Thalo Blue (52 page)

Zeb, aware of the tension, but not able to step around it, reached out for a hamburger bun. His hand moved awkwardly as if aware that every set of eyes on the table was on him, and he knocked over his glass of orange punch. It spilled outward as the plastic cup fell on the table. There was a torrent of orange liquid, like a miniature wave, and it coated the white table cloth.

No one even made an attempt to stop the spillage or clean it up.

He looked at his mother and she had tears in her eyes—they were pink and he thought if he moved closer he would see them bloodshot and filling like little pools. And when Daniela looked at Dad, Sadie bolted from her own chair, letting it fall backwards to the mottled lawn. She ran to the house. And the table of guests sat silent in a glowering breeze of hot air.

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He went inside because he thought the sight of the camel’s intestines would finally make him let go of his own insides, but more importantly, Daniela’s innocent silence coupled with the idle chatter of Mr. Merridew and Mr. Wittman—both of whom really always gave Zeb the willies anyway—had finally begun. It was banal, that talk, like usual. It was trite and needless and it made Zeb see a dull tan on the trees that were usually a glossy and fertile green. And since his dad was no longer there, he thought he could get away with being rude. There would be no consequence if he wasn’t caught.

Oliver had gone inside to do—it would seem—whatever a husband chases after his wife for when she has gotten upset in a public display. In the kitchen they talked. Well, Oliver talked, his voice raised but not too raised. He pulled on Sadie’s arm. Zeb stood in the bathroom with the light off and the door partially, silently drawn. He was unknown to them, having come in the side door.

Sadie was leaning over the counter, her head hanging like it was broken. Oliver stood soundless for a moment, a full moment, only staring at the side of Sadie’s face. They looked a long way from their happy courtship of ten years before, when a hammock stretched across the living room of a shabby apartment they could barely afford.

They were naked and content in the moment then.

But not now.

Zeb watched still unseen from behind the drawn bathroom door, his serious nine-year old profile lost in the vanity mirror’s reflection, and his father paused, stopped raising his voice altogether. He seemed to realize, almost to snap out of it, and know that getting angry with someone else who is angry does little good. Then he said, low with soothing effort in his voice,
Come on Sadie-babe, it’s just the rest of today, then tomorrow. Please. This has to go smooth sailing or Merridew’s going to make be look really bad. Wittman’s the uppity-up. If he likes me I’m in. We’re in. Good things. Smooth sailing. You know that.

We can talk about all this later.

That appeased her, but did not trim away the anger.

It’s not just all that
, she said.
It’s—It’s something else too. But—you’re right—we’ll talk about it tomorrow, later...after all this. Go. Go fishing.

He thanked her, as Zeb stood unseen in the doorway of the bathroom with his queasiness forgotten for a moment. But, it seemed to him, though only nine and never knowing what was going on, that Oliver was thanking her for the wrong thing.

But he went. A little while later, after everyone had eaten something with pedestrian politeness and mock happiness, Oliver led Mr. Wittman and Mr. Merridew to the boat at the launch in the front east corner of the property, a boat which no one there knew he had only borrowed from a sometimes neighborly family man with interests in the real estate business. That man would be upset with Oliver because the boat, a large flat-body barge particularly good for shallow water fishing, would have a large dent and a tick in its engine when it was returned. Oliver would never be able to borrow that boat again.

And Zeb would remember that detail easier than he would the black tiles of his mom’s cool bitterness but not as quick as the sickly sight of potato salad.

The detail he would remember the absolute clearest, though, the one that he could always, for years and years, replay like a piece of filmstrip on an ever-ready projector inside his head, was of that boat driving off through the shallow edge waters of Lake Charlemagne.

He stood, in the late-day sun, on this side of the closed gate, watching as dad looked back from the flat deck. That arm came up in what could have, might have, been an attempt at a wave. But it just held there, that arm, just became a stiff, motionless half-wave. A salute, maybe, or a flag pole without a piece of fabric in the wind.

It was soundless and empty but it stayed with Zeb.

Even after his mother didn’t.

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In the morning, after a breakfast of eggs and bacon—when cracked, the eggs came out nearly crystallized and the bacon had been a rock despite the fact that neither had been in the refrigerator—Zeb walked through the snow in back of the cottage. Pleased that the day promised more mildness, he walked longer than anticipated. He went into the inclines, the vales and the slopes of those northern trails which, even long after the summer of his ninth year, he knew nearly as well as his own form in a mirror.

Dr. Rutherford certainly did not have this in mind when he sent Zeb out to heal. He was alone in the quiet woods, trudging through thick drifts of snow down trails of his childhood. The snow squeaked and crunched under foot. Beneath it, long dead twigs and pieces of bark snapped and cracked. Inside his shoes, his socks were wet, and so were his pant legs. His toes were chilled, but they, as did his finger tips and the tips of his mind, felt invigorated.

He was humming.

Among the ash trees, the pines and spruces, the oaks and elders, the poplars and birches, he spotted a deer and another fox, maybe the same one. He meandered as his feet got colder and his body got warmer, heading for a spot he remembered well. Atop his humming Zeb realized he could hear a plane overhead, as though it had always been there, noisily present. He looked up, expecting to see a small dark shape gliding behind the white and black of the overhead branches where snow clung. But there was no movement up there, none to match the sound. It was one of those instances when one sense finds some information but the others can’t catch up. They are left blind, scraping upon needed realization beneath a hint of desperation.

Comprehension eludes capture while a hunt for the source of the inspiration begins.
Where’s that little trinket, the one catching the light just so?

He half expected, among the drone of the mysterious flyer, a growing whistle, like the sound of a bomb dropping, and he pictured the trees around him, though damp and frozen, igniting with flame nonetheless. A giant rush of colorless movement, cat-like in a jump that you don’t see coming. For solace he pictured a doorway at the cottage, one in his hallway in Vaughan, but out here there would be no shelter from such an unwieldy torrent.

Breathing heavier, yet still not in competition with the buzzing specter above, he made his way through the brush, up a winding path that he knew led to an unshaded clearing. Overhead the plane hummed with greater urgency. Loud it came, then fell way, only to swell loud again. It seemed to be circling. He searched for it above him, carefully picking his way around tree roots, ice-coated rocks, and sapling stems, but was still unable to see it.

In his mind he had a vision of a military plane, dark green and black, sleek, a bird, all wings with something like a heavy hood across its face as it swooped and fell, rose and rolled. Inside there was a dark glove with a finger hovered over a red button on something that looked vaguely like the joystick for a video game. It did not surprise him, this notion that rank and fire would fall from the sky. This was a mixed up world. And the concept that judgment should come hurling out of nowhere seemed just as likely as not.

He came to that clearing, a small space filled with junk, old water heaters, rusted mattress springs with their fabric all decayed away, car parts, bottles and cutlery. The sound of the plane had faded to indistinguishable within the subtle noises of the forest and all he heard then was a faint
tinktinktink
.

There was the back end of a Ford half ton in the mounds of junk and bother, brown in color, but covered in reddish rust. F O R D stood out in faded white letters and the bed of it sat tilted on its axis where two rubberless wheels found a niche in the frozen soil, dead grass, brown clover, and white cushion of snow.

Out of that flat bed, where it had been hidden from view, came a hopping black bird—a crow—with long black beak and silken feathers.
Tink-tinktink
. His claws made that peculiar noise on the cold metal of the tailgate as he perched there and resettled himself, kicking loose some of the white down. The crow had nothing to say.

“C-A-W,” Zeb spelled, under his breath, and the crow seemed to tilt his head towards the boy. “CawCAW,” Zeb said a little louder. He thought about the plane’s noise, and of the lyrics from a song he just invented—the one he had been humming. He committed that tune, and its words, to memory then. And he called it
The Third Planet
.

The Faraway Place.
Those words, somehow tied to the title of the song, came to him like the last drip from a canteen. A pure little nugget of thought with no real precursor, the kind you get when you’ve been struggling to pull something close and then you step back from it—only to have it fall effortlessly into your lap. “Zeb,” his mother said in his memory, “Get your water paints and your papers and brushes, we’re going to the Faraway Place for the weekend. Come on, hon, pack up.”

That’s right; The Faraway Place
.
I’ll be damned.
Long before Zeb had an understanding of time and distance, when he was still only five or six, he had dubbed the cottage at Charlemagne Lake with that informal title. Charlemagne was too hard to for him say yet, and Edan was not nearly as interesting. He only knew that the drive seemed to take forever and he couldn’t color in his books or writing tablet from the backseat of the car during the trip—it was too jittery on the road, and especially on the gravel, to keep control of his crayons. But he knew the faraway place was getting close when they were on that gravel and the water came near to the car and then wound itself away as they went up inclines and into thickets of trees. In those moments The Faraway Place was at its closest point without being there yet. The Faraway Place, just then, was at its most real without
being
real.

On the tailgate of the truck’s bed, the crow had not left, had only stood and cocked his ascot of black feathered neck this way and that. He was not necessarily sizing up Zeb but not necessarily looking to flee from him at any moment either. Zeb turned away from the crow perched there on the tailgate of the old rusted Ford, and headed back towards the cottage with the song—and that phrase, The Faraway Place, still fresh in his mind—like an unopened tube of oil color. The day was getting milder, his breath was faint. It was Tuesday, still mid-morning, give or take. And fire had not come from the sky, raining on him like assured death. He wondered when—
if
—Malin would be coming. He couldn’t wait to show her his painting.

V. A Falling Gate Prophecy

He heard her but did not see her.

He had been sitting on the couch in the living room next to the easel where he had thrown a sheet over his latest painting. There were tubes of paint scattered on another sheet at his feet and the whole room was a scene of misshapen ghosts. Beside him, on the similarly sheet-covered sofa, was his Book of The Dead, tan and gray. He was leafing through pages, reading bits of his own words randomly, like they were just occurring to him. Some thoughts sounded foreign. Some hit so close to home he nearly choked on them.

And, on the latter pages, there were fastened one or two Polaroid or standard prints of his mother. A stack he had found yellowing in an old box when he was thirteen had been painstakingly split up and matched with sketches and dialogue on each page. As though looking through some marvelous artifact from a bygone age, he turned pages with his eyes wide.

“‘April seventeenth,’” he read aloud, looking down at Sadie’s exposed form. “‘We think of ourselves as containing time. But in actuality, it is time that contains us. We are born and instinctively, over our lives, through parents and the day-to-day we learn a kind of lesson about that. We look ahead and see the countdown towards our implied finality. Maybe eighty years, perhaps a touch more, if we are extremely lucky. And we set about, in our sloppy manner, to fill up the days as the days count down.

“‘But we don’t have time. Time has us. By the long and the short.’”

Sebastion took a breath, considered, then continued.

“‘And perhaps life is the same. Do we have life? Do we breathe into it, or does it breathe into us? Is it ours? Or does it have us...held in a slippery tenure that can detach at any moment?’”

He looked out the window at the snow of the yard, past the car’s silver coat, at the ice and snow atop the lake’s winter skin.

Then he turned the pages again, and found another one.

“‘March seventh. ...Let's call it "eventuality," that force that allows everything to ultimately work itself out. If you sit on your hands long enough, the answers don't necessarily come, no one is necessarily better off, but things will find their own way to a natural set of conclusions. Just you tempt it; leave things alone and see if Eventuality doesn’t ring the bell with its luggage in hand and a big smile on its face.’”

Zeb stood and moved about the room.

“‘August twenty-third. Money grows on three branches: comfort, security, and power.’”