The Boys of My Youth (10 page)

The camper people are out of it. Their colored lanterns are dark now and the TV is on inside, the glow of Letterman and his
guests reflected in the window. I can see a head framed in the light, surrounded by a frizz of hair. It’s the poodle, looking
at stars.

We clear the table and spread out a sleeping bag on it, flannel side up. This is the best way to watch the sky. Eric has his
red flashlight and charts, I have my sweatshirt zipped and a Walkman with two pairs of headphones. It’s his turn to choose
a tape so I’m waiting for something discordant and spooky but when he pushes the button it’s one of my favorites.
Thank you
, I mouth to him. He smiles, closes his eyes, and takes my hand. Side by side. He moves into the solitude of headphones and
constellations. I am perched on planet Earth, Milky Way galaxy, who knows what universe. Way up there, satellites are parked
with their motors running, and vivid rings of plasma do laps around Saturn. Way down here, there is only the terrible arch
of the sky, the sagging moon, and nothing else.

The earphones make my head feel like a hollow tube, full of horns and drums and a voice that echoes like green glass. I am
alone inside my own skin and the edges of everything have begun to darken slightly, curling and browning, the beginnings of
disintegration. Inside my chest a heart begins knocking to get out. I am alone down here, and up there, clinging to the spoke
of a satellite, looking upward at the dark velvet, and downward at the dark velvet.

There is nothing.

Pockmarked and surly, the moon steps back and drops the curtain, darkens the theater for the stars. The clock is halted, the
desert gives up its heat. A finger-size lizard with infrared spots and oval eyes finds itself, one second too late, in the
damp cotton of a mouth. Power lines gleam and bounce their signals on the ground, startling the brain waves of small mammals,
putting thoughts in their heads. Something swims through the medium of sand and surfaces, pinches hard and holds on.

In the endless black of deep space a small comet hurtles along, tossing iceballs and dirt behind it, on a perpetual path,
around and around and around, pointless and energetic. Propelled by the force of its combustion, the comet passes within
a light year of Sirius, burning out of control. Under the press of gravity and air, inside the earth’s atmosphere, the coyote
reads the signals in the ground, whirls, stops, and sprays a bush. He begins loping again, without awareness, the desire widening,
a dark basin, until he cries as he runs, low and controlled. They are somewhere.

The moon is gone and Eric has fallen asleep beside me. Planets and stars. I know only the ones that everyone knows: the sun,
the moon, the dippers, Gemini and Cancer. They move into formation, still and distant as dead relatives, outlining the shape
of my mother’s mouth. Nothing moves. Inside my head images emerge and retreat, emerge and retreat. I have to open my eyes.
In the vivid blackness overhead a diamond falls through the sky, trailing its image, a split-instant of activity. By the time
I realize I’ve seen it, the sky has recovered. I can’t breathe in this emptiness. I turn on my side on the hard picnic table
and look at Eric.

He is awake, watching me. He knows the desert is making me sad, that I have these moments; he smiles and moves up close. I
can feel the sky on my face, the warm flannel of the desert floor below. I can feel the face of the man beside me. In the
silence of the monument he begins whispering the names of the constellations while I listen: Cygnus the Swan, Pegasus the
Horse, Canis Major the Great Dog, Cassiopeia, Arcturus.

I am on planet Earth.

They are near. He pulls in the scent with loud snorts, running from bush to rock to bush again. This is a clearing, a high
naked spot. On the distant rise, just ahead, waiting, they are still invisible, but the scent rises in the air around him,
palpable
as mist. He opens his mouth wide and stands frozen, ears back, eyes pressed shut. The dirt beneath his pads is hard and dry,
devoid, the moon is gone.

As the mist rises around him, the sound comes forth, pulled from tendon and muscle. It pushes itself through his lungs and
into the night, a long trembling wail, dying slowly, drifting finally, without his help, dissipating. Still frozen, he listens
for a moment to the roaring silence, waiting, and slowly the sound moves back toward him, fainter, broken into parts like
music. Many voices.

They are ahead of him, in the high clearing where the deer sometimes sleep, pausing to listen, ready to bring him in with
the radar of their voices. He begins running again and gravity relinquishes its hold. The terrain becomes buoyant and he soars
low over the ground, like a night bird, a skipped stone.

The tent is completely dark. I am floating on the ocean in a canoe, each dip of the oar pours out a panful of light, beneath
the surface small silver minnows hover like aircraft. My big collie roams along the shore, following the boat, whining low
in her throat, stamping her white paws against the sand. I row toward the beach, casting light behind me, and she begins to
bark.

I am awake suddenly in the darkness. Outside the tent is the padding of feet, around and around, a swift turning, a pause.
There is something in our campsite, trying to get our food. Eric startles and wakes, I touch his hair, breathe into his ear.
The paws turn again, there is loud panting, the low whine, and then a series of barks and yelps, a prolonged terrible howl.
It is deafening and wild, I can feel him out there, conjuring hysteria out of the dark. A long, plaintive keening, and suddenly
it ends, drifting off, carried away from us. We are breathing low and shallow, resting on our elbows.

When the reply comes he joins in, barking first and then crying, pitched high then low, the howl of loneliness and communion.
It is lunar and eerie, the pleading of the cold, dead moon to the blue and green revolving earth, the call of sister stars
across years of space, the cry of a child who has lost her mother. Now it is coming from every side, the beautiful wailing;
they are swarming over us, gray and brown ghosts, distant relatives.

In our green cocoon, we move closer to each other, hands, faces, knees. The walls of the tent press down like skin, the ground
presses up like bone. The coyote is gone, suddenly, the air thins out and becomes ours again. Inside the narrow landscape
of the tent, hills and valleys realign, adjust themselves, realign again with whispers.

The coyote runs, straining to reach the others, a quarter mile away, over the crest of the ridge. They are waiting for him
in the darkness, in the burning desert with its lifted arms of cactus. In the dark tent, on my smooth ocean, inside my mind,
he is there already, gray and golden like the desert, like the moon, moving among them in the clearing, feeling the thrust
of snouts, the padding of many paws, the push of love.

I
t’s okay to be married to a per
-fectionist, at least for a while. Just don’t try to remodel a house with one, is all I can say. This is what he’ll do: set
you up with practice boards and nails to make sure you have the technique completely down before you attend to the task at
hand, which he has suggested would be the best task for you at this particular time in your training. You sigh and jokingly
threaten him with the hammer but because you aren’t adept at pulling nails from ceiling trim you grudgingly work on the practice
boards until you can almost remove a nail without splitting the wood all to hell. It makes your knees hurt to crouch that
way so you take a doughnut break, staring out the dirty window at the neighbor’s house across the way. The perfectionist comes
in on his way from a completed task to a waiting, un-begun one. He notices you standing there and grins.

“It doesn’t get done that way, does it?” he kids you.

You feel revitalized from the jelly filling and pour a tepid cup of coffee from the thermos, head back in, crouch some more.
The pieces of trim are in pretty good shape, long stately things that will nestle up against the ceiling, hopefully hiding
the uneven line between wallpaper and paint. The perfectionist is feeling very sensitive about that particular uneven line,
since he tried and tried to make it straight. You assured him over lunch the previous day and again over dinner that the line
would be covered up by the lovely trim. You, in fact, feel encouraged knowing that an uneven, almost jaggedy, edge will be
hiding in the house. You tell the perfectionist this in a joking way and he stares at you for a long moment and then smiles
uncertainly.

In the other room you can hear him giving explicit directions to his brother-in-law, who owes you guys a big favor for helping
him put an oak floor in his den last summer. The perfectionist convinced him to go ahead and sand and refinish all the floors
in the house while he was at it. After all, he explained, you might as well do it right. Then it’s done and you can feel good
about it. You know? His own sister didn’t speak to the perfectionist for about three weeks after that, until the job was done
and her furniture was back in place. He kept advising her to try another way whenever she got frustrated and started sanding
wildly against the grain. Unfortunately, she knew that “try another way” is what they used to say to the retarded citizens
at the sheltered workshop where he worked after college.

“I’m not retarded, pal,” she told him.

No matter how hard you try, the long, lovely pieces of trim start out fine and end up with these odd-looking splits and splinters.
He’s whistling in the other room. You try a different technique than he showed you and suddenly the longest piece has become
divorced from itself. Oh dear.

“Well,” says the perfectionist, standing in the doorway. “We’re having trouble, I see.” He sets down his chisel and shows
you once again how to tease the nail from the wood. “You can’t just go nuts on it,” he explains. “You can’t
wrestle
it.”

Carefully and efficiently, he sets himself to the task. Within fifteen minutes the wood is free of the nails, which are stacked,
mostly unbent and ready to be used again, on a windowsill. You open the can of spackle with a screwdriver and begin the tedious
job of filling all the little holes left behind. He’s behind you before you know it.

His hair is tufted up in back from the hat he’s been wearing and his pants have plaster dust on the knees. He has the sweetest
face of any man you’ve ever seen. He smiles. “Just be sure not to glob it on,” he says gently, and then retreats again, into
the rest of the house, which is structurally unsound but possibly fixable, just like you.

T
he collie wakes me up about
three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline,
barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched
to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love.

She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator
— careful, almost went down — then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet, in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here
she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard.

In the porchlight the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like
something erased on a chalkboard. Over the neighbor’s house,
Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon
with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there.
Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds
of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us is aware
of it yet.