John Brandon - A Million Heavens

Arn was napping. Dannie had less than an hour to get out there. She wrote a note, telling Arn what time to look and stressing that he not bump or jostle the telescope. She taped the note to the top of his alarm so he’d hit it with his hand when he reached to stop the buzzing.

She got in her car and sped away from town, checking the clock in her dashboard and watching for signs, and eventually she found a spot where she could access the trail, a small parking area with a single exposed picnic table. She got out of the car and felt cold, and that’s how she wanted to feel. When she took off her sweats, she wanted her skin alive with goose bumps. When she removed the bikini, she wanted her flesh to sting.

She hiked steadily and without thinking, slightly uphill, losing her breath. Prickly pear stands lined the trail, their fruit still hard and green. Tiny birds flitted this way and that. Dannie was getting there. Though her feet were starting to hurt, she was making good time. The trail was full of stones that looked like they belonged on the bottom of a river.

Dannie drank some water. She adjusted her bikini bottom. She was rounding a bend in the trail that she recognized from the telescope. She had to cruise downhill about a quarter-mile and she’d be there. She’d be to the totem pole rock. She’d paced herself correctly. She had ten minutes, plenty of time.

When Dannie turned the last corner, the big totem rock was right where it was supposed to be. The sun was where it was supposed to be, striking its last pose before it sank away. Dannie’s resolve was right there in her chest, where it belonged. The old man wearing a windbreaker and white Velcro sneakers was not where he was supposed to be. Dannie didn’t know where he belonged, but he didn’t belong on her bench-like outcropping in the middle of her wide spot in the trail. Dannie stopped a few yards from him and put down her satchel, thinking he might take the hint and move on, that he might understand it was someone else’s turn to have the bench. He didn’t, though. He sat there. Dannie sighed, like she was so glad to have found a place to rest, and the old man kept looking blankly out toward the sun, which was all color now and no brightness. His hair was of a different generation, that parted, water-combed style. Now that it was the real gusting winter, Dannie saw about one hiker a week on this trail, but here was this guy. She didn’t know what to do. She had a few minutes, but they were melting fast. Arn was going to wonder why such pains had been taken to allow him to watch Dannie stand next to an old man on a trail.

“Where’d you come from?” Dannie asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why are you here?”

“Just resting.”

Dannie made an exasperated motion toward the basin with her arm, indicating they were in the middle of nowhere.

“My group deserted me,” the old man said.

“What group is that?”

“Or I deserted them. I guess that’s probably the way it happened.”

Dannie glanced back across the expanse of desert. Her condo complex was a raised, brownish stain. “You really should start heading back,” she said. “It’ll be pitch dark out here.”

The old man folded his arms.

“The temperature’s already dropping.”

“Let it drop.”

“You’re just going to sit there till you freeze?”

“If I feel like it.”

Dannie looked at the old man’s pressed slacks. His eyes were not cloudy or watery. She looked at her watch, knowing what it was going to say. It was almost time. It was time. It was too late to panic. The moment was now and it was wrecked. The sweat suit would remain on. The bikini would remain hidden. Dannie’s irritation was drying easily into defeat. In a couple more minutes, there wouldn’t be enough light for Arn to see anything out here. She leaned against a boulder. What was she even doing out here? What was this? She knew the answer. This was desperation. Out here away from everything, she could see. Whatever she and Arn had, it was running on fumes. When you had to make grand efforts, it was already too late. Dannie was trying to kick-start the relationship with the only thing they’d ever really had, which was sex. Dannie wasn’t getting what she wanted, and Arn wanted nothing. They’d lost momentum. Dannie wasn’t young. She didn’t need to be pulling stunts like this.

She stepped close to the old man and he made room for her on the flat seat of the rock.

“What kind of group?” she said. “I want to know.”

“Watching birds of prey.”

Dannie looked out through the failing light. She couldn’t remember seeing any hawks or eagles. Only buzzards and crows and gulls.

“They give you binoculars,” the man said. “I couldn’t get mine to focus.”

“You just track them while they soar around?”

The man shrugged. “The whole thing was my wife’s idea. To get me out of the house.”

“Yeah,” Dannie said. “I don’t have anything to get me out of the house either.”

“Turns out there’s not much worth doing. There’s not much out here.”

The man was softening a bit. “I dread the mornings,” he said. “The whole day out ahead of me, knowing I’m going to drift around.”

Dannie got out some trail mix and the old man didn’t want any. He didn’t want water, either. Dannie couldn’t see the condo complex at all.

“It’s not the mornings for me,” she told the old man. “It’s the nights.”

He couldn’t get any of the cushy factory jobs, so he ended up doing odd crap nobody else wanted to do. He never kept these jobs long. He always felt like someone was gaining on him. You didn’t get off scot-free from smacking your legal guardian in the head with an aluminum bat. It wasn’t a live-and-let-live deal. It wasn’t boys being boys. If Arn stayed put too long, his past would catch up with him.

Just inside Oregon’s border he worked at a mill that produced wooden arrows. The arrows looked exactly like the arrow that kid had shot at Arn in middle school. The mill had a room on the side of it where all the sawdust collected, and once a week someone had to put on a mask and go in there and shovel the whole thing out, filling dozens of tall canvas bags. This was one of the tasks that fell to Arn. Sawdust came out of his nose along with his snot. It came out of his ears when he swabbed them out. Arn’s boss would call him into the office, where he would preface whatever complaint he had with an assurance that he was not jumping Arn’s shit. “Now, I’m not jumping your shit,” he would always say. “I don’t want you to think I’m jumping your shit.” There was a woman who did quality control at the mill and one Monday she came in late, looking devastated. At break time she told everyone she’d gone on a bear hunt and three dogs had given their lives to protect her.

In Northern California, Arn worked at a winery. He got picked up in a van every morning. He did not participate in The Crush, which he’d heard so much about. The winery was small-time, a couple years old, owned by two brothers who were learning as they went. Arn’s sole responsibility, for weeks, was to open bottles of wine and dump them. Thousands of bottles, poured into a steel tub and lost down a drain. Arn never knew what was wrong with the wine, whether it was tainted in some hazardous way or merely tasted funny. When all of it was gone, Arn weeded and painted.

He rented a cheap, clean studio apartment that happened to be smack next to a high school, and this high school was a corral for countless numbers of the most alluring girls Arn had ever seen. The Spanish tutors up in Oregon were homely compared to these Lodi girls. These girls had breeze-blown bangs and movie-star sunglasses and tiny tops held in place by proud little breasts that didn’t bounce an inch when the girls walked across the parking lot. The girls who were seniors all went across the street for lunch, to a wholesome deli with tables outside in the sun. Arn started taking his lunch break at the same time they took theirs, started driving into town from the winery every day in one of the company vans to grab a table and eat sandwiches full of pesto and sprouts. He had no problem talking to the girls. He talked to one after the next after the next and managed to sleep with four of them. He would tell the girls, vaguely, that he worked in the wine industry, that he wasn’t from around here. There were no other men at this deli. It was like Arn had crashed on an uncharted island. Sometimes he felt like he was being tricked, like a mouse gorging himself on free cheese. He managed to keep himself in Lodi until summer, before losing his nerve and hopping on the overnight train.