One Day the Wind Changed (6 page)

A tall old man stepped forward, out of the group. This was Dr. Alexander, who had delivered all of the babies in the parish (recently, there had been only two additions to the dwindling community—Hannah, now seven, and a boy a year younger named Joey). Dr. Alexander pushed past Father Thomas. He knelt beside the fellow in the sky-blue pants. The doctor sniffed the air. Now everyone smelled it too: salt and brine. A blue horsefly buzzed about the doctor's head as he placed his ear to the stranger's chest, felt for a pulse in his wrist, and examined his eyes and throat.

“This man's lungs are filled with water,” said Dr. Alexander. “He has drowned.”

“Impossible,” said Father Thomas.

“See for yourself,” the doctor answered. He pressed firmly on a spot between the stranger's ribs. Water, green as seaweed, spurted from the young man's mouth. Everyone gasped as though each person, old and young, had developed breathing trouble.

Timidly, someone wondered aloud if this were an omen-of what, he couldn't say. Perhaps the cactus garden was sacred ground. It held the bones of desert pioneers. Who knows? The parishioners' heedless trampling of the dirt each week was an affront to God, maybe, and the spirits of these elders.

If so, why an anchor, why a sailor? someone asked. What did these things have to do with the desert?

Someone else suggested that the drowned young man might be a warning to the community that it was in danger of disappearing. After all, only two children had been born here in the last seven years; we are not being fruitful, we are not multiplying. We are getting old, all of us, and our good works will be swept away, with scarcely a ripple. Everyone agreed that this notion, however plausible, still did not explain why God had failed to speak to them through symbols more suited to the desert. A burning bush would be more like it, someone mumbled.

Then little Joey, the youngest member of the parish, squeezed past all the men and women, who stood planted, scratching their heads. Joey held an open Bible. Almost from birth, he had been a precocious reader. His mother read aloud to him every night from the Old and New Testaments, and made him follow her index finger with his eyes as it glided past words on the page. “Right here,” he said. “In the book of Genesis. God separated the waters above the firmament from those below.” He looked up. “There must be a sea above the sky!”

Father Thomas stared at Joey with amazement and pride.

“Listen!” Hannah said again. Above them, the racket grew louder. Now, six wavy-haired young men, also dressed in blue pants and no shirts, came scurrying one by one down the rope. One gripped a small silver blade similar to the instrument the first young man had carried. Two others balanced between them a thick wooden pallet about the length of an adult male.

The parishioners gave them room. Should they rush to greet these glistening figures? Should Mrs. Latour run inside the church and whip up a big batch of potato salad for a hospitality luncheon? But the strangers, like their brother before them, appeared to be oblivious to the crowd. While the one with the blade hacked at the knot in the rope, the others attempted to fasten their drowned compatriot to the pallet, using hemp straps. After two or three minutes, their faces turned blue. They seemed unable to breathe. Finally, the rope snapped free of the anchor. It flew this way and that, as though tugged by an object in turbulent motion. The man with the blade signaled urgently to the others. They dropped the pallet. It thumped against a tombstone, raising dust, and came to rest against it at a forty-five degree angle to the ground. The strangers gathered their fallen comrade in their arms and hurried to link hands. The man closest to the end of the rope snatched the line as it began to rise into the air, and he pulled the others behind him until they had winked out of sight in the uppermost reaches of the sky.

None of the parishioners spoke. Mrs. Latour pulled a thorn from her flesh. “O!' she cried.

Silently, Joey pointed to the pallet, then he gestured at the sanctuary door.

Six years later, Dr. Alexander was the first of the old generation to die. Then Mrs. Latour. Father Thomas lived to the flinty old age of ninety-eight, and by the time he was ready to lay his body down for the last time, Joey was a vigorous middle-aged man—who called himself Joe—on fire with the words of the Lord.

As they passed away, one by one, the parishioners were laid to rest under sparkling new tombstones on a small rise overlooking the cactus garden with its flowers, thorns, and graying, weathered markers. Joe worked hard to maintain the fresh headstones, but sun and dust had begun, already, to wear names and dates off the square granite faces.

Hannah had married Joe's younger brother, who was born a year after the visitation of the sailors from the sky. Her seven children sang joyously each Sunday, and louder than anyone else, after Joe's sermons. The remaining elders said these were beautiful youngsters and, along with a few others born to families over time, were bound to produce healthy stock for the future. Each week, once the service had ended, the parishioners filed from the church, brushing their fingers across the solid sanctuary door, carved from the left-behind pallet, and the hinges fashioned from the hooks of the anchor. Every now and then, one of the men or women glanced up. Though all year the days remained arid and dusty, sometimes, someone said, the sky turned—just a little, over in the east (“Look! Look!”)—the color of the sea.

I
've never left the desert. The serpent, still near, now in the shape of a diamond-back rattler, curls over black, eroded stones. He no longer tempts me to make fresh bread out of rocks. Instead, he tells me a fortune can be had in petroleum, but I'm not the least bit moved. I know the limits of the land. The pumps go up and down; their taut, metallic hammering drives right through my skull.

The roughnecks, knocking off for the night, toss their hardhats into the air, scattering skinny hounds in the road. The fellows head for the one bar in town, a small Texas town that remains a town just because Bubba's stays open. They laugh whenever they spot me.
Goddamn nutcase. Sees stuff that ain't even there. Thinks he's friggin' Christ, or something. Who knows, who knows? Rig broke, year or so ago. Conk on the noggin
.

I've heard much worse. Believe me.

Later, when Bubba's shut for the night, one wiry wildcatter stumbles to his trailer home, falls into bed next to a snoring woman. She wakes. They make love. I wait by their open window, tensed, poised to be useful if someone drunk or exhausted topples into a sinkhole here or burns himself in a gas-leak fire.

The couple coos. Their bodies cool. For a moment I'm only a jealous man.

Sensing my weakness, testing me, the snake hisses, “Take her. Just walk in and take her, man. Take it all. It's yours for the asking.”

I love it all, it's true, and love means grasping, want, desire. But the value of the desert is its poverty. That's why I've stayed. And stayed.

Tonight, refinery flames outshine the moon, revealing lunar emptiness right at my own two feet. I'm reminded there's nothing here to claim: worn-out odds and ends. Behind me, a collie circles, dragging a hurt hind leg. I've seen him before, begging by the bar, abandoned like all of Earth's creatures, but he's never looked so stark. Ribs, muddy paws. He whimpers, as quiet as the sighing through the trailer home window. Now he falters, breathes into the dirt. I kneel, inhale the dust from his fur.
O how I miss you
, I whisper,
O how I miss you already
, but I mustn't sit with any single victim. Too many. Too many. Eventually, I'll be forced to leave him to the diamonds, the hidden flowers that open their mouths in the night.

On evenings like this (but aren't they
all
like this?), I tell myself again and again, a hammer in my head, I must live with myself, with only myself. I must learn to love what isn't mine, since nothing is mine. Nothing has ever been mine.

W
as it the house, or what was happening in the house, that woke me, while tin bells sounded in my ears and dust pounded the window panes next to the clown in his big, brown frame on the wall?

My father had found us a three-bedroom rental on Hill Street, in a newly developed residential area near a power station and a row of Sinclair oil tanks. Our neighbors planted willows in their dirt yards, though these were poor attempts at trees. The wind carried dust and gravel past their leafless limbs and dumped them on our roofs each day. The tapping of pebbles on my window reminded me of poodles with pert, groomed nails prancing across a slick wooden floor, though where, at the age of seven, I had ever seen such dogs, or a wooden floor, I can't say.

Sometime after midnight, each night, I'd wake to the
tink-tink
of bells in the house—at the far end of the front hallway, in the kitchen, by the back porch door. Leather straps in bows tied the bells to my mother's fuzzy blue house shoes.
Tink-tink, tink-tink
, said the bells as she paced the darkened rooms holding my baby sister, hoping to rock her to sleep. Years passed before I registered the fact that the ringing always woke me, not my sister's bawling. At least where
she
was concerned, I seemed to have attuned myself to happiness.

Waking was not a welcome moment for me. Always, in the early mornings, dust-showers pierced the house. From the green wooden exterior to the foam insulation in the walls, ours was a house of dust.
Tink-tink, tink-tink
. I'd shoot up in bed, stirring, beneath the sheet, the heat-musk on my skin. Unfailingly, my first waking thoughts were of my grandmother, who had died of emphysema when I was an infant. I keep no memory of her death-rattle, though Mama swore to my presence in the room, writhing in her arms at the foot of the old woman's bed. Apparently, when Grandmother launched her last sigh, I determined that if
she
wasn't going to use more air,
I
would seize it. Mama said my eyes grew wide and I opened and shut my mouth, like a fish.

Now at night, in my father's house, I'd sit in the dark on my four-poster, listening for the window-scratching and the soft-stepping clarity of the bells. Seconds passed before I realized I wasn't breathing. Inside, my nose felt peppery—dusty and hot. I arched my shoulders and strained toward the ceiling. Up there, my father had pasted plastic glow-in-the-dark stars. I imagined I'd been sleeping in a canyon.

As I gasped, light-headed, stars flashed inside my skull—burst capillaries? (“capillary”: a word I'd learned from my mother as she sat at the kitchen table over iced coffee, working crossword puzzles).

The sparks mixed into a single blurry presence: Grandma's ghost, coming to reclaim her breath.
Tink-tink
. She was gone. Had I really seen her? Or felt her or
something
in the room? A tapping at the window. Gravel. Dust. At last, air moved through me. Inhaling, I traced its sweet ache, crashing inside me like an ocean. I rocked with the happy rhythm, and my gaze came to rest on the clown.

My father had found him in
Life
magazine, in a photo-essay on the theme of running away from home-as in “to join the circus.” The clown, in a green Irish leprechaun hat, smiled wistfully at the camera, but later, when my father reproduced his image in oils on a canvas, and hung it on my wall, the smile turned faintly malevolent-or maybe this was my child's imagination, for my father was a skilled, if untutored, amateur painter. I was delighted by the bullfrogs and finches and bluebottle flies he had rendered, as a youngster, on the backs of the bathroom cabinets in my grandmother's Oklahoma house. My father's imagined menagerie had survived the old woman, which impressed me with paint's scumbled power, so much stronger than the pulsing, soft organs inside us. Perhaps it was this feeling, inchoate but vivid in me as a child, that frightened me most about my father's clown.
This monster will outlive me
.

Each morning my father left the house and vanished in a veil of dust before he reached the end of the driveway (at least, this is my memory of watching him from the living room window—a small figure growing dimmer, as, down the block, the red lights on the power station's T-shaped electrical spires cut through the weak light of day). He may as well have flown to the moon. Would he ever get back home?

As soon as he left, my mother crumpled. All morning she wore her bathrobe. She wouldn't comb her hair. The bells rang on her feet as she breast-fed my baby sister and fixed me waffles. I attended school, though on many days asthma kept me in bed, and my most powerful recollections are of staying home with Mama, of shopping with her in the late afternoons, once she'd finally dressed.

While she pushed my sister in a cart inside the dime store, I'd ride the plastic pony by the door. It ate silver coins. It bucked up and down, like the oil pumps my father showed me once in the middle of the desert when I asked him what he did for work.

One day, my mother bought a vaporizer and placed it in my room: a round glass container, thick and green, brewing steam. “This will moisturize and cleanse the air,” she promised me. “You'll breathe better.” From then on, the vaporizer's hissing obscured the bells. I'd wake at night, feeling alone in the house, my breathing still rocky.

Mama must have cooked supper sometimes, but most evenings Daddy returned from his days downtown carrying bags of hamburgers or Chinese takeout from the Blue Star Inn. Once, my sister nearly lost an eye, playing with a chopstick while he prepared our plates. My mother scolded his carelessness, listlessly. He ignored her. Her misery with the house, the town-“Your boy can't even
breathe!
” she shouted one night in the kitchen-was so pervasive by now, I believe it was no longer, for him, one of her distinctive characteristics.

After supper, he'd ride me on his shoulders as he threw away the food bags. He'd stand in the alley behind our house, point at the stars, and tell me stories of the constellations: mythic quests, bears and dogs, seven secretive sisters. I didn't understand these tales, especially the stories of Greek or Roman heroes. Swords and pelts played no part in my desert life: the wait, each day, for Daddy to come home, for Mama to feel better.