by Josh Weil
“Jack!” Eli called.
The shape stopped.
“Get the fuck off there!” Greg shouted.
Mirza’s flashlight showed down on us. “Guys,” he said. His voice sounded like his tongue was swollen.
“You can see fine from here,” I called. “You can see great.”
“Pete.”
“Hey,” I said. “How’s your mouth?”
He turned his flashlight on his face: a lumpy mess of stitched lip.
“Looks good,” Eli said.
“Looks fucking badass,” Greg said. “Get the fuck off that thing and come show us.”
He did something unreadable with his mashed face, then put the flashlight back under his arm. We followed him with our own beams as he crawled along the rubber belt, higher and higher on the crane-like arm. By the time he reached the end, he was beyond the range of our flashlights. He stopped, shut his off. A small black lump at the very tip. Each time a gust came, the whole high conveyor belt swayed.
The three of us talked about how to get him off. We talked about how freezing it was. Every now and then, one of us would call to him to ask if the mirror had flown by. He didn’t answer. At midnight, we climbed down. Halfway to the ground, I stopped on the ladder.
“It’s not gonna happen,” I shouted up to him. “There must have been a problem. They probably aborted, Jack. They’ll probably try again tomorrow night. Come on. Come down. We’ll walk home.” I couldn’t even tell if he was looking at me.
Down on the ground, the others wanted to leave him.
“He’ll come down eventually,” Eli said.
“Yeah,” I said. “When he drops.”
“Well we can’t just stand here all night,” Greg said.
Eli nodded. “We’ll freeze. We’ll get like hypothermia.”
“He’ll get hypothermia,” I said.
“He’s Eastern European,” Eli said. “Eastern Europeans are genetically capable of withstanding lower temperatures.”
“Fuck off,” I told him. Then: “Maybe we should call someone.”
“I could ride my bike to the nearest house,” Greg said. “Call his mom.”
I wouldn’t let him. They argued with me until it was clear there was something they didn’t know and then Greg said, “Well what the fuck then?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should call the cops.”
“Are you frigging crazy?” Eli said.
“Okay, what about the fire department?”
By the time Greg returned on his bike, we could see the flashers coming. Through the trees, the red and yellow lights pulsed nearer until they were out in the open and we could see the truck. It was a pickup. They didn’t have the siren on.
Two of Culver’s volunteers came out slamming doors. One wore a lumpy knit hat. The other was bald to the cold. We let them know what was going on. They let us know just how deep in shit we were. The one with the hat walked back to the pickup and got the floodlight blasting. It hit the concrete plant all at once, grabbed it out of the night like it had yanked it by a cord, then crawled up the conveyor belt to the top.
The bald one shouted to him. Mirza didn’t say anything back. There were long minutes of one-sided conversation. After a while, it started to seem like the fireman was a fool, shouting things up at a night sky that didn’t seem to care, and he stopped. He and the other volunteer talked too low for me to hear. When the bald one turned back to the conveyor belt, he shouted, “Alright. I’m going to come get you, then.” He was watching the ground as he walked, heading for the hole in the fence, so he didn’t see Mirza take out the gun.
The other one shouted.
“What?” The bald one said, then looked up. He had reached the fence and his hands were on it and it shook a little. “Kid,” he called. “That better be a toy.”
“Where did he get a gun?” Eli whispered.
“Is that a toy?” the other volunteer said. He was talking to Eli.
“I don’t know,” Eli said.
“Let it go,” the bald one shouted up at Mirza. “Just drop it and we’ll forget it ever happened.”
The flashers lit the fence yellow then red, yellow then red. The spotlight stayed on Mirza steady as if it was sewn into the sky.
“I’m coming in,” the fireman shouted. “If you shoot me, I’m going to be pissed.”
“If you shoot …” the other one started.
The bald one held up a hand. “He’s not going to shoot,” he said. “Kid? If you’re going to shoot, tell me, okay? That only seems fair.” Puffed in his parka, he was having trouble getting through the hole in the fence. “I’m not armed,” he shouted. “So, how about you give me fair warning. Say, fire off a warning shot. How’s that sound?”
He was through to the other side and pulling his coat free from a snag when Mirza shouted something. All of us looked at him.
In the floodlight, he held the pistol pressed to his temple. Eli and Greg both said things they wouldn’t normally say within hearing distance of adults. I was silent.
“Okay,” the man in the fence called. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Don’t come close,” Mirza shouted.
“You bet,” the volunteer called. “See. I’m stopped.” He stood a few feet inside the fence. “What do you want?”
“Turn off light,” Mirza shouted.
“Sure,” he called back. “We turn off the light, you drop the gun, we’re all happy, right?”
“Turn off first,” Mirza said.
“Go ahead, Lyle,” the bald one said. He didn’t take his eyes of Mirza. “Lyle, go ahead.”
As soon as it was off, the flashers seemed brighter. They pulsed their colors over the trees, the fence, touched pieces of the concrete plant, reached partway up the conveyor belt. After about fifty feet, though, it was just a black solid strip stabbing into the dark bowl of the sky. The stars shivered and swam. When the light appeared, half the size of the moon and twenty times as bright, I felt my breath leave my body. I watched it, waiting for it to move, to slip uncannily through the web of the stars. It was only when it didn’t that I realized it was Mirza’s flashlight. He was pointing it straight at us. Then the beam slid off us and landed on the fireman inside the fence. That was when he started shooting.
V. The Space Mirror
Moon Slayer. Star Demolisher. We never saw it. That night, we thought it must have swept by too far to the north. Or maybe they just aimed it somewhere else. They were steering it from their control center in Moscow; this is what Mirza told us one of those nights that long-ago fall. He said the mirrors had to be angled just right to throw the reflection where they wanted. Maybe, we decided, of all the moments over all the miles of the earth, the few seconds over an abandoned concrete plant in northern Vermont were just the wrong few seconds. Maybe in those seconds whoever had been at the controls had just decided to give the nighttime a moment to itself, angled the sunlit wings away from the planet, let darkness catch its breath.
I thought he would kill the men that night. They were both shouting—we all were—the bald one tearing at the fence, struggling to loosen his parka from the barbs, his shout suddenly pinched to a scream. But it was the wire that gashed his cheek, ripped a hole in his palm; the bullet just nicked his neck. One inch closer, the paper said. Fortunate, it said. They put Mirza away.
By the time we were finished with tenth grade, his mother was gone, too. It was assumed she moved down near Rutland to be closer to the juvie prison. But when they let him out, he came back alone. We were all off to college by then—Greg and Eli and me—and when I heard he had returned to Culver I swore I’d stay away. I did, for a few years.
He’s a line repairman now. On call for the electric company. I don’t know much more about the work other than it’s dangerous. He lives alone in a trailer way up in the pine woods along Rattlesnake Gutter. Our postmistress tells me he has a lot of dogs. She doesn’t know much more; nobody does. He doesn’t talk with people. Or they don’t talk
with him. I’ve seen him twice. The first time was in the co-op. He was buying bulk. I only glimpsed his back—greasy hat-mashed hair, beard bushing at his jaw, shoulders thin and brittle as when we were boys—before I turned and slipped out of the store.
Every time the first snows come, I watch the slow pileup on the deck chairs, or lose myself in the swirl before my headlights, and decide to hire him to plow my drive. People say he does a good job, shows up before they’re awake, sends them a bill. They don’t know his phone number. It’s not listed. Send him a letter they tell me, a check. Each winter I find myself on the north side of Rattlesnake Gutter, stalled in my car, looking through the passenger side at his house. Black trash bags are duct-taped over two windows. Through a third, I have seen the yellow inside of a microwave and, above it, a sagged line of gray socks hanging. Once the dogs start they keep on until I drive away again.
The second, and last, time I saw him was almost a year ago. The night before it had snowed big and I was halfway up Rattlesnake Gutter when I met him coming down. The gutter road is one car’s width, cliff on one side and gorge on the other. We idled in each other’s lights. Then he backed up, lowered his plow blade, and cleared a turnout for me. As he drove by I rolled down my window. He stopped just past. I had to lean out into the cold and crane my neck around. He watched me do it. After a moment, he raised his hand good-bye, began to roll his window back up. His brake lights paled.
I said the first thing that came to me: “You know it never deployed.” He didn’t look like he knew what I was talking about. “Banner,” I said. “Znamya. The reflector never opened. Something with the controls, I guess. They had to jettison it.” And then, in his silence, as if it was some kind of excuse: “It was on the news.” And then, of all things: “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” he said.
“For everything. What happened here, then, your father, everything Jack.” I had not thought of him as that in years.
He looked at me as if he had not known till right then who I was. “My tata,” he said, “used to stand on new bridge over river Drina and throw women off just to show how he can shoot them before they hit water. Women he has raped.”
Snow was mashed against the curve of his plow blade and I watched a chunk fall off, silently, in the snow beside it.
“In Rutland,” he said, “I live two years uncomplicated life.” He lifted his hand. “There is no place for turn up there,” he said. “You must back whole way down.” Then there was just the sound of his window glass squealing upward, his tires creaking away over the snow.
My wife says I can’t know he’s unhappy, tells me he would have ended up like that anyway, that long before I knew him things stronger than me shoved him on a trajectory I couldn’t have changed. But on nights of bad weather I still can’t sleep. Somewhere out there a limb is cracking, a tree is down, a line snaps at the rain. On those nights, awake beside the sleep breathing of my wife, it seems the whole of the natural world is waiting to punish me with what it has in store for him.
I wonder if he thinks about that night I pulled him off the train. If he imagines how it would have been to ride on, to cross the border in a thickness of north woods, to unbuckle from the ladder and leap free of the cars. I wonder if he dreams of that artificial moon rising above the trees, bathing the forest in its beam, chasing the night off him into the depths of the woods. I wonder if that’s what he saw each night after lights-out those two years he spent in his cell.
The first cold snap has already come and gone. We’re in the last of a late Indian summer. One night soon I’ll go to the concrete plant. The town tore it down long ago, turned it into a gravel pit. Each fall I walk the dirt road in and come out of the woods into the sudden openness of gouged earth. I try to imagine the pit lit with an unearthly glow, alive with the rumble of backhoes and cranes holding the dark at bay until the natural dawn. But there are just a few machines left alone for the night, the railroad tracks waiting atop their ties, the cold expanse of the sky. The air is quiet as only a treeless place can be.
THE POINT
OF ROUGHNESS
I’m behind the barn, splitting burn wood, when I see the bear coming for our daughter. It’s December, dusk. At my back: high piles of cut rounds. Out in the field: the bucked trees stacked, their drag marks dark in all the snow, the pines looking almost black beyond. And between their trunks: a patch of true black moving. Everything else is still—the stone wall, the glass greenhouse, the sledding hill behind our home, packed hard by the weight of my wife and daughter gone down run after run—except a spot of orange: Orly in her snowsuit. Rolling snow boulders. Down by the old stone wall at the edge of the woods. Beneath the splitter’s rumble, the shaking of the pine boughs is a silent ripple washing steadily towards her.
For a second I can feel her in my hands—the heft of her when I first pick her up, my arms strained with her struggling—and then it’s just the log again and Orly is out there, suddenly standing straight up, staring into the trees. Her hands are bare—she will not suffer gloves, shucks mittens as soon as she thinks she’s out of sight—her fingers stained so bright by markers I can see them slowly curling towards her palms. She takes a snowsuit-stiffened step. Another. The first time we zipped her into the hunter’s camouflage, I crouched down, winked. Hey bub, I said, get me a beer, eh? Bess laughed. But Orly only asked, Who’s Bub? And when I poked her bright orange belly with a wriggly finger, my wife said Ev, the way I knew meant stop.
I shout it now—Stop!—I must—Orly!—because she goes still at the wall, small hands on the stones, standing on tiptoe, peering over. But in my ears there is no echo of my voice, only the thudding from the hog stall, the chugging of the splitter waiting for me to load another round. Move, I tell myself, run, can feel her grabbed away into my hug, her warmth close as I shush her, Bess glancing up, seeing us through the kitchen window … And I am grateful for the near dark that hides me still standing here. Loading the log. Cranking down the handle. There is something hypnotic about watching hydraulics work, the steel ram pushing the round, the first touch of the wedge, the slow cracking open of such a solid thing, and, anyway, it’s only a black bear, probably already gone.
They show up every spring, shaggy from sleep, coats loose on shoulder bones. Our first year here in these New England hills, one night at the almost end of winter, we stood at the bedroom window, watching them. Two cubs digging at the compost pile, jerking back from pawed puffs of heat, shaking their heads, pouncing on the fleeting steam. I looked at Bess—just that fall we’d faced it: my surety that I didn’t want to threaten what we had by having kids; her struggle with what it meant then to stay in love with me—but she was smiling, her laugh its own puff on the window. Wrapped in the comforter, we watched them play and play, as if they’d discovered a game that could keep them happy indefinitely. By summer we’d built a better compost bin but there were the blueberry bushes, the beehives, the scent of Bess and me so fresh from sex the grass was still imprinted on our skin. Once, in the orchard, lying beneath last apples beneath a late October sky, I looked at Bess above me—her cloud of curly hair barely held back, the loosed strands swinging to her rocking hips, the lighter brown of a face impossible to look at without thinking of the sun, those breasts she mostly hid from its brightness, but not from me, paler still, still perfect—and saw, not more than twenty feet behind her, that unmistakable shuffling shape. We leapt up, ready with hand claps, shouts, but it was already wheeling, as if shocked into flight by the sight of our naked selves. Winter would find us naked again, out in the greenhouse, beneath our marriage lights. Nine years ago we’d strung them up, three thousand tiny bulbs glittering above us as our guests watched us exchange our vows. Now, each Yule season, we light them again. Each solstice night we step back in, spread out our sheepskins beneath a galaxy of our own stars. Then, sweaty, steaming, we burst back out, whooping at the wildness of running naked through thigh-high snow, at the nearing woodstove warmth, the feeling that we’ve escaped the darkn
ess for another year. Of course, by then, the bears are gone, curled up in caves, safely away.
Except for this one: a large black bear standing in the twilight, hardly ten feet from Orly. They stand so still, staring at each other, that when I move to lift away the log’s split halves it seems a breaking of some understanding. The pieces clatter onto the cordwood. The bear doesn’t flinch. Orly doesn’t look at me. And I can feel it: the fear that she will. If I could see myself I would be shouting at me to do what anyone would do, what, as I reach for another round, I am aware I am not doing, am wondering, instead, what the bear will do, what Orly … For a moment, I think she’s singing to it. Which could be true. Kids like her can have a way with animals the rest of us won’t ever understand. I listen for her voice, a hum in my ears.
Orly. It was Bess who chose her name—Oralee, Hebrew for “my light”—but it was me who shortened it. And Bess? I don’t know what her name means. Nor Evan, not more than that it’s Welsh. Once, we considered renaming each other, trading in our parents’ choices for the language of this land where we’d become ourselves. I chose for her Wanee-mbee-shkwa: Good Water Woman. And she for me: Nawasnaneekan. It means “my light,” too.
All the seasons grown together, all the water, the sun, everything taken from the soil over all those years, all starting to rip apart: that is what a piece of wood sounds like when it splits.
Somehow through it I hear the screaming, see the lunge, the blackness blurred, the spot of orange scrambling backwards in a burst of snow exploding with the back door’s blast of yellow light, Bess flashing through it, the frantic form of my wife running. And before the hatchet is in my hand I know that hers are empty, know, as I start running, too, that this animal—which should not be here, which should be hibernating beneath the earth somewhere—will turn from its small prey to the larger threat, charge my wife instead.