Last Summer at Mars Hill (36 page)

Andrew shook his head. “Don’t—You can’t—”

Howell reached for his shoulder and squeezed it. “How does it work?”

Andrew stared at him, silent.

“How does it work?” Howell repeated excitedly. “How can you do it?”

The boy bit his lip. Howell’s face was scarlet, his eyes feverishly bright. “I—it’s this,” Andrew said at last, pulling the amulet from his chest. “It was my mother’s. I took it when she died.”

His hands shaking, Howell gently took the stone between his fingers, rubbing the frayed string. “Magic,” he said.

Andrew shivered despite the fire at his back. “It’s from here. The Indians. The Tankiteke. There were lots, my mother said. Her grandfather found it when he was little. My father—” He ended brokenly.

Howell nodded in wonder. “It works,” he said. “I saw it work.”

Andrew swallowed and drew back a little, so that the amulet slipped from Howell’s hand. “Like this,” he explained, opening his mouth and slipping one finger beneath his tongue. “But you don’t swallow it.”

“I saw you,” the old man repeated. “I saw you playing with my dog.” He nodded at Festus, dozing in front of the fire. “Can you be anything?”

Andrew bit his lip before answering. “I think so. My mother said you just concentrate on it—on what you want. See—”

And he took it into his hand, held it out so that the firelight illuminated it. “It’s like all these things in one. Look: it’s got wings and horns and hooves.”

“And that’s how you hid from them.” Howell slapped his knees. “No wonder they never found you.”

Andrew nodded glumly.

“Well,” Howell coughed. He sank back into the chair, eyes closed. He reached for Andrew, and the boy felt the old man’s hand tighten about his own, cold and surprisingly strong. After a minute Howell opened his eyes. He looked from the flames to Andrew and held the boy’s gaze for a long time, silent. Then,

“You could fly with something like that,” he said. “You could fly again.”

Andrew let his breath out in a long shudder. “That’s right,” he said finally beneath his breath. He turned away. “You could fly again, Major Howell.”

Howell reached for the boy’s hand again, his fingers clamping there like a metal hinge. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I think I’ll go to sleep now.”

The following afternoon the plow came. Andrew heard it long before it reached Sugar Mountain, an eager roar like a great wave overtaking the snowbound bungalow. The phone was working, too; he heard Howell in the next room, talking between fits of coughing. A short time later a pickup bounced up the drive. Andrew stared in disbelief, then fled into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

He heard several voices greeting Howell at the door, the thump of boots upon the flagstones.

“Thank you, Isaac,” wheezed the astronaut. Andrew heard the others stomp into the kitchen. “I was out of everything.” Andrew opened the door a crack and peered out, glaring at Festus when the dog scratched at it.

Howell motioned the visitors into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Andrew listened to their murmuring voices before storming back into the living room. He huddled out of sight on the window seat, staring outside until they left. After the pickup rattled back down the mountainside, he stalked into the kitchen to make dinner.

“I didn’t tell them,” Howell said mildly that evening as they sat before the fire.

Andrew glared at him but said nothing.

“They wouldn’t be interested,” Howell said. Every breath now shook him like a cold wind. “Andrew…”

The boy sat in silence, his hand tight around the amulet. Finally Howell stood, knocking over his glass of scotch. He started to bend to retrieve it when Andrew stopped him.

“No,” he said hoarsely. “Not like that.” He hesitated, then said, “You ever see a drunk dog?”

Howell stared at him, then nodded. “Yes.”

“It’s like that,” said Andrew. “Only worse.”

Festus followed them as they walked to the door, Andrew holding the old man’s elbow. For a moment they hesitated. Then Andrew shoved the door open, wincing at the icy wind that stirred funnels of snow in the field.

“It’s so cold,” Howell whispered, shivering inside his flannel robe.

“It won’t be so bad,” said Andrew, helping him outside.

They stood in the field. Overhead the full moon bloomed as Festus nosed after old footprints. Andrew stepped away from Howell, then took the talisman from around his own neck.

“Like I told you,” he said as he handed it to the old man.

Howell hesitated. “It’ll work for me?”

Andrew clutched his arms, shivering. “I think so,” he said, gazing at the amulet in the man’s hand. “I think you can be whatever you want.”

Howell nodded and turned away. “Don’t look,” he whispered.

Andrew stared at his feet. A moment later the flannel robe blew against his ankles. He heard a gasp and shut his eyes, willing away the tears before opening them again.

In front of Andrew the air sparkled for an instant with eddies of snow. Beside him, Festus whined, staring above his head. Andrew looked up and saw a fluttering scrap like a leaf: a bat squeaking as its wings beat feebly, then more powerfully, as if drawing strength from the freezing wind. It circled the boy’s head—once, twice—then began to climb, higher and higher, until Andrew squinted to see it in the moonlight.

“Major Howell!” he shouted. “Major Howell!”

To Howell the voice sounded like the clamor of vast and thundering bells. All the sky now sang to him as he flailed through the air, rising above trees and roof and mountain. He heard the faint buzzing of the stars, the sigh of snow in the trees fading as he flew above the pines into the open sky.

And then he saw it: more vast than ever it had been from the orbiter, so bright his eyes could not bear it. And the sound! like the ocean, waves of air dashing against him, buffeting him as he climbed, the roar and crash and peal of it as it pulled him upward. His wings beat faster, the air sharp in his throat, thinning as the darkness fell behind him and the noise swelled with the brightness, light now everywhere, and sound, not silent or dead as they had told him but thundering and burgeoning with heat, light, the vast eye opening like a volcano’s core. His wings ceased beating and he drifted upward, all about him the glittering stars, the glorious clamor, the great and shining face of the moon, his moon at last: the moon.

Andrew spent the night pacing the little house, sitting for a few minutes on sofa or kitchen counter, avoiding the back door, avoiding the windows, avoiding Howell’s bedroom. Festus followed him, whining. Finally, when the snow glimmered with first light, Andrew went outside to look for Howell.

It was Festus who found him after just a few minutes, in a shallow dell where ferns would grow in the spring and deer sleep on the bracken. Now snow had drifted where the old man lay. He was naked, and even from the lawn Andrew could tell he was dead. The boy turned and walked back to the house, got Howell’s flannel robe and a blanket. He was shaking uncontrollably when he went back out.

Festus lay quietly beside the body, muzzle resting on his paws. Andrew couldn’t move Howell to dress him: the body was rigid from the cold. So he gently placed the robe over the emaciated frame, tucked the blanket around him. Howell’s eyes were closed now, and he had a quiet expression on his face. Not like Andrew’s mother at all, really: except that one hand clutched something, a grimy bit of string trailing from it to twitch across the snow Andrew knelt, shivering, and took one end of the string, tugged it. The amulet slid from Howell’s hand.

Andrew stumbled to his feet and held it at arm’s length, the little stone talisman twisting slowly. He looked up at the sky. In the west, above the cottage, the moon hung just above the horizon. Andrew turned to face the dark bulk of Sugar Mountain, its edges brightening where the sun was rising above Lake Muscanth. He pulled his arm back and threw the amulet as hard as he could into the woods. Festus raised his head to watch the boy. They both waited, listening; but there was no sound, nothing to show where it fell. Andrew wiped his hands on his pants and looked down at the astronaut again. He stooped and let the tip of one finger brush the old man’s forehead. Then he went inside to call the police.

There were questions, and people from newspapers and TV, and Andrew’s own family, overjoyed (he couldn’t believe it, they all cried) to see him again. And eventually it was all straightened out.

There was a service at the old Congregational church in Kamensic Village near the museum. After the first thaw they buried Howell in the small local cemetery beside the farmers and Revolutionary War dead. A codicil to his will left the dog Festus to the fourteen-year-old runaway discovered to have been living with the dying astronaut in his last days. The codicil forbade sale of the bungalow and Sugar Mountain, the property to revert to the boy upon his twentieth birthday. Howell’s son protested this: Sugar Mountain was worth a fortune now, the land approved for subdivisions with two-acre zoning. But the court found the will to be valid, witnessed as it was by Isaac and Seymour Schelling, village grocers and public notaries.

When he finished school, Andrew moved into the cottage at Sugar Mountain. Festus was gone by then, buried where the deer still come to sleep in the bracken. There is another dog now, a youngish English cocker spaniel named Apollo. The ancient Volkswagen continues to rust in the driveway, next to a Volvo with plates that read NASA NYC. The plows and phone company attend to the cottage somewhat more reliably, and there is a second phone line as well, since Andrew needs to transmit things to the city and Washington nearly every day now, snow or not.

In summer he walks with the dog along the sleepy dirt road, marking where an owl has killed a vole, where vulpine tracks have been left in the soft mud by Lake Muscanth. And every June he visits the elementary school and shows the fifth graders a videotape from his private collection: views of the moon’s surface filmed by Command Module Pilot Eugene Howell.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
: Nicholas Margalis’s manuscript is in the archives of the National Air & Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

In memory of Nancy Malawista and Brian Hart

This is probably the story I love most of all my short works. It received my favorite rejection letter of all time: the editor of
Weird Tales
turned it down because he found it “bizarre.”
Wow,
I thought, I’ve written something that’s too weird for
Weird Tales.

Kamensic Village is the fictionalized version of the small town where I grew up in northern Westchester County; I first started writing stories set there when I was in high school. For a few years in college I worked off and on as a home health aide, and in 1977, when I was nineteen, I spent a week in that small town living with a woman who was dying of cancer. Her cottage became the dying astronaut’s refuge on Sugar Mountain (and her dog, Apollo, became Festus). A few years later, the death of someone I knew triggered what has become a continuing struggle to understand suicide. “Snow on Sugar Mountain” was my first attempt to put this into writing (subsequent efforts include “Last Summer at Mars Hill” and most of my novels). It also hints at my lifelong secret love affair with the American space program. I discovered Nicholas Margalis’s notebook when I was working at NASA; it was squirreled away in what the Records Management Division technically termed “The Nut Files.” I cried when I read the notebook, and still keep a xeroxed copy on my desk. The original remains at the Smithsonian.

I
MET THE BEARDED LADY
the first day I rode with Cass on the town route. That sweltering afternoon I sprawled across my mattress on the floor. A few inches from my nose lay the crumpled notice of the revocation of my scholarship. Beside it a less formally worded letter indicated that in light of my recent lack of interest in the doings of The Fertile Mind Bookstore, my services there would no longer be needed, and would I please return the
Defries Incunabula
I had “borrowed” for my thesis immediately? From downstairs thumped the persistent bass line of the house band’s demo tape. Then another, more insistent thudding began outside my room. I moaned and pulled my pillow onto my head. I ignored the pounding on the door, finally pretended to be asleep as Cass let himself in.

“Time to wake up,” he announced, kneeling beside the mattress and sliding a popsicle down my back. “Time to go on the ice cream truck.”

I moaned and burrowed deeper into the bed. “Ow—that hurts—”

“It’s ice cream, Julie. It’s supposed to hurt.” Cass dug the popsicle into the nape of my neck, dripping pink ice and licking it from my skin between whispers. “Snap out of it, Jules. You been in here two whole weeks. Natalie at the bookstore’s worried.”

“Natalie at the bookstore fired me.” I reached for a cigarette and twisted to face the window. “You better go, Cass. I have work to do.”

“Huh.” He bent to flick at the scholarship notice, glanced at yet another sordid billet:
UNDERGRADUATE ACADEMIC SUSPENSION
in bold red characters. Beneath them a humorlessly detailed list of transgressions. “You’re not working on your thesis. You’re not doing
anything.
You got to get out of here, Julie. You promised. You said you’d come with me on the truck and you haven’t gone once since I started.” He stalked to the door, kicking at a drift of unpaid bills, uncashed checks, unopened letters from my parents, unreturned phone messages from Cass Tyrone. “You don’t come today, Julie, that’s it. No more ice cream.”

“No more Bomb Pops?” I asked plaintively.

“Nope.” He sidled across the hall, idly nudging a beer bottle down the steps.

“No more Chump Bars?”

“Forget it. And no Sno-Cones, either. I’ll save ’em for Little Eva.” Reaching into his knapsack, he tossed me another popsicle and waited. I unpeeled it and licked it thoughtfully, applying it to my aching forehead. Then I stood up.

“Okay. I’m coming.”

Outside, on the house’s crumbling brick, someone had spray-painted
Dog Is Glove
and
You Are What You Smell,
along with some enthusiastic criticism of the house band written by Cass himself. A few steps farther and the truck stood in a vacant parking lot glittering with squashed beer cans and shattered bottles. Before I could climb in, Cass made me walk with him around the rusted machine. He patted the flaking metal signs and kicked the tires appraisingly. The truck settled ominously into the gravel at this attention and Cass sighed. “Damn. Hope we don’t get another flat your first time out.”