A Million Heavens (10 page)

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.

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.

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 what. 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.

He closed at nine each evening and then, before he went home, spent a couple hours out behind the station drinking whisky on ice. There was a nice view from behind the station, and sometimes when he was too sober his house made him lonely. The moon was out and the desert floor seemed to glow. It was near midnight and still the silhouettes of the mountains that buffered Sandia could be seen. The gas station owner used less ice as the night wore on. The aching in his joints had subsided.

The gas station owner, earlier that day, had been reading a book about Oppenheimer and his gang, the atomic set, all the scientists who had been
assembled from Europe. The gas station owner was jealous of people who got consumed with something, who could fall prey to an obsession of the mind, some intellectual entanglement that kept them up at night. The gas station owner was a practical person. He could think abstractly, but not in a productive way. He wished he could wander around in a stupor, his body lost but his mind focused, neglecting food and all hygiene. The gas station owner was currently drunk. That much was sure. If he was going to walk around in a stupor, it was going to be from Evan Williams.

The ice in the cooler was frozen together in one big chunk. The gas station owner arose and ambled into the back of the station and retrieved a butter knife. He sat and chopped at the ice until enough was broken off to make another drink—at this point, a few shards. Every night he told himself he needed an ice pick and every day he failed to endeavor to locate one.

The gas station owner had decided he wanted his nickname to be Shade Tree. These were the thoughts the whisky gave him. He didn't want to be addressed as Shade Tree; he wanted it on his gravestone, and wanted to be buried under a big cottonwood. A suburb called Rio Rancho had sprung up north of Albuquerque and the gas station owner had seen in the paper that they were getting ready to dedicate a cemetery. It was not easy, in the desert, to find unbought gravesites under consequential trees. The gas station owner made a plan to call the place in the morning.

He heard a car pull in out front. It happened a couple times a night. The driver would get out and examine the pump, searching for a place to slide a credit card, then curse a bit and maybe spit, then continue on down the road because that was all that could be done. The gas station owner liked to think, in this day and age, that people still ran out of gas. He wanted to live in a world where that still happened. The gas station owner did not fool around with credit cards. This hurt his business, but not that much. He hadn't heard a door slam, hadn't heard the car out front pull off. In a minute he'd have to walk around and check it out, make sure some idiot kid wasn't vandalizing the place, make sure it wasn't a drunk who'd pulled off and passed out. The gas station owner slurped some whisky. It tasted like sugar-water. It tasted like stale tea.
Clouds passed in front of the moon and the desert floor lost its luminescence. The gas station owner turned his head and someone was standing not ten feet from him, a tall man with thick hair and a baseball cap. The cap was sitting up on top of the hair. The gas station owner stood spryly, sloshing whisky on his sleeve. He faced the man, letting the man know he was alert, drunk but not
too
drunk.

“Help you, friend?”

The man looked over as if he'd just noticed the gas station owner, as if he'd sleepwalked out here. “I doubt it,” he said.

The gas station owner was not shaken. He was prepared to gently guide this man back to his vehicle or to fight him. The guy had on some kind of khaki outfit. There was a patch on his sleeve.

“You own this station?” he asked.

“Free and clear.”

“You Jay Fair?”

“People call me
Mr
. Fair when they're standing on my land.”

“I'm here about the illegal shooting of some elk, Mr. Fair. Seems not everybody respects the seasons. Not everybody in the world follows the laws passed by their legislators. That may come as a shock to you.” The man still wasn't looking at the gas station owner. He was looking off at the desert night. “You know anything enlightening about that topic?” he asked. “The topic of elk poaching?”

“I've never seen a rent-a-cop up close,” the gas station owner said. “I never go to the mall, so…”

The man wanted to smirk. He tapped the patch on his sleeve, which said FISH & GAME. The guy had something tied around his wrist, some type of animal call.

“Is that a whistle?” the gas station owner asked. “Do you have a whistle?”

The man had turned his head farther away. He was looking in the opposite direction of the gas station owner.

“What's so interesting out there?”

“Nothing,” said the man. “I don't like looking at poachers, is all. It makes me sick to look at a poacher.”

The gas station owner performed a sigh. “Poacher” seemed a trumped-up term for somebody who caused an occasional trespassing elk to become dinner. Obviously this ranger guy thought he was something special. That was why he was poking around in the middle of the night instead of during business hours. He thought he was some desert hero. The gas station owner wasn't going to ask about the late hour. He was going to pretend it was noon instead of midnight. “Look, I'm pretty busy with my whisky. How does this go? How long do you keep staring into space and making accusations? I could get insulted and demand a duel, if that'll speed things along.”