By Dylan Smith
For the last three days I’ve been alone up here in my shack. Drying out, coming down, recovering. It’s been hell since I took the last of Chris’s pills but I’m through the worst of it at least. No more mirages on the edges of imagined things. No more violent voices in the night—no visions. Just a gentle breeze through the midnight leaves, a soft gust swirling through the eye of the storm of my life. My shack is like a hole in the side of this mountain. I’m holed up inside it like a vagabond, a fugitive, a thief. Nothing left but bandit rations now. Shitty coffee, cans of beans, blahblahblah—I’m hungry. Dawn fires built to boil water brought up in buckets from the muddy creek and this mountain wind moves through me tonight—I am no man, a ghost. My outhouse hole is almost full. Subterranean snowcapped mountain. Winter’s ashes and sawdust sprinkled down on decades upon decades of human shit. I wonder if Alma ever took one in there. God, I hope so. Then a part of her would be near. Art certainly has—that I know for sure. Still no sign of him yet. Nightmare from last night: Art mowing lawns in denim short-shorts and a wizard hat. Chris coming up behind him on horseback in the dark. Come and see. The barn down below both black and brightly burning.
No rain. No moon. No beer.
Still no word from Alma either.
June 16
Today I woke early and limped up to the Glasshouse to find some food. A freezer in the basement full of bags of fruit and fish. I let the fish thaw bare on the bluestone poolside while I floated in the salty blue water. From the pool ledge I looked out over familiar trailers and trees and in through the windows of giant empty mansions, and through my telescope I spotted Alma’s greenhouse, the creek, her kitchen. My Volvo looked like a grave newly dug in the grass beside Art’s barn, the dusty dead black of it reflecting no light. Let the dead bury the dead. No light. I thought about my poems as I floated. My narrowing path. My secrets. My vision’s been blurry in the left eye still, but back in the city Chris’s new girlfriend, Sarah, she super-glued the cut. I never should have buzzed up to that apartment. I had holes in my socks, no boots, so I had to—it was a necessary mistake. Sarah noticed the cut above my eye right away. Asked a lot of questions, reasonable ones I had no honest answers to. She looked me up and down a lot. Said she thought I was crying blood. The place was incredible though. Windows overlooking the park. Sarah told me the apartment had once been her grandpa’s. Apparently her grandpa was dead. I’d taken the last of Chris’s pills on the elevator up and was stealing a lot of paranoid glances out the windows: the cathedral, my Volvo, the torn up city street. I think it freaked Sarah out. The cathedral bells rang out at random with the rise and fall of the playground down below. I have to be sure I’m not getting towed, I told her. Sarah had bright eyes. Paint covered pajama bottoms. Green crocs. I thought I recognized her from somewhere, I still don’t know where from yet. I asked if I could take a shower. Sarah hesitated. I offered up more lies and she laughed and led me into her room. This is where I work, she said. Left me alone with her paintings for a while. They were big. I loved them. Each seemed to be throwing a birthday party for itself. I found a bag of Chris’s stuff in the closet. Some clean underwear and socks, Chris’s boots. The disco ball from our first apartment in the city, and this new journal. I stuffed it all into my duffle bag. Got cleaned up. That’s when Sarah knocked. She had a tube of super glue for the cut. Okay, I said. She sat me on a stool in front of my favorite painting. It had an umbrella in it, an actual umbrella. I asked about the painting. Up top and to the left she had flattened the black umbrella and underneath that was a row of upside-down yellow inventory paper. A perfectly balanced composition. Powerful work. Purple glitter paint swirled and smeared and Sarah pointed to a splatter of shining confetti letters. That’s the alphabet, she said. And some numbers. Right. And this white stuff on the umbrella here is Glass Balloons. I looked up at her. Glass Balloons? Yeah, Sarah said. She was looking at the picture. I just find this stuff, you know. The umbrella I found in Chinatown, the yellow paper I think came from a friend. I looked closer. Glass Balloons! The white stuff seemed to be what glued the umbrella down over blurry streaks of dayglo blue and orange buildings and glitter and the picture looked like a curb in the city to me now—like a birthday party had blown up downtown and this was the perfect happy rubble of it, the colors streaming in a kind of easy crayon rain, and the graph paper even formed a grid.
Sarah had pink and blue paint on her wrist. Even her smell was a little familiar. First she cleaned the cut with alcohol. Q-tips and gauze were involved. My hair still dripped wet from the shower and I asked how she knew how to do this. I grew up with a lot of brothers, she said. Sarah squeezed the cut. Applied the glue. She did it all gently though, gently. You’re going to have a gnarly scar, she said. That’s okay. I don’t care. Your hands smell just like flowers.
The Glasshouse refracted the daylight into rainbows and spangled them across the pool water at dusk. I washed the bird shit and blood from my jeans, then flung the legs over a tree branch to dry them. I could have ironed my clothes with a rock. That’s how hot it’s been. Birds soared up into the sun-shot air and dove back down in whirling black circles through the heat. I made a fire. Ate the fish. The sun went down behind the smoke drift and mountains. I wonder where the wind comes from?
I’ve been avoiding the inevitable, the unfolding calamity of my life.
Alma. The city. Everything I’ve taken from Chris.
It’s midnight now. Starlight shining through the pines.
I can still feel the sunshine in my jeans. Glass Balloons.
Every time a tree creaks I think it’s Chris hiking up to kill me.
June 17
This morning I found Art standing over a hole in one of the barren hay fields behind Alma’s garden. His hands were on his hips, his hat pulled down low against the sun. We waved as I approached but he didn’t smile at me or nod or speak. I watched him notice my new boots, my limp. He made a show of shaking his head. I stood beside him and put my hands on my hips too, kind of mocking him, trying to get a laugh. It didn’t work. I looked down into the hole. The hole looked deep. I didn’t know what was going on. Art knelt down and pulled up a tangle of red and blue wire from within it. The back of his sky blue shirt had been bleached from the sun and a length of rope led down deep into the narrow dark. The rope was attached to a back plastic pipe. The hole was as wide as the middle of a sunflower and it was lined with thick black metal pipe and the wind sounded like water rushing down through the trees.
Art looked up.
“It’s like the Endless Hole.”
“What?”
“You never heard of that guy? This guy from back in the day. On the radio. He’d always call in about having an Endless Hole in his yard.”
“Never heard of that.”
“Figures.”
Art stood. A red car came struggling around the corner. An old lady from up the road named Ruth. Art and I had done some work on her cottage. We waved as she went slowly by.
I took off my sunglasses. Art noticed the cut above my eye.
I hadn’t been to work in over a week.
Finally Art smiled.
“Somebody sure kicked your ass.”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you get ahold of new boots?”
“Chris gave me these,” I said. “Hand-me-down boots.”
Art laughed. Shook his head, scratched his beard. He laughed and laughed.
“What? I’m serious.”
“Sure you are, Sunshine.”
“No, seriously. What? They’re steel-toed. He gave me these as a gift.”
“Guy kicks your ass and gives you the boots to remember him by? You can’t bullshit me, Sunshine. I know Chris didn’t give you any free boots.”
I looked down at a burn hole in the right tongue of my boot. From when Chris left them leaning against the wood stove to dry. That was just last winter. Stepped straight through some ice as we walked across the creek.
The air all around us felt huge and hot and still. My rib still hurts whenever I laugh or cry or scream, so I tried to hold everything in. A bird cried out. I didn’t know what kind it was. I took shallow breaths. Another rush of wind came down from high up on the mountain and it flattened out along the tops of trees and banged open the gate to Alma’s garden. All around us the leaves turned inside out, sparkled a thousand shades of Beck’s. Art’s favorite beer. The gate slapped shut—then it flew open again. Now the air was still.
“Is she home?”
“Is who home?”
“Alma, man.”
“No—nobody’s home. Not anywhere. It’s been a ghost town.”
“Have you heard from her at all?”
“Heard from who—from Alma? Why would I?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her either.”
“Says the guy who’s never had his phone charged for as long as I’ve known him alive. You expecting her to write you a letter?”
“I don’t know.”
“You see that’s your problem, Sunshine. You’re even worse than I was. At first I thought she might be up there with you. Like a honeymoon kind of thing. But then I saw your sorry broken tracks limping up the trail alone.”
“You could have come up and checked on me at least. I was pretty sick.”
“Yeah, well. Seemed natural enough to me. You and that lonely poet life. Even lone wolves come down from the hills when they’re hungry.”
It was hard work pulling up the well pump. A hundred feet of water line and rope. The water line was slick and dark with earth and mud and it got lighter and more clay-colored the farther it went down. I didn’t have any gloves and my newly cleaned jeans got immediately muddy. Art walked the line out across the drought clenched field, holding it above his head as he went, and I struggled to pull the last of it up by the rope. The pump was fancier than I imagined it would be. Stainless steel cylinder. Somehow pretty shiny still. Art came back through the field, heat waves shimmering above the swaying burnt hay. More like something you’d shoot into space, I said. But the connections were all rusted and shitty above the pump, and I noticed the rope had frayed. Art examined the wiring. Said the thing had burnt itself out.
Art pointed at the date imprinted on the metal.
“I was your age when this went down.”
His shirt was soaked with sweat.
I looked closer. The date said 1991.
“That’s the year I was born,” I said.
Another car came around the corner quick—“Cop,” I said, standing.
Art looked up. No sirens or lights. The sheriff just waved as he hauled ass past the barn. Art waved back. I did not. The sheriff disappeared into the trees.
Art cut the well pump wire with his knife.
I knelt down again.
“You make everything we do look suspicious,” Art said.
“Weren’t you about my age when you found work up here?”
“Something like that.”
“Then wouldn’t you have been here when this well pump was put in?”
“It’s possible,” Art said. He looked up at the cop dust being blown away by the wind, then back down into the hole, frowning. “Yes—I guess anything’s possible. Maybe I helped the last guy do it. I don’t know—probably not. Long time now. Don’t really remember either way.”
Back up at the barn Art offered me a beer. I told him I’d been dry since my cathedral experience in the city. Something strange must have happened in there. Spiritual maybe. Art just shrugged. Alma’s well pump dead in his hands. Like a caveman carrying some kind of futuristic bone. He ducked into the dark of the barn.
I walked over to where my Volvo was parked in the grass. The Citibike was in there still. That was not good. My stomach rolled. I saw my duffle bag there too and remembered hiding Calder’s wizard hat under the seat. That was also not good. Shame. Fear. Guilt. I sat in a shady spot where the grass meets the gravel.
The grass was dry from no rain and my arms felt tired from the work. It felt good to be tired in that way again. It must have been right around noon, the shadows of the trees all coiled up and black. Art lunged back out of the barn with a beer and took a seat on a stone slab by my car. He had mowed all around the car and the grass underneath it looked greener than the rest. Tall and healthy to the bumper. Art looked down at the grass now too. The bottle in his hand was green and dewy and it dripped in a wonderful way. Beck’s. A beer did sound pretty good. I didn’t know what day it was. Not that it mattered. Art opened the bottle with his knife.
“I need you to move this car off my grass.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not.”
“It’s broken.”
“Broken how.”
“I don’t know. It broke down. I had to get it towed up here.”
“You had this vehicle toward up here from New York City?”
“Yeah.”
“Sunshine—”
“Somebody down there would have charged me money. I figured we could fix it up here for cheap.”
“Cheap? You make no sense, Sunshine. You’re out of your goddamn mind.”
“Chris pays for whatever it’s called—roadside assistance. I happened to have his card. Free tows for the first ninety-something miles. The lady charged me an extra eighty bucks for the Citibike. But it was still pretty cheap.”
“And did Chris hand-you-down that bicycle too?”
“Look. The tow truck lady tried to jump it. The radio comes on but it wouldn’t start. Nothing happened.”
“Okay.”
“Will you help me fix it?”
Art shook his head and laughed. My jeans were heavy with sweat and muddy water. I looked up the hill. The air was so hot that it rippled, and Alma’s farmhouse flapped like a flag in the heat.
I heard another screech from that unfamiliar bird. I couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Next time you’d better taper off instead of cold turkey,” Art said. “It’s supposed to be safer that way. They say cold turkey like that could kill you.”
“Okay. But will you help me fix the car? I’m out of water.”
“Fine, Sunshine. A lack of power. I’ll try to take a look at it tomorrow.”
The bird call came from high up in the woods. I felt relief. I wanted to ask Art what kind of bird it was, but suddenly a silence had settled in all around us. The air felt still like the surface of calm water. I didn’t want to disrupt it. I closed my eyes. Some time passed. Art went back and forth to the barn for Beck’s but I stayed still, and soon there was a kind of opening, and a door, and beyond that everything was wonderful—the moment I entered upon was everywhere, it was perfect—something had separated me from my senses and now there was no space and no time and no language (so no me) and it was all spiraling up and up and down into one formless edgeless endless red door way deep down within me opening, opening in me where the light and dark had never been divided.
“This stone has a sparkle to it,” Art said.
His words sounded distant, lovely, alien, strange.
I opened my eyes. Art had three empty bottles beside him on the rock and his hat was hanging from his knee. We’d left Alma’s water line out in the field and it unfurled down below like a hundred foot snake. I took a deep breath. My rib didn’t hurt so bad anymore. The shadows of the trees had lengthened back out. I wondered how much time had gone by.
“Wow—Sunshine, look up—it’s the hawk.”
The hawk looked dark against the blue sky soaring, hanging as high as the well went deep.
“You ever read any Homer, Old Man?”
“Hey, easy. I’m not that old.”
“ that hawk is an omen,” I said. “It’s a drifter, no mission—floating just for us. How wonderful.”
“Speak for yourself, Sunshine. You sound like a dirty hippie. We’ve got missions—go look inside that barn. We’ve got plenty of missions.”
Art finished his Beck’s. The hawk’s shadow spun counter-clockwise over the roof of the barn and a blurry truck passed by blackly. Still not Alma. Art got up to get another.
“What the hell,” I said. “I’ll take one.”
Art came back with four and handed me his knife.
“Plenty of missions, Sunshine—too many missions. The only thing we lacked today was a little bit of, whatever—whatever it is—wait, what was it?”
The hawk cried out—it screeched.
I laughed. Beck’s. Pop-pop. The logo is a key.
I always figured I knew what a hawk sounded like.
I guess I was always wrong.
For money Dylan Smith plants flowers on rooftops in New York and has a website with links to other stories online. Oh and check out The Other Almanac. A piece of Dylan’s will be published in print with them this fall.