Flights above the Earth
The first time he saw her he was in the diner and hungry. He’d been hungry ever since he set foot in that little town, the one called Radiance. It was summer, and hot, and the blue of the sky never changed, not a cloud to cover them as they took down trees and drug logs and piled them neat. They were land clearers, and that was that, but he wanted more and he knew it. He’d get his own rig, one of the boys said, but Russell wanted more than that. Wanted his own men to boss, his own company at the very least. He’d been looking at maps of out West, the possibilities for copper and the richest veins of uranium they’d ever seen. He’d looked at photos of the factories in Willette, New Mexico. Foreman, at least. That was part of what left him hungry, the next and next and next of all his plans. And a man shall have dominion over the earth. He woke hearing those words and he knew it was his daddy talking, after all this time. Memories made him hungry for all he still didn’t want to be, all that he’d left.
When he saw her at the counter lunch place in Radiance he was not surprised, and yet he was. Her blue-black hair hung on either side of her face as she leaned in to cards spread on the table in the corner, her studying them so hard that when she did look up and meet his eyes, he almost jumped out of his skin.
When he made his way toward the booth where she was, he left his body, looking at her as she pushed her hair aside so that he saw the full of her beautiful face. No other word for it than beautiful, but it was her hands that he remembered later. Slender hands shuffling the odd cards spread in front of her, the pictures of fire and towers. Hands like wind and all things thin and fast. He just stood, wondering where he was for a little, lost somewhere between the door open onto the hot sun of the street outside and the red-and-steel of the counter. He tipped his hat to her. He didn’t know what else to do, because he was lost already. Picked up and set back down inside a dream he’d long wanted to unremember.
He’d had that dream most of his life—details of it rearranged, gone—but he would never forget the first time he dreamed it. He’d grown up in a little Georgia town called Oceanus where he’d loved fighting, pocketknives, and playing in the swampy alley behind their house. A factory dumped old tires and chemicals there, and they settled on the water like green light so that at ten years old he told himself he’d seen the power of heaven. But in the dream he had later on, he wasn’t in some factory-made Georgia swamp. He was in a place where the land was hard, dry. Red dust swirled up in the distance where there was a house and a woman sitting on the stoop with a cup of coffee. He tried to call out to the woman, but his mouth would not make any words. He knelt, picked up a fistful of the dry earth, tried to hold on to it as the dream changed and he was picked up, carried through the air as if he could fly. He felt weightless, capable of anything as he flew over woods spotty with bare earth and fallen trees, over dirt roads and highways. He flew through a sky lit up with hard stars and half a moon that showed low mountains jagged with tears and ruts. Smoke rose from burning black heaps of what he’d later know was coal. In this dream his heart was full and glad and he woke, breathing in the used-up cigarette smoke air of home, a voice in the wind saying, You know how.
By the time he was sixteen, he’d forgotten there was such a thing as a wish. Pipe dreams, his daddy called the tiny figures Russell carved from pine when he was thirteen, carting them to sell in Hack, the closest town. His daddy, Joe Wallen, was not a cruel man, but he believed in what he saw and tuned up and set right. The world made sense if you looked at it under the hood of a car. There you could fix things, tear them out and put them back, patch them up with stove cement if you had to. He preached, on streets corners or over the trading of knives and guns in town. The world, his barber shop sermons went, was the way it was and a God-fearing man kept his cards close. The world, Russell had thought, was made of tall, spindly pines, and wisteria vines that choked the air with sweetness come spring. He had tried flight, tried to make sense of a world that was brittle, grass burnt pale in summers of scorching heat, like Georgia was when he was a boy. He brought home the wisteria blossoms for his mother. He carved pine into snakes and bears, passable in their beauty. He said nothing as Joe Wallen tossed the critters fireward, watching them sizzle and rise, snapping with pine sap. A man should have bigger plans than play pretties, his daddy said.
It was 1952 and he was nearly seventeen the day he wore a brown felt hat and skinny tie to meet the recruiter in town to persuade them he was old enough for what ended up being the last year of the Korean War. It wouldn’t have mattered, Joe Wallen said as he gave Russell a Bible smelling of fresh inked paper with an inscription in the front. For Russell as he sets forth. In Korea he’d had no need of dreams of flying. Artillery sent lightning across the sky, blinding him, pushing him outside his own body with fear and a simultaneous wish that he might somehow be a hero. He was not. He fumbled and hesitated. He trudged and found himself begging the moment before he shot a gun, begging that killing someone else would spare his own self. It did. His journey forth was for one year, and he came back to Georgia with a shot-up knee and stories of undefended hillsides drenched with blood and dead men, some of them better stories than if they’d been true. There was no celebration. You know how to make do, his daddy said to him after one night, then two, a week. Get on, boy, he said, his voice holding nothing of hot, dry winds above the earth, nor of God.
It was not God that Russell followed down the highways north, then south again, then east and west, directionless soon and not afraid at all anymore. He slept on a golf course on the edge of Atlanta. Just into Tennessee, he fetched cases of liquor in a store in a little town called Fine. In the back room at a prostitute’s house in Arkansas, he let her gather him next to full breasts that he sucked on like he was a child again. He was no child. He felt neither glad nor afraid of anything at all. He never dreamed now. The world was flat miles and the rise and fall of suns. Nights with their moons and cold stars meant hunting a place to sleep and making plans for miles ahead. He was a seeker, the prostitute said, but he sought nothing yet. All he knew was that he wanted hard cash and a pretty woman to keep him company. He wanted his own two feet headed in the right direction, and that was enough for now.
He thought about God, he had to admit. God was thunder over a passing train before a storm. God was the charged air rising off wires at an electrical plant at night after pay for doubles. God was fire and water, earth and stone. He asked God for things with names. The right number for craps. A job that held on long enough to earn hard cash. Such a God was made of fulcrums and tire irons. Of iron cranes against a bright blue sky. Lift. Hold. Push ahead. These were the words of prayers he said into the air of any promising day. He thumbed through the no-longer-new Bible that Joe Wallen gave him once upon a time, and he found pages of angels with gold illuminated wings. He found Christ with hungry eyes and his feet crossed and nailed fast and bleeding. And who, Russell Wallen asked himself, would not prefer gold and plenty? Who would not prefer the weight of riches, and if riches came with the wings of angels, then so be it.
When he met Della Branham he knew right away she was no angel. Her eyes were the most curious color he had ever seen, a changing mix of gold and blue, and hers were hands that knew ways of doing things. Her nails were half-moons of black dirt and her middle fingers were stained yellow from cigarettes when she worked the pump at the station where he stopped for gas in Wellsprings, West Virginia. She leaned across and squeegeed the windshield, popped the hood. He followed what she did like it was a map of a place he knew but had forgotten—the way she circled his car, nodding her appreciation for a 1957 Chevy, the way she shrugged and said, “Good enough,” about the extra checks she offered. Transmission fluid. Tire pressure. She’d have offered him free brake relining, she told him later on, if it meant he’d stay put. He sat on the bench by the cash register and waited until they closed, hand-rolling cigarettes and lighting them for her one by one. He found it exciting, the way she picked a thread of tobacco off her front tooth and did not smile at him at all. “Russell Wallen,” she said, and it was no question, no invitation. It was as if she’d known him a good while and was reminding herself of the ins and outs of that knowing, tallying up whether to ask him to stay or go.
He stayed two weeks in Wellsprings, and he brought her gifts each day. The violets and chickweed he made into a tiny bouquet she tossed into the can behind the station that held old oil. She sniffed the Wind Song he splurged on at the five-and-dime and outright laughed at him, though she spritzed her wrists and then rubbed them hard against the legs of her overalls. One night all he brought her was an ice-cold Pepsi, and that she loved, raising the bottle to her lips and drinking it down all at once, the muscles in her throat rippling with thirst. She set the empty bottle down and put her hands on her hips. “Now what are we going to do, Russell Wallen?”
It was his third day in Radiance when he saw the beautiful girl, her slender hands shuffling cards at a table at the drugstore. After that, he stopped in mornings, lunchtime, late afternoons for cups of coffee and root beer floats, but the girl and her deck of cards were never there again. What’s up with that girl with the cards? he asked the lunch counter waitress. The waitress shrugged, but then admitted that she’d had her cards read. That girl, she said, told me things about, well, things she had no business knowing.
He remembered how she’d touched the pattern of lines on his palms. Her fingers were warm, wisps of themselves as they traced his future. “You want to own the world, mister,” she said. He declared that was true, and at that moment the world was her. He longed for her touch to go on and on, tracing its way past his wrist, up his arms, toward his heart, if he admitted it. He didn’t admit it, the desire he felt, and yet he looked for her in the windows of the houses he drove past late in the evenings, looked for her on porches and roadsides, in the woods as they made way for their trucks and chains and saws.
You are taking the world apart, said a man whose land they’d bought for timber, looking stunned. The man’s truck was stacked with chairs and a table and boxes of things spilling out into the leaves. It was as simple as showing them a deed, a part of the job. It was the way the world was, little towns like this one taken apart and put back together, changed, Russell admitted. But change was the way of it if you were ever going to, what, make anything out of anything at all, make a dollar or two, get ahead. The trees came down. The earth opened up. Inside the earth, well, that wasn’t his business, the seams and guts and hard insides of the land, the coal. He was helping it along, all of it, and he couldn’t help who it hurt. Things were like that. Hurting. A tree had the scent of sap, and it sighed when you took it down, and then you moved on to the next.
The night he finally saw her again, it was late, and he’d sipped too much whiskey. He stumbled along the edges of Radiance, some sound or other leading him along like it was a taste. He thought it was an open window, a radio, Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys. Something or other he’d like listening to as he drove the back roads. This sound was a man’s voice and a fiddle tune so clear and sweet he stood still and held his head up to the night sky and just listened, breathing it in. Up ahead, a crowd outside a store, on a porch. The soft shoes of them dancing there. A fiddle cutting through the dark. Cutting through the heat of a hot summer night. The sound cut through something inside his chest he wasn’t sure he wanted cutting, opened up a space that made him shiver as he saw her. She looked at him, her head tilted, a question he already knew the answer to on her lips. He drew deep on the bottle and held the whiskey in his mouth until it burned.
Della could recite the spark plug gap on most any car he could name. Could outstrip him in a mean minute when it came to changing oil, relining brakes. She was good at ways and means, borrowing, building. If he had a thought about what came next, be it bottom dollar or saving up for a rainy day, she was ahead of him, always. Before, he’d been lucky if he’d stockpiled ones and a sleeve of quarters for a poker game, but now they had, she said, a picture for the future. Saving up, buying in. They’d be someone, him and her. She was, he told himself, both sister and friend, both partner and trusted companion. Della Branham, now Della Wallen, his wife.
He felt something like love for her in spades. Tenderness maybe. Curiosity, for sure. Reams of possibility. Like that time, the ocean time. They decided on that scheme with five minutes to spare and a whole new world ahead of them. They laughed, the two of them, thinking about how they’d drive south to the Gulf with ice chests and more, drive all night and the next day too. How they’d come with a list of the best diners, the snappiest restaurants, holes in the wall, name it, and supply them with crabs and lobsters, mullet and fresh this, fresh that. Who knew? Seafood in landlocked states. What better plan? And he’d loved it, standing with Della on the edge of the great big ocean outside nowhere, miles beyond East Point, Florida. How she’d rolled her trouser legs up and waded in deep, letting the salt water drench her, kicking the wet back at him and drenching him, too. She’d waded toward him and nestled herself into his arms. How warm she’d been, the sweat and salt feel of her next to him, their wet clothes cool between them like a second skin.
He was glad to be alone in the town called Radiance. Glad that Della was back in West Virginia at her service station, laying plans ahead. He hardly thought of her, of Della in her body, her body next to his, as the riffs from a fiddle player washed over him. He danced by himself, spun some woman around and around, her flat black shoes scuffing along the boards of the porch. The song words settled inside him, so alive and full. Desire. Regret. As he danced and held that woman close, he looked over her shoulder and there she was, the girl. He watched her hands, how they clapped time like a song all their own, a heart song made out of the black night air.
Later, once Radiance was a dream he took out and recalled little by little, he wondered if he loved the two women as if they were one. Or did he love neither of them at all, two souls as different as the face of God? God was light and dark, sorrow and joy, a God both real and full of a dream he’d long let go. He loved Della. He said that to himself again and again. Said it like a prayer you recited word for word each night. Said it into Della’s back as he held her close, breathed the same breath as her as they fell asleep. Love was love, and it was just part of the things you did and made. After Radiance they’d head west, make their biggest plans yet come true. That was how he loved her, his wife. Loved her as strong and true as the factories in Willette, New Mexico. Copper. Uranium. Things strong and sure, dredged up from the earth and made into something. Themselves, made into something. He’d be a foreman there in no time flat and soon they’d head back east. Their own business. His own business. The both of them, working hard and making the world take shape. And love? Wasn’t that it, when you came right down to it? Wasn’t love the making and doing and seeing it come alive, the work of their hands?
How they had loved that first time in a Radiance motel room with a sway-backed bed and a sink the color of rust. The pale skin of her unveiled, the rose of her nipples, the curves and hollows of her chest, her belly. How she held her hands above her head like she was pulling light and song right out of the air. Her fingers slid down his bare skin like he was a song too, a song he’d never heard, never felt, never believed possible. How he flew again at long last, hovered above her, believing again in more than all the earth he’d ever traveled. All those towns and roads. All the plans he’d made rose too, a mist, a fog, an after-the-rain. He felt washed clean by her. New again. Like dreaming was as real as anything else, more real. Real as unfamiliar skies and stars, stars no longer cold and hard but a melting sweetness he took into his mouth again and again.
All those afternoons with Ruby, he told himself he was working at getting her out of his blood, getting her out of the very air he took inside his body. Her hands reached for him again and again. Hold me, she said, her eyes as sad as leaves beginning to fall, sad as summer passing. One more afternoon, stolen from the rest. His body all along hers, his body inside hers, making one body, one heart. But he could not let himself say that word. Love. Heart. There were places he could not go. There had to be rules, after all. Had to be limits to what he let himself want. There was that much, at least. An endpoint. A boundary. The edge of the cliff you did not cross. He wrote that to Della. Four more weeks here. Two more weeks there. One. All our plans, she wrote back, coming true.