here it is, the thrilling conclusion. like the others, help pointing out the overly erudite parts would be much appreciated.
ACT III
When she was six and quietly eating her first waffle cone, standing behind her mother who’d been caught in a conversation with an acquaintance from church, Rita Laney watched a blind man walk down the sidewalk towards them. A gust of wind blew the man’s straw hat off his head and sent it floating like an air hockey puck across the sidewalk and into the glass door of the ice cream shop Rita Laney and her mother had just come from. She could hear her mother’s conversation, something about how good the Easter lilies had looked this year, and how much better they might’ve looked if Rhonda Evans hadn’t sprayed them with that vegetable-based hippie bug killer. The man stooped, putting his hands over the concrete, fingers reading the braille of the gum on the sidewalk. Rita Laney didn’t yell to the man to help him for fear of interrupting her mother, and it took him five minutes to find it. Ever since, Rita Laney’s deepest, most ineffable fear had been being blind, being unable to see everything, and being reliant on the aid of others too timid to actually help.
Every day Rita Laney either made or re-heated a dish loaded with carrots: carrot casserole, carrots and potatoes au gratin, carrot-and-feta-stuffed ravioli, while Stu emptied the baggers of his mower. She set the table, putting the salt and pepper by Stu’s seat and the hot sauce by Luke’s. Today she laid out carrot tacos as Stu came in. The freezes had started, which meant the sprinkler system had been winterized and the grass hard and dead, but Stu still smelled like sweat and two-stroke exhaust, and instead of the mower’s green cud, he tracked in a death-brown mush and left tiny mudprints where the frost that had stuck to his shoes melted off.
As he came into the kitchen, Rita Laney asked, “Stu, did you remember to swing by Finnegan’s?” Rita Laney had realized the sauce cups from Finnegan’s were a significantly freer option than the “medical-grade” ones she’d been overpaying for from the pharmacy, but a Randian sense of capitalism had ingrained itself so completely into her that she felt guilty taking free things, no matter how few or how trivial, so she made Stu do it.
“Oh,” Stu said, rubbing the fog off his glasses with his shirt. “No, I forgot.”
“Well, could you swing by tomorrow?”
“The guys and I have a tee time and the car’s got to go into the shop. Which reminds me,” he turned to Luke, “I’m going to need to borrow Herbert tomorrow. You think you can find a way home?” He took a bite. “Maybe Delailah could give you a ride.”
“Delailah doesn’t have a car. Her mom’s paranoid that she’d slide through a stop sign and get killed by a moving van or something.”
“Well, you’re in high school, I’m sure you can figure something out.”
Rita Laney, who hadn’t gotten a yes or no from Stu and feared unansweredness, took the conversation back. “So can you, Stu?”
“The guys and I have a tee time right after work. I’m gonna have to go straight to the course, I won’t have time to swing in.”
“Well Finnegan’s is open 24/7.”
“Yeah, well I’m not going to waltz in there after the dinner rush. You have to go in when it’s busy or it’s awkward.”
“You were supposed to get it today. Luke’ll be overdue for his drug test.”
“Oh what difference is a couple days? If you’re so concerned he needs to do it tomorrow, why don’t you go to Finnegan’s yourself? It’s not like he’ll be able to piss it all away with the extra day if he was going to fail it anyway.”
“Fine. Get them the day after tomorrow. Go in during the Saturday brunch rush.”
The last five minutes of school each day made Luke think of the drawing in the Illustrated Guide to Space— the book he’d read in the mornings of his childhood as he ate his cereal— that explained spaghettification. Each minute, like the unfortunate astronaut, stretched wretchedly the closer the ultimate goal came, the red second hand of the classroom’s clock stretching out of the plastic into psychedelic pasta piling in loopy coils around the room.
Eventually the buzzer rang, and Luke left his books in his locker and went out to meet Delailah in the parking lot.
“Any luck?” he asked her.
“Nothing. Seems like town’s still dry.”
“How is that even possible? There are twelve thousand college kids sustaining the all-night diners in town. There’s gotta be something somewhere.”
“We just don’t know the right people, I guess. We could probably go wander campus and ask people.”
“Fuck that. What about Bertha? She’s always slinging that schwaggy shit.”
“Asked her last period. She’s got nothing, or at least nothing she’s willing to part with.”
“Cockwaffle. I haven’t smoked since those two bowls last weekend. What if I end up passing the test? Then I’m fucked.
“You could always come clean, point out that you actually passed this time.”
“Yeah, alright. If my mom found out I’d been tricking her like that she’d lynch me from the nearest maple.”
“Well I’ve asked everyone I can think off. No one’s got anything.”
“I asked everyone too. I even asked Justine if she’d smoke me out. She’s baked nonstop and even she was dry, or dry enough to be stingy.”
They stood for a while, solutionless, watching people leave for the weekend. That moment of temporary liberation— life should look more like this, Luke thought, a genuine excitement for the coming microseconds of the grand scheme. Why must Friday afternoon be the only climate suitable for true happiness, the only petri dish inoculated with the spores of joy, the other days festering under the grow-lamp constantly pushing its productive agenda on the sad circles of gooey life?
Delailah finally piped up again. “Hey. There’s one thing we could try. We could go to Haseldorf’s place.”
Luke had never introduced himself to Elias Haseldorf, but he’d spent enough time awkwardly sharing a space with him that he couldn’t imagine snaking into the home lair of that awkwardness; he couldn’t imagine what dim depths such a complete antithesis to his own perception could mine out of a basement in the cold earth. He imagined himself as a bright yellow canary taking draughts of the putrid anti-air, looking around at the greasy copies of throwaway science fiction, gutted boxes of rifle and handgun ammunition, and so goddamn many baseball caps bloodstained and grime-rimmed from gutting animals and fighting.
“Oh,” he said. He searched for an excuse not to— hell, he thought, I’d rather jump into the Clark Fork and let my arms sink as I suck water. He thought of the time he came into a party at Walker’s house, loudly looking for “hard-bodied women,” or the time he beat up Al Parnel on the rumor that Al thought his sister was stupid. He could have told Delailah he didn’t want any part of that violence, any part of that objectification. But, despite what felt to Luke like a thundering clusterfuck of reasons to say no, to refuse to go to Haseldorf’s dungeon, the disembodied essence of Rita Laney sprouted from his limbs like mistletoe, her mouth like a broken sewer main and the backhoe of Luke’s actions continuing to dig more and more of the caustic shitslick of her judgement, her accusations that he’s fucking up. He could hear her, watching the drug test turn the color she actually wanted to see: Oh my god. Oh my god. You’re never driving again, you hear me? You dirtbag, you drug-addict burn-out! Is that what you want? To be a piece of shit, to be the cancer that kills the middle class this family struggles so hard to float in? You can walk like the burn-out you’re going to be. I can’t even look at you!
Then a small stone of reason appeared in the silty bottom of their thought-stream. “Can’t we just call him?” Luke asked.
“No way. You want to talk to his wack-job mother? Try to make it not sound like you’re going over there to buy weed from him?” Then she added, as though the secondary reason, “We can’t anyway. I heard his mom stopped paying the phone bill.”
“Damnit. I guess it’s our last shot, then. How can you even like that guy?”
“He’s not that bad if you just ignore some of his wacker aspects.”
“That fuckbag is all wack aspects.”
“Well we’re going to have to wait for you to get your car back. He moved out to East Missoula.”
After the early evening dark, they pulled up to a trailer house painted that polyester orange-yellow the sun had on seventies film, the feathered lawn and its mower both dead, frozen in drought in the thin strip before the wooden steps. Luke and Delailah climbed the stairs and gave the screen-door three knocks. The bare bulb above them came on angrily, and at least six different locking mechanisms rattled loose.
Ms Haseldorf resembled a jack-o’-lantern— not so much because her year-round fake tan made her skin look like the rind of a pumpkin, or that her teeth looked like they’d been hacked from the inedible shell of a vegetable with a dull knife, or even that she was so lit you could see the light coming out of her many cracks— but because, at first meeting, one got the impression that she’d grown out of the soil of some dreary field, and that it must have been one mangy deer that came to feed on that gourd and to spread its seeds, and that without something gutting her out and cutting a face onto her and giving her a kid and a purpose, that she would have shriveled into a humus-lump on the soil. She gave the two of them those up-down glances that last just long enough to feel like a groping, then, after taking a long drag from a Newport, asked, “You here to see Elias?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Delailah.
“Elias!” the woman screamed in that inappropriately loud voice used by people who think they live more rurally than they actually do. She walked back into the house, letting the door start to shut again before adding, “You can come in if you want.”
The inside of the trailer made Luke think of what an all-night diner would smell like if the floors were carpeted, all the furniture upholstered, smoking in public were legal again and cats and dogs and maybe a parakeet were allowed inside. Everything sweated bacon grease, that absolutely everything became breaded and fried before it left the kitchen. A small cat busily worked the corner of a sofa with its claws, pulling out white fluff. “Goddamnit Mortey, cut that shit out!” Ms Haseldorf said as she kicked the cat into a nearby chair. The cat cast a hiss back at her before slinking into some lamp-shadow. “Fuckin cats,” she said to Luke and Delailah. “Mortey’s a new one, hasn’t been trained up yet.” She smoked some more, then yelled up the stairwell. “Elias!”
“What, mom?”
“You have some visitors, get off your ass and come down here.”
“Tell ‘em to come up, ferchrissakes.”
She looked up at them, “Well, you heard him. Lazy ass.”
Elias’ room differed from Luke’s apprehension of it. The shitty books— which weren’t science fiction, but still had covers painted in the eighties— and the various boxes of ammunition were both stacked very neatly on a shelf. A string of hooks in the wall above his bed catalogued his hats. Each had an order; author/date of publication for the books, caliber for the bullets, color for the hats. Everything else about the room, however, was accurate, even the color— something of a sub-vomit, the color you’d put to canvas before detailing a chunky puddle of puke.
Elias and a kid who introduced himself as Tank sat on a couch, watching videos of mudbogging on Elias’ computer. They were drinking some cheap beer that came in hunter’s orange cans— just in case a marksman were to mistake the can for the many cylindrical aluminum creatures that ply the western states. “Want a beer?” Elias asked without looking away from the mudbogs.
“Nah,” Luke said.
Delailah said sure and Elias handed her one of the bright cans. “This is warmer that it is outside. It’s almost hot.”
“Yeah, I have to keep them behind my computer so my mom doesn’t drink them. But if you hold it long enough it cools down some.”
“Does your window open?”
“Nope,” he said. “So what’s up? Come just to hang out? Haven’t seen you in forever, Delailah.”
“Yeah, it’s been awhile. Why weren’t you at Erika’s party?”
“No one told me about it. I was out hunting anyway.”
“Ah, bummer. Well, actually, we came over to see if you had any pot.”
“Well,” he said before taking a long pull from his can, “I did, but my mom found it and sold it to all her friends. Bitch won’t even give me half the money, and I paid for both fucking ounces.”
“Oh, that sucks. Well, uh, what about your own stash? We just want to get smoked out. You see—”
“I was going to hold a quarter of one of the ounces for myself. I’m all out.”
“Fuck. Do you know anyone who has any?”
“Nope. Tank and I just smoked the last of his. So unless you wanna make a run to Canuck-land you’re shit outta, kiddo.”
Luke and Delailah sat for a while. The computer, like glowing screens in public places, kept them distracted from each other, kept them from letting their thoughts out their mouths. Elias and Tank, being stoned and drunk, sank into their chairs like planets pressing basins in space-time, and each inebriation exponentially adding mass, the sag drawn further and further down, and each making it harder for thoughts to reach escape velocity.
Luke and Delailah continued to stand as Elias and Tank giggled each time a contestant got stuck or the torque tore pieces from their vehicles. “Well what should we do?” Luke said quietly, as to not interrupt the show.
“I dunno. I’m out of ideas.”
“Me too. But we gotta find some. Let’s back to town.”
They said goodbye and walked back down the stairs. Ms Haseldorf stood in the living room, above all the chairs, shaking vodka into a bottle of grapefruit juice. Luke and Delailah stopped as Ms Haseldorf asked, “Leaving so soon?”
“Yeah,” Delailah said, “we wanted to see— to see if Elias wanted to come hang out. But he’s busy.”
“Busy?” she asked, her eyebrows mimicking her intonation skyward. “What’s he so busy doing? Lazy shit. So who’re you? How’d you know Elias?”
“We knew him in middle school.”
“Names?”
“Luke,” Luke said, hand extended to accept hers. She held his in her crack-trellised fingers, her breath a malignant citrus.
“You got a last name Luke?” she asked, her eyes in a relentless stare like the black glass orbs of the mounted deer in Luke’s uncle Rodger’s den, a stare that Luke felt self-consciously. He wondered what she wanted to dig out of him with that stare.
“Laney.” She let go of his hand with a citric exhalation.
“And you?”
“Delailah Hornbeam.”
“Huh,” said Ms Haseldorf. “When I lived in Redding I knew a chick named Denise Hornbeam. Any relation?”
“I don’t think so, but I never knew my dad’s side of the family. A bunch of them ate Grandma’s canned asparagus contaminated with botulism at a family reunion when I was little.”
“I got food poisoning once,” Ms Haseldorf said with the same enthusiasm double-jointed or hammer-toed people brag about their oddities. “I was driving through The Dalles in the eighties when that towel-head lunatic put bacteria in the salad bars. Me and Shorty— my first husband— went to the Taco Time and spent the next week puking our guts out. I’ve never puked so much, not even back in the seventies when I used to drink enough to put your whole generation to shame. I got to that point, you know, where you run out of stuff to puke up but your guts just keep wrenching and eventually you come up with something, that green shit that comes from way deep down and burns its way out. You have to brush twice to get that shit out of your mouth.” She shook more vodka into the grapefruit juice and took a long pull. “I couldn’t believe it when I found out it was a bioterror attack. I mean, in The Dalles, you know? What the fuck’s in The Dalles? Just ‘cause we let some cull towel-head brainwasher into our country. If we can’t even stop these crazy terrorists how does that make our government look? I ask you, what’s the government worth, then?”
The nervous laceration Luke had felt opening up in the nook between his stomach and the top arc of his large intestines since the end of the school bloomed like a ball of ink blown with a straw, and each inky branch sneaking into secret folds of his brain, and the palm-dampening middle-class terror of impending embarrassment and inconvenience without serious long-term harm manifesting itself out of the design like the supposed meaning of a Pollack. He had to get out, the potpourri of smoke and cat piss and the film of grease in the kitchen began to give him existential spins. He looked at Delailah and tossed his eyes like dice towards the door.
“It’s not worth a goddamn thing,” Ms Haseldorf said, shaking the vodka grapefruit.
Delailah started to excuse them. “Well Ms Hasel—”
“What good’s a government that betrays the folk that made it so great? Giving handouts to the trash that pull us all down, letting in all these foreign leeches so they can suck us true Americans dry.”
“Well,” Luke said, hoping that speaking up would alleviate his philosophical heartburn, “America’s a country of immigrants. I don’t know why so many people are so paranoid about letting more of us in.”
“A government’s job is to protect its citizens and its culture. I don’t care what color you are but if you’re gonna move to America you damn well better learn to speak English and live like an American. All these socialist demands like health care or affirmative action don’t come from true Americans. True Americans don’t need a hand out, they fight through the hard times. Real Americans learn to deal with the bullshit.”
As he picked a retort from his word-orchard, trying to avoid the profanity-laden trees, Luke realized he couldn’t change this woman’s mind, and, standing here in her house, he realized that she gaped like a pitcher plant and not even the stickiest of Luke’s words could adhere to the walls of her opinion. He couldn’t even tell his best friend that he might, maybe, love her, so how could he talk politics with this rank-breathed woman without sliding into the digestive bottom of her xenophobia? No matter what he could say now, no matter if he left, he’d spend the next several hours feeling his faith in the future dissolve like rice paper in a dragon’s mouth. The only thing to do, he decided, was to ignore the deceptive leaves and get the hell out.
“What time is it?” he said, checking his phone. “Shit, I gotta go,” he said, and walked out the door. Delailah followed him out a minute later.
“Thanks for fucking ditching me back there,” Delailah said as she got into the car, the door not even shut before Luke pulled out of the driveway. “You made us both look like jackasses.”
“Oh who gives a hovering fuck how we looked? I’m never going to see her again. And even if I do, what’s it matter? No one can live to please everyone.”
“Elias is a friend of mine, and so is his mom. She let us into her home and you disrespected her by just up and walking the fuck out. Yeah, she has a lot of wack-ass right-wing ideas, but man the fuck up, man, and listen to it. You made me look bad. You may think that you live in some sort of cool isolation but fact is we’re sponges who soak up our friends’ behavior, and when you’re acting shitty you fill my sponge with your shit-particles. Pull your goddamn head out of your ass and look around and check the consequences of your actions sometime.”
Luke pulled over just before turning onto East Broadway. “I was thinking of the consequences, ok? I decided I’d rather just leave than have to deal with the fallout of telling her I thought she was certified bat-fucking, shit-twister insane.”
“It wasn’t like you had to do either of those things, Luke, and you could have had more tact about it.”
“Coming out here was your idea. Elias is a piece of shit—”
“Don’t talk about him like that, he’s my friend. You don’t have any good reason to think he’s a piece of shit, you just have this irrational bias that your fireheaded mom shoved down your throat growing up. You say no one can live to please everyone but you’ll sure as fuck try, won’t you? You need to appease everyone on Earth but apparently that doesn’t apply to people you think are lesser than you, but it sure as shit will make you risk going into this piece of shit’s house so you don’t have to deal with your mom’s rage. You could never let your life get a little hard, you just want that silver spoon to keep feeding you heaps of easy. Some day you’ll have to acknowledge your own actions, some day you’ll have to nut up and realize you decided to smoke pot that day.”
“It was your pot. And your idea.”
“You still decided to take that first hit. You decided to take every single hit. I didn’t tie you the fuck down or anything. You act like I’m a one-woman conspiracy to fuck your life up. I’m just trying to be your friend. Get over yourself.”
“You’re one to talk about self-absorption. You look at yourself in the mirror for half a fucking hour half the times I pick you up. I try to share my joys or my pains and you can’t stop fucking with your nose ring, trying to get the perfect angle. I tell you about the wack-ass drug testing I have to go through and all you can do is delight in how it works against the Machine, how it fits so well into the narcissistic fight against normalcy that you stuff yourself with! You’re the most self-absorbed person I’ve ever met.”
“Oh that’s fucking rich.”
“Yeah, isn’t it? I can sling shit back at you, Delailah. You may think no one sees through the screen you try to build reading Howard Zinn in history class or scribbling Plath villanelles on your notebooks, but I know you, I know that all of that’s just an exercise for your ego. You want the world to think you’re so fucking edgy but it’s all just a show, self-masturbation totally reducing any semblance of intellect into a soup of vanity.”
Delailah stopped talking and stared forward out the windshield. Ahead a streetlight puked its incandescent orange onto the tiny patch it guarded faithfully from darkness. The sidewalk heaved where the root of a Norway maple violated it. Neither could look at the other.
“Luke,” Delailah finally whispered, taking long pauses between words and longer between sentences, “I try. I fucking try. I wake up every morning and feel totally disconnected from everyone, from everything. I— I look out my window every morning, I look at the trees, I look at the dead grass on the North Hills, I search those last moments of warmth beneath the sheets before school for attachment. But I find nothing. I find my feet as cold and painful to move as my chest. I feel the joy of sleep drain away as day yawns into my being. I remind myself I have friends who love me, that I am surrounded by good people but some mornings it’s just not enough. Have you ever gone to school wishing you didn’t know anyone because you feel so completely apart, even from the ones you love, and that seeing their faces, seeing the love on their face like a veil but still feeling that they do not fucking matter? I know I’m vain. But I’m not vapid. Focusing on the superficial is the only way I can keep my mind off the knifewounds in my soul. It’s an act, yeah, but any decent actor knows their art. I can’t pretend I’m a good actor but I know my art, and I know the art of happiness is the hardest thing of all. But at least I push my boundaries, instead of trying desperately to stay within them like you do. When was the last time you even crossed a line?” She reached for the ash tray. “I bet you’ve never even used this.” She pulled it open.
A fine layer of grey, like the dust on a crematorium floor, filled the ash tray, and, between neat and recent piles of ash, lay a perfectly rolled joint, tapering subtly towards the twisted end Luke always thought looked like a witch’s nipple.
Delailah picked it up between her forefinger and thumb, the way a devotee would pick up the pieces of a shattered icon. “Holy shit,” she said. “I guess you do use it.”
“I’ve never opened that ash tray,” Luke said.
“Then whose joint… is it?” Her intonation rose the way it does when the question becomes unnecessary, realizing mid-question the answer.
All the tension of going to Elias’ house and their argument suddenly collapsed into a black hole of laughter. They laughed so hard their diaphragms ached, the dizzy headrush of oxygen depravation pushed out all the animosity that had been building since they left Elias’ house.
They drove back and walked into Greenough Park, found a nice piece of the bank of Rattlesnake Creek.
They smoked the joint, with deep, pathological breaths, their limbs rattling with residual stress, Luke imagining the smoke filling him like the tsunamis of fog that roll off the Pacific into the redwoods, and felt each of those sillily-named sacs in his lungs spread like a redwood’s scaly leaves reaching gratefully into the banks of fog. He’d never really believed the people he’d met over the years who talked about minute details of the smoke’s taste Luke couldn’t perceive, those invisible traits like a lemony taste with earthy undertones, and laughed them off the same way he laughed off those ridiculous descriptions of wine in his dad’s food magazines. He still couldn’t taste lemon, or earth, or even the fuel he’d heard a guy at a music festival describe once, but he could detect a purity to the smoke that told him his dad smoked the good shit, and after a few minutes he felt the high’s firm hand push him off the sober ledge.
He looked over at Delailah. She wore a hand-knitted beanie with ear flaps and long rope stringers hanging down. “I like your hat,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said. Her voice retained the languid pace the confession of her loneliness had given it. “It used to be my dad’s.”
“Oh,” Luke said. “Do you miss him?”
“I don’t remember much of him. But I guess I’ve always felt his absence, so in a way I miss him.”
The creek flowed past. Luke watched as the ripples warped the reflection of the moon into a luminescent murmur. Luke thought of the old metaphor that time is a river. Maybe it’s true, but not because it flows, or that it has a beginning and an end, or that it falls rapidly at first then slows, widens, and wanders as it slowly approaches its oceanic death. Time slowly undresses the eventualities of everything, the way the river eventually digs its way through even the bedrock into the molten heart of the earth, its own rushed yearning to greet the ocean its own doom. But no rivers in the world drop straight into planet, for time is also the unending change that forces the river to cut a new channel, the tectonic upthrusts, the sudden landslide filling the ravine with debris. You can’t hierarchizing these catastrophes, they’re all just geologic happenstance. Delailah was right, this is the hardest art, this appreciation of the fine and minute beauties that ply the frighteningly huge universe.
“Delailah, I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I was stressed and I freaked on you. I’m sorry. The truth is you’re my closest friend, you’re the closest person I have. Sometimes I wake up and wonder why I should really get out of bed, sometimes I doubt the meaning of doing anything at all. Sometimes I just want to get in Herbert and drive any direction out of Missoula as far as I can before my mom wigs and calls the police and I pull over obediently to disco-strobes. But as soon as I see you at school in the morning all that goes away, you’re part of that framework that keeps me from falling into the shitty chasm of depression. I guess I’m just trying to say that I love you, I care for you, and I want you to know that and I hope it makes those cold-toe mornings less awful for you.”
“It’s ok, Luke.” She pulled a quick, noisy breath through her nostrils, then continued with the same calm, “If you hadn’t pissed me off like that I never would have opened that ash tray. Things worked out. Things usually work out.”
Delailah’s sunfire glare had mellowed to lunar hues. Her confession had provided a tempering reflector that managed to collect her soul-light while distilling out her self-conscious aggression. As Luke looked at her in this uncommon peace, seeing her being seasoned to its own second-hand glow, he realized a depth to her he’d never seen, and, his thoughts branching like time-lapsed spring willows, realizing he sat in a pure moment, one of those times when all the angles of one harmonic shard of existence glint as the light strikes it through just-right, the music swells into full, heartbreaking, gorgeous triumph and it all burns burns burns like the very last second of everything, then ceases, forms into a opaque drop, and falls into the stained water of everyday, barely noticed, but complete in every way. Life is a sequence of those uncontrollable, unexplainable, unimaginable moments of beauty linked by a shit-string; to hell with the river, time is the dirty water that fills the gaps between those shining times. The art of happiness is keeping the shit-water out while cramming as many of those gleaming moments as we can in our mason-jar hearts. Luke looked at Delailah. She’d lain back, and the moon, mottled by the cottonwoods, left strange emphases on her ridged face. The fake jewel at the end of her nose ring lay at the just-right angle to catch a firefly glint of moonlight. Then a cloud obscured the moon.
