Tim Horvath - Understories

“No, honey,” said Lena to Kelly, pulling her by the sleeve back onto the trail.

Kelly looked like she was about to cry, and Scully leaned over, patted her head, and said, “It’s okay. Just that the growing season here is real short, so our meadows are real delicate.”

We moved together. I watched the backs of Emmett’s sneakers, flashing red bulbs. Each of his steps looked like a potential stumble. We stopped to watch mountain goats on the side of a hill; they seemed unperturbed by the steepness, well over forty-five degrees. Scruffy, absorbed only by the next mouthful, they barely noticed us. “Yes, they’re eating an early dinner,” said Lena to Emmett. Then she turned to Scully. “It’s amazing that they can walk up there.”

“These goats love the extreme angles.” He indicated this with his hands. “That’s how they protect ’emselves. Occasionally, they’ll use those horns, too, mostly with one another. Sometimes you’ll see them square off.” His brought his fists together as he added, “Mostly the males, during mating season.”

“Typical,” Lena snorted.

Scully laughed, like she’d gotten at some secret about him. “There’s one spot in the park, though, where there’s a salt lick. It’s up on the side of a moraine, practically vertical. They go crazy over there. All bets are off. You’ll see males knocking females out of the way. Even kids are fair game. No pun intended.” He smiled again, glancing at the kids. “Yeah, salt makes ’em go nuts. Heck, they’ve been known to lick unsuspecting hikers.”

Lena turned to him, and she must’ve looked confused. He held up his arm, which was glistening, and said, “Sweat. Yum, huh?”

“Aha,” she said. Then she started asking him a lot of questions. “Speaking of hiking,” she said, “what are these hikes you organize?” She asked him about his adventuring, about backcountry camping. “The only way to go,” I heard him say. She looked back and smirked at me, then said loudly, “I don’t know about backcountry. Maybe when I’m an old woman. Getting him to take a week off to go car camping has been an ordeal.” She turned back to Scully, and pretty soon I heard her talking about rock climbing and surfing. I’d forgotten about her surfing. For a moment, I thought he was going to put his arm around her, give her a consolation hug, slip her a brochure.

Now, no matter how I’ve depicted myself up till now, I’m not the type to backpedal from what’s on my mind, even at the risk of ruffling some feathers. I listened, like I always do, staring at the little green patches on Scully’s pack. But at some point when the trail opened up just a bit, I eased myself forward next to him so that we were in a line. “Scully,” I said. “I have to ask. What happened to the guy I knew from high school? This,” I said, giving him a double solid open palm on the shoulder, “is all well and good. I mean, you’ve done quite well for yourself. But. .” I paused. What was I getting at? “What happened to the Scully I remember? You know, the grade grubber, the guy who made a stink about the way athletes got coddled. The guy who used to tell us he would follow in his father’s footsteps and beat the pulp out of the Nikkei. No offense, Scully,” I added.

The wind kept becoming more audible as we neared the side of the mountain that had loomed ahead of us the whole way. Now his voice struggled to rise above it. I watched his hair blowing chaotically while he talked. “I always wanted to make it out of New York,” he said. “Right from day one. I mean, I hated it — the goddamned Upper East Side.” He snorted. “I didn’t even realize it, though, for a long time. I mean, we all had it pretty good. Our parents all did a pretty good job of making us not see that there was a ‘rest of the world,’ if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do know,” I said. “But how’d you realize it? College? Ski trip? Class-five rapids? Smack your head and see the light?”

I watched him get this far-off look, but it was like he was straining to see something really close, peering through some bifocal in midair. “You know, of all things, I think it really had to do with the Planetarium Club,” he said. “Did you know about that?”

“I heard about it,” I said.

“Did you say Planetarium Club ?” inquired Lena. She was trying to listen and pay attention to the kids, who were immediately behind us but fighting to keep up the pace, Emmett in particular. It was uphill after the initial descent. I figured I’d be carrying him at least part of the way back.

He laughed. “It wasn’t really a club, exactly. Let’s face it, not school-sanctioned. Not something I was exactly putting on my ‘college transcript.’” As he said this the trail narrowed a bit, and I naturally fell back a couple of steps, so I was with the kids.

“Tompkins Tech,” I could hear him explaining to her, “had a planetarium. In the school. I mean, that’s the kind of school that it was. Some schools, I didn’t know any at the time, but I’m sure they barely had books and chalk, but we had a planetarium. You guys ever been to a planetarium?” he turned back to ask Kelly and Emmett.

Kelly shook the negative decisively.

“Yes, you have,” said Lena. “Remember the time we went to see the star dome in Manhattan? And, pumpkin, you went with your school.”

“Sure, the old Hayden Planetarium,” Scully recalled fondly. I was really glad that Scully didn’t bring up going there to smoke weed and watch Laser Zeppelin, not with my kids right there. I gave him credit for that omission.

He went on: “Only problem was, from my perspective and that of several of my peers, the only way you could see the planetarium in action was once a year when they opened it up and showed it off on Open School Night, and then it was really mainly for the parents, and students were asked to ‘make as much room as possible’ for parents. So my dad and mom got to see the planetarium once a year more than I did. Then the other way you could get a gig in the planetarium was to take astronomy with Millert. Problem A: Millert’s class was killer, a sure-fire GPA sinker. Problem B: Millert himself was completely insane. I mean, the guy used to spend half the class talking about how the Earth was eventually going to get swallowed by the sun, and how that made everything meaningless.” He looked back at me. “Only Fettis could debate him, Fettis with his Portable Nietzsche .” Now this was sounding more and more like the Scully I knew and sort of disdained — griping, judgmental, grade-conscious. I didn’t know if I was conjuring him back or if he’d been lurking there all along, just waiting for an excuse to come storming out.

“So, the Planetarium Club — that was what we called ourselves, a bunch of us forward-minded individuals. We made a copy of a key to the planetarium — some kid whose dad was a locksmith. God, I couldn’t even tell you his name just now.”

“And you broke into the planetarium?”

“Broke into the planetarium,” he said, throwing in “not a good idea” to the kids, as if he felt obligated. “About nine or ten of us. And not only did we break in there,” he said; “we had ourselves a real sleepout there. Somebody — gosh, I think it was Carl — who’s our valedictorian?” He turned around as he said it.

“That would be Brian,” I said.

“The other one, then, the salutatorian. He knew how to run the equipment there like a dream. He’d been Millert’s sidekick for years. Heck, he must’ve gone on to work for NASA. Anyhow, basically the two of us got the thing fired up, and. . it was amazing. I can remember the first time. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before in my life. I’d been to the country only a handful of times. I mean, in my life I figure I’d seen at most a handful of stars, and suddenly just splattered across the sky were thousands of them, most beautiful sight. I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t know what a star was, but honestly, I thought of them as being the little pointy things, like stickers you get for good behavior. I don’t think I was the only one, either. I mean, Sammy Rusa — that guy who worked in his parents’ ‘restaurant,’ which you know was a front, right? You think that guy had ever seen stars? Except when he got into a fight.” He gave that barrelly laugh again.