of the grace of this striated oak. Fungus and decay had drawn a pink arc through the middle and outlined the arc in purple. There’s only one right time to work with a spalted piece like that. Too soon and it’s not yet interesting, too late and it’s weak and rotten. Someday the piece would speak. A vibration from its next life would reach the conscious me and tell my fingers how to begin.
A phone call from Holly snapped me out of my stupor. She was living with Frankie at her parents’ place, a thirty-acre ranchette north of town. Holly didn’t call often. I could tell she was bothered; the pitch of her voice was high. “You won’t believe this,” she said. “What Frankie found.” He’d gone out early looking for shuttle fragments. Guiding his pony through heavy brush, he looked up and saw an orange space suit wedged in the crook of a tall tree. There was an astronaut’s torso inside it.
“Did you go and see?” I pressed. “Do you know for sure?”
“It’s in those trees next to Parkers’ place. God, Wes. It’s awful.”
“A body still intact?”
“Fell out of the sky. Just like that.”
“Jesus. Where’s Frankie now?” A picture came to mind I didn’t much like: Frankie under a tree, looking up.
“Mom’s fixing him lunch. If he can eat it. I couldn’t. He wanted to go back. I caught him with Dad’s binoculars.”
“Jesus,” I said again. “Hide them.”
“Grady says for you to drive over with the bucket truck.”
My brother was chief of the volunteer fire department; I understood what he was asking. Someone had to go up in that tree and bring down what was stuck. “Twenty minutes,” I said. The company rig was just down the road.
“Wes?”
I knew this tone, a slight drawing out of my short name. Holly was going to change the subject. It was a pattern in our lives, her wanting to talk, and me wanting to duck.
“Grady’s your brother and he loves you,” she said. “You need to tell him what’s going on.”
“Right now,” I said, “I need to go.”
I put an apple in my pocket and grabbed an old pair of gloves I could throw out tomorrow. The dead made me squeamish, something Grady well knew. I’m not like him, steady and rock-solid. He’s the most honest man I’ve ever known. We were in the same state, marriage-wise, but when Eileen fell out of love with him, she just told him. There was no hemming and hawing, no philandering, no telling him she couldn’t love him the way she should, this last being what I told Holly. Grady left Eileen, walked away from corporate life in Tulsa, moved back to Kiser and bought a business for himself. He didn’t want his old life anymore and he knew it. In Kiser they loved him for that, rejecting the big city. He joined the fire squad and they made him chief right away, though the honeymoon wouldn’t last. He’s too conscientious for a town like Kiser.
I hadn’t spoken to my brother in two weeks, since we’d gotten into it while cooking ribs on Mom’s birthday. He thought Holly and I should reconcile.
“I didn’t second guess you about your marriage,” I’d told him. “Don’t second guess me.”
“We didn’t have kids,” Grady said.
“You think I’m happy about that? But for Frankie to see Holly and me like that, barely speaking, tension you could cut like wire, it was worse.”
Mom used to say that Grady was born into adulthood, very sure of what he knew. Growing up, everything about him was so measured, so wise, so ordered, it made me want to scream. Maybe it got to Eileen, too.
“Frankie would have been all right,” he said.
“Frankie?” I said. “He hears things that aren’t there, has friends that don’t exist. He’s a sensitive kid. Divorce or not, I don’t know if Frankie will be all right.”
“Then help him. Encourage him to come out of his shell. Get him in the 4-H. That’s a good group of kids.”
I shoved the tongs I was holding right up to Grady’s face. “Stay out of it. Just stay the hell out of it.”
I knew then he had no idea, though just that week I’d laid out the truth to Holly, and she’d sworn to keep quiet until I was ready. I had loved her—still did—and I’d certainly been attracted to her. When we married she was pregnant, so I nudged doubt to my toes and took my place at her side. I’d hoped husband was who I was. But I was wearing a pair of boots made for other feet and the longer I wore them, the more they hurt. Holly didn’t know what was wrong. It was more than just the bedroom stuff, though that grew dismal enough. I lost interest in us. I went to work every day and came home to something I didn’t want. Here is the most cliched thing in the world, but it fits: I came home to a lie. There was no one thing that tipped us over in the end. I didn’t hunker down in a duck blind with some guy who was more than a friend, or slink off to the bar in Shreveport that caters to the same-sex crowd. There were attractions, sure, but I never acted.
Holly was grateful to have a place to pin our troubles, relieved to know it wasn’t her, that she was innocent.
That she was hoodwinked.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she’d said.
“No,” I said. “Not that.”
I picked up the bucket rig and drove down Route 7 toward my father-in-law’s place, where Grady would be waiting. I hadn’t been out since Friday night, before the shuttle fell. At first, what I saw along the highway was normal landscape: lush fields, swampy spots and the branchless lower trunks of our towering pines, stark as charred asparagus. But a half-mile down the road, a pasture was littered. I could make out chunks of black and bits of white that looked like foam. A rod-like thing stuck out of the grass. For another mile I saw nothing odd, but just over the rise at Avitt Tindale’s ranch, seven horse vans were parked in Avitt’s front range. The riders were spread in a line, heads down, aiming for the thicket that bordered his place. I should have been searching, too. My own mother had lifted hot metal from the highway, before she knew she wasn’t supposed to. Now, my son had done more.
I turned off the highway at 104, where two feet of blue tarp covered something that lay beside a wire fence. Next to it was a rustic cross, made from twigs. Acid rose from my gut like a vicious cloud; the orange juice dump had been a mistake.
A sheriff’s deputy blocked the dirt road that led to Cloyd’s place. When he signaled me past, I spotted Grady’s car and a black SUV with government plates that I figured to be FBI. Frankie was across the grassy meadow holding the reins of his horse, letting Rosco graze with the bit in his mouth, which I’d taught him not to do. Signs of my absence hurt. Frankie spent Wednesday nights with me, and two weekends a month. Other people were filling the space I once took up in his world.
When Frankie waved, I rolled down the window and pointed to my mouth. He looped the reins over Rosco’s neck and took off the bridle. When he looked back at me for approval, I gave him the okay. Frankie favored my mother—same gray eyes and the dark wavy hair of Lila MacFarland’s youth. Funny how it would skip a generation like that. He gestured like her, too, and when he was talking about something he’d thought hard about, he would rub the side of his finger across the tip of his nose, a feminine gesture that made me nervous for him. Turns out
