There: “The ship sailed across the sky.”
He read on: “In that sky were stars and comets and other bright shards that reminded the pilot of shattered stained glass. He gazed through the ship’s rear window as if to see the marble of his planet, but it was gone from sight. He sat and watched the silent universe spark and glow as the ship glided through it. Somehow, he smelled the bitter tang of the tomato plants in his mother’s garden, he saw the sway of a pine tree’s matchstick branches, he heard the organ pipes of Sundays.”
He ran his finger over the markings in the page’s margin: “Kick ass, Beto!” Jess Winters had written. “Took my breath away.” Jess had been his partner during the class exchange. He traced her handwriting now, chill bumps rising on his arms. He remembered she had written a poem about the earth and sky changing places. He’d not written anything in her margins but told her instead, “It’s perfect.” Her note was too kind—after that paragraph, the story devolved into ridiculous details about the spaceship itself and a human-robot war that had destroyed the Earth. He smiled. God, he’d been obsessed with space then. He would sit with Tomás in the carport as he worked on his truck and reel off facts about constellations, about NASA’s launch that year of the Hubble telescope—about the images he’d seen on the news of exploding stars and the inner core of Comet Levy and the rippled window-curtain structure of the Orion nebula. With a laugh, Tomás would say, “Mission control to Beto. Hand me that wrench, hombrecito.” Little man, Tomás had called him, teasing, pinching his round cheeks back when they were still round. At home and in the world, he was Beto instead of Roberto. Always diminutive.
Roberto rubbed his neck, smelling the young woman on his hands. He splashed cool water on his face, and his stomach rumbled awake. There was a time when it had always rumbled—the year he turned sixteen and grew three inches, the same year Jess Winters arrived in town, a month after two men in uniform showed up on his family’s doorstep. Back then, he felt as if his stomach were eating itself. After his paper route, he would run past his sister Luz scrambling eggs and chug whole milk straight from the jug. Luz would say, “Jesus, Beto, slow down. We gotta make it till Friday with that.” When she wasn’t looking, he would sneak extra bologna or turkey from the fridge, wrap it in a paper towel, and put it in his pockets; as he walked to school, he pulled out the meat and wolfed it, barely chewing, trying to stop the ache.
Quarter to five now. The young woman hadn’t budged. He remembered how she’d called out his name—his full name, Roberto. He trailed his fingers across her shoulder before he pulled on jeans, boots, and his work shirt. He left her a pot of coffee, a blueberry muffin, and a hand-drawn smiley face on a Post-it note. In recent years, since he finally grew into his body and became a man who turned heads, he’d made up for lost time. He met someone new every couple weeks. He took home college students or just slipped with them out to the alley of the Pickaxe, up against the concrete wall. He was thirty-four now, an age when he ought to be doing more than screwing his way around town, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
Outside, a mottled yellow moon skulked behind the Black Hills. The sky had begun to lighten but was still dark enough he could see bats at the end of their night hunts, their strange staccato flutter at the corners of his vision. Whippoorwills trilled and then hushed as he passed their roosts. He looked up in a way he hadn’t in a long time, checking the summer stars. Vega. Ursa Minor. August—time for the Perseids. He scanned the sky, but saw no meteors.
He walked to the shop via the route he always took: down Main through the District. In a town this size, Roberto didn’t have to drive much outside of his job—thank God. As everyone in town knew, he was a great mechanic but a terrible driver. Six fender-benders and scrapes since the first in driver’s ed, when Mr. Valenzuela yelled, “Brake! Brake!” but Beto hit the gas instead, plowing straight into a neighbor’s prized roses. So he walked or biked everywhere, head down, ignoring hollers and the occasional thrown cups from passing cars. The cops left him alone because they knew him—because Gil Alvarez was a family friend—though he still knew enough to look straight ahead and take his hands out of his pockets if he saw a patrol car.
As usual, Main was quiet at this hour, the only lights on at the Woodchute and at Ms. G’s bakery. As usual, he paused across the street from the bakery and watched her through the illumined window. Ms. G—Esther—kneaded dough, her curly hair pulled up in a bun under a green bandana, her loose pants swishing. Because it was dark outside, she couldn’t see him standing there, a bit of predawn magic. His stomach growled harder. He wished he could get a cinnamon roll hot and fresh from the oven. He wished she would open her door to him the way she once had at school: Come in, come in. What’s going on? He remembered her past words: You can’t see my heart. My heart is an inferno, and he wished he could confess to her: mine isn’t. Nothing but stone, ash, even when he fucked so hard he sweated through the sheets. Though she couldn’t see him, he waved to her, tucking his shirt collar tight against the sudden chill.
At the shop, Roberto climbed behind the wheel of the old blue Cherokee Jeep, Iris’s orchard workhorse. He clutched at the wheel, wringing it like a wet towel. He’d never been able to make sense of it. He understood cars and engines the way good cooks knew spices or mathematicians knew numbers or pianists knew keys. He listened to an engine and knew it was a busted gasket, a loose nut, the carburetor, a cracked block. But all that changed when he slid behind the wheel. He knew his problem was related to Tomás’s death, but it wasn’t as if he pictured Tomás in the crushed Humvee (although he did so at other times, often before bed, imagining twisted metal, a crushed roof, blood pooling on a dusty road). In the driver’s seat, all his intuition and knowledge disappeared. It was as if he’d never seen a car before—heck, it was as if he’d never sat before, as if he’d never seen his own hands and feet.