A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  Mayor Cabrera was driving in the opposite direction of his worries, away from Lofte, where more and more people seemed to sense the town was going under. People were sniffing it on the wind. Some would move away, get out while the getting was good, and this would accelerate the town’s demise. The lifers, the ones who’d raised children in Lofte, would stay. They’d expect Mayor Cabrera to work a miracle. They’d think that since he had reddish skin and smelled earthy, he’d know how to fix everything. But the only fix was money, and no one had any. The truth was the town had been in decline for twenty-five years. Longer. Denial was the only defense against it, and denial was finally running low. Maybe Mayor Cabrera would work a miracle. Maybe Ran and his followers would move to Lofte.

  The old racing grounds loomed up, nothing left but two sets of weathered bleachers staring each other down over a weedy flat. Mayor Cabrera remembered when they’d raced dogs, even horses. Now the place was a ruin. Compared to other ruins it was brand new, but it was a ruin. Mayor Cabrera was still five minutes from Dana’s villa and he felt his worries losing steam already, their urgency flagging. He felt his neck loosening up, his breaths filling his whole chest. When he was with Dana, he felt that being alive was enough. Being alive was an achievement and a reward and an end in itself. Maybe that religious group would come to Lofte and save the town and maybe they wouldn’t. What if they spurned Mayor Cabrera and went elsewhere, to Oklahoma or wherever? Would he have another date with dana? Yes, he would. What if the motel went under? Would he still get to press his mouth against Dana’s ear? Yes, he would. No matter what happened, nothing was going to stop him from sitting up with Dana after the rest of the world was asleep, Mayor Cabrera peacefully spent, a happy cliché, nursing the tart gin drinks Dana mixed and telling and hearing of times before he and Dana had known each other, enjoying the old stories all the more because he was in a story that moment.

  REGGIE

  Sometimes he jogged, like a person concerned with health, and sometimes he slowed to a despondent shuffle. His laps didn’t mean anything but that didn’t seem like a reason not to do them. On the bar one day he noticed a box, a slim green box sitting there where a drink would’ve sat if Reggie ever drank. He opened the box and a harmonica was inside. He took the harmonica in his hand and turned it in the weak light, the instrument winking at him. It was more lustrous than the bar implements and it was the perfect weight. Reggie breathed neutrally into it and it produced a whimper.

  Reggie carried the harmonica back over where the piano and guitar were and set it down in its own space on the floor. Here was something else, sitting up on the body of the piano—a framed picture. Reggie turned the picture toward him and took it in. His chest felt crowded. It was a picture of a house but more importantly it was a picture of a yard. Mr. Dunsmore’s yard. He was a friend of Reggie’s parents who lived down the street. When Reggie had gotten old enough and realized what he wanted to do for a living, this man had given Reggie reign over his almost-acre. The deal was that Mr. Dunsmore would not pay Reggie, but Reggie had an unlimited budget to put toward the property. Mr. Dunsmore added Reggie’s name to his tab at the nursery. Mr. Dunsmore had never had a son, just a string of daughters, and he taught Reggie to play chess and taught him some things about grilling. Mr. Dunsmore tried to let Reggie win at chess, but Reggie had no aptitude for the game. He wasn’t strategic and didn’t like to think about more than one thing at a time.

  Reggie leaned against the piano and examined the picture, picking over the landscaping choices he’d made like someone picking friends out of an old graduation photo. This yard was his masterpiece, his pride. A yard wasn’t like a song; it wasn’t catching lightning in a bottle. A yard was like a person. It could grow distinguished. It could be dragged down by its flaws. Mr. Dunsmore would let the yard go now. He wouldn’t let anyone lay a hand on it. The yard was surely in disrepair already, but in this photo it was perfect: hemmed at each side by hand-watered ironwoods, a smoke tree hiding the shed, arrow-straight pathways through the blackbrush, an agave guarding the porch steps, pebbles of cloud-gray surrounding the garnet pumice in the flower beds. Reggie could smell each plant. He remembered the smell of Mr. Dunsmore’s deck shoes and remembered the perfume Mr. Dunsmore’s youngest daughter wore, home on weekends from school down in Las Cruces.

  Reggie was letting it happen again. He was being manipulated, his emotions guided and coaxed. Someone wanted him to think about Mr. Dunsmore and his yard. Reggie looked at the bureau. He’d stashed the chorus program and the belt buckle from his uncle in the top drawer. He looked at the guitar and harmonica. The bar had appeared. Before all that, the library. Of course, the piano. It had been here waiting on Reggie when he arrived and it was still waiting. Reggie slid the picture of Mr. Dunsmore’s yard out of the way and folded his top half forward onto the piano, resting his cheek against the wood. It looked grainy but was slick as a car hood. Reggie closed his eyes and went limp. He was supposed to write songs. That’s what he was being nudged and nudged toward. It was songs. He wasn’t waiting. Whoever was in charge was the one waiting. Whoever was in charge had been trying to tease songs out of Reggie, to trick him into writing. That was it. Reggie had a talent and someone wanted to exploit it or exhaust it. Reggie wasn’t waiting, he was being held captive. The instruments weren’t meant to comfort him. They weren’t hospitality. Even the afterlife wanted something from you. The only thing of value you had left.

  Reggie took the picture of Mr. Dunsmore’s yard and placed it in the top drawer of the bureau with the other items. He stood in front of the open drawer. There was something bubbling up in him that he’d rarely felt in the living world. It was anger. Anger at injustice. At powerlessness. He picked up the harmonica and squeezed it almost hard enough to break it. Inspiration was being engineered in Reggie. He was a cow and his udders had been getting massaged since the moment he arrived. Reggie tipped his head back and gazed up into the inscrutable low sky that constituted the roof of his quarters. He wasn’t even sure he had more songs. What if he didn’t? Reggie wondered if the songs were a simple bribe—his music in exchange for a pleasant eternity. Maybe heaven was like a third-world country, you had to grease a few palms. Reggie had died free of debts and he didn’t owe anyone anything now. He wasn’t going to be bullied. He hated a bully. His anger was everywhere, in his organs. He felt that something inside him had been wound and wound as he completed lap after lap around the main hall and now that something was spinning loose. That’s how he felt on the inside but he concentrated on keeping his outward bearing calm and deliberate. It was easy to forget, until something reminded him, that he was being watched, and he wanted whoever was watching to be startled by what he was about to do. He put a shoulder to the bureau and gently moved it away a few paces and then carried the guitar in its stand to a safe distance. He ran his hand over the piano and then hoisted and propped its heavy lid. He got hold of the bench and raised it over his head. It felt neither heavy nor light, same as the harmonica had felt to Reggie, same as a good gun had always felt, back in life. Reggie sidled around and gathered his breath and brought the bench down with all the force he could muster into the innards of the piano, and a sour shout filled the room. Reggie felt good about what he was doing, relieved, after walking in circles for ages, at the physical decisiveness of the action he was taking. He disentangled the bench, drawing moans from the piano, and posed with his weapon above his head before crashing it down over and over into the delicate workings of the colossal instrument, splintering the soundboards and bashing loose the bass strings and then the treble strings and jarring the bridges loose at painful angles. The red leather of the bench was scuffed and in two places torn open. Reggie was sweating lightly. He took a couple more whacks and then tossed the bench into the piano, where it rested on top of the rubble it had created, legs sticking into the air.

  CECELIA

  She opened her passenger door and reached through the car and pushed open the driver’s door, which was still broken and
was going to stay broken, then she walked around and got into the driver’s seat and rested her forehead against the steering wheel. Crossing campus, she’d seen a flyer Nate had pinned up. He was calling his new band Thus Poke Sarah’s Thruster. His tryouts were in two days. Cecelia opened her window and reclined her seat, not ready to be in traffic. She looked at the white sky, the sun stuck up there like the bottom of a pail. She hadn’t done anything about Nate, hadn’t taken any action, hadn’t begun to figure out what action she could take. She was afraid, was the truth. At times her anger felt stronger than her fear, but other times she felt paralyzed. And sometimes she wondered if it was Nate she was angry with or if she was fed up with the whole world and frustrated with herself. She had too many enemies. She needed to find some mindless courage. People said bullies were cowards but that wasn’t true. It was the victims who had no courage. And she’d only been Nate’s victim since she’d refused to keep on with the band. Before that, she’d benefited from his single-mindedness and from his resources. She’d been afforded the chance to perform music, to play Reggie’s songs for people who lived to hear them. Maybe in a weird way Cecelia missed Nate. She missed the gigs. She missed the band’s following, roughly a dozen fans who’d been committed enough to seem deranged. The twelve fans had been nervous around Reggie but spoke easily to Cecelia and Nate. They treated Cecelia and Nate like they were fans themselves, fans that got to play in the band. These people were overqualified community college types who showed their devotion by holding their heads against the speakers during the upbeat songs and solemnly swaying, eyes shut, during the slow numbers. They wore gloves to the shows—driving gloves, brightly colored mittens, fingerless gym gloves. They had a way of intimidating strangers who wandered into the venues. Nate had tried booking gigs in secret, with little or no publicity, but there was no escaping these fans. They had told Cecelia and Nate that if Shirt of Apes ever had T-shirts or bumper stickers or key chains made, the items would be rounded up and destroyed. The items would be confiscated and burned.

  Cecelia started her car with the normal clattering of the engine and drove to the cemetery. The roads were quiet and the cemetery was quieter. She brought her car to a stop in the spot she’d sat during Reggie’s funeral. The breeze leaning in the windows carried the scent of flowers—all the bunches of cut, surviving flowers lying this way and that in every corner of the cemetery.

  This time Cecelia got out of her car and walked out around the hill. She was finally going to pay her respects. She passed a pickup truck with an open trailer of lawn equipment, and half-a-dozen men were eating sandwiches, using the pickup’s hood as a table. They nodded as Cecelia passed. She looked at all the flowers everywhere. It wasn’t a normal amount. The bouquets looked like a mob that had been mowed down with machine guns.

  Reggie’s grave, this time of day, was not in reach of the shade, and Cecelia was able to single it out because the stone was so shiny. The glare gave him away as recently deceased. The stone was simple, not small. It seemed like Reggie himself, no interest in pride or regret. Cecelia’s heart, for a moment, did not feel crowded in her chest. She wanted something to do with her hands. She saw now why you brought an offering, why flowers covered the entire grounds. It was so you could make a living action, be responsible for an alteration to the scene you’d entered, do something.

  Cecelia stepped up to the gravestone and put her fingers to it and it wasn’t as cold as it should’ve been, like the skin of a snake. Seeing Reggie’s full name there, recorded in the most permanent way, sunk the idea of his being dead further into Cecelia’s heart. Once your name was engraved, you couldn’t do anything else. Your file was closed. No more accomplishments or kind lies. No more people to meet for the first time who might think you were interesting or merely nice or that you might rub the wrong way. No more books to read. No more midnight snacks. No more songs. Cecelia wanted to talk to Reggie. No, she wanted him to talk to her. She wanted to hear his voice, but she would’ve settled for watching him do something, anything—wrap up extension cords or tune a guitar. She owed him. It was easy to feel that. Cecelia owed Reggie.

  She looked at the year of Reggie’s birth and at the other year. She knew a century from now someone would stop at this grave and feel nothing more than the broad sadness anyone felt at the death of a young person they’d never met. This someone would shake his head, thinking of himself at this age, thinking of himself when he was poised to come into his own. It didn’t have to be a century from now, Cecelia knew. It could happen tomorrow.

  SOREN’S FATHER

  A strange thing had happened—strange to him, anyway. Women were interested in him. Soren’s father had his cell phone number changed but the women still called the clinic asking for him, sometimes lying to try to get to him, claiming to be his sister or niece. It wasn’t a bunch of women, but the same persistent handful over and over. They left baked goods and smokes at the nurses’ station. Women did this sort of thing, Soren’s father knew; they fell in love with prisoners and movie stars and other men they’d never met.

  He hadn’t been with a woman since Soren’s mother, and he knew that was not a good thing. It was proof of cowardice, if anything, and usually there was a price to pay for cowardice. He knew he ought to spend less time in the clinic room. He ought to spend less time with no one for company but his indisposed child. It was much worse than being alone, being in the clinic room. He panicked at the idea of thinking of things to say to some woman, topics to bring up on a date or whatever. As things were, at least he never had to worry about what some woman felt like eating for dinner, about what time some woman wanted to go to bed, about what offended or placated some woman. He had enough to worry about and he could do his worrying on his own. These women were primarily interested in his son, he knew, and he didn’t want to discuss his son with anyone, especially anyone in high heels, but he kept catching himself drifting off at Soren’s bedside thinking about these women, imagining what they looked like—their legs and supple necks and petite hands. He went over and stood at his son’s bedside, feeling unsure of anything. Soren had a wild hair sticking out from his eyebrow. A coarse gray hair that wasn’t lying flat with all the others. What was he doing with a gray hair? Soren’s father thought of plucking it but he didn’t want to. He smoothed it with his fingertip over and over until it stayed in place.

  DANNIE

  She’d discovered a worthwhile use for the telescope on the balcony. In some craggy hills beyond the wrecked golf course, probably over a mile away, was a stretch of hiking trail. dannie tracked the hikers in and out of shadows, staying with them as they passed behind bristlecone thickets or permanent dunes and emerged on the other side. She had seen women take dumps, men toss beer cans into the brush. Today she had three males, about twenty-five, stoners but outdoorsmen. They had their shirts off and all of them were skinny like rock stars. One had a booklet and he kept reading passages out of it that made the other two laugh. They were the types of guys who had no one to answer to, no bosses or girlfriends or accountants or coaches. They were walking through life without shirts, cracking themselves up.

  She went in and opened her old e-mail account, the one she’d used when she lived in L.A. She could close the thing, cancel the account’s existence, rid the universe of it, but she hadn’t yet. That was too final. The number next to the word INBOX was in parenthesis and was very high. Maybe it was full. Dannie, looking at this e-mail page, felt a perfect mixture of curiosity and dread. She didn’t genuinely care who had gotten married or who else had gotten divorced or who was moving to New York or New Zealand or who was going back to school for interior design or who had breast cancer or whose parents had died or who wanted to be sponsored for a charity 10-K or who’d opened a Pan Asian restaurant in an up-and-coming neighborhood or who’d worked on a movie that was going to Sundance or who’d gone fishing in Mexico. And Dannie had especially low interest in hearing any news about her ex-husband—whether he was dating someone or was in jail or gay or wha
t. Dannie pretended he no longer walked the earth, and it worked for her and she was going to keep pretending that.

  She hit CHECK ALL and slid the cursor to the DELETE button and then she waited. She couldn’t tell what all was going through her mind. She stared straight into the screen and the next thing she knew her fingertip pressed down. She hadn’t given herself permission to do this. Her hand had taken it upon itself. It couldn’t have, though. It didn’t work that way. Dannie had made a choice. It was easy for her to do the rest of the pages. CHECK ALL, DELETE. Over and over. Dannie kept going until she had zero new messages. She guided the arrow up the screen and signed off, then set the computer aside and stood unsteadily, feeling worried but proud. She found some things to straighten, some things to dust, kept her arms and legs moving as long as she could. There would be nothing on TV. She didn’t feel like reading.

  A vacant hour passed, lost. Maybe two hours. Dannie’s fertile time of the month had come and gone and she was not pregnant. Nothing had happened inside her, she could tell. Nothing in her body. In her mind, though, things were happening that should not have been. Sometimes Dannie could not elude the thought that Arn might not be real. He might not be a real person. He had no e-mail account and no phone number. Dannie and Arn never went out and so she never saw other people talk to him. He had clothes and some possessions, but Dannie could’ve planted that stuff. When your mind put itself to work on a delusion, it built in reasonable explanations for things, for why you might not be able to go out in public with a person and see other people talk to him. The person could work nights and be a homebody who was perfectly happy to spend his time only with you. There would be a reason why you couldn’t remember getting to know the person, why you could only remember not knowing him at all and then knowing him as you did now. Dannie could’ve dreamed Arn up and then loaded her fridge with bacon.