by Josh Weil
Well, that we knew. That was over. By the time a year had passed there would be other co-ops among other long-neglected farms, thousands of miles of power lines, poles planted all across the state. The entire country. In those next decades it was as if the stars we had always seen above showered down upon the darkest swatches of our land, lit our once-black nightscape up. Our towns grew galaxies, subdivisions burning bright, our farms bespecked with the window light of renters’ doublewides, new brick homes built for our children, the all-night glow of our security lights.
But still, generations gone by, we couldn’t quite quit thinking about Abe Bell. As those of us who’d known him grew fewer, our minds more feeble, we would tell our children things that seemed each year a little more uncertain, a little less alike. Some of us insisted he had been taken to the hospital, seen at the hearings, was the one who had accused PP&L of contravening law. Some said he’d fled before then, fully recovered, some swore he’d never even chopped a tire, that the whole thing was a fable, there’d never been a man named Bell, it was we, alone—your grandpa, your old uncle—who’d risen against PP&L. Wouldn’t, we their children whispered among ourselves, there have been an investigation? And we spouses: Wouldn’t PP&L have wanted to keep it quiet? While we teens, free from reprimand by great-grandparents no longer living, joked of Bell’s golden years back in the country from which he’d come, the tales he must have told his comrades of socialism seeded in our very heartland, here.
Where, with each passing year, a little more of what he’d planted was lost with the land our siblings sold, his story leaked away with friends settled in the suburbs, the cities soon to steal our daughters, sons. Gone were the heavy horses we used to walk behind, rest our cheeks against their steaming sides to whisper things we couldn’t tell our husbands, mothers, wives, the plowing now done by a team of one. Gone was the milk cow, dairy now a word meant for farms made for nothing else, except, perhaps, a trip to a neighbor’s parlor, a cup of coffee at the kitchen table before the trip back home. Seldom and more seldom and soon replaced by men bringing bottles in trucks, then not even them to wave at us when we creaked open our front doors. Chicken coops collapsed, our last hens cooked back in, oh, when was it: ’70, ’71, ’72? Later for some, though eventually we all wound up at the grocer’s, paying our visits from behind passing carts, until—the IGA, the Kroger, the Walmart—even the chance of seeing someone we knew was lost in those enormous warehouses where we bought our plastic gallons now. Only the silence stayed. We tried to fill the holes the rest had left with the whooping of The Price Is Right, wailing from Days of Our Lives, the seconds ticking by on Jeopardy! echoing around our empty living rooms until we replaced that, too, with the bleeps and blats of dial-up, news of one-time neighbors whose voices had once filled our phones, and then simply the silence of high-speed lines strung where we’d long ago fought for a single one to carry a little electricity into our homes.
From which we disappeared for hours now, sunk into a screen, filled with the sense that somehow we had failed, that the world still hurtled past, and we were simply clinging to its speeding side. In far-off Africa it seemed everyone spoke on cell phones, on the Mongolian steppe herders lit their yurts with solar panes, in China they churned electricity from dams that did to villages in a few moments what had taken us a century. And some days, seeing the news of oceans climbing, watching the cities flooded on TV, a fear crept on us, touched us where the fingers of long-gone friends no longer did, filled the hollows left by dead husbands and wives, pushed at our chests the winter that a thousand Lithuanians froze in a blackout of their country’s grid, pressed a little harder when we heard the Russians had devised a way to reflect the sun off the wings of satellites, solar mirrors they said would send down an unceasing luminescence, light their patch of earth all night. That sent us out into our fields, stilled us beneath the stars. Until the fields were no longer ours, the night sky no longer there.
Now we live surrounded by vast swaths of corn and soybeans, unimaginable acres of apple trees, each county assigned a single crop. From our windows, we watch the mammoth machines, the migrant workers moving through in thousands, out there all night beneath the mirrored satellites that years ago our own country launched into the thermosphere, those moon-sized spots of gleam that crowd the sky, the Milky Way, dimmed all these years by our earthbound lights, having finally disappeared. The way our few remaining homes, standing alone atop the land that we have sold, will one day, too. When we die off and they at last are bulldozed.
Sometimes, on sleepless nights, wandering the empty rooms, wondering about some old acquaintance or once-close cousin, we go out into the eerie mirror light, halfway between dusk and day, and search the fields for suggestions of what our great-grandparents had done. The single wire they’d once strung has long since given way to a 400-kilovolt transmission line, a dozen conductors swooping between steel towers hundreds of feet high. But beneath them we can still make out, hidden in the grass like a toppled headstone, the remains of a rotted pole. Shuffling in the weeds we can sometimes even find the dip in the ground, a sunken place where once there must have been a hole. Times like that we feel the pressing worst, as if it is a curse brought on by murdered Bell, or by our own great-grandparents, or by ourselves, this charge in all our hearts, this flash that fires in us even now, this spark that drives us ever forward, still.
ANGLE OF
REFLECTION
I. The Space Mirror
They said it was the end of darkness as we knew it, an age of perpetual light: morning and day and dusk and dusk and dusk, and morning again. Launched into orbit, it would spin, big as a house, moving through the sky at twenty times the speed of sound, its reflective wings unfurling like the petals of some massive morning glory seeking sun. Something like that should have had a better name. It should have been baptized by some blind singer in an ancient Dane’s mead hall. Moon Slayer, he would have called it. Star Demolisher. The Mohicans, whose burial mounds we still came upon in the woods, would have made it The One Who Keeps the Light Warm Until the Dawn Awakes. Hell, even NASA would have come up with something passable. But it was the Soviets who dreamed it up and so it was the Soviets—who named their own country the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for God’s sake—who got to name it: Banner. Maybe it sounds better in Russian.
It was built to crash. By the time they actually got it up there the Soviet Union had eaten itself and was cracking its own bones for the marrow and there was a whiff of death about the whole thing. At a signal from Moscow, it would detach from the space station, find the sun, reflect it earthward, and slip a beam of daylight along the surface of the world, slicing through night, across the continents, the seas, racing towards Russia, hunting for home. It would circle the globe a few times, then—foom!—hit the atmosphere. Self-immolation.
Maybe it just seems murderous now, looking back at it all. Then, there was a thrill to it. Junior high was conquered. High school was begun. We were all fifteen. Except Mirza. Nobody knew how old Mirza was. You’d have guessed maybe a couple years older than us. Unless you’d spent the time, like we had, those fall nights up in the old concrete plant, smoking weed, him as quiet as ever, and you’d look over and get just the bit of moonlight on those creases by his mouth, just the feel of him, and think, Fuck if he’s not thirty. Mirza Kojic. We called him Kojak, like the TV show. Then just Jack. Jack with his mouth like an old man’s. He was obsessed with that space mirror. Never told us why. Never told us much of anything. Never really even talked.
Afterwards, we called him Mirza again. Not to him. We didn’t talk to him anymore. But when we talked about him. To each other. Which, mostly, we didn’t.
II. The Concrete Plant
We were fifty feet up in the abandoned plant, the usual four of us smoking our usual weed in our usual spot. The funnel was wide enough that if you looked up you’d see a patch of night sky the size of a garage door. If you looked down, you’d see your knees (you’re squatting with your back ag
ainst the rusty wall), your shoes on the slant of metal angling towards the hole in the middle. The hole dropped straight down fifty feet into the mixing tank. It sat there between us, black as a gun barrel, just wide enough to fall through.
In the distance, a train pushed its warning noise down the tracks.
“We should jump it,” Eli said.
“Goes too fast,” Greg said. “Get your leg chopped off.” He sucked in, looked at us with bulging eyes.
“You wait till it slows, genius,” Eli said.
Holding the smoke in, Greg made a death-by-index-finger motion across his throat. He was bigger than the rest of us—small black eyes, pale skin, gelled hair—and he would have been a bully if he wasn’t always stoned. He had two fake front teeth from when his hockey-obsessed dad, who dug up their entire backyard to make a training pond, checked him into a tree. “Get your fucking hands sliced off,” he croaked on his exhale. “Slip under the wheels …”
“Jockhead,” Eli said. “It’s curved down.”
This was asked: “What the hell is curved down?”
“It’s what they call it when the train comes to a bend in the—”
“Who’s they?”
“I’m telling you, Pete. Take your hit and listen, eh?” Eli had lived stateside since he was four, but ever since junior high he’d started turning “out” into “aoot” and wearing patches depicting the Canadian flag. He was as Jewish looking as you could get, except for his hair. It was what he called a killer ponytail, which meant it reached to his ass, or would have if he hadn’t been forced to wind it in a turban. His parents were Sikhs. Dharamjot (formerly Bernard Riffkin) and Guru Rajni (was Shirley Goldberg) smelled of tea tree oil and did yoga behind the bleachers during soccer games. He hated them perhaps even more than Greg hated his dad. “You walk the steel till you get to a good sharp bend,” he said. “And then dig a grave where the engineer can’t see you. Grave digging is when you get down beside the tracks and lie flat and wait for a hotel. A hotel’s what they call a boxcar. A cattle car’s a barn. The whole thing is called riding the rooster. They have a very sophisticated lexicon.” He stared at us. “Hoboes, geniuses. Jesus, you all’ve gotta lay off the stuff. Except Jack. Jack needs another hit. Give him the thing, Pete. I mean, look at him.”
When you passed a joint to Mirza, he took it with the obeisance of a gentle-mouthed dog easing a biscuit from your fingers. His hands were shrunken and bony as the rest of him; he couldn’t have been much over five feet, a hundred pounds. When he wasn’t around, the three of us dreamed up horrors about what had happened to him back where he was from. He had a dent in his left brow like someone had cracked him with a pipe. He smiled a lot. You wanted to look away from his teeth.
“What’s hoboes?” he asked in what we assumed was just the way Serbians sounded.
He and his mother had showed up in Culver that spring. We saw her at the Stop and Shop or the school parking lot, smoking, returning our parents’ greetings with silent nods; none of us had ever heard her speak a word of English, just the strange language she poured over Mirza while she fidgeted with his palm or collar or hair. We had seen him in class, of course, but we’d only started hanging out that summer. We were facing our first year out of the town school, about to start at the regional high, and he was one more Culverite in a world growing thin on Culverites, or we probably wouldn’t have hung out at all. The only time we did was at the concrete plant. None of us invited him to our homes. None of us had been to his.
We explained the concept of hoboes.
“No,” Eli corrected us. “They didn’t just used to. They still do. They still are. I’ve been reading this book.” If you started talking about something, Eli was reading a book on it. “We could be hoboes. Freighters, in the lingo. There’s nothing to it. When the rooster shows, you run alongside, sync up, take a jump, and you’re on.” He took the spliff from Mirza, looked at it. “You ate it,” he said. “You frigging mawed it. Somebody give him like a frigging Tums.” Through his exhale, he said, “Picture it. The four of us, eh? Chiggered to a car. Riding north, like off to Canada, kiss Culver good-bye, frigging Vermont, frigging school, ’rents, like fuck off Dad, I mean nothing, nothing but the rooster and us and woods and like, like …” Holding the smoke in, he made a circling motion with his free hand, as if urging us to finish his sentence, then dropped the dead end in the chute. It drifted down the hole between us, a campfire spark in reverse. “Peaceful,” Eli croaked. “Like totally frigging peaceful.”
The train roared by. It rattled the old plant all the way up to our funnel, and we leaned back against the metal, feeling it. The funnel was at the bottom of an old silo, the whole thing way up on stilts, and beside it a second tower stood on its own spindly legs, the mixer gone, the long thin line of the conveyor angling from the distant ground into the sky, and we watched it lit up in a sudden sweep of the train’s beam, shaking against the stars. After a while, it was hard to tell which was shivering and which was still.
In the quiet afterwards, Greg said, “I’m gonna leave him a note. Dear Dad: Fuck off.”
“I’m not even gonna leave a note,” Eli said.
“Dear Dad: Shove a puck up your ass.”
“You know what I’m going to do?” Eli said.
“And pack it in there with your fucking stick.”
“Take a dump on his yoga mat.”
We all laughed except Mirza. He had shut his eyes. If he had looked even a little relaxed you would have thought he was asleep.
It was suggested that before meeting at the tracks to grave dig for the rooster we should all make lists of everything we hated about our dads, leave them on our kitchen tables.
“Like whatever, Pete,” Eli said. “Your dad isn’t around enough for you to know what to hate. You probably don’t even hate him.”
“Sure.”
“That’s not hate,” Eli said. “‘Sure’ is like, like discontent.”
He was assured it was like hate.
“So say hate. Jack hates his frigging dad.” Eli switched on his flashlight. “Frigging look at him. You can see it.”
He didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. In the beam, you could see his forehead dent pulse where the blood flowed under the skin.
“Hey,” Greg said. “How about this: hand the spliff around and when you get it you have to list all the things you hate about your dad, okay? Give me it.”
From when he started to when we were done was long enough to go through two more joints. Mirza took his tokes in silence. The rest of us moved on to the things we’d do when we came back from our year on the rails: Eli was going to dump gasoline on his dad’s head, strike a match to the turban; Greg was going to make his dad swallow his front teeth. We even painted the scene of our escape: we’d tell them all to meet us at the railroad crossing and, as we passed, the signal flashing and chiming its theme, we’d shoot out our parents’ windshields with Greg’s pellet gun. We were so caught up that we didn’t notice Mirza until Eli said, “Jack?”
Mirza had shoved himself to the edge of the center chute. Dangling his feet down the hole, knocking his heels against its throat, he bent over, peering down.
“He’s looking for spent butts,” Eli said.
We laughed.
“Get away from there,” Greg said.
Mirza flicked on his flashlight, sent its light down the hole.
“Hey,” Eli said. “We’re talking about the four of us.”
“You can shoot the gun,” Greg said. “Take out the windshields.”
“You can clip my frigging dad,” Eli said.
“Shit,” Greg said. “You can blast mine in the fucking face.”
The word “fugitives” was said like it couldn’t help but make everyone grin and “outlaws” followed.
“Think of it, Jack,” Eli said. “All badass on the run? It’d be like frigging rape and pillage. It’d be like the frigging Vikings. C’mon, get back from the hole. Help us plan it, man.”
Mirza nod
ded. But instead of scooting back, he just held out his flashlight and dropped it. A flickering beam shot up out of the chute, hit Mirza’s face, flung itself around the funnel rim. There was a distant bang. The hole went black. Still hunched over it, Mirza said, “In Viäegrad I once saw man they catch on train. When they catch, they take his arms and hold off side so his legs hit ground and like this till his feet have no more skin, all his bones break. Then they drop. I saw man like this. Crawl all way from track. He has no pants.” He looked up from the hole. That terrible smile.
“Jesus,” Greg said.
Eli said, “We were just making shit up.”
Sometimes Mirza’s smile looked built over his real face like a fence made to block a yard from a stranger’s view.
After that, we smoked in silence. Then we dropped the last one down the chute and climbed up to the funnel’s rim. Bolted to the outside of the tower, a ladder dropped. Greg climbed over the lip of the funnel onto the rungs. Then Eli. Mirza waited at the rear. When you first stepped over the edge and turned your back to the earth it felt as if the ladder was tilting backwards, a sensation less like you were closing in on the ground than it was closing in on you. If you looked down, which you shouldn’t, you saw the abandoned shack made miniature by distance, the crane-like conveyor belt that once carried the mix up past our funnel to another that had fallen long ago; it now lay far below, rusting like the wreck of a ship.