First Light

  Dorsey and Hugh let the silence go by.

  “Where’s Laurie?” Mrs. LaMonte asks. “You never bring her out here.”

  “She’s back at the house, minding the girls,” Hugh tells her. “She said it was too hot for her to come out here. Droughts like this get her depressed.”

  “Droughts,” Mrs. LaMonte says, clinking the ice cubes in her glass. “You know, preachers used to come through here, during droughts, when I was little. In this part of Michigan people always used to crowd into the tents by the lake to hear the preachers, who visited all through the summer. The one everybody liked best was this shouter with silver hair, James Biggs Hope. He could heal. He said he would put the doctors out of business with the medicine he carried in his hands. I didn’t like him. He didn’t make anybody well, that I ever saw. The one I liked was somebody who came through once, I forget his name, who called himself the Good Shepherd of Love. A short man with a limp, with an assistant who looked like Bess Truman. He set his tent up south side of town, within sight of the lake.”

  She takes a sip of her lemonade and swallows noisily, checking Dorsey and Hugh’s faces to see if they are listening attentively. Satisfied, she begins to flutter her right hand near her cheek.

  “Anyway, this one, this Reverend Whatever-his-name-was, had quite a get-up: green silk scarf, black coat, black shirt, black pants. And a gold chain with a gold heart, a Valentine’s Day heart, hanging around his neck so it was over his real heart, where a cross would usually be. So all you had to look at was the scarf, that head of hair that looked like sheared cardboard, and the heart, the gold one. He started low and quiet, like one of those late-night radio announcers. Everybody was expecting hellfire and the catalogue of sins and the falling-away from the true faith. Everybody was hoping for, you know, threats of punishment. He gave us a little of that but it was just a prelude to what he really wanted to do, which was to praise what he called the abounding power of love. From him, this ugly man. No one expected it. People are always happy to hear that they’ve been sinning, which is why it won’t rain, but they don’t expect it when you tell them they’ve come up short on love.”

  Mrs. LaMonte looks over at Dorsey as if the story is for her benefit. Then she leans back, the cane chair creaks, and she continues.

  “What he did was, he quoted Matthew and the Epistles, he quoted Jeremiah and Micah and the Song of Solomon. He made them think it hadn’t rained because people didn’t kiss one another, didn’t like one another enough to give what he called ‘a little human shade.’ He called it the Gospel of Tongues. He said the Bible said to put your arms around your fellow man. He said Jesus kissed. I thought he’d be a big hit. After all, I was a girl, thirteen. Tongues. Well, my goodness. But no. They didn’t run him out of town, but they left that tent morose and grumpy. He didn’t collect more than a few dollars. The people of Five Oaks were not about to listen to a man preaching about kissing. My mother said it was wicked filth. She made my father agree with her on the way home. But as I remember, it rained the next day. And the day after that. Maybe people took his advice. You never know what people do at home.” She turns to glance at Hugh. “Or anywhere else.”

  On the way back, Dorsey’s feet are propped up on the dashboard again, but she is thrumming her fingers on her leg and squirming. Hugh would like to see the expression in her eyes, but she has put on her dark glasses. Noah is sitting quietly now, with the soccer ball in his lap and his head turned so that he can look up at the sky through the back window.

  “So how long are you planning to stay in Minneapolis?” Hugh asks.

  “Long enough to get Simon settled in.”

  “Then you’re going back to Buffalo?”

  She nods.

  “With Noah?”

  She nods again.

  “This isn’t a separation?”

  “No, this isn’t a separation. We’ll just be separate for a few months.” She plays with her hair by swirling it around her index finger.

  “Does Simon have someone in Minneapolis?” Hugh asks.

  “Simon has someone everywhere, and, love, it’s none of your business.” Hugh is conscious that she continues to lecture him and justify herself, but she does it silently, staring straight ahead. Although he concentrates on the road, Hugh also sees, in his mind’s eye, as if projected there by his sister, an image of Simon. In it, Simon is lying on the floor. His eyes are closed, and his posture does not suggest sleep so much as a lazy and narcissistic form of martyrdom. The image is that of a successful martyr, realizing obscure profits. His arms are raised far above his head and are crossed at the wrists. Then someone is lying down on top of Simon.

  Hugh puts his left hand to his eyes, rubs them violently, and looks out the front window. Bastien’s U-pick Apple Orchard is still there, passing by on the right-hand side of the road, five miles south of town. He’d once sold a Buick Century—blue, stripped down, only an AM radio—to Harry Bastien, but the car was repossessed by the bank, and Harry hasn’t spoken to him since.

  Landscape in the plain style passes by them at sixty miles an hour. Hugh is a moody driver, and the thought of his brother-in-law, the actor, depresses him: he accelerates to sixty-five.

  “What’re you working on these days?” Hugh asks.

  “My work?” Dorsey looks at Hugh, her mouth dropping open in surprise.

  “Yeah, your work. What’re you doing?”

  Dorsey waits a long time. Then she says, “I’m working with someone else on what’s called missing mass. If you take the usual calculations related to the Big Bang, you discover that there’s just enough density in the Universe to make it closed, to stop the expansion of space. That’s called flatness. Anyway, the problem is, if you estimate density with the galaxies that are currently observed, you’re missing about eighty percent of the mass that’s supposed to be there. If you count the leptons and the baryonic matter, there’s still eighty percent missing. It may be nonbaryonic matter, gauge particles, but no one is sure. That’s what missing mass is. People are even talking about shadow matter now, invisible planets, stars, and galaxies that have a gravitational pull. That’s what I’m working on.”

  “Missing mass.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t get it,” he says.

  “You don’t have to.”

  Hugh notices a ruffling black crow profiled on the roof of Tom Rangan’s Auto Parts. Behind the front building is a long field seeded with rusting Buicks and Ramblers and smashed and broken Cougars and Lynxes. The cars are halved and amputated and chopped in thirds and have bites taken out of them at acute angles, pure metal geometry. Hugh has always loved automobile junkyards, this one especially. The brown, oxydized metals give him peace of mind. Against the image of Simon sprawled on the floor, or the problem of missing mass, Hugh consoles himself with car parts and dented chrome.

  “You always had the brains,” he says to her.

  “It’s no fun,” she says. After a pause, she holds out her hands, making arcs. “Imagine going back to the first second of the Big Bang. To the first fraction of a fraction of a second. Imagine getting on a time machine and seeing space contract. Imagine time reversed. If you—”

  “—No,” he says.

  “What?”

  “No. You think about it. I don’t have to—I live here.”

  Where the amusement park once stood on the shore of the lake is a cluster of condominiums. The farm store, just outside of town, has turned into Kathy’s Tack Shop. The five-and-dime has been renovated and now sells antiques. “What’s happened to this place?” Dorsey asks. “It’s turned frilly.”

  “Gentry,” Hugh tells her. “Rich people moved in. I’ll be damned if I know where they came from. They’re everywhere. Small towns with lake frontage are chic, I guess. Even out here. Some of these stores still sell what a person needs. Otherwise it’s luxuries.”

  Five stoplights, six blocks, one statue of a veteran of the First World War, two right-hand turns, and one bridge over the to
rn-up railroad track, and they are parked in Hugh’s driveway. Hugh’s daughters, Tina and Amy, come running from the porch, their hair flying, and begin to pound on the back windows and the trunk with small fists. “Where is it?” they shout. “Where’s the stuff?”

  Hugh tells them. He takes out the three bags of fireworks and places them in a corner of the porch, near the sand bucket. He tells the girls to leave them there, to touch nothing. He asks them what they did while he was gone.

  “We played with Uncle Simon,” Tina says.

  “What’d you do with him?”

  “We built embassies,” Amy says, giggling.

  “And airplane terminals. And cars and apartment buildings.”

  “Why did you do that? What did you use to make them?”

  “Daddy, it’s a secret,” Amy says. “We’re not supposed to tell.”

  “Cardboard,” Tina blurts out.

  Finished with their father, the girls run around the corner of the house with Noah. Dorsey has already disappeared into the house in that quiet and almost motionless way of hers. Hugh fingers a seashell, an alphabet cone, in his right pocket, then goes up to the front door. He stands in the front hallway, listening. He’d like to play with Noah, but Noah is elsewhere. The house is hot and quiet. In summer, he can always smell the house’s age in the dusty pine and old carpeting. He calls upstairs; no one answers. He thinks he hears a radio playing. That would be Simon, either listening to or imitating a radio. Hugh looks through the long front hallway, past the living room and into the kitchen and thinks he sees Laurie in the backyard, bent over something in the garden. He knows he hasn’t actually seen her, but he imagines her back there among the flowers, down on her knees among the baby’s breath.

  It’s not baby’s breath. It’s pansies. She is pulling dried blossoms off the flowers and leaving them in piles of shriveled colors in the grass on either side of her knees. Hugh creeps up behind her and gives her a kiss on the back of her neck.

  “Such large mosquitoes,” she says, looking him up and down. As sweat inches down the sides of her face, she frowns at him. “How was Mrs. LaMonte? Was Roy there?”

  “She was all right. Sales are bad this year, so she had a big inventory. I didn’t see Roy. She talked about hot weather and drought and preachers. She talked about kissing.” Hugh allows himself a look at his wife, but she doesn’t bother to react. “Where’s your hat?” he asks.

  Laurie touches the top of her head. “I lost it. I’m letting my brains cook. How much did you spend on the fireworks?”

  “You shouldn’t be out without a hat.”

  “I’m all right. It can get as hot as it likes. I’ll just burn. And then I’ll peel. You must’ve spent a lot.”

  She isn’t standing, so Hugh squats down so he’ll be at her eye level. He doesn’t know why she hasn’t stood up. Priorities. “Where’s Simon?” he asks.

  “Upstairs. Inside. He hasn’t been out all day. He’s been doing something with the girls. You know how he hates sunlight.”

  “They were building embassies, Amy said.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know. I’ve been out here.” She pulls at another pansy. “Embassies. Maybe it’s a joke.”

  “Maybe,” he says, looking up at the roof of the house. The lightning rod, he now notices, is crooked, at a slant.

  “Look at the roses,” she says, pointing. “We should do something. You name it, they’ve got it: blackspot, powdery mildew, rust. Poor things.”

  Hugh counts to ten, then walks inside for a glass of water.

  At three o’clock, Dorsey and Simon are still nowhere in sight, and Laurie has gone inside to take a nap, and Noah, Tina, and Amy are lighting sparklers and then playing a wrong way, clockwise-around-the-bases softball game whose rules they have communicated to each other by means of an improvised sign language. Hugh is sitting on the backyard hammock, staring intently at the house. His shirt sticks to his back. Bees drone in the hollow of an elm above him and to his left. He can’t doze and is afraid to lie backwards on the hammock. All around, distantly, are reports of gunfire, explosions, and bombs. His sunburned legs are throbbing painfully.

  With smoke from his cigarette descending into his lungs like spirit-fingers, Hugh looks toward the second floor and sees the window of the guest room, where Dorsey and Simon are doing whatever they do together. Thinking of Dorsey up there in her old room, Hugh imagines time moving backward. It’s an unpleasant thought, and he shivers in the heat. He watches Tina write Noah a note before she rushes into the house. Hugh winks at Noah, and Noah winks back, a co-conspirator. Tina likes it that Noah is deaf. She can write him notes, as if they were in love. She can scream at him, and he’ll go on smiling. She can pretend that she knows sign language, and Noah can pretend that he understands. They’re both good athletes and enjoy playing soccer together. In this group of two girls and a deaf boy, the outsider is Amy, with her dark watchful eyes and her faultless memory for slights. Her cousin, the deaf boy, and her sister gang up on her. From his hammock, Hugh can see Amy’s face, shadowed with anger, as she follows Noah into the house, trying to get the boy’s attention by throwing grass at his back.

  Hugh looks up at the bent lightning rod. His moodiness takes itself out of his mind and rests against the exterior painted wood, puttied glass, and bent gutters he has failed to repair. He takes one last puff from the cigarette, stubs it out on the lawn, and stands up. A cloud covers the sun, and from the distance he hears the cooing of a dove. No one is watching him. Hugh feels this as a great, rare freedom.

  From the rafters of the garage, Hugh takes down his aluminum extension ladder, and, grunting and swaying, carries it to the house’s south side, where the roof can be approached, and the ladder’s anti-slip swivel feet can be planted in the lawn instead of in Laurie’s roses or baby’s breath. On the ground he extends the ladder to its full length and then tests the hook to make sure that the rear sections are locked into place. Then he pulls the ladder up, losing control of it for a moment so that it perks and dips. He holds his leg out, bracing himself, and pulls the ladder back so that it is settled against the gutter. Its top is two feet above the lowest edge of shingles. So far he has made almost no noise, just a vague metallic rattle.

  As he climbs, he feels the flimsy aluminum shake with an oscillating, palsied tremble. He stops, waiting for the trembling to subside, then continues up.

  He lifts himself onto the roof’s green shingles and slowly creeps up the high-angled roof toward the apex, the soles of his running shoes giving him traction. The shingles are as hot as the sidewalks and handrails in Hell. (His father’s phrase, which he remembers now, smiling, his face heat-bathed.) He inches his way toward the edge of the roof, reaches out, grabs the ten-inch lightning rod, and bends the metal so that it points straight up. This is important, he thinks. Lightning doesn’t come down sideways.

  He feels in his pants pocket the bulge of the seashell that Noah gave him. He moves himself backwards and allows himself one moment of recreation, one gaze outward.

  The hill on which his house had been built eighty-five years ago descends in a series of passive angles toward the river, which broadens at the town’s edge to become what is called Five Oaks Lake, its shore blocked to his view by willows along its bank. But he can see the various roofs of the houses and businesses of Five Oaks and quietly names them: the Quimbys, the Russells, the hardware store, the flat roof with the smoking incinerator in back which must be the IGA, and the municipal park with its baseball diamond on the hill itself. He counts up other houses, knowing all the names. Underneath him is his own house, old and solid. From it he feels through his skin a low sub-audible murmuring.

  The keys in his left pocket are irritating him, pressing inside his trouser against his leg. He reaches in, pulls out his keychain, and throws the keys high into the air. They disappear into the sun, then fly out in a long curve and land on the lawn, sounding out like small bells.

  That night, Simon does not come to the table for dinner. Dorse
y sits next to Noah, who has already seated himself next to Tina, and she announces that Simon is still learning his lines and will skip eating. The hot dogs are piled in a pyramid on the serving plate in front of Hugh and are surrounded by bottles of ketchup and mustard, bowls of potato chips, pickles, salad, and Jell-O.

  Hugh looks at the food, at his two daughters and his nephew, his wife and his sister. He looks at them and then stands up. “I’m going to get Simon,” he says.

  “What?” Dorsey says. “No.”

  The three children watch Hugh. Noah tugs at his mother, and Dorsey makes an explanatory sign.

  “Hugh,” Laurie says, pronouncing his name with an unusual emphasis. “I already talked to him. He doesn’t want to come down for dinner.”

  “I’ll go see,” Hugh says.

  He takes long steps out of the room and hurries up the stairs two at a time. He hears the women talking, and his sister calling his name to retrieve him. They won’t chase me, he thinks; my hairline is receding. After rushing down the long upstairs hallway, he stops outside the guest room, Simon and Dorsey’s room. He waits for a moment, then knocks. Just above a whisper, Simon tells him to come in.

  Simon is sitting by the window, the late-afternoon light coming in over his shoulder, throwing his face into shadow. A bound script lies in his lap, and his right index finger points at a line. The room is stifling, but Simon seems cool and relaxed, not a sign of sweat on him.

  “Oh, Hugh,” he says. “What a surprise.”

  “I just came to see if you wanted some dinner. We’re all having hot dogs.” Hugh glances at the clothes all over the floor, the rumpled unmade bed, the maple tree in the yard outside the window. My maple tree, he thinks. The room smells of somebody’s lovemaking.

  “I know,” his brother-in-law sighs. “Dorsey told me the menu. Hot dogs and potato chips and pickles with ice cream and Jell-O salad and cookies with surprises inside. Not in that order, of course. Very appetizing. Very Fourth-of-July. Sorry I can’t come down.” He smiles. “I have to learn my lines.”