John Brandon - A Million Heavens

She heard footsteps approaching the door outside and it didn’t take her long to resign herself to being caught. She was engaging in a criminal act, damaging property, and in a moment someone would catch her. All there was to do was wait and see who that someone was. It could be a security guard who’d be thrilled to finally bust someone for a serious crime. It could be that homeless guy from the bench looking for a warmer spot to bed down.

Cecelia heard the doorknob turning and then a moment later she and a guy about her age were looking at each other with identical frankness. The guy had on a tight-zippered sweatshirt with a hood and long plaid shorts. He didn’t pull his hood off. Cecelia recognized him from when she’d spied on Nate’s band. He released the knob and the door shut. He was the keyboard player. He looked at the carnage of the guitars and then at the drum set, then he squinted and said Cecelia’s name.

“How do you know me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the guy said. “I do, though.”

He looked at her coat on the floor, not far from where he stood.

“Are you up late or early?” Cecelia asked him.

“I’m always up at this time.”

The guy looked around again and shook his head, seeming both disappointed and impressed, then he walked over and sat on the bench next to Cecelia. He seemed like a person with a reasonable, fair burden. He understood that things got complicated. He tapped one of Cecelia’s gloved hands with his finger.

“Fashion or fingerprints?”

“At first they were to keep my hands warm,” Cecelia said.

“You don’t seem drunk.”

Cecelia shook her head.

“You’re, like, a badass.”

Cecelia could smell the guy. He didn’t smell bad.

“Barry and Sam are going to lose their shit,” he said. “Those dudes pride themselves on their bad tempers.”

“ You’re not mad?”

“The only thing that makes me mad is when people don’t keep secrets, but I can forgive that too.”

“Nate will replace all this stuff,” Cecelia said. “Probably with better stuff.”

The guy yawned, then he said, “He’s kind of a dickwad, I know. I’m not going to tell on you.” He pulled his hands out of his sweatshirt, both of them, like he was going to do something with them. “They don’t know I write songs,” he said. “I come early, when everybody’s asleep. I write pop songs. I write songs they can play at the beginning of sitcoms. I’m not a delicate genius.”

Cecelia thought of when that kid had caught her on his screened patio. She could remember feeling confused, about everything. Now she didn’t feel confused. Not that she’d figured anything out, but at least she was in charted territory.

The guy told Cecelia he was only in a band to work on his stage presence, to get used to collaborating, access to instruments, rehearsal space. In time he was going to move to a music town like Austin or Seattle.

“You’re a slimeball,” Cecelia said.

The guy winked.

He was more savvy than Cecelia and Reggie had been. He was using Nate.

“What does the T stand for?” Cecelia asked him. “T. Anderton.”

“Terry Anderton is who I bought this from. His parents got it for him, but he wants to be a veterinarian.”

“Then what’s your name?”

“It’s going to be Nevers. No one knows that. I’m keeping the name secret as long as possible. don’t tell anyone, okay? I don’t like when people tell secrets. I can forgive it, but I really don’t like it.”

Cecelia reached behind the guy and with two fingers tugged his hood off. He looked upward with only his eyeballs. His hair was red and very short. His red hair and his tan skin clashed.

Cecelia grasped his head with two hands and kissed him. He wasn’t ready. He put his hand out to brace himself and sounded a patch of keys. The noise was wrong but interesting, like his hair against his skin. The notes didn’t linger; the quiet they left wasn’t the same as the quiet from before. The guy, Nevers, tried to catch up, to get as much of Cecelia as she was getting of him. He shifted and pressed himself against her. She felt his fingertips descend the skin of her hip and she pulled out of the kiss. She rose off the bench and snatched her coat off the floor by its sleeve. She wanted to say something before she left, something reassuring. She wanted to tell Nevers that one day soon, when her mind was her own again, she would let him take her out to dinner and then she would sleep with him and then in the morning he might try to play her one of his pop songs.

The songs had ceased.

There had been the songs, and when there weren’t songs there had been the pets to calm him. The wolf had still not taken a chicken, and that meant something to him. It had become a vow. Now the songs had ceased. The pets would no longer be enough. The wolf could feel that. His hope was dead. The wolf had abandoned the gully near the house with the chickens and had taken up residence at the ugliest spot in the desert, a place where the humans had once produced drugs. There were a couple trailer homes rotting into the earth, stinking of science. The old bristlecones had perished. They’d survived a thousand years in the most discouraging soil in the world but had not survived human fun. Drugs were not merely fun for the humans, the wolf knew. It wasn’t that simple. Every creature in the world was laboring to escape the perils of human intelligence, and often that went double for the humans themselves.

The wolf’s foreleg had healed and his teeth were stained, but the pets would no longer be enough. Not without any songs. The wolf understood right and wrong now but didn’t prefer one to the other. He was living out season after season, endless unconvincing winters.

The humans were on the lookout for the wolf but none had spotted him. All they had were their eyes. There were humans who were paid to look for things and they had never found this place. It hadn’t always been the ugliest spot in the desert. There’d been an explosion and a scattered buffet for the buzzards. If there were a human paid to look for the wolf, he would never imagine the wolf so close as the gully and he would never find this bankrupt place, would never smell the chemical-soaked carcasses of the trailer homes.

The chickens may have been the only pets left unguarded in the whole of the basin now. The songs had been protecting the wolf and the wolf had been protecting the chickens. The songs had been made out of something pure, something like instinct. The pets, they gave nothing but momentary glee and permanent knowledge, and knowledge was the worst thing for the wolf. And now he needed the knowledge. He didn’t want it but he needed it. Like the humans with their drugs. It was bad for him, knowledge, and he could never give it back once he had it, not a useless shred.

Finally Cecelia had come home at a reasonable hour. Mayor Cabrera parked around the corner. He’d already gotten a copy of the key from his sister-in-law, and she’d called him and said Cecelia was fast asleep. Mayor Cabrera opened the passenger door and then reached through and unlocked the driver door and went back around and lowered himself into the Scirrocco. He puttered down the block a ways before opening it up. He had a guy on the outskirts of Santa Fe who’d agreed to work at night, a German compact specialist. He’d told Mayor Cabrera there wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix before morning, except his marriage.

The shop was made to look like an adobe dwelling, like all businesses in Santa Fe. The mechanic sat on an overturned bucket, outside on the driveway, fiddling with a pair of glasses. He slipped the glasses in his shirt pocket and motioned for Mayor Cabrera to pull inside. He shook hands then immediately propped the hood up and began poking around. Mayor Cabrera had no clue how much this night was going to cost him. He imagined a very high figure, so that he wouldn’t be shocked. The mechanic jacked the car up a few feet and wriggled underneath.