When the Stars Begin to Fall

by James Lincoln Collier

  It amazed me how calm Dad was staying. “That doesn’t alter the fact that you need a search warrant before you come into a man’s house. Now get out before I have you arrested for trespassing.”

  “That’s my saw, White,” Jim Otto shouted.

  “I’m going to count to three,” my father said. “If you’re not out then, I’m going to have this officer arrest you.”

  “White—”

  The cop took Jim Otto’s arm. “Better come on outside, Jim,” the cop said.

  “I don’t just mean outside,” my dad said. “I mean off my property.”

  “Come on, Jim,” the cop said. And they left.

  They came back two days later with a search warrant, but the chain saw wasn’t there anymore. “Somebody swiped it off the back of my truck,” Dad told Jim Otto. “It wasn’t your saw anyway.”

  Jim Otto was pretty sore, and he cursed Dad out until Dad told him to shut his mouth or he’d shut it for him, and the cop made Jim Otto leave. The truth was, though, that nobody had stolen the chain saw from the truck. Dad had taken it over to Watertown and sold it for fifty dollars. I was disappointed that it was gone, because it was so pretty, not like Dad’s old beat-up chain saw. I said, “Dad, if it was your saw, why did you have to sell it?”

  “They were going to make trouble about it. Jim Otto’s been out to get me for a long time. I don’t need that kind of aggravation.”

  “Why is Jim Otto out to get you?”

  “He thinks I cheated him on a load of cordwood. Which I didn’t do.”

  Sitting there in the janitor’s room, smelling the disinfectant and the peanut butter, I wondered: Would Dad really steal anything? I just didn’t see how he could—my dad wouldn’t steal things. I remembered how calm he was when Jim Otto and the cop came. If he’d really stolen that chain saw, he wouldn’t be calm, would he?

  But it was true about Helen shoplifting out of the drugstore, because every time she swiped something she called me into her room and showed me what she’d got. It made her feel good to shoplift stuff. I couldn’t understand it. A couple of times I’d been with her in the drugstore when she was swiping stuff, and it made me feel nervous. But Helen got a kick out of it.

  So people thought we were dirty and stole and were just in general no good because of the junkers rusting by the driveway and the paint peeling off the house. I finally learned that nothing we did to get the other kids to like us would do any good. I was in the sixth grade when I learned that. The science teacher had a bird-watching club that met after school on Wednesdays. They’d go someplace in his station wagon to watch birds. I figured if I joined it, maybe I could make friends with some of the other kids. So I signed up, and I went a couple of times. I really liked it. I got a bird book out of the library and began studying the birds. Then, on the third Wednesday, while we were waiting around after school for the science teacher to get his station wagon, I started to go into the boys" room. I opened the door and I heard one of the kids say to another one, “Let’s get the front seat. I don’t want to sit next to Stinky White.”

  It made me go red, and mad and sick inside all at once. I ducked out of there and out the side door and hid in the area way. Around the side of the building I could hear the science teacher say, “Where’s White? Has anyone seen White?” I heard the horn honk, and after a minute the station wagon drove away. I never went back to the club. I just studied birds on my own.

  After that I realized that the other kids would never like us, and I decided to forget about it. At school I didn’t try to belong to any gang. Helen and I were by ourselves. Oh, there were a couple of girls who would let Helen eat lunch with them—girls that she sat next to in class and had got to know a little. And if the guys were getting up a softball game at lunchtime, they couldn’t stop me from playing if I decided to. But we didn’t have any real friends. Nobody ever said to us, “Hey, what are you doing after school?” We generally went home after school every day because we didn’t have anything else to do. It was like we’d got a black spot on us, and couldn’t rub it off, no matter what we tried.

  I stood there in the backyard looking at the house with the paint peeling off, knowing that Helen was upstairs in her room feeling lousy with herself and wishing now that she hadn’t let those guys come over, and suddenly I got sore. It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t right. What had we ever done to anybody? I was mad at Charlie Fritz, and mad at Dad for not having a regular job, and mad at everybody. I smacked my fist on my leg so hard it hurt, and gritted my teeth and said out loud, “I’m going to do something. I’m not going to be trash anymore.”

  TWO

  Timber Falls was a poor kind of a place. It was way upstate New York in the Adirondack Mountains, and there were always stories in the Timber Falls Journal saying how American prosperity had passed the region by, and giving figures on unemployment that showed that the towns around there were a lot worse off than towns in other parts of the state.

  Timber Falls wasn’t much of a place anyway. Main Street had a railroad track running down one side of it and a row of buildings along the other side, mostly old brick buildings. There was the drugstore, the hardware store, a bank, Old Man Greenberg’s Sports Center, a couple of supermarkets, and down at the end of Main Street the town hall. That was about it. The train station across from the row of stores by the railroad track was closed because hardly any trains went through there anymore. You couldn’t buy a ticket to anywhere there. About the only trains that came through were freight cars going up to the carpet factory.

  The carpet factory was the big thing. A lot of people in Timber Falls worked there. Dad always said that if the factory ever closed, the town would just dry up and blow away. Mom was always trying to get Dad to go to work there so as to have a regular job, but Dad wouldn’t. He would say that he wasn’t ready to be anybody’s slave yet.

  The other thing was the mountains. They were everywhere you looked. You could stand in the middle of town and look all around, and everywhere you saw mountains. All year long they changed colors: brown in the spring, then going yellow as the trees budded and then light green as the buds came out, and dark green as summer came on; and in the fall going red and yellow and then brown once more when the leaves fell; and then white when the snow fell. They were always changing.

  Rich people came up to hunt in the mountains in the fall. Leastwise, they seemed rich to me. Most of them had two or three expensive guns and fancy tents and cookstoves. Dad said, “I wish they’d stay where they belong, and keep away from here.” But most people said they brought in money—buying shells at the hardware store, and steaks at the supermarket, and whiskey at the Liquor Mart.

  It was beautiful up in the mountains. Sometimes, when Dad was in a cheerful mood, he’d take me up there. He’d fill a thermos bottle with coffee and pour in a slug of whiskey. We’d drive into town and get two big roast beef sandwiches and a Coke for me at Red’s Deli. Then we’d drive up into the mountains on the winding tar road, park the car on a dirt tote road, and hike on up to this place Dad knew about, where there was a rock cliff that jutted out of the side of a mountain. Up there you could see for miles and miles out over the Adirondacks. There was nothing out there but mountains and woods, and nothing in the woods but birds, deer, bear, and fish in the streams and lakes. We’d sit there and eat our roast beef sandwiches, and Dad would drink his coffee and whiskey, and we’d talk. “It’s a satisfying view,” Dad said one time. “No people.”

  “Why don’t you like people, Dad?”

  “Wait’ll you know them better. I’ve been knowing people for forty years, and the less I have to do with them the better. Look at ‘em all, robbing and cheating and stealing, so a man can hardly make a living. And then if you have anything left, they tax it away from you.”

  It didn’t seem to me that it was everybody else’s fault that Dad didn’t have a regular job, but I didn’t say that. “I thought you said you didn’t have to pay any taxes,” I said.

  He gave me a look. �
��When did I say that?”

  “A while ago,” I said.

  “Well, you just forget about that, Harry. Just forget I ever said it.”

  So I changed the subject and we talked about the hunters and deer, and Dad said maybe he’d get a couple of shotguns and we’d go after deer ourselves. But I knew he never would. Mom never knew how much he had. If she needed money for food, she would ask for it, and he would grumble and give it to her.

  Actually I didn’t go hiking with Dad in the mountains all that much. When you got down to it, I don’t think it happened more than two or three times. Mostly Dad was quiet and kept to himself and didn’t do much with the rest of us. He left in the morning without saying much. Mostly what he did was odd jobs. He’d truck stuff for people—pick up their trash when they had a big housecleaning, or move their furniture for them when they moved. Sometimes he did a little tree work, sometimes he’d do house painting, sometimes he’d do carpentry. He’d do anything so long as it wasn’t regular and didn’t last more than a week. Every time Mom got on him about going to work in the carpet factory, he would say that he couldn’t stand being regimented like that. It was all right for the middle class with their fancy sofas and washing machines, but he had more spirit than that.

  Mom was thirty-four and Dad was forty-two. Dad had been married once before, but we didn’t know anything about that. Being as Mom and Dad had been married for seventeen years, you would have thought Mom would have known better than to get on Dad about a job, but she never gave up. She started in on him that night after Helen let those guys come over. She was opening some cans of Heinz beans. We were going to have franks and beans again. We ate a lot of stuff like that—franks and beans, canned hash and eggs, cold cuts, spaghetti and meat sauce out of a can—because, as Mom always said, it was cheap and nourishing. But Helen said it was because she would rather watch TV than cook. It was because of her being tired so much, I figured. Helen got her looks from Mom. She said Mom could be pretty if she took some trouble over herself.

  Anyway, that night Dad came in through the kitchen door at supper time and said, “The clutch is going on the truck. The whole truck is going. They’re going to make me buy at least two new tires to pass inspection this year. That’s a hundred bucks even if I can find some used ones. I’ll have to put four, five hundred dollars into it just to get through the rest of the year.”

  “That’s good money after bad,” Mom said. She was standing at the stove in her bathrobe and furry slippers, stirring the beans. It was an old gas stove, and the pilot lights didn’t work anymore. You had to be careful about lighting it, because sometimes it would light down inside somewhere instead of on the burner.

  Dad sat down at the kitchen table. It was an old pine table Mom had bought for ten dollars once and painted blue. It had been pretty when it was just painted, but it had got all scratched up since. “When’s supper?” Dad said. “I’m hungry.” He started to take off his boots.

  “Soon,” she said. “Frank, maybe you should give up the truck.”

  He looked at her. “Doris, how am I going to make a living without the truck?”

  “You could take a job at the carpet factory.”

  “I figured that was coming,” he said. “No way. I’m not about to make myself somebody’s slave yet.”

  “It’s good money, Frank.”

  “I don’t care about the money. Besides, why should I add to the world’s pollution?”

  “I don’t see why that’s your worry, Frank.”

  “It ought to be everybody’s worry,” Dad said. He took off his socks and rubbed his foot. “These boots never did fit right.”

  I said, “I wondered where that stuff in the river was coming from. It’s from the carpet factory.”

  “It sure is,” Dad said. “Of course, they won’t admit it.”

  “I thought it was against the law to pollute.”

  “It is,” Dad said. “But people like them don’t pay any attention to the laws. They’re arrogant, those biggies with their Cadillacs and fancy houses. They run the factory anyway they want, regardless of the law. They do anything they want regardless of the law. They cheat the workingman, they cheat the public with lousy goods, they pollute, then they get some fancy accountants to figure out a way to get out of paying taxes on their money. No way I’m going to go out there and work for guys like that.”

  “Harry,” Mom said, “where’s Helen?”

  “She’s up in her room,” I said.

  “Tell her supper’s ready,” Mom said.

  I went upstairs and into Helen’s room. She was still lying on her bed. “You’re supposed to knock before you come in,” she said. She was in a pretty bad mood.

  “Why do you let those guys come over if it always makes you feel bad?”

  “It’s none of your business,” she said.

  “Someday Dad’s going to catch you and he’ll kill those guys.”

  “I said it was none of your business,” she said.

  “Supper’s ready,” I said.

  She went on lying on her bed. “Two more years,” she said. “Two more years and I’ll graduate and then I’m going to get out of here so fast, nobody’ll believe it.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Anyplace, so long as it isn’t Timber Falls.”

  I didn’t want her to go. I knew I would miss her. She was about the only person I had to talk to. “Don’t you think you’d get homesick?”

  “For this dump?”

  “Well—But I mean for Mom and Dad.” I really meant for me.

  “Them?” She spit when she said it. “What have they ever done for us?”

  “Well, still,” I said. I was hoping she would say she would miss me.

  But she didn’t. “I hate them,” she said.

  That made me feel kind of funny. “You don’t really hate them,” I said.

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “Yes, I do.”

  “Still,” I said. “Anyway, supper’s ready.”

  After dinner Mom turned on one of her shows and sat there watching it with Helen. But it wasn’t interesting to me, so I went out and sat on the back steps and watched it grow dark; I saw the sky go deep blue, and finally the stars came out. The peepers were going like mad, too, and the air had that damp spring smell to it.

  I liked watching the stars come out. I would pick out a part of the sky that had no stars yet, a place where there was nothing but that deep blue. I would stare at it and stare at it, and all of a sudden there’d be a star there. It was like magic.

  I did that a few times, until I got tired of it, and then I started to think about Helen going away. She had two more years of high school, and I had three. She talked a lot about what she was going to do after she graduated. Sometimes she said she wanted to go to school to become a dental technician. They made good money, she said, and she could have a nice apartment or condo or something, with wall-to-wall carpets and a big color TV and nice furniture, the way it was in some of the other kids’ houses. Sometimes she said she was going to go to Hollywood and try to make it in the movies. That idea worried her, though, because she didn’t think she was pretty enough. I would tell her she was pretty, but she had a hard time believing it. She would say, “No, I’m not pretty. My nose is wrong and my mouth is too big and my hair is always funny.” When she was in that mood, she would decide to be a dental technician.

  When I graduated, I was going to go into the air force. There was a reason for that: If you were in the air force, nobody could say you were trash. It wouldn’t matter that I stunk in the third grade, or that the paint was peeling off our house and my dad didn’t have a regular job. If you were in the air force, nobody could say you were trash. The thing was, you needed a high school degree to get into the air force.

  I never told Mom and Dad about my plan. I knew what Dad would say about it. He would say that going in the air force was a sucker’s game. I would just be cannon fodder for the biggies who ran the cou
ntry.

  I wondered: Did Helen really hate Dad and Mom? Or did she just say that because she was in a bad mood? I didn’t hate them. Sometimes I got mad at them for things they did, but I didn’t hate them. Mom was okay, really. She tried her best to do things right. It was only that she was tired so much. Dad was okay, too, sometimes. I just wished he wouldn’t talk about the biggies all the time. I never knew whether to believe him when he talked about them cheating everybody and polluting the Timber River and such. I wished I knew if he was right.

  He was right that there was pollution in the Timber River, though. I knew because times when I’d be lying by the river looking at the fish, just watching them flash around, changing direction all in an instant, I’d see on the top of the water flashes of red and green and yellow. It was some kind of chemicals, or oil or something.

  But how did Dad know that it was coming from the carpet factory? Wouldn’t the police or somebody have made them stop if they were really polluting the river? I knew it was against the law, because we’d studied it in social studies. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to find out, I figured. The stuff would be coming out of a pipe or something. The carpet factory was right next to the river, so it would be easy to run a pipe from the factory to the riverbank. Of course, I didn’t know that was the way they would do it, but it made sense. It wouldn’t be hard to find out either. You could just go out there and walk along the riverbank until you saw the pipe or whatever it was. Something like that would be easy enough to spot.

  Suddenly it came to me that I could go out there and look for the pipe myself. I could find out if Dad was right—that the carpet factory really was polluting the river. If they were, I could report it to the police, and they’d make the factory stop it. There’d be a big story in the Timber Falls Journal about me. I’d be a hero. The other kids at school would want to be friends with me, and nobody would say I was trash anymore.

  I began to get really excited. The more I thought about it, the better an idea it seemed. All I had to do was find that pipe. What would be so hard about that? I was so excited, I couldn’t sit there anymore but started walking around on the lawn.