36

THAT NIGHT, AFTER THEY’D FINISHED EATING, AND SAT BY the fire, in the dark, the loons began to warble. It had been an unseasonably warm autumn, but now there was a chill in the air that hadn’t been there before, a double ring around the moon, rainbowlike in its brilliance, even seen through the trees over them.

David said they should definitely head south, that the loons got crazy before bad weather.

He’d expected Max to argue that he’d checked with the National Weather Service before they’d left, but Max agreed it would be a good idea.

“If we go back in and we don’t get hit by it,” he said, “we can paddle around close to shore, camp out in the woods just off the highway. How’s that?”

David nodded, drew his jacket over his shoulders, and Janie said she was cold, so they built up the fire and it snapped and crackled, and when the moon lifted out of the trees, Max sang, in a surprisingly fine voice, that of a crooner,

Oh Mr. Moon, Moon
Bright and shiny Moon
Won’t you please shine down on me

 

“Sing it,” Max said to David and Janie, “and I’ll sing counter.”

“What’s that?” Janie said.

“Just start,” Max said, and David and Janie did, and when they hit the end, Max signaled them to repeat it, and then Max harmonized over them, and it was so good they stopped for a second, amused.

“You got a great voice, Davey,” Max said.

“I do not,” he said.

“You do, though, really. So does your mother. That’s how we met, you know?”

Janie interrupted Max to ask how she sounded.

“Great,” David told her, and Max nodded, but she’d worked herself up to it now.

“This one’s funny,” she said, and she sang in a high, reedy voice,

In the boarding house where I lived
everything is getting old
There are gray hairs on the but-ter
and the bread is green with mold

 

Janie paused, then grinning, sang again,

When the dog died it was hot dogs
When the cat died, catnip tea
When the landlord died I left there
Spare ribs were too much for me.

 

Max laughed, and David did, too. David was thinking about Jarvis, and what she’d said about him, that he was a camel poot.

“Where’d you come up with this stuff?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

It was so warm there by the fire, they lay back and watched the stars. There was a ribbon of magenta, emerald, and indigo northern lights over the back of the ridge, the night heavy with the feel of time, as if time itself here were palpable, substantial, all times one time, and this whole world here an illusion, and only that echoing thing inside real, this indefinable something, and the three of them together, and yet all three not, so that there was both this wanting to be carried along in the flow of it, this beautifully happy yet melancholy time, this reminder that all things came into being and disappeared again, and that even this place here was nothing but some physical manifestation of a dynamic that was, really, in motion, and their sense of being here, now, and the northern lights playing over them, and the loons warbling, far off to the north, so that the wind carried their voices like lost souls to them, was timeless, and pure, just itself, almost, and only Max knowing how much you lost, because youth cannot know loss like this, it knows potential, the future, and lives in the present, looking to the promise of the future, for to truly know loss early removes us from life, so that we forever stand at a distance, and even living, know already this is gone, will be history, this, too, shall pass, not only what is difficult, but even all that we love. Even joy.

But to all, these realizations come in moments of stillness, oftentimes in autumn. Realizations that sit Buddha-like in anyone, once they come.

Everything does come of nothing, and returns to the same. But what beauty between!

And that true beauty only to be experienced by those who look, even for a moment, the length of a breath, into the face of that truth.

For it is the fear of this realization that lights cities, fuels the great diversions, and for most, even a taste of it is too much, and those who run fastest and farthest from it are talkers, and fabricators, and inventors, running, always running from this realization, while a small few, oftentimes hated, or ignored, run into it, this moment of stillness, and hold it up to the light, not horrified, but seeing the beauty instead, all of it, though those who can’t bear this moment break it, always, fill it with neon, with noise, so many saying nothing, or polarizing what is real in some makeshift battle, which is diversion again, all bright lights, and funhouse mirrors, and propaganda, yet in the quietest moments, when all this stops, we tell our stories.

All we have are our stories, and embedded in them are ourselves, what bits or pieces remain, that we carry, or are carried in us, what of ourselves we can grasp, even as we, too, are passing away. Knowing it or not.

All this, in the space of a breath. A feeling, an intimation, a pause.

And David was feeling all of this, in the dark, out with Janie and Max, back of the fire.

Had a minute passed, or an hour?

“I remember,” Max said, breaking the silence, “when I was a kid, your uncle Leonard and I sold the Saturday Evening Post. Got to this time of year people weren’t wandering around downtown so much when it came out, and we’d stand there and freeze, and it got so bad we got a Star route. Up at four, had one hundred thirty Sundays apiece, each must’ve weighed four pounds, and we didn’t have a cart, so we got a bicycle, with a rack on the handlebars, but couldn’t afford inner tubes for the tires, we were in the Depression then, and no one had money for anything, so we stuffed the tires with grass, and we’d ride that thing around like that.” Max laughed. “When it snowed it was hard to find grass for the wheels and we’d stuff them with wadded-up newspaper.”

David had heard these stories before, but here, he was not bored, or disinterested. Just now, he felt this proprietary . . . something. And he was surprised at how much of his father’s old story he’d forgotten.

“Tell me that old one about how Herman destroyed that Packard.”

And Max obliged him, Janie sinking down the log again, until her head pitched forward, her chin on her chest.

“She asleep?” Max said.

And quiet again, the spine of the island rising up under them, it seemed, they were pushed up into that dome of stars and infinite darkness, broken by ribbons of northern lights.

Beautiful, and awful.

David nodded, then lifted her into his arms, and carried her to the tent, and zipped her into her sleeping bag, in her face, even now, not really innocence, because Janie understood a great deal, but a newness, a blush, he, David, needed so badly, needed to protect, so that he could re-create that in himself.

Could recall it.

And walking back to the fire, he felt a certain dull irritation at Max there. He shouldn’t have let her lie on the cold ground, but had. David had felt Janie shuddering, even in her sleep, as he lay her in the sleeping bag.

“You get her tucked in?” Max said.

David said he had, and he sat and watched the fire, almost bored, but at the same time, hypnotized by the flames. It would die down soon enough, yet if he tossed on more wood, it would be an invitation to sit here longer, and talk, and not knowing what he wanted, but needing to do something, he dropped more wood on the fire, and the flames leapt up, and at that moment his destiny was changed, this small act, a deciding one. Among others.

But here, feeding the fire.