Melanie Thon - Meteors in August

Mother said, “I wiped the shit off my mother’s ass for eight years. You think you can break my heart like she did, old man?”

Daddy sat down on the edge of the tub. “He killed her,” he said. “He killed my girl.”

This was the letter:

I am a friend of the boy who flew the plane into Moon Lake. He has asked me to write this letter so that you will understand and hopefully forgive what he done. Yes, he is alive, but a long way from here where you won’t ever find him. There’s a girl in that plane, Gloria Zykowski, and she is not alive but my friend says please get her out and send her home. He knows he did the wrong thing but there is no changing that so please don’t think it will do any good to find him and punish him. It won’t. That girl is dead. He rented a plane in Calgary and filed a flight plan going north but they made a wide circle south to Moon Lake where you saw them. He did not mean to kill her. He loved her. He wanted to marry her but she’s only sixteen and her father said no, so my friend, Roger Skeba, that’s his name, came up with this plan to fly the plane into the lake and swim away. No one would be looking for them way down in Montana. He figured it would be just like they disappeared. Looking back it’s easy to see it was a stupid plan but he didn’t mean any harm to her. They were going to get married and live in a town where her father would never find them. He said it was going to be like they was born again, that’s what he said, but it didn’t work out that way as you already know.

Sincerely yours,

A. Friend

Now, of course, a lot of people thought that letter was a hoax, some crazy kid playing the meanest kind of joke imaginable; but the next day the Rovato paper tracked down a story from a Calgary newspaper: a small plane, supposedly heading north, had disappeared on August 9. Sure enough, the missing people were Roger Skeba, twenty-four, and Gloria Zykowski, age sixteen.

We were still taking bets on it — somebody reading about the missing plane in Calgary and the crash in Moon Lake might have put the stories together for his own amusement. It was hard to believe anyone would down a plane in a lake on purpose, even a fool for love. Of course Arlen believed it and felt vindicated: that was no wood on the water.

Mom made me swear not to aggravate my father with this crazy speculation; but the next night when I took him supper, he begged me to read the paper and I couldn’t refuse him any more than I could have refused a dying man a sip of water.

A dozen men were on the job now, trying to find the plane, but that kid must have had a good eye because he aimed straight for the deepest crevasse of Moon Lake. From the sky, he must have seen the place where waves darken, where green rolls over itself, a froth of white, then black. “I told you,” Daddy said. “They might never find her.” His eyes began to tear. The evening sun burning through the curtains made the room close and hot, but Daddy hugged himself and shivered, a chill in his blood as he sank to the frigid depths, stones tied to his feet.

“Fish big as men, peering in the windows, looking at her, I saw them. And she’s cold, Lizzie, she’s so cold. I saw her last night, right there.” He pointed to the window. “She said, ‘I can’t see, Daddy, the water’s too dark. The water’s in my eyes.’ But she stared at me. She saw me. She blames me.”

My father believed his water dreams.

“Please,” I said.

He pounded the bed with his fists. “No. I won’t believe it. I won’t believe she’s dead till I see her face.”

People were looking for that boy, but he’d vanished like a vapor off the water, leaving no tracks and no scent. Father wasn’t the only one who took it personally: there was a fervor to the search, as if Roger Skeba had stolen each man’s daughter. Some folks swore that Red Elk must have guided the boy over the mountains. Who else could have done it? The old hatred flared. But no one went after the big Indian. They’d seen him leap into a burning building and survive. They knew they didn’t have a chance with such a man.

On the seventh day the men working the lake dropped a line and hit metal. It took all afternoon to get it hooked up, and it was almost dark by the time they dragged the plane off the bottom of the lake and hauled it to the shore.

But it wasn’t too dark to see the girl slumped in her seat, still strapped tight by the belt. The men stared at her through the windows, their eyes wide as fish eyes, and they were afraid to open the door, and they were afraid to touch her and know her name.

We wouldn’t have heard the news until the next day if Arlen hadn’t come flying into the house, shouting her fool head off, the joyous bearer of bad tidings. Daddy jumped out of bed and started pulling on his pants while Mom stood in the doorway, arms crossed, shaking her head.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

“Looking for that boy,” said my father. “We oughta lynch that boy for what he did.” But already he was swaying, his muscles flaccid from days in bed. He had to sit down before he fell on his face.

“You’re in no condition to chase after anyone. Besides, that boy’s long gone.”

“He killed my baby.”

“No, Dean, some other girl, just a stranger.”

But he didn’t hear her. He rocked on the bed, clutching at his side. He looked as if someone were squeezing the breath out of him. “It hurts,” he said, “here — and here.”

Mom whispered to me, “Call Dr. Ben. Tell him to get here quick.” She sat down next to Daddy and held him while I went downstairs to make the call. Arlen was halfway down the block already, going from house to house spreading the news about the girl and telling her own story over and over, saying she’d seen that boy swim away from the wreck, and if Les had only believed her for once in his life they might have caught him. Yes sir, he’d be in jail this very night, and if he’d lived till the trial, they might have seen some justice done. That poor girl.

Dr. Ben appeared at the door in twelve minutes flat. For once he understood there wasn’t time to spare. By then Daddy had curled up on the bed with a pain that shot from his groin to his shoulder. Mom was sure he was having a heart attack, that’s how his father had died, sprawled on the floor at fifty-two.

Dr. Ben pressed and poked, shook his head, poked again. I thought the worst, but all that feeling and head shaking only meant that Dr. Ben didn’t have a clue. “It’s not his appendix,” he said, “I know that, and his heart sounds fine — to me.” He put the stethoscope on Daddy’s chest again. “Yes, yes, I think so, it’s fine, just fast, that’s all, from the pain, I suppose.” The doctor didn’t instill great confidence in me. I wondered if his hearing was good enough to listen to a man’s heart. “I’ll just give him a shot,” he said, “a little something to get him through the night.” I remembered Arlen calling Dr. Ben a horse doctor for the way he doled out tranquilizers.

“I’ll check on him in the morning,” the doctor said. “Call me if there’s a problem.” Daddy moaned; he didn’t think he’d last till morning. Dr. Ben filled the syringe, jabbed my father’s butt, patted Mom on the arm and said, “There now, he’ll sleep straight through. Don’t you worry.”

But we weren’t worried about him sleeping; we were worried about him waking up. The shot did its work: Daddy’s fists uncurled. Still, I wasn’t convinced Dr. Ben had done the right thing. I’d seen my father bring a hammer down with all his might and smash his thumb. I’d seen him cut his leg nearly to the bone. In times like those he swore until I thought his head would spin off, but he never let out a whimper as he did tonight, a helpless animal cry. That’s how I knew this was different. And that’s how I knew this was bad.