Falling Idols (32 page)

Her headlights woke him late the next night but he pretended they hadn’t as she eased open the shack door and crossed to where he lay on the mattress on the floor. On his side, Austin feigned sleep the way most people never thought to, breathing slowly and deeply instead of falling deathly silent. She bought it. He could feel her go to her knees on the mattress, then slowly draw the sheet down to his waist and leave it there. She was looking at his back in the moonlight, at its mat of old scars. He thought she might’ve touched one, very lightly, but the feeling there was nearly gone.

Soon she retreated but never left, and maybe he’d slept for a moment, because when he began to wonder if she was still watching him in the dark, and turned over to peek through slitted eyes, he saw that Memuneh had come back without his even realizing it.

Near the door, Gabrielle was sitting with both legs tucked beneath her, sagging back against Memuneh. He held her from behind as a parent might hold a child stricken with sorrows, arms wrapped protectively around her, rocking her so gently she might’ve been made of crystal. Now and again his arm would rise, and his fingers dab beneath her eyes.

They were both at such peace Austin dared not move. For all the mystery of his origins, Memuneh seemed a simple creature. He aspired only to be a comforter, as if unsure of what he was, and in lieu of that certainty had looked to paintings for the gentlest reflections of how his kind was seen by those who professed to need them most. He was the creation of dead men and pigments.

Gabrielle was still there in the morning when Austin awoke for good, but not the Kyyth — granting them privacy, maybe. He saw that she was looking through his journals. That he didn’t mind and that she didn’t look sheepish when he spotted her … there could be no greater evidence than this to their having reached back toward their old familiarity.

“‘Let me tell you about loss,’” she read aloud. “‘Let me tell you about lies. Let me tell you about disappointment and heartache and betrayal, o my.’” She closed the notebook. “Feeling a little maudlin that day, were we?”

“Or that year,” he said.

“Did you write that about anybody
I
know?” She set the journal aside. “Had your heart torn out by women
and
angels. Just think of the songs you could write.”

He decided to say nothing of the previous night, simply see where the day led. After he slipped on his pants she followed him outside, and he used the tiny outhouse and washed from the bucket at the pump, then shaved. She combed out the snarls in his braid and rewove it, and ran her fingers through the streak of silver on the other side.

“What brought you out of it?” she asked. “Your maudlin era.”

“Evolution?” he guessed. “I just got sick of the sound of my own gloom. I was so full of shit. I really missed laughter. So I started by laughing at myself. You can’t imagine how liberating that was.”

“I’d like to try,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard.

She levered water from the pump and let it cascade over her bare feet. She was wearing a dress, full and flimsy and very free about her hips and ankles, and as the day advanced the heat didn’t seem to bother her nearly as much as it had before.

She was still there at dusk, so they watched the evening redness in the west while eating the eggs and beans he cooked over an open fire. The night was clean and cool and cloudless, perfect for stargazing. They spread two layers of blankets on the shack’s roof — ground level was risky; sidewinders might be drawn to their body heat. They lay on their backs, side by side, above them the light and dust of the galaxy, one of billions. For an hour she said nothing, and he wondered how long it had been since she’d seen this panorama, the man-made luster of New York stealing it from her sky.

“Do you remember when we used to do this before, and what we used to say the stars were?” she said. “Sure you do, you remember everything.”

“I remember,” he said. “Your idea, though, wasn’t it?”

“We were probably stoned.”

A decade and a half or more ago they’d decided that stars were the souls of the dead, still shining, and the souls of the yet-to-be, waiting for their descent. Or maybe one and the same, souls in respite before their return, that next chance to get it right, or at least better than the lifetime before. It was utter bongwater, but explained Hell, trapped in a nuclear ball of gas and fusion that burned away all the taints unfit to live behind a baby’s smile.

She told him that Memuneh had promised to share with her the same things he’d already shared with Austin. She asked if there was anyplace in particular that Memuneh went when he wasn’t staying at the shack. Austin just grinned and said, well, maybe he’d share that with her too, while he was being so forthcoming.

“He has a thing for the desert,” Austin said. “He says it reminds him of what’s left of the home of the first civilization, when
they
first met
us
.”

“Which — Egypt? Sumer?”

“Earlier than either one, according to him. A lot earlier.”

Later they listened to a train as it roared through and out of Miracle, whistle piercing the night, then saw the distant spear of its headlamp as it raced across the darkened land. And since he’d never lived where wolves were known to roam, this was how he imagined their howls to sound in the wild, purposeful and forlorn and sharp with wanderlust.

Maybe Gabrielle felt it too, because soon she asked what was next for him. Where would he go from here, once he’d gleaned all he could from this rare and wondrous encounter? Would it always be shacks and subsistence, for the rest of his life? Was there no part of him left that wouldn’t be let down by what an average day had to offer? Or did something yet remain that would be satisfied by what he could hold in his hands and heart?

Valid questions, all.

“You said you have a woman here?” she said, voice flat now.

“Yes.” Then, “She’s no one I could grow old with. It’s not that type of relationship.”

“What’s her name?”

“Scarlett.” He waited for snide comments, but they never came.

“You’re already old, Austin. We’ve always known that.”

She said nothing more about Scarlett, and throughout the day, as during her arrival, had said nothing at all about her husband back in New York. He found this more revealing than any truth she might’ve shared or lie she might’ve attempted.

And now it was clear as the night sky why she’d come. It was not to be taught, nor to forgive, although that was part of it. It was, instead, to usher him back to the rest of his life, far from these fields of ephemera. I’ve seen the nearest shore of Heaven, so burn out my eyes, because it could never be Paradise without her … and even with eternity in the balance I still don’t know if I can bear her absence one more day.

In eleven years he could not remember a single sunrise when some part of him hadn’t ached for missing her.

When he reached for her hand she didn’t pull it away, and he found that if he focused on the stars he could forget about the blankets and roof beneath them, and it was almost like flying.

*

Despite claims by the town’s latter-day immigrants and all the revisionist New Age apocrypha written up in cheaply-printed booklets and sold from wire racks beside cash registers, the long-term residents knew better and laughed: Miracle, Utah, had never been named for some earlier imprimatur of divine favor. It had been called Miracle to honor a mule of the same name owned by the first family to settle the area in the early 1880s. The mule had pulled a wagonload of their earthly possessions across the Great Plains, over the Rockies, and into the parched Utah desert, where the family — all fourteen of them, minus the three lost along the way — opted to make their home within the paltry oasis of fertility they found there. Mostly dead anyway, the mule was shot through the head and eaten.

The settlement drew others and, like most towns sprinkled throughout the expanding annex of the nation, went through times of boom and bust. Within a decade after the bones of that heroic mule had been gnawed clean out of nutritional desperation, rich deposits of copper were discovered nearby, then mined for nearly two generations until the shafts wheezed nothing but rocks and dust. By then there was too much town to dry up and blow away, but not enough to roll ahead on its own momentum. There was just enough to stagger in circles without falling.

Why, then, after more than a century since its humble and sacrificial beginnings did it suddenly appear graced by a divine presence? Theories abounded, but one of the simplest held that the name itself had done it, that Heaven had looked down and read the sign on the way in, and decided that alone merited its attention, like a declaration of faith that had never been abandoned.

Mule shit,
said the crustier and more pragmatic of the old timers. It was enough to make the town’s namesake turn over in its shallow grave … if the beast even had one.

Still, there was no denying the obvious: Something had come to Miracle. It was first seen floating just above the roofline in front of the town’s tallest building, the three-floor brick hotel. It was seen, on occasion, to emit such a dazzling light that the naked eye had to turn away. On a day of murderous heat, when the electricity went out, a dark and swollen cloud came in from across the distant mountains, in direct opposition to that day’s winds, and cooled the air and streets with a torrent of rain.

Its interaction in the lives of individuals soon followed: a broken leg healed after a drunken tumble down a flight of stairs, a cancer burned painlessly from the jaw of a tobacco chewer. A woman who’d hours before learned that her son had been killed in an accident during army basic training claimed that it appeared in her home and held her through the night while she cried. His eyes, she said, were the most striking eyes she’d ever seen — one blue, the other brown.

By the time Austin read this — incredulously reported in a month-old issue of
Disclose
magazine that had reached him in Alaska — the world was already beating a path to Miracle’s door.

*

Like most days when he’d made this walk, Austin covered the distance more quickly than he knew was humanly possible. Not far from the shack his head would begin to spin — not with the dizzy side-to-side vortex of drunkenness or illness, but one that seemed to wheel from back to front. He never felt as if he were losing his balance, just his sense of solid ground beneath him. It was not unpleasant, and he’d walk a bit farther along the desert road and find himself in Miracle as fast as if he’d driven.

On foot yet four miles in as many minutes? It was profoundly disorienting at first. But now he just accepted, and laughed. And today headed for the hotel.

With a hesitancy to discuss her past even greater than his own, Scarlett had come to Miracle last year within a week after he had. She’d given different last names on different occasions, and there was no reason to believe any were valid, just as there was no reason to believe that Scarlett was her given Christian name. He’d made these near-anonymous acquaintances before, men and women brushed into peculiar corners by circumstances of lives that had slipped their control, or those who’d remade themselves from scratch and hid from whatever they wanted to leave behind.

It was morning, with Memuneh and Gabrielle off on their own, as he’d promised her. Austin supposed he was taking advantage of it to come say goodbye. Neither he nor Scarlett had ever said how long they planned on staying, but it went unspoken that Miracle was no permanent destination.

“Well look at you, all red-faced and serious-looking,” she said when she opened the door to her room. “You run all this way just to see me, or are you meeting your friend for cornflakes and thought you’d drop by for a quick bounce?”

“You know about Gabrielle already?”

“This town doesn’t bustle so much these days that a new face doesn’t stand out when it stays more than one afternoon. People talk. She’s at the bed-and-breakfast, right? They
know
where she’s from, Austin, and I’ve got me a good memory. Oh, and come to think of it? I might’ve heard she wasn’t there for breakfast this morning, imagine that. Now where
ever
can she be, I wonder?”