View From The Window

The plane is halfway through the air when the windows start to dim. It’s a connect flight from Houston to Albuquerque and I’m sitting by the wing, dreaming about a conversation long ago.

We lived in a shank shack out in the desert, a fifteen minute walk up a single lane road where no one could get to us. The realtor knocked ten percent off the asking price because there was no running water, so we had to use a well in the twenty-first century. Daddy saw that as a plus- thought all that walking would turn us into a real family, one worth its salt.

Near the well was a chicken coop, and a windmill that made a strange whistle when the day was quiet enough. The days were always very quiet, especially in the summer, when my brother and I would play cards on the dusty living room carpet, the only light coming from the hatchings of the screen door and the curtains in a blue cotton tint. We’d play war and rummy and games like that on milk crates where we’d sweat in our boxers and talk about comics we stole from the school library.  

On one specific day, that screen door barked like a gavel as it opened and came to rest. Me and Greg looked up, a bit scared, a bit excited. It wasn’t a sound we associated with loneliness, and like most things loneliness could become a protection of its own.

“Morning, boys.” It was my father, the highway cowboy of our daydreams. His beard was long with streaks of gray, and his hair flowed longer under his tan “Merle Haggard” ranch hat. The wind that designed the desert pulled at his loose denim, so that even then, the world was trying to steal him away. My brother and I latched onto his legs, shackling him to our home.

“What’re you doing here, Pa?” my brother said.

“I’ve got something to show ya.” He moved to the kitchen, walking like Frankenstein. “But I want to tell you boys a story first. Wanna hear it?”

Greg and I nodded with great eyes of pearl.

“Well, then, come on up. And Greg” Daddy pointed under the sink, which was a spigot-less fossil filled with Vienna Sausage cans. “Grab that bucket.”

In the rear of the kitchen was another screen door, and in the summer it turned orange and alive. Daddy pushed it open, and in the heartland of our little America, between the tired wooden giant and the muted clucking and the sand that seemed a permanent resident in our home, he reclaimed his title as the ruler of it all. The orange from the door had stained his hands, and we felt it on our shoulders as he led us into the country, his fingers a comfort that, even to this day, I’ve never found in religion or elsewhere. As we walked, he spoke.

“You see, your Daddy ain’t too different from this world. He’s a driver, and in a lot of ways, so is everyone else.”

“What you mean?” Greg held the bucket low, and it clipped the ground every step or two.  

“Well, I move things. I load them up in my truck and I get them to people who need it. Then, once that’s done, I load up some more and start moving again. Texas to Kentucky, Kentucky to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh to Cleveland. Round and round and round like that.”

I nodded, and he turned his gaze towards my side. “Now, it may not seem like it, but most everybody works this way, too. The farmers plant and harvest, the schools churn out the students, the little barn mice search for food and hide when they got it. Have you noticed this?”

We were closer to the well and the land was losing a bit of its luster. His words reminded me of how Greg always folded with pocket sevens. Just like that, as if he hadn’t any choice to do so, just tossed them on the milk crate face up. When I asked why he tossed a pair, he’d shrug. Pocket sevens and a shrug. I told my father I noticed this.

Greg piped up, as if this were an accusation. “Well Billy strokes the chickens before he puts em’ down. Pets them for a half hour. And he cries when he wrings them out.”

My face grew hot. Pa’s hand strengthened on my shoulder. “Boys, you’re missing the point. It ain’t a competition. We all got these things, these little cycles we’re involved in. Just look at the sun and the moon. Everyone depends on em’, but they don’t know any different. They move when they gotta move, running their course, and when it’s over they do it the next day. Again and again.”

“When’s the moving stop?” Greg asked.

My father chuckled. “Well, that’s the great mystery, Greg. We could sit here and guess, but the truth is maybe forever. Or it could be tomorrow.” Daddy felt my body tense up and took it back. “Not tomorrow. Probably not in your lifetime.”

I tried to move the conversation along. “What did you want to show us?”

“You’ll see. We’re almost here.”

We approached the well, and in the presence of our Pa, whose appearance we considered almost mythical, it looked incredibly dated. A few bricks had fallen into the sand. Plus, my brother and I had broken the spoke a long time ago, so a chaffed bit of rope hung out of the well’s mouth like a snake put to sleep in the shine.

“Fetch us some water,” said Pa, but Greg needed no instruction. He’d already awoken that snake, looped it under the handle of the pail, and twisted it until a sort of fibrous tumor developed above the bucket. Then, he tossed the bucket inside the well. The rope spit old grains of sand as it ran through his hands. When the water and wood collided, we could hear very little of it- only breath, a single breath, one that traveled round and round. All three of us pulled it upwards, and when it had been unearthed, it was wet and glimmered warm as the stars above our house in the summer.

“Now,” Daddy began, and he got on one knee, slower than the two of us boys did. “When I’m on the road, a funny thing seems to happen. I’ll be moving through my day, but so are many others, and these cycles overlap sometimes. Usually they’re truckers- occasionally it’s a cross country tourist. We’ll throw each other a smile, and if it ain’t our first time, then maybe we’ll grab a coffee. But it’s never much more than that.”

“One time,” Greg said, “I saw the same turkey vulture everyday for two weeks. Sitting on a gutted jackrabbit out a half mile from our house.”

I nodded because I remembered that bird. Its head was always covered in red pulp, and in the night I thought I could hear it batting its wings outside our window, as if warning us where all this was headed.

Daddy looked very solemn. “That’s part of it, yes. The vultures and the jackrabbits and the fat black ants that we find when we look close enough. They’re all in on it, all tapping into each other’s cycles.”

My eyes were downcast, focused on the bucket. The water tilted and slowed inside like a dying hurricane.

“But there’s the other side, too. Honeybees and hummingbirds and the turning of the world. And that’s where some amazing things can happen.”

It was only then I realized how much darker the world had become, as if my father’s speech had sucked the soul and the pale yellows out of the land. The water had finally stilled. A glowing object lay prone within it.

“Here’s one,” Daddy said, and pointed to the bucket. “Remember what I told you about the sun and the moon? Them not caring much about their course?”

Between the bucket’s lips, under the beating heart of twine, the sun had become a crescent. A black cut of ink chewed hungrily at its white skin. The sky had turned gray, and I grabbed my father’s hand.

“Even they run into each other once in a while.”

Me and Greg said nothing. We knew what it was, in theory- the comics mentioned them all the time. But to see the drive-by in real time, to taste night in the afternoon and complete silence and a hope that your father might come home…  can you put a price on that?

His voice was strong and etched hard by long roads and rest stop cigarettes. “This is all it is, boys. That’s what I’ve figured out. We follow our cycles, and when our time comes, we take it to the end.” He grabbed harder on our shoulders, pulling us closer. “But it’s these communions that make a life. The good and the bad and the strange. All of it.”

The crescent had receded to a fingernail and then a whisker. When that shiny whisker was gone, our father turned us around to look. Up above our home, hung between the blades of the mill, was a ring, rail-thin and brilliant. Beads of light bled from the edges of the dark, dripping onto the desert and onto the footprints that we paved out to the well. It was the outline of a dream, a tunnel you chase after death, a vulture’s eye, the beginning and the end. It was everything.

“Dad,” Greg said. “Will Mom ever come home?”

Daddy looked onward, and his long brimmed hat shook from a quiet breeze. It didn’t stop until the sun had become barren and clean again. Out in front of us, encouraged by the breaking of a new day, the chicken coop rustled and clucked. From inside, a rooster crowed.

I come back to it just like my Daddy, staring endlessly out a window, and my eyes feel coated in silk. I blink it away. The plane is very empty except for a few suits and a flight attendant. She comes down the lane with a tired smile and offers me a drink. I decline.

“Can’t believe I’m missing the eclipse,” she says. “Do you got a good view over there?”

“No,” I tell her.

“Darn,” she says. “Bet you wish you were down there, huh?”

“Yup,” I tell her, and this time it’s a lie. I chose this flight for a reason. For two reasons, actually.

The first is that a funeral always comes around on such short notice. Greg hadn’t left me much time to be picky. Selfishly, I wish he’d told me a week or two in advance, before he knotted himself up like he did that bucket. That way, I could’ve made a drive out of it. A stop at Daddy’s grave, another stop at the old house, and maybe lunch at that place where me and Greg liked to skip stones before school. That would’ve been a nice trip, I suppose.

The news had wrecked me, but it hadn’t surprised me. In my heart, I always knew that he’d go out that way. Just as I knew he’d fold on pocket sevens and shrug it off like it was nothing. Part of me hated him for it, and part of me understood. I picture that vulture digging its head into the insides of that jackrabbit, picking it to the bone over fourteen rotten days, with my mother standing behind them all the while, and I think to myself, why bother? These things run in cycles, a wise man once told me.

The second reason wasn’t something I could put a finger on. It was more a feeling, or possibly a reaction, to the current state of things. I believed- and I really believed this- that if I watched that eclipse on solid land, through the bucket as I did on a Saturday afternoon in Lubbock, Texas, then I might take a note and follow my brother. Not out of fear or grief, but out of necessity. There are some things you can only see once, and when you urge for communion like I do, there’s only so much temptation you can take.

So I stare, 35,000 feet in the air, as the sky turns to nothing, imagining how that ring of fire is scaring and mesmerizing and changing the lives that we fly over. I think about that until the window heals and returns to blue.

The flight attendant moves back up the row, dragging a cart as she walks. There is no one to take a drink from her. It rumbles in the numb exhale of the plane’s interior.

I stop her near me, giving her a smile that I think I learned from my father.

“Would you like to have a coffee with me?”