Another Perfect Catastrophe Read Online Free PDF Page A

mountain.
    Dad braces his foot against the bottom scaffolding and begins hauling himself up in slow steps. “You know the part that gets me?” he says, looking down at me. “He was in the damn desert.”
    I start my own climb, the rust on the iron bars scaling my palms. “I think the part that gets you is that nobody believed him, and he was right, and everyone that doubted him met a horrible death.”
    He laughs. “Yeah, that, too.”
    By now he is puffing hard, his legs above me quivering. We walk out and sit on one of the girders, not at the top, but high enough to make me nervous. Off in the distance I can see the lights of the next town, a faint glow rising up. We sit side-by-side, dangling our legs over, like the men earlier with their lunch pails. When the wind blows, even lightly, the whole structure shakes a little.
    â€œI know what you’d like,” my father says.
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œIf it started raining right now.”
    I laugh out loud. “True, I’m a sucker for easy irony.”
    â€œYou know Noah put the bigger animals—your elephants, your camels, what have you—on the lower levels. That way he eliminated the need for ballast. Pretty damn brainy.”
    â€œUh-huh. Where are you getting this stuff?”
    â€œTold you, from websites. All these nuts still looking for ‘the real Noah’s Ark.’ One of them’s an astronaut. They’re missing the point.” He raises the collar of his Corvette jacket, shivering a little.
    â€œWhich is?”
    â€œValidation. We all want stories told about us a long time after we’re gone. We all want to be Noah, or his ark.”
    â€œTrue ones or lies…doesn’t matter, huh?”
    He taps my thigh with his fist. “You got it, bub.”
    â€œSpeaking of stories, why don’t you tell me once and for all about the cancer?”
    â€œI had my say, junior.” He takes another cigar and the Zippo from his pocket, unwraps the cellophane, and lets it fall away. “You’ve still got that number, don’t you? Or did you lose it already?”
    I pull the napkin from my jeans and unfold it. He frowns, nods.
    â€œAnd how about you , once and for all?” he says. “You plan to keep phoning that girl? My vote is cease and desist.”
    The night is cloudless, faint stars visible above the lights from the surrounding towns. Laney used to take us far away from the lights, out into the country near Pigeon Creek, down washed-out dirt roads where we could watch the smear of stars away from the lights of town, where I would ask her to name them for me, over and over. I would tell her that those nights were the reason she majored in astronomy. By now, I imagine, she has pasted stars to the watercolorist’s ceiling and has named the constellations for him, charming him with reruns.
    â€œThat’s pretty much done with,” I say. “But I do have another call to make.”
    He glances down at the paper, jams the cigar in his mouth, lights it. “You know, Billy, I’m thinking I ought to head out tomorrow,” he says. “Drop Wendy off where I found her, then find my way north.”
    â€œI have to call Kenny Pecora.” I take his lighter from him, the chrome case still warm, and flick it, the flame swirling blue and yellow. My father’s face draws down with confusion.
    â€œWho the hell is Kenny Pecora?” he asks, still eyeing the napkin.
    â€œStudent of mine,” I say. “He looks like Teddy Roosevelt.” My father watches me as he puffs his cigar.
    We sit, quiet, gripping the steel girders in a cloud of early autumn chill and cigar smoke, the lighter burning my fingers, our legs touching, dangling. It is this image of us I will recall seven months later, in the minutes after the phone finally rings on my desk at work and it is Dr. Snelson calling me, his words circling back like the answer to a