When the Stars Begin to Fall

by James Lincoln Collier

  I went on for a while until I figured I was getting to a point opposite the carpet factory on the far bank. I took a look around, and when I didn’t see anybody, or any cars coming, I slipped into the woods, moving as quick as I could to get to where I wouldn’t be seen from the road. When I was far enough in, I slowed down and walked to the river. About ten feet from the riverbank I crouched down and looked out across the river. About fifty yards upstream on the other side I could see the steel mesh fence where it came down through the woods, turned, and then went along the riverbank.

  I backed off into the woods a little bit, so anybody who happened to be on the opposite bank wouldn’t see me, and began moving slowly along upstream. Every couple of minutes I’d stop and push back toward the riverbank to see what I could spot. I didn’t see anything that looked like a pipe.

  After a bit the woods on the opposite bank ended, and there was the factory, sitting in the middle of the blacktop parking lot. Being as it was Saturday, there weren’t many cars there—just a dozen or so. Some trucks were parked at the loading platforms. I didn’t see any people.

  I figured if there was a pipe, it would come out around there. I worked my way a little upstream until I was directly opposite the middle of the factory. Then I stopped and began looking along the opposite bank. It was hard to make out anything. The river was a couple of hundred feet across, and a lot of brush and weeds grew on the opposite bank.

  I looked up at the factory to see if there was any sign of a pipe coming out of it. From where I was standing I could look into the factory and see the shapes of some machines. Still no people.

  Then I noticed a security guard walking across the blacktop parking lot toward the river. I stood watching. He came all the way down to the steel mesh fence that ran along the river at the edge of the parking lot, and stood there, looking across the river.

  Suddenly I realized that he was looking at me. I’d gotten too close to the riverbank. I froze. I was about five feet back into the woods, partly in the shadows and partly in the sunlight. There was no way I could tell whether he could actually make me out, or had seen movement and was just suspicious. I didn’t move, and after a minute he turned and trotted off across the parking lot and disappeared around behind the factory.

  Now what? Had he seen me? Was he going to call the police? Would he get into a car and come after me? That was a pretty scary idea. My view of the factory gate was blocked, and I wouldn’t be able to see a security car driving out.

  Still, I wanted to find that pipe. I took another good look along the riverbank opposite to where I was standing. Then I moved back into the woods a little, and continued on upstream the way I’d been going. Every fifty feet or so I dropped to my knees and crawled out to the riverbank as close as I dared, and scanned the bank opposite. I went on doing this until I was a half mile above the factory, and then I gave it up. If there was a pipe coming out of the riverbank, I missed it.

  But I knew that the pipe had to be there, because when I looked down into the Timber River at the place where I was, which was a good bit upstream from the factory, the water was clear. There wasn’t any green tinge to it, or any rainbowy patches of oil, the way there was farther down. They had to be dumping stuff into the river somewhere, and I couldn’t see how they could do it except from a pipe. Probably they’d camouflaged it. What I needed was binoculars. I wondered if Dad knew anybody who had a pair of binoculars I could borrow. Anyway, the best thing was to give up for the day and see if I could get hold of some binoculars somehow. For one thing, I had to go home and finish the garbage pit.

  I was worried about going home, though. I was afraid that the security guard might be out there on the beat-up blacktop road waiting for me to come out. Or maybe he’d called the cops, and they would come patrolling as I was walking along. I decided I’d better wait a little, so I pulled back into the woods out of sight of the river, sat down with my back against a big maple, and ate my sandwiches. They tasted pretty good after all that running around in the woods. Then I went carefully through the woods until I came to the road. I had a look around. There was nobody there, and so I started for home.

  It was around three o’clock when I got back. Dad was already home. He was up in the barn working on something. I went on up and saw it was a sickle bar, for mowing fields. He’d got the parts carefully laid out on the old plank floor and was washing them off with kerosene from a coffee can.

  The barn was pretty beat-up. The paint had been gone off it for years. The sides were gray, and the wood was so soft, you could scratch it with your fingernail. There were cracks where the boards had shrunk and warped, and a couple of the window-panes were broken. Dad said he wasn’t going to pay good money to fix up somebody else’s barn.

  Inside, along one wall, there was a long workbench with Dad’s tools scattered on it. Most of the rest of the space in the barn was filled with Dad’s junk. There was an old V-8 engine Dad had got somewhere, a couple of power mowers, some worn truck tires—oh, just a mess of stuff. And more was hanging from the beams above—coils of rope, pieces of chain, old fan belts, loops of wire. Dad liked junk.

  Upstairs was the loft. There was some old furniture there that belonged to the people we rented it from: an old sofa, a couple of bureaus, some busted chairs—things like that. The loft was where Helen would go with Charlie Fritz and those guys.

  “Where’d you get the sickle bar, Dad?” I said.

  “I bought it from some guy for fifty bucks. He couldn’t get it to work.” He didn’t look up but went on cleaning the sickle bar parts.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “There’s work around cutting fields,” he said. “You can get twenty-five bucks an hour for that kind of work.” Then he looked up at me. “Where’ve you been? I thought I told you to dig a garbage pit.”

  “I started it,” I said. “I’m going to finish it up now. Listen, Dad, you don’t have any binoculars, do you?”

  He looked back at the sickle bar and began unbolting the engine from the carriage. “What do you need binoculars for?”

  “For birds,” I said.

  He grunted. “If you need binoculars, Old Man Greenberg’s got plenty of them in the Sports Center.”

  “I haven’t got enough money to buy any. I keep trying to save, but I always have to spend it.”

  He didn’t look up but went on twisting the nut with the end wrench. “I didn’t say anything about buying them,” he said.

  For a moment I didn’t get what he meant. Then I got it. I felt weird, like I’d suddenly been shifted into another place. “What?” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  He went on swinging the end wrench round and round. “You heard me,” he said.

  “I couldn’t do that,” I said. I still felt weird.

  “What do you think, you’re better than everybody else?”

  I began to grow hot, and to blush. “I just couldn’t,” I said.

  He took the end wrench off the nut and unscrewed it with his fingers. But this time he looked at me. “Now you listen to me, Harry. Do you think those guys don’t steal, those biggies with their Cadillacs and fancy houses? How do you think Old Man Greenberg got that Mercedes of his? How do you think that Herbst over at the carpet factory got that big house?”

  I hated the idea that my father stole. I just wanted to get away from him. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “They lie, cheat, and steal. That’s how.”

  “But I don’t see—”

  “You don’t see.” He wasn’t working on the sickle bar anymore. He was just kneeling there, looking up at me. “Well, I’ll tell you how. They make deals with each other to underpay their workers, to fix prices and overcharge for the garbage they make, and when they pile up the dough, they get some smart accountant to get them out of paying taxes. Oh, you better believe it, Harry, these biggies are the real crooks. If the stuff they do ever came out, they’d all go to jail just like that. But it won’t come out because
they’re in with the government, and the cops don’t dare lay a finger on them. But let some poor working-man take a can of paint off a truck so he can support his family, they bang him in jail and throw away the key. That’s what cops are for—to keep the working people in line. Did you know that, Harry? Did you know they invented the police to keep the poor from taking back what the rich stole from them?”

  I felt like I was being smothered. I wanted to get away from him. “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “You think about it, Harry,” he said. He started to work on the next nut. “Think about it.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I said, “Well, I better go dig the garbage pit.”

  I went out into the woods and began to dig, and while I dug, I thought about it. So Dad had stolen the chain saw from Jim Otto. I began to remember other things. Once Dad came in with a brand-new set of socket wrenches that was worth fifty or a hundred bucks. Once he came home with a little black-and-white TV because Mom had been complaining she couldn’t see her shows on our old one. Once he came home with a pair of brand-new snow tires for the truck, still in their yellow paper wrappings. I remembered asking him why he hadn’t had the tire store guy put them on the wheels, the way they usually do. He told me that the guy had been too busy. But now I knew.

  It made me feel sick. Maybe we were trash after all. Maybe everybody in Timber Falls was right: The Whites were just plain no-good. Oh, we were clean now, and didn’t stink. But what difference did that make if we stole? The thing that made me sickest about it was that everybody knew we stole. They hadn’t caught Dad yet, but they knew. Jim Otto knew that Dad had stolen his chain saw, because he’d seen it sitting on our kitchen floor. Jim Otto had told it all over town, so everybody knew. And I was sure that there were other things. I was sure that when stuff was missing, people remembered that Dad had been around. So they knew, and it wouldn’t do me any good to deny it, because it was true. We stole.

  What about all that stuff Dad always talked about the biggies stealing from the working people? Was Dad right? Was it true? It sounded just like an excuse to me, but I didn’t know.

  Then I had another thought: Would I grow up to be like Dad? Would I become a crook too? Thinking that made me feel even worse. Look what happened to Helen: She had started to do wrong herself. Could it happen to me too? Would I start having temptations to steal that I couldn’t control, the way Helen couldn’t control herself when those guys came around? Maybe I would. The idea made me feel empty inside, and I decided to keep a close watch on myself, just to make sure I didn’t take anything at all that didn’t belong to me, even something as small as a paper clip.

  FIVE

  Two days later Dad came in at supper time and handed me a brand-new pair of binoculars. “Here,” he said.

  I took them and stared at him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I paid for them.”

  I knew I had to say thanks, but it was an awful struggle. “Gee, Dad, they’re great.”

  “Don’t lose them,” he said. “They cost forty bucks.”

  “Gee, Dad,” I said. “I won’t lose them.”

  I took the binoculars up to my room, laid them on the bed, and sat next to them, staring at them. They were beauties all right. Seven by thirty-five, just right for bird-watching. For birds you don’t want them too powerful because powerful glasses have a small field and you can’t cover enough area. It thrilled me to look at them, so new, and sleek. I loved just looking at them. After a minute I picked them up. I loved holding them too. They felt heavy and firm.

  I set them back down on the bed, and stared at them some more. For I hated them too. They scared me. Dad had stolen them, there wasn’t any question about that. If he’d bought them, they would have come in a box with instructions and all that, not just plain like they were.

  I took them outside to try them out while there was still some light. I slung them around my neck, climbed over the stone wall, went into the old pasture with the sumac and little cedars growing in it, and began looking at things. The binoculars were terrific all right. A couple of robins were building a nest, and I could bring them in so close it seemed like I could touch them. They were great binoculars, just what I needed for finding the pollution pipe.

  But why should I bother with that anymore? I let the binoculars hang down from the strap. If everybody in Timber Falls knew we stole, would it make any difference what I did to stop being trash? And suppose I went out there to the factory and the cops came along and caught me with the binoculars?

  I wondered who he’d stolen them from. Probably Old Man Greenberg. Although, when I thought about it, it wouldn’t be easy to steal anything from the Sports Center. It was a pretty small store. Old Man Greenberg sold guns and tennis rackets and badminton sets and shotgun shells. From behind his counter he could see pretty much everywhere in the store. It wouldn’t be easy to steal from there.

  Maybe he had stolen them from some store over in Watertown. Or maybe he’d just happened to see them lying on the seat of somebody’s car, and reached in and grabbed them. In Timber Falls people didn’t usually lock their cars when they went into a store. It wouldn’t be hard to steal from a car.

  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that he must have known where they were, and just gone and took them. He might have seen them in somebody’s house when he was delivering cordwood or hauling away somebody’s junk. Maybe he’d seen them hanging on a nail behind a bar somewhere. I just didn’t know.

  The problem was that I couldn’t return them even if I decided to, because I didn’t know who to return them to. And I couldn’t walk around with them hanging around my neck, because at any moment I might run into the guy he’d stolen them from. And if I just hid them away and never used them, Dad would ask me why I wasn’t using them, and I wouldn’t have any good answer to that.

  Anyway, I was afraid that Old Man Greenberg would suddenly turn up with a cop, the way Jim Otto had, so that night I hid the binoculars in the cardboard box where I kept my clothes. But no cops came that night, or the next night, and in a few days I stopped worrying about it. I hammered a nail into the window frame and hung the binoculars on it where I could see them when I was in bed. Whenever I got a chance, I practiced with them, focusing on birds, squirrels, and chipmunks out the window. And on the next Saturday I took them back out to the woods by the carpet factory.

  I kept them buttoned under my jacket all the way. Even so, going through town, I was pretty scared that somebody might spot the strap around my neck, and the bulge under my jacket, and guess what it was. But nobody did, and I got out there okay. It was a cloudy, raw day, the kind where it looks like it might rain. I was glad of the weather, though, because it darkened the woods, and made it harder for anybody to see into them. I slid cautiously in among the trees, and then started along through them. In a few minutes I began to make out through the branches and tree limbs the shape of the factory across the river and the empty parking lot around it. I dropped flat and crawled forward over the dead leaves on the ground. When I was three feet from the riverbank, I stopped. I didn’t dare go any farther, because I would be pretty easy to spot from the factory if anybody was looking.

  I propped myself up on my elbows and raised up the binoculars. When I got them adjusted, I began to scan the whole factory, going from one side of the parking lot all the way across to the other—the blacktop, the cars, the cement block factory building, more blacktop. And I’d got just about that far when I saw the security guard. He was sitting on top of one of the loading platforms, smoking a cigarette. I could make him out pretty well through the binoculars. He was maybe in his fifties or something, and getting bald. A flashlight and nightstick hung from one side of his belt, and a pistol from the other. I wondered if he was allowed to shoot people who were trespassing. Anyway, he was a good long way from me, and I didn’t think he would be able to see me in the woods, dark as they were, unless I started moving around in clear view. Just then he flung dow
n his cigarette, jumped off the loading platform, and went off quickly around the building, out of sight.

  I scanned the rest of the plant, moving the binoculars around until I’d covered every inch of the factory. I didn’t see anything suspicious—no pipe running out of the side of the factory, no big valves and dials. That didn’t surprise me very much. If they were dumping stuff in the river on the sly, they were sure to bury the pipe, or hide it some other way.

  Now I began to work the binoculars slowly along the riverbank opposite, starting as far upriver as the first bend. It was pretty hard to make anything out, even with the binoculars, for there was brush growing out of the bank, rocks sticking out here and there, tree branches hanging down, and dead sticks that had fallen out of the trees. I went slowly, covering every inch of the bank as carefully as I could.

  I didn’t find anything—nothing that looked like a pipe jutting out of the riverbank. I was disappointed: I was sure that a pipe was there, somewhere. How else would that stuff get into the river?

  So I started moving the binoculars along the bank again, going in the other direction this time, and suddenly, when I was searching pretty far upriver, I saw something. I held steady and readjusted the focus to make it as sharp as could be. There was something there all right, something that looked like a black shadow running down the riverbank. What interested me was that it had a straight edge. You don’t see anything straight in the woods: everything is crooked, or curved, or wiggly.

  I had to get a better look at it, so I crawled back into the woods, and then ran a little ways in a crouch upstream toward where I’d seen the straight-edged shadowy thing. When I was getting close, I dropped flat again and crawled out toward the riverbank, stopping a little way back in the shadow of the woods.