UNDER PALE BLUE STARS

UNDER PALE BLUE STARS MATTHEW OLIVAS University of California, Riverside, 2020 Fiction 2 ABOUT A DECADE AGO you shot an opossum with a cross bow. You shot it two more times to finish the job, all in quick succession. You didn’t want to prolong its suffering. It needed only to die. Still, it felt like forever – its little silent sighs into stillness. It happened on a Friday night a little after nine o’clock. You remember this because you’d just won another football game, you hadn’t yet torn your ACL. The victory was contagious and the whole town was infected by then with cheering down the streets, and the faraway blare of the marching band beyond the neighborhood. You’d be going to playoffs. You had a date that night too, with Thalia Carson from Physics. It would be your first date, though not for a lack of trying, not many girls – or other kids your age for that matter – cared for the movies you did. Superhero movies weren’t in anymore, too childish. But Thalia thought it was a sweet idea and you’d never been called sweet by a girl before, so you should have been getting ready for that date. Instead you had been summoned to the back yard by your frantic mother, ordering you to get your crossbow. Out there, November air cooling your damp hair, you found your mom and your younger brother Julian. You hadn’t even had time to take off your jersey. Your fingernails still caked under with mud. Julian was pointing a shovel at the wall, frantic but laughing. “It’s right over here! It’s got nasty little vampire teeth! Truly an Olympic champion at being horrible.” Julian was being Julian about it. “It’s going to eat my chickens,” you mom said, “you have to kill it.” Your mom shined a light on it and it, whatever you thought it would be, was perched on the fence, fanged and hissing like Satan: an opossum. Your mom wasted no time at all, she said to you plain and simple, “Kill it.” You and your brother had shared a look. He was so much like a smaller you it was scary, down to your mom’s eyes and black hair and dark skin. You turned back to ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 3 your mom but she was already in the house, gone, and you tuned to the opossum, still hissing and still very small. That’s when it dawned on you. It wasn’t funny anymore. “Hurry up, dude, it’s cold as balls,” Julian rubbed his hands together. You had a date, and not much time for this. So you aimed, and it hissed at the end of the scope. You hesitated – once – twice –shot it on the third. Three thumps was all you heard. The distance band music had stopped. There was a cricket or two, and nothing more. That was the first time you killed something. You remember you rushed to get clean after that. You had the urge to scrub yourself down, and pick out the dirt in your nails, scrape the clumps off your scalp but grains tangled in your hair, and you scrubbed your shoulders raw – by the end of it you felt as dirty as you’d started. The grime wouldn’t come off so you did it again. Scrubbed again. And again, until your mom knocked at your door saying you’d be late and you had to force yourself out. You got dressed you mom stepped into your room and gave you a look “You’re pale,” she said, “and are those scratches?” Of course, that was some time ago. That long ago murder came to your mind, and you’re not sure why. It wasn’t something you spoke about. You had omitted it from your mind. What memory you did keep from that night was the date, and you would bring it up over and over, at your wedding day and all the other times you told the story of how you met your wife. You told that story so many times but even that story has gotten old. Married for six years, Thalia and you, right out of Junior College, and into the glum apartment you two share now. You want to be back in your apartment, with her, smelling her lilac hair and in your memory foam mattress gone flaccid. It was better than the heat. The scorching heat as you march along in desert twilight. You passed an opossum that was shriveled up and dead about five yards back. It’s rare seeing animals so far south, nothing lives out there in the desert. At least not anymore. ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 4 Never mind, you don’t pay it any attention, can’t let these things get to you. You’re working. Tonight you hunt immigrants. The dead opossum, your brother, and your wife you force in the back of your head. You stay focused. In front of you are the footprints of the runaways. You’re stepping in them, matching foot with footprint, careful not to slip – just as the ones who made the prints had been - until you walk up to a vantage point at the side of a hill. The sun pokes over the horizon. It won’t be long until the sun is down and you lose visibility and a fall from this high will kill you. Lucien isn’t far behind, you hear him coming. He’s huffing through his rebreather mask, in and out, it’s the only sound for miles. The Arizona desert stretches for miles and the shadows try to keep up. Mountains line the distance, black and small, and sound doesn’t travel out there. Gravely footsteps don’t echo either, they just die out once the sound is made, stretched thin and wide in every direction until they are just another nothing the desert consumes. As it does everything. If it was up to you wouldn’t work out there. You wouldn’t work for the private sector helping the US government bulk up the southern wall, you’d be in a city or a town or somewhere north and not scorching. You would be a police officer like you father, probably have gotten the job sooner, and maybe even had a child – or two! But you are not a police officer, even though you are your father’s son. You’re standing at a mountain top overlooking the desert with goggles that make you think Owl. There. Through the green lenses, you spot the ruin of a town at the base of the hill, three beams of light shine amongst the wreck. You get into a squat, despite the heat. Stay still. Be silent. You won’t be seen. It won’t be long now, until the sun is down and the stars blanket the sky from east to west. ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 5 What was once an aggressive orange will fade to black and what was blue will go to violet, and soon, black also. But with that will come the stars! You can take comfort in that, no matter how dark it was, you just had to look up, take off those goggles and see the stars that have always just been there. “How many?” A muffled voice breaks the silence. You turn to Lucien in his own insolation poncho, wearing his own rebreather mask, not unlike yours. He watched you through owl goggles. You take off your rebreather, “Four flashlights,” you tell him. You put the mask back on. None of you like the masks, but its company policy. Filters the toxic air – the radiation. Bombs went off yeah, there was radiation too, sure, but that was further south, deeper in Mexico. Lucien kept his mask on “just to be safe”. He looks like a wraith – you both do. It’s too intimidate. “Cool,” he says. “’Bout two miles from here, huh? Well we’ll make it before back up, but hey something fun for once.” He slaps your chest, makes his was down the mountain. “Come on, Gonzo!” You are Jacinto Gonzales. But Lucien likes to call you Gonzo. It irks like nails on scraping chalk board, and they even call you that back at the precinct. You swallow it though. You stay silent and follow Lucien. Honestly, you’ll be used to it. It’s the not being referred to at all that’s worse. That scares you… At least this way you know they like you. The town looks peaceful from far away. You approach it now, slowly, and its skeletal buildings become all the more clear. You used to wonder why so many people didn’t like you. You don’t any more. You accept it for how it is. It’s not like you ever did anything wrong to them. Never intentionally. That can’t be said for most people. You were nothing but courteous to your brother, even if you hated him all your life - though when you started really hating him you didn’t know. It couldn’t have ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 6 happened all at once, you would have remembered that date or time or place. No. It was slow, methodical, and brutal like a disease. There were key events obviously, when he started calling cops pigs in high school. Pigs - as if that didn’t make him half hog himself then. There was the time he quit his job in college and said it was because a cop had aimed a gun at him. You’d seen your brother scared, he was always so… snarky – cavalier. He didn’t seem so distraught when he told you the story, only sullen and meek, but still smiling as if it had all been a part of some “I told you so plan.” “If you didn’t do anything wrong, you should have been fine,” you told him. You just knew he did something, maybe back talk, maybe sass – what was it about Gonzales’s that made people dislike them? You still pitied him. You even loved his daughter, Nina. More than just loved. How someone so terribly liberal managed to have a daughter so genuinely kind, you’ll never know. You knew she was worth it though, worth putting up with him for years and doing your best to make idle talk with his equally liberal, rich, wife about anything that wasn’t politics just to be able to steal Nina away and take her to the movies to watch cartoons and superheroes or anything primary colors. None of the girt that everyone your age seemed to prefer. She actually appreciated them, like you. You used to sit with her after the movies, taking her home late because one, it upset Julian, and two, the better reason, it made her happy. Nina would tell you about whatever drama it was that kid’s had those days, and even share with you the jokes she’d written down – she wanted to be a comedian. You even told her about becoming a police officer, something she liked even if Julian didn’t. Sometimes, just maybe, you thought maybe Julian didn’t mind it either. But that was Julian. One night Nina asked about your last physical test. It was your fifth one, for a fifth try at a fifth academy – it was also the fifth rejection. It wasn’t any fault to you though. Just as you told her, it was always down to the same thing, the same thirty ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 7 four millimeter liability of a reconstructed ACL. Shown only by a faded pale scare on your left knee. Nina had traced her finger over it inquisitively, it tickled. “You can be a firefighter, probably a great one,” she said. You only looked at her, puzzled. “Well some just came to our school a few days ago for the first and second graders. They passed out red hats and that adorable bear came out on stage – you could be that bear, uncle.” She swept her hand across the air, squinting at whatever she imaged in front of her. “You’d be a big one too. You’d tell people -” she gruffed her voice for that bit – “Only you can stop forest fires.” “Prevent,” you correct her. She furred her brow. “It’s prevent forest fires.” “Fine. Fine.” She waved you off. She was right about one thing through – you would be a great one, but Nina didn’t know your father. No one did, not even Julian. He was too young to remember much about your father, or even the world for that matter. For him there was no time before the planet warmed and migrants poured in in the thousands… but that’s not the point. The point is that only you really seemed to remember you who your dad was. You had spent hours during his funeral listening to the stories of better men and how your father changed their lives. People you didn’t even know. Faces that now only come off as peripheral, spun stories he never told you about. You remember that feeling, that giddiness in a sea of grief, hope – one man did a job and after decades, people actually said it: What he did mattered. You almost said yes to Nina. You were on her porch by that point, ready to ring the bell and for Julian to claim her again, and you just had to say the word to her: yes. Yes I will be a firefighter. But you didn’t. “That’s not me,” you said to her. You were, and are your father’s son. If you couldn’t be a cop, well, then what would you be. Exactly. ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 8 You just have to do this, you tell yourself, cold, in the desert of the night. You’re marching through the ghost town. Just a bit longer. Soon you won’t have to, you could get enough money, get a real home, and transfer to a real precinct, as a real officer of the law. This was just temporary – no, necessary. You don’t get the name of the town as you walk through. All the signs are faded. You wonder how old it is, if it was abandoned long ago in the eighteen hundreds, or more recent, when everyone escaped the heat. There are so many ruins at the southern border, it’s always so hard to tell. It’s sad almost, this forgotten place, alone. Like you. Your ear piece picks up rustling. Your gun, already in your hands, scans the shadows. You heart’s pounding. It’s so hot. Lucien has his drawn too and he’s moving with you, back to back, and following the sound of gavel and the shattering of glass up ahead. “Remember, there’s five,” he tells you. Armed, you remember. Five illegals had slipped away under the watch of a detainment center eight miles south. They told you this back at the precinct, the fugitives killed two guards and took a gun. They are armed. They were heading north. Still holding onto that notion, so they are still desperate also, and desperate men kill. So many people died when the mass migrations happened. Raids and riots, and shooting from police and civilians alike for people who had and might not had been threats. Julian wouldn’t remember living on food rations, he was too young. You tried to tell him this long ago. It’s different now, you tried to explain. “ICE was bad back then, we need order now.” But he was stubborn. How was he supposed to know? Let him think you’re wrong, you had decided. You know what your doing is right, so it didn’t matter if he or your family or the world said you were wrong. As long as you don’t say it yourself. ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 9 Because if you did then what would you be? You kick open the door of the church. Lucien follows in after you, and inside at the foot of the alter steps you spot one of them. You approach. Moonlight steams through broken windows, as shadows maybe lurk outside. You think you see something out the corner of your eye. The man waits for you two at the steps in a puddle of his sweat. He’s tired and breathing deep, and then, once your close enough, you see his face; his sunken black eyes, his olive skin, not unlike yours. An itchy restless urge grips you, gently, as if ants had slowly crawled one by one into your skin and now all you can to is scratch to get clean. There are still four out there, and the two of you are partially lined up and waiting. “Hands up,” Lucien shouts. “Stay down, hands in the air. NOW!” He’s so loud. Think of something quiet, drown it out. You think of all the times you sat in silence. A lot of the time you’re alone and just out of the way enough. It would be at baby showers, or Thanksgiving dinners, or even the last Easter Gathering (where you last saw Julian). You would, and had, and failed at talking to your own family. Those little clusters. You chimed in here and there, mostly nodding, laughing along at the edge of circles. It wouldn’t be until you spoke more, and they gave you looks, you cousins you’d known all your life, uncles and aunts too, they would nod and move on, with polite smiles. Was it something you said, maybe? That’s when you feel most alone, when you’re surrounded by so many people and you’re still so quiet. You close off the sounds and in silence Lucien lashes out, grabbing the man by his collar and toss him aside. The man’s talking, but Lucien doesn’t speak that language. You do though, and you heard him say his name was Oliver. You heard him asking for forgiveness. Mercy. ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 10 Pushing Lucien aside, you get down on your knee, your hand palm up and stretched out to him. He just had to take it. You ask him, in your mother’s tongue, where the others were. He says he can’t tell you. You tell him you’re trying to help. “I need you to cooperate,” you say in Spanish. He says he doesn’t want to die here and you think of the widows whose husbands Oliver and his party killed on their way out to freedom. You saw the widows on the TV that afternoon, as you got ready. They seemed so gone. Dazed and answering questions in-between sniffles. Your mom’s a widow too. “But I don’t want you to die,” You tell him, honestly. “Just tell me where they are.” He begs you not to send them back, even if it’s what he deserves. Even if you know that’s death enough. You almost take him then, you can just hold his hand, and go far away and come back later, but you’re mad. “Gonzo.” Lucien watched you and Oliver and the two of you look like little green aliens in his goggles. You’re mad. Mad that Oliver looks like you. That you look like him. The thought passes, what would you do in his position, and it’s consumed by the desert. You wouldn’t kill people like that, leaving wives to grieve in that way you watched your mom grieve a life time ago. So you don’t think what you would do in his spot, you wouldn’t have gotten there in the first place. He insults you when he speaks in your mom’s language. Everything he says just makes you sick, and worse, and shit. You want to cry. You don’t. You haven’t since you were a boy at your father’s funeral. Please, Oliver said. Please. I know you’re a good man. You have good eyes. He touches your goggles, looking through them. You get up. You turn around, tell Lucien, “I hear something,” and leave the church, and leave Oliver to Lucien, whatever Lucien will do. You did all you could. You did all you could. ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 11 “Just look at the stars,” you say, under your breath. You do. You stumble out into the night heat and you peel away the green with your goggles. You take your mask off and breathe in, and out. You look up to the sky and the pale blue stars are right there. Did all you could. You take off your head set too, as to not hear the fumbling from Lucien’s end. You’re alone out there. “Is that it, then?” The voice came from your memories. Lucien? It wasn’t an old memory. It wasn’t one you tried to shake out, and focus on the stars, but it came back to you in full force like a freight train: “Do you want to be an officer to help people or because you want to enforce the law?” Julian had been worked up that he was red in the face. You didn’t get a chance to answer, you could only blink with surprise, and maybe guilt. You opened your mouth but he had kept going, “Is it really that important? Being a big man with a gun? You’re going to get someone killed, or worse.” “What is to you if I die?” you heard yourself saying. It’s not like they liked you anyways. They like me at the precinct though, they call me Gonzo. “No. You’re going to kill someone else.” “Shut up!” You shot out of your chair in a violent jolt. You had tried too hard to be a cop, so hard to get in. You weren’t like him with novels and tenure and a house. There wasn’t anything else you could do that mattered. Why couldn’t you just tell him that? Maybe he would have understood. “Just Shut. Up!” You punched the refrigerator. You pulled your hand away and a dent matched where it had been. “Come on, let’s go.” Julian left with Nina, slowly, shuffling out of the kitchen and out the front door. You listened to the car engine drift away. Your mom was sitting idly at the end of the dining table. “Mom?” you croaked. ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 12 She sighed. “I can’t tell you what to do. I just know that your father never killed someone. Whatever you do, Jacinto, you have to do good. Or you might not come back.” Why did you have to remember that? You pinch your brow. The memory leaves you weak. It’s still so hot and musky, and you want to go home. You wander through the town, scratching your arms when whispers prickle at your ear - a figure darts by in front of you. You scream into your hands. The other aims your trembling gun. The whispers are audible enough to know they’re not in your head, and you’re coming from the house you’re right out front of. You go in. Inside, you step over an old photograph of a boy in a sports jersey. The glass crackles. Maybe you would have been a football player, in another life - where you didn’t tear your ACL. Its scar is deceitfully small. You mom had been happy about it though. You had overheard her in the back of the car, on the way out of your surgery. Rain was tapping the roof of the car. She was talking to Julian, and you should have still been asleep from the anesthetic. You repeat her words in that vacant had-been home. “He never would have been a good player. Too kind – too gentle.” “Huh?” The voice came from just under the floorboards, where you stood. You drop your gun, and get down. By the time you’re done with it, your hands sting but the pain is dull and far away. Your skin is raggedy, blood drops from where your fingertips had been splintered away. But the hole in the floor is big enough now. Lifting the last wooden plant, the floors mouth gaping at you, breathing in the heavy air, you spot the little eyes staring up at you in the dark. You jump down in front of them, how many there are you can’t tell – you don’t have your goggles. They’re just things – moving within the darkness. But by the ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 13 sounds of their wipers you know they’re young, kids. You reach for the gun you left on the floor, “Don’t move.” The voice comes from behind you. The cold barrel of a gun jams into your back – you’re on your knees. The dirt burns, and you don’t want to die, not down here. The man behind you speaks in a heavy accent, “Don’t fucking move.” “Don’t! He’s barely a man, look at him!” someone calls form the dark. Another shadow darts across the black, and stars chattering too quick for you to follow. The stranger ignores it and shouts at them to get away from there. To run north and hide, and that he’ll slow them down. Them. He means you. Those widows on the TV – would Thalia join them tomorrow? The tagline would read about a window’s highs school sweet heart, just turned thirty. The stranger pulls the trigger. Gears crunch - you don’t die, the guns doesn’t fire. You turn around and for the first time look him in the face, and he’s no older than you are: a clean face. He mutters, “Oh.” You fall into a frenzy with him, kicking up gusts of orang sand. He clawed at your face and pulled at your mask, tightening it around your throat. You pound on him to get him off you, he’s not moving. You knee him – once – twice – he screams at the third one. He rolls off, and somehow you managed to grab your pistol and get to your feet. He doesn’t. He’s unarmed and on the ground. “Wait,” He chokes, “Wait.” He’s so young. Something cold and wet streams down your cheeks. Everything’s blurry. You don’t have to shoot him. Your fingers are on the trigger, you don’t want to die. It won’t be long through, there are sirens outside. They’ll be coming for you. They won’t tell you apart from them, they’ll drag you out, throw you down – chain you down. The kids would still be down here, but they still have time right now. They ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019 14 can go and run far, far away. You want to tell them that, you’re so close to opening your mouth. You almost throw down your gun. The world teeters on a razors edge – But Lucien comes. He peers into the dark still hole, where he can’t make you out and the boy is right in front of you scared out of his mind. Lucien doesn’t see him, he just see’s you and your gun through green goggles. His gun is raised, and you, well you just have to open your mouth. ———————————————————————————————————————— The Foundationalist Volume IV, 2019