Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  Maud drew the blanket up over her shoulders. “I was going to my car. To get something to read.”

  “I’ve been doing what Maggie told me to do,” Driver said. “Sitting in my excavation. Want to see it?”

  CHAPTER 11

  JAKE

  on the lam from love

  fleeing down that long and lonesome road

  Jake propped open the door to his apartment, lower story of a two-story duplex. Light spilled into the darkness. He carried Pasqual’s congas down the walkway to Santiago’s van. Roy followed with one of the keyboards, went back inside to get his sax. Randy wandered out. Without her boots. “You should fix your outdoor light,” she told him. “What if one of us fell with a load of expensive equipment?”

  “It just needs a new bulb.” Jake went to get the guitar stands.

  When he came back out she’d placed herself beneath a street lamp. Light spilled over her waterfall of blonde, turning it pale silver. She watched them load Pasqual’s percussion paraphernalia into the van’s carpeted interior.

  “Pretty damn good.” Santiago grunted as he moved the other keyboard into place.

  Pasqual nodded. Roy nodded. Jake nodded. Randy flipped her horse-tail length of hair over one shoulder. “Hardly room for Santiago’s keyboards with all Pasqual’s shit.”

  Beside her, Roy hugged his sax case, rocking back and forth. “Hmmm, hmmm,” he murmured. “Hmmm, hmmm.” Managed to imply agreement as well as a sense of impending doom. Sang, “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.”

  Jake eyed Randy’s stockinged feet. She’d been giving out signals all through rehearsal. No way to avoid the tête-à-tête she clearly wanted.

  “You still haven’t forgiven Jake for not hiring that friend of yours.” Santiago placed the last of Pasqual’s Guatemalan bags, jingling, clacking, in the back of his van. Moved across the sidewalk, put an arm around Randy’s shoulders. “Just because you’re the best goddamn female bass player on the planet doesn’t mean we have to believe he’s God’s gift to the world of percussion. Let it go, senorita.”

  Randy shrugged herself out of Santiago’s embrace. But as she pulled her hair back, holding it in a fist high above her head, she looked mollified. Jake sent a look of intense thanks in Santiago’s direction. Santiago chuckled.

  “What’re you laughing at?” Randy demanded. Looked at Jake. “What are you two laughing at?”

  “I gotta go,” Roy said. “I’m gonna split. I’ll see you later, sometime, tomorrow, have a nice life.” Loaded his sax case into his red Buick and drove off.

  Santiago was still laughing. His big belly shook. “We’re touchy today. You on your period, or what?”

  Jake had been wondering the same thing. He’d known Randy longer, but wouldn’t have asked.

  “Slimebag. That’s a sexist assumption,” Randy said.

  Pasqual laughed. “If feminism has you on their side, they don’t need masochists.”

  “Misogynists, stupid,” Randy muttered.

  “Or masochists either. C’mon, pobrecita,” Santiago coaxed. His grin was big and white. “Give us a smile.”

  “Anyway, Ran,” Jake said, “a month ago you were sleeping with him. Now you’re not. Wouldn’t that have gotten a bit complicated?”

  Randy flipped her hair again. “Who knows what might have happened if he’d landed this gig?”

  “If he loved you for your connections, you don’t want him,” Santiago said.

  Randy ignored this. “And percussion’s one thing. We need a drummer.”

  Amidst the laughter, Santiago shook his head at her. “Sometimes you are one transparent tomatillo. Now come on, before Joanie’s closes or, Dios forbid, runs out of green chile enchiladas. You’ll feel better after you eat.”

  Randy eyed him. “You haven’t known me long enough that I’m going to let you talk to me that way.”

  “This is respect, woman. I’m trying to indicate my concern for your welfare.”

  “You coming?” she asked Jake.

  Jake shook his head. “One of these nights I’ve got to unpack. I’ve been back three weeks and look at it in there.”

  “You’ve been back for over a month. What’s another day?” Randy’s lower lip moved out. “Come on to Joanie’s. Please.”

  “I’m bushed, Randy. I’ve worked all day.”

  “He’s gotta finish that song,” Santiago said. “And you don’t want him to come to Joanie’s. Tina tells me she’s got the hots for him.”

  “Oh, man!” Randy put her hands on her hips, glared at Jake.

  Jake began to sputter. Santiago howled with laughter.

  “You left your boots inside,” Jake said. “Want me to get them?”

  Randy lowered her head, strode up the cement walk.

  “Uh-oh, poor Jake, Randy’s pissed.” Pasqual laughed. Lean as a weasel, when he shoved his hands in his pockets he looked like he might take his pants right down to his knees. “But then Randy’s always pissed at you.”

  “Unrequited love.” Santiago ducked into the driver’s seat.

  “No,” Jake said, but it was too complicated to explain. “See you tomorrow. Setup’s at eight.” Waved them off.

  Randy greeted him at the front door of his apartment. One boot on, the other in her hand. “What?” he said.

  “You told me you were over her.” Randy pointed. The offending snapshot was propped up against some paperbacks.

  “What’s it matter, Ran?” Jake almost groaned.

  Randy flopped on the couch. Put a long, slim leg high in the air to pull on the second boot. Looked triumphantly at Jake. He nodded. She did have a fabulous body. Curious that their brief affair had been largely unsexual. There had been few frantic couplings. He was still touched when he remembered how her small back had moved against his chest, how she’d pulled his arms around her. The perfection of her long legs had only served, most of the time, to make him miss the slightly bowlegged quality of Lizzie’s. “Look, Ran, you have the best legs in the world, you’re a fabulous bass player—you got that from Santiago himself. What else do you want to hear?”

  Pouting, Randy pulled her hair over one shoulder. Fingers moved quickly, braiding a blonde rope. “I just want someone to love me, Jake-ie.”

  He sat, looped an arm over her shoulders. “I do love you. Just not the way you want. But you don’t love me that way either.”

  “That’s true, I don’t.”

  He searched for the little lines at the corners of her eyes that would tell him she was cheering up. “You are something else, you know,” he said. “Flashing that bass of yours around up there next to me, those legs of yours driving the guys wild. Swinging your blonde mane—”

  Randy drummed the heels of her boots into the floor. “Okay, okay. Stop with the syrup, already.”

  “And what would I do without you to hustle me away from the backstage chicks—”

  She hissed. “Women.”

  “When’d all this start, Ran? I go out of town for a few months and you get your consciousness raised?”

  “I’ve just been talking to a few people, is all.”

  “Look. I’m just not in the mood to be with anyone. If it ain’t you—”

  “No,” she said, twisting up her mouth, “if it ain’t Lizzie. Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie.”

  But she felt better, Jake could tell. She zipped up her waist-length, fake-fur-trimmed jacket. Sauntered back down the pavement towards her car. He stood in the doorway and watched her go. Now that they weren’t sleeping together, neither one of them seemed to mind if people thought they might be. He took time to admire the high, round attraction of her rear end, smiled. Already she was looking around to see who else might be noticing it.

  He went back inside. Maybe he’d finally unpack the boxes in the bedroom, use the shelves he’d bought two weeks ago and had yet to assemble. On his way through the living room he picked up the photo of Lizzie from the bookshelf. While they were together he’d meant to get it framed. After they split, it hadn’
t seemed appropriate. The snapshot, curled at the edges, was a close-up of her grinning face. Uneven bottom teeth, tousled cap of red hair. Darling.

  He’d had it angled up against some books before he moved to Nashville. Unpacked it into a similar place in the depressing apartment he’d rented there. Here it was again, propped up against probably the same two Tom Clancy paperbacks. He left it where it was. Headed for the kitchen to get a beer.

  Looking through drawers for a screwdriver, he did his imitation of Don Henley getting down to the heart of the matter. “But I think it’s about . . .” He sang as he peered into the drawer closest to the wall, and closed his eyes to finish the line. “Forgiveness.” A tilt of emotion made him pause. Matchbooks. Warranty card for the coffeemaker. Batteries—AA and AAA. Flashlight. Keys. Plastic vegetable bags. Rubber bands. Corks. The motley assortment, so quickly assembled, made him feel that he was, what? Home? Not quite. But something. “Even if, even if,” he wailed, “you don’t love me anymore.”

  CHAPTER 12

  MAUD

  KATE:

  Let him that moved you hither

  Remove you hence. I knew you at the first,

  You were a movable.

  PETRUCHIO:

  Why, what’s a movable?

  KATE:

  A joint-stool.

  PETRUCHIO:

  Thou hast hit it: come sit on me.

  KATE:

  Asses are made to bear and so are you.

  PETRUCHIO:

  Women are made to bear and so are you.

  —THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

  Driver led the way past Maggie’s trailer, then past the octagonal shape of a hogan. He wore no shoes. The moon gleamed on his bare back and silvered the scrub and sagebrush around them. Several times Maud had to break into a jog to keep up with him. With the blanket dragging behind her, she felt absurd, a caricature of a squaw, wearing a costume created out of a limited dress-up box.

  Suddenly Driver dropped from view. A fissure—a canyon—opened where there had seemed to be solid earth. On the other side of the canyon the silvery scrub continued, but beneath her the moon lighted a path that zigzagged down the wall in a series of hairpin turns. Driver did not slacken his pace, and Maud slipped and slid in her sandals over the slick rock.

  Driver waited at the bottom. The temperature had dropped as she descended, and Maud pulled the blanket high on her shoulders. Above them, a cliff bulged, rising like an enormous, unwrinkled forehead. She wanted to speak to the age and the size of these canyons, the power of water and wind and sand. But it had all been said, and would sound trite.

  “Okay?” he asked. She nodded, and he set off again along the sandy bottom of the canyon. After a short distance he veered right and began to climb.

  “We’re going back up?” Maud knew she sounded plaintive.

  Driver pointed at the soaring rock. “There’s steps carved into that if you prefer. We took the easy way down.”

  She trudged after him, wrapping the blanket around her neck like a huge muffler so she could use her hands to clamber over fallen boulders and maneuver the steep places. From somewhere above her Driver said, “Here, toss that up to me.” Arms outstretched, he stood on a shelf that jutted out from beneath the brow of rock. Maud tossed, and scrambled on all fours to join him.

  The light of the moon, working its way down the canyon, hinted at ruins tucked into the angle where shelf and overhang met. Some walls still stood, easily ten or even fifteen feet high, with the small doorways Maud recognized from her tours of Mesa Verde. Elsewhere, walls had fallen, but the rubble she would have expected had been swept away.

  Driver grinned at her astonishment. “Come on.” He led the way along the cliff shelf, up a few stone steps, and stopped beside a ladder protruding from the edge of a large pit. He handed her the blanket and clambered down the ladder. He looked up, his face and torso smudges of white in the dark, a circle above a broad V. “Toss.”

  But Maud hugged the blanket to her, shy; entering the kiva was like entering a church.

  “Come on.”

  She had to clear her throat. “May I?”

  “Nice of you to ask.”

  She negotiated the smooth tree limbs of the ladder. She recognized the few elements of kivas she’d come to know: the fire pit, right behind it the slab of stone that acted as an air break, above that the ventilator shaft. Niches had been built into the wall at intervals. A low stone bench ran the circumference of the circle. The floor was swept clean.

  She nodded with appreciation. When Driver smiled, he looked young and the taut anger that characterized his face disappeared. She knelt beside the small hole called the sipapu. “Why is this called the Place of Emergence?”

  He told her what she’d already heard—that it was the place where The People had emerged from the previous world into this one.

  “But is it a metaphor? Like our Garden of Eden? Or like our Flood?”

  “Omigod.” He dropped his jaw in a parody of shock. “Is the Flood supposed to be a metaphor?”

  “Ha ha. Did some version of Emergence really happen? Or is it just coming across the Bering Strait or something?”

  The whites of his eyes gleamed. “How much we both want another world,” he said. He pulled twigs and bark from a pocket of his jeans and knelt beside the fire pit, laying these in a careful circle. “The Bible, Gilgamesh, the Navajo, the Hopi and Acoma—lots of creation myths have a flood in them. Something happened. Some-thing dire.” He layered larger twigs and branches stored in the kiva onto the pile, then lit it with a match. He blew in strategic places, a dark, lithe shadow moving in the dim, growing red light. His legs were stocky, his back long and lean, an unexpected combination. Muscles moved beautifully beneath his skin. She felt her belly soften and warm.

  The fire crackled. Maud pulled the blanket more closely around her. “If a person studied hard enough,” she said, “and knew the proper ways, and had the right blood running in her veins—” He looked at her sharply, but she did not smile. “If you had all that, could you go back through the sipapu if you wanted to?” she asked. “Could you vanish?”

  “You mean like you are trying to do?”

  She laughed. “Is that what I’m trying to do?”

  They watched the flames flicker and then catch. The spurt of energy that invested their first few minutes in the kiva disappeared, but they both knew they had not come there to talk. She helped him spread the blanket so they could lie together upon it. “Is this all right?” she whispered.

  He raised his head to look at her.

  “To sleep with you in this place?”

  He put his lips to the skin of her throat.

  Maud found herself with her mental eyebrows raised at herself, watching behavior she didn’t recognize as her own. She watched her mind skip away, merry and coy, from how quickly this had happened, from thoughts of disease, the betrayal of Miles—in their eight years together she’d slept with no one else.

  Driver was firm, not at all gentle, but she found she did not mind. This act seemed to be a gift, a necessary gift. Bestowed by whom? He moved into her with a huge, shuddering sigh and took the rest of his pleasure with little attention to hers. She did not come before he did; usually this meant she would not come at all, but she found herself burrowing towards climax with a selfish attention foreign to her. Her period was due in a few days; if she could be fertile, it was unlikely to be now. Nevertheless, she thrilled and panicked at the idea that she might, with her impulsiveness and her vigor, be pulling a child into her.

  It seemed to her that Driver wept. “Driver?” she said, but he would not raise his face. She stroked a hand over the incredibly smooth skin of his back. He sniffed. “Why is your car so packed up? Why are you leaving L.A.? Why did you speak with an accent and now you don’t?”

  She shifted so she could see his eyes, but found no mockery there. There were so many things she could say, so many reasons for all those things. She didn’t want to talk about Miles. And even if
she could explain the necessary inanity of commercial auditions, that was only part of it.

  She touched a finger to the constellation on his cheek. He tensed, but let her trace its curve. “Someone told me that I needed to get out of my head.”

  “Get out of your head,” he repeated, and sighed. “Me too. Who told you to do that?”

  “Nikos.”

  “Ah.”

  “No. Not like that. He’s a teacher. My acting teacher.”

  “Teacher,” Driver murmured. “Say that three times, it’s an odd word. Tell me the story of how you were told to get out of your head.”

  She told about Nikos first. How exciting it had been to be accepted into his master class.

  “What does that mean, ‘master class’?”

  “Supposedly it means that the people in it are good. They’re ‘masters.’ They work a lot. Not me, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. That’s all part of it. I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Go on.”

  “The class is held in a theater on Saturday mornings. There’s a stage and rudimentary lights.” All this detail was too much. But how could she convey what it had been? She tried to match her breathing to his. Perhaps they would fall asleep. The warmth of the fire was pleasant against the bare skin of her legs. Beyond that she didn’t want to think.

  He pulled the edges of the blanket up and over them. “Go on. I like stories.”

  She described the scene she’d chosen, told him about her scene partner, Damien. “I didn’t know he was gay when I asked him to work with me. I just thought he was right for Beau.”

  “Beau?” He laughed. “What a name. As bad as Driver.”

  They’d worked hard on the scene. The night before their scene was up, she’d gone to bed early, had risen early and worked out, wanting to be thin, taut, streamlined. But halfway through the scene she lost track of where they were, forgot her lines. “It was terrible,” she told Driver, “but I kept going.”