Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  Bart shrugged. “AA. She’ll be here.”

  The conversation grew general and loud. Ron poured Maud more beer. “I hear you’re an actress!”

  Ginger added in her drawl, “From Hollywood.”

  It would sound stuffy to say the preferred term was actor. “You must have sat in hot tubs with all kinds of famous people!” Ron said. The talk turned to the theater company in town, Fable Mountain Stage Company. Charlie’s Aunt had just opened. Ron pouted. “I keep auditioning but I haven’t been cast in over a year. They use only a few locals.”

  “Not the way I heard it,” Ginger drawled. “What about Music Man last year? That was all local.”

  Ron ignored her. “I’m still waiting to hear about A Christmas Carol. Auditions were last week. They get all these actors to come in from Denver, friends of theirs, probably, and ignore those of us who’ve been acting here forever.”

  Ginger said, “Yeah, and you guys who’d been acting here forever manage to put on a show about once every two years.”

  Ron shrugged. “Hey! It’s expensive. These guys have some kind of trust fund. They use actors that belong to the union. Do you belong to that, Maud?”

  Maud found that the stories of her abysmal career could be very funny outside of the context that had spawned them. She was gratified by the laughter she generated when she told the story of pretending that Lizzie’s kids were hers during an audition for a Ford commercial. Jeep arrived and asked her to tell the Cheesios story. “Fascinating,” Ron said, rubbing his hands together. “You think about auditioning for these guys?”

  “You should do that, Maud!” Jeep said.

  The idea made Maud feel weary.

  The band members made their way back onto the stage. Jake shook his mop of black hair and grinned, holding a fist in the air. The girl on bass sounded a “Whoo-eee!” that got the attention of most of the room and made them shout “Whoo-eee!” right back. Jake raised his hand. “One two three four!” They smashed into a song with a reggae backbeat that made Maud want to leap to her feet and twirl in space. She rocked her shoulders a bit and then stopped; she would rather Ron, or Rick, or Mick, or whoever they were, didn’t ask her to dance.

  “Hey, Jeep.” A man—a boy, really—blond and tall, stood beside the table. He wore a red kerchief around his neck, a cowboy hat pulled low on his forehead.

  Jeep’s cheek were red. “Hey,” she said.

  The man looked down at Maud. His eyes were very blue. He jerked his thumb at the mass of swaying bodies at the front of the room. “Dance?”

  Ron said, “You beat me to it, numskull. I’m next.”

  Bart leaned in. “This will be interesting, darlin’.”

  Maud stood. Jeep said, “Have fun.” Ginger shook her head, shifting her eyes away, as if she were seeing something she preferred not to.

  Maud followed the narrow hips in their faded jeans through the tables and chairs to the polished wood of the dance floor. He turned to face her. He was tall; she had to crook her neck back to meet his eyes. The faintest glint of blond fuzz ran along his chin, his upper lip. The band pressed, the sax wailed. She looked away from him, feeling a little breathless.

  “I’m Rich,” he said.

  She had a moment’s confusion, in which she thought he was telling her his financial status. “Rich,” she repeated, realizing this was Ol’ Cowboy Hat himself. She wondered if dancing with him would be okay with Jeep, broken up or not broken up.

  He began to dance by snapping his fingers and bending and straightening his knees. His feet, in their shiny, pointy boots, turned in, then out. Maud raised her hands, rolled her hips, feeling awkward in the face of his awkwardness. Yet she was a trained dancer. It was one of the many things she had taken the time and trouble to learn to do, and do well, one of the many things she was ending up doing nothing with. This thought made her lift cocked wrists above her head, flamenco-like, and twirl. She touched her right toe down to keep from going around again. Rich looked at her admiringly.

  She felt the beer glow in her cheeks. Lights rotating above them made blue spangles on the drum set sparkle. She felt as if she spangled herself, and she smiled at the band, at the blonde bass player, and at Jake, who was standing back from the mike while the saxophonist took a solo. She didn’t know if he recognized her, although he nodded in her direction as he played through chord changes.

  Maud twirled again. Like some extravagant musical, the first scenes of her time in Marengo had been played against a drab background. But come the first dance number and the stage was transformed. The bleak scrim through which she had been peering suddenly rose to reveal set pieces flying in and out, furniture twirling, the stage itself revolving, lights, color, movement, the flip of skirts, the tap of heeled shoes, arms and legs and mouths in motion, sound pouring from nowhere, from everywhere. Marengo. It was a verb: She was Marengoing. She had come, as others had come, to seek her fortune. When they reached the ends of their ropes, when their stakes tapped out, their lodes ran dry, their streams panned out, this is where they’d come. Maybe here in this town, with its false fronts and dusty dreams, she would finally find her place; she would belong; she would connect.

  She twirled again to the last beat of the song. Lizzie would dismiss all this as pheromones. And maybe it was. But something magical, dust in the air, beer, music, the smell of perfume and sweat all around her, made her feel alive, happy. Marengoing. She smoothed back hair that had fallen into her face. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Thank you, beautiful lady.” He pushed the brim of his hat up with a finger. “One more?”

  CHAPTER 19

  JAKE

  laser flash

  dancers clash

  and the lipstick on your sad, sad mouth

  a ruby gash

  where are you going, girl

  On his way to breakfast, Jake ran into Roy outside Joanie’s. “We smoked last night.” Roy held high an open palm. Jake felt like an impostor, slapping five, but Roy kept hold of his hand, manipulating it into various positions. Finished off with one last slap. “How you doing, my man?”

  Jake shrugged.

  “Pasqual and I were talking last week. You got some shit on your mind it seems.”

  Jake nodded. Loosed himself from Roy’s grip, put coins into the newspaper dispenser. He could imagine. Last week there’d been a Thanksgiving dinner. He’d come late, after eating with his sister and Willy’s odd family. Roy, Pasqual, Pasqual’s wife, Adela, Santiago and his wife and kids, Randy. They would have used him as some sort of musical theme, taking their riffs. Why he’d left. Why he’d come back. What he and Lizzie were up to. Where Theo fit into things. They would have covered all the permutations.

  “Anyway. You wanna talk, sometime, anytime—” Roy’s long hands looped through the air, one of his shoulders rising as he pulled a hip back. He snapped a forefinger, thumb up, at Jake. “I’m your man.”

  “Sure,” Jake said. They slapped palms again.

  Jake scanned the front page. The right-to-lifers still hadn’t left. Sue would be livid. The color photo on the front page showed Kryptonite bicycle locks linking them to each other and to the fence around the clinic. They looked pathetic, heads squished together. The chanting faces of the pro-choicers looked distorted, ugly and mean.

  He used the pay phone to call Sue, to put a sympathetic message on her machine. He was surprised to find her home. “You’re not working today?”

  “The clinic’s a zoo. If someone’s coming in for something as innocent as a urine sample, they get mauled, hangers shoved in their faces.” Sue sighed. “We’re taking turns staying out of the thick of it.”

  “I thought you said they’d all gone home.”

  “That was weeks ago, Jake. Months. This is a whole new bunch, from Wichita this time. Why they think they can come in and change things around in a city—a state—that isn’t their own . . . It’s an extension of the mentality that says a woman can’t have control of her own life, her own body. And do you know ho
w many of them are men? It’s scary.”

  “You sound tired.”

  “Sick of the whole damn thing. I never thought I’d wonder if it’s worth it.”

  “I begin to see Willy’s point of view,” Jake said. “The country’s going to hell—”

  “Don’t—”

  “I’m going to hell.” He ran the edge of a quarter along the grooves someone had carved with a knife in the wall beside the phone: Y & A FOREVER! “Since I’ve been back I don’t do anything. Can’t finish a song. Still haven’t unpacked. Four months and I’m still living out of suitcases.”

  And why do you think that is, buddy?

  He told Minerva to shut up.

  “Have you had breakfast?” Sue asked.

  “Since I’ve been back?”

  “Ha ha ha. Low blood sugar. Culprit of a myriad so-called quote-unquote disorders.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “So, have you?”

  “Actually, no. I’m at Joanie’s. Join me?”

  “I can’t, Jake-o. I’ve just stripped the beds. Dishes await, no one’s vacuumed in weeks.”

  Jake felt as little and as disappointed as a boy.

  “But the hell with it,” Sue said. “A latte sounds great. Give me ten minutes.”

  Jake hung up. Mortified at how glad he was to have some company. Company he didn’t have to explain himself to. Justify himself, or his failures. He stood for a moment next to the phone, surveying who it was he’d have to get by to reach a table. Elmer of Mountain Music, head bent over a newspaper. Joanie herself, perched on her usual morning bar stool, presiding over the cash register. Last week she’d slid into his booth, wanting all the “gory details” of the Nashville debacle. And Tina was fetching a coffeepot, doing her best to lock eyes with him.

  Still he stood there, tapping fingers on his jeans to the polyrhythms Pasqual had concocted for “On the Lam from Love.” The only song he’d managed to write that whole time in Nashville, one he’d started on his way down there. Even now he could remember the sense of that drive. Shoulders hunched over the steering wheel, foot pressing the accelerator all the way to the floor. The car itself had seemed to hunker into a forward-leaning trapezoid, shaped by the urgency of his need not to get where he was going but to get away. Away from things that swooped and dipped above him as he drove, small cartoon tornadoes with leering faces.

  “Jake! Hello! We heard you were back!”

  “Hey, Emily. Tom!” He lifted his hand to the couple who had lived next door to him before he’d left. “Hey, Becky! You’ve gotten so big!”

  “We’re so glad you’re back!” the woman shouted as they were towed out of the café by their daughter. “Come see us!”

  He returned the wave of another acquaintance slipping onto a stool at the counter. A booth was empty but he didn’t move. Remembered driving down a street in Nashville. Looking for the house of someone who knew someone who might be able to get his tape to someone who knew someone. Was it the width of the street? Hour of the day? Kids pulling a wagon along the sidewalk? For some reason he’d missed Marengo with a force like compressed air. But as he drove along, peering at house numbers, he knew there was no way he could face the discussion and conjecture that would surround him if he should return. He’d resolved yet again that he’d just have to stick it out, even though he was so depressed he could hardly get up each morning.

  Then a song came crooning through the car radio. Travis Tritt, chalking up another love lost to foolish pride. He’d pulled over, put his head back, closed his eyes. Listened to the rest of the corny song.

  Apologizing would be so simple. He’d be damned if he’d crawl.

  He could apply the lyrics to himself, himself and Lizzie. But that he was moved had to do with Marengo. He had a life there. Things that mattered were already in place. Things he couldn’t imagine ever finding in Nashville, things that when named were, like the song, corny, sentimental. So he didn’t name them. But he knew he had to go back.

  Still, months had passed. Then he met Santiago. Who’d made it easier to return.

  And he’d walked the gauntlet ever since. Joanie’s was only a concentrated form of it. A song of his hadn’t, and wouldn’t, ever make Top 40. He’d gotten adept at the quips that allowed him to sidestep the queries, the concern.

  He made his way to the empty booth. Waved at Joanie, making change for a customer, talked with Elmer, promising to stop in at Mountain Music, nodded at Tina, who bumped into a table as she told him hello.

  A woman sat in a booth opposite, sheets of paper scattered on the table in front of her. Chewed the end of a pen. Composer, creator, working at the endless task of perfecting what seldom seems perfect. Caught up in this thought, he smiled when she looked up. Her own smile leapt back, lighting a face that otherwise seemed to brood. She took a breath, as if she were going to say something, then looked down.

  Maud, Jake realized. Maud Maxwell, who’d been dancing with Rich Pack the other night at Farquaarts.

  He thought he would try a belated hello. But she seemed self-consciously caught up in her work. He pushed the remains of someone’s breakfast to the edge of the table and opened his newspaper.

  “Hi, bruth.” Sue slid into the booth opposite.

  “One of the many ironies in my life,” Jake kept his voice low. Maud had looked up to watch them. “Is that I ran away from any semblance of home and family as soon as I was old enough to drive a car. Then, after Nashville, twice after Nashville, I come back partly because you’re here. Go figure.”

  “Coffee?” The waitress—he was thankful it was not Tina—held mugs in one hand, the pot in the other.

  Jake took coffee. Sue ordered a latte. Leaned across the table. “That’s Lizzie’s sister.” Maud was writing furiously. Black hair fell over her shoulders, looped onto the table on either side of her arms. “I saw them together at Safeway the other day. They were with the kids.”

  “Why are we whispering?” Jake whispered. They both laughed. The waitress brought Sue’s latte. When he thought Maud wouldn’t think the laughter was associated with her, he looked again, found her sliding out of her booth. She stood beside her table, huge bag hanging from one shoulder, counting change onto a tip tray. Long skirt, short sweater emphasized a very flat stomach. Turned sideways, she could slip through the crack in a wooden porch. Lizzie had always described her as skinny. To Jake she looked as if she were agonizingly hungry.

  She approached them. “Sorry I keep staring. It’s just I know who you are. Don’t get up.” She had a crooked front tooth. He thought about Lizzie’s slightly sharp ones.

  “Hello, Maud. Good to see you.” He took her narrow hand in his. Her clasp was strong, fingers cold. “This place is buggy with sisters. Scuzzy with them. This is mine. Sue.”

  Sue, as always, was good with small talk. Asked how Maud’s house was, where she was working, how she liked Marengo. Maud was impressed that Sue was an RN. “I have such admiration for people who really do things for people. Theater, television, is such a playground most of the time.” Just before she’d left Hollywood she’d sent away for an application to the Peace Corps. “It was forwarded to me. But after reading the small print I realized I probably wouldn’t get posted to Nairobi, or to some small village in India. I’d be sent to Detroit. Some unromantic, smoggy place like Pittsburgh. So I threw it out. So much for my vocation.”

  Sue found this funny. Took Maud’s phone number. “Maybe we can have a cup of tea one day.”

  Tears bloomed in Maud’s eyes. “I’d love that.”

  “Tea sounds boring,” Jake said. “But I’ll buy you a beer. We’ve both fled tinseltowns. Nashville. Hollywood. We should compare notes sometime.”

  Maud nodded. Her face looked strained, half-moons beneath her eyes the color of bruises. Jake figured it wasn’t a good time to bring up Miles, though he was curious to know, in a competitive sort of way, how his career was doing.

  “Well, it’s good to see you.”

  She turned to leav
e. Jake asked, too fast, “And how’s Lizzie?”

  Maud’s eyes widened, narrowed. Deep brown, different from Lizzie’s, which glinted gold and sometimes turned green. “Fine,” she said, “fine.” They all nodded several times. Jake wondered how much Maud knew. Probably everything. On the other hand, Lizzie was incredibly opaque about her emotions. Any number of times she’d not told him about some crisis in her life until after it had passed.

  “Well.” Maud adjusted the strap on her bag. Her face looked older than her body, eyes bracketed by bursts of what could be called laugh lines except for the sorrow that seemed to burn there. Before he could think of anything else she was walking away from them, bag bouncing against her thigh.

  “Oh, boy,” Jake said.

  Sue had her hands pressed to her mouth. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Will she do?”

  “Do?”

  “Do you find her attractive?”

  “Jesus, Suze!” Although his mind had skittered onto and away from the same idea.

  She grinned. Hellion. Brat. “Just wondering.”

  “Well, stop wondering.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “I feel half-baked. Nothing’s going right. Songs won’t come. I hate my job. No, that’s not true. But I drag my butt through rehearsal at night when what I’ve been doing all day is thinking in binary. On, Off. Yes, No. One, Two.”

  “You know what you should do?”

  “Here you go again! I did what you said! I climbed Fable. I even went to see Lizzie. It was a bust. I told you. A complete and total bust. She hates me.”

  “Ask her if she’d let you have some time with your son.”

  He grunted, rubbed at the caffeine prickle behind his eyes. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Tell her that you’d like to have some normalizing time with him—that should impress her.”

  “Normalizing time? She’ll barf. And then laugh. And then she’ll hang up.”

  “It’s a thought.” She stood and zipped her parka. “I’ve got to go. The permanent-press buzzer on the dryer is blaring at me across town.”