Stars Go Blue

by Laura Pritchett

  “We sure helped a lot of things be born.” He says this when he walks into the kitchen, to his wife and daughter. They both turn and smile at him. Beautiful smiles in a warm kitchen. By god if he’s going to gut his wife and daughter like a fish.

  But he needs to hurry. He can feel the slip now, fast as a dam breaking and the sudden onslaught of water.

  II.

  “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else

  my heart concealing it will break.”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  The Taming of the Shrew (act 4, scene 3)

  RENNY

  She feeds the chickens, who are as annoyed with the winter as she. They have quit laying eggs nearly altogether, as if in protest, and eye her as if she’s responsible for the short days and bad weather. She scowls back. None of this winter is her idea. She’s done what she can to mitigate and help. She’s even put in a light that flicks on at four in the morning, and she’s given them extra vitamins, and their egg production should not, in fact, be so low. She does try, she does. Just as she feeds Ben. She does lather his face in the mornings, she does do his laundry, she does show him how to turn on the radio, she does drive him somewhere at least twice a week to get him out of the house. A thousand acts of kindness each day, for Ben and the chickens and the donkeys and the horses and she does do so much.

  And no one loves her, not even the chickens, and no one notices, and no one cares.

  “Give me an egg or two, girls.” She murmurs this to them in the cold-echo air of the cement-block chicken house, and in response, a mouse runs along the baseboard of the floor. She slides her hand under each chicken, each sitting in her own nesting box, and they gently peck her hand in protest. Fat Girl has one under her; Penny does not.

  She stares at the globe in her hand. E-G-G. It should stand for something. Or maybe not. All the stupid acronyms in the world. People and their stupid need for letters. The Department of Corrections, DOC. Average length of stay, ALOS. Provisions of section 18-1.3-406. Colorado Murder in the Second Degree. The SORL1 protein. The NIA, National Institute on Aging. The NHGRI, the National Human Genome Research Institute. She wonders if Carolyn and the kids should get tested. They could let their hopes sink to the depth of the sea, where they belong. They can have their hearts be broken now, and get it over with. There is, in fact, some sense in that.

  Perhaps someone in this family has it. Jess, probably. All that she has in common with him. Please let them not share that. Please, no.

  One of the chickens near the end of the row lets out a cackle of egg-laying, and so she stands there, in the cold, waiting. Life is about efficiency. This chicken is the one that Jess once named Oh-Beetle-Beetle, and she hardly pecks at all. Not like Floppy, who can bring tears.

  The beta-amyloid proteins. The presenilin 1, or PS1, genes and how they affect lysosomes, how they get mutated. She’s never been stupid. She’s kept books and invested well and guessed correctly when to cut the hay. She had a degree in animal sciences, but she was born in the wrong era—she just got married, without thinking about it—and she should have gone on to be a vet or a scientist. But she was good at the business side of the ranch, and she kept the books, and she made up her own useful acronyms or codes. She wonders if she could ever tell a friend—perhaps Zach?—about all this. How her love for the ranch was manifested by making it work. By knowing all the words and columns and figures and facts.

  She stamps her feet to warm up, glides her hand over the chicken, and then notices, with a start, how clean the chicken house is. The cement floor is mostly devoid of chicken shit; there’s only the clean hay that has been kicked around by the chickens themselves. It’s clean enough, in fact, that she knows it must have been cleaned today. She pauses, cocks her head. “Jess?” She calls it out, in the cool air of the chicken house, and then leans her head out the door and calls it again.

  She stares into the silence created by the boom of her voice. A squirrel has paused halfway up a tree. The donkeys have raised their heads. The hayfields and distant mountains all sit in silent white. And then she hears the clink of hoof on wood, and she walks out of the chicken house and into the shed next door, the one in which they stack the best hay and alfalfa, and she sees Jess in there with Fury, the horse, both in the space created by missing bales, in a cavern created by still-green hay. The horse is standing, shifting his weight, but Jess is sitting on a bale, leaning against another bale, just lying there, in a ratty old sleeping bag, looking as if she’s dozing. She’s wearing a gray flannel shirt that used to belong to Ben and a Carhartt jacket and a bright pink hand-knitted hat that someone in the Alzheimer’s support group made for her. She looks up at Renny with one eye.

  “Warming up,” she says. “Smells good in here.”

  “Why do you have a sleeping bag in a hay shed?”

  Jess rubs her nose and shrugs.

  “There’s a house for warming up. You could come inside.”

  “I like it here.”

  Renny simply doesn’t know what to do with blankness. “You just carry a sleeping bag around with you?” She cocks her head and stares. It’s true that Jess is beautiful, more beautiful than anyone in the family. Fine dark brown hair and green eyes with eyelashes long enough to belong on a horse. A perfect dimple on one side, which rarely shows. Tall and slender and beautiful. A lot like Rachel, except that Jess has a still-noble presence and a quiet watchfulness that is like Ben. And it’s this centeredness—Renny decides that’s the right word—that gives Jess her deep beauty, which is shining so bright right now that Renny has to scowl at it, otherwise she will gasp.

  “Well, yes. On the saddle.”

  Jess always speaks with the tone of voice that ends conversations, no upward lilt, no invitation to keep speaking. She’s done speaking, and Renny would like to strangle her. Instead, she pauses, breathes, tries to make her voice more pleasant. “Was it you that cleaned the chicken house?” And when Jess nods affirmative with a shrug, Renny nods at the room, then at Jess, which is her way of saying thanks. “Well, why aren’t you going to Mexico? They could take you.”

  Jess gives her a look of amused delight. “Goodness, Renny. It’s a romantic getaway. Plus, I don’t want to go.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I want to be here right now.”

  “And why is that?”

  Jess shrugs, as if it’s obvious. Then she says, “Renny, you’re all right.”

  Renny lets the horse nuzzle her jacket, which makes a swishing noise. “You want to be here, in this cold wasteland of an idiot winter, and stay by yourself in that house, and not go to Mexico, and not come stay with us. Do I have that right, Jess?”

  “Yes,” Jess says.

  Renny hears the gruff of her voice, and she tries to calm it. “Jess, I don’t understand you. Not one bit.”

  “I like it here.”

  “But no normal person would like it here, Jess.”

  Jess shrugs.

  “Why don’t you go talk to Grandpa, at least?”

  “I just did. He went past me on his way on a walk, so I walked with him to the middle gate. He was talking about gutting fish. How we used to fish together and he’d gut the fish for me, because I didn’t like it. He didn’t like gutting fish either, it turns out. I didn’t know that.”

  Renny reaches out to stroke Fury’s neck. The horse, at least, is deserving of some attention. But she will try. “I remember how surprised I was, when you first moved here, after Rachel, that you’d never been fishing.” When Jess only nods, Renny adds, “You were just a young teenager, of course, but I suppose I had thought Ray or Rachel had taken you. You lived right by that lake!”

  Jess chews on a piece of hay, looks up. “Nope, we never went fishing.”

  “Ben loved doing that with you. After you moved here.”

  “I know.”

  “Ben was a good grandfather.”

  “I know.”

  “What was Ray or Rachel thinking, never taking two kids
fishing?”

  “I wish Ray wasn’t getting out.” Jess says it while looking up at dust motes floating in the sunlight coming through the door. “Does stress make Alzheimer’s worse? Ever since last week, Grandpa has seemed . . . worse. I wonder if Ray stresses him out.”

  She says it calmly and quietly, rhetorically, and it suddenly occurs to Renny that she simply hasn’t thought about how all this must feel to Jess. Not really. How it would feel to be in Jess’s body. How people keep disappearing on her. How it would feel to have your mother’s killer, your stepfather, free from jail? And your mother gone? And your grandfather disappearing? And would you worry that this killer-father would try to get in touch with you? Does she ever get angry at how unfair it all is? At the same time, she wonders at herself for not wondering sooner. Why don’t thoughts like this occur to her naturally? Why has she not considered this before? It’s like forgetting mint for Lipton tea. She wonders if some segment has always been missing from her brain. What’s wrong with her? She will get better at this; she will try for a real conversation.

  “All this time,” Renny says, “I’ve been able to picture Ray in a cell, eating food from a metal rectangular plate. And now? Now he is in Greeley, Colorado, doing what? Ordering pie? Applying for jobs? Now that he’s out, well, what will he do? Men like that need to exert control. They need familiar surroundings. They’ll apologize and then become assholes again. Jess, he was so . . . feckless. So unmindful. I guess I hadn’t thought how that would feel . . .”

  Jess shrugs, but her peaceful look is gone. She unzips the sleeping bag, stands up, brushes hay off her jeans. “I’m gonna ride home—”

  “I doubt he’ll directly contact us. He hasn’t been in touch with you, has he?” She pauses. “You’re not worried, are you?”

  “No.” Jess glides her hand along the horse’s neck, twines her fingers in the mane. Renny notices Jess’s efficiency, just like Carolyn, but one heartbeat calmer and smoother. She watches as Jess folds up the sleeping bag, sets it on a bale of hay, and slides the reigns into her hands. She pulls the horse forward, nudging gently past Renny so she can get out the door, like a ghost that’s going to walk through her. Renny steps to the side and watches them both clomp past her.

  “Well, good-bye,” she calls after Jess, who has mounted and started to ride in the direction of her own house.

  Jess puts up a hand in a silent wave, and Renny resists the urge to pick up a hunk of icy snow and throw it at her head. And then she does, but the clump falls short, and neither the horse nor the rider acknowledges the soft sound behind them of snow falling into snow.

  She walks back into the chicken house, reaches under the chicken, past the fluff, past the pecks on her hand, and brings out another the egg. Now she has two.

  As she walks back to the ranch house, it starts to snow. She realizes that Ben might have been the one who knew the water best—his endless days out there with a shovel and plastic dams, his endless musing over the best ways to cover a field with irrigation water. But it was she who understood the facts and figures. Which is why she knows about Apolipoprotein E-e4, which is called simply APOE-e4, but she likes knowing the long version. She likes knowing about the gene variants of CR1, CLU, and PICALM, and a fifth gene variant, BIN1, which is so genetically important. Alzheimer’s.

  It comes to her then: She knows this ranch like a chart. But Ben knows it like a poem. She hopes he’s the wiser one, because it gives her permission to leave it up to him to make the right decision.

  BEN

  Ben stands in his darkened bedroom and cannot remember why he’s there. He is next to his bed, looking down at his suitcase. It’s like a cave, this room, dark, with stalagmites of cracks in the plaster, with the old thick original window that is buckled and warped because the glass has turned to water.

  On the shelf, there is a photo of his mother and father and sister, all dead. He used to work cattle with them at the old place in Greeley, and he remembers well how they’d run cows in the corral before sending them through the chute. He remembers the onion crop and the sugar beets. He remembers that it is a town founded on the idea of irrigation, that a man, long ago—Horace Greeley, his name was—had thought to build a utopian community on the plains. How another man—James Michener, his name was—wrote a book called Centennial. And if he remembers correctly, that author got it about right. About the hardships and the dust and the hopes and the calloused hands of working the desert into fruition. But in certain ways, he wonders if moving all that water was ruining the earth even as they watered it into being. The balance got upset.

  There’s a funny thing, he’s realizing. Which is that his mind is just like the cows in the vee of a fence. He has cornered his diseased mind and he can separate from it and give it vaccinations. He can observe it and keep records of it, as he would a cow. But someday it will come out of the corner and meet up with the rest of his mind and he won’t be able to corner it any longer. Like a heifer gone berserk; no keeping her in.

  He told Renny he was taking a nap. But the truth is, the time has come.

  Greeley, Colorado. He writes it down on a notepad, because now he remembers why he’s standing by his bed. He knows that things with many steps get hard. Lists are good. For example, the story of the woman in his disease group who used to make biscuits—she loved biscuits!—but then there were too many steps. Now she has to use Bisquick even though she does not like Bisquick. She holds his hands at the meetings and he always wonders if she feels angry at the boxed biscuits.

  He has made a good list, and that’s important because there are lots of things to think through. The list is in his suitcase. He consults it now and doesn’t move on to the next item until he is sure. He has packed clothing, his Colt .45, bullets, the pink juice, syringes, money (which he has stolen from Renny, because she thinks he doesn’t know fives from fifties and doesn’t let him carry cash anymore). He has written a note with his name in case it gets bad: My name is Ben Cross. I am trying to get to Greeley, Colorado. He also has the newspaper clipping that he has carried around since it was printed, the one detailing the sentencing of Ray and the death of Rachel.

  It’s dusty in here, in this bedroom, in this Sears mail-order house that was built a hundred years ago and which he bought when he was thirty and thus he has lived here for forty or sixty or a longtime years. He picks up a picture of his father and sees how dusty it is, and so he wipes the frame on the front of a shirt. It cleans the glass but leaves a smudge of dirt on the gray wool.

  That’s what his brain reminds him of: dust. That’s how he sees the world. There are sometimes small specks of dust and sometimes whole rooms of dust, and sometimes it blows away and he can see very well and other times it is so dusty that he doesn’t even know what lies on the other side of the dust.

  The dust just needs some water.

  But he cannot get enough water into his brain. He has to hurry. When you reach out to catch a chicken or a calf, you have to move fast, otherwise you end up just chasing. Fast movement is what is called for. No flinching.

  He is afraid, yes. He has said his prayers. He has courage.

  He hears a commotion coming from the front door of the house and so puts the picture back and puts the suitcase under his bed. He wonders if his parents will be waiting for him on the other side. He doesn’t know who is out there, in the kitchen, but a dog is barking. Probably it is that gold-colored dog that doesn’t bring back anything, even though it should.

  He combs his hair in the bathroom. He says to the mirror, “Body is great, mind isn’t what it used to be.” People at the grocery or post office sometimes ask how he’s doing. Sometimes he complains about his hip that hurts or his tooth that still aches even though the dentist did that thing that kings wear on their heads. But he cannot really say the big thing because there are no words. This is horrible, that he will die twice. “Stand with it,” he says to the mirror. “You just gotta stand with it.”

  When he gets to the kitchen, he sees that
it’s Del, who is married to Carolyn. And Anton the sheriff. Both used to have Western-style mustaches; Ben remembers that. But now they are clean-shaven. Del with his sandy wavy hair. And Anton that has deep brown eyes and very deep brown hair, and for this reason this sheriff reminds him of Ray, the man who killed his daughter.

  Del says, “Morning, Ben. It’s me, Del, and Anton come to see you.”

  He shakes both men’s hands, although Del hugs him anyway. When he’s asked, Ben says, “The body’s doing fine, but the brain’s not so good these days,” to which the men nod and say, “Doesn’t that beat all?” and “I know it, and it’s no good.”

  Ben is worried about the sheriff. Why is he here? Does he know something? But Anton is turned around, helping himself to a cup of coffee from the coffeepot. Next to the sheriff is the kitchen window, outside of which are the aspen trees, and he considers for a moment the white beauty of their trunks, and wonders how long until they will leaf out. Ben says, “Just stopping by for a visit, are you?”

  “Yup. Dropping Satchmo off. Appreciate you watching her while we go on vacation. And Anton wanted to walk the place. Look for good fishing holes along the river, for when spring comes. We’re thinking of walking out to the back. Want to join us?”

  Not once has the sheriff walked out back, although Del has plenty of times. Del belongs to this place almost as much as Ben, coming over to help put up hay and fish and fix fence. He has put hours in on this place, to be sure. He is part of the family. It’s fine if they walk the place.

  Renny walks in the porch door then, huffing and grumbling, a frozen chicken in her hand. “Fred died,” she says, holding the chicken out, upside down by the feet. “She didn’t get put in last night. She was caught in the wire of the fence and froze.”

  Ben can tell she’s angry and he’s sorry about Fred, whom they have had for a long time. Fred has been a good layer; lots of double-yolkers. There is nothing to say. He thought the chickens were in when he locked their door. It’s their job, really, to be in by dusk. He wishes he could hold Renny. Hold her and hold her and apologize and apologize. She throws the dead frozen chicken in the trash, considers it, and then pulls it out and sets it on the kitchen counter. He knows she’s fighting tears and also wondering whether it’s worth cooking; not really, since the work involved is far more than driving to the store and paying a few dollars for one already set to go.