The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (9 page)

“You won't tell, will you?” he pleaded.

I said no, of course I wouldn't tell; but we should leave before Terry came back.

“Terry isn't coming back,” said the Orange Tan. “Stay a little longer. I don't want to be left all alone down here.” I woke in the night to the sound of my parents' voices. Pop whispered questions and Umma just said yes and yes. Faron had thrown one leg over me. He stank of the marsh.

*   *   *

Next morning Terry Nguyen surprised us with cheese danish at Launch Control. The video was about flight suit maintenance. The lights went down, and when I felt my way from the pastries to my assigned seat beside Sylvia, I found it occupied by Bill Reade. He suggested I take his seat in the front row, and I did. But I couldn't concentrate. Her father's presence behind me was an iron beam, masterful and cold. While a man talked about the daily inspection of glove gaskets, Bill placed both hands on my shoulders. He kneaded them lightly and withdrew.

That night, after we'd picnicked between the trailers, the grown-ups retired early, leaving us kids to play Uno.

“I'm his,” said Sylvia, unprompted. “That's how he sees things.”

Faron nodded along. He stared at the discard pile like he had something he wanted to get off his chest. I wondered if he understood what Sylvia meant.

 

8.

Training settled into a pattern that was a torment for me and tedium for the rest. School, gym, analog, repeat. Months passed, six or maybe eight. Faron and Sylvia grew more restless to embark with every passing day. The more they learned about that legendary realm beyond the Night Glass, the more they wanted to explore it firsthand. All I hoped for was to get through Gyro without making everybody take five. As for Umma, her sadness dug in to a deep quiet corner where Pop's forced sunshine could not reach.

I discovered one morning that our bathroom window had been jimmied. Faron laughed at my theory that it was burglars. It was him. He closed his pocket knife and looked over the launch tower toward Indian River. He had snuck out the previous night to swim in the lagoon. Restless, he said. I wanted to know why he had not asked me along. Instead of answering, he picked up his buttonwood branch and kept working on a toy sword.

The trailer bathroom backed up to a hairy palmetto, perfect cover for a moonlit escape. When Faron slipped out again that night, I waited half an hour and then followed. Sylvia had been acting strange ever since our dip in the lagoon. She'd cosset me, hug my neck, and chat forever about nothing—the food in the Habitat, the sex lives of rabbits, my brother. But when her father came around, she treated me so cold I thought we were no longer friends.

That night I got it in my head to draw Sylvia out of her trailer, invite her for a swim myself. If we could return to that braless moment on Indian River, maybe we'd get somewhere.

Chips of cement lay around the trailers. I collected a handful and ducked inside the mangrove. From there I could wing them unseen at Sylvia's loft window. My aim has never been especially precise. The first two skimmed the top of the Reades' trailer; a third angled off a branch and struck the wall of their master bedroom. I dropped to my belly and slid backward into the brush.

A light went on. The trailer rocked from side to side as angry feet stalked through the kitchen. When the door flew open, there was Mae Reade. She judged the trajectory and angle of impact correctly, and walked toward the mangrove where I lay hidden. Meanwhile the loft light went on, too, and I heard the muffled cursing of Bill Reade; Sylvia must have been too frightened to speak.

Mae said: “Get out here, boy.” Not loud, not even mad-sounding. “Your slut is not available at the present time.” Sylvia's mother knew about me, about us.

The mangrove, as mangroves do, edged a torpid stream. I frog-legged backward into the water. It occurred to me then that a pair of juvenile gators had been seen basking on the banks that very morning. I must be brave, I thought, for Sylvia's sake, and slithered deeper into the stream, hoping the moonlight wouldn't show a ripple. Something walked across my back, its legs like chopsticks, but I pressed my head into the sandy bottom to stop my lungs from bitching.

When I could hold my breath no longer, I flipped onto my back and touched my lips to the surface. How long I lay in that cemetery pose, I do not know. Pop once told me that a fair bit of love is waiting it out. He meant Umma. She had endured so many of his bad spells, his jail time. But she had tested Pop's patience as well, in ways I did not then understand.

I heard a splash, as if a gator had slipped into the water, and decided I had waited long enough. I ducked back through the brush toward the clearing, where I found the Reades' trailer all lit up. Bill sat at the picnic table, eyes fixed on the coal of a cigarillo. He, too, knew how to wait in the interest of love.

To reach our trailer without getting caught meant a long hike through the woods and up the beach. When I finally emerged beneath our bathroom window, Bill was gone and the Reades' trailer was once again dark.

In the loft my brother lay on his stomach, eyes shut but hardly sleeping. His hair was still wet. I asked if he hadn't seen Bill Reade on his way in.

“You smell like dead shit,” he said, not looking at me.

*   *   *

The following morning the grown-ups were up and at the picnic table earlier than usual. They talked in fragments, trouble lurking in the long pauses. My name was spoken more than once. I decided I should take my lumps for last night so I left Faron dozing and crawled outside. The table was spread with decadent breakfast items, cold cuts, boiled eggs, a brownish fruit juice too syrupy for my taste. A jug of Haven Dark sat by the pitcher, and I saw that Umma was already deep into it.

Sylvia came out of her trailer and I showed her an exaggerated wince, but she didn't take the hint. I stood behind Pop, hoping his big frame would absorb the scorn Bill was about to heap on me. But I had misjudged the situation and its seriousness. This breakfast had been catered by Terry Nguyen. He loved to pack bad news in a gift basket. And this news was the worst.

“Wake up your brother,” Pop told me. I was confounded. What did Faron have to do with me and Sylvia? I nearly hucked a rock at the window, then considered Bill and thought better of it.

Inside I told Faron that something was up. I helped him into his jumpsuit and peeled off a leaf that had stuck to his neck. “It's some kind of meeting outside, with the Reades and everybody.” Faron looked spooked, but he walked right up behind Bill.

“Mr. Reade,” he said.

“Don't smart, boy,” said Bill. The Reades were awful sensitive types. “You wouldn't smart if you knew where you were headed.”

This was nothing to do with me and Sylvia. It was to do with training. In four days, Mae told us, we would phase into high-intensity analog exercises.
In situ
was the figure of speech she used. I gathered from a consensus of frowns around the picnic table that this was foreign for deep shit.

Before the Constellation program was forced underground, its would-be astronauts performed analog maneuvers high in the Arctic Circle on an island called Melville. The Gunts left behind explicit directions to the base and a spiral-bound copy of their training protocol. Terry, like any other good Bosom man, was determined to run this show, fantasy or not, by the book. Months ago Nguyen's scouts had discovered the remains of a Quonset hut and a shed full of ice-mining equipment on Melville Island. If we were to thrive, even breathe, on Europa, we would need to master the ice. Drink of it, crack it, control it. Poking holes in a skating rink was an insufficient analogy for homesteading a frozen moon. So we would pass sixty days in the nearest habitat to Europa our planet could muster.

Bill Reade claimed he'd flown look-see missions in Upper Canaday. Except for the Panarctic gas fields and a few copper mines, now exhausted, he called it a valueless place, and colorless, too. (A semantic coincidence occurs to me; Copernicus took his name from that precious metal, copper.) The Gunts said white bears once ruled the land, but their numbers were greatly diminished. Bill confirmed their existence. Those monsters are not gone, he said. “Nine feet, tail to maw,” he claimed. “And whiter than snow. I shot one from my jet, and that old boy just stood up and took a swipe at the sky.”

*   *   *

Three mornings later I woke up hugging my brother so tight, I couldn't feel my arms. Down in the master bedroom Pop was trying to coax Umma out of bed by appealing to her appetite. “He said sticky buns. Terry promised us sticky buns and fatty-meat rolls. As much as we could eat.”

He zipped up her jumpsuit and fussed with her hair. Me and Faron grabbed the bags Pop had packed the night before, and together we went outside to wait.

When it came to a feed, Nguyen was a man of his word. The Vanster was filled with the delicious aromas of palm syrup and grease. We gorged ourselves as he drove to the airstrip, where the KC-135 shuddered on the tarmac. All the way from Floriday to Canaday we flew in its padded cavity. I wished I hadn't eaten so many fatty-meats. At an air base in Fort Churchill we disembarked, dry-mouthed and dizzy from the fumes, and squeezed inside a bush plane bound for Melville Island.

I had packed for my entertainment an omnibus edition of Mr. Sheldon Rosette's late-period novels, most of which I had read more than once. One work, however, I had saved for last.
Nation of Sleep
concerns the misconceived life of a Gunt senator who discovers he is not a public servant after all but a prepubescent girl living in a budget motel. Every night she snuggles in under her pink pony duvet to dream up a complete nation called the United States of America.

The bush pilot put down on a neck of land named Sabine Peninsula. To reach our lodgings, we hiked an hour over a landfill of ice and dirt. Bill was right: this was a dead world. There were no grasses to wave hello, no trees to catch the steady wind. When you spied a patch of moss, you remarked on it. Melville Island was as solemn as the Atacama Desert, minus about 130 degrees. However, Bill had been wrong on one count: the Arctic is not colorless. Its palette is every shade of miserable, like a rainbow of gloom: ice white, dull slate, a mottled red like the bloom on a frostbitten cheek.

Still, it appealed to me, the blank acreage. From the moment we touched down on the tundra, I knew I had found a home. All that space was like breathing, a long draft of wine, like laughing and not caring who heard. My bones unlocked; the unobstructed view expanded within me. Years before I arrived in the Chilly desert I knew the appeal of open country.

An icy slope bent to the gray-haired sea. Hefty as he was, Pop performed badly on this surface. Faron had to spot him the whole way down, and even in crampons the big man took a bully header. When he landed you felt the whole island bob like a floating dock.

Nguyen marched us onto a teardrop of land. Ice floes swayed on either side. Under a snowdrift we spied the zinc wall of a hut. Terry indicated a shovel and said Faron should dig his way inside to start the heater. After a few minutes my brother emerged carrying an antique Bushmaster, which he leveled at Bill Reade's belly button.

“Reach for the sky!” he said.

Cool as he could, Bill complied. I knew my brother was pranking, but I was not sure if Bill did. Also: it didn't matter. Faron's jokes often ended serious. His ironies would get all tangled up with his impulses until he was just plain mad and driven to do what he had only been kidding about. The two men drew closer till the muzzle poked Reade's gut.

“Do you suppose I have not been shot before?” he asked.

Pop tried to drive them apart but slipped and hit the ice again. Everyone laughed, even Bill.

Nguyen grabbed the gun and hurried us inside the hut. “Save your ammo for the bears.”

A blue glow from snow-caked windows, the orange grin of a heater, the light inside was like permanent sunset. I could make out a small kitchen and, at one end, four pairs of bunk beds. Me and Sylvia would be sleeping in the same room, and Bill could do nothing about it. The bush pilot entered with a cheery noise—he was a whistler. He dropped a pair of crates beside the stove.

“That be all, Mr. Terry?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. See you in four weeks.”

The pilot hesitated by the door. “Somebody ought to go back outside and check on that lady.”

 

9.

High summer had begun in the Arctic. The sun that set over Melville Island would descend for another three months. A single pale dusk would slowly expire until September, when night fell and stayed down till spring's gradual dawn.

Umma sat on the ice outside our hut not weeping, not complaining, only watching that intractable sunset. I suppose she reflected on endings, how infernally slow they can be. Those weeks on Melville Island were meant to prepare us for Europa, only an exercise. For our poor mother, the exercise was too credible to be endured.

The Quonset hut had grown tolerable warm. Snow melted off the windows to let in the oblique summer light. But Umma refused to come in out of the cold. Pop unrolled their sleep sacks on a bunk. He brought her a cup of tea but she would not remove her hands from that damned canvas bundle. The mug melted a hole in the snow. The water refroze around it, as well as the tea inside, while she nursed that evil baby stuffed with syringes, rubber straps, and envelopes of rock fink.

When I think on Umma today, it is this picture that replaces all the happy ones: her too-big calico dress, her laughter at some Faron foolishness, her small figure hurrying up the Dixie Hiway past the bonfires to our home.

Pop had to carry her inside the hut. She did not fight him, nor did she uncross her seated legs. He put her down, still sitting, on the bunk, and curled up around her like a cat. When dinner was over, Terry drew the muslin curtains against the sunset, signaling bedtime. I slept with my face to the wall so that Sylvia would not see the wallet I kept pressed to my mouth. As I drifted off I wondered who it was controlled our destiny: some conspiracy of Chiefs, or a lonely girl who dreamed us up from a pretty pink room.