Weighing of the Heart

“Behold, thy lips are set in order for thee,
so that thy mouth may be opened.”

—Egyptian Book of the Dead

I’m out driving one day and this girl comes floating along the side of the road—riding air, a clean three inches over the gravel. She takes little steps, though it doesn’t look like she has to. Just bounces and glides, bounces and glides, like a ghost who’s just become a ghost and still doesn’t know it.

She isn’t hitching and doesn’t look my way. I brake for her anyway. This is the middle of nowhere, the eternal flatness where somebody once took a big stamper and stamped it all to dirt.

I spit my gum out, pull over into the dust, and crack the passenger door.

“Funny sort of locomotion there, if you don’t mind my saying.”

She wears a leather skirt down almost to the knees. Her sleeveless blouse, faded from green, shows off her tattoo: a small white feather like a stray fluff of goose down that tumbled out of the sky and settled between her shoulder freckles.

She reaches for the door handle, changes her mind, then changes it again and asks where I’m headed.

“Generally speaking,” I say, “nowhere at all. But I can be persuaded to alter my route.”

She grabs the frame and pulls herself in, has trouble with the heavy door. “California, please,” she says, persuading me with her smile and her dusty blues, pale as air.

I look straight west, trying to picture it, but see only the dirt pressing out, mingling somewhere with the old empty vault. “Can’t say I’ve been to California, unless it was late at night one time and I cut through a piece of it without really knowing.”

She says nothing. There are more words in there but she keeps them to herself.

I ease back onto the two-laner. “Okay,” I decide, “it’s California. But I’d like to ask you a question first, if I may.”

She’s floating above the seat the way she floated down the road, her sandals hanging above the floorboard, tremoring with the big V8 and the rattle of half-crushed soda cans.

“That’s personal,” she says, folding her arms.

“What? I haven’t asked you anything yet.”

“You were gonna ask me how I came to be on the side of the road.”

“Not at all. What’s past is past. I was only interested in your walking style. I’ve never seen a floater outside a ghost movie.”

Now her face winds up and she puts her hands to her eyes and sobs, sucking in her breath and catching it short. Every time her shoulders twitch, she notches up a little higher off the seat until her head bumps the nappy roofliner.

I start to wonder if I ought to set her back on the road. After all, she was floating sweet as suds without me. Except when I hear those sobs and watch the straw hair spilling over her fingers, I don’t have the heart for it, though the open road and my carefree driving now look sadly endangered.

Here’s how it is: I’ve put long miles between me and old times, but once in a while it feels like nothing at all. I’ll be driving for days, paying close attention, testing myself even here in the stamped-out flats where the land’s been muzzled for good. Then, late night, the old AM radio signing off and the wind pouring in like sighs, I’ll lose my focus and fall into blackness, ratcheting downward till a bolt of wakefulness jacks my chin back in place. I’ll steer my wheels back to the road and twist up the radio fuzz. I’ll howl and twitch and claw my nails into my cheeks. I’ll draw up blood with a broken toothpick. And still I tumble toward the black. Finally, I’ll check my rearview, the way a guilty child checks its mother’s face, knowing just what I’ll find but dragged to it anyway, and what I find is my lovely wife, like all the miles I’ve driven have come to nothing, like the attention I’ve paid for years hasn’t bought me a moment’s peace: it’s The End of Old Times, and I’m staring again at the spider web my head weaved into the windshield and apologizing to my wife, who’s already joined the departed.

I’ve forgotten so much in the miles since the accident. I’ve forgotten the car I wrecked and the kind of tree I twisted it around. I’ve forgotten the finer points of my wife’s face, and there are times I have to work hard to even call up her name. I’ve forgotten the town where we once made our lives, the house we kept together, the plans we made in bliss, the struggles to love and the talk between us at night. Thanks to the miles.

But I haven’t forgotten my lapse of attention on our last night together and the blight of regret on its heels, and in moments of careless driving it all replays in the rearview.

And now I’ve invited this girl into my car when I should have kept to the road. A natural instinct, I guess, like when someone holds out a balloon or a bouquet of flowers—you grab without thinking.

I put my hand on the girl’s tattoo and try to pat out the sadness.

“I didn’t mean for that to happen. I told you I wouldn’t get personal, and here I must have done it anyway.”

I pat until my hand gets uncomfortable there, and then I make some shushing noises while she quiets down.

“How about if I just keep my mouth shut?” I say, thinking I’ll take her as far as the next highway then tell her I have a turn to hang, a new road to drive.

She nods, sucking in her lips, holding back the crying and whatever other words she’s afraid of letting out. She touches her fingertips just gently to her eyes, pressing the tears before they gather momentum.

I drive. I let the road pull me along.

“See now? A lot better. We’re experiencing all the pleasures the open road grants to the alert traveler.”

She nods again, working her lip like gum.

A few patches of scrub slip past like refugee camps. The heat puddles and scatters on the road, fingers up in the distance. A hot breath roars in my ear. The tires and engine hum, and the dome of the world hovers high. I eye the county two-tracks, the tempting way they angle back and away from the main road, but say nothing, feeling okay now. Out driving, there are times I feel like a mummy in steel rags, but then moments like this confirm the perfection of the present tense, a flame eternal for those who attend it.

She’s stopped her crying now and has one hand gripping the door handle and the other squeezing the edge of the vinyl seat, holding herself in place. Her feet still sway with every ripple in the pavement.

When she finally speaks, the words come slow, like she loves them too much and is giving them a long kiss goodbye as they pass her lips.

“One night it just happened,” she tells me. “I had beautiful dreams about floating in bright blue oceans, and when I woke up I was looking down on my pillow, thick and round like I’d never slept on it. I grabbed hold of the bed and held tight, afraid I’d float out the window and up like a spirit and nobody’d ever see me again. I stayed there, floating where I was until I got up the courage to float down the hall to the breakfast table, more like paddling than walking.

“When Mamma and Daddy saw my condition they turned their heads away like I was something shameful.

“‘You get yourself down on the ground this minute,’ Daddy told me.

“‘How’m I supposed to do that?’ I asked him.

“‘I ain’t a voodoo doctor,’ he said. ’You got yourself up there, now you get yourself back down or I’ll put you out for good.’

”’Eat some crisp bacon,’ Mamma said. ’That might do it.’

“But not even a whole plate of bacon helped. Soon as I let go of the breakfast table I rose up and bumped my knees and spilled the coffees, and Daddy threw down his napkin and slammed out the door.

“‘Your daddy told you not to get that tattoo,’ Mamma said. ’That’s likely what done it.’

“I shook my head and cried, but every breath launched me higher, out of my chair then over the table. My head was knocking the ceiling when Mamma finally stopped rinsing the dishes and looked up at me. ‘I always thought there was something wrong with you,’ she said.

“I left home after that. Been wandering four whole days now.“

I can tell the story took a toll, like she’s putting the whole nasty business out on the table again, but I sort of wish she hadn’t said it. It’s a burden I don’t need, not even my own burden, and now all I can think is, How do I shake this off?

“Well,“ I say. “That’s some story. Yes. How do you suppose... I mean, I never heard of a live floater before. I’ve seen magic shows, but I don’t take stock in illusion. I heard about ghosts, which I take slightly more stock in given the nature and limits of human knowledge with respect to the world’s mysteries. But never a live floater. You been to a doctor? They’ve got all kinds of specialists these days.”

She crosses her ankles, trying to keep her feet from swaying. “You know any free ones?”

“There’s clinics,” I say, “but none I know that tends to floaters.”

We think a bit. I slap the wheel. “Ankle weights!“

“You think?”

“Sure, all we do is get something heavy around those feet and you’ll be clomping around terra firma in no time.”

She looks at me, fingers pressed up against the ceiling, strands of straw hair clinging to the roofliner, that little white feather tattoo bobbing with every squeak of the shocks.

“It’s worth a try, anyhow. Look around my back seat, see if you can’t find something heavy under those blankets or on the floor there.”

She steadies herself as she spins around, then leans into the back seat and rummages through my personals, her sandals dusting my glove compartment.

“You been sleeping back here?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, knowing I’d have to speak to that at some point. “Yes I have, but only to take naps by day. Late night’s best for driving. No traffic and not much to look at, a real test of driving skills.”

She totters on the seatback now, her blouse riding up her spine and her feet thumping the windshield as she reaches way down to the floor with her long skinny arms. She looks like an astronaut struggling with an outer space experiment.

“Wow,” she says, “you sure do like to drive.”

“Yeah, well, when I’m doing it, it’s what I do, and I don’t believe in doing things indifferently. Too much of that in the world these days.”

She twists around, pushes herself back down in the seat, and holds out a pair of black work boots.

“Steel toes,” I say. “There’s the stuff. Put ’em on if you can stand the smell.”

She knocks off her sandals and works her feet into the boots, heels squeaking, face scrunching, but I can tell they aren’t going to work because even with one boot on and the other in her hands, her behind is still gliding across the vinyl seat.

A little curve in the road floats her over to my side.

“’Scuse me,” she says, pushing against my thigh and launching herself back in place.

I clear my throat and watch a dust devil whirl across the asphalt, carrying bugs and birds and small rodents to a new life elsewhere. The sun swoops low and I flip down my visor.

The girl bangs her head on the window and dash and I cringe a little, but she finally gets the boots on. She catches her breath, staring like she’s waiting for them to work their magic.

They clunk together over a bump. Then again.

She smiles with half her mouth. “They ain’t ruby slippers.”

Clunk.

I give her the other half of the smile. “Hmm. Don’t understand it . . . those boots must weigh more than you do.”

“I kind of like them,” she says. “They’re so big, it’s almost like I’m touching the ground anyway.”

I’ve grown to like her, and the burden doesn’t seem so much. Maybe it’s something to wrap me in the here and now.

The night of the accident, I had a fight with my wife, whose wondrous face I’ve mostly forgotten. I’ve forgotten the substance of the fight, too, but the fact of it remains, a tank full of fuel for miles of regret. The outcome is that my wife was giving me the silent treatment, which it seems right to believe was her habit in these situations. I didn’t expect it to last so long.

We drove through the woods—maybe pine—on our way home from an evening somewhere, or else a vacation. No radio. Maybe it didn’t work. Maybe we’d even fought about that.

A silent wife and a broken radio put my skills to the test, and I failed miserably. I began to nod off.

I might have thought: You’d better make nice or it’s going to be a hell of a long car ride. But by then I was too tired to think. Maybe I’d even had a few drinks.

The motor hummed, the wind sighed, the tires roared softly, but the silence held its own. It wrapped me in rags, one by one, and the weight of it pressed my head gently to my chest.

If my wife had been talking to me, she might have said, Pay attention! There’s a curve in the road and a tree with your name on it!

But maybe she’d nodded off, too. And so the silence drew a bead on Forever, and long miles of driving can’t make me forget it.

At least now I’m awake and in the present, and the past seems a shy passenger slumped in the back seat, the riddle of this floating girl more to my liking.

“Half a solution is no solution,” I tell her. “Listen, I’ve been down this road once or twice before and my turnaround’s always been a service station up ahead. There’s a man there who might set you right.”

“People’ll laugh when they see me float,” she says.

“Not this fella. I came in once with a muffler problem and a special request. I told him I’d like to just stay in the car while he fixed it, if I might. So I drove the car onto the lift, turned up the radio, and ate my lunch ten feet in the air while he replaced the muffler. He never raised an eyebrow. And you hear that?” I ask, cupping my ear.

“Hear what?”

“See,” I say. “Problem solved. A right-minded mechanic if ever there was.”

She smiles. “You talk different.”

I raise my eyebrows, and she repeats my last words with her shoulders thrown back and her chin tucked in, then bursts a laugh at her own impression.

“You making fun of me?” I ask, mock-serious. “I warn you, I’m a sensitive man, at the mercy of whims and fancy. I might get the urge to turn around and drop you off where I found you.”

She tries to gauge me. “Sorry,” she says.

“Right now I’m taken with this idea of getting you back on solid ground. Seems a worthwhile undertaking, but I need to know that you’re committed to it.”

“Am,” she says with a nod. “When I was drifting down the side of the road, I was thinking about the things I might do in California. Be in the movies. Get my picture taken for magazines. Roller skate at the beach. Then I imagined everybody laughing at me. Even if they put me in a movie, nobody’d know it was me.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’d float up off the screen. At least my head would. ’Bout the only people’d know it was me’d be Mamma and Daddy, and they’d just be more ashamed than ever.”

“Oh,” I say, “but they can keep a close-up on your face and never bother with the floating body. Too much emphasis on a woman’s body these days, anyway. Of course, there’d be problems with action scenes. Maybe then they could put ropes on you and pull you along like one of those Thanksgiving parade balloons.”

“Might could,” she says. “But who’s going to hire an actress they’ve got to do all those special favors for?”

“All the stars get special favors. But you’ve got to show you’re star material. We get you through a couple auditions and into the movies, fool ’em if we have to, then when you’re a star you kick off the weights, rise up high as you like, and tell them they’ve got to deal with it. And they will, because then you’ve got star power.”

She grins at that.

I pull off the road into the lone gas station that hangs out there in the flatness like a handhold for cross-country climbers. It looks to have risen from the dust, and then the dust set to work to reclaim it. What pavement there’d been has crumbled to dust. The fallen sign has been scoured to muteness by dust. Dust has driven itself into the white paint and chipped it off and peeled it back. The office window and the pump faces are clouded with dust. Dust piles up against the pumps and against the tires of the cars and the engine blocks and mufflers and the other parts that ring the station like a rusty choker.

The mechanic is sweeping the bays, slinging out dust. I pull to the pumps and give a little honk.

The man sets his broom against the wall and takes his sweet time walking over. I crank the window down all the way and put my elbow out in greeting. “Fill her up, if you would.”

I watch him in my sideview. He has a good pair of sideburns—not as a fashion statement—and his gray hair follows the sunlight like a little field of sunflowers. A couple of threads hang at the pocket of his overalls where someone’s name has been torn off.

“’Member me?” I call.

He clicks on the pump handle and comes forward, hand on the vinyl roof.

“’Member me? You gave me a new muffler, and I’ve been making good use of the peace and quiet since.”

“Temporary fix,” he says. “I saw lots more problems under there.”

“And you told me straight,” I say. “What more could a customer ask of a good mechanic?”

“Nothing,” he says.

“You remember how I ate my lunch ten feet in the air, the radio playing something old and sweet?”

“Didn’t notice.”

“Of course, you were busy. Well, I was thinking about that today—tell you why in a moment—and I was remembering how kind you were to indulge my little peculiarity. I know a mechanic’s got a proper procedure for everything—we all do—and my staying in the car had to go against proper procedure, let alone a state law or two.”

“Mm-hmm,” he says. The pump handle clicks.

“Well okay,” I say, “we’ve got a situation here, the solution to which might involve some creative thinking that also goes against standard procedure. Beside me is a budding Hollywood starlet with a career-threatening flotation problem.”

He leans down to get a look at the girl through the open window. She gives him a shy smile, which he acknowledges with a slight nod.

“Probably best to show you.”

The girl obliges, pushing open the door, boots clomping like marionettes.

The mechanic replaces the pump handle and comes around for a look. I slide to the passenger’s side to oversee.

He stares for a moment, fists on hips, judging the space between soles and dust.

“Take off your boots,” he says.

She fights to keep her balance as she pulls each one off and lets it drop, raising two little clouds that march off on the breeze.

“Now walk a bit,” he says, and she takes a few deliberate steps away and back like she’s testing a new pair of shoes.

The man squats for a closer look, rubs his stubble to invoke the mechanical muse, then sweeps his hand between her bare feet and the ground like he’s checking for strings. She wiggles her toes nervously.

“Turn around.”

She twists a bit and turns without moving her feet, and when she comes to rest he gently squeezes a heel between his thumb and forefinger. One heel, then the other, up and down, testing the firmness or the sponginess or what have you.

“Boots didn’t help a bit,” I offer. “Steel toes, too.”

“Make any difference whether she’s standing or sitting?”

“No sir,” she says.

“I bet she could do a handspring, a cartwheel, and a somersault, never once touch the ground,” I add.

“That’s true. I done a cartwheel a couple days back, just to see.”

“Mmm.” The mechanic stands up, puts one hand on her shoulder, and seems to gauge the pressure against his fingertips. He lowers her gently to the ground, lets her go and catches her, does it again, like dribbling a balloon.

“I figure if it was helium it would’ve passed through her system by now,” I say.

He steadies her and lets go, gives a decisive nod, then ambles back to the garage he was sweeping, which has already sprouted a new thin layer of dust.

“Don’t you worry,” I tell her, my head out the window. “He knows what he’s doing.”

She crosses her arms and scratches one foot with the other. The shadows inch their way east, and the air loses some warmth.

“Don’t you ever get out of the car?” she asks me.

“There are necessities,” I say, “but generally speaking, no. At least, not while I’m out driving.”

“You’re an odd bird.”

“Look who’s talking. You’re the one with the feather. Flap your wings and you might get to California for the winter migration.”

She smiles, not so self-conscious anymore. “I’m not gonna forget that you helped me,” she says. “When I’m in the movies and giving interviews, or roller skating at the beach and talking to my friends, I’ll tell how I owe it all to you.”

I laugh. “You’re star material,” I tell her. “You already talk the talk.”

The mechanic returns with a set of keys hooked to onefinger.

“What’s the prognosis, doc?”

He flips the keys up into his palm. “Follow me in the car.”

When he jumps into an old convertible at the side of the building, a cloud of dust rises up around him.

“Hop in,” I tell the girl.

We pull onto the road behind the mechanic and head west, farther than I’ve been down this road. Dusk has been set in motion. The blue sky thickens and the air stills. I roll up the windows.

Pretty soon, little teeth rise up in front of the setting sun, first I’ve seen of the distant mountains between here and California. I’m about to point this out to the girl when she jolts me, grabbing my sleeve and shouting, “Look there! Look there!”

I take a deep swallow, my arm hairs on end from the fright she gave me.

She’s pointing to an old drive-in that backs up to a curve in the road, the huge screen like a dark cut-out in the evening sky. A little ticket booth stands beside it, and a wooden wall squares off the empty viewing field. Looks like ages since the last movie, and the marquee leaves no trace of its title.

A cold wave of memory passes through me, my hands shudder, and I suddenly seem to be driving the wrong direction. I’ve taken this project too far, strayed from my purpose, I think, and now I’m ashamed of my inattention. The dozens of heedless miles I’ve just driven weigh heavy on my heart, and the world feels too small.

When the mechanic pulls off the road, I follow, but when he rolls past the old ticket booth and through to the viewing field, I jump on the brakes.

The girl looks at me as the dust rises and settles. The little ticket booth stands beside us, its angled roof half-caved. No one reaches through the broken glass to take our money.

“Can’t do it,” I say.

“Can’t do what?”

“I haven’t been in a drive-in since . . . not in years. You go on in, and I’ll wait right here.” I lie about waiting because I don’t have the heart not to.

“We gonna watch a movie here?” She looks worried.

“He’ll take care of you. Just go on.”

“Is he a talent scout or something?”

I can just barely see the shape of the mechanic. He leans against his car, waiting, all the way back at the projection building.

“He’s a good mechanic, and he knows to go beyond the mechanical parts if that’s what’s called for. Now get out,” I say, a little too hard. My wet palms slip on the wheel and my throat tightens up.

She looks at me like she wants to cry again, and I think she suspects the truth.

“Go on,” I say.

She sniffles, but then pushes open the door and drifts on through to the viewing field, bouncing and gliding a little slower than before.

I idle in reverse, crackling the gravel, then spin the wheel when I hit the pavement. I flip on my headlights and gas it back east, trying to swallow back the miles I let slip.

The flatness everywhere rises up and darkens the sky, and now there’s just the darkness and the cones of my headlamps. I crank down my window, hoping the wind and the motor will hum away my thoughts and keep my attention on the road, where it belongs.

No dice. The silence swells like an orchestra, and the wind and the RPMs and all the miles I’ve put behind me can’t block it out. I grip the wheel hard and press the gas till the motor wails, but old times fill my rearview anyway.

After the accident, brushing glass from my hair, apologizing to my dead wife, I tried to think. I knew there was a proper procedure for the aftermath of tragedy, but I was scared and couldn’t recall it—the forgetting had begun without my even trying.

I pulled my little garden shovel from out of the trunk and started digging there in the woods under the trees I could not name. My hands shook and my sweat dropped in the dirt. Things were too quiet.

I loosened the topsoil with the point and then shoveled it out, a tiny scoop at a time, the rhythm of the action and the slush of the dirt numbing me, my breath clouding the cold night air. I must have dug for hours, though the memory of it’s lost. And the hole I dug couldn’t have been regulation depth, maybe not even deep enough to cover her, because when I placed her in there I know I held her hand for a moment, patting it maybe, rubbing it I’m sure, double-checking her face to see what I’d done.

Silence, and then again silence. I let go.

When I’d filled the hole, I stamped down the earth as best I could, with the shovel first, slapping the ground and working up a sweat, then with my feet and my palms, trying to make it all even, like nothing had happened there. Failing, I put my fists to my forehead and cried.

I remember all that, and now I remember something else, too. In the town we once lived in and the house we once slept in, my beautiful wife and I would lie together at night and whisper. I don’t remember the town or the house or the beauty of my wife or the words she whispered, but now I remember her warm breath when it passed from her lips, each breath as good as her last, and I feel it again, the way it whirls in my ear, slow and aimless, like it might linger there forever.

I crunch on the brakes and stop there in the middle of the flatness, my head on the wheel and the tears tracking down, salting my lips. I let them fall, and let the memories play as they will. It seems like all these years they’ve been whirling and whirling, like a whisper’s breath without the whisper. Now I hear the words, too, and I finally make sense of them.

After a while, I tell myself to breathe deep. I tell myself to open my eyes.

Dusk has turned to night, and the stars drift through the vault, quiet and distant. I crank down the window and take deep breaths of the biting air. When my hands can flex and grip the wheel again, I turn the car around and mash it back to the drive-in.

At the curve in the road, little cinders of light now burst through where the dust bored holes in the screen. When I crunch past the ticket booth and onto the viewing field, I see the cone of light hanging in the air, kindling the dust.

Rows and rows of speaker poles grid the field, all of them singing the same old tune in chorus. As I idle through the field—half cement, half weeds, all dust—the music rises and falls, rises and falls as I pass the speaker poles, some of them beheaded and hanging by wires. I can hardly catch my breath.

Finally, I spot the girl up at the glowing white screen—star material, just as I thought.

She has the opposite problem she thought she would. Instead of floating off the top of the screen, she hasn’t yet floated high enough, so the bottom of the screen cuts her off at the knees.

But that doesn’t seem to bother her. She moves in the light like she’s part of some old dance number. She jumps and kicks and cartwheels and somersaults and never once touches the ground. The mechanic put her in the movies after all, and now I’m her audience.

As I idle slowly forward, the cone of light shining above me and the chorus of speakers on either side, I seem to raise her up little by little, a matter of perspective. She jumps and kicks and throws her head back, and she waves her arms and swivels her hips, and as she rises higher on the screen, calves and ankles coming into view, the coldness seems to pass from me and I smile.

At last her bare feet are in line with the bottom of the screen, and I put on the brakes and watch for a moment. She’s back on the ground now—movie ground, anyway, and that seems good enough. I can almost feel her laughter. I put my elbow out, listening to that old melody in chorus, wishing for a box of popcorn, even.

Then maybe because she kicked a little too high, or maybe because she just got carried away, she starts drifting upward little by little. She doesn’t realize it at first, but after a spin move she looks down and gets scared.

I put the car back in gear and kick up the dust, trying to get to her quick. I skid to the bottom of the screen, but I can see already that I won’t be able to reach her.

“Help!” I hear her yelling over the music. She keeps floating, up toward the spirits like she first feared.

I can’t let her go. I think I’ll take her through those sawtooth mountains and down into California after all. I get out of the car, stumble a bit, my legs heavy from underuse, then pull myself up onto the hood. She’s just out of reach and still rising.

“I won’t forget you!” she yells down, tears in her voice.

I won’t give up. I crouch, take a deep breath, and jump up with all I’ve got. I somehow get hold of one of those thin, dusty ankles. I stand there, arm stretched high, feeling as light as I ever have, like I’ve just been handed a balloon or a bouquet. And this time I won’t let go.