A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  And maybe none of these other people here tonight would quit. For the muscular guy the vigils were a discipline, another component of an ascetic program aimed at physical health. There was a man who wore sunglasses and who always had a pen in his hands—nothing to write on, just a pen to fiddle with. There was a red-haired woman who wore homemade earrings. She had a tattoo of a humane, inclusive sun on her foot, and wore sandals no matter the temperature. There was a manic painter, in splotched overalls, constantly tapping his foot or biting his fingernails. Painting seemed like the worst job for him, and vigiling also seemed against his nature. The vigils hadn’t helped the painter calm down, but he was still here. There was a guy with a pinched face who wore a trench coat with hundreds of pins on it, like a colorful armor. He would close his eyes for long stretches but it was obvious he wasn’t dozing because of his rigid posture, his head propped snobbishly atop his thin neck. He never slouched, even draped with that ten-pound coat. There were a few chubby women, a little older, for whom sympathy was a calling. Of those the group had lost, a significant faction had been college kids, maybe even a couple high school students. One of them was still here, the girl with the doleful eyes who drove that car that made such a racket pulling into the parking lot. Another of the losses had been a very old lady who’d worn a necklace with a bunch of rings on it. Dannie was forced to wonder if she’d passed away. She’d looked decrepit getting all the way down on the ground and then trying to rise. Dannie didn’t know which was sadder, to think the lady was deceased or to think she’d quit, to imagine her dead or to face the fact that one could still be making false starts at eighty-five years old.

  Dannie had quit a marriage and quit her friends. She had quit her hometown. Quitting had defined the trajectory of her adult life. She didn’t want to quit on the other vigilers and she didn’t want them to quit on her. She wanted everyone to see it to the end. Dannie wondered about the people who had quit. What were they doing at this moment? Were they disappointed or proud or numb? She wondered if they could eat or do laundry or get lost in a movie, knowing the vigil was going on without them. She wondered how many of them were alone. She wondered if they’d found peace or found something else to take the place of peace.

  HISTORY OF ARN I

  At ten years of age he was shipped to the Northwest, where he learned not to expect sunny days. People were proud of the dampness. When the sun appeared for a week and the streets and yards and tree branches dried out, people wondered how to act. Summer was an affront. Arn wasn’t one of these people. He’d been born in the Midwest. He saw how it was out here. You were supposed to give in to the rain and stay or you were supposed to hate it and want to move away, but Arn had no say about where he went. To someone like him, weather, cloudy or sunny, didn’t mean a thing. Weather allowed people who weren’t truly sad to play at it, people who weren’t happy to go through carefree motions.

  Before middle school Arn had moved so often that the houses he’d lived in blended together. All the houses smelled like casserole and had littered lawns patrolled by pets with disappointing names. All the houses contained an adult who was slightly meaner than most or slightly nicer than most and areas that were off-limits and elaborate systems for divvying the chores.

  And then Tacoma. There was a foster mother, but it was the father Arn remembered. His name was Ron Darling, like the baseball player. Ron Darling was bald, with a clay-colored beard that blended in with his chest hair and wrapped around to the back of his neck. He told a lot of stories. Arn was old enough to realize that most of the stories hadn’t happened to Ron Darling but to someone he knew or had talked to in a bar. The details were exaggerated, the settings plucked from air. But the unlikeliness was what made the stories; the fact that the guy was asking you to believe something so outlandish is what made it feel true. This man, Ron Darling, could not have been a houseboy for a pop star. He could not have moved from Chattanooga to California at age eighteen and met some people and then some more people and ended up living at the home of a famous teen heartthrob, refreshing drinks and entertaining guests with his high-dive prowess. “Different time,” Ron Darling would remark. “People had houseboys. Closest I come is one of you foster punks.”

  Ron Darling had a bunch of other foster kids, all boys, and he hired them out for work. It was like he had a labor agency but didn’t have to pay the workers. Or barely pay them—five bucks a day. He could undercut the legitimate agencies and he got paid under the table. He would drive Arn and his brothers to some lumberyard or machine shop and put his feet up and read a crime novel, occasionally looking up to dole out praise. He told the boys that in order to overcome being foster punks, they had to learn how to work hard, that work could save them. And Arn always worked hard.

  One of his foster brothers under Ron Darling, a black kid with jutting bottom teeth, constantly annoyed Arn. Arn didn’t mind work, but he minded this kid and his grainy, rising voice. The kid would not stop talking. He tried to give Arn tips while they worked, tried to show him shortcuts and reveal the finer points of power tool use, but the kid didn’t know any more than Arn did. Every slip Arn made, the kid would be standing over him, wagging his head. He’d click his tongue and say something like, “Told you—work smart, not hard.” The kid had comments about what Arn ate, about his T-shirts. Arn did not want to bicker with this kid, yet he did. The kid had a way of drawing Arn in. All Arn wanted to do was fistfight and get it over with, but somehow it never came to this. The kid had been at it a long time, irritating people, and was skilled at narrowly avoiding violence.

  One day, Ron Darling could not ignore them any longer. Arn had screamed at the kid and the guy who owned the little moldings plant had heard. It was a Sunday. Arn had declared that if the kid spoke again in the next five minutes he was going to kill him, that he was going to hit him in the head with a hammer as many times as it took to make sure the kid could never say another word, and if Arn had to go to jail or juvenile hall that was fine was him. Ron Darling walked over, pointedly not worked up, and asked the black kid to come with him. They left and Arn kept working. He had no idea which one of them was in trouble, he or the black kid. Without the kid’s yapping and Ron Darling’s oppressive presence, Arn got most of the job done that day.

  In the evening, back at the house, the black kid was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t going to be there anymore. Ron Darling said they weren’t going to discuss it. He wasn’t angry with Arn, wasn’t pleased with him. A problem had arisen concerning his business and he’d smoothed it out; that was all. Arn saw the value in being a good worker, but also he felt he’d won something not worth winning.

  Terrance. That was the black kid’s name.

  Quickly a replacement was found for Terrance, an Indian kid who claimed to have run away from a reservation. Arn suspected it was a rule; you could only have so many white kids before you had to take a minority. The new kid was surly and weighed his words. Almost instantly upon his arrival, Ron Darling began ridiculing him. His name was Jonathon and Ron Darling pronounced his name in a syrupy lilt, as if the Indian boy were gay. Ron Darling invited the other boys to join in with the ridicule, and most did. Ron Darling said it over and over, the kid’s name, and Jonathon went into a determined campaign of avoidance. He read a lot, war histories, and stared out an open window. Arn was friendly to Jonathon whenever he got the chance, when Ron Darling was elsewhere. The kid seemed above conversation but he sometimes spoke lone statements toward Arn. “My mother descended from the people of Sitting Bull, my father from bridge builders.” Statements like that. “My honor exists, fully formed. I need only find it and wear it like a fine coat.”

  One evening Jonathon refused the dinner Ron Darling served and Ron Darling began calling him names. Jonathon stood and calmly announced that Ron had no grounds to speak even a single word to him, that Ron’s babble was but dried thistle in the wind. Ron Darling grew earnest and told Jonathon he ought to be grateful, that he could do a lot worse, and Jonathon replied that Ron
Darling understood the nature of true gratitude as well as a hamster understands calculus. Ron Darling, now flustered, said he could see why no reservation would want a useless punk like Jonathon, and Jonathon declared that he would rather die than live on a reservation, that he would rather perish shivering in the wilderness than rest warm and fed but with his heart full of the white man’s lies. Ron Darling, no way around it, was losing a verbal confrontation with a twelve-year-old kid. He wanted to hit Jonathon—in fact, he raised a tense arm—but that was the one thing he couldn’t do. He couldn’t hit a kid and put his business in jeopardy. He could either keep the kid and keep making fun of him and risk being made a fool, or he could do what he’d done with Terrance—invent some infraction worthy of dismissal and send him down the line to the next family. Which was what he did.

  Arn, in Jonathon’s absence, felt spineless. He felt like Ron Darling’s pet. He liked working hard, but he was losing faith in it. For choosing the evil he knew in order to delay the next move, the next upheaval, he felt beaten in spirit.

  A few weeks before eighth grade was to start, Ron Darling’s wife left. It surprised Arn how much this event damaged Ron Darling. He grew sullen and less mean. He ate nothing and played music in the house almost constantly, music without words, music that seemed meant to drown out whatever was going on in his head. His wife had been a negligible presence, not wanting much to do with the boys, but apparently Ron Darling had needed her for something. Maybe her family had money and now Ron Darling would never get it; maybe she’d found someone who would give her kids of her own, though she was kind of old for that. In her absence, Ron Darling began talking almost exclusively of a time—some distant decade—when he’d ridden the crest of a Houston real estate boom, owned a fleet of BMW’s, had a hickory tree growing in his living room and a live-in maid. “I’ve been a maid and I’ve had a maid,” he kept saying, almost singing it, like a country song. Arn wondered if Ron Darling had ever even lived in Texas. He never mentioned his wife. He was less mean, but it seemed like he was saving it up, hoarding his ill will for a specific purpose. It even occurred to Arn to comfort him, but he didn’t know how. There were a couple other boys who’d been with Ron Darling longer. They were giving him a wide berth, so Arn did the same.

  He went to school and people talked to him and he took notes and sneaked a cigarette now and then. He came home and ate snacks and watched TV and chuckled at the jokes of his foster brothers. No more dinners were served. Several weekends came and went with no work, no piling into the pickup and putting on gloves that were too big and toiling the minutes away and then breaking for burgers and then toiling the rest of the minutes away. It took Arn well into the fall semester to realize it: Ron Darling had lost interest in his business and had quit booking jobs. He’d lost interest in much, and one of those things was scuttling around chasing a buck. Arn had been slow on the uptake, and now all the warm weekends had passed.

  At school, Arn and his foster brothers were wary of each other. They all had something in common, something to be ashamed of, but that shameful fact could be worked around as long as they weren’t together. One of the brothers ran track. One was a nerd. One a suave horn player. Arn decided to try out for basketball and found that it was not a difficult game. All he had to do was hustle and good things happened. It was a school of the whitest kids around. If Arn decided to snare every rebound, he could. If he decided to score a lot, he could. The coach didn’t go out of his way to praise Arn, but Arn figured that was because the coach didn’t want to show favoritism. The tryouts lasted a week, and by the end of that week Arn knew he’d found an identity as an athlete that might obscure his other identity as a foster kid. Instead of laboring with shovels and drills, he would burn the hours of his weekends practicing free throws and learning to dribble with his left hand.

  On Sunday, Arn found an abandoned hoop at an elementary school near his house and shot countless deep jumpers into a steady wind, riding a high. On Monday, he waited until after first period to go to the locker room. He pushed back the door and sidled up to the roster, breathing the foul air that he’d helped taint with his basketball sweat. He belonged in the locker room, had a claim to it. His eyes darted from name to name, too fast to read them. They weren’t in alphabetical order. Arn put his hand to the paper. He worked his way down the whole sheet. He was so excited, his eyes wouldn’t work. He took a look around. No one was watching him. He started at the bottom this time and worked his way to the top. Now he felt it in his stomach. His name was not there. The names of a couple kids who were almost as good as Arn were there, and also the names of about ten kids who were clearly inferior. Blood was racing around in Arn’s head. He pulled the roster off the wall and checked the back of it, resisted the urge to rip it into pieces. A couple kids came through the door and Arn was instantly embarrassed. They paused and then squeezed past him—not kids who’d been at the tryout, just regular PE kids. All the other basketball players had come before school and found their names. Arn wondered if they’d noticed his absence on the roster, if they’d been confused, if they’d secretly determined which player had made the team who didn’t deserve to, which player was the worst of all. Arn pressed the roster back onto the wall.

  When lunch period arrived, Arn was not hungry. He returned to the locker room, picked his way through to the offices where the coaches hung out. Coach Shell saw him through the glass and excused himself, stepping over some other coaches who were splitting a pizza. He came and stood in front of Arn, his head tipped to the side. He seemed like he felt guilty but was trying not to show it. Resigned is what he was—to what, Arn didn’t know. Coach Shell wasn’t saying anything. He was going to make Arn speak. But Arn didn’t. He waited it out too. Coach Shell scratched his neck. He looked at Arn like the two of them had suffered a common injustice.

  “Ask your dad, or your… whatever.” Coach Shell did something to his collar and then scratched his neck harder. “Ask him why James Shell wouldn’t let you on his basketball team. I have my reasons, I guarantee you that.”

  Arn did not agree to ask Ron Darling anything. All he wanted to say was that none of this was fair, but he wasn’t going to say that.

  “If you’re trying to piss off Ron Darling, you should’ve let me on the team.”

  Coach Shell shrugged his shirt back into place. “It’s not like you have to quit basketball for life. It’s just a middle school team. Worst one in the county.”

  “Say I was the best player at the tryout. I want to hear you say it. Say I’m the best basketball player at this school.”

  At this point Coach Shell must have considered his job, considered the fact that he could get in trouble for unfairly excluding Arn. All he would say was, “You worked hard out there. You gave a great effort.”

  That evening Arn went into the back room of the house, where Ron Darling was sitting in front of his TV, and announced that whatever feud Ron Darling had with Coach Shell, it had cost Arn a spot on the team.

  “It’s a poor musician who blames his instrument,” Ron Darling slurred.

  “I’m not the musician,” Arn said. “That’s Randy. I’m blaming you.”

  “James Shell can go to hell.”

  “Yeah, he probably will.”

  “It rhymes. James Shell can go to hell.”

  “And you’ll go right along with him, you asshole.”

  Ron Darling’s breath caught. He looked small in his recliner. His white T-shirt was stained down the front. It didn’t take him long—a couple shamed seconds—to understand that he had fully fallen and this was the sort of thing that happened after the fall: your once loyal charges told you to go to hell.

  After the basketball episode, things went downhill at the middle school. Arn’s PE class did a unit on archery and some kid intentionally shot Arn in the arm with one of the dull wooden arrows. Arn, in frustration, broke the arrow in two, and he was sent to the office for destroying school property. Arn began drinking protein shakes and doing lots of push-ups
, not even counting the push-ups, hoping for fights that never materialized. People seemed afraid of him, not in a way he enjoyed—the girls as well as the guys. He took all the money he had, the multitude of five-dollar bills Ron Darling had given him for each day he’d worked, down to the discount store and bought their cheapest home gym. He dragged it into his room and cleared a space for it, sliced the box open and spread the parts over the worn carpet. The gym didn’t use weights, but heavy bands you had to stretch. It was around midnight, five hours after he’d brought the box into his room, this box adorned front and back with pictures of a satisfied man doing curls, that Arn threw in the towel. It wasn’t his fault that the thing wasn’t coming together. There were missing parts and extra parts. The directions were vague, grammatically incorrect. The assembly, even if it were possible, did not seem a one-man job. Arn leaned down over a flap of the cardboard and drove his fist into the face of the satisfied man doing curls. He collapsed on his bed. The store where he’d bought the gym didn’t do returns; if you bought a thing, that thing wasn’t their problem anymore. Arn told himself he’d work more on the home gym the next evening, but he didn’t.

  Close to graduation, Arn tried and failed to pick up smoking as a regular habit. He was relieved middle school was ending, but not hopeful about high school. He skipped the graduation ceremony, of course. He had his own ceremony, which was the cleaning out of his room, the getting rid of everything. The home gym and his basketball sneakers and a half-pack of cigarettes he’d abandoned and report cards and a coin collection he’d forgotten about and a Mariners cap he’d stolen from one of his old foster brothers. There was a lake nearby with a rotting dock and Arn guided wheelbarrow-load after wheelbarrow-load through the woods, over a hard-packed trail full of roots that bumped the wheelbarrow up off the ground, and out to the end of the dock, where he tipped the wheelbarrow forward and wrestled it side to side, dumping every scrap. He pictured the fish under there, not knowing what to think, letting the strange objects settle on the bottom of their world and then nosing closer to investigate.