432
PARTISAN REVIEW
weeks, six. Then one disappeared. When Tim and Ava arrive there will
be seven.
The man at the service station says, "Do you know that during the Ice
Age all of this was covered with ice. That's what they say. Clear to New
York. Ice! I find that hard
to
believe. I don't know if I can beli eve that! "
The man's wife is a big woman whose muscles are as hard as apples.
Tim pays her for the gas and a bag of peanuts. She calls Tim and Ava
"sweeties" and smiles. Her cheeks are plump as tomatoes . Ava doesn't
want any peanuts.
Ava likes to sing with the scratchy choir on the radio. She doesn't like it
when he sings, but Tim loves to hear her make a melody with her thin
shaky voice. Ava is a rotten driver and the highway vanishes under the
car. Angels sing in the darkness. Small pink bushes move through the
dim fringe of the headlights and reappear in the red darkness behind .
Tim wants to sleep but can't. He braces himself against the dashboard.
The car goes off the road.
"Get out of the car!" says Ava. "What?" "You 'll see. Get out of the
car." Roadside gravel crunches under shoes. There is carbon monoxide
in the air and the headlights go off. The door slams and she comes up
to
him and puts her hands in his pockets and watches the darkness,
which had been cupped over the car, expand. The last memor y of auto
noise is lifted on the thermal air currents with the migra ting Redtail
and the darkness expands until the eighth heaven (or Stellatum) where
it fills with so many stars that the lovers almost fall off the bluff, and
then continues to expand until the stars seem as lonely under the
immense blackness as Tim and Ava. "And down there, you see, is
where we are going." She points to a star in the warm earth constella–
tion.
Just beyond their field of vision a star flashes loose and leaves a slim
green welt across the heavens , while in the North Atlantic the boiler of
an oil tanker blows a hole amidships, beginning a slow process in
which forty-eight men will be lost. Only a mattress, a life jacket and
some scraps of lumber will be picked up by rescuers. "It's scary." ''I'm
cold." " It's not summer any more." And Canadian goose number seven
arrives. And shonly, two white globs of cottage wall appear in the
headlights . "We're here! " Ava goes into the bathroom and vomits.
Ava is sorry they 've arrived after dark. There are barn owls and
