A Million Heavens (23 page)

The last time the wolf had gone to the window for a song was almost two full days ago. He needed one soon. The first song had come in the morning and the second one in early evening. If the people who lived in the house next door to the house with the chickens had glanced out
their little red-tinted kitchen window they would have seen him. They would've reported him.

From the gully the wolf could no longer see the chickens but he could hear them ruffling their feathers and knew when they were asleep. He could hear them bickering, pecking one another's feet. The wolf was not going to take a chicken. He was charmed by their vulnerability. The wolf was effortlessly guarding the chickens from the coyotes, now in the thick of their thin season. The wolf did not want anything to disrupt the delivery of the songs. He wanted the older woman to stay home all day, safe, boiling water on the stove and staring out the window and sometimes weeping, and he wanted the chickens safe in the yard and he wanted the road shushed quiet with the passing of healthy cars until he heard the racket of the girl's injured car and she was back from wherever the songs came from. He wanted to be shimmying under the window, pinned against the wall by those spiny bushes that were at once dying and growing unruly. There was a hunger in the wolf that was also a desire to starve, and the girl's songs were all that could help. He wished he could hear them always and then he could sleep in the day and howl at night like he was meant to.

It had been two days without a song. The sky was losing light. The wolf felt repulsed at the thought of eating, but he had the old itch for a kill. His teeth were sharp and too large for his mouth. He feared he was going to bite his foreleg hard enough to break the bone, and then he'd die stuck in this gully. His own blood was the saltiest he'd ever tasted and it reminded him that some blood was sweet. He would wait until midnight, if he could last that long. If the girl did not return by midnight with a song, he couldn't be held responsible for whatever wickedness his longing drove him to.

Her period arrived. She had believed she might be pregnant and had not allowed herself to think about it because she didn't want to jinx it, but she
had thought about it anyway, secretly, and she
had
jinxed it. She stood on the balcony and watched a posse of crows milling about down where she'd planted those avocado pits, their black wings tucked against the wind like men in coats.

She arose and put her eye to the telescope. The town was abandoned, the streets resting. There were wreaths on the lampposts. Eight of them. Dannie had sat out here one day and watched the mayor himself hang them. He had carried his ladder from post to post, had given each wreath a smack before he'd raised it. Dannie was drinking from a bottle of water, and she leaned over the railing and poured some down and it splattered on the desert ground as if on a tabletop. The water wasn't going to sink in. It was going to sit there like a kitchen spill until the night froze it or the day evaporated it.

She went inside, fetched her driver's license, and left it out on the kitchen counter so when Arn awoke he would see it and discover her true age. He still thought she was twenty-nine. She sat curled up on the couch and after a while heard Arn bumbling around in the bathroom. She heard the toilet flush. She heard the noise he made when he stretched, heard him getting into some crackers in the kitchen.

“You left your license in here,” he called.

“I did?”

“On the counter.”

“Notice anything?”

“About your license?” Dannie heard him pick it up. “The picture doesn't do you justice. That I can notice right off. It doesn't show how your skin is.”

Dannie didn't answer.

“California,” Arn said, distinctly pronouncing each syllable.

“Look at the date of birth.”

Arn clicked his tongue, thinking, doing math. “I get it, you're older than you said.”

“By how much?”

“You're thirty-three.”

“I'll be thirty-four in three weeks.”

“Shoot,” Arn said. “In that case, I've got shopping to do.”

“Let me guess,” said Dannie. She felt hostile and made no effort to keep it out of her voice. “You don't care. It doesn't matter how old I am. You're not mad that I lied. You don't think any less of me. Everything's hunky-dory.”

“Well,” Arn said.

“You don't care, right? What a guy. Guy of the year: Arnold Avery.”

“Should I fly into a rage?” Arn asked. “I can do that, just let me get some coffee first. Let me wake up a little and then I'll throw some shit around and curse.”

“That might be a nice change,” Dannie said.

There was a long pause then. Both Dannie and Arn tried to stay still, Dannie on the couch and Arn in the kitchen. They hadn't argued before. Dannie knew that part of her irritation was at herself for ever feeling she needed to lie in the first place. What, she was ashamed? She was afraid some dumb kid would think she was old? It had been an act of impulse, lying, but then she hadn't been woman enough to admit it and laugh about it and it had grown into something compromising.

Arn shifted his weight on the linoleum.

“Let me see
your
license,” Dannie said.

“It's buried at the bottom of one of my bags.”

“Can I see your wallet?”

“Sure, but the license isn't in there.”

Dannie heard Arn walking to the bedroom, then coming back toward her. He handed her the wallet and sat close on the couch. The wallet smelled like the inside of a new car. There was nothing in it but cash.

“When did you get this?”

“Tuesday.”

“What'd you do before that?”

Arn shrugged. “Pockets.”

“You don't have an ATM card?”

“My account's only a savings account.”

“Well, you need a checking account and you need a debit card and also a fucking credit card. If you want anyone to take you seriously.”

Arn looked at Dannie levelly. “I don't want anyone to take me seriously.”

“You don't have health insurance, do you?”

“I never do anything dangerous.”

Dannie folded the wallet and rested it on the coffee table and Arn made no move for it. Neither of them said anything for a few minutes and Dannie had no idea if the fight was over and no idea if she wanted it to be.

The coyote had been injured as a pup and had been rescued and rehabilitated by an Albuquerque veterinarian, mostly as a publicity stunt. It was decided the coyote would never survive in the wild with his lack of pack training, and so he was gifted to the high school out in Golden, whose teams were called the Coyotes. The coyote never snapped at anyone; in fact, children often had their pictures taken with him. The coyote lived in a spacious room adjacent to the gymnasium where weight room supplies were stored. The man who cared for the coyote, though not a paid employee, had been given the title of “trainer” by the high school's athletic department. He did his best to look out for the coyote, but still the animal was stolen each year by the rival high school. The last time, they'd dressed the coyote up like a ballerina and put the pictures in their school's newspaper.

The wolf hurled himself through the big glass window of the supply room. He disentangled his legs from the flimsy blinds, stepped over an iron bar, and walked steadily toward the coyote, who retreated a step but didn't cower. The wolf could only imagine the coyote was glad to be put out of his misery. The coyote hadn't been taught by his elders that a coyote's only duty was to survive at all cost.

When the wolf tasted the blood, he saw the trainer's life. The trainer received an amount of money each month that was meant to buy food for the coyote, but instead he pocketed the money and fed the coyote leftovers from the school's cafeteria, the tangy pizza and country fried steak. The
trainer was not mentally deficient, but he knew folks thought he was. His brother had died young. His mother was mean. The trainer was addicted to low-stakes gambling and stayed on his computer all night, blowing the dog food money and blowing an allowance he still drew from his grandmother, who loved him but had mostly lost her mind.

She had been distracted, but had not forgotten her hostilities with Nate. She set up a meeting with the leader of the devoted Shirt of Apes fans, at a location of his choosing, which turned out to be the picnic area of a farmers' market. The market was open on weekends but this was a Tuesday, so there was no food to be had, no drinks, no one around.

The guy was waiting for Cecelia, and when she walked up he gestured for her to sit down across from him at his picnic table. His sunglasses were crooked. They looked like they were about to fall apart. Cecelia had never seen this guy without his sunglasses on. He had attended the first month of vigils for Soren, she remembered, he and his gang, but they'd disappeared. Cecelia wondered if they'd quit for ideological reasons or because they'd found something better to do. She'd always been intimidated by him, at the Shirt of Apes shows, but the fact that he'd quit the vigils gave her a sense of superiority.

“I have five minutes,” the guy said. He didn't shake Cecelia's hand or smile at her.

“That should be sufficient.”

“I have something to say first. I think you're beautiful.” He spoke hurriedly and with little intonation. “Maybe not now, without the band, but on stage you were beautiful. I'm telling you this as a person who takes a keen interest in beauty. The way you looked with your guitar, wearing that dress shirt…”

Cecelia wasn't going to blush. She knew not to take the declaration personally.

“Yeah, must've been the guitar,” she said.

“You were an exquisite accompaniment. Reggie couldn't have had a better bandmate.”

“I've never known your name.”

“It's Marc, with a C.”

“Well, Marc, it's the other band mate I want to talk to you about. The third Ape.”

“Nate,” Marc said. “He was necessary. There wouldn't have been a band without him. Reggie wouldn't have started one. You wouldn't have.”

“He's starting a new band and he's going to use Reggie's songs. Their first gig is tomorrow.”

Marc took this in. He brought his hands above the tabletop. “We've already had a ceremony, putting those songs to rest.”

“You had a ceremony for Reggie?”

“For the songs. We scored each one out as sheet music and put the papers in helium balloons and released them. No one's supposed to ever play them again. That's the meaning of the ceremony.”

“It's despicable, right? What Nate's doing. It's a crime.”

“Of that, there's no doubt. No doubt at all.”

Marc was starting to stew, but the ball was still in Cecelia's court. She had to be specific.

“What I want is for you guys to do your thing,” she said. “I want you to show up at Nate's gigs and make sure they don't become popular. Like you did with us—scare everyone off. I don't want Nate making money off Reggie's songs.”

Marc rubbed his earlobe softly between two fingers. He knew how to enjoy mulling something. “The situation grieves me, but I cannot do what you ask. I wouldn't take my fanhood lightly that way. I wouldn't fake devotion and I wouldn't ask anyone else to.”

“Just this once?”

“I'm sorry.”

“For Reggie?”

He made a disappointed face at Cecelia, his lips pressed tight, and she knew she wasn't going to ask him again. What he was saying was
correct and she knew it. She'd insulted him, maybe. He had no idea what Cecelia was going through and she couldn't tell him—no idea she was being entrusted with new songs of Reggie's by means she couldn't fathom and that she needed to keep the old songs safe for reasons of principle but also because it was important that Nate suffered a loss. She was a curator of the mystical and was also a contestant in a common feud. Another song had arrived that morning, and Cecelia had recorded it on the cassette tape. She'd started to feel like a piece of machinery herself, equipment. She was compatible with a boxy, not-new tape recorder and also compatible with the hereafter. The song from this morning had been bluesy and the lyrics told of a man who'd tried to build his own river. The man digs the river out by hand and constructs docks on the river's edges and rests boats down on the dry waiting dirt and plants thirsty trees up and down the shore. Then he has to wait for a storm. The chorus was whistling, and Cecelia could still hear a trace of her own voice whistling away. She had begun to wonder if this happened to other people, if others received transmissions from higher planes of existence. Why would it only be her? It was tiring to walk around like everything was normal when really you were a participant in a secret supernatural entanglement, but maybe lots of people were living under these conditions. Maybe Cecelia wasn't anything special. Scores of folks were walking around with knowledge they couldn't share and that, if they did share it, no one would believe.