Meteors in August (23 page)

Father stayed home from work, lying on his bed like a man who expected to die. Half the people in town had seen him go after the big Indian, and the other half claimed they were there. He was a sooty-faced madman. His followers conveniently forgot how they'd cheered him on. Dean Macon was a lone fool.

Besides that, Arlen had put it in his head that he could have been the one hanging from his own shirt in that cell, and my father believed it in a way. I think Myron's death made him afraid of what could happen to a man who exposed himself to Miriam Deets. Father could never do what Myron had done, but he'd laid himself bare all the same, and the things he wanted from that girl took on a new meaning. He figured he'd better lie low and stay out of fate's path.

Mother didn't leave the house for days in a row. She sent me to the store for groceries. “Don't answer any questions,” she said, “even if you think you know the answer.”

As I wheeled the cart down the aisles I heard whispers, my father's name and my own. I kept my head down. If someone tried to speak to me, I gave the cart a push and jumped on the back for a quick ride.

Mom kept her hands busy that week. She defrosted the refrigerator and vacuumed every rug in the house. On Tuesday she started washing windows in the living room, and by Thursday she'd reached my bedroom in the attic.

The day of Myron's funeral I rode my bike to the cemetery and stood on the hill above the gravesite as they lowered his mahogany coffin into the ground. Mrs. Evans had spared no expense. I heard the coffin was lined with white satin, and the handles were solid brass. She was sorry now. She should have gone to see Myron that day, though she was disgusted by what he'd done. “I wouldn't have left him there all night,” she'd said to Sheriff Wolfe the day Myron died. “Didn't he know? Didn't he know his mama would forgive him?”

Reverend Piggott's speech was brief. I suppose he didn't have much to say for a man who had committed the final sin of taking his own life. Less than a dozen mourners saw Myron buried. Caleb Wolfe peered over the very edge of the hole, holding his hat in his hand, watching the box shudder as it hit bottom. Bo Effinger wept like the overgrown child he was. Tiny Mrs. Evans wore a netted veil to hide her bloodshot eyes. When she threw the first clod of dirt, I saw her fury: she heaved it with all her pitiful strength, then turned and walked away, letting the men with shovels finish their job.

She sat in the hearse, waiting for the others, and I wanted to go to her. I wanted to say something kind and comforting, but I couldn't think of anything Mrs. Evans would believe. I hopped on my bike and coasted down the hill.
Myron loved his cats
, I said to myself.
That was something
. The road blurred in front of me.

I think Daddy might have forced himself to go back to work on Monday if Willis hadn't been hit with another tragedy. Bad luck comes in threes, folks said; the fire and the hanging just weren't enough. “The devil's got to have his due.” I must have heard that a dozen times.

Arlen and Les and their kids were swimming at Moon Lake when the devil took his third delight. They saw the whole thing, watched the plane lose power and go into a dive, straight into Moon Lake at the deepest part, watched the waves suck it down, a tin toy in a whirlpool.

When Arlen busted through the front door to tell us about it, Mom and I were sitting in the living room in front of the fan with nothing on our minds but that hot wind. Daddy had just ventured down the stairs for the first time all week.

“You won't believe this,” she said. “You will not.” Her hair had dried in twisted strands and shook like a head full of water snakes. “I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.” She saw Daddy standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking like his own ghost. “Mercy me, Dean, you are going to broil wearing that flannel robe in this heat.”

“Mind your business, Arlen,” he said.

“How dare you tell me to mind my business? I saved your life, Dean Macon, and I could have just kept to myself.”

“Please,” Mom said, “not again.”

Daddy sat down on the last step and tightened the belt of his robe. I was glad he stayed clear of the wind of the fan. He had the weeklong smell of sickness. When I took him the breakfasts he didn't eat or the suppers he barely poked, I left the tray on the nightstand and slipped out of the room as fast as I could. Mom refused to sleep with him though he begged not to be left alone in the dark. At first she pretended it was accidental: she fell asleep in the chair in his room or on the couch downstairs; but now she slept in Grandma Rose's room every night, and I didn't blame her. Still, I believe I would have slept on the floor before I slept in the bed where a woman died.

“I think it was a two-seater,” Arlen said.

“What?” said Mom.

“The plane. I'm telling you about the plane we saw go down in the lake. It was such a little thing, like a piece of folded paper. It circled wide at first, real high, a kind of loop-the-loop. Then it started spinning, tighter and tighter, heading straight for the water. We all sat on the beach—laughing and clapping. We thought it was a show. Any minute we expected the pilot would pull back. But all of a sudden, there wasn't a sound. The engine stopped dead. The wind stopped too, and the plane fell out of the sky like a bird with a bullet in its belly. Dead duck. Hit the water like a duck too, that flat splat. It sat on the surface for a couple of seconds, bobbing; then it sank so fast I thought I'd had a dream and none of it had happened.”

I looked over at the stairs to see how my father was taking it, but he was gone. This past week he'd gotten so quiet it scared me—no more clomping or banging, no more yelling or snoring. He was slipping out of the world, it seemed to me, and I wondered if you stopped hearing a person before he disappeared for good.

“Well?” Mom said.

“Well, what?”

“The pilot, did he get out?”

“Now, this is the truly strange part, if you ask me. I swear on my dear mother's grave I saw someone swimming away from the wreck. Les and the boys just laughed at me. They said the crash would have knocked him silly; he didn't have time to get out, and even if he did, he'd be in no condition to swim from the middle of Moon Lake to the shore. They said I saw driftwood or a piece of the plane rocking on the waves, but don't you think I know the difference between a man and a piece of wood?” She laughed. “Well, sometimes it's harder to tell than others, but this time I'm sure: there were arms moving. There were legs kicking. Someone's alive and we should find him before he's not.”

“Did you call the sheriff?”

“That worthless dog? He's barely moved all week. Won't wear his badge either. Sits in his office, panting from the heat. Brokenhearted over Myron Evans, I hear. You'd think they were sweethearts. Anyway, I tried to get Les to drive around the east shore, just to see, but he said I was on the verge of one of my hysterical fits and he was taking me home. He thinks I'm in my room, right this minute. He locked the door himself, thinks I'm sitting on the bed waiting for Dr. Ben to come give me a tranquilizer. That man could have been a fine horse doctor the way he can put a person to sleep. Whatever ails you, he thinks the best cure is to knock you out for a day or two. Never mind. You know how I escaped?” She was getting the giggles, and I began to think Uncle Les might have been right about that hysterical fit. “I climbed out the window and slid down the rain gutter. Me. Forty-eight years old. Spry as a girl. Young heart.” She gave my arm a slap. “Bet you couldn't slide down no rain gutter, Lizzie.”

“Don't give her ideas,” Mom said.

“Anyway, somebody's alive,” Arlen said. “I hope they find him in time.”

I believed her at first, but as soon as she told us how she escaped from her room, I began to think my uncle Les had had a good idea calling the doctor. She thought Jesse was alive too—for days—even though we'd all seen his eyes flung open, wild with surprise. We'd all seen Nina breathing into him, the only one who thought to call him back, but it was hours too late. And we'd all seen the sheriff wrap him in a sheet after the doctor said, “Been dead since two o'clock.” It was well past five. Still Arlen didn't believe it, and Les had to hold her back when Caleb Wolfe drove away with the soaked sheet making a dark spot on the backseat of his car. At the burial she wailed:
Take my baby out of that box
. Reverend Piggott waited for her moaning to stop before he said:
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
… And then, raising his hands to God,
Weep not for him who is dead, nor bemoan him; but weep bitterly for him who goes away, for he shall return no more to see his native land
.

My grandmother dreamed of water the night she died. “I was caught in an eddy,” she told my mother, “spinning in the cold river. My head was about to go under, but I woke before the water could suck me down for the last time, and I'm still alive.”

Grandma Rose must have known how close she'd come to the rocks, that they waited for her on the other side of her closed eyelids. But my mother said, “Hush now, hush now,” and pulled the knotted sheet from her crippled hands. When my grandmother slept at last, Mother slipped away.

In the morning, my mother found Daddy in Rose's room and almost scolded him for waking her. But he was on his knees, his head resting on her bed, quiet, so quiet. He had uncovered the old woman's feet and was staring at them. He caressed one, touched her toes with his fingertips, so tender, full of awe, as if he touched the feet of Jesus. “I had a dream,” he said. “I saw her swirling in dark water, but I couldn't reach her, you see? I didn't get here in time.”

23

EVERY NIGHT
Daddy called me to his room. And every night he asked me to read the paper, the
Rovato Daily News
, just the parts about the plane crash. I did, despite the fact that Mother had forbidden it. She didn't like my going to his room at all. She said, “If we stay away, maybe he'll take a bath.” That was all she had to say concerning my father.

For a week he'd barely eaten enough to keep a chicken alive; now he ate everything I brought him and asked for more: biscuits and honey, bacon and runny eggs that dribbled down his chin, pork chops and gravy and heaps of mashed potatoes. It seemed he thought it was his duty to eat enough for himself and for that boy from the plane who might be lost in the hills above Moon Lake.

Three days passed, and the divers still hadn't found a trace of the plane. This confirmed Father's old fear of Moon Lake, and his belief that there were trenches so deep a man might never be found. But on the fourth day the
Rovato Daily News
printed a strange letter that made Daddy weep until he heaved. That ended his days of feasting. He was so weak he let Mom take him to the bathroom. She didn't bother to shut the door, and I watched from the hallway as she stripped him, her kindness swift and silent. She washed his hair and scrubbed his back, brushed his teeth as if he were her child. When he stood, shivering and naked, he held a towel in front of himself and said, “Don't look at me.”

Mother said, “I wiped the shit off my mother's ass for eight years. You think you can break my heart like she did, old man?”

Daddy sat down on the edge of the tub. “He killed her,” he said. “He killed my girl.”

This was the letter:

I am a friend of the boy who flew the plane into Moon Lake. He has asked me to write this letter so that you will understand and hopefully forgive what he done. Yes, he is alive, but a long way from here where you won't ever find him. There's a girl in that plane, Gloria Zykowski, and she is not alive but my friend says please get her out and send her home. He knows he did the wrong thing but there is no changing that so please don't think it will do any good to find him and punish him. It won't. That girl is dead. He rented a plane in Calgary and filed a flight plan going north but they made a wide circle south to Moon Lake where you saw them. He did not mean to kill her. He loved her. He wanted to marry her but she's only sixteen and her father said no, so my friend, Roger Skeba, that's his name, came up with this plan to fly the plane into the lake and swim away. No one would be looking for them way down in Montana. He figured it would be just like they disappeared. Looking back it's easy to see it was a stupid plan but he didn't mean any harm to her. They were going to get married and live in a town where her father would never find them. He said it was going to be like they was born again, that's what he said, but it didn't work out that way as you already know.

Sincerely yours,
A. Friend          

Now, of course, a lot of people thought that letter was a hoax, some crazy kid playing the meanest kind of joke imaginable; but the next day the Rovato paper tracked down a story from a Calgary newspaper: a small plane, supposedly heading north, had disappeared on August 9. Sure enough, the missing people were Roger Skeba, twenty-four, and Gloria Zykowski, age sixteen.

We were still taking bets on it—somebody reading about the missing plane in Calgary and the crash in Moon Lake might have put the stories together for his own amusement. It was hard to believe anyone would down a plane in a lake on purpose, even a fool for love. Of course Arlen believed it and felt vindicated: that was no wood on the water.

Mom made me swear not to aggravate my father with this crazy speculation; but the next night when I took him supper, he begged me to read the paper and I couldn't refuse him any more than I could have refused a dying man a sip of water.

A dozen men were on the job now, trying to find the plane, but that kid must have had a good eye because he aimed straight for the deepest crevasse of Moon Lake. From the sky, he must have seen the place where waves darken, where green rolls over itself, a froth of white, then black. “I told you,” Daddy said. “They might never find her.” His eyes began to tear. The evening sun burning through the curtains made the room close and hot, but Daddy hugged himself and shivered, a chill in his blood as he sank to the frigid depths, stones tied to his feet.