Ron Rash - Burning Bright

It takes me a minute to find her, right up on the front row, writing down every word the teacher is saying. I’m next to a hedge so it keeps me mostly hid, which is a good thing for the moon and stars are out. The teacher ain’t some old guy with glasses and a gray beard, like what I figured him to be. He’s got no beard, probably can’t even grow one.

He all of a sudden stops his talking and steps out the door and soon enough he’s coming out of the building and I’m thinking he must have seen me. I hunker in the bushes and get ready to make a run for the truck. I’m thinking if I have to knock him down to get there I’ve got no problem with that.

But he don’t come near the bushes where I am. He heads straight to a white Toyota parked between Lynn’s Chevy and my truck. He roots around the backseat a minute before taking out some books and papers.

He comes back, close enough I can smell whatever it is he splashed on his face that morning. I wonder why he needs to smell so good, who he thinks might like a man who smells like flowers. Back in the classroom he passes the books around. Lynn turns the books’ pages slow and careful, like they would break if she wasn’t prissy with them.

I figure I best go ahead and do what I come to do. I walk across the asphalt to the Chevy. I kneel beside the back left tire, the barlow knife in my fist. I slash it deep and don’t stop cutting till I hear a hiss. I stand up and look around.

Pretty sorry security, I’m thinking. I’ve done what I come for but I don’t close the knife. I kneel beside the white Toyota. I start slashing the tire and for a second it’s like I’m slashing that smooth young face of his. Soon enough that tire looks like it’s been run through a combine.

I get in my truck and drive toward home. I’m shaking but don’t know what I’m afraid of. I turn on the TV when I get back but it’s just something to do while I wait for Lynn to call. Only she don’t. Thirty minutes after her class let out, I still ain’t heard a word. I get a picture in my mind of her out in that parking lot by herself but maybe not as by herself and safe as she thinks what with the security guard snoring away in some office. I’m thinking Lynn might be in trouble, trouble I’d put her in. I get my truck keys and am halfway out the door when headlights freeze me.

Lynn don’t wait for me to ask.

“I’m late because some asshole slashed my tire,” she says.

“Why didn’t you call me?” I say.

“The security guard said he’d put on the spare so I let him. That was easier than you driving five miles.”

Lynn steps past and drops her books on the kitchen table.

“Dr. Palmer had a tire slashed too.”

“Who changed his tire?” I ask.

Lynn looks at me.

“He did.”

“I wouldn’t have reckoned him to have the common sense to.”

“Well, he did,” Lynn says. “Just because somebody’s book-smart doesn’t mean that person can’t do anything else.”

“Where’s Janie?” Lynn asks when she sees the empty bed.

“She took a notion to spend the night with Momma,” I say.

“How’s she going to get to school come morning?” she asks.

“I’ll get her there,” I say.

Lynn sets down her books. They’re piled there in front of her like a big plate of food that’s making her stronger and stronger.

“I don’t reckon they got an idea of who done it?” I ask, trying to sound all casual.

Lynn gives a smile for the first time since she got out of the car.

“They’ll soon enough have a real good idea. The dumb son of a bitch didn’t even realize they have security cameras. They got it all on tape, even his license. The cops will have that guy in twenty-four hours. At least that’s what the security guard said.”

It takes me about two heartbeats to take that in. I feel like somebody just sucker-punched me. I open my mouth, but it takes a while to push some words out.

“I need to tell you something,” I say, whispery as an old sick man.

Lynn doesn’t look up. She’s already stuck herself deep in a book.

“I got three chapters to read, Bobby. Can’t it wait?”

I look at her. I know I’ve lost her, known it for a while. Me getting caught for slashing those tires won’t make it any worse, except maybe at the custody hearing.

“It can wait,” I say.

I go out to the deck and sit down. I smell the honeysuckle down by the creek. It’s a pretty kind of smell that any other time might ease my mind. A few bullfrogs grunt but the rest of the night is still as the bottom of a pond. So many stars are out that you can see how some seem strung together into shapes. Lynn knows what those shapes are, knows them by their names.

Make a wish if you see a falling star, Momma would always say, but though I haven’t seen one fall I think about what I’d wish, and what comes is a memory of me and Lynn and Janie. Janie was a baby then and we’d gone out to the river for a picnic. It was April and the river was too high and cold to swim but that didn’t matter. The sun was out and the dogwoods starting to whiten up their branches and you knew warm weather was coming.

After a while Janie got sleepy and Lynn put her in the stroller. She came back to the picnic table where I was and sat down beside me. She laid her head against my shoulder.

“I hope things are always like this,” she said. “If there was a falling star that would be all I’d wish for.”

Then she’d kissed me, a kiss that promised more that night after we put Janie to bed.

But there wasn’t any falling star that afternoon and there ain’t one tonight. I suddenly wish Janie was here, because if she was I’d go inside and lay down beside her.

I’d stay there all night just listening to her breathe.

You best get used to it, a voice in my head says. There’s coming lots of nights you’ll not have her in the same place as you, maybe not even in the same town. I look up at the sky a last time but nothing falls. I close my eyes and smell the honeysuckle, make believe Janie’s asleep a few feet away, that Lynn will put away her books in a minute and we’ll go to bed. I’m making up a memory I’ll soon enough need.

Perhaps if work had been less stressful, Boyd Candler would not have heard the owl.

But he hadn’t slept well for a month. Too often he found himself awake at three or four in the morning, his mind troubled by engineering projects weeks behind schedule, possible layoffs at year’s end. So now, for the second night in a row, Boyd listened to the bird’s low plaintive call. After a few more minutes he left the bed, walked out of the house where his wife and daughter slept to stand in the side yard that bordered the Colemans’ property. The cool late-October dew dampened his bare feet. Jim Coleman had unplugged his spotlight, and the other houses on the street were unlit except for a couple of porch lights. The subdivision was quiet and still as Boyd waited like a man in a doctor’s office expecting a dreaded diagnosis. In a few minutes it came. The owl called again from the scarlet oak behind the Colemans’ house, and Boyd knew with utter certainty that if the bird stayed in the tree another night someone would die.

Boyd Candler had grown up among people who believed the world could reveal all manner of things if you paid attention. As a child he’d watched his grandfather, the man he and his parents lived with, find a new well for a neighbor with nothing more than a branch from an ash tree. He’d been in the neighbor’s pasture as his grandfather walked slowly from one fence to the other, the branch’s two forks gripped like reins, not stopping until the tip wavered and then dipped toward the ground as if yanked by an invisible hand. He’d watched the old man live his life “by the signs.” Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered, and the timber cut, even when a hole was best dug. A red sunrise meant coming rain, as did the call of a raincrow. Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, and a life about to end.