of the cord, felt the joints bump against her fingertips. “Or maybe I'd just come home without him.”
“I don't know, Ruth. You have to think of the kids.”
Ruth sniffed. As if she ever stopped thinking about her kids, as if they weren't the first thing she always thought of, her closest, most essential thoughts. It was Del she didn't know how to think about. It wasn't indifference she felt, not really, it was more like having to decide whether she wanted to sink ever deeper into Del or whether she wanted him to disappear, or to disappear herself. These topics were not available to discuss with Sister. She couldn't possibly understand a marriage, but that wouldn't keep her from having strong opinions.
Sister kept going. “What I mean, Ruth, is that maybe there's some better use for that money, if you manage to save it, than just coming back to where you started.”
Ruth pulled the nursing school brochure out of her pocket. Good jobs helping others. Rural training initiative means flexibility for you. She had never been jealous of Sister's vows, chastity least of all, but she'd been surprised by how green she'd felt when the church sent Teresa to college.
“I'll think on that one,” Ruth said, and because she wanted to do that thinking before she talked any more to Sister about it, she asked, “How's Mano?”
Mano was their especially little sister, seventeen, the age difference between Ruth and Mano almost the same as the age difference between Mano and Charley.
“Flighty. Struggling to finish high school now that she knows she got her scholarship to that art school in Denver.”
“She'll make it,” Ruth said, picturing Mano flourishing her calligraphy pens.
“I'll make her.”
Ruth could see Mano, dreamy, bent deeply into her art, Sister hovering behind her, checking the clock, encouraging strict production deadlines. Life in the church must be so simple, Ruth thought, if it allowed for such clarity, such a sense of control. “I have to go. There's a line for the phone.”
“I miss you, Ruthie. Kiss those kids for me. Call soon.”
Del was three sheets when she found him again, so she took the wheel of the Falcon. She wanted to pack the kids in the back and keep going all the way to Colorado, let her mother read them books, let Mano teach the girls to paint, let Sister explain the mystery of the Trinity to Charley. It wasn't Del's gathering restlessness she felt, it was her own. This time, Del couldn't “quit” fast enough.
The tires threw gravel as she pulled onto the road. “Jesus, Ruthie,” Del said, “you don't have to donkey-stomp it.”
A WEEK PASSED. RUTH was stirring the dinner beans when Charley stumbled into the kitchen of their trailer in Gabbs, pulling her toward the door. “Ma! Come outside! Come see!” Del looked up from the solitaire he'd spread across the gold Formica table, raised an eyebrow.
“Coming,” she said. “Easy.”
Outside, the Shoshone range had gone rosy, reflecting the pastels of the sky. The smell of sage was heavy, the dust baked stale. Her daughters were spinning, singing a song she didn't recognize.
“Do you see the clouds? Mom? Look up!” Charley was yelling. His voice was always louder than the moment demanded. It drew unkind attention from others. A few neighbors stared from their porches, a few darkened their windows. Not all of them went back to minding their own business.
Ruth knelt down to be close to Charley's ear. She felt tense, scrutinized. “You don't need to shout, Charley,” she said. “I'm right here.”
The clouds were like giant discs lying on their sides, stacked in twos and threes in the fading desert light—white tinged with gray, the edges glowing in pinks and oranges.
Charley was still shouting. “Those are alto cumulus standing lenticulars. They're made of gravity waves and wind.” He threw his arms around her neck. “Mom! Wind blows through them at hundreds of miles an hour, and they just stay there, hovering in place. Like spaceships—people used to think they were spaceships.” At least half of Charley's fascination with the sky was the possible alien life that could reside there. Del had encouraged this, his only real point of connection with his son—Del was a scholar of alien abduction, a conspiracy connoisseur. Otherwise, Del seemed baffled by Charley, perpetually annoyed.
Nancy rolled her eyes, whispered to Brenda, who giggled.
“Be nice, girls,” Ruth said, but her daughters were only mirrors of the way the world seemed to react to Charley. It was a small consolation that Charley himself did not register ridicule. Charley radiated his enduring enthusiasm outward into the world despite the world's cold reception.
Ruth flushed, felt saliva fill her mouth, just managed to turn away before she vomited into the sagebrush.
Nancy rubbed her back, pulled a tendril of hair off the side of her neck.
“Hey Charley,” Brenda said, “let's play tarantula race.”
Ruth watched her children get down on all fours and crawl, frantically, toward the porch step finish line, then disappear inside the house. When she could pull herself together, she followed them, the last heat of the day radiating up from the sand, warming her calves, her knees. She found a letter from Sister in the mailbox and waved it like a fan, cooling herself as she took one last look at Charley's clouds. She'd always thought they looked like stacked pancakes, those clouds, but as they drifted over the Shoshone peaks, it did seem likely that they were piloted, that they had a clear destination. Ruth was exhausted by the relentless efforts of piloting her own life, especially now that she had so many passengers.
Back in the kitchen, the kids swarmed around Del, who tried to explain the rules of solitaire.
“The goal is to get the suits in order,” he said. “Line 'em right up.”
The girls laughed and climbed into his lap. Charley nodded, stared reverently at the cards.
Sister had sent a small silver pendant engraved with a bearded man in robes, a staff in one hand, a giggling child on his shoulder. Ruth held it in her palm. The enclosed note read: St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers and children (also: gardeners, epileptics, and sufferers of toothache). Church lore says his protection is especially effective against lightning and pestilence. Keep him close, Ruthie.
“Your sister,” Del said, shaking his head, “is off her nut.” He went back to his solitaire, humming “All-Around Man,” and Ruth caught a glimpse of the carefree teenage Del she had loved once, for real. Her parents had chaperoned their first date to the movies. Del had put his coat over her lap to keep her warm. Underneath it, he'd rubbed his thumb back and forth against the inside of her thigh. It had been the most scandalous thing that had ever happened to her. She had wanted a whole life just like that.
Ruth tossed the envelope and laughed. “Sufferers of toothache,” she said dismissively, but she spent some of her precious creamed corn dollars on a cheap chain from the pawnshop, wore St. Christopher so that she could feel the silver against the bare skin over her heart, imagined the cells in her belly that would become her baby's fortified teeth.
RUTH WENT TO SEE about a job before she started to show, before the idea moved beyond impossible. The kids were off school, so she packed them into the Falcon, because what else was there to do with them?
Ranger Allen was a bear of a man, barrel-chested, with a beard and dark-rimmed glasses. He was about her age, sloppy. His park ranger's shirt was untucked, a grease stain above and to the right of where his navel would be. The scent of cigarettes actively vaporized out of his untrimmed, shaggy hair. The vaguely sour smell of the unwashed seeped from his clothes. Days, he was the ranger at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, which contained both Berlin, a godforsaken ghost town from the Comstock Lode days, and the fossilized remains of the ichthyosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile that lived in the ocean that once covered the Great Basin. Nights, Allen hosted an AM radio show about alien sightings and cover-ups, ghost stories and gover
nment conspiracy. Del was Allen's most dedicated listener.
They found him working in Berlin, and she saw her children's eyes widen as they took the place in. There were a few splintered miners' shacks, a broke-down oxcart, an intricately carved wooden bureau. Someone had, optimistically, planted a scrawny young piñon among the cluster of long-abandoned homes. The Nevada sand swirled into spiraling clouds that rattled against the wooden walls, long since stripped of paint by the wild desert wind. Ruth could see at least five tarantulas migrating across the ghost town. She felt especially assaulted by spiders and the desert heat. Even in the cooling October afternoon, she couldn't keep herself from absorbing it. It left her feeling desiccated and spent, more raisin than grape. She did not want this place to get inside her. She was carrying enough already.
“Ruth,” Allen said, nodding. He wasn't smiling, exactly. He looked bewildered.
“Hey Allen,” she said. She pressed the nails of her fingers into both her palms. Don't back down. Don't let him say no. “I came to talk about the Help Wanted sign I saw over in town.”
“That so?” Allen scratched at his beard. “It's custodial, mostly. Cleaning pit toilets. Picking up litter. It's not exciting.”
Nancy and Brenda giggled, and she and Allen both turned toward the children. “I don't need more excitement,” Ruth said.
Allen nodded. “Del know you're here?”
Ruth felt her heart seize. It was a truth-or-consequences moment, so she hedged. “Does it matter?”
Allen shrugged. “Not to me, I guess.”
Charley had dropped in behind one of the tarantulas, whose movement seemed slower than the amount of motion it produced, a constant motion, all eight legs stretching and reaching at different times, the pattern incomprehensible, pipe-cleaner fuzzy. Charley took a step, stopped, waited a few beats of Ruth's heart, then stepped again. The tarantulas were the only thing that could bring Charley's attention down to earth. The girls followed close behind him, their skirts swishing softly against their legs.
“You like them spiders?” Allen asked Charley.
“They're tarantulas.” Charley frowned as though he didn't want to talk about something Allen so clearly knew nothing about.
Be polite. Ruth wanted to correct him out loud but didn't. She didn't know what would be worse, in Allen's estimation, and she needed to make the right impression.
Allen bent down so he was eye level with the boy. “What else you know about?”
“I know twenty different constellations.”
“Twenty?” Allen let out a low whistle. “That's a lot to know. You know Orion's Belt?”
“Of course,” Charley rolled his eyes. “I could find Orion since I was three. Orion's boring.”
Allen laughed. “I guess you aren't interested in the spaceships then. I thought you would be, being Del's boy and all.”
“Spaceships?” Allen had Charley's attention. Ruth held her breath.
“They been here before, and when they came, they came right from Orion.”
Allen stood up, turned his face into the blue sky, where Orion would be if it were dark. They searched the sky together for a minute, and when Charley turned back toward Ruth he was smiling—the same Charley smile, exponentially bright.
Brenda was letting a tarantula crawl on her arm. Ruth had not allowed this at first, but Charley had convinced her they were both unlikely to bite and not actually deadly poisonous. He'd looked it up in an ancient set of World Books in the school library.
“Are there ghosts here?” Nancy asked Allen.
Ruth watched Brenda's tarantula unfold its first set of legs, which stretched delicately forward and planted themselves, levered the crawling mass of the body forward. The creatures did not look at all efficient, Ruth thought, but they sure did cover country.
“There's nothing to be afraid of,” Allen said. “Most days the population of Berlin is entirely tarantulas.”
“Thomas Edison invented a machine that could call the dead,” Charley shouted. Nancy winced, covered her ears. “Or he tried to. It didn't work.”
“Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, not a dead guy phone,” Brenda said.
Ruth sighed. None of her children had made friends at school, but she didn't worry about the girls. She had shared not just a room but a bed with Sister when they were young, Mano joining them straight out of the crib. Ruth knew sister love was like a gas—it could lift the barometric pressure of the entire atmosphere if you needed it to.
“But if there are ghosts,” Allen said, “they're over there in the old hospital. The doctor was nothing but a Chicago stockyard butcher. Could be the ghosts of his lost patients haunt this spot, only they must be scared of tarantulas, since I don't see any here now.”
Brenda giggled, intertwined her fingers so that the tarantula could walk from one arm to the other. Nancy went wide-eyed, scooped a tarantula off the ground, held it between her body and the old hospital. Ruth clutched St. Christopher. Charley went back to tarantula-stalking, tracing their paths on a piece of lined binder paper. Sometimes he stopped and held the map he had created up to the sky, studying both intently.
“What are you looking for?” Allen asked.
“Patterns,” Charley said. “Trajectory matches.”
“Smart,” Allen said. “You should try it at night too, against the stars.”
Charley and Allen were like Sister, Ruth supposed, all of them seekers of faith, or magic, or whatever meaning could be found combining the two. Ruth dismissed the alien talk from the men in her life the same way she'd walked away from Catholicism, with just the tiniest nagging doubts that it all might, in fact, be true. Ruth imagined St. Christopher at the controls of a lenticular spaceship, heading for Orion's Belt. She imagined each star in the constellation a nosy ghost ancestor with strong opinions about her choices.
“What do you see?” she asked, kneeling down next to Charley.
“I haven't been looking long enough to know.”
She could prove nothing, disprove nothing. She decided then to stop doubting Charley, to stop worrying about how he did or did not fit into the world. What if a hand-drawn map of tarantulas skittering across the desert really could unlock some mystic secret of the cosmos? Navigation might be the boy's hobby now, but Ruth recognized its potential for practical application.
“That's a smart kid,” Allen said. “Can you start tomorrow?”
Ruth sent a small prayer of gratitude to St. Christopher then, for Allen's kindness to her boy, for the job she needed, that nobody, so far, was suffering toothache or other pestilence. Ruth's eyes followed her children's fragile limbs as they stretched and contracted into the landscape.
RUTH WAS AN UNLIKELY state parks employee. After a few months on the job, her pregnant belly stuck out so far she tore a small hole in her sweater's seam. Everything about her was poorly suited for the environment. The February wind blew steady and unpleasant, pinning the flared legs of her park uniform against her shins. She climbed into the cab of the truck for relief, pulled a stocking cap over her hair. Desert sand made its way through the knit of her wool socks.
Allen cracked the driver-side door. “Ruth? You okay in there?”
“Just wanted a break from the wind,” she said. “I'm fine.”
“You need me to call Del?”
“He's probably not home.”
She had taken Sister's advice, lied to Del about her wages. She was adding to her creamed corn can every two weeks, praying to St. Christopher for the journey back home. Allen looked at her for a long time, shook his head, went back to work.
Ruth tried to bend down to remove her shoes, but the child in her womb moved in protest, pressing down on her bladder just enough for a small amount of urine to release, to leave a wet spot on her panties. She felt one of the child's limbs extend down farther than it should, passing what she felt must be the barrier be
tween belly and leg. The pain was sharp. Ruth felt as though she was being peeled from the inside, as though the membranes holding her together would hang now, stripped and useless, from her muscle and bone. Ruth drew in a quick breath and held it, waiting, willing the pain to spread out from her pelvis and into her knees, to make her arms shake and weaken. She wanted the pain to be brief but all-encompassing, to have her body store the memory of it, to practice. This child would come anytime now, and she needed to prepare herself, to be ready for the familiar ways it would rip her apart.
The final chore of every workday required sweeping the pavilion that held the ichthyosaur fossils, dinosaur reptilians that swam well but had to surface to breathe. Ruth struggled to discern the fossil outline in the assortment of rocks and boulders in the display, even though she'd seen Allen's presentation for park visitors a million times, watched him map the skeleton by pointing to various areas on a small toy dolphin. She could not identify the creature's backbone, could not tell its skull from its feet, but she felt a deep ache of empathy for this poor animal, sunk for all eternity into the sand, everything cool and familiar having evaporated, the world dried-up, unrecognizable, tarantulas migrating annually over its bones.
“It's some kind of instinct,” Ruth said. She hadn't seen a tarantula in months, but she thought about them all the time, pictured their fuzzy legs in perpetual motion. What was the chemistry driving their built-in sexual clocks? Did they, like Ruth, regret the distances love required?
“What kind?” Allen asked, but she didn't answer. Ruth put her hand on her belly. Her baby's hand pushed back against it, hard, like it needed her attention, like it had something important to tell her.
RUTH CAME HOME TO see Del sitting in a folding chair outside the trailer. His short-sleeved gray coveralls were unzipped above his belt so that Ruth could see a sunburn on a V-shaped strip of his pale chest. He hadn't gotten that underground.
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