The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (19 page)

He stepped out of the van, tamping the air with his palms. Was the man actually pleading for peace? He was. Somewhere on the road behind him lay a mangled lump of paternity. Our father, the widower, mad with grief and probably dead by it as well. We had been orphaned by Terry Nguyen; the creep would make us wards of the Cuba Pens; we would come up like I Murder and meet an end just as absurd.

Faron drove the branch into Terry's windpipe and backed him up against the bent wheel. Terry's voice buzzed like a squirrel. “We can work something out,” he said. “You are decent boys. I have always had faith in you.”

If he was probing for humanity, I thought, he would come up dry. But a man like Terry Nguyen always expects a positive outcome. It's just a matter of performing the right actions in their proper sequence. There are only so many variables.

My brother did not feel much pity for Nguyen, but Terry had never expected that. Faron looked at the insect he had pinned against the van and he felt sorry for himself.

“Why do you always have to put us here?” It was Pop he was asking. Pop's ghost. “It isn't fair.”

No answer came, so Faron withdrew the stick and drove it up into Terry's toy nose. Nguyen clawed at his face like a man trying to pull a kipper from a tin of oil. “Fuck you, Pop,” said Faron. He brought the stick down on Terry's shoulder and then tossed it into the gravel. My brother walked away.

I shouted that we could not just leave, but Faron was already down the culvert and up the other side, gaining speed through the palmettos toward our trailers.

Faron had been cursing a corpse, but our father was only half as dead as he thought. Pop appeared alongside the Vanster cradling a smashed arm, his chest painted blue with axle grease. Blood pumped through a hole in his cheek.

“Give me some room,” he told me, wheezing a little.

Pop pinned Terry against the van with his ragged chest. Through the gap in his cheek he blew a bloody mist across Terry's face, then dragged him around the front of the van and forced him down onto the pavement. He arranged Terry's head under the bumper a few inches in front of the bent tire.

“Put your foot on him,” he told me. “Hold him still.”

I stepped on Terry's chest. Pop climbed behind the wheel and asked was the man's head well situated.

I said hold up, wait, I'm not ready, and then: “Okay. Give her some gas, Pop.”

If Terry said anything at all, it was the word
please
, but spoonbills can cry like a doomed man, too. The tread croaked on the cement, moving slowly. Inches separated Terry's face from the tire but Pop stretched them into a mile.

I said, “Hell. Oh, hell.” Just as the rubber touched Terry's ear, I dragged him to his feet and hugged him tight. He felt warm. A fellow man. A living man. His hairpiece hung down over one ear showing a rectangle of scar tissue that suggested botched surgery. At the side of the road I gave him a shove into the blackberries. “Run,” I told him.

Pop pulled forward a few feet. The blood had stopped flowing from his cheek. He looked me over: a stranger, a nuisance, something in the road. I thought, well, here it comes. He will kill me now, I thought. Beat me unconscious and leave me to die among the blackberries.

Pop's eyes turned sad. Life had not worked out the way he might have hoped. He had had expectations, I saw this for the first time; they had not been met. Then he drove off, leaving me alone on the Crawler Road.

 

15.

I have been left by myself in some curious places. As I sat alone in the waiting room at the Flagstaff Babying Clinic, wondering how I would pay for the extraction, Penny could be heard within excoriating the nurse and me and the child inside her.

Nonfamily were forbidden in the delivery room, and until you were born I was not considered kin. I am not sure I would have watched anyway. Umma always warned us boys against standing too close to a woman's birth tubes. Pop had done so, and he wept for a month.

This was an after-hours clinic where one nurse performed the extractions, answered the phone, and counted my money under a grimy yellow light. Most of the night I was the only man in the lobby. The seats were pastel scoops so worried by backsides that I could count the bolt heads through the padding. I stood up to tour the room.

In one corner an aquarium wanted water. I peered through the algae as a single confounded eel slapped the glass with its tail. The filter gagged and sputtered. I found a plastic pitcher and filled it from the bathroom tap. After six or seven trips the tank was full and the filter ran smoothly. The eel ceased its slapping. I watched its dimpled eyes for a sign of gratitude. Instead, the animal rolled onto one side and convulsed in the suction of the intake tube.

I took a nap out of self-pity, dreamed I sat on a painful chair in a vacant waiting room, and woke to find myself no longer alone. A crowd had gathered, watching me with patient smiles. I recognized the boy from the ticket booth at Lowell, two groundskeepers, the entire cleaning crew. Our security guard paced nervously by the entrance. They formed a cordon around me, although I got the clear sense that it was not me they had come to protect.

Some invisible process had gotten under way as I slept; people don't just show up together without a reason. Beside me sat Raoul. He stared ahead at the swinging door that led to the birthing bay. Through his sparse whiskers I watched his tongue probe its cheek like it wanted out. Without speaking, he wedged an envelope between my hip and the seat.

I thought: Oh, hell. Another contract.

Inside was three million in smeary Bosom notes, enough to cover the extraction and a box of butt wipes. Raoul draped an arm over my bouncing leg and leaned in: “We are family now, Rowan.” All around the waiting room bloomed the flowery grins of solidarity. “You and the baby will be well taken care of.”

“Okay,” I said. “I thank you.”

Chief Goldsmith of the Seminole Tribe, Percy Muck of Castle Kintek, Fink Lovers, Jesus Lovers: I had, since fleeing Cape Cannibal, been offered so much family it was beginning to feel like an epidemic, a final clinging sickness that would strangle our poor world. As Smart Man Tolemy said, “The Gunts were a Cult of Togetherness, and that is how they lie down, together in a mass grave.”

Swim apart or drown with the rest. Huddle like rabbits. Easier than to be plucked up by the scruff for the spit. The cordon constricted into a group hug. I wanted to run, but Doodie, the security guard, blocked the door.

A groundskeeper offered me his flask.

I refused, tried to return the money to Raoul.

“I have people on the telescope circuit,” he said. “Truckers and docents, gift-shop cashiers. They told me you would come, told me where you come from.” His dainty fingers danced across my jeans, the silver rings went
clickety-clack
. I shivered. The Fanta Trucker.

I thought: This is the work of Terry Nguyen. He did not need to pursue me, only to lay a trap and watch me follow its long string of lures. I was at the shark rig. The shock was imminent. In a minute Terry would step through the swinging door holding my newborn child and he would make me pay for what I stole from him on Cape Cannibal.

“Don't be afraid, Rowan,” said Raoul. “This is about caring. We all got here somehow bad.”

I was wrong. Terry Nguyen was not behind that door. What happened in that waiting room was my rescue from him. Sometimes around the kitchen table of a fink house—maybe the dope was hitting just right or you were just tired—a Sorcerer would reveal himself as a bona fide sage. An old fool would make sense.

Raoul tapped out a litany on my leg: “Sputnik,” he said. “Mariner 4, Voyager, Hubble, Cassini, Curiosity.” He spoke these names as Dr. Padma Ridley had, with the tedious reverence of a Jesus Lover. Raoul stared at the side of my head till I felt the force of his intention drill into my ear, a feathered bit. “Orion,” he said.

I threw the envelope and bills scattered over the carpet.

*   *   *

The founder of the Lowell Observatory was a Bosstown dandy with the fussy name of Percival. He had come up in a large and well-made family, had traveled the globe and collected himself a fortune on the modest scale of the Gunts. But he was terrible lonesome. He imagined a far richer world up in the sky, heaped with treasure, lapped by seas of molten silver, and peopled by understanding women who did not make excuses.

With a rudimentary telescope he spied a network of canals, the contours of a splendid civilization, on the ruddy Wanderer Mars. Percival wanted more than life to push his own gilded barge down those thoroughfares, to dine in its opulent cafés and love its honest women. To show the world his Unsunk Venice among the stars, Percival built a powerful telescope high on a hilltop in Flagstaff, the first great observatory of Gunt America.

Lowell died on Earth. The last of his machines was that great cannon lifted onto the bed of a pickup and hauled away for scrap. Unsunk Venice was turned into a bedtime story, added to the foolishness of
The Lonesome Wanderer
. “What a fool cannot destroy, he will make absurd,” Raoul always told us. He was right. But a sort of converse logic is true as well. From nonsense something real can be restored. A city can be raised from the sea.

Like Lowell before him, Raoul had climbed Mars Hill on his own unpopular mission. That forgotten library underneath Jersey contained a trove of Astronomical texts that had hitherto vanished from the Earth. They covered every manner of cosmological intrigue from the density of stars to the wingspan of galaxies. After hours Raoul descended into the stacks to learn the weight of the moon, to study the anatomy of a black hole. The ghostly energies and substances that swell our endless sky, the invisibility of the universe to us, and the insignificance of us to the universe, he read each word and carried that remnant library in his head on a pilgrimage to every Astronomical ruin in America, doing day labor to feed and board his neglected body.

He knew something few others did: that an observatory was not merely a site of religious observance, it was a machine that could see the poison rivers of Titan, the warm sea beneath the Europan crust, Lowell's Martian Canals. Along the way he quietly enlisted followers, calling them his Copernican League, the wretched of the Earth, the losers, the lonely, and the highly imaginative.

They loved him, believed in him, but there was the stink of failure about Raoul. Behind his back and with affection, they called him Moses Washington, after the clown from the comics who discovered America but was too afraid of bears to get off the boat. Raoul had the same stutter, same beard. Same doomed expression.

*   *   *

While Doodie calmly collected the Bosom currency off the clinic floor, Raoul told me everything. He asked would I join them. Join their club. Would I share my secret knowledge of Astronomical phenomena?

“We have chosen you, brother, for full membership in the Copernican League, Earth Chapter.” Doodie replaced the envelope on my lap.

I replied that I was about to be a father. I had a good job. I didn't have time for clubs.

“I understand.”

I looked at them all. The Copernicans were my people. They had mopped latrines in the Cuba Pens, picked bud by day, and slept in kennels with guard dogs. They had defiled themselves for a single tumbler of Haven Dark. They had brutalized and abandoned and had the same done to them. They were not good people, they were mine, and I wanted nothing to do with them.

“I have fallen in with unsuitable company in the past,” I said, politely.

“You'll fit right in!” Raoul grinned. “Look, Rowan, I know that you have lost the ones you love. I know that some losses cannot be recouped. If you will not join us,” he extended a hand, “I wish you well.”

I tried again to return the envelope, but he pushed it away. The money was mine to keep. Penny was one of their own. Doodie opened the door. The Copernican League stood as a group to go.

“Do you hold meetings?” I asked. (Meetings are something I cannot abide.)

“We study,” he confessed. “We talk. But mostly we search. We never stay anywhere long.”

He thanked me for my time, hoped they had not been any trouble. Now, if I did not mind, there was work to be done. Once Penny finished her babying, the League had preparations to make.

“Search?” I said, catching his leg. “What for?”

“For light,” he said. “Nothing more. Tolemy missed one, you know. You don't think he could tear down every telescope on Earth, do you?”

The Astronomers had been smarter than the Smart Man. They had hidden their finest arrays in backwaters. “Down in the Southern Hemisphere, in the empty nation of Chilly, the grandest telescope of all waits for us,” said Raoul. “It may take us six months or a year to reach it, but the Copernicans are heading south.”

Penny would join them, he was sorry to say. This news did not break my heart. I was worried about only one thing.

“You won't take the baby?” I asked.

“I don't guess she would fight you on that score. Not Penny.”

Before he left, Raoul leaned over to remind me what I would be missing: the Mountains of the Moon, the Rings of Saturn, nebulae and quasars. “The icy volcanoes of Europa.”

It was a pity, he said, that I would not join them.

We heard a cry from another room, and I stood with the Copernican League as the door swung open. The babying nurse entered carrying a confused bundle, red in the face from her efforts, and too beautiful to describe, you. This, I thought, is how every human meets her family, surrounded by strangers.

When I named you Sylvia, Penny did not ask why nor care. Call her what you want, she said, not knowing it was too late anyway. You had a name before you were born.

 

16.

Pop did not bother running. They found the Vanster where it had expired, not far from our trailers, burping steam and stinking of coolant. He had gone down to the stream to rinse his wounds. When the two Bosom men went to fetch him, they said Pop was so quiet, the ducks dipped at his feet for weeds. He had made a sling from one leg of his jumpsuit. His damp hair was finger-combed to one side, neat as he could make it.