Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  But he ran into her sooner than expected. The back of her. In the spare room off the hallway, her head buried in the big storage closet. She suddenly emerged, backwards, dragging the highchair out with her.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Stevens’ daughter needs a highchair for her little girl. They can’t afford hardly anything, and this is still in great condition.”

  “Well, it’s never been used.”

  She turned around. “I know that.”

  He scratched his face nervously. A little too hard perhaps (Was he bleeding? He’d never hear the end if he was.) “Well, of course you do. Are you selling it to her?”

  “Of course not. They need it, we never did. I’m trying to help out. Why? You didn’t want to keep it, did you?”

  He didn’t know what else to say. “I didn’t realize we still

  had it.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  He didn’t know. Sometimes you said things out of a feeling and you didn’t realize what you were saying. Like praying, maybe, like speaking in tongues. Now he’d have to come up with some kind of explanation for her, even though he had no idea himself.

  He looked around. “I never come in here, so I didn’t know we still had it.”

  “It’s been in this closet the whole time. Twenty-five years. You just forgot.”

  “I told you, I never come in here.”

  She stared at him. “Are you saying there’s a room in this little house of ours you haven’t entered in twenty-five years?”

  Of course he’d never thought about it that way. He’d never thought about it at all. He’d never thought about the unused chair. He’d never thought about why they hadn’t tried again. But now that he did think about it, he thought it was all a strange and sad way to be in the world.

  *

  He went for his daily walk. Just because he’d realized this thing about himself (and actually, Pat had realized it for him) didn’t mean he should change his daily routine. What was he supposed to do? Run off and find a therapist? He didn’t know if men his age even went to therapists. Hadn’t therapy been a fad? A lot of people went a few times, and he remembered some made-for-TV movies, but he didn’t know anyone personally who still did.

  Besides, what did he want to change about his situation? Not a damn thing. He had a right to. Whatever.

  He was actually feeling pretty energetic, and thought he might be able to stay out walking longer than normal. Pat should be pleased with that, whether she actually would be or not. The walks had been her idea—after his retirement she’d complained how drowsy he seemed during the day, that obviously he needed a reason to move. She’d nagged him in that way she had of inserting phrases like of course, if you were walking every day into completely unrelated threads of conversation.

  Not that there was actually anything wrong with that. She was probably the only person in the world who cared if he was anywhere.

  He tried to let it all go—his mind was buzzing. He really didn’t think you moved as well when your mind was buzzing. There was a hitch in the step, as if your foot was distracted by the inner dialog. The feet wanted to know what was going on, just like the eyes, just like the hands.

  Usually he took his walk along the storefronts between the house and the new municipal centre. He’d never told Pat that he took that route—he knew what she’d say. She’d say he was probably spending most of his time window shopping. It wouldn’t be an argument, either—she’d just say that was probably what he was doing, just putting it up in the air like that, and then she’d be about her business. She wouldn’t wait to hear what he had to say about it. So then it was out there. Was it truth or was it just an unanswered accusation? She’d left some of these statements lying around the house for years. The aging changed them—some became irrelevant and forgotten. Some would age five or six years and then they’d be fact and it would be too late to refute them.

  He and Pat almost never argued. But that meant different things to different people.

  Of course, in this case, it would have been true fact. Pat was right most of the time, which was both his safety and his aggravation. He couldn’t walk ten feet without stopping to window gaze. That was why his walks always took so long. That was why she worried.

  But today he had this surprising gift of energy. Or was it just the heat from worrying over this high chair thing? He walked when he fretted—he’d always been like that. But it didn’t make any difference. He was moving along pretty good—he was going to check out the park. They lived only five blocks from that big spread of trees, grass, and flowers, but he hadn’t actually been inside in years.

  There were a lot more kids than he expected. Running and shoving, they made him nervous. Didn’t that prove he would never have been a good father, that it had been a bad idea in the first place? Pat always said it was different when they were your own kids. But how did she know? She’d never had any.

  A couple of boys, nine or ten maybe, ran past him and jumped up on a low wall, teetering in exaggerated fashion, then falling off purposely, arms flailing. One of them complained that he’d banged his elbow. The other boy punched the kid on the sore arm and ran away. The injured kid ran after screaming like a banshee. It was a high pitched, unnatural sound, which Byron assumed was pretense, but how could you ever know for sure? Boys that age were one jump and a decibel away from psychosis. Perhaps he had been the same—he wasn’t sure—that period of his life remained a sugar-smeared blur.

  Several young girls came toward him pushing doll-filled strollers, smiling, their combined laughter a pleasant contrast to the earlier boy’s screech. But as they came closer Byron pulled up short, startled to see that their passengers were in fact real, comatose, drooling babies. He stared at the mothers who stopped laughing and stared back, as if he were some sort of threat.

  They were about as old as the high chair. The day he bought it there had been snow on the ground, the air smelling of wood burning stoves and fireplaces. He hadn’t gone to one of the big discount department stores, but to a local specialty baby shop run by an elderly couple who seemed to know all there was to know about matters infantile. He wasn’t sure if that was a good word as far as the rest of the world was concerned, but it worked for him. The endless beginnings of things, repeated in neighbourhoods and small homes around the planet, young families stepping up on time’s wheel, without a clue as to their final destinations, but being brave about it just the same.

  He and Pat and their unborn child had been one of those brave young families, until the child (Byron still could not bring himself to say “she”) decided at the last minute to back out of the deal. “She decided to stay up with the angels,” is the way his mother had put it at the time, and at the time Byron had felt betrayed. He didn’t think he even believed in heaven, but he’d felt betrayed just the same. Somehow his daughter had decided he wasn’t going to be a good father for her, and so had elected not to participate.

  She would have been about the age of these young mothers. She would have some sort of career, her own thoughts and fantasies about the world, relationships, perhaps a baby, his grandchild, in a stroller similar to these. She would have made of his life a very different destination.

  He trudged on down the path, picking up speed. What was he doing? He wasn’t some marathon man in training. Practicing for a heart attack, more like it. It seemed an ironically healthy way to commit suicide.

  As if on cue (it heard me speak its name), he felt an invisible hand squeezing his heart, fingers long and narrow like a young girl’s. Suddenly dizzy, he was afraid he might fall, which for some reason seemed suddenly worse than death. He moved his swimmy eyes slowly and found a bench, staggered there, sat down and collapsed backwards against the wooden slats. Dizziness prevented him from holding his head up, so he let the weight of it fall into his chin, which he rested onto his chest, eyes closed.

  The crowd roared in his ears. He was glad someone was having fun.
<
br />   *

  When he opened his eyes babies had hold of his knees, trying to climb up but slipping on the shiny worn material of his pants. He was surprisingly calm about it, perhaps. He blinked his eyes a few times and sighed in contemplation.

  One of the babies had succeeded in reaching his upper leg, straddling him, compressing its chunky thighs vise-like to hold on. Remarkable strength, really, enough to make him wince. He looked around to see who was watching. A middle-aged woman strode by, glanced over, grinning. Whether she could see the babies or if she was just being friendly he had no way to tell.

  He was trying to think, to remember, but the babies made it difficult. Now there were two up on his leg, and another two yanking at his other pants leg, crying. Another one had somehow scaled the back of the park bench, and now straddled the back of his neck, drooling into his ear as it released an endless babbled whisper.

  He had seen the babies before, although it had been many years. They used to come to him when he was working out in the back yard, or sometimes late at night when he was in the living room by himself, reading. An ordinary person would have been alarmed, he supposed. But then they had stopped coming, and he actually had forgotten about them, which seemed like impossible behavior, now that he thought about it. Who could forget such apparitions? Who could avoid a bedroom in their own home for over twenty-five years?

  He supposed the babies would make at least some sense if he had started seeing them after the unhappy event. When he and Pat no longer needed the high chair. An understandable reaction. But Byron had been seeing the babies for years before he’d even known Pat.

  “You’re back,” he said to them softly, not wanting to be overheard. “Exactly why is that?”

  The babies chattered nonsense words and crapped their diapers. Byron gagged on the stench, thick as bad gravy. He stood desperately, dumping the squalling infants, and stumbled away.

  The babies had never come alone before, but had been simply the vanguard of … what was the word? Not exactly an army. “Plague” came closer. He glanced at the edges of the path. A viscous smear here and there like vomit. An indication of eyes and mouths. Not exactly hideous, but disturbing. The fecundity of the world. Creating life at its most inconvenient.

  All the babies were crying now, and he wept for them. But there was nothing he could do. Let one of them tell him what he could do about this, this fertility of the void, and he would do it, or try. But they couldn’t tell him. They were just babies.

  He ran from the park, his chest working its way apart.

  Perhaps he could forget about the pain. With a little effort, he was sure, he could be dumb again.

  *

  Byron waited in the living room while Pat finished preparing dinner. She was angry at his lateness, although she would not tell him directly. The way she banged pans was expressive, and almost musical. In fact he almost enjoyed the sound.

  The living room had always been a quiet, elegant place to sit in. To Byron it suggested life in an English manor, the rich lord, the women kept away in their part of the house, which in contrast was a place full of the loudness, the messiness of life.

  This room, however, was a place of safety, where emotions rarely raised a temperature, where the babies slept in the corners, in the shadows behind chairs, only a pink sliver here and there to betray the presence of a tiny bald head, where their soft snores might be mistaken for the breeze from the window or the steady groan of the grandfather clock.

  He and Pat had done all right without children. They had travelled extensively and eaten in the best restaurants, and they had bought fine things, and in the evenings they had had their quiet, uninterrupted conversations, and the days had passed one into the other, and the hours had crept steadily from meal to meal and into their bed with little notice.

  They did not need children to remind them how precarious life could be, how fragile, how momentary. They did not need children to remind them of how things change, day by day, how feelings are hurt, how limbs are broken, how disappointment waits to pounce, how lives entwine, then separate into distant houses, occasional phone calls, and increasingly remote connections. They did not need. They did not require children to teach them these things.

  But tonight he did not forget about any of this. He did not forget about the babies, or the drama and magic of what did or did not happen in his brain. Even through dinner, and the companionable reading they shared after dinner, and the snuggle in bed, the spooning of their lives one against the other, he did not forget, and so just before they both fell asleep he asked her, “When you give Mrs. Stevens the high chair, would you ask her if we could have it back when they’re done with it?”

  She didn’t reply at first, and after a time he decided she must be asleep, when she said, “of course.”

  DINOSAUR

  Where did the dinosaurs go? The children looked down at their desks. A change of climate, ice age, caterpillars eating their food, disease, mammals eating their eggs. Freddy Barnhill was thinking these answers but was too self conscious to raise his hand. The teacher waited. But nobody’s really sure, Freddy thought. Nobody knows.

  Sometimes he thought they might be lost somewhere. They couldn’t find their way. They couldn’t keep up with the others, the way the world was changing so. So they got left behind. They got abandoned.

  Twenty years later, Freddy drove the fifty-nine miles between Meeker and Rangely twice each day thinking about his father and thinking about dinosaurs. Only occasionally were there changes in subject matter, although he would have expected both topics to be exhausted by now. People might call him obsessed; hell, people would call him crazy.

  Along Colorado Highway 64, endless streams of yellow-blooming rabbit grass whipped by, each scrub-dotted washout and arroyo threatening to draw his eye up its channel and send him into the ditch. Almost as soon as he turned the pickup onto the road, he would start to see his father’s enormous hands pressing down at him from above the bar. He’d feel himself suddenly afraid of his father’s instability and scurry under the table to hide. Then he’d hear the sudden crash of his father’s huge head on the table as he passed out. An endless crash; his father’s head slammed the hard wood again and again the fifty-nine miles between Meeker and Rangely.

  There seemed to be little life in the gullies and low hills. Harsh land which had to be struggled with, which swallowed any failed attempts. Early settlers had named this land with their complaints: Devil’s Grave, Bitter Creek, Camp Misery, Bugtown, Poverty Gulch. Rotted houses around clumps of tumbleweed leaned from the hillsides like aged throats, their swollen walls collapsing. The broken fingers of ancient windmills reached toward an empty sky.

  Once he reached Rangely, the sense of lifelessness was even more pronounced—grey, lunar sandstone in ridges and flatlands as far as the eye could see. Wind-blasted landscape alive with sagebrush, little else. The oil companies’ reservation: new and old riggings, abandoned shacks. His father had spent most of his adult life here, working for one outfit or another.

  Mel Barnhill had originally been a cowboy. A drifter. Then when things had begun to change with the oil wells coming in, he’d changed, too. He’d been a mechanic, construction worker, jack-of-all-trades. Freddy remembered seeing him work on some of the early crude equipment, even some of the steam operated earthmovers. Enormous brown hands working with rough-made wrenches. Smiling, singing—he always had been happy working with machinery. Freddy had helped him, sort of, as much as any very small boy might help his father in his work. But that time had passed. As had the life of the cowboy.

  His father liked thinking of himself as an outlaw. “Don’t need no laws, no woman to tie me down. Like to do as I please.”

  Freddy remembered following his father up the street after one of the man’s long drinking bouts. The swagger in the walk, he thought now, had been reminiscent of Butch Cassidy or professional killer Tom Horn, who used to hide out not far from there. Cattle were still being rustled at the time, an
d Freddy could recall more than once his father hinting that he had had a part in some of it. He’d wink at Freddy sometimes when he said this, but Freddy never could tell if that meant he was just joking, or that he really had done those things, and Freddy was supposed to be extra proud. The first time Freddy’d seen a John Wayne movie, he’d thought that was his father up on the screen. The walk was the same. After a time he began to wonder if his father practiced it.

  Dramatic gestures seemed to be a lot of what the old-timers in the area were about. Gestures for a fading way of life. When he thought about it now, Freddy believed his father had known the life was rapidly becoming obsolete, the cowboy and rancher becoming extinct. It was the end of an era. Not long after his father’s time, they built that new power plant at Craig, and the old timers suddenly didn’t know every face when they came into town. People had to lock their doors.

  “Dumb cowboys! Stupid sodbusters!” Freddy’s father had been drunk, screaming hoarsely in a corral outside a Rangely bar. Freddy remembered the incident vaguely; he’d seen only part of it through the bar window. But every time he ran into one of his father’s old friends, it was recalled.

  His father had been drinking with some of his cowboy friends; there’d been an argument. They’d accused Mel of turning his back on them, becoming a city boy, because he worked for the oil companies.

  Little Freddy had shuddered behind the window. His father was dragging a cow out of the barn. Before anyone could do anything, he shot it. The big brown animal collapsed as if in slow motion, its head making a sick thud on the hard ground. One of the waitresses had held Freddy so tightly it scared him, but it had calmed him down.

  This was the landscape Mel Barnhill had willed to his son. It provided the backdrop for most of Freddy’s dreams. And yet it was at the outskirts of Rangely that, every day, Freddy started thinking about dinosaurs.

  Fourteen miles north of Rangely was the little town of Dinosaur. And twenty-seven miles west of there, just across the Utah border and above Jensen, was the big Dinosaur Quarry of the Dinosaur National Monument. One of the largest sources of dinosaur fossils in the world. Primitive land, or the way the earth might look after some catastrophe. Freddy didn’t go any more. Standing up there looking out over the canyons, where the Colorado Plateau had crashed up against the Uinta range, it was as if his whole life might disappear out there someday, pulled into the emptiness.