Stars
Steve never meant to lose Linda in the forest. It was
just that he was so excited to reach the high alpine lake that he ran up
the mountain like a billy goat and left her behind. Once he turned to check
on her while standing on the trunk of a massive Douglas fir that had
uprooted over the trail, and she hadn’t been more than twenty yards
back. He then scrambled up a steep incline littered with scree and in five
minutes turned to look again. At least it seemed like five minutes. She
wasn’t in sight, but as he was almost to the lake, he simply kept going
and waited for her on a boulder by the edge of the clear water.
When another five minutes or so passed and she still
hadn’t arrived, he became worried and backtracked to find her about
halfway up the steep section, where he offered her a hand. She pushed past
him and after reaching the top fell against the nearest pine, gulping from
her water bottle.
“You bastard!” she screamed when he tried to wrap an
arm around her waist. She dropped the water bottle and beat at his chest.
He tried to stop her, but she wrenched out of his grasp and turned away.
At first he thought she was laughing. Quickly, though, he realized she was
crying, and only then did he understand what he had done.
“Why did you leave me?” she finally asked, her
normally smooth, pale face blotched red.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said.
“How could it not be on purpose? I don’t understand
how you can just go racing ahead like that.”
“I thought you were right behind me.”
“I lost the trail! And then I couldn’t see you
anymore, and I started calling, but you never came back.”
Steve hadn’t heard her calling. He must have been
farther ahead than he had thought.
“Where did you get lost?” he asked.
“The trail stopped at that big log! It was too high to
climb over with my pack on, but when I tried to go around, it was so dense
in there, and, and…” She started crying again, and when she turned to
him her pupils seemed entirely to fill her eyes. “It’s just like you
to do something like this. You’re always doing something that shows you
don’t really care about me.”
He knew she was talking about the upstairs neighbors
again, and it irritated him that she would use a situation like this to
bring it up. After all, he couldn’t control what went on above them. But
he felt so guilty about leaving her on the mountain that he resisted the
urge to argue.
“I promise I’ll always be there for you,” he said.
This time she let him touch her, stroke the heat off her face. “I
promise I’ll never leave.”
♦♦♦
They pitched their two-person dome tent on the far side
of the lake in a grassy flat near the head of an outlet stream, trickling
low now that it was August. All winter long snow packed the surrounding
bowl; they had discovered this by accident when as newcomers to Idaho they
tried to hike this trail last October, only to find it blocked with drifts
three feet high. But the beauty of the area had impressed them, and they
had resolved to come back. By setting up so near the water now, away from
the bowl’s high granite walls, they enjoyed an unobstructed view of the
sky. The lake mirrored the sunset’s orange and aquamarine almost
perfectly, though the occasional black fly or late-feeding cutthroat
disturbed the surface, bent the reflection in oscillating waves of light.
Best of all was the silence around them: no creaking
floorboards, no mysterious thuds or shuddering bangs, only the swish of
pines and snap of the tent’s rain flap in the breeze.
Steve opened a can of beans and skewered two plump
Italian sausages on a stick while Linda prepared a fire on a gravelly
patch of earth. First she dug a hole, which she rimmed with large rocks
and filled with small twigs, then larger ones, and then finally
well-seasoned deadwood they had scavenged from the forest. Despite the
altitude, it took only two match strikes before the stack caught the
flame. Linda looked pleased.
“Who says a man stole fire from the gods?”
she asked.
While they waited for it to settle into a good cooking
temperature, Steve opened a bottle of burgundy with the corkscrew on his
Swiss Army knife and, after allowing the wine to breathe for a few
minutes, filled two tin cups halfway, handing one to her and holding up
his in the gesture of a toast.
“Here’s to making it,” he said. Afterward, he
wasn’t sure if he meant it as congratulations for scaling the mountain,
as he had intended, or a prayer for the future. She hesitated and then
drank without smiling.
A half-moon peeked over the ridge across the lake,
astounding Steve with its brightness so early in the evening. Like Linda,
he had grown up in Ohio, just west of Cleveland in Rocky River, and the
hazy orange glow of city lights that hung over the night sky even in the
suburbs obliterated most of the stars. But here in the Rocky Mountains,
more than eight thousand feet up, miles from any other human, let alone a
city, the moon and stars were brighter than he’d ever seen with his
naked eyes. Not even the pulsing halo of the campfire could chase them
away.
Something flashed overhead, a vapor trail of light, and
then vanished.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“Huh?” She was poking the fire with a moss-covered
pine bough, watching the dried strands of vegetation contract in the heat.
“I just saw a firefly.”
As a kid he had captured lightning bugs in old peanut
butter jars on countless humid summer nights. When he was a little older,
he simply caught them and let them go, keeping track of the numbers,
always pushing to set a new record. Later, he would lie on his back in the
grass and watch the sky until his mom called him in, then, pretending to
go to bed, he would peer through his Sears catalogue telescope at the
stars winking on and off—the effect of swirling, invisible atmospherics.
“You saw a spark from the fire,” Linda said,
matching his excitement with dull evenness. “It was your mind playing
tricks on you.”
He shifted on the ground. “Why,” he said, “are you
always trying to tell me what I’m thinking?”
“How many fireflies have you seen since we moved
here?”
“I suppose if I wait I’ll get the answer.”
“Zero. There aren’t any fireflies out west.”
As soon as she said it, he knew she was right. Because
he hadn’t seen one, it never occurred to him that he hadn’t. “Well,
why didn’t you just tell me up front?” he asked, annoyed at his own
ignorance. “Why did you have to beat around the bush?”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said slowly,
looking him right in the eyes.
♦♦♦
They had met three years ago at Peabody’s Down Under,
in the flats section of Cleveland by the Cuyahoga, the river that had
caught on fire. He was finishing his law degree at Case Western Reserve
University, she working as a receptionist in her father’s oncologist’s
office. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was playing that night, and the
club was full but not packed. Drinking a Rolling Rock out of the bottle at
a side table, Steve was hypnotized by the tall woman with the swirling
gypsy skirt out on the nearly empty dance floor, eyes closed, body swaying
in a fluid, sensual manner. He liked that she didn’t appear aggressive,
desperate, like the women who danced here on rock and roll nights. He
liked that she was there for the blues.
The lanky Brown put down his guitar and picked up his
fiddle for a version of “Baby Take It Easy.” Despite the switch to a
more up-tempo tune, the young woman barely altered her rhythm, swaying at
half time to the music, her arms above her head like charmed snakes. Steve
left his beer to join her, forcing himself to keep it slow, though he
didn’t feel comfortable with this, his eyes locked on her. Her eyes
opened briefly, saw him, and then retreated behind closed lids, a slight
smile warming her mouth. After Brown picked up his guitar again and
launched into an old T-Bone Walker tune, she opened her eyes for good,
watching Steve’s. At the break he offered to buy her a beer, and she let
him order a Coke. He introduced himself and asked what her name was.
“Linda,” she said. “Linda Dowling.”
She was from Willoughby Hills, on the East Side of
Cleveland, and they joked about the schism. The working class Poles,
Slavs, and Hunks who made up the West Side looked at the East Siders with
their urban brownstones and country homes as snobs, while the East Siders
couldn’t hide their pleasure in having the Museum District and grand
Severance Hall on their bank of the Cuyahoga. The flats was where
the two groups met and mingled. It was where Steve first touched Linda, on
her cheek with the back of his hand; where, when he strayed near her
mouth, she slowly closed her lips around his fingers and lightly bit them.
♦♦♦
Steve held his hands toward the fire and then leaned
back against the log behind him, taking another sip of wine.
“Aren’t you going to cook our food?” Linda asked.
“The fire’s not ready.”
“I’m starving.”
“If I put the sausages on now they’ll just be burned
on the outside and raw on the inside.”
“I like them burned.”
Steve took a long drink from his cup. “All right,”
he said, slowly pulling himself up and pouring the beans into his aluminum
Boy Scout cooking pot, which he hung on a stand with a rotating arm that
swung out over the fire. He then circled the yellow flames until he found
a nook of amber coals, pulled his log closer to that spot, and sat back
down, holding out the skewered sausages. Linda placed her mossy stick by
the fire, rooted through her backpack until she found a can of cashews,
which she popped open and began devouring.
The spice of sausages mixed with the sweetness of
burning pine pitch, and Steve began growing hungry, too. The beans were
nearly bubbling over. He swung the pot away from the heat, flipped the
meat, and moved it closer to the fire. When it was done, he fitted each
sausage into a bun and ladled the beans onto tin plates while she refilled
their cups with wine. As soon as he handed her a plate, she took a bite of
her sandwich and immediately began huffing in and out, her mouth wide
open, moving the food around with her tongue. Before taking another bite,
she forcefully blew on it, but still neither of them spoke. Steve looked
up. The stars were streaked across the sky like jewels, a giant string of
jewels that had broken open. That’s what he eventually told Linda, just
to restart the conversation.
She watched a spark kick up from the fire and sail
dizzily away on the updraft before winking out of sight.
“Did you know fireflies are cannibals?” she asked,
right before taking a big bite of beans. He waited for her to finish
chewing and swallow. “Those flashes, the ones you didn’t see
earlier?” she continued, ignoring his sour look. “Only the females do
that. It’s an attraction thing, and it’s also part of a caste
system—so many blinks tells what caste they’re in, so they can attract
a mate from the same social order. Here’s the wild part: sometimes when
a female is really hungry, she’ll blink the wrong number of times to
attract a male from a different caste.”
“So?”
“Then whammo! She eats him.”
“And the moral of this story is?”
She set her plate down, and the ironic look on her face
disappeared.
“The moral of this story is, don’t let your female
go hungry.”
After a short pause, he laughed, genuine guffaws from
the stomach. He set his own plate down and moved next to her, putting his
arm around her shoulders and pulling her close, locking his free hand into
one of hers. She placed her head on his chest and snuggled into his wool
knit sweater, tucking her legs up under her and stroking his legs with her
long fingers.
They had whiled away hours like this when they had first
moved to Boise. Even though Steve had worked just as much then, it had
seemed that he had more time—something about the freshness of being in a
new place, of not feeling the accumulated pressures of the intervening
year hanging over him. His volunteer work for the Sierra Club, the pro
bono legal advice and hours spent maintaining hiking trails, was more
than gratifying, it was necessary for maintaining a balance in his life.
But he was beginning to miss the balance of her flesh.
They hadn’t slept together the first night they met,
hadn’t even gone home with each other. But Steve had remembered her
name, the bold way she had announced it to him, a stranger in a club, and
the next day he called to invite her for a coffee at the Arabica, the one
in Lakewood, on the West Side. They made love a week later and were
proud they had waited that long; both said they knew it was
inevitable from the first night. Everything felt right, especially when
they discovered early on that they each wanted to move west—west of the
Mississippi west, the West of mythic mountains, craggy canyons, and
wide-open deserts, a place to stir the blood and imagination, away from
the East’s thoughtless shopping malls and tangle of interstate highways
like varicose veins.
Linda had wanted finally to put her environmental
science degree from Oberlin to use. She fondly thought of her family’s
many ski vacations in Sun Valley, and after weighing her needs for culture
and nature—nature winning—pitched the notion of Idaho to Steve.
“Why not? We can’t even keep the most beloved home
football team in America from leaving town,” he had said, still angry at
the loss of the original Browns. He would miss old Municipal Stadium and
new Jacobs Field, the renovated downtown and historic neighborhoods, the
good restaurants and even better music scene, but he looked forward to
other possibilities. They did their research, and after Steve graduated
from law school, studied for his bar exams, and passed, he soon found a
job in Idaho’s capital with a firm that handled the banking interests of
such Western giants as Albertson’s and Boise Cascade—not what he’d
had in mind, but it would do for now. Linda cashed in on a tip from one of
her father’s Sun Valley connections and landed a job as an interpretive
specialist with State Parks and Rec.
They were still in their late twenties, with no children
and none on the way. They rented a turn-of-the century apartment with
twelve-foot-high ceilings, a brass chandelier, and hardwood floors,
located near the trendy Co-op where they shopped. They bought a Jeep
Cherokee and season’s passes to ski at Bogus Basin, hiked and camped on
the weekends whenever they could. Now they were looking to buy a house in
the foothills. Somewhere in there they got engaged. They had become
official Boise North Siders.
♦♦♦
Still enmeshed with Linda by the fire, Steve groped for
the bottle of burgundy, but it was empty, so he untangled himself from her
to pull another bottle from his backpack and open it. This time he
didn’t bother letting the wine breathe, just filled their tin cups to
the rim. They both drank to make space before bringing their cups together
in another toast, a dull tink followed by Linda’s noisy sipping,
interrupted when Steve began patting the air.
“Wait, wait, wait! It’s your turn to make a
toast.”
“I’m no good at that kind of thing,” she
protested.
“You’re supposed to take turns. That’s the way
it’s done.”
“Who says? You do it.”
She fell silent, and Steve couldn’t tell if she was
waiting for him say something clever or trying to think of something
herself. What would she say? East is east, west is west, and never the
twain shall meet. He didn’t know where that came from. To new
neighbors. That was more her style. She held her cup in both hands as
if to warm it, swirling the dark liquid inside.
“They’re shooting stars!” he exclaimed.
“To shooting stars!” she said, lifting her head,
then her cup. The jocularity in her voice held an edge of tipsiness.
He straightened his body and pointed his free arm to the
blackness beyond the orange glow that surrounded them like an egg. “That
thing I thought was a firefly earlier? It was a shooting star. I just saw
another one.”
“So there you have it,” she said.
At the end of the lake, with the high granite cliffs
spread around him, Steve felt as if he were sitting in the end zone of
Municipal Stadium, a cavernous, windy place that had bolstered the shores
of Lake Erie before it was torn down, wide open to the sleet and swirling
snow dismissed as “lake effects” by the locals, where anything could
happen on any given weekend during football season. Only now the show
wasn’t just down on the field—the level lake—but up in the curvature
of the sky. It fit snugly over the bowl like a bubble, reminding Steve of
the planetarium he had visited as a schoolboy. But the stars were even
brighter than those pin-dots of light that mechanically shifted and
blinked as the planetarium simulated the changing seasons or points of
view from the different hemispheres.
He had been working a lot lately. Two thousand billable
hours a year. Who designed that system? That was forty billable hours a
week alone. He had to work sixty real hours a week just to meet his quota.
No doubt this put a strain on his relationship with Linda, but she was
working, too—and anyway, they were going to need the money when they
finally bought a house. They were well-off but hardly rich; he had student
loans to pay, and housing in Boise wasn’t cheap, not on the North Side.
For the most part, he liked his job. He only occasionally thought of his
old Sears telescope and field trips to the planetarium, only briefly
wondered if he wouldn’t be better off teaching astronomy at some small
college, where he imagined the sole pressure would be to publish a
scholarly article every now and then.
But that was the kid in him still lying on his back in
the grass, thinking of all that blackness between the lights—dark
matter, the shadow stuff that makes up most of the universe. He took
another swallow of wine. His face felt hot. He decided he must be sitting
too close to the fire, so he scooted back, holding his cup away from his
body to keep from spilling, which worked until he bumped into Linda.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m too hot.”
“I think you’re drunk.”
“It takes one to know one,” he said in a playful,
sing-song voice.
A gust of wind shook the tent behind them and bent the
frame diagonally, though the stakes held firm. Linda took off the scrunchy
from her ponytail and shook her head, her straight brown hair swishing
around her shoulders like a stage curtain suddenly opened. When she
stopped, wild strands of hair latticed her face.
♦♦♦
Steve tried to drain the bottle of burgundy by adding
more to each cup, and when they both couldn’t hold another drop, he held
the bottle up against the firelight, assessing it with one eye closed. He
then tipped it to his mouth, finishing it off, before idly tossing it into
the glowing embers.
“Hey!” Linda said sharply.
“I’m sorry. Did you want the last swallow?”
“I mean the bottle.”
“I said I’m sorry. I should’ve asked you.”
“Dig it out.”
He drank enough from his cup so that he could set it
down without spilling.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s going to explode if you leave it in there.”
He looked toward the fire and finally understood what
she meant. When he looked back to her, she was frozen, her eyebrows raised
and shoulders slightly shrugged, both hands held up in her “There you
have it” gesture. His only motion was to settle more comfortably against
the log.
“I’ve never seen one do that,” he said.
“Besides, I like watching the glass melt.” In the morning when it had
cooled he would pick it from the ashes. He was a “pack in, pack out”
kind of guy. She should know that.
She reached for the stick she’d been burning earlier
and tossed it onto Steve’s lap. He picked it up and gently set it beside
him, wiping motes of charcoal from his jeans while shaking his head. The
wind must have loosened a tie on the rain flap because a free end now
repeatedly smacked against the tent.
“If it bothers you that much, dig it out yourself,”
he said.
“Why should I always have to do everything?” She was
suddenly furious. “Why can’t you just be there for me for once?”
He breathed deeply, in and then out, trying to dispel
the familiar sensation in the pit of his stomach, a tension, an acidic
energy that put him on the defensive. “Aren’t I here with you now?
Aren’t I here even though I have a pile of work waiting on my desk at
the office?”
“That’s my point. With you it’s always work, work,
work, rush, rush, rush. Then you sleep like a peaceful, innocent baby all
night long.”
“It’s not my fault I’m not as sensitive as you
are.” He held up a hand. “Yes, sensitive. You want me to toss and turn
and worry and fret like you do, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to
hear everything you do.”
“No, you don’t. That’s the problem. Why would you
want to see things from my point of view? Why should you actually have to
work at a relationship?”
“They’re just people, for crying out loud, people
trying to live their lives. It’s an old apartment, and we’re not even
going to be there much longer.” He grunted and threw a pebble into the
fire.
When they had first seen their apartment, they were
charmed, but while they knew there would be the inevitable problems
associated with an aging building, they never expected the seemingly
indestructible claw-footed bathtub to leak or the beautiful maple
floorboards to crack and squeak so much. They were early-to-bed,
early-to-rise types. Steve slept like a rock, but Linda stayed up all
night, listening to the upstairs neighbors walking all over them. The
neighbors were a younger couple, in their late teens or early twenties,
who worked evenings and kept odd hours. When they came home, Linda could
chart their progress through the main front door, up the stairwell, and
from room to room in their apartment. She had told Steve this and asked
him to have a talk with them about it. He did, and then he came back and
made his report.
“I don’t know what to say, honey,” he said.
“They’re aware of the situation and do the best they can. They even
take off their shoes as soon as they’re in the door.”
“And you believed them?”
“Why shouldn’t I believe them?”
“Because they’re keeping me awake all night long.”
“Honey, we can’t expect the whole world to keep the
same hours we do.”
“It’s like a herd of elephants above us.”
The thing that got him the most was that she then began
waking him in the middle of the night. The last time was last
Thursday. He had been dreaming about work again—something about blowing
up a couple thousand balloons so that his firm’s main partner could pop
them all at once for one of his clients—when she shoved him hard. For
some reason, it fit with what was going on in the dream.
“It’s the goddamned circus,” she said.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” he responded
sleepily.
“It’s about time.” When he rolled over and began
breathing deeply, she gave him another shove.
“Aren’t you going to talk to them? You just said you
would.”
“The neighbors? I already did.”
“And a lot of good it did! Steve, it’s three in the
fucking morning. They both get off work at midnight. What are they still
doing up?”
“They need to wind down, for Christ’s sake.” He
was awake and cranked up himself now. That ball in his stomach—it felt
like somebody had punched him. “You know, I was asleep. Talk about being
rude.”
“They’re making way more noise than two people who
are supposedly trying to be quiet. What do they do, anyway? They’re not
in college, they’re just working at some restaurant or bar—not that
there’s anything wrong with that if you’re doing something else
besides partying all night long. At least when you waited tables, you were
working to get ahead in the world.”
The rain flap was really beating the tent now, but Steve
continued to stare into the fire. The flames were hypnotic. He felt he
could see things in them. He loved Linda, but she was such a delicate
thing, a ceramic figure that needed to be handled lightly. No, she was
more like an opera diva, a strong, stubborn woman with nerves of glass who
could shatter herself if she hit the wrong note. Who always had to be
right. What would it be when they were married and living in their new
home in the foothills—the sound of crickets? Flecks of wayward sand
against the windows? The house itself settling around them?
“We’ll find our own place soon, and this will all be
over,” he said quietly.
“You just don’t get it,” she said, her eyes dark
chips of granite in a pale moon face. “This isn’t about them. This
isn’t about them at all.”
A gunshot erupted from the fire, and Steve felt
something whiz by his head while chunks of flaming wood and a shower of
smaller sparks blew into the air, a fountain suddenly and forcefully
turned on, a terrifying and beautiful arc over them. He leaped to his feet
with a yell. Linda was more precise.
“Jesus Christ!” she screamed, patting at her shirt
while wildly looking around her. “Shit!”
Steve was numb. He watched Linda, still steadily
swearing, jump toward the tent and begin brushing off smoky embers that
were burning holes in the nylon shell. He knew he should join her, knew
this was a hazard that needed his attention. But the explosion had blown
the fire in a sunburst pattern from the pit she had built, and in the
matted-down earth around it cinders glowed like stars fallen from the
sky—scores of them, some glowing brightly, some dully, whole
constellations flickering and sparking in the breeze. He couldn’t resist
entering this scene.
“I told you it would explode, I told you,” Linda
huffed, stopping her work briefly when she saw he wasn’t putting out any
fires. “Steve, what are you doing? Steve!”
He wasn’t listening to her, didn’t even turn around.
In a moment he would. For now, he carefully moved through spiral galaxies,
spidery nebulae, the dark matter between them.
Originally published in sfwp.org:
an online literary journal
Copyright © 2006 by Jeff Fearnside
