A cat pawed up to Dannie and the other vigiler, the college girl. Dannie had no idea how many more weeks this girl planned to stick it out. Dannie didn't know what she'd do if she were the last one. It was a responsibility Dannie didn't want. She didn't want to be alone and she didn't want to be the one who let the vigils lapse away. The cat approached the girl and Dannie watched her make no acknowledgement. It was a Siamese cat, but something else was mixed into it. It had the look of an orphan, bored and wily.
Dannie felt childish in this girl's presence. She needed to be an adult now, but she had no confidence that she was. Dannie had grown impatient because she hadn't gotten what she wanted from Arn right when she'd wanted it, because everything hadn't happened according to her timetable, and so she'd run him off. She hadn't been capable of simply being happy and enjoying him. Dannie was supposed to have been the grown-up in the relationship, was supposed to have known what was good for her and what was good for Arn. She didn't know what was good for anyone, and now she was going to have a little son or daughter to guide. She was missing Arn's presence in her future child's life, she understood, but she was also missing the way his breath wheezed when he slept, not quite a snore, and she missed the ropey muscles of his arms and his belly and the way he never gave away his mood with his voice, and Dannie missed Arn's wise, patient innocence, which she thought she could use about now.
The wind gusted and Dannie watched the girl pull up her hood and tug the drawstrings. She had precise fingers. She could do sign language
or construct toys. The tepid winds reminded Dannie of the Santa Anna winds. Maybe they'd made it all the way across the desert. Maybe that's how the gulls had made it here from the coasts, riding bands of destined air. Dannie felt antsy. Her scalp felt hot.
Fucking Arn. Dannie still hadn't told her old friends she was pregnant and it was because she didn't want to pretend she preferred being alone, like it had been her plan to use some dope for his sperm and the plan had worked splendidly. She didn't want to have to describe Arn, or make up some fake guy in order to avoid describing Arn. She was angry at him for not coming back, angry with herself for not going after him. She'd been telling herself he was in the wind. She'd been telling herself he was hardened against her, through with her. But maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was missing her too. Maybe he was cursing her this very moment. Arn was another thing Dannie had lost, but what if she hadn't lost him yet? The course of her adulthood had been charted by quitting, and maybe she needed to not quit on Arn, to not quit on something she'd lost but go get it back. Maybe she needed to go find the best part of her life instead of worrying about what other thing she would lose next.
He had taken to shutting the screens down for hours at a stretch, sometimes all night, and starting them up again minutes before the owner arrived at dawn. He was tired of humoring the owner. The government had an observatory of its own, immeasurably more powerful, rows and rows of dishes a hundred miles to the west, like some huge gleaming sand crop. This job made Arn feel toyed with. He'd worked at warehouses where products were stored, factories where products were made, a bar where drinks were served, a winery that didn't produce wine but at least might've served as a front for criminal enterprise. This observatory had no function whatsoever except to tickle the fancy of the owner. Aliens were not attempting to communicate with us. They weren't. And if they were, they could. It wouldn't matter whether or not we had wired bowls
propped up on the desert floor. It wouldn't matter if some idiot were sitting the graveyard shift.
Arn was back to sleeping in his truck bed, and it wasn't so bad this time of year. It wasn't freezing or hot. Arn didn't feel safe sleeping under his topper, but people weren't safe anywhere. Bad luck and aliensâif they wanted you, they'd find you. Arn had a membership at a YMCA in an Albuquerque suburb so he could shower. He sat out at the pool sometimes. There were tan lifeguards in bikinis, but they didn't do much for Arn. The weight rooms were full of fathers. They were all faking being good fathers like Arn was faking being a regular guy who wanted to stay in shape. Not one person Arn saw seemed genuine. Now and then he shot hoops, only when he found the courts abandoned and could shoot in solitude. Just like at the church compound back in Oregon.
Dannie wasn't going to come for him. She wasn't going to have a change of heart. She'd probably found another kid to play around with. Arn knew the only reason he was still in New Mexico was he was hoping Dannie would come. Normally he would've quit this job by now. He would've been in the next state, Texas or Oklahoma. He had no energy for going back on the road, same as he felt no energy for the brown lifeguards in the red suits. New Mexico had been the first state he had not felt lonely in. Dannie had been his friend. Whatever else they may have been or not been to each other, they had become friends. There wasn't a way for Arn to win except to know her again. Whatever cheap motives he'd had at the start, they'd died off. He'd had an ally and had lost her. He missed her skin and the way she rested one fingertip on her chin when she was about to explain something. He wanted to push his forehead against her cheek.
Arn turned a page of the huge poetry book and the next page was blank. There were no more poems. Arn closed the book and slid it to a far corner of the metal desk. Arn hadn't known what any of the poems were about, but he'd enjoyed them. The poetry book was the only book in the observatory that wasn't work-related, that wasn't a radio manual or a history of space encounters. Arn had finished the whole thing, one thin, crinkly page at a time.
Arn saw now that he had been
hoping
all this time that someone was after him, the cops or a private detective or the enraged family of the man he'd slugged with the bat. He'd needed someone to be after him. On the run, he didn't have to admit anything about himself. He was a deceitful orphan. That's what he'd been afraid of being and that's what he'd become. He'd had to keep moving, in part, to not get caught in his lies. They were lies of omission mostly, but you could get caught in those too. He had told Dannie she'd been his first, and that he'd never been to California. He'd acted unfamiliar with bars, unfamiliar with drugs. This was the part he'd played with all the women. Mystery was all he had. And false innocence. He didn't have a self. Everything around him in the observatory was clean and hard, the buffed concrete floor and the metal desk and the molded plastic chair. Nothing had been chasing Arn, and it had chased him far enough. He went to the middle of the room and got down flat on his back on the floor. The concrete felt good against his arms and legs. Everything sounded different when you got down low and still. It reminded him of the vigils he'd been going to with Dannie. He wondered if she was still going to them. Arn was going to miss the boy, the way one missed peaceful places one had only seen in pictures. Some time in the past months Arn had learned that he could be still without hiding. You could just be where you were. He tapped his fingers on the concrete. The aliens were talking around us. They were holding lively conversations just beyond the reach of human surveillance.
Arn was trying to get fired so he'd be forced to leave the area, but he didn't
want
to leave. He didn't have the guts to simply quit. He was sabotaging himself, turning the machine off every night. The machine kept a record, of course. If the owner bothered to check, he'd know right away. But the guy probably wouldn't fire Arn. He'd have a talk with Arn, something like that. He'd write Arn up, as if this were a real company with real policies and protocols. The owner's main concern would be that they'd missed a transmission.
A shop that sold musical equipment had been going out of business and he had bought five cases of those space-age tiles you could nail up that were supposed to soundproof a room and improve the acoustics. The guy who owned the shop hadn't been one bit upset that it was going under. The guy had a brand-new tattoo, still under a bandage, and he kept lifting a corner of the bandage and admiring what was hidden underneath. Mayor Cabrera didn't believe the squares could really soundproof a room, but they might
dull
sound, and Mayor Cabrera could make sure never to rent out the unit right next door. There were thirty rooms and he couldn't recall the last time they'd rented more than half of them at one time.
It took him almost three hours and a whole canvas sack of roofing nails. His forearm was numb. The hotel room looked like it belonged on a UFO. Mayor Cabrera was doing the only other thing he could think of for Cecelia. Her car, and now this. He didn't know how to be an uncle. He had no experience with it. He was trying to help her and he was also trying to win her over. She had thanked him, about the car. He'd seen her in town and she'd only spoken to him a moment but he'd sensed a softness toward him. She was like her mother. She could talk herself into being bitter, but it wasn't in her heart. Mayor Cabrera put surge protectors in all the sockets and lined up some music stands against the wall. He dragged the desk out and brought in a big amp. Mayor Cabrera was working on a baggie of jerky and he had a couple more tallboys in his cooler. He was no longer the mayor of Lofte. He'd informed the board and they'd drawn up paperwork and he'd signed it. There would be a special election. Until then, the lawyer was in charge. Mayor Cabrera wasn't Mayor Cabrera anymore. He was just Cabrera.
Cabrera
. The next time they held a council meeting, he wouldn't be there. He was Ricardo Cabrera, private citizen.
He filled the closet with bottles of water and cans of ginger ale, fruit roll-ups, bags of popcorn. He dragged the mattress outside and then the box spring and when he went to move the bed frame he saw something underneath, on the floor. It was one of those magnetic travel chess sets. He opened it and it had all the pieces, all thirty-two. He knew what he'd do.
He'd teach his sister-in-law to play chess, whether she wanted to or not. Most of their life together was in the past, but not all of it. Some of it was waiting for them, time waiting to be spent. They were family. They would play chess. Once she knew what she was doing, Mayor Cabrera would get a regular set, carved of wood, with pieces substantial enough to work around in your palm as you parsed out your next move.
Mayor Cabrera had once gone to Sun Studios in Memphis with his wife, and it hadn't looked much better than this hotel room now did. They had a control room at Sun, but other than that it was about the same as this place. Mayor Cabrera began gathering his supplies and tidying up, the extra tiles and his beer cans and such, and was struck with a pang of pure fear. He couldn't stall about Dana anymore. All the amends were in progress. There was nothing standing in his way now. He was a brother-in-law again and was becoming an uncle again and he had to find out what he was going to be to Dana. He deserved her as much as he ever would and she'd either want him or she wouldn't. Nothing could make him pathetic now. He felt able to weather a hardship with dignity.
The wolf scrambled up the loose rocks and out of the gully. He had returned to the house of the older woman and the girl, the house where he'd once heard the songs. The wolf stopped at the edge of the property and listened hard, as if trying to hear the drifting of clouds. The temperature was dropping. The wolf could feel it in his snout and behind his eyes. There was no space between the wolf and the sheer cliff of his ill mind. His saliva tasted like paper and his paws were stones.
A hard twig was barbed into the wolf's side and he yanked it and then paced toward the chickens. The wolf pressed his muzzle to the fence and the chickens did not hustle about. They kept going about their pointless business. They weren't afraid. They felt nothing for the wolf, considered him harmless. The chickens were skinny and their beaks and feet were the same color as their feathers. They stood with heads high, almost haughty.
They were waiting for the next idiot scuffle to break out, for seed to be scattered. When death arrived, as it was about to, they would greedily scuffle over that too.
The isolated homesteads. The outposts of the outposts. What he'd done to the chickens had provided the wolf no solace, nor did he feel regret. The wolf had made the chickens thin air, had given them unprofaned existence, and they'd given him back nothing. He'd gained no knowledge. If there existed a more potent apprehension it could be found only in a human, not in a human's lesser companion. The wolf now peered out from a thicket of soft weeds, spying on a mother and a baby. The house was a box of sticks but the porch was grand. The wolf couldn't see the baby but it was there, wrapped down in the cradle. The mother made tender, distracted clicking sounds in her cheek. It was dawn, the world yellowing. The mother rose and stepped inside the house without shutting the front door. She could see the cradle from where she stood, the wolf knew. The mother was recovering from injury and the baby was a baby.
The wolf broke from the thicket, crossing the dirt road and halting at the mailbox. He couldn't see the baby but now he could smell it, fatty and scrubbed. Like he would've in his old life, the wolf washed the base of the mailbox with his urine. If he took another step closer to the baby he wouldn't be able to stop himself. Before he knew it he would have the soft infant in his hard jaws, its limbs flopping as the wolf galloped into the wilderness. He kept his haunch against the post. He wanted the mother to come back out to the porch so he might be able to flee but she was brewing tea. The wolf smelled cut pine and tobacco and the knees and elbows of the baby. He couldn't back away and tried not to move an inch closer. The wolf wondered if he was mad enough now, devoid enough of instinct, that he could be blamed for his actions. Innocence was a silly human notion, but guilt had been around always.