A Million Heavens

by John Brandon

  “Where’d you come from?” Dannie asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, why are you here?”

  “Just resting.”

  Dannie made an exasperated motion toward the basin with her arm, indicating they were in the middle of nowhere.

  “My group deserted me,” the old man said.

  “What group is that?”

  “Or I deserted them. I guess that’s probably the way it happened.”

  Dannie glanced back across the expanse of desert. Her condo complex was a raised, brownish stain. “You really should start heading back,” she said. “It’ll be pitch dark out here.”

  The old man folded his arms.

  “The temperature’s already dropping.”

  “Let it drop.”

  “You’re just going to sit there till you freeze?”

  “If I feel like it.”

  Dannie looked at the old man’s pressed slacks. His eyes were not cloudy or watery. She looked at her watch, knowing what it was going to say. It was almost time. It was time. It was too late to panic. The moment was now and it was wrecked. The sweat suit would remain on. The bikini would remain hidden. Dannie’s irritation was drying easily into defeat. In a couple more minutes, there wouldn’t be enough light for Arn to see anything out here. She leaned against a boulder. What was she even doing out here? What was this? She knew the answer. This was desperation. Out here away from everything, she could see. Whatever she and Arn had, it was running on fumes. When you had to make grand efforts, it was already too late. Dannie was trying to kick-start the relationship with the only thing they’d ever really had, which was sex. Dannie wasn’t getting what she wanted, and Arn wanted nothing. They’d lost momentum. Dannie wasn’t young. She didn’t need to be pulling stunts like this.

  She stepped close to the old man and he made room for her on the flat seat of the rock.

  “What kind of group?” she said. “I want to know.”

  “Watching birds of prey.”

  Dannie looked out through the failing light. She couldn’t remember seeing any hawks or eagles. Only buzzards and crows and gulls.

  “They give you binoculars,” the man said. “I couldn’t get mine to focus.”

  “You just track them while they soar around?”

  The man shrugged. “The whole thing was my wife’s idea. To get me out of the house.”

  “Yeah,” Dannie said. “I don’t have anything to get me out of the house either.”

  “Turns out there’s not much worth doing. There’s not much out here.”

  The man was softening a bit. “I dread the mornings,” he said. “The whole day out ahead of me, knowing I’m going to drift around.”

  Dannie got out some trail mix and the old man didn’t want any. He didn’t want water, either. Dannie couldn’t see the condo complex at all.

  “It’s not the mornings for me,” she told the old man. “It’s the nights.”

  HISTORY OF ARN III

  He couldn’t get any of the cushy factory jobs, so he ended up doing odd crap nobody else wanted to do. He never kept these jobs long. He always felt like someone was gaining on him. You didn’t get off scot-free from smacking your legal guardian in the head with an aluminum bat. It wasn’t a live-and-let-live deal. It wasn’t boys being boys. If Arn stayed put too long, his past would catch up with him.

  Just inside Oregon’s border he worked at a mill that produced wooden arrows. The arrows looked exactly like the arrow that kid had shot at Arn in middle school. The mill had a room on the side of it where all the sawdust collected, and once a week someone had to put on a mask and go in there and shovel the whole thing out, filling dozens of tall canvas bags. This was one of the tasks that fell to Arn. Sawdust came out of his nose along with his snot. It came out of his ears when he swabbed them out. Arn’s boss would call him into the office, where he would preface whatever complaint he had with an assurance that he was not jumping Arn’s shit. “Now, I’m not jumping your shit,” he would always say. “I don’t want you to think I’m jumping your shit.” There was a woman who did quality control at the mill and one Monday she came in late, looking devastated. At break time she told everyone she’d gone on a bear hunt and three dogs had given their lives to protect her.

  In Northern California, Arn worked at a winery. He got picked up in a van every morning. He did not participate in The Crush, which he’d heard so much about. The winery was small-time, a couple years old, owned by two brothers who were learning as they went. Arn’s sole responsibility, for weeks, was to open bottles of wine and dump them. Thousands of bottles, poured into a steel tub and lost down a drain. Arn never knew what was wrong with the wine, whether it was tainted in some hazardous way or merely tasted funny. When all of it was gone, Arn weeded and painted.

  He rented a cheap, clean studio apartment that happened to be smack next to a high school, and this high school was a corral for countless numbers of the most alluring girls Arn had ever seen. The Spanish tutors up in Oregon were homely compared to these Lodi girls. These girls had breeze-blown bangs and movie-star sunglasses and tiny tops held in place by proud little breasts that didn’t bounce an inch when the girls walked across the parking lot. The girls who were seniors all went across the street for lunch, to a wholesome deli with tables outside in the sun. Arn started taking his lunch break at the same time they took theirs, started driving into town from the winery every day in one of the company vans to grab a table and eat sandwiches full of pesto and sprouts. He had no problem talking to the girls. He talked to one after the next after the next and managed to sleep with four of them. He would tell the girls, vaguely, that he worked in the wine industry, that he wasn’t from around here. There were no other men at this deli. It was like Arn had crashed on an uncharted island. Sometimes he felt like he was being tricked, like a mouse gorging himself on free cheese. He managed to keep himself in Lodi until summer, before losing his nerve and hopping on the overnight train.

  In Fresno, Arn found work at an outfit that produced diploma frames. The place was full of lesbians, and a lot of them prided themselves on having been fired from other jobs because of their lifestyles. Arn’s task was to cut the backboards of the frames down to size. He had his own area and could set it up as he chose. When he cut a board too small or large, no one bitched. They threw it out and tried another. Arn cut boards and cut boards and ate the free food the company was always ordering for lunch.

  He met a woman in Fresno, a bartender. This woman let Arn help out at her bar on weekend nights, extra money for Arn. Each night, after the bar closed, the people who worked there held a low-grade party at someone’s apartment. They would drink a little and do some drugs and eventually pair off and go home. At one of these parties, Arn drank a bunch and went out into the yard and looked into the sky and it struck him for the first time that he might be a murderer. He’d never let himself consider this possibility—hadn’t been ready to, he guessed. He’d hit the man with a blunt metal object and the man might very well not have survived. The man had not recovered. They’d rushed him to the hospital and tried everything to save him, but it had been too late. The mother and son were alone now, more miserable than before. The mother and son hated Arn. Arn’s case wasn’t getting buried by fresher offenses. It was still right at the top. A murderer. Arn’s face was probably on posters back in Washington. He was on a special page of the national fugitive database reserved for real scumbags, his face among the faces of rapists and such.

  In Nevada, Arn spent his days standing on a platform, ears plugged and knees rattling, feeding strips of scrap plastic into a grater.

  In Phoenix, at a mine supply, he stood inside a huge warehouse and instead of cleaning and organizing the place, as he was being paid to, he threw a golf ball back and forth with a bald man who ate a lot of snack cakes and did calisthenics. No one ever checked on the two of them. Arn realized his attitude toward work had changed. He used to want to impress people, to impress himself, an
d now he only wanted to reach the end of another day and another week and get his check. He was an adult, for better or worse. He took naps on piles of tire tubes. Sometimes he swept. The building was so long that when Arn threw the golf ball it would bounce three or four times before it reached the bald man.

  Arn’s second day in Tucson, he went into a coffee shop to look at want ads and struck up a conversation with an Asian lady. The lady was much older than Arn, but you could only tell that by her eyes. He asked her to meet him for a movie later and she readily agreed. Arn was glad he’d bothered to put on a decent shirt. The lady left the coffee shop and Arn switched to a different section of the newspaper, the one with the movie times. There was a theater right downtown, about two blocks from where Arn was sitting, and this was good because he didn’t want this woman to know that he didn’t have a car. That was a revelation that could wait.

  The Asian lady met Arn for the movie and later in the week for dinner and another day they went for a long walk in a park. The Asian lady did not seem intent on enjoying these dates, was not stymied with the question of whether she and Arn were connecting. She was going on the dates, it seemed, because she knew it was healthy to go on dates and foolish to turn them down. When Arn had been acquainted with her for two weeks he asked her if he could stay with her until he found his own place and she agreed to this.

  The Asian lady had plum streaks in her hair and she ate a lot of bagels and did a lot of sit-ups. She had no family in this country. She had graduated from business school at University of Arizona and had applied for a loan to open a sunglasses shop and the loan had been approved. She was about to open a second shop. She didn’t say much to Arn, but when she touched him she did so gently, like he was precious. She never said a word about his lack of an automobile. She said nothing about the trouble he was having finding a job. She didn’t understand the jokes Arn made, seemed to have no use for them.

  One morning, instead of bagels, she whipped up a breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast. When Arn sat down to it, she asked him if he would like to marry her.

  Arn set his orange juice down.

  “Is this a citizenship issue?” he asked.

  “This is a I’m getting old issue. You like me. I’m good-looking.”

  It occurred to Arn that you could ask someone to marry you right away, like the Asian lady was doing, or else you had to wait a long time and pick the right moment and be sure of everything. They seemed equally good methods.

  “We get married and you manage the new shop.”

  “Wow,” said Arn.

  The lady laughed. “You think about it.”

  “I will,” said Arn. “I’ll think about it.”

  The Asian lady took more bites of bacon, like she was getting comfortable with it, like she’d never eaten it before. “You think,” she said. “You say no, I’ll ask the man who owns the barbecue place near my shop. He’ll say yes, for sure.”

  “If I say no, you’ll ask someone else?”

  She nodded vigorously. “The guy who owns the barbecue place. He’ll say yes right away.”

  CECELIA

  She had received another song and then another. One whole side of the cassette was full. The songs arrived in flurries or at least pairs, and then there’d be stretches of dead air in between that could go on for days. Probably Cecelia was facing one of these stretches now. The songs never had anything to do with her life—no college, no crappy cars, no arson. She had no idea how many were coming. She could not begin to imagine where Reggie might be. Cecelia had made a deal with herself to try to keep her emotions out of this, to perform her duty of recording the way one did laundry or dishes. Since she’d made this deal, the songs were coming even easier. She’d learned how not to resist them or be delighted at their arrival, to simply receive. The last song had been about an old businessman who goes searching for a girl he’d loved in grade school. As a child he’d shown his affection by throwing the girl’s shoes in the lake near their houses. As an old man, he returns to the lake and dives to the bottom, trying to find the little sandals and boots and roller skates.

  During the day, Cecelia avoided the house. She’d caught her mother crying one evening, indulging in redundant sobs. Her mother had been standing in the kitchen near the window and letting herself blubber and this had made Cecelia want to yell at her. She hadn’t, of course. She’d slipped off, her mother never aware she was there. More than once Cecelia had come home in the afternoon and seen her uncle’s car in the driveway and had passed right by. Maybe he could help her mother. Or maybe she’d drag him down with her. Whatever they were doing, Cecelia wasn’t going to disturb them. She didn’t know why her uncle was coming around all of a sudden and didn’t care to know.

  Cecelia felt both proud and empty when she thought of Nate’s barn. She’d kept the clothes from the fire in her car in a plastic grocery bag for days, unable to figure out what to do with them. If she took them somewhere and tried to burn them someone could catch her in the act. She didn’t want to throw them away, not smelling like gas. She was being paranoid, probably. Cecelia wondered if the fire department had come to Nate’s house. They must’ve, in that neighborhood. She wondered what Nate’s mom and dad thought. She wondered what had happened to the rabbit. Cecelia had seen nothing about the fire in the newspaper, heard nothing around campus.

  SOREN’S FATHER

  Gee was the first person he’d let in Soren’s room who wasn’t part of the clinic staff, his first social visitor. She usually stayed about an hour, and while she was in the room Soren’s father felt relief from his loneliness but he also felt intruded upon. The clinic wasn’t fun or freeing like when they went out to dinner. Gee always went over to Soren when she arrived and again right before she left and pressed her forehead against him and whispered things to him that Soren’s father couldn’t hear. She never brought flowers, but often she brought food. Today she had éclairs, and though Soren’s father wasn’t wild about sweets he ate one and made sure to seem he was enjoying it. Gee had also brought coffee. She couldn’t stomach the clinic brew.

  She finished eating and stood at the window with her short foam coffee cup, a look of certainty on her face that for some reason irked Soren’s father.

  “Albuquerque is so ugly, it’s beautiful.” Gee’s coffee cup was making a patch of fog on the window. “God made this place ugly and humans made it uglier, and that was just what it needed. It needed to be uglier.”

  Soren’s father knew he wasn’t required to respond to such statements. Especially here in Soren’s room, he could stay as quiet as he liked. Gee came away from the window and sat. The chairs were orange and the table was small and high. She told Soren’s father she was through with the art world. She was through consulting on galleries and she was through with her own art too.

  “I’m making the same roadrunner over and over. That’s not art, it’s craft.”

  Soren’s father told Gee he’d seen a real roadrunner out the window earlier that day, strolling right down the roadside.

  “The real thing is always better than the artifice.”

  “Thanks for the coffee,” Soren’s father said. He tipped his cup toward her.

  “I’ve had enough food of the spirit. I’m ready to deal with food of the stomach.”

  “The restaurant,” Soren’s father said.

  “I found a space that would be suitable. Not perfect, but suitable. I paid them to hold it for me a couple weeks.”

  “You must be about ready to reveal the idea.”

  “I am. Asian-influenced chicken wings, served with watermelon.” Gee’s eyebrows perked.

  “Is that an appetizer?”

  “That’s the whole menu.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Soren’s father.

  Gee explained that the wings would boast a more complex spice pallet than usual hot wings, and the watermelon was a Southern twist on celery and tasted better than celery. Instead of bleu cheese, she was concocting her own dipping sauce with local goat chees
e as the base.

  “If you’re cooking it, I’m sure it’ll be good,” Soren’s father said.

  Gee gave him a long look but didn’t say anything. She was deciding, Soren’s father knew, if it was the right time to talk to him about going in with her. She’d talked about it before and she would talk about it again. Soren’s father was enjoying a break from loneliness, but he was also looking forward to being alone in the room again. It was a wrong feeling, he knew. Gee was wonderful. That was a fact. He was craving solitude and he also found that for some reason he was looking forward to the next vigil in the parking lot. That was the kind of company he wanted, company that was quiet and didn’t know what it was after. Soren’s father had purposely never invited Gee over on a Wednesday. She seemed totally unaware of the phenomenon of the vigils and that was okay with him. He didn’t care to hear her opinion on the matter.