Mr. Splitfoot

~ ~ ~

IT’S STILL SNOWING. Icicles smash off the roof in a rush. The wind’s making weird sounds down the chimney. After breakfast Nat finds a wardrobe of winter garb in the mudroom — parkas, snowshoes, mufflers. He finds a compass. “Who wants to see the storm up close?”

Mr. Bell’s playing solitaire. Ruth is distracted by a paperback mystery, The Keening Wind by Wanda La Fontaine. “No thanks.”

“Not I.”

So Nat fills the pocket of his coat with cereal and wanders out alone.

“Careful,” Ruth calls after him, then, “Come back soon.”

The door closes. A quiet hour passes. Mr. Bell repairs a broken chair. Ruth finds a collection of LPs. Cher, Electric Light Orchestra, Peaches and Herb, something called the Bevis Frond. Every record in the collection is old. No one has lived here for a while. No one buys records anymore. Whatever the reason, each album feels like a forgotten archive of the way life once was here on Earth. She chooses the Bee Gees, Spirits Having Flown. She likes the title. After figuring out the stereo, the needle begins to pop. The song opens with three-part, falsetto, brotherly harmony. “With you.” A disco beat drops in loud and rolling. “Baby, I’m satisfied.” It is inescapable. It is fantastic. Ruth and Mr. Bell eye each other. He rises from the couch and starts by swiveling his shoulders, lifting his arms overhead as if climbing up a beanstalk. He grooves slowly. Ruth is still seated. Mr. Bell clears a coffee table out of the way. He does the breaststroke, slides down the fire pole, sashays left, makes the pizza, sashays right. He drops to his knees, hops up to his toes. He turns up the volume, kazatskies and cabbage-patches. Mr. Bell moonwalks.

Ruth shuffles and straightens the cards he was playing. She sets the deck aside and stretches in preparation, shaking her hips gently, nearly by accident. Mr. Bell and Ruth dance wildly. He keeps the music coming or she does. Flipping the record, finding new ones. They boogie through Hall and Oates, Françoise Hardy, The Chi-Lites, Joan Jett, Doris Troy, the Orange Blossom Special, Harry Belafonte, and one record simply called Wine, Women and Cha Cha. The snow keeps falling. Mr. Bell cues up “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Ruth blushes. He does not flinch. He takes her in his arms, leaving a tiny channel for mystery between them. They slow dance, spinning, sometimes close enough to feel the shapes beneath their clothes. Mr. Bell looks at her directly. “Shall?” the record asks, then skips. “Shall I? Shall I? Shall I?” It skips again. Without letting her out of his arms, without looking away, Mr. Bell delicately applies pressure to the stylus. “Come back?” Skip. “Come back? Come back?” He nudges the needle forward once more. “Again?”

When the song finishes, Ruth pats her brow dry. She’s on fire. She tucks her chin and thanks Mr. Bell for the dance. “Cocoa?” She slips away from him.

“Thanks. I’m all set.”

Ruth disappears into the kitchen, and the house falls silent again.

Nat finds many things outside, chief among his finds is the old mining town. A handful of buildings still stand. Others have been weathered so harshly that their private chambers — bedrooms, toilets, and attics — are twisted inside out. Windows and walls are filed parallel to the ceilings and floors. Electrical spiders dangle from the plaster. Exposed floral wallpaper. Snow is free to drift inside these half-homes. Some are in better shape than others. Nat snowshoes through.

Past the ghost town, he scrambles down an embankment, using tree trunks as anchors. He slides and falls just the same, landing at the base of the blast furnace. Its walls are like a castle’s tower. The blocks of stone, anorthosite or sandstone, are as big as bears. Tie rods lash the old rocks in place, but the hole where hot iron once ran from the chamber into sand pigs has eroded into an entrance. Nat steps through into the gigantic chimney, and the storm disappears inside. Temperatures here once climbed as high as 2,500 degrees, even when ten feet away winters dipped to thirty below. A round light shines on him from the opening far above. He listens but hears nothing. He tosses a small stone up the chimney, then ducks. The rock falls back to earth as a good idea pushes up through the soil, not unlike the hand of a zombie reaching up to grab some brains.

Ruth is alone by the fireplace. Nat does not remove his winter clothes. “I want to show you something. Get suited up.” The gear room is small and tangled with wooden water skis, jarts, snow pants, mittens, towlines, ice axes, snowshoes. Ruth chooses a pair made from guts.

They climb over drifts taller than their bodies. Though the snow is blowing in every direction, the path to the ghost town is a bit easier to tread now that Nat has stomped it down twice. He stops her in the woods. “There are a finite number of snowflakes here, which means you could count them.”

She looks up into the storm. “No, you couldn’t.”

When they arrive at the broken-down village, Nat lifts his chin and smiles.

“What’s this?”

“We could fix these houses up, make them homes for kids who are aging out.”

Ruth dusts an armful of snow from the front window of one cottage. A gas stove, a rug. She removes her snowshoes at the door and steps inside carefully, as a person stepping out onto ice. In the kitchen there’s a green citrus juicer the last tenants left behind, proof that life happened here before they arrived. Their living left a mark, maybe a small one, maybe not. Who built these homes? How long were they here? What words did they say as they worked? The shelves are wrapped with forget-me-not contact paper. Part of the floor is gone, and there’s a pile of leaves where a rodent built its nest. There’s a soap dish and a tin of vegetable shortening. There are bedrooms and a stove. Ruth enters one of the bedrooms, and the house creaks as if listing on a fulcrum. She steps back out. The old stove, the old linoleum, the old cabinet doors. It could be a home. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

“OK. First one for me. Second one for you. Then we’ll keep going.”

“One for Ceph?”

“Sure. Ceph, Colly, Raffaella. Everyone.”

“Why do you get a home first?”

“It was my idea?” he suggests.

“To make a home for us? Please.” Like children arguing over the shape of a dream.

“Fine. Yours can be first.”

She spins around. “OK. I want this one. This one’s mine.”

Nat shrugs. “OK.”

“OK. This one’s mine.”

Mr. Bell sits by the fire, pinching his face as if it is made from clay. “It’s a very good idea, though maybe there are cabins a little closer to a town? A place where a person might purchase a hamburger or find a job?”

Nat and Ruth nod.

“How will you pay for the repairs?”

Nat shrugs.

“You’ll need some money, a box full of money.”

“Got one?”

“No, but I heard there might be one in an empty pool somewhere. Right?” Mr. Bell laughs. “Maybe there are homes that need fixing up a little farther away from here?”

Ruth’s thawing out under a quilt. The squares of fabric are less than square, human-made. “Did it end badly?”

“The problem is I don’t know that it has ended at all, though longevity certainly seems unlikely. Mardellion’s followers were runaways, drug users, sick and bankrupt people. He gave them a home and helped people no one else was helping, which is really very close to taking advantage of desperate people.”

Ruth pulls a thread off the quilt.

“Eventually Mardellion collected too many people, too many mouths to feed. Responsibility like that makes a person do reckless things.”

“Like what?”

“First he found some lines in The Book of Ether that told him—”

“What’s that?”

“Book of Ether? Mardellion’s religious text. His greatest hits.”

“He wrote a book?”

“It’s prophecy, poetry of a sort. I’m sure there’s a copy around here somewhere. Maybe up in the temple.”

“The temple?”

Mr. Bell draws in his chin, smiles again.

“I thought this was some blue-blood Adirondack camp.”

“Ah. No. Bring blankets. It’s even colder up there.”

One door in the upstairs hallway has a bronze latch shaped like a bird’s beak. Mr. Bell lifts the latch. The staircase is unlit. “Watch yourself.” They follow him up into the dark. Smells of mothballs. “One moment.” Mr. Bell switches on a light. The room soars like an airport hangar, round as a chicken’s egg, a perfectly white space-age chapel or sci-fi movie sound stage. They’re inside the roof.

Ruth takes a seat on the floor. Nat plops down beside her, covering them with a blanket. Their breath is visible. She wraps up to her neck. Mr. Bell does the same, woolen blobs in a white room. Mr. Bell’s silent a moment, looking around.

One side of the oval has been given over to a number of electronics, two television sets, an ancient computer, and another small record player, a lowly command central set in front of a swiveling captain’s chair.

“What kind of name is Mardellion?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s his real name?”

Mr. Bell pulls his hair behind his ears. “Probably not.”

“How’d he wind up here?”

“Drove out from Utah. The mine was shutting down, so he got it for a song. Moved his followers in, up here. Closer to God and outer space meant farther away from people’s families and the law. Isolation set in. He starts chattering about being the messiah, about apocalypse. He starts in on underage girls.”

“What?”

“People’s daughters. He made them his wives.” Mr. Bell sheds his blanket, standing. “There’s a copy.” He brings it back to them. “Book of Ether. All yours. My gift.”

Ruth cracks it open, reads aloud:

95

The sky in multitude.

The face of the sky.

The Earth is a place.

The skies sent out a sound.

It is by no means the only place.

The sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass.

Let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open.

It is not even a typical place. The Cosmos is mostly empty.

Ruth stops. “What?”

“He took The Book of Mormon, a little Cosmos, a little Bible. Some Queen and Grace Jones. Neil Young. Cher. Bowie. Whatever moved him.”

“It’s plagiarized?”

Mr. Bell’s smile shows his teeth. “Think of it more as a catalog, a collection of the words that made one man.”

“Are you an Etherist, Mr. Bell?”

He shakes his head. “No. I am not an Etherist.” He pulls the blanket over the back of his head. “Historically, culturally, yes. I’ve been dipped in the dye, raised by the hand, but I haven’t believed a word Mardellion whispered since I was twelve.”

“What happened then?”

“He made my mom disappear in the middle of the night.”

“What?”

“She was mad about the girls. She was his actual wife, his legal wife.”

“Mardellion’s your father?”

“I suppose he is.”

“Yikes.”

“Indeed.”

Nat’s gone to bed. The sun set and it’s still snowing, a supernatural snow, though probably the trees and rocks don’t see it that way. Ruth stokes the living room fire, then draws a chair up before the records again. She thumbs her way through Rita Coolidge, Richard and Linda Thompson, Marianne Faithfull. She cues up the Thompsons’ song “Wall of Death.”

“You know the story behind this?” Mr. Bell asks.

“No. The Father didn’t allow much music.”

“It’s the last record they made together before she lost her voice.”

“Why’d she lose her voice?”

“Hysterical dysphonia. Broken heart. She and Richard were splitting up after a long marriage, three kids. He had a girlfriend, I think. Maybe Linda hit him over the head with a guitar, kicked him in the shins or something? He probably deserved it. They treated each other poorly, but they still had to sell the record, had to go on tour and sing together.”

“She couldn’t talk anymore?”

“It happens.” Mr. Bell shrugs. “The second-to-last night of the tour, they were in LA, maybe the new girlfriend was in the audience, maybe there was a knife or a gun. Who knows. People say Linda sang more beautifully that night than ever before. Something beyond human abilities.”

“Fury.”

“Maybe. Grief. Shock. They’ve never released the tapes. Then she lost her voice.”

“She ever get it back?”

“Yeah. But it took a long time. I’d imagine a person could get used to not talking. It would be hard to start again.”

“If you grew up here, how’d you know about that?”

“My dear.” Mr. Bell leans back; his T-shirt lifts, exposing a flash of stomach. “I’ve not lived among the Etherists since I was fourteen,” he says, as if he’s just a normal boy who grew to a man in America, someone who likes rock and roll.

Ruth makes a funny smile.

“What is it?”

“Nat and I used to think we invented you.”

“Hmm.”

“Like you were a dream we had. We made you up because we could never imagine where you came from.”

“I’ll try to take that as a compliment.” He screws his eyes in mock puzzlement. “I might be strange, but I assure you”—his voice lowers—“I’m real.” And to demonstrate his realness, Mr. Bell lifts Ruth’s hand to his forehead like she’s a cool towel on a fevered brow. He drags it across his cheek until Ruth is cupping his chin, his breath.

Ruth drops her hand back to her leg, breathing heavily, burned.

“The Thompsons spent some time in a religious sect themselves.”

Ruth listens to Linda sing. “She did?” Linda Thompson’s voice is power and submission, spirit without religion.

“Sure. Religions need women. Who else would do all the work?”

Ruth nods.

On the album cover, Richard sits on the floor in a yellow room. His legs are open, his arms are too. Bravado and confidence. Linda’s trapped in a framed photograph on the wall above him. Just her head, no body. Richard doesn’t look at Linda. Linda doesn’t look at him.

“I often wonder who I’d be if my mother raised me. Maybe I’d be better.”

“Maybe you’d be dead,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“And maybe you wouldn’t be the wholly perfect Ruth you already are.”

There’s a closet in the living room. Ruth ducks into it, flushed. She digs through the board games and books there to calm the idea that Mr. Bell will, any minute now, devour her in a way that’s not yet been confirmed in her life. In the closet she finds a Walkman and an old tape recorder that looks like a mini robot with a plug-in microphone and five lever buttons at one end. Beside it, a carton with three blank tapes. Ruth calms herself by pushing the buttons. She brings the device to him. “I want to record some of these songs.”

“On that?” Mr. Bell lifts his top lip, like there’s a bad odor. When Mr. Bell tries to act older than he is — as if he’s full of knowledge and experience — it ends up making him seem even younger to Ruth.

“Yeah. So I can take it with me.”

“That”—he points to the tape recorder—“is a Dictaphone. This,” Mr. Bell says, flanking the stereo, his hands like a spokesmodel’s, tilted to display, “is a hi-fi system. You know what that means?”

“No.”

“High fidelity. Intense truthfulness. Painful purity. You cannot use an old Dictaphone to capture faithfulness.”

Ruth thinks about this for a moment. I’ll just record it when he’s asleep. Hell with fidelity. She’s not leaving the mountain without Linda Thompson. Ruth returns to the stacks. She thumbs past Mario Lanza and Kenny Loggins. “What’s this?” She pulls out several copies of the same record. Each one wrapped in plain brown kraft paper like a porn mag. She removes one from its sleeve and is surprised to find that the vinyl is not black but a beautiful glowing yellow gold.

He clambers toward her on his knees. “The golden records. Man. I haven’t seen these in a long time.”

“What’s on them?”

“Remember Voyager?”

“No.”

“NASA sent up two satellites in ’77, and on board both they packed golden records in case the satellite should ever encounter someone who might want to listen.”

Ruth’s eyes flash. “Aliens?”

“Yup.”

“What’s on the records?”

“Pictures of life on Earth. DNA sequences, babies, bugs. Music.”

“A real catalog. How did they choose what got to go?”

“How do you make a record of everything in a finite space? Hard job.”

“Yes. But what are these?”

“Mardellion thought the Voyager mission was perfection. Sagan and Ann Druyan produced the records, and for Mardellion it was faultless. See, Golden Records, Golden Tablets. The records made a link between Joseph Smith and Carl Sagan; religion and science. It was natural. So once someone had been with Mardellion long enough, he would ‘reveal’ his involvement with the Voyager missions. This was carefully guarded information, a secret, something a follower had to earn by proving their total faith. You’d have to have total faith to believe that bull. NASA hires a pharmacy clerk to represent Earth among the aliens? Not that Mardellion thought it was untrue. I think he really believed he was cosmically responsible for the Golden Records. It wouldn’t be so hard. Belief just takes steady convincing. Mardellion had a studio in Massapequa press duplicates of the original songs sent to space. In reality, he had nothing to do with Voyager. Still, that doesn’t mean the records aren’t cool.”

Mr. Bell removes the record from its sleeve. The center label says, The Sounds of the Earth, To the Maker of Music — all worlds, all times. He slips it onto the stereo and lies back on the thin and dusty rug. The record begins to pop.

An old man with a funny accent speaks.

“Is that Sagan?”

“Nah. Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the UN and, sadly, a Nazi.”

“They sent a Nazi into outer space?”

“They didn’t know he was a Nazi in ’77. Unfortunate though interesting choice, since it could almost convince you that some cosmic truth of our existence slips in no matter how much Sagan and Druyan tried to control it. Waldheim’s dead now. Lots of the people on this record are dead now. We sent ghost stories up into space.”

After Waldheim, many voices, speaking many languages. Ruth understands only one greeting: “Hello, from the children of Planet Earth.” The record crackles. Then something frightening, shrieking and grunting.

“What’s that?”

“Whales.”

Raindrops, thunder, crickets and monkeys, footsteps, heartbeats, birdsong, trains. There’s the sound of a mother kissing her child, saying, “Be a good boy,” and all manner of songs: classical, drums, bagpipes, yelling, Pygmy girls chanting, Chuck Berry. The vinyl pops. The songs pile up. It keeps snowing. Mr. Bell announces each new track. Russian, Bulgarian, pan pipes, Mexican, Azerbaijani. Stravinsky. One song, just a man with a guitar. The man hums and moans. “Blind Willie Johnson. ‘Dark Was the Night.’”

Ruth closes her eyes. Into Beethoven. Then a scratching, skipping, the sound of a zoom. Buzz and crackle trilling like a machine. “And what’s that?”

“Ann Druyan’s brainwaves.”

“Are we supposed to be able to tell what she’s thinking?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

Ruth listens. She opens her eyes. “No.”

“She was thinking about falling in love.”

“With who?”

“She and Carl got engaged after the first Voyager lifted off.” Mr. Bell sits in front of Ruth. He shuts his lids for a minute. She watches him. When he opens his eyes, he asks, “Could you hear my brainwaves?”

She shakes her head no. “What were you thinking about?”

“Ruth Sykes.”

She smiles at the ground. “Where are they?” She speaks quietly.

“Sagan’s dead.”

“No. Where are the Voyagers?”

“They left the solar system a while back. They’re still going.”

“Where?”

Mr. Bell leans back on his elbows. “Away from us. Away from each other.”

The record reaches its end. She draws a circle on the rug with her finger. “Can we listen again?”

“Of course.” Mr. Bell sets the needle at the start.

Ruth leans back on straight arms, makes two mountains of her legs. The record says, “I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet.” Mr. Bell, golden himself, kneels between Ruth’s knees. “We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship.” He takes her chin in his hand. Her eyes lift. “We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe.” Mr. Bell kisses her, his wife, for the first time, for real. “It is with humility and hope that we take this step.” An orbit aligned, Ruth bends into him, returning his kiss, bouncing all she’s got back to him across the soft darkness of deep and distant space.