Stars Go Blue

by Laura Pritchett

  But there is no time for her to succumb to that. There is now a flurry of activity. Anton comes back, ice crystals on his face and eyelashes, stomping his feet and sending snow across her floor. When he hears the report of the missing truck, he promptly leaves for town. Eddie and Ruben hear the news too and drive into town to look around as well. And Renny, as Anton requested, starts to look around for clues. For slips of paper or writings or anything that might offer some suggestion as to whether Ben had a plan or just up and left. She finds only the usual scraps—lists of places or things to accomplish: New fence posts with Carolyn, one note reads. Tell Renny thank you, another note says. Call Jess and ask how she is. It’s all the mishmash of a brain trying to right itself, like a boat at sea seeking balance.

  Between the dark hours of midnight and daybreak, while the blizzard is in full force and the sky is socked in with black thick fury, she calls Carolyn’s cell phone. She tells herself that she’s calling for one reason, which is that Carolyn will not forgive her if Ben is found dead and frozen and Renny had not called. But really, she only wants to hear another human voice. There is no one, though. Only a clicking noise. Perhaps there is no service.

  She walks to Ben’s drawer and rifles through it again. Then she goes through his laundry, pulling scraps from his jeans. Now she’s angry. She’s tired and wants to go to sleep. Where is he?

  She searches in earnest now, throwing clothes and items all over the place. Satchmo runs around her, excited, picking up shoes and dropping them. In one corner of the closet, she finds more lists.

  Feed chickens (7 chickens)

  Feed donkeys (4)

  Feed horses (2)

  Check cabin

  Call Eddie

  Ruben

  Or:

  Check on Jess. Watershed of the heart

  Goodbye = back away = water runs backward

  Or:

  I am married to Renny. I am Ben Cross. Born May 5, 1934,

  Greeley Colorado. Hell’s Bottom Ranch. Two daughters.

  Or:

  I am a dummy.

  That last one slows her down, but she tosses it to the side and keeps up her search. She finds pocketknives and the glasses he has been missing for weeks. She finds money, stashed away in the toes of his cowboy boots. She finds river stones that must hold some meaning. She is disgusted that everything is so dusty and that she let it get that way. She finds the bleached white of a raccoon skull. She finds an envelope labeled Instructions to Ben Cross, but when she opens it, there is nothing in there.

  She walks through the house and then sits at her desk, littered with her calendar and various farm bills and receipts and bookkeeping, the bill of sale from the cattle they sold a year ago, and which she needs for this year’s taxes, paper clips and tape and an old letter from Jess.

  When Anton calls to report that they haven’t seen him and to ask if she has any news, she tells him she’s found nothing. He ends the call by saying, “Renny, do you think it had anything to do with today, at the cemetery? I saw you two, and then I saw him yelling. What set him off? Did he want to go somewhere?” and Renny’s brain feels like a snowstorm, she can’t think, but all she says is, “No, no, I don’t think so, it’s just that you look like Ray, is all, we’ve both noted that before, and maybe this time, when he saw you across . . . well, I think he mistook you,” and Anton says, “Renny, this storm. It’s ten below right now,” and Renny says, “I know it, I’ve been watching the news,” and then there is a pause before he hangs up, a pause that means Renny, prepare.

  Renny closes her eyes and thinks of the cemetery, of the yelling. Ben was angry, more angry than she’s ever seen him. At Ray. Ray. Ray.

  And then she knows. She picks up the phone, pauses, puts it back down. Son of a bitch. She stands, walks to her bedroom quickly, dresses in warm thick fleece pants and hiking boots and a sweater. She packs a small bag quickly, she calculates things in her mind: buses have many stops, her truck has four-wheel drive, Ben knew Ray was in Greeley and could remember that because it was also the town of his birth, and she wouldn’t mind seeing Ray herself. She and Ben will face him, one last time, together.

  BEN

  The restaurant’s lights have been dimmed so that people can sleep. It appears that most are, heads on hands, although a few have stretched out on the gray tile floor. The waitress, the one with the belly growing in her stomach, has sat down next to Ben and fallen asleep leaning against him. She breathes like a small windmill. He can hear the cook still making something and a few people murmur over in one corner, but it is mostly quiet.

  Ben wishes he could sleep but instead watches the woman’s belly, which is round like the moon and rises and falls just like the moon. Across from him, the boy-man has fallen asleep, leaning back against the wall, his legs out across the seat of the booth, and Ben recognizes the horse on his shirt, which is the Bronco from the football team. The boy snores about every third breath and moves his jaw and scratches his arms in his sleep and sometimes says a whole bunch of words mashed up together or sometimes simply says one word, which is always fuck.

  Ben can’t remember why he’s here. That’s okay, he tells himself. Hold steady. It will come to you. Besides, he knows Renny will come help him. She’ll be here soon. He misses holding Renny and he misses sex, a word that comes to him suddenly with the shock of memory of what it was like, and for a moment, he is happy. Then suddenly some dust blows and he remembers Ray. Go away, Ray, get out of my brain, Ray, bring my daughter back, Ray, you are in Greeley, Ray. And then he thinks a calmer thought which is I miss you, Rachel. I hope I get to see you, Rachel. In the next life, Rachel. Are you there? And then his brain circulates like a dryer that is going round and round:

  Go away, Ray.

  I miss you, Rachel.

  Hell’s Bottom.

  Go away, out of my brain, Ray.

  What are my granddaughters’ names?

  Leanne. Jess.

  Yes, Leanne. Jess.

  Renny.

  Where’s Renny?

  I miss Renny.

  Are there other grandkids? He can’t remember. But he does remember the games Renny used to play with him to keep his mind active: list your grandkids, list all the dogs we’ve ever had, list the places you’ve been.

  He bit off the tip of his tongue. That’s what it feels like. He can’t remember the words that live on the tip of his tongue.

  Then he is crying, and the crying wakes the waitress, who sits up and says, “Oh, honey, it’s going to be okay.”

  He wants to say that his brain feels worse than ever, that he is terrified that he soon won’t realize it, that this is the last thing he will ever know about his brain.

  “The storm will end soon. I bet they have the roads cleared by morning. You can get back on the bus. Where you heading, anyway?”

  He shrugs and wipes at his eyes with his sleeve.

  She regards him. “You should get some sleep, hon. It’s going to be okay.”

  “My brain’s not so good,” he says now, and he realizes, with a pang of clarity, that this waitress chose to sleep next to him because he needed her, he was the most fragile, she was worried that someone would rob or hurt him, that she was taking care of him the way a rancher would take care of an injured animal. Her pregnancy makes her this way. He’s so grateful. What a kindness. “My brain . . . But I’m not as dummy as people think I am.”

  “Aw, now, mister, you don’t look like a dummy at all.”

  “I just can’t find the right words. I know I can’t find the right words. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking them. That I don’t know what I want to say. I do know. I do have things to say.”

  “Well, that must be awfully hard then.”

  “But there’s no use complaining.” He hears the sorrow in his own voice.

  “Well. But sometimes it helps.” The woman sits up and stretches and rubs her belly. “Oh lordy, my feet hurt. See? It helps a little to say that. To share it with someone. And there’s always
hope.”

  “No!” He says it suddenly, surprising them both. “There’s not.” After the doctor said, Dementia, probably Alzheimer’s given your age, that’s when he’d understood again that hope is a bad emotion. Because then you’re hoping about the future and not paying attention to now. Because hope is sometimes just a joke. He touches the moon-woman’s arm. “Tell ya what I’m gonna do, see. I’m not going to hope. Now, you don’t either. Don’t hope your life will get better. Just make it so. Don’t hope you are able to handle this baby. Just do it. Just be glad, just move fast, just do what you need to do. But for god’s sake, don’t hope. Just be . . . Just be . . .”

  She looks at him sadly and says, “Sure, sure.”

  “Rachel. I had a daughter named Rachel.”

  “Oh?”

  “And her husband. Whose name is Ray.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ray, who killed her.”

  “Oh, my god. I’m so sorry. That’s . . . horrible.” She leans into him. “We forget how some people are horrible, don’t we? Your own child. Oh god. We just assume . . .” and then puts her arm around him.

  “He was in Cañon City.”

  “Yes, the prison.”

  “They released him now. His time is up, they say. But it hasn’t been very long. And I don’t think he’s a better man.”

  “Oh,” she says. “I’m so sorry. That makes it far worse, huh?”

  “I’m going to visit him.” He sees that startles her. “Because I need to see him. Because I gave my family bad genetics. Bad DNA. That protein. That lysosome,” and now he is crying, tears sliding down his cheeks like a quiet rain, and the words come out more freely because of the tears. “But he did it on purpose.”

  The belly-woman reaches out to hold his hand. He realizes he has hurt her, that she is crying, and he nods when she says she better attend to some things but that she’ll come back with something for him to eat. He remembers Renny yelling at him about watching football and how it was a waste of time, of precious time. Why couldn’t he ever talk about something real? Renny was right about everything.

  He puts his jacket under his head and stretches out, his legs along the booth, although the booth is not long enough. Across the room is a young woman, a girl even, who had been on the bus. The one who looks like his dead daughter. She’s in a booth, sleeping with her head turned away, and the wool shirt she wears is just like one he used to have, gray plaid with a bit of red. Probably she is alone and scared too.

  He doesn’t want to be a burden. To the waitress, bus driver, Renny. He told Renny to move him to assisted living a long time ago, so that he could get used to it, but she’d said, They’ll just let you rot. They won’t make you do things, and doing things is how your brain is going to last. He can hear her voice exactly. Her love was tough, but it was real.

  But he didn’t even mean it, wanting to move to assisted living. He was just feeling his options out. He wants to die on the ranch. Remember, he says over and over, you want to die on the ranch. Or at least outside.

  He let Renny take him, once, to a living place. Last week or maybe yesterday. Jess went too. Jess drove them both into town and they went on a tour. It was a big place and was just how he imagined it would be, clean and friendly with a big room in the middle with a TV and a chess table and other tables and a room for eating and a bedroom that was small and tidy and had a view of a parking lot.

  When he stood inside, looking out at the parking lot, that’s when he knew he would take his life. But he didn’t want to use the gun, too messy, too loud, and too much like Ray and Rachel. And Jess had touched his arm and said, “Grandpa Ben? This place isn’t for you.”

  He wanted something quieter to do his quiet life justice. It was the first time he thought about how he wanted to die, and he realized he wanted to die facing the sky. He wrote a letter about it, didn’t he?

  “That was an important moment, not like the Broncos,” he says now, but no one hears him and no one stirs. Perhaps he falls asleep, and in his half dreams he recalls the mountain lions and the black bear and the foxes. He dreams of the things he killed and the things he did not. He dreams of animals. In his dreams, he tells himself he should dream of people, concentrate on people, but he keeps dreaming of animals instead, and they are so wild and beautiful and he knows that deep down they are one and the same.

  RENNY

  Renny has engaged the four-wheel drive. Although she goes slowly, she goes in the sure knowledge that the highway patrol has closed the roads but that, as always, she is exempt from all dumb rules. Besides, the deputies have better things to do than to stop her, and also, she’s lived in Colorado all her life and not once has she misjudged a slippery blizzard road, which is saying something given the number of snowstorms she has seen come and go, the number of blizzards she braved in order to haul newborn calves into the kitchen, or in order to feed animals, or find them, or round them up for shelter. This is not that bad; the media and police are always exaggerating everything. Everyone exaggerates everything, she thinks now, because it makes them feel important. The stupid human need to feel important. Plus, she’s avoiding the highway and taking the back roads to Greeley, and she’s been to Greeley plenty of times—she and Ben used to drive there regularly to visit his folks, back when they were still alive, and to visit their gravestones once they were dead. He’d recently been pestering her to take him to Greeley, pester pester, and it made her crazy. “Drive yourself,” she would say, although she knew it was cruel, that he couldn’t, and that he’d probably give about anything to accomplish a simple task like that again.

  She can see the faint lights of Ault. AULT: A UNIQUE LITTLE TOWN, their sign says, and it’s really the only town on the way to Greeley. Once she makes it to Ault, she’ll be on Highway 85, which will no doubt be plowed, and which always makes her feel safe since the highway is split by a track of grasslands and she’s always appreciated the lack of things coming right at her. She’ll pass the sugar beet factory and the sheep farms and the silos. As long as the windshield wipers are going full speed and the headlights make the reflectors on the intermittent green posts shine, and she drives carefully, she’ll get there. The road has been plowed once, and although it’s getting covered up again quickly, she can make out the slight distinction between plowed and unplowed by the way the headlights catch the shadow of the difference. She’s got four-wheel drive. The road is flat and deserted. There’s nothing to run in to. Just go carefully forward. She’ll make it.

  She’ll get there and find her husband at the Greyhound bus station. She’ll see Ray, although she’s not sure how, although she remembers the County Road EE. She will be guided to the one or both of them by instinct. She will face, with her husband, the man who murdered their daughter.

  Satchmo sits next to her, panting and sometimes whining. She should have brought her some food, but she forgot that, along with probably ten million other things. She reaches under the seat where Ben keeps a bag of beef jerky and hands Satchmo a big piece. She turns on the radio to discover that radio waves are not stopped by storms at all, and a bit of jazz comes floating through the cab of the truck. Satchmo lays down then, head on Renny’s lap, makes a small whine, and thumps her tail.

  “You might not be so bad after all,” she tells the dog.

  Up ahead, she sees the bright and erratic lights of what must be a snowplow, though she can’t see the vehicle itself at all. It’s coming toward her, lights like a UFO surrounded in a wall of white, and she puts on her blinker and starts to pull as far as she can to the edge of the road. Then the whish of the air, of the snow, of the machine itself. Satchmo lets out a bark as Renny jerks on the steering wheel, realizing she is still too close, she is going to be hit. Her truck is smacked by an enormous amount of snow—an incredible thud—and then, as if it were the most natural and right thing to do, her truck simply heads down the small irrigation ditch. She feels it start to tip, pause, almost right itself. She holds her breath, clutches the seat belt, reach
es out to hold the dog against the seat. The truck tilts, slowly, thirty degrees, forty-five degrees, sixty degrees—it seems impossible, it’s such a small incline!—but like a math problem she needs to help a grandchild with, like some imaginary problem come real, it is enough of an incline.

  Impossible.

  She braces before the noise of her truck hitting snow. It’s a loud thud, but no crashing, no splintering. So loud, and then so calm. She feels vomit in her throat as she slides sideways into the seat belt and also into the dog and the dog is barking, climbing over her, and her shoulder hurts and the dog’s claws tear through her sweater, and then, suddenly, there is pure and real silence.

  The truck, on its side, stalls out. The dog is still clawing past her leg and she turns, hoping to see the snowplow stop—thinking that he must stop—but blinking lights are receding in the distance. She reaches out with her left hand and presses on the horn and the noise seems loud enough to stop anything but the snowplow has disappeared.

  Impossible.

  It creeps in on her: He never saw her. She and Satchmo are miles from anyone, in the middle of the night and in the middle of a blizzard, and no one knows where they are.

  “Okay, let me think here. I can’t believe that just . . . happened. Satchmo, shut the hell up.” She unbuckles and lets herself slide to the window of the pickup and crouches there and feels around in the dark for her purse. She feels it with her hand, the smooth feel of leather, and she clutches it to her. She leans up and turns the ignition off, then halfway on, so that the headlights are again beaming into the night. Only then can she see the wind whip and rise and tear around. One light is high up, one is at ground level, and their beams intersect in the far distance.