One Day the Wind Changed (2 page)

It wasn't true. The truth was, he understood nothing-not while the world roiled and lurched.

Nothing
is what they'd paid him to produce. In detail.

Nothing would be his legacy.
That
he understood.

He tasted dust. The wind kicked up. He closed the notebook and returned it to his pocket. He walked across the street to the school. One of the side doors, next to the auditorium, had a small hole in it, just above the lock, a consequence, perhaps, of clumsiness on the part of the builders as they installed it. He'd speak to the contractor in the morning, he thought-then he thought, What's the point?

This door was hollow-core, cheap, a last-minute addition, lacking the loving detail of the rest of the project. Just three days ago, he'd received instructions to finish the town early: the test had been expedited. Optimal weather in Europe.

Stephen slipped inside the school auditorium, to a storage cabinet in the back of the room. From it, he removed a toolbox and a small block of foam insulation. He wasn't one of those architects who lived in his head, inside the cages of numbers they'd sketched on the page. He sought hands-on action-another sore spot between the contractors and him. He smiled. His expertise around the house was one of the things that had first endeared him to Sherrie.

Returning to the damaged door, he filled the hole with foam. Though working in the dark and in an increasingly bitter wind, he managed well by taking his time, making sure his movements were exact. The door creaked as he pushed and pulled it. With a razor blade he sliced away the excess material, then, with a putty knife, he spread vinyl spackling on the patch. In half an hour, when it dried sufficiently, he'd sandpaper the surface of the door and touch the whole thing up with paint. He stepped back. Splendid.

“Y
ou want boredom, go sit in the center of the universe,” he said. He cut into his blood-rare T-bone. I finished my coffee. Sturling's was empty except for the two of us and a pair of middle-aged Navajo women chattering over chocolate ice cream in the corner by the kitchen. It was after ten p.m. Each night now I stop by the diner for a mug of decaf and a slice of blueberry pie to fortify myself for the late milking. Occasionally I bump into an impatient young genius—an astronomer working with the radio telescopes a few miles down the road at the Very Large Array.

“And what's with the local motels?” he said. “At the VLA I can pick up radio waves from a gas cluster millions of light-years from here. But at the Beechnut Lodge and now over at the Meadow Wind, I can't get squat on TV—and the signal's from Albuquerque. Eighty miles! Last night I tried to make it through an old Jimmy Stewart western, but Lord, the noise and the snow…”

It's an impressive getup out there, off Highway 60. Twenty-seven giant antennae looking like some spook-set from a Hollywood movie. Visitors running around arguing about molecular clouds, magnetic fields. Their skin broils because they spend their lives under fluorescent lights and they show up unprepared for the desert. Star-guys. You'd think they'd understand about the sun. “The center of the universe,” they call it: the Very Large Array, its ears pointed at the Big Bang, listening for God's salty sigh (surely, by now, the Almighty would be weary, bleached-out, and salty; I imagine his breath smelling like desert sage). But for the visiting scientists, who've applied for observation time on the ‘scopes, the VLA experience is apparently less than stellar: all night in a tiny, carpeted cubicle monitoring computer screens, sipping soft drinks, trying to stay awake (ceiling fans purring to keep the instruments at a moderate temperature), watching for errors or distinctive data. Most of them-and this young Einstein, last week, was no exception-are more excited that Sturling's offers 32-ounce steaks for under five bucks. I've learned you get what you spring for-especially with Sturling-so I stick to the pie.

“What's your project?” I asked the guy. Nothing these Brains ever spill makes sense to me. I don't know a fucking thing. But I figure it's best to treat strangers kindly in case someday I find myself a stranger somewhere.

“Young stars,” he said. “Where, in the Milky Way, most of them form. At McDonald Observatory last year I did an infrared survey on a supernova remnant, IC-443, and found a dense cloud in that arm of the galaxy that might be a star-cauldron.” He sipped his water. “The VLA can determine if there are fainter young stars embedded in the cloud—
if
we get the damn equipment straightened out. Right now, Antenna 11 is out of commission. Pointing problems.”

He was thin, this fellow, but I could see that twenty, thirty years under crackling lights staring at screens was going to soften and settle him into something like a pudgy human anthill.

“Young stars. You mean, like—”

“Origins. Birth. The birth of everything. Nothing comes from nothing. What do
you
do?” he said, polite but only half there.

“Rancher,” I said, checking my watch. “And the Holsteins are waiting for me.” As I rose to leave, I caught the chill I often feel at night when lights burn low and people get scarce. Cold space wafts between my body and the nearest living thing, and I think about my parents, gone now, because nights with them in the old house by the hearth used to be so pleasant, and I remember Liz, my wife, recently passed-leukemia, the doctors said, but I saw she was done for the first time I showed her my two and a half acres and she glimpsed her hard life, whole, like a signal from the future-and standing there, as I so often do, in Sturling's, I smelled the sage that always fills my nose in lonely moments. I don't know why, an odor from nowhere, from God, I guess, if I believed in God, a collective dryness across time, smudging the years away, piling up like tumbleweeds against an old cistern after a dust storm.

I turned at the door and saw that part of what I'd sniffed-the hard mustiness-came from the folds in the clothing of the Indian women, the red cotton blouses and woolen shawls. They'd risen from their table, a few paces behind me, their faces whiskered with ice cream melting into wrinkles, exhaustion, and mirth-this last because they're also accustomed to the weekend whiz kids around here. “Saw a
snake
out back,” one of them hissed at the hungry young astronomer.

“Oh?” he said.

“What's your name?” she said.

“Nick.”

“Nick, this snake was curled up like a rope set to snag a grizzly. It was eating its tail.”

“That's a myth,” he said. “I mean, snakes don't do that.”

“Where you from, Nick?”

“Manhattan.”

“Ever been out to the desert?”

“Not this desert.”

“Then you can't say what's being born here and dying, can you? And you know what else, Nick?”

He set his bloody knife on his plate. “What else?” he said.

“Little by little, that snake is going to swallow itself” She adjusted her shawl on her shoulders: a stark, earthen pungency. “Then its jaw will turn inside-out, and when it does …” She made a snap-shut motion with her left hand, then her right. “… the universe, the whole damn shooting match, will
blink out!
”

Her friend howled.

“Ancient wisdom.”

“Right,” Nick said. He looked at me.

In the doorway, a light breeze chilled my neck. “Can't help you, Nick,” I said. “I've lived here all my life, and I don't know a fucking thing.”

A smart kid, he fell back on certain knowledge: people always want something and it's easiest to give them what they're after if you can. He reached into his pocket and offered each gal a handful of coins.

“Thank you, Nick, thank you!” Snake Woman said. Her friend laughed again. “When you vamoose, now, don't go ‘round behind the building. Just leave that critter alone to do its hard work. May take ten years, or a hundred, or a thousand or more, but we don't want to rile it, now do we?”

The ladies slipped past me, out the door, smelling solid. Permanent.
Geologic

“This place,” Nick said, “bores the shit out of me.”

Look harder
, I nearly said.
Listen close
. Instead, I muttered, “Good night. Have a pleasant stay,” and walked out under clouds and no stars, a smell of sage, a whiff of faraway mountains (a mixture of snowmelt and granite), and a low, persistent absence from nowhere I can name, like a small, tenacious weed in the Sangre de Cristos—a weed.

M
eteors let go past the sliced moon in the pockets of a dark, pulsing thunderhead. No one can say how long it will rain.

It rains on the chopped stalks of a field by a road where Okies broke their backs in ‘36, bent over berries, peas, and nuts. It rains on the shack where picked nuts once were kept; where winter wheat waits this evening to dry; where a white man and a brown woman made furtive love, just once, in ‘42, and never knew each other again.

Okie. Chicana. Two worlds passing like falling stars.

It rains on rows of seedlings touched by few wet hands, now that gears and grease and oil rule the land. These days, the woman's grown son trails a tractor every spring, picking up gravel, scrub, debris. The man's legitimate son, the one he'll sometimes bother to acknowledge, has never met this older brother, never even heard of him, or known that his father had a tryst before his marriage. He has inherited the old man's work, and owns the factories that make the tractors in the fields.

Tonight, it rains on separate paychecks, on the worlds they will—or will not—buy. It rains on tinted bank windows, crumbling public housing, this soaked and weary crowd we call our town: people whose families touched years ago, a shy miracle in the shape of an unlikely couple, an unpredictable union-happy, unthinking, relieved-one hot, rainy day in a shack after work, where no one gave a good goddamn, just as, tonight, we're all past worrying how long it's going to rain.

E
ach week, here in the Dollman Planetarium, we host children's tours. Fifth and sixth graders. They burst through the door full of questions.

“Does the sun make noise?”

“Does Saturn wear bracelets?”

“Do clones have belly buttons?”

As I watch the kids' faces, I wonder who among them will grow up flummoxed by the world. Over there: the boy with the blue backpack, bumping into walls, chasing sun rays reflected off his teacher's watch-yes, a possible dreamer. That quiet girl sucking her thumb, picking her nose … her withdrawal suggests she can only sip at the world a little at a time.

The kids delight in the handwritten letters framed on the walls in the hall outside the Star Room. Astronomers from all over Texas, particularly from McDonald Observatory in the mountains down south, receive strange and hopeful notes from people. Sometimes the astronomers forward the letters to us and we display them, with permission from the writers or their families. I love to help the children sound out words, or wend their way through especially prickly sentences.

Today, three tall boys gather before Ms. Ruth Simon's letter, addressed simply, “To Whom It May Concern / McDonald Observ.” The boys' teacher, a thin, redheaded woman with an alluringly high voice helps them read it:

The thumb-sucking girl stumbles through A. J. Rymer's note to NASA from the early 1960s. It is framed in red-stained oak. She presses her face to the glass and mouths:

The girl turns to me. “Is this true?” she asks.

“No.”

“Then why is it on the wall?” She aims a wet thumb at my face.

“Because the man who wrote it
thought
it was true, and it's interesting to look back, with what we know now, and see how ideas change or grow.”

She squinches her nose. Freckles like cinnamon. “If it's not true, it shouldn't be on the wall.”

Ah. A seeker of answers, a hugger of absolutes.

“Are you the man who makes the moon rise?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Do you live here?”

“Not exactly, no. But I'm here much of the time.”
Too
much of the time, my lover said last month when she walked out on me, leaving behind only a Tupperware container full of tofu and, in the bathroom trash can, a frayed black bra with straps as thin as garter snakes.

One of the girl's classmates, a pudgy boy with unlaced sneakers, stands behind her, staring at the sign