One time Glen came to my house with a long roll of paper. He wouldn’t say what it was; he would only show me, so we tramped down into the basement, and when he unrolled the paper on the ping-pong table, it turned out to be a map of the world. On the Europe part, he had traced in colored pens the engagements of Andy’s company up from Sicily into Italy, with places Andy had mentioned in his letters marked by blue stars. He painted a big star over Pisa (I’d never bothered to find out where Pisa was) where Andy was at that point healing up from being shot by the Jerries. I called Mom and Dad down. Dad picked the map up—the spread of his arms was not quite enough to straighten it out flat in the air—and stared at it for a long time, his nose a mere inch from the blue Mediterranean. After he put it back on the ping-pong table, Mom smoothed it out and traced with her fingers the travels of her firstborn. They said nothing. They didn’t have to. But before Glen left, Dad poked his head back down the stairs and said, “Thank you,” in a tone you didn’t hear that often.
So it was the night Glen informed us of a fire in the sky. It was a Glen thing, and therefore suspect, but how cool if true! For a few delicious moments we assumed that was what he really meant, that a great blaze from above was going to end the world, until he went into his lecture on space debris and the coming to earth of some in a shower called the Leonids. Meteors is what he meant, after all. Not the Apocalypse, but good enough. Mom drove us out to the Knoxville Highway to find us a place to watch the meteors. At some later time she would honk three times to tell us she was there with the car to take us home.
Glen settled down in the night grass, lying on his back, looking up into the billion billion stars. The trees on three sides of the highway pull-over stood still and gray in the darkness, but now that I’ve said “gray” I have to add that they were also stone black below and luminous coppery silver above, where they fronted the sky. The fourth side was a wall of stars. Glen’s head rested on the palms of his hands, the long gray stalks of the mountain grass poking up beside his elbows and knees. He was silent. He was happy. I could tell though it was too dark to see his face very well. I wasn’t sure he was looking at the sky, or at me, or at Vince—who was teetering along the curb like an Olympic balance beam contestant—or if he was looking at anything at all. Enough light issued from the stars that I could see his smile and the outline of his body. It seemed strange to me that a kid who wanted to see the stars so much, who’d made such a point of being there in time for the show, would be lying down on the grass, rather than standing up with me, closer to the sky, on the slope of the mountain, as near heaven as you can get around here. The minute I thought that, though, I realized how silly it was, to count a few inches in the face of the immensities between us and those points of light.
If one actually fell, if a meteor fell out of the sky, it would annihilate us all in the same second.
A little breeze came, and the dark and light and the leaves and the grass stirred around us like millions of decks of cards shuffled by invisible dealers. When the breeze was right you could hear sounds, sometimes human voices, sometimes the stirring of animals, from the purple-blackness below the hill, where there were a few farms and long stretches of forest. The lights of the farms made the surrounding emptiness that much darker.
Tilden was singing in the blue darkness. Tilden had a nice voice, but it was the sort of thing you’d never say to him. If you mentioned he had a nice voice he’d know you had heard him, and the fiction, shared wordlessly, tacitly among us, was that Tilden’s singing was private and inaudible, heard only by himself. He made up the tunes, I think, or if he didn’t, he was listening to a different radio station than the rest of us. It was a shame. He sounded good, but we already anticipated running with a crowd in the midst of which one never sang to oneself.
The point of honor that night was to be the first to see a shooting star. “November, the Leonids,” Glen said, a night when the sky would fill with shooting stars like a battle scene in a space movie. I saw one as soon as we parked, but Glen said it didn’t count because it was too early and it wasn’t a Leonid but a plain old meteor. There was no use arguing with Glen when he’d made up his mind about something like that.
I looked at him lying belly up in the grass.
“You happy?”
“What?”
“Are you happy, Glen?”
“I guess so. You?”
“I’d be happier if you counted my meteor.”
“It counts as a meteor but not as a Leonid. I thought I explained that.”
Glen shrugged. That’s just the way it was.
Vince said, “What are you girls talking about?” and squeezed in between us, so our skinny boy bodies were wedged together like sardines in a can.
“I was just asking why Glen gets to decide everything.”
Vince thought a minute and said, “Because he’s smarter than me and Tilden doesn’t really care. That just leaves you bitchin’ and moanin’ like an old woman.”
I took his point and turned my attention to the stars. Restless Tilden started chasing lightning bugs. I could feel the sudden cold where his body left the proximity of mine. The three of us were lying on our backs with heads resting on our hands. We weren’t the only people to know about the meteorites, so every now and then a car ground into the pull-over, sweeping the stars away with its headlights. As our eyes readjusted, we listened to the conversations of the newcomers, couples, mostly, taking the excuse of scientific observation for a night together in the woods. The boy-girl couple just up the hill from us had gotten there before we did, and were a little bored, and were beginning to play with each other, and giggle, and admonish each other, “Watch the sky, now.” A white van pulled up below with a bunch of kids in it, older kids, maybe college kids. They were drunk, but sweet and happy. One big kid flopped down into the grass beside Glen. I don’t think he knew he was there; I think he thought Glen was a natural feature, a gray swelling out of the gray rock of the mountain. He liked it that way.
We hoped that when people died they became part of the mountain, and never quite left the scenes of their lives. That’s why the mountains were so big. They keep growing and what they grow with is us. We liked that.
I looked up again at the twinkling dome. Mom taught me to wish on a star once, but I forgot the exact procedure. Glen would know. I figured he was wishing a lot harder and a lot more than me anyway. He was one of those people who had an emptiness in him that wasn’t meanness or sin or anything like that, but just strangeness, as if he hadn’t figured himself out yet. Of course he would be wishing for something I couldn’t comprehend. Maybe he was wishing to be a girl so he could have Vince the way he had him that night at the camp-out. I was still trying to figure out how all that might work in the life before us. Me, I was actually pretty content as I understood things. Vince claimed victory on every field and Tilden lived in a world of his own making. None of us would answer questions like, “Are you happy?” when we thought they were serious, so there was no use asking. We were all right.
A car approached, hesitated, went on higher up the mountain. A big hoot-owl went at it down in the darkness, who-who-ing in a way which would have been scary if my pals hadn’t been with me.
Some of the voices coming out of the night were more familiar than others. We heard a couple of Coach’s boys, a couple of the younger footballers. We would have joined them, maybe, had Glen not sunk down in the grass like he was a tortoise trying to find a shell to hide in. They were just JV’s from the middle school, but Coach’s influence had reached down to them, and they would be particular about whom they ran with, and cruel to those they didn’t.
I was about to say, “I’m getting bored,” when, almost at the limits of visibility, Tilden’s arm shot out straight, pointing at the sky. I looked up at the glimmering remnant of a meteor’s trail. I was about to remark on how interesting that was when another came, and another. I admit I thought we weren’t going to see anything. It wasn’t until other people gathered in the darkness, looking up expectantly into the star-bowl, that I realized the Leonids were not a Glen Copland invention.
People around us were saying “Ah!” I looked up again at the dark sky slashed with white trails of flame. Ten, twenty, forty, a storm of falling rock transformed into a lace of pale fire. Glen lay on the ground with his arms open, welcoming the shooting stars. Without moving my head, I could see the fire trails appearing low in the east, but mostly I was looking at Glen, his arms held up like that. I’d seen that gesture before, in a book or a slide show, or maybe a sleeping bag on the side of a mountain. Glen had taken the sky as his lover. The gesture was too knowing: I didn’t think the sky was his first.
“Glen?” Vince said.
“Yeah?”
“Doesn’t this just make you come in your pants?”
Glen’s arms collapsed onto his chest, his hands contracted into fists. He bent in the middle a little, lifting his back off the turf. He let out this spluttering wheeze which is what happens when a good one catches you off guard. He seized a deep breath, and then his belly-laugh belled out over the mountain silence—strange how silent it was, when the meteors were so like fireworks you expected explosions mid-air—and you could see the shadows of people turning to look at him, but you knew it was all good, that the sound was somehow exactly right, Copland holding his belly, his eyes mere slits now, tears streaming from the corners, as the shooting stars blazed and went out, blazed and went out.
“I swear to God, Silvano,” he said when he could catch his breath.
The couple just above us might have come to see the shooting stars, but they were doing something else now. The little flashlight they brought to look at the star map had gone out. One could hear her low moans as he fumbled about in her shirt, under the loosened top of her jeans. That was the last November when sex was still funny to me.
The meteor flashes slowed a little over the ridge, but if you looked east they were still coming like a fake-out bomb attack, all fizzle and no bang, beautiful, the way artillery must be if you know it will never hit its mark. I didn’t know if you were supposed to be afraid or not, but the comparisons I made in my imagination to cannon and artillery made me apprehensive.
“What if it did?” I said out loud. “What if one of those things actually made it to the ground? Glen? What if it did?”
Glen took a minute to consider this. He sat up. I could see the sticks and leaves clinging to the back of his gray sweatshirt. Finally he said, “That would be so goddamn beautiful.”