“I’m not sure anyone should watch,” I said. “You better stay here.” When Frankie was little and he wanted something he couldn’t have, we’d try to distract him. Now I nodded toward two men in dark windbreakers, standing by the SUV. “Those guys from the government?”
“Yeah. One’s FBI. The other’s an astronaut. He thanked me. It was cool.”
“Awesome,” I said. Normally Frankie would groan when I borrowed his lingo—back then the word was not so common—but this time he was silent. I put my hand on top of his head, tousled him a bit until he smiled. “What you hear is not really voices, is it?” I asked. “The way I’m talking to you now?”
Frankie looked across the meadow, into the trees. “It’s kind of weird,” he said. “You know how a thought comes to you? Like the answer to a question on a test. You know you don’t know the answer. But something pops into your head, and it doesn’t seem right and you don’t know why you’re putting it down. But it turns out it’s right. I don’t know. It’s sort of like that.”
My son had intuition, probably that was all. Maybe it spoke more clearly to him than to the rest of us. Or maybe he just listened better.
“Wish me luck,” I said. I put out my fist and he knocked his against it. It was the guy-to-guy send-off he favored in those days.
I headed for the edge of the clearing where Grady was waiting for me. Behind him the trees rose in unadorned splendor. I thought the hardwood forests were beautiful in winter, with the foliage on the ground, and above, the branching miracles of cellulose and lignin. Over our heads the sweet gum balls hung like black jewels. The ash leaves that had stayed through frost were drained of color, brittle and defiant. They rattled in the breeze that had come up. I wondered what my boy might hear in the movement of those stubborn leaves.
Grady looked tired. My brother had a good poker face for disaster, but on the local news last night he’d seemed beaten. All day, people had been calling in reports of human remains. It was Grady’s job to guide the government types down dirt paths and logging roads, to find out if the caller had spotted an astronaut’s arm or the disconnected tibia of an unfortunate heifer.
“How’re you holding up?” I asked.
“Thought you might be away this weekend.” Grady’s voice was hoarse; I could tell he’d had no sleep. It looked like he hadn’t shaved since Friday. “I figured Houston,” he said.
“Got this sore throat,” I said, “so I didn’t go.” I’d been spending a few weekends in Houston, without explaining why. I figured my best shot at some kind of honest life was to move to the city and hope nobody in Frankie’s world would hear anything more about me.
Grady ran a hand across his eyes and pressed on his temples. “You got a girlfriend there or something?”
I didn’t answer right away. In Houston those weekends I would wander the streets, walking past the clubs, wondering if I wanted a part of what happened inside. What would life be like with no one watching? Turned out it was nice. It wasn’t long after this day that I moved. It’s been seven years now; things have worked out.
“No,” I said finally.
Grady didn’t look convinced. “Because if you do,” he said, “you just need to say so. Frankie, he thinks it’s because of him. He thinks the whole thing is because of him. It’s how kids do. And he’s more insecure than most.”
“Did he tell you that? Did he tell you we split up because of him?”
“You know he gets that look, like he’s not even here. He’s checked out and gone somewhere else. Where’s he gone, Wes? What’s up with that?”
“So he daydreams. It won’t hurt him. His grades are good.”
“Holly says he’s bored senseless in that school,” Grady said. “Right out of his gourd.”
“Let’s just get to work,” I said. I never would have asked Grady to take my place in Frankie’s life, or help fill the gap when I left town. I’d hoped he would, it just didn’t turn out that way.
I followed my brother into the brambles, through brush with vines so tough they’d trap a horse’s legs. Grady held a head-high briar aside for me—the kind we called a blanket-shredder, with inch-long thorns that could ruin an eye. “Look up,” he said. “Over your head, two o’clock.” What I saw was an orange suit with a leg dangling out of it, as though the fabric had been ripped away. When we got closer, I could see there was no foot at the end of the leg. The torso was cradled by two branches in a deep crook, about sixty feet up. The astronaut’s pose was awkward, but the arms of the tulip tree had received him with dignity, above the eager sniff of scavengers. He still had his helmet on, and I gave thanks that no one had to look around for that, maybe with his head inside.
“None of them burned,” Grady said, gazing up, shading his bleary eyes from the sun that poked through for a moment. “Not a body part so far.”
The skin of the dangling leg was dark, we could see that from where we stood. “African-American,” I said.
Grady nodded. “Michael Kirkland. Payload specialist. Somebody found the foot by a mailbox yesterday.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Can you get the rig in here?”
I looked around for a path. The trees were thick. “Over there,” I said. “We take down that sweet gum, I can squeeze through between those two beeches.”
“I know you hate this,” Grady said.
“Why me?” I said. “Chandler’s got a bucket truck. You know how I am.”
“I could go up instead.”
“There’s insurance rules. Nobody goes in the bucket who doesn’t work for Horton.”
“If it helps any, there’s no one else I trust this much.”
“To do this?”
“Yeah. And not to jaw about it.” He tipped his head in the vague direction of the black SUV. “They don’t want this in the newspaper. That deputy you passed out at the road, he’ll keep the media out. Not forever, though.”
“Cecil Dawson, wasn’t it?”
Grady shrugged. It was Dawson who’d taken my brother to lunch last month, the day after the Kiwanis met to pick a high school queen for the Piney Woods Festival. At the meeting, Grady had pushed for Vanessa Johnson, a five-foot-eight beauty with brains and grace. But the Kiwanis said they weren’t ready for a young woman with nut-brown skin to lead their parade down Main Street and sit with the mayor at the Saturday barbecue. Grady had delivered a tongue-lashing: Half the town’s school was African-American—get over it. At lunch the next day, Dawson leaned over his plate of green beans and baked chicken and said sourly, “We thought you were one of us.”
I eyeballed the distance between Michael Kirkland and the ground. “What if I get up there and puke?”
“You won’t. Think about the mechanics. It’s an object you have to get out of a tree, a puzzle you have to work out. He might be stiff.”
“Christ. I hadn’t thought.”
“Do what you have to do. He can’t feel anything and the NASA guys, they just want him down. You don’t have to tell anybody how it happens.”
I got the chain saw out of the rig. The tree I needed to take down was only about twenty years old. Sweet gum wood isn’t much good for carving but the bark is deeply ridged, which makes it handsome, I think. I made my quick cuts, and when the tree had fallen, I gave thanks I knew how to do something in life. Better than what was to come—today, next week, next year.
I moved the bucket truck into position and climbed in, setting the chain saw in its usual spot, as if this were an ordinary day, where I might have a water bottle stashed in the corner. I could have used one now. Adrenaline