A Million Heavens (15 page)

In the evening, back at the house, the black kid was nowhere to be found. He wasn't going to be there anymore. Ron Darling said they weren't going to discuss it. He wasn't angry with Arn, wasn't pleased with him. A problem had arisen concerning his business and he'd smoothed it out; that was all. Arn saw the value in being a good worker, but also he felt he'd won something not worth winning.

Terrance. That was the black kid's name.

Quickly a replacement was found for Terrance, an Indian kid who claimed to have run away from a reservation. Arn suspected it was a rule; you could only have so many white kids before you had to take a minority. The new kid was surly and weighed his words. Almost instantly upon his arrival, Ron Darling began ridiculing him. His name was Jonathon and Ron Darling pronounced his name in a syrupy lilt, as if the Indian boy were gay. Ron Darling invited the other boys to join in with the ridicule, and most did. Ron Darling said it over and over, the kid's name, and Jonathon went into a determined campaign of avoidance. He read a lot, war histories, and stared out an open window. Arn was friendly to Jonathon whenever he got the chance, when Ron Darling was elsewhere. The kid seemed above conversation but he sometimes spoke lone statements toward Arn. “My mother descended from the people of Sitting Bull, my father from bridge builders.” Statements like that. “My honor exists, fully formed. I need only find it and wear it like a fine coat.”

One evening Jonathon refused the dinner Ron Darling served and Ron
Darling began calling him names. Jonathon stood and calmly announced that Ron had no grounds to speak even a single word to him, that Ron's babble was but dried thistle in the wind. Ron Darling grew earnest and told Jonathon he ought to be grateful, that he could do a lot worse, and Jonathon replied that Ron Darling understood the nature of true gratitude as well as a hamster understands calculus. Ron Darling, now flustered, said he could see why no reservation would want a useless punk like Jonathon, and Jonathon declared that he would rather die than live on a reservation, that he would rather perish shivering in the wilderness than rest warm and fed but with his heart full of the white man's lies. Ron Darling, no way around it, was losing a verbal confrontation with a twelve-year-old kid. He wanted to hit Jonathon—in fact, he raised a tense arm—but that was the one thing he couldn't do. He couldn't hit a kid and put his business in jeopardy. He could either keep the kid and keep making fun of him and risk being made a fool, or he could do what he'd done with Terrance—invent some infraction worthy of dismissal and send him down the line to the next family. Which was what he did.

Arn, in Jonathon's absence, felt spineless. He felt like Ron Darling's pet. He liked working hard, but he was losing faith in it. For choosing the evil he knew in order to delay the next move, the next upheaval, he felt beaten in spirit.

A few weeks before eighth grade was to start, Ron Darling's wife left. It surprised Arn how much this event damaged Ron Darling. He grew sullen and less mean. He ate nothing and played music in the house almost constantly, music without words, music that seemed meant to drown out whatever was going on in his head. His wife had been a negligible presence, not wanting much to do with the boys, but apparently Ron Darling had needed her for something. Maybe her family had money and now Ron Darling would never get it; maybe she'd found someone who would give her kids of her own, though she was kind of old for that. In her absence, Ron Darling began talking almost exclusively of a time—some distant decade—when he'd ridden the crest of a Houston real estate boom, owned
a fleet of BMW's, had a hickory tree growing in his living room and a live-in maid. “I've been a maid and I've had a maid,” he kept saying, almost singing it, like a country song. Arn wondered if Ron Darling had ever even lived in Texas. He never mentioned his wife. He was less mean, but it seemed like he was saving it up, hoarding his ill will for a specific purpose. It even occurred to Arn to comfort him, but he didn't know how. There were a couple other boys who'd been with Ron Darling longer. They were giving him a wide berth, so Arn did the same.

He went to school and people talked to him and he took notes and sneaked a cigarette now and then. He came home and ate snacks and watched TV and chuckled at the jokes of his foster brothers. No more dinners were served. Several weekends came and went with no work, no piling into the pickup and putting on gloves that were too big and toiling the minutes away and then breaking for burgers and then toiling the rest of the minutes away. It took Arn well into the fall semester to realize it: Ron Darling had lost interest in his business and had quit booking jobs. He'd lost interest in much, and one of those things was scuttling around chasing a buck. Arn had been slow on the uptake, and now all the warm weekends had passed.

At school, Arn and his foster brothers were wary of each other. They all had something in common, something to be ashamed of, but that shameful fact could be worked around as long as they weren't together. One of the brothers ran track. One was a nerd. One a suave horn player. Arn decided to try out for basketball and found that it was not a difficult game. All he had to do was hustle and good things happened. It was a school of the whitest kids around. If Arn decided to snare every rebound, he could. If he decided to score a lot, he could. The coach didn't go out of his way to praise Arn, but Arn figured that was because the coach didn't want to show favoritism. The tryouts lasted a week, and by the end of that week Arn knew he'd found an identity as an athlete that might obscure his other identity as a foster kid. Instead of laboring with shovels and drills, he would burn the hours of his weekends practicing free throws and learning to dribble with his left hand.

On Sunday, Arn found an abandoned hoop at an elementary school near his house and shot countless deep jumpers into a steady wind, riding a high. On Monday, he waited until after first period to go to the locker room. He pushed back the door and sidled up to the roster, breathing the foul air that he'd helped taint with his basketball sweat. He belonged in the locker room, had a claim to it. His eyes darted from name to name, too fast to read them. They weren't in alphabetical order. Arn put his hand to the paper. He worked his way down the whole sheet. He was so excited, his eyes wouldn't work. He took a look around. No one was watching him. He started at the bottom this time and worked his way to the top. Now he felt it in his stomach. His name was not there. The names of a couple kids who were almost as good as Arn were there, and also the names of about ten kids who were clearly inferior. Blood was racing around in Arn's head. He pulled the roster off the wall and checked the back of it, resisted the urge to rip it into pieces. A couple kids came through the door and Arn was instantly embarrassed. They paused and then squeezed past him—not kids who'd been at the tryout, just regular PE kids. All the other basketball players had come before school and found their names. Arn wondered if they'd noticed his absence on the roster, if they'd been confused, if they'd secretly determined which player had made the team who didn't deserve to, which player was the worst of all. Arn pressed the roster back onto the wall.

When lunch period arrived, Arn was not hungry. He returned to the locker room, picked his way through to the offices where the coaches hung out. Coach Shell saw him through the glass and excused himself, stepping over some other coaches who were splitting a pizza. He came and stood in front of Arn, his head tipped to the side. He seemed like he felt guilty but was trying not to show it. Resigned is what he was—to what, Arn didn't know. Coach Shell wasn't saying anything. He was going to make Arn speak. But Arn didn't. He waited it out too. Coach Shell scratched his neck. He looked at Arn like the two of them had suffered a common injustice.

“Ask your dad, or your… whatever.” Coach Shell did something to
his collar and then scratched his neck harder. “Ask him why James Shell wouldn't let you on his basketball team. I have my reasons, I guarantee you that.”

Arn did not agree to ask Ron Darling anything. All he wanted to say was that none of this was fair, but he wasn't going to say that.

“If you're trying to piss off Ron Darling, you should've let me
on
the team.”

Coach Shell shrugged his shirt back into place. “It's not like you have to quit basketball for life. It's just a middle school team. Worst one in the county.”

“Say I was the best player at the tryout. I want to hear you say it. Say I'm the best basketball player at this school.”

At this point Coach Shell must have considered his job, considered the fact that he could get in trouble for unfairly excluding Arn. All he would say was, “You worked hard out there. You gave a great effort.”

That evening Arn went into the back room of the house, where Ron Darling was sitting in front of his TV, and announced that whatever feud Ron Darling had with Coach Shell, it had cost Arn a spot on the team.

“It's a poor musician who blames his instrument,” Ron Darling slurred.

“I'm not the musician,” Arn said. “That's Randy. I'm blaming you.”

“James Shell can go to hell.”

“Yeah, he probably will.”

“It rhymes. James Shell can go to hell.”

“And you'll go right along with him, you asshole.”

Ron Darling's breath caught. He looked small in his recliner. His white T-shirt was stained down the front. It didn't take him long—a couple shamed seconds—to understand that he had fully fallen and this was the sort of thing that happened after the fall: your once loyal charges told you to go to hell.

After the basketball episode, things went downhill at the middle school. Arn's PE class did a unit on archery and some kid intentionally shot Arn in the arm with one of the dull wooden arrows. Arn, in frustration, broke the arrow in two, and he was sent to the office for destroying school
property. Arn began drinking protein shakes and doing lots of push-ups, not even counting the push-ups, hoping for fights that never materialized. People seemed afraid of him, not in a way he enjoyed—the girls as well as the guys. He took all the money he had, the multitude of five-dollar bills Ron Darling had given him for each day he'd worked, down to the discount store and bought their cheapest home gym. He dragged it into his room and cleared a space for it, sliced the box open and spread the parts over the worn carpet. The gym didn't use weights, but heavy bands you had to stretch. It was around midnight, five hours after he'd brought the box into his room, this box adorned front and back with pictures of a satisfied man doing curls, that Arn threw in the towel. It wasn't his fault that the thing wasn't coming together. There were missing parts and extra parts. The directions were vague, grammatically incorrect. The assembly, even if it were possible, did not seem a one-man job. Arn leaned down over a flap of the cardboard and drove his fist into the face of the satisfied man doing curls. He collapsed on his bed. The store where he'd bought the gym didn't do returns; if you bought a thing, that thing wasn't their problem anymore. Arn told himself he'd work more on the home gym the next evening, but he didn't.

Close to graduation, Arn tried and failed to pick up smoking as a regular habit. He was relieved middle school was ending, but not hopeful about high school. He skipped the graduation ceremony, of course. He had his own ceremony, which was the cleaning out of his room, the getting rid of everything. The home gym and his basketball sneakers and a half-pack of cigarettes he'd abandoned and report cards and a coin collection he'd forgotten about and a Mariners cap he'd stolen from one of his old foster brothers. There was a lake nearby with a rotting dock and Arn guided wheelbarrow-load after wheelbarrow-load through the woods, over a hard-packed trail full of roots that bumped the wheelbarrow up off the ground, and out to the end of the dock, where he tipped the wheelbarrow forward and wrestled it side to side, dumping every scrap. He pictured the fish under there, not knowing what to think, letting the strange objects settle on the bottom of their world and then nosing closer to investigate.

His room in the afterlife was now roughly the size of his old bedroom in his parents' house, but with the piano and the bureau and the guitar reclining in its stand the place was cramped as a closet. Reggie didn't even pace anymore. He leaned against the walls. He didn't want to think of his room as a cell. This place wasn't prison and had nothing to do with prison. He believed this place had nothing even to do with laws, earthly or biblical, and whether Reggie had broken them. The floor had grown colder and Reggie had given up resting down where his mat used to be. Now he curled up on top of the bureau. With concentration, he could get the noise in his head to dull without the need of whistling or humming, but in time his concentration always gave out. He thought of the desert mornings, so obvious and refreshing. He thought of sleep, of open spaces.

He thought, at long last, of Cecelia, of the way she frowned when happily surprised and smiled when disappointed. He never could've done it consciously, but some wise part of him had kept him from dwelling on Cecelia until now. Some conservative branch of him had saved her for an emergency, and that's what Reggie was in the midst of. That, or the afterlife was now directly controlling Reggie's memory. The afterlife had broken Reggie down emotionally and now was giving him the comfort of a friend. Cecelia was an ace being played.

Before Reggie had met Cecelia, he'd never imagined an audience for his songs, but in time he'd begun judging their quality purely by her reaction. She was adorable and admirable in a way that made Reggie long to protect her rather than exploit or impress her. Not that she needed much protection. She seemed to wish at times to be gullible and thoughtless, but she wasn't. Reggie thought of her tiny pale feet curled up under her when she sat and played guitar. He thought of her sandpaper elbows. The way her face was somehow sharp and soft at once. He thought of their first meeting, at a concert held in the biggest auditorium on campus. About thirteen people had shown up. A woman with buzzed hair had played a deeply resonant wind instrument as tall as she was and a man with braids to his waist had accompanied her on xylophone. The two were married
and both worked at a college on the West Coast. Their music sounded like it had been born deep in a mystical woodland. They were unfazed by the comically sparse crowd. They'd played three or four lengthy songs and then bowed and wheeled off their instruments. Reggie had noticed Cecelia during the show, sitting up straight and paying unwavering attention, a lock of hair wrapped around her finger, brow furrowed. When the show was over she remained in her seat and so did Reggie. He watched her as she kept gazing at the stage, empty now. Everyone had left the auditorium and Reggie felt like he would've waited all night for her to make a move and finally she gathered up her satchel and sweater and sidestepped into the aisle. Reggie hurried to get next to her and she wasn't a bit startled by him. He told her his name and she said hers. When they got outside she handed Reggie her bag to carry and then he walked her toward the parking lot. There was a feeling that nothing had to happen, that they didn't have to banter about the concert or identify things they had in common. They walked past the fountains in quiet, part of the hushed soundscape of the campus night, and when they reached Cecelia's car Reggie handed over her bag and thanked her, not knowing what for, and she shook his hand but not like men shook hands—she took one of his whole hands in both of hers and just stood there with it a moment like she was going to tell him something about his future. Reggie was thinking he had to ask for her phone number but for some reason he couldn't. He'd let her adjust her rearview mirror and back out and drive off. The next time he saw her was the first day of the next semester, in a class on early-twentieth-century painting. After class they had lunch together at a place with good stromboli and finally they talked and talked like old friends, breaking a long-standing silence between them, getting up for refills of soda and sipping on them deep into the afternoon.