Stars Go Blue (13 page)

He doesn't want to be a burden. To the waitress, bus driver, Renny. He told Renny to move him to assisted living a long time ago, so that he could get used to it, but she'd said,
They'll just let you rot. They won't make you
do
things, and doing things is how your brain is going to last
. He can hear her voice exactly. Her love was tough, but it was real.

But he didn't even mean it, wanting to move to assisted living. He was just feeling his options out. He wants to die on the ranch.
Remember
, he says over and over,
you want to die on the ranch. Or at least outside.

He let Renny take him, once, to a living place. Last week or maybe yesterday. Jess went too. Jess drove them both into town and they went on a tour. It was a big place and was just how he imagined it would be, clean and friendly with a big room in the middle with a TV and a chess table and other tables and a room for eating and a bedroom that was small and tidy and had a view of a parking lot.

When he stood inside, looking out at the parking lot, that's when he knew he would take his life. But he didn't want to use the gun, too messy, too loud, and too much like Ray and Rachel. And Jess had touched his arm and said, “Grandpa Ben? This place isn't for you.”

He wanted something quieter to do his quiet life justice. It was the first time he thought about how he wanted to die, and he realized he wanted to die facing the sky. He wrote a letter about it, didn't he?

“That was an important moment, not like the Broncos,” he says now, but no one hears him and no one stirs. Perhaps he falls asleep, and in his half dreams he recalls the mountain lions and the black bear and the foxes. He dreams of the things he killed and the things he did not. He dreams of animals. In his dreams, he tells himself he should dream of people, concentrate on people, but he keeps dreaming of animals instead, and they are so wild and beautiful and he knows that deep down they are one and the same.

RENNY

R
enny has engaged the four-wheel drive. Although she goes slowly, she goes in the sure knowledge that the highway patrol has closed the roads but that, as always, she is exempt from all dumb rules. Besides, the deputies have better things to do than to stop her, and also, she's lived in Colorado all her life and not once has she misjudged a slippery blizzard road, which is saying something given the number of snowstorms she has seen come and go, the number of blizzards she braved in order to haul newborn calves into the kitchen, or in order to feed animals, or find them, or round them up for shelter. This is not that bad; the media and police are always exaggerating everything.
Everyone
exaggerates everything, she thinks now, because it makes them feel important. The stupid human need to feel important. Plus, she's avoiding the highway and taking the back roads to Greeley, and she's been to Greeley plenty of times—she and Ben used to drive there regularly to visit his folks, back when they were still alive, and to visit their
gravestones once they were dead. He'd recently been pestering her to take him to Greeley, pester pester, and it made her crazy. “Drive yourself,” she would say, although she knew it was cruel, that he couldn't, and that he'd probably give about anything to accomplish a simple task like that again.

She can see the faint lights of Ault.
AULT: A UNIQUE LITTLE TOWN
, their sign says, and it's really the only town on the way to Greeley. Once she makes it to Ault, she'll be on Highway 85, which will no doubt be plowed, and which always makes her feel safe since the highway is split by a track of grasslands and she's always appreciated the lack of things coming right
at
her. She'll pass the sugar beet factory and the sheep farms and the silos. As long as the windshield wipers are going full speed and the headlights make the reflectors on the intermittent green posts shine, and she drives carefully, she'll get there. The road has been plowed once, and although it's getting covered up again quickly, she can make out the slight distinction between plowed and unplowed by the way the headlights catch the shadow of the difference. She's got four-wheel drive. The road is flat and deserted. There's nothing to run in
to
. Just go carefully forward. She'll make it.

She'll get there and find her husband at the Greyhound bus station. She'll see Ray, although she's not sure how, although she remembers the County Road EE. She will be guided to the one or both of them by instinct. She will face, with her husband, the man who murdered their daughter.

Satchmo sits next to her, panting and sometimes whining. She should have brought her some food, but she forgot that, along with probably ten million other things. She reaches under the seat where Ben keeps a bag of beef jerky and hands Satchmo a big piece. She turns on the radio to discover that radio waves are not stopped by storms at all, and a bit of jazz
comes floating through the cab of the truck. Satchmo lays down then, head on Renny's lap, makes a small whine, and thumps her tail.

“You might not be so bad after all,” she tells the dog.

Up ahead, she sees the bright and erratic lights of what must be a snowplow, though she can't see the vehicle itself at all. It's coming toward her, lights like a UFO surrounded in a wall of white, and she puts on her blinker and starts to pull as far as she can to the edge of the road. Then the whish of the air, of the snow, of the machine itself. Satchmo lets out a bark as Renny jerks on the steering wheel, realizing she is still too close, she is going to be hit. Her truck is smacked by an enormous amount of snow—an incredible thud—and then, as if it were the most natural and right thing to do, her truck simply heads down the small irrigation ditch. She feels it start to tip, pause, almost right itself. She holds her breath, clutches the seat belt, reaches out to hold the dog against the seat. The truck tilts, slowly, thirty degrees, forty-five degrees, sixty degrees—it seems impossible, it's such a small incline!—but like a math problem she needs to help a grandchild with, like some imaginary problem come real, it is enough of an incline.

Impossible.

She braces before the noise of her truck hitting snow. It's a loud thud, but no crashing, no splintering. So loud, and then so calm. She feels vomit in her throat as she slides sideways into the seat belt and also into the dog and the dog is barking, climbing over her, and her shoulder hurts and the dog's claws tear through her sweater, and then, suddenly, there is pure and real silence.

The truck, on its side, stalls out. The dog is still clawing past her leg and she turns, hoping to see the snowplow stop—thinking that he must stop—but blinking lights are receding in the distance. She reaches out with her left hand and presses on
the horn and the noise seems loud enough to stop anything but the snowplow has disappeared.

Impossible.

It creeps in on her: He never saw her. She and Satchmo are miles from anyone, in the middle of the night and in the middle of a blizzard, and no one knows where they are.

“Okay, let me think here. I can't believe that just . . . happened. Satchmo, shut the hell up.” She unbuckles and lets herself slide to the window of the pickup and crouches there and feels around in the dark for her purse. She feels it with her hand, the smooth feel of leather, and she clutches it to her. She leans up and turns the ignition off, then halfway on, so that the headlights are again beaming into the night. Only then can she see the wind whip and rise and tear around. One light is high up, one is at ground level, and their beams intersect in the far distance.

From the glove compartment, she finds the cool cylinder of the flashlight. As she turns it on, the dog whines. She casts the light about the cab. She can see her own arm, the dog, the Valentine card Ben made her, the junk from the dash, all of it scattered around her on the passenger-side door and window. The dog has a cut on her forehead and is bleeding and Renny reaches out to feel it and can tell, with her fingers, that it is not deep or large, and that the dog is fine. Still, she says, “Oh, Satchmo. Sorry about that. Don't worry.”

Oh, god. She can't breathe. What is she supposed to do? The wind outside is howling so loud that she can't think. Or perhaps it is Satchmo that is whining. Perhaps it is the universe?

Did she bump her head? Or is this seasick dizziness just nerves? She must be smart here. She must think. She must get her brain to work. She considers: If there was one snowplow, there will be another. If Anton goes to her house, he will find
her missing. If she can start the truck, she can stay warm. On the other hand, she needs to make sure the exhaust isn't covered; she doesn't want to die of carbon monoxide. And the truck has, in fact, fallen on the side with the exhaust. She has the cell phone in her purse, doesn't she? She must think, she must think. But over all this, twining through all this, is a simple childlike surprise. She never would have thought this. It simply seems impossible. She expected Ben to die, and that she would live. She's thought plenty about Ben's death; she's been saying good-bye in various ways for some time now. But she hasn't even begun the process—
and how could this be?
—of saying good-bye to herself.

Vomit rises and she chokes as she swallows it down. Everything depends on the cell phone, and she's forever forgetting to charge it, just like she forever forgets things like bringing mint for tea. With the purse tucked under her chin, and a flashlight in one hand, she tugs open the zipper and feels inside until her hand wraps around her phone. She turns it on, and miraculously, it lights up. 9-1-1. Only one other time has she called this number. Seventy-two years on this planet and she's dialed it once, in order to save her daughter, and it was too late. By the time she heard the sirens, her daughter was in her arms, bleeding from her head all over. Convulsing. Shaking. Convulsing. Dead. By the time she heard the sirens, Ray had raced out, Ben had raced out after him, shouting after the black Ford truck that was peeling out of the driveway and then falling to his knees. By the time they came, her daughter's eyes had turned still and although she had slapped her and screamed and tore off her own shirt to staunch the blood the eyes were still.

Only once she has asked for help. It didn't come. And so that part of her died. The part that is willing to reach out and ask. Be tender in that way. Because, for god's sake, if you go
through life and hardly ask for anything—and then you ask once, just once!—and there's no response, well, then, the hell with it.

9-1-1. She punches it in, praying to all the good people who know how to help. “Please,” she says aloud, “please-oh-god-please.”

The wind howls and whistles around her as she waits, listening, for something on the other end. She holds her breath, waiting. It would be nice if, for once, she could count deeply on someone else.

BEN

T
he restaurant is so bright and loud against the dark of night and storm. People are waking and food is served and a baby cries and the boy-man paces and moves his jaw and scratches his wrists and cusses and the girl in the gray-plaid shirt reads a book. Ben gets up to stretch his legs and use the bathroom and a few folks stand for a moment or two outside the door so as to see the storm and feel the cold tight air that sucks at their lungs. He looks at a book that has been handed to him, but he can't read small words anymore, only the big words on signs. He has no other way to pass the time and wishes for a football game but instead he watches people, cranky and hopeful, and one woman is crying in the corner. He closes his eyes and thinks of red willows and dark-eyed horses and how both ripple with the joy of the world.

There are people with phones. He knows he should call but he cannot remember the number. He knows his wife's name is Renny but he can't remember the second name that comes
after the first. He looks up to find the girl staring at him. It makes him feel shame, so he looks at a chain that's hanging from his wrist. Why is it there? Has he been in jail?

Water fills his eyes and spills over and he wonders about the source of that water, how at one time it was in the sea.

“Aw, mister. You want me to call someone?” The waitress is rubbing her moon and he shakes his head, no, and then, to make sure she doesn't worry, he goes into the bathroom to comb his hair and swish water to get rid of the thick taste in his mouth.

Finally the bus driver stands up and yells something. The sun will soon be up, the man says, and the plows have gone through and although it's still snowing, they will continue on.

Ben follows the others into the whipping snow underneath a black sky. He boards the bus and finds a seat and he is glad, so glad, that the boy-man sits elsewhere and that he is left alone. Ben has his jacket, his wallet, and his suitcase. He knows he's done a good job. He is worried that someone is going to stop him, but in fact no one does.

The bus pulls out of the big parking lot slowly, bumping over a poorly snowplowed area, and then onto the highway. A few people cheer, but Ben can tell that it's going to be slowgoing, very slow. From the side window he can see only the flakes hitting and melting or the ones whizzing close by. It seems to him that the snow is very tender. Or trying to be.

Sometimes they pass signs or small towns and one lit-up sign advertises
FILM
*
GIFTS
*
OXYGEN
and another
THE FAMOUS GROUSE
. He passes a trailer house that also has a lit sign in the darkness, and it says it is a library and it makes him sad, such a small space for so many huge ideas. The snowplows pass every once in a while, throwing white on the windows, and he likes to watch their power, likes to
know that they are clearing the roads so that he can go back to Renny. There are two pieces of paper in his pocket, and he gets both out to hold in his hands.