John Brandon - A Million Heavens

The musicians kept asking questions of the crowd and the crowd kept combining their voices with certainty. The wolf was afraid of these humans and he also pitied them. They had little soul left and that’s why they aggrandized what sliver remained. And what of the wolf’s soul? Lately he found himself panting with no cause, while resting on a cool morning under an outcropping. He’d caught himself clamping his jaws down on his own foreleg.

The wolf hastened away from the concert straight toward Sandia Mountain, exhilarated because he’d completely broken off his rounds. They were unrecognizable tonight, his rounds. He didn’t feel worried about them. He felt a blessing of strength that needed to be used, so instead of skirting Sandia he began to climb it, the most inefficient and unpleasant route to Lofte, beating up his paws, thirsty, hoping to ensure he’d be able to sleep in the morning, straight up the mountain and then he’d go straight down the other side and he would not avoid anything the remainder of the night nor give way nor hold himself still, meaning that whatever creature fate put in his way before dawn would be subtracted from the living world without any knowledge of what had happened to it.

As soon as the offices opened back up he called the free paper that covered the basin and ordered a want ad. The next issue wasn’t going to press for over a week.

NEEDED: gas station/store managers, lofte, no nights, two positions open, 505-386-2387

The idea of leaving the station put the gas station owner in mind of a young boy shedding a shabby blanket that had always comforted him. The mirror in the back room he peered into when he trimmed his hair. The bills he got to sit and write out, the amounts of which changed by mere pennies from month to month. The short aisles of canned goods he could straighten and straighten — condensed milk, chili, potted sausage, peppers. His radio stations that came and went. His whisky in the evenings. The big window behind the register.

Taking even this small step of placing the ad in the paper agreeably loosened something behind his eyes. Cleared his head. He was going to shed his blanket and face whatever gales the desert could offer. He was going to confront the desert, finally. He wanted to find the middle of it, the still dry heart of the land. He could see himself walking into the wild and could hear that quiet moment already, the rhythmic crunch of his boots and the lisping of the desert wind against his body, the quiet simple sounds of what would be the first brave thing he’d ever done.

The numbers at the vigils had peaked and then in the last couple weeks had declined, but this Wednesday evening it was raining — a musty drizzle that refused to rally into an earnest storm, that kept dampening everyone and then losing steam — and more significantly, the holidays had arrived. This Wednesday they’d lost fully half the group from last week. The fat had been trimmed; Dannie tried to think of it that way. Anyone sitting vigil tonight was staunch. She appreciated these people for being lost like she was and for not wanting to talk about it just like her and for never missing a Wednesday. Maybe this was the perfect size for the group, about thirty.

Arn had been sitting back to back with Dannie and he scooched around and rested his hand on her boot. He was wearing a garbage bag over his clothes like everyone else. The muscular guy with beady eyes had handed them out to everyone off an enormous roll. Arn was soaked anyway. He looked like he was about to grin, but he could look that way for hours. He was a comfort to Dannie because she knew nothing could make him quit. He always kept a reserve, an empty part of him, a reserve of nothing, and it gave him an advantage. He was attending the vigils because Dannie wanted him to and because he wasn’t picky about what he did with his time. He was picky about what he ate, but not about his pastimes. He would not grow overwhelmed or lose heart.

And maybe none of these other people here tonight would quit. For the muscular guy the vigils were a discipline, another component of an ascetic program aimed at physical health. There was a man who wore sunglasses and who always had a pen in his hands — nothing to write on, just a pen to fiddle with. There was a red-haired woman who wore homemade earrings. She had a tattoo of a humane, inclusive sun on her foot, and wore sandals no matter the temperature. There was a manic painter, in splotched overalls, constantly tapping his foot or biting his fingernails. Painting seemed like the worst job for him, and vigiling also seemed against his nature. The vigils hadn’t helped the painter calm down, but he was still here. There was a guy with a pinched face who wore a trench coat with hundreds of pins on it, like a colorful armor. He would close his eyes for long stretches but it was obvious he wasn’t dozing because of his rigid posture, his head propped snobbishly atop his thin neck. He never slouched, even draped with that ten-pound coat. There were a few chubby women, a little older, for whom sympathy was a calling. Of those the group had lost, a significant faction had been college kids, maybe even a couple high school students. One of them was still here, the girl with the doleful eyes who drove that car that made such a racket pulling into the parking lot. Another of the losses had been a very old lady who’d worn a necklace with a bunch of rings on it. Dannie was forced to wonder if she’d passed away. She’d looked decrepit getting all the way down on the ground and then trying to rise. Dannie didn’t know which was sadder, to think the lady was deceased or to think she’d quit, to imagine her dead or to face the fact that one could still be making false starts at eighty-five years old.

Dannie had quit a marriage and quit her friends. She had quit her hometown. Quitting had defined the trajectory of her adult life. She didn’t want to quit on the other vigilers and she didn’t want them to quit on her. She wanted everyone to see it to the end. Dannie wondered about the people who had quit. What were they doing at this moment? Were they disappointed or proud or numb? She wondered if they could eat or do laundry or get lost in a movie, knowing the vigil was going on without them. She wondered how many of them were alone. She wondered if they’d found peace or found something else to take the place of peace.

At ten years of age he was shipped to the Northwest, where he learned not to expect sunny days. People were proud of the dampness. When the sun appeared for a week and the streets and yards and tree branches dried out, people wondered how to act. Summer was an affront. Arn wasn’t one of these people. He’d been born in the Midwest. He saw how it was out here. You were supposed to give in to the rain and stay or you were supposed to hate it and want to move away, but Arn had no say about where he went. To someone like him, weather, cloudy or sunny, didn’t mean a thing. Weather allowed people who weren’t truly sad to play at it, people who weren’t happy to go through carefree motions.

Before middle school Arn had moved so often that the houses he’d lived in blended together. All the houses smelled like casserole and had littered lawns patrolled by pets with disappointing names. All the houses contained an adult who was slightly meaner than most or slightly nicer than most and areas that were off-limits and elaborate systems for divvying the chores.

And then Tacoma. There was a foster mother, but it was the father Arn remembered. His name was Ron Darling, like the baseball player. Ron Darling was bald, with a clay-colored beard that blended in with his chest hair and wrapped around to the back of his neck. He told a lot of stories. Arn was old enough to realize that most of the stories hadn’t happened to Ron Darling but to someone he knew or had talked to in a bar. The details were exaggerated, the settings plucked from air. But the unlikeliness was what made the stories; the fact that the guy was asking you to believe something so outlandish is what made it feel true. This man, Ron Darling, could not have been a houseboy for a pop star. He could not have moved from Chattanooga to California at age eighteen and met some people and then some more people and ended up living at the home of a famous teen heartthrob, refreshing drinks and entertaining guests with his high-dive prowess. “Different time,” Ron Darling would remark. “People had houseboys. Closest I come is one of you foster punks.”