star V738

When the phone rings I go outside.   Always.  Dad insisted I have a satellite phone and it works better out on the balcony. 

"Your father is dead."   That's what the satellite phone said.    These stars, they don't recognize me.  They float away in the night sky getting smaller in the distance like a train.    

My mom is still talking.   "He had just come back from the doctor..."     And I'm still looking at stars.  I don't really understand the science.    These stars may all be dead and we don't know yet.  I know what the science is, of course.  All these stars may not be real.  But it's July fourth.    Down the valley they are celebrating something, maybe the emancipation of the heavens.   

"Well," I say after a couple of light years, "he has been dying for quite a long time.   It could have just been muscle memory, magnets and a lifetime of scrambled protons that kept him alive this long."    

"He went out into the woods with his shovel.  I didn't think anything of it.  I just figured another chicken died.  But he never came back."

"How long you had chickens?"

"The sheriffs went out this morning.  They found a black tarpaulin with a pulley system in a tree by a big mound of dirt.   He buried himself."

"He was low maintenance.  Did they dig him up?"

"Took 'em four hours," she said. " Digging in that red clay.  And he buried himself with all his magnets."   

"He told me once he wanted to die like a satellite and either float out of orbit or crash into earth." 

It was a mostly clear night, with a few puddles of clouds thinking about rain.   The kind of rain that doesn't seem to need a cloud but keeps them close for company.  Out here away from the city you can see all the holes in the sky.   

"And his shovel," Mom said.   The phone was getting heavy. My words were light and porous like styrofoam.    

"What?" I asked. 

"They said he still had his shovel.  They asked me if I wanted it?"

"He loved to dig holes."

"They think he lined the hole with a magnetic slate.  They were able to identify him but they said  they could keep digging him out but it would be easier to get a crane."     

"Had he finally went all the way crazy?"  The amateur firework show below was in full orchestration.   It sounded like hollow cannons echoing through the hills.   I asked what was wrong with him.  "Why was he at the doctor?"

"It was the dentist."  

Down the hill, below the thick splattered sky, I see the last lights of a freight train swaying down tracks.   Up high a blue light explodes with a pop and rattles down against the back of the night.   Sounds linger like thunder.   The tin roof of our apartment building shines with the flash of a carnival ride.    It was my turn to speak. "I hate dentists."   

"When he didn't come home for dinner, I thought he'd gotten himself lost again.   Last week the neighbors found him in their pasture having a serious conversation with a goat about  the conductive alloy of the earth's core."

"Goats are the greatest."   Words were slowing down bouncing back more slowly from space.   "Did he leave a note or anything?"

"No note but did you know your father has been writing travel books."

"What?   He hasn't been anywhere.  Ever." 

" I know," Mom said.  "I hadn't been in his workshop for years.  I was looking around.  He has long manuscripts about his adventures abroad in Paris, Lebanon and Florence."     

"Mom, those are all small towns near the farm."

There was a bit of a pause while our voices bounced back and forth through the atmosphere.    "Well...that makes more sense," she said. 

"Did I ever tell you when he took me out for a drive.  I was about twelve and we mapped out the perfect elliptical radius from the hospital where he was born?"

"Oh, God."

"Yep.   We drove back and forth all day long.  Every highway, every little side road.   Sixty eight miles, exactly.  He marked the coordinates with little crosses on the side of the road.   Sometimes people would stop and offer condolences, something nice, like 'Sorry for your loss'.    He would just nod  'circle of life' he'd say stoically without looking up.   'Noone,' he used to tell me,  'a man's gotta know his place in this world.'"  

There was the preamble of crackling then an explosion.  I wish I could leave my head in the driveway and run for cover.  Maybe my head was getting smaller.  There was a storm coming, seemingly from nowhere.   

"Mom, do you remember when we named a star for his birthday?  It came with a cheap fake looking certificate and celestial map."

"Oh, yes.   God, he hated that star."

"I'm looking at that star right now."  I said.  "He said it made the big dipper look like it was cleaning up after celestial rodents.   That's what stars are, he would say.  He called them  'evidence of mice.'"

There was silence on the other end of the phone so I kept talking.  "He said he hated stars.  He hated that star.   'You can't trust them,' he told me.   You never know if you are looking at something or being tricked and actually making wishes into the abyss.   Never trust a star."  

Blast from the geysers of pyrotechnics refracted and dissolved.   The night was taller than ever.  

"Noone…." she paused.    I'm still looking into the sky.  It was starting to rain.  

'Yeah.  Mom ...what.... are you okay?"  

"I found that certificate-- the one with the star we gave him.  He built a frame.   It was hanging on the wall above the desk with all his fabricated voyaging notebooks.    I'm looking at it too.  I'm holding it."

"I'm still looking at it.  Do you think he finally made peace with that star?"  I asked.   There was no answer.  There didn't need to be.  

"Mom, I'm coming home."

"There's not gonna be a service.  He is already in the ground.  I ask the sheriffs to just cover him back up.  He never wanted a service."

" I want to dig him up."

"What...why?"  she asked. 

" I want to.  He showed me how to demagnetize a shovel.  I think I want to  bury him just beyond one of those road crosses we scattered across the state."

Mom didn't say anything but I'm sure she was trying to reconcile  the ridiculousness of it all.   "I'll do it at night while the headlights illuminate down the road and around corners.  And I'll stay out there until someone stops and offers their condolences."

"I think he would have liked that."

"I don't know, maybe."

In the valley they are still shooting fireworks in the rain.  Clouds and smoke are weighing down the sky.  I'm still looking at Dad's star.  That tiny luminous speck in the big shovel and stare at it until it's gone.