Melanie Thon - Meteors in August

He sailed through the jagged opening, a huge man, suspended in this long moment when every mouth opened but no one made a sound. He hit the sidewalk with a thud, suddenly back in the world of gravity. His face was black with soot and his chest heaved. Zachary Holler was slung over his shoulder, draped on his back like a sack of meat.

Caleb Wolfe cleared the clot of people from a circle of cement in the street and helped Red Elk lay the boy down. “Give us air,” he yelled. “Give us air!”

Red Elk tilted Zack’s head back, put his hands on the boy’s chest and leaned forward and back, forward and back — but Zack Holler was as still and stunned as Jesse was when they pulled his pale body out of Moon Lake. The big man breathed into him, put his mouth over Zack’s mouth, shared his smoky air with the white boy. But that paltry bit of oxygen was too little for either of them. After a few mouthfuls, Red Elk sat back on his broad haunches, gulping. Caleb Wolfe took over. He pounded Zachary’s chest and swore. I think it was the cuss that called Zack Holler back, that pulled his soul down to the gritty street and made his rib cage swell with the first living breath.

“Water!” Caleb cried. “Jesus, his hands.”

Coe Carson brought two pails for his friend and lifted Zack’s red hands into the water. Coe’s knuckles bled from grinding them into the gravel. His lips moved, a plea; tears rolled down his cheeks. I prayed for a miracle that would deliver me from the kind of accident I’d wished upon Zachary.

Dr. Ben hobbled down the street. Stooped, his white head bobbing, the old man took his time. The doctor saw it this way: if the boy was dead, why should he bust a gut getting there; and if they had him breathing, a minute or two either way wasn’t going to change anyone’s chances. I hoped that when Dr. Ben lay on his bed, wheezing out his last gasp, he would look down the long tunnel of this night. At the edge of his own dark dream, I hoped he’d see a vision of himself, walking and walking, but never moving closer, never reaching the bed to sit beside himself.

By the time the good doctor crouched beside Zack Holler the sheriff had given the boy his second life.

Father stood across from me in the ring that had formed. He was pressed up close to Miriam Deets. Lanfear was on the other side of his wife, and he and my father spoke a few words to each other over Miriam’s head. Lanfear couldn’t see what I saw, that Daddy clutched Miriam’s hand, the left one, the one Lanfear could no longer hold if he strolled side by side with his wife. Father’s eyes looked strange, milky as the eyes of a fish tossed up on the beach, two days dead. He gripped Miriam’s fingers, his own fingers clenched as if in pain. She let him hold her. Maybe she was sorry she’d refused his money all these weeks, sorry for his sake as well as her own. I thought her touch was all that saved him, all that kept him from leaping on the big Indian. He’d worked with Red Elk day after day, holding back his anger. Now he saw his chance: Red Elk was down and out of breath. I was afraid my father might sink low enough to jump the man while he was on the ground.

Zack rose into fierce consciousness, wailing. He jerked his hands out of the water, but Caleb Wolfe forced them back down. Dr. Ben filled a syringe and rolled Zack far enough on his side to shove it into his buttocks, right through the thick denim of his jeans. Zack’s head dropped before the needle was out.

The doctor began bandaging Zack’s hands. They grew large, snowpaws. I imagined Zack grabbing a bottle of tequila in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. He didn’t know how hot they were, that the glass was ready to crack. His touch shattered them, sending slivers of glass into his fingers and palms, splattering alcohol up his forearms and into his face, alcohol that burst into flames, torched by a wild spark.

Joshua Holler clawed and kicked to get to his boy. Seeing him gave me an image of Zack as a grown man: his fingers thick and dirty, good for poking into other men’s chests; his jowls and belly slack from all those brews with the boys. I was wrong to wish for Zachary’s misfortune: men like this heaped misfortune on themselves.

There was no sign of Zack’s mother. Ruby Holler was probably out at Ike’s Truckstop, slapping coffee and greasy slabs of beef and gravy in front of thankless truckers on their way to Canada, strangers who didn’t give a damn that the center of town was going up in smoke.

I wondered where Gwen was too. I thought of the steamy windows of Gil Harding’s Duster in the school parking lot last winter. Tonight they could stay home in Gwen’s upstairs bedroom. I imagined them falling onto Gwen’s flowered quilt, bouncing and laughing, laughing because this bed was soft, softer than the grass in the park or the vinyl seat in the back of Gil’s car, softer by far than the rough boards on the dirty floor of the tree house, the only place I’d ever lain down with a boy, softer than the street where that boy lay now.

Gwen didn’t know about any of that. And she wouldn’t be sorry when she heard. Her mother wouldn’t be sorry either. No, they’d say Zack was to blame, a boy who plays with fire gets burned. But I regretted it all the same because I’d wished for it. I had dreamed this pain into the body of Zack Holler, ached for him to feel one quarter of what I felt.

Late as it was, I dared to hope Gwen and her mother might still come. Their cool hands on Zack’s bruised forehead were the only hands that could soothe him in his deep sleep. I scanned the crowd. Miriam Deets stood on her tiptoes to kiss Lanfear on the nose. My father was gone.

Red Elk scooped Zack off the pavement and carried the limp boy to Joshua Holler’s truck. The closest hospital was in Rovato Falls, but if Zack was in a bad way, they’d have to take him all the way to Missoula, a hundred and seventy miles south. A lot could go wrong on the way to Missoula.

I thought of Joshua Holler, alone on a dark Montana road. His journey would be endless and silent — unless Zachary woke again. And what could a father do? What was there to do with a wailing boy but thump him on the back of the head and pray you hit him hard enough, but not too hard.

And Joshua Holler might notice, as if for the first time, all the white crosses along the highway, at least one at every curve, the markers of death, reminding him that a car had spun out of control in this very place.

I worked my way back to the alley. The roar was steady now, the fire sure of itself and strong, drowning every other sound like a river surging down a gorge. The firemen had given up on the bar and turned their hoses on Saddles & Studs, the Western clothing store next door. Already its roof smoldered and one wall was sure to go. My uncle Les and his three boys had organized a human chain from the back of the Last Chance, a line of men and women passing buckets, hoping to save something that was clearly destroyed. Arlen joined them. She was proud to see her boys working together, inspired for the first time.

All her life, Arlen had watched the slow, sullen way men work when the job they do has no worth of its own, like the work a man does in the mill, where sawing wood doesn’t mean there will be a fresh stack in the shed to get his family through a month of winter. The boards a man measures and cuts only remind him that there will be more wood tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, and none of it will ever find its way to his pile.

I was sad to think of it just then, to think of all the men in this town who worked at the mill, who got their first summer job at sixteen and retired at sixty-five. Their dream of Heaven was an endless plain of sage and sand where nothing grew tall enough to bother chopping it down, where the tumbleweed broke from its own stalk and rolled away.