The Desert Sky Before Us

by Anne Valente

  AFTER THE RECEPTION and after she’s helped Angela clear the table, Rhiannon watches Billie recede to their trailer. Their father stays seated at the empty picnic bench, the only light the blinked-on bulbs gracing the front steps of each trailer. The night sky speckled with stars. The afternoon’s winds diminished to the faint pulse of a breeze blowing up from the valley, what feels like an intermittent hand against Rhiannon’s skin.

  She sits down beside her father. Both of them look out across the valley.

  You doing okay?

  He nods. As good as can be expected.

  That turned out all right. Better than I’d have thought.

  Nobody punched anyone. No one stole any cars. A civil reception.

  How long are you staying?

  Leaving tomorrow. I need to get back to Dacono. You girls?

  We don’t know. Maybe tomorrow.

  Any more plot points on your mother’s journey?

  Rhiannon leans back against the picnic table. We didn’t even look. But I’m guessing we’re heading home. Billie’s got to be back within two weeks for mandatory check-in, and I can’t get any more time off work.

  Her father glances at her. How’s it going? The job?

  It’s not awful.

  Not too late for you to get back out on the road.

  That’s one thing you and Billie agree on. She said the same thing.

  She’s right. You could still race.

  Rhiannon watches the dark wash of the valley so she won’t have to look at him.

  I know you miss it, he says. You don’t have to say so. I can see it in your face.

  Rhiannon thinks of Beth’s voice on Marcus’s cell phone, her knees stiff from crouching in the shade of the trailer’s hot-metal siding.

  How did you manage a career like that while you were married? she asks. How did you make it work to be out on the road, doing what you loved?

  I really didn’t, did I? Your mother got tired of it. But she was traveling too, always out here where she didn’t want me to be.

  Is that why you got divorced?

  It’s as much my fault as hers. I was gone a lot. We both were.

  Rhiannon thinks of Beth’s lithographs. Her show this September in Detroit. That should’ve made your relationship stronger, she says. Right? That you both actually did something you loved.

  There’s more to it than that.

  Like what?

  Your mother and I came from different worlds. Her father sighs and gestures toward the darkened valley. Look at this place. She was far more worldly. She knew so much more about everything.

  I don’t think that matters.

  Oh, you don’t? Try going to faculty parties for twenty years. See who will talk to you if you don’t have a formal college education.

  Rhiannon smiles despite herself. I don’t know if Beth’s art friends ever even knew I raced. I don’t know what they would have thought.

  Yeah, but come on. It’s not like anyone ever looked down on you.

  Rhiannon looks at him. How would you know?

  Her father leans forward on his knees. Goddammit, Rhee. You were good. You were so fucking good. There was no reason at all for you to give it up.

  The picnic table’s wood is cool against Rhiannon’s back and she thinks of the gas station attendant in Colorado, a boy who recognized her, how many more people might have if she’d just stuck with it. If it mattered whether they did. If it mattered more whether she could have said herself that she was proud of everything she’d done.

  Dad, Rhiannon whispers.

  He says nothing beside her.

  Dad, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with my life.

  The valley is an ocean of darkness beyond the picnic table, every mesa disappeared to an expanse of black. No rush of cars. No distant highway. No cricket hum, no cicada drone. Nothing but the spackling of constellations, a paintbrush smear of the Milky Way faint above them. A sky like nothing Rhiannon has ever seen in the Midwest, overwhelming as her father reaches over and takes her hand.

  You know what you’re doing, he says. You don’t think you do. But you know.

  Rhiannon doesn’t want to tell him that she doesn’t. That she feels nothing out here but an ending. She imagines the dust and rock Billie threw across the ridgeline settling somewhere down in the sandstone bed of the valley, a valley her mother surely knew like the short lifelines of her own palms.

  AFTER HER FATHER disappears into his trailer, Rhiannon sits on the picnic bench alone. The thought of returning to her and Billie’s trailer still too raw, a dim square of light through the small bedroom’s window letting Rhiannon know Billie is still awake. The same in Angela’s kitchen window: a thank-you Rhiannon knows she needs to extend. Rhiannon leans her palms into her knees and stands. The lights in Marcus’s trailer gone dark. She will remember to thank him tomorrow.

  When she knocks, Angela opens the door.

  Come in, she says. Was just wrapping up for the night.

  Rhiannon steps inside and sees Angela’s computer and a scattering of notes spread across the small kitchen table. Continued fieldwork. Of course. What Rhiannon realizes Angela has set aside for the entire day to accommodate their mother’s wishes. She sits down at the table and Angela gathers the documents into a pile and shuts her laptop.

  Want anything? Tea?

  Rhiannon shakes her head. I’m good.

  Hanging in there?

  Look, I’m sorry about what happened today.

  No need. Funerals are messy.

  I think Billie’s having a harder time than she’d ever admit.

  And what about you?

  Rhiannon looks up. I just wanted to thank you.

  Really, it was no trouble at all.

  I can see it was. Rhiannon gestures toward the stacks of paper and Angela’s closed computer. I know even two days off can be tough if you’re in the middle of work.

  Your mother told me you were a driver. And now what? Textbooks?

  Rhiannon wants to ignore the question. I guess I just gave up.

  Angela surprises Rhiannon by laughing. Tell me about it. Try being a woman in paleontology. All these male scientists getting their feathers ruffled at every little challenge to their work. And a black woman on top of that? Forget it. You know how many times I thought about giving up? You know how many times I’ve been mistaken as someone’s assistant?

  I got that too sometimes. Maybe not the same as you. But it’s easier selling textbooks. The world doesn’t expect much more from me.

  Oh, come on. That’s too easy. You don’t actually believe that.

  Rhiannon meets her eyes. Despite Angela’s warmth, Rhiannon sees she isn’t afraid to push.

  It was so hard being a woman in that field, Rhiannon says.

  I know, Angela says. But you go after it. Everything else is just noise.

  Rhiannon watches her. How do you know what you want?

  You just know. Or else you know what you don’t want. It sounds like textbooks aren’t what you want.

  They’re nothing like being on the road. Rhiannon waves a hand around the trailer’s interior. Or being way out here. You must be energized out here, all of the time.

  It’s hard work. There are days I hate it, every last shred of it. Especially the conundrum of what happened here. It baffles me to exhaustion sometimes, when I’m here in the summer and when I’m back in Salt Lake City.

  But you love it.

  Angela levels her eyes at Rhiannon. Yes. I do.

  Did my mother? Did she really love what she did?

  It’s an unfair question, she knows. A stupid question. Rhiannon already knows the answer in having observed her mother for so many years despite the ways she kept her profession separate from her home. And these highways and coordinates: the precision their mother put into letting them finally see this lifelong love. The gleam of a Kansas riverbed. The ascent of sandstone trails. The tornado-swirl of bats lifting from a cave. Southern Utah sun, buttes and red-rock formations.
A landscape devoted to John Wayne and European explorers and the myth of cowboys and men. A land their mother studied but never tried to own. The same as Angela. The same as Beth: landscape art. Midwestern lithographs. The Spiral Jetty, what Rhiannon still doesn’t know if Beth has ever seen. Billie’s birds. Work in tandem with the earth, even if the earth could take everything from them completely.

  Yes, Angela says. I’ve never seen anyone more in love with what they did.

  Rhiannon wonders if Angela is embellishing for her sake. She guesses Angela’s passion matches what her mother carried across her life, digging out here side by side as if nothing else mattered. Rhiannon feels her lungs falter, Angela’s words a slow blow that halts her breath: she wonders if anyone could ever tell just by looking at her what it was that she loved. The raceway. The road. A thought that buries her with grief, the first wave of sorrow she’s felt all day. Not the sage smoke of a fire ring. Not makeshift ashes thrown in frustration across a valley. Only that someone could so easily tell that her mother loved what she did and that Rhiannon knows without Angela having to say anything at all that the same isn’t true for her: that no one can tell just by looking at her what she does or does not love.

  GARCIA, BUD. A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO FALCONRY. COLUMBIA: UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS, 1990. 25–29. PRINT.

  CALL NUMBER: SK322 .Q2 1990

  BEGINNING FALCONRY EQUIPMENT

  Beyond adequate weathering pens and mews for falcon housing, as well as a proper diet of quail, rats, mice, chicks, and rabbit for high, medium, and low caloric value, birds of prey require a standard set of equipment for beginning falconers.

  Scales maintain a hawk’s flying weight, which must be measured every twenty-four hours. All hawks require perches, and broadwing birds such as red-tailed hawks require a rubber-topped bow perch that can be staked into the ground. A leash secures the hawk from the bow perch to the falconer’s glove. To tether a hawk to the glove, a set of jesses is affixed directly to a hawk’s legs and unlatched when the hawk is released for flying.

  To train a hawk to grow comfortable leaving the glove, a falconer needs a creance, a spool-like lure that will grow gradually longer as the hawk grows accustomed to flying longer distances. A lure is also necessary, with food attached to a dummy bunny to train the hawk to hunt. The creance and lure are required for use until the hawk is comfortable hunting on its own, and so the hawk does not get lost.

  Because hawks often do get lost at least once for every beginning falconer, bells strapped to the hawk’s jesses are advised, as is a system of telemetry. A small transmitter is affixed to the hawk, and the falconer keeps an aerial. Through signaling between the transmitter and the aerial, hawk and falconer may find their way back to each other if the hawk is lost.

  39.3228º N, 110.6895º W:

  Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, UT

  Billie stirs in the sun-warmed sheets of the trailer, daylight slatting through the blinds of the bedroom’s lone window. Rhiannon sleeps beside her, turned away. Billie’s eyes half crusted, a hard night past a harder day. Stolen car. A funeral. Scattered rock. Her father. And that her mother kept him from her for six years: inexplicable. She doesn’t remember falling asleep or hearing Rhiannon come in. She sits up and rubs the scabbed sleep from her eyes and creeps beyond the bedroom. She thinks to make coffee and doesn’t, her mouth cotton dry from taking too many beers from the cooler at the ceremony. She grabs a water glass instead and through the window above the rush of the kitchen sink watches a swelling disc of sun crest above the valley. She sets down the glass. Watches the light splinter across the jagged curves of each mesa and define their peaks. It steals her breath. A land so wide it almost makes her afraid beyond the closed space of a correctional center bunk bed, a communal cafeteria, the poplar tree line of a prison yard. If nothing else, she has seen sun-dusted rivers, a swirl of bats. She has seen the remnants of red dust on her sneakers and it is something.

  The bedroom door creaks behind her and Rhiannon squints out against the sunrise filtering through the kitchen window.

  Morning, Billie says.

  Rhiannon disappears into the bathroom. Billie doesn’t want coffee but knows Rhiannon will. She rummages in the cabinets until she finds a bag of grounds and fills the coffee maker, its staccato drip echoing through the trailer when Rhiannon reemerges.

  Hungry? Billie asks.

  Rhiannon sits at the kitchen table and rubs her face. Not really.

  You want coffee?

  Rhiannon glances at the coffee maker. I guess.

  Billie sits across from her. You want to ignore me for the rest of this trip?

  It’s kind of early for a fight.

  I’m not fighting with you.

  I don’t know what you want from me, Billie. I’ve done everything I can for you.

  Billie holds her tongue, the disappointment in her sister’s voice nearly unbearable.

  I picked you up, Rhiannon says. Drove you out here. Paid your way, your motel rooms, your meals. I barely balked when you took my car for an ill-advised joyride. But the funeral? Come on. Be better. You can do better than that.

  Billie sighs. There wasn’t even anything in that urn.

  Who cares?

  I fucking care.

  The coffee maker growls a prolonged groan, the pot finished, and Billie gets up and fills a mug and slides it across the table’s chipped veneer.

  Rhiannon cradles the cup. We knew coming into this that there’d be nothing here. Nothing to bury. It’s the ceremony that counts. It’s what Mom wanted for you.

  Billie plants her fingers on the table so her voice won’t waver. No, what Mom wanted was for me to be at her funeral in March.

  There’s nothing you can do about that.

  And fuck, how I wish there was.

  Rhiannon lets out a long breath. Is that what this is about?

  I don’t know. Fuck, Rhee. I don’t know.

  Then what, Billie? Figure it out. You can’t just go around for the rest of your life doing whatever the fuck you feel like doing.

  What, because you didn’t?

  What the hell is that supposed to mean?

  Billie shakes her head. Doesn’t want to start a fight. Doesn’t want to rip another chasm wide open between herself and someone else.

  It means nothing, she says. It means it’s hard enough knowing just how badly I fucked all this up by not being there for the real thing. On top of Dad being here. On top of him saying Mom kept him from visiting me for six goddamn years. Jesus, Rhee. Six years. I don’t know how to feel about either of them right now. Give me some fucking slack. None of this makes any sense.

  Rhiannon nods. I know.

  Why would she do that? Why keep him from me? Why keep him from me for six years only to have him come now, at the worst possible time?

  Or the best. Maybe she thought you’d need him the most right now.

  Billie looks up and feels the urge to say what’s gridlocked beneath her tongue: that it’s Rhiannon she needs right now. Rhiannon the most. A sister who’s barely spoken to her since she threw an urn of rock and gravel across a valley and Billie wonders only here in the trailer whether this second funeral means more to Rhiannon than she let on. Whether a proper goodbye in an Illinois cemetery was no fail-safe at all.

  How are you doing? Billie asks.

  So good of you to ask.

  I mean it. Are you okay?

  Honestly, I feel nothing.

  I heard you talking to Beth yesterday. Is everything okay?

  Rhiannon sighs. This has nothing to do with Beth.

  Then what does it have to do with?

  I don’t know. I just know I’m ready to go home.

  Look, I’m sorry. Rhiannon. I’m sorry I did what I did.

  I know.

  The rising sun filters light across the table and Billie hears the fight drain from her sister’s voice.

  I meant to be better, Billie says. To do what Mom wanted us to do out here. But it’s just too much. That guy in Col
orado Springs. The hawk feather Mom left me. This place. This place that meant so much to her. And now Dad being here. It’s just too much.

  I know.

  When’s he heading back?

  This morning. He’s heading up to Dacono.

  And us?

  I don’t know. I’m ready to leave as soon as you are.

  Billie stands. Retrieves her daypack from the trailer’s bedroom. Tries to remember what day it is: Sunday morning. She’s nearly lost track. She hasn’t opened their mother’s journal since they arrived at the quarry. She pulls the journal from the daypack and brings it back to the kitchen table.

  This has to be it, Rhiannon says. We made good time, considering. We have until this coming Saturday to get back. At this point, I’m fine with heading home early.

  Billie thumbs through the journal’s pages to the last one they opened. The allosaurus: what stood in the visitor center and marked their arrival to the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry’s coordinates. What led them here to Angela and Marcus. To their father. Billie turns the page and half anticipates a blank sheet of paper, the journal at its end. What she sees instead is an image that briefly stops her breath, that there’s any image at all.