When Arnie Beers woke one morning to find a sign planted on his front lawn, he was amused.  He chuckled as he pulled the sign’s flimsy posts out of the ground and held it up for his wife to see from the picture window.  They both smiled and shrugged.  In simple block letters painted in red on a two-foot by three-foot piece of white cardboard, the sign simply said: ARNIE & MAUDE BEERS.
 
Arnie was a small-town judge, recently retired after a satisfying 35-year career.  He took the sign as some sort of reverse vandalism, even a pat on the back.  An anonymous citizen saying, “Take a bow—go ahead, you deserve it!”  He felt proud, in a modest way.  But he didn’t really want a sign on his front lawn; benign though the gesture was, it was a little out of bounds.
 
“Best to nip this in the bud,” he thought.  He put the sign in his garage.
 
The next morning another sign was on the lawn.  It was virtually identical to the first.  The mosquito of alarm that buzzed a split-second in his ear was not loud enough to get his serious attention.  Into the garage went the second sign.
 
Arnie didn’t get annoyed until the third day.  “OK, that’s enough,” he said aloud into the summer morning, looking around him at the empty yard, the quiet country road.
 
Nobody heard.  There was a sign in place again on the fourth morning.  Maude said, “Why not just leave it there this time?  Maybe that’s all they want.  What does it hurt?”
 
So Arnie begrudgingly left it alone: one day, two days, three days.  Nothing was quite right.  He met his friends for their usual golf game, but he found himself unable to relax.  His swing was off.  His friends laughed when he told them what was bothering him.  “Just some harmless wacko,” Vern Denning said.  “He’ll get bored soon; just wait ’im out.”
 
Skip Schultz said, “Or wait up all night with a shotgun.  Give ’im a helluva surprise.”
 
A week passed with the fourth sign on the lawn.  It seemed that maybe Maude was right.  Her way had always been to presume that benevolence reigned in the world, a trait that served her well during all those years as a fourth-grade teacher.  Despite causing the occasional spat, her optimism was one of the things Arnie loved most about her.   And, after all, nothing had happened; the thing just stood there, as if the signmaker were satisfied.  Arnie, however, was fuming; he wasn’t about to just hand over control of his little plot of land, of any fraction of his life, to some unseen stranger.
 
A whole week was damn well enough.  Arnie ripped the sign from the lawn and tossed it into the garage.  But he still wasn’t ready to violate his sleep pattern.
 
The next morning, when he saw the new sign, he phoned his friend Joe Vitalo, the town Chief of Police.
 
“There’s really nothing I can do, Arnie,” Joe said. “No crime, no perp.…  You know I need the manpower for other stuff.”
 
Arnie grumbled, “You gotta ride herd on the wackos, Joe.”
 
“Tell you what—” Joe said.  “I’ll have whoever’s got the shift cruise past your place a couple times in the wee hours.  We’ll keep our eyes open.”
 
On each of the next three mornings, Arnie found a new sign planted on the lawn.  Joe Vitalo said, “Look Arnie, give ’em a chance to go away on their own.  This is the best I can do.”The newest sign went clattering onto the jumbled pile in the garage.  The time had come to catch the vandal himself.  He decided to sit up all night in an easy chair facing the picture window, watching.  He didn’t have a shotgun, had never owned a gun of any kind, so he armed himself with a big bright flashlight.  He imagined surprising the bastard in the act, a deer in the headlights.  Maude protested, “Arnie, really, you’re just going to make yourself ill.  It’s not worth it.”  But he couldn’t be budged.  She made him a cup of herbal tea, wrapped her robe tighter around her breasts, and disappeared alone into their bedroom.
 
Arnie sat in the darkness as minutes, then hours, crept past at a glacial pace that seemed almost spiteful.  The indistinct shadows of trees cast by a waning moon drifted in imperceptible inches across the dim lawn.  An old ache began its slow bloom in his lower back.  This was a bad idea, he knew it.
 
Arnie never would have taken it this far if not for the fact that something felt deeply awry.  Three months earlier he had attended the funeral of an old college friend, who had finally lost his two-year battle with lung cancer—a man who had never smoked and was fit in every other way.  Since then, long before the first sign appeared, Arnie had become aware of something—a trace of disquiet, a vague imbalance—growing like a tumor.  Not in his body, but in a secret, walled-up chamber in his body’s general vicinity.
 
Now he wondered if the sign marked him as a target.  Was there a hit man on the way to their door, a black car cruising the country roads, looking for blood-red letters on a white board?  Did someone hate him so much?  He ranged back through thirty-five years of courtroom memories, calling up every sullen backward glance of a jail-bound miscreant, every dark scowl of a victim’s family member whose bloodlust he, the arbiter of justice, had not satisfied.  There hadn’t been many; after all, this was a peaceful little town.  But… it only takes one.  And a worse idea: what if there were someone he could not recollect, had no awareness of, someone whose life he had damaged unknowingly, wrapped up as he was, always had been, in his blind, petty, self-absorption… someone who’d been simmering in hatred for years, and was finally taking revenge?  Maybe he deserved it, maybe justice was about to be served, a hand from on high poised to slap him down from his arrogant perch, to knock him tumbling from his bench, from that pathetic, deluded inner throne that he had trundled about on his back all his adult life.  It was becoming appallingly clear:  not only did he lack the wisdom of Solomon, he couldn’t explain even the simplest events in his life.  And, if that were true at his age, then obviously his days on this earth had been an utter waste, nothing learned, nothing accomplished, zero value, absolutely zilch.
 
Arnie’s eyes popped open at 5:12 a.m.  A hint of rose from the east lit the hazy scene before him.  Shaggy trees across the way, wet black street, sweep of muted green lawn, and there it was: the sign had returned.  A curse leapt to his lips, but before it could erupt, it sank under a rising swell of discouragement.  He was old and tired and ineffectual.  He wanted all this to just go away and leave him in peace.  Creaking up from the chair’s clutches in stiff stops and starts, he shuffled his slippered feet to the window and yanked the drapes closed.
 
Late that afternoon, Arnie and Maude ignored the sign on the lawn as they backed out of the driveway, and they didn’t mention it during the forty-minute drive over the ridge at Highmount and along the country roads lined in day lilies, into the village of Woodstock.   The plan was to meet their daughter Donna for an early dinner, then go to the Center for Photography, for the opening of a show called “A Portrait of Protest: Fifty Years of the Anti-War Movement in Images.”  Donna was an activist, and while Arnie agreed in general with her politics, he found her too often shrill, sometimes seriously annoying.  Fingernails on a blackboard, setting his teeth on edge.  Although, truly, Arnie was immensely proud of her, he had never found it easy to say so.  
 
The day had been hot, oppressive under a gray sky, and when Maude and Donna, giddy at their rare mother-daughter reunion, entertained the idea of dining al fresco, Arnie put a grumpy stop to it.  He took their elbows and guided them firmly into the air-conditioned depths of a chic Woodstock eatery.
 
The two women giggled and chatted and touched each other like best girlfriends, and while Arnie felt a glimmer of gladness to see Maude enjoying herself, he couldn’t seem to escape the bubble of irritable gloom that surrounded him.  With altogether too much fluttery hand motion, Donna jabbered non-stop:  she was so excited about being able to arrange for the photography exhibit, which they would visit after dinner, to come to a gallery near her home in New Jersey.  She had even met one of the photographers.  Arnie had to restrain himself from interjecting, “So are you going to give your mom or dad a chance to say a word?” even though there was nothing he wanted to say.
 
Finally, as they finished up their entrees, Donna surprised him.  She interrupted her incessant chatter, touched his arm with a look of genuine concern and asked, “Dad, what’s wrong? Are you feeling okay?” 
 
His out-of-practice voice had a croak in it.  “I’m fine.  Just didn’t sleep well last night.”  He knew Maude was avoiding eye contact with him, and he felt grateful he could trust her to stay silent about the signs on their lawn.  He changed the subject: “What’s up with Al?  Why isn’t he here with you?”
 
It was Donna’s turn to avoid his eyes as she picked at her broccoli rabe polenta.  “You know, working at the hospital all the time.  And complaining about it.  I’m pretty fed up, actually.”
 
Arnie didn’t show the stab of worry he felt at hearing that.  “Hmph.  Tell him I expect him here next time.  Gotta have another man in this crew.”
 
“Yeah, Dad.  Well, we’ll see.  You guys want dessert?  Or should we get over to the show?”
 
At the Center for Photography at Woodstock, in a building locally famous because Bob Dylan had once lived upstairs when it was a café in the sixties, huge photos hung on stark white walls and people milled about holding plastic cups of white wine.  The walls held images in black and white from Korean and Vietnam War times, people costumed in period clothes and hairstyles, marching, shouting, holding placards.  The pictures seemed to Arnie, even as ancient as he felt, somehow separated from the real world, as if all that passionate protest had been just a movie, an old Hollywood drama meaning nothing more now than absurd nostalgia.  And then there was the more recent work, in color—often splashy, garish, violent color—of other people, a newer, somehow more real sort of people, so much the same but so subtly different in their modern style, still marching, still shouting, still holding placards, protesting Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq.  Everywhere were hands brandishing signs, signs, those blank rectangular shapes with their four, always four, sharp corners like shards of glass, and on which carefully etched or sloppily dashed words screamed out vital, meaningful, incomprehensible, dangerous messages, and it was all too much for Arnie to take.
 
An open door led from one side of the main gallery into a small triangular room containing a photo exhibit called, according to a plaque on the wall, “Odalisque Amerikai.”  Arnie found himself grateful to be alone in the claustrophobic little space and began taking a close look at the images.  Crafted by a photographer whose name contained, in Arnie’s estimation, entirely too many consonants implausibly jumbled, the prints were cleanly arrayed in a single row around the room.  Each was 16 by 20 inches in a simple black matte and frame.  The photos were nude studies rendered in an infinite variety of subtle but glowing shades of black, white, and silvery gray.  In every one, a woman reclined outdoors in an unlikely setting: an industrial railyard, an automobile scrapheap, a ramshackle barn, an empty desert highway.  The first thing Arnie found interesting about the images was not the setting, however.  It was that they did not depict impossibly svelte and beautiful young models as one might expect, but real women, women like your next door neighbor, your sister, your wife.  There were wide hips, heavy thighs, pendulous breasts.  There were cellulite and stretch marks.  Some eyes were downcast, others gazed out at Arnie with a direct calm that held both kindness and sorrow.  These were mothers, women at the ageless pinnacle of lush femaleness, bathed in an otherworldly light and transfigured into sensuous angels of mercy, miraculously captured in exquisite detail on the flat surfaces of platinum prints.
 
Arnie moved from one to the next, at first nearly breathless, surprised by his own response.  He was not an art lover; had often joked about not having an aesthetic bone in his body.   Then he realized the source of the emotion rising up in him.  These images flung him back to a time long gone, summer after glorious summer, when he would take Maude and baby Donna camping: the Adirondacks, the Rockies, a willowy bank of the Colorado, a remote beach on the Yucatan.  The three of them would laze about, totally naked, laughing, playing, free of all care.  He and Maude were in their early thirties then, working hard together to build his law practice; he had often felt these nature-communing vacations were their key to sanity and a lasting marriage.  It was like living a miracle:  a few days of primitive pleasures erased months of complicated stress.  But as Donna got older and responsibilities changed, nude camping faded into the past.  He hadn’t thought of it in years, and now, standing in the gallery with memories reeling out like movies before his inner eyes, he felt a groundswell of gratitude begin rising up to replace the self-pity he’d been lost in.
 
During the time Arnie, Maude, and Donna had been inside the gallery, the sky had turned dark as slate and nasty gusts were kicking up.  It was clearly time to head home and, after quick goodbyes to Donna, Arnie and Maude scurried for their car.  But they hadn’t gone a block when Arnie suddenly said “Wait.”   He grabbed Maude’s elbow, turned her around and guided her with rapid steps back to where Donna still stood under the gallery’s awning.  He gathered them both into a hug, his big arms strong around their shoulders, pulling them in until their foreheads touched his cheeks.  For a moment, he held them like that, still as stone, and then he said, “I love you.  I love you both.”  As he kissed their heads, big raindrops began to splatter the sidewalk.
 
His wife and daughter were too surprised to react; they barely had time to look at each other wide-eyed before he pulled Maude away and, his arm around her shoulders, took her dashing through the rain toward their car.
 
The trip home became more and more tense as they drove.  Wind lashed the trees and sent debris flying.  The car shuddered, slammed by gusts.  Rain blasted their windshield as if shot from a firehose.  Arnie hunched forward, gripping the wheel in two fists, peering into the deluge, slowing to a crawl at the worst spots.  The journey began to seem endless.
 
By the time they turned onto the county two-lane that led to their house, the rain had thinned considerably, revealing an eerie, slanting light that bathed a wet world strewn with the broken branches of trees.  Occasional mean little squalls still buffeted the car, but Arnie and Maude knew they were on the home stretch.  Then, less than a mile from their driveway, as they rounded a right-hand curve, a tall pine caught by an errant gust came toppling its full length, out of the vertical forest, falling toward horizontal as if in slow motion.  Every possible combination of steering and braking seemed in Arnie’s mind to simultaneously appear for consideration, as his feet and hands did something all on their own—something, probably even the best thing, but not enough.  His vision was suddenly engulfed in wet green pine boughs and his ears deafened by the terrible heavy crunch of wood on steel, drowning Maude’s scream. 
 
For the second time that day, Arnie’s eyes popped open after an interminable blank.  He knew immediately that he was alive and, remarkably, not in pain.  He looked at Maude, who looked back at him with moon-wide eyes before her face crumpled into a sob.  He understood what the sob was for, because he felt it too: even more than shock, it was gratitude that they were both alive and uninjured.  The two-foot-thick trunk of the tree had slammed to the pavement ten feet in front of their bumper, and a big limb lay angled across the ruined hood amidst an impenetrable tangle of smaller limbs and tufts of needles.  The windshield was cracked but not shattered.  Steam hissed from the engine.  The car was a mess, but everything was glorious, because Arnie and his beloved were whole.
 
As he leaned and hugged Maude, her tears subsiding, he was startled by a knock at the window.  A bearded man had appeared as if from nowhere and was speaking loudly, “Everybody okay?  Sir?  Ma’am?  If nobody’s hurt, please get out of the car as fast as you can.”
 
With the man’s help, Arnie was able to wrench his door open and Maude was able to crawl out his side.  Calm and in command, the stranger guided them to sit in his own pickup truck as, all at the same time, he called the local police on his cell phone and signaled an oncoming car to slow and stop.  Arnie was dazed and compliant; Maude was silent.  For an unknown length of time, they sat in the cramped truck, his arm around her, her head on his shoulder.  Later, these minutes seemed blurred, gone, lost behind the single thought that loomed forefront in Arnie’s mind:  he could have died.  Had they been moving a half-second faster, they would have been in perfect position to be crushed.
 
What did this mean?  Was it a warning?  A message from somewhere unseen?  He was not a believer in any mainstream God; he had in fact, until so recently, found his strength in his own imperfect self, without the need for a supernatural parent.  He didn’t feel likely now to venture far from that, but he was suddenly mystified, engulfed with wonder.  What forces were at work, out of sight, filling the air all around him like radio waves, ready to kill or bless at an instant’s whim?  Sending cancer, war, a daughter’s failing marriage… but also split-second protection, helpful neighbors, warm memories of sunshine on bare skin?  He had no answers, but he knew one thing:  he was glad that he had told his wife and child that he loved them.
 
Both rain and wind had faded to a strange, dripping stillness, and dusk was approaching.  At the bearded stranger’s summons, a police cruiser had arrived and the officer was directing traffic, a county road crew had appeared and set up cones and detour signs, an orange-vested man was standing by with an extinguisher in case the engine caught fire, other men prepared to attack the fallen tree with chain saws, a tow truck was waiting to free their car, and police chief Joe Vitalo himself had come to give Arnie and Maude a ride home.
 
“That guy who….  I didn’t get a chance to thank…” Arnie mumbled from the back seat, where he and Maude sat in the chief’s cruiser.  They were just finishing the long looping route that took them around a mountain, to approach their house from the opposite direction.
 
“Yeah… Tony.  Ex-cop from the city.  Good man.  I’ll tell him you said thanks.”  Joe spoke as he turned into the Beers’ driveway.
 
“Arnie, look.”  Maude whispered.
 
The sign, ARNIE & MAUDE BEERS, still stood in their front yard.  Impossibly, it had survived the storm, looking only a bit twisted on its two thin stakes planted deep in the lawn.  Joe brought the car to a stop, put it in park, and turned to Arnie, acknowledging with a silent nod and a raised eyebrow that, indeed, the sign was still there, and he was still ready to help if he could.
 
Arnie glanced at Joe, then took a long look at Maude’s sweet, tired face, lit by the last blue remnants of daylight.  Inside his weary heart was a muddle of inarticulate protests and ancient fears.  Answers, control, the laws of an orderly world: these had always been his anchors.  But now, someone was out there, watching.  For good or ill, entirely unpredictable.
 
All he could do was follow his body’s impulse: he let out a heavy sigh as he turned to look through the glass at his yard, his house, his world.
 
In the summer twilight, the sign’s crimson letters on their snowy field had turned to purple on gray; still, the names were clear: those words, those strings of symbols that identified himself and his life’s love.   But in that moment, just before he opened the car door and entered his home as if for the first time, the words seemed instead to describe something ineffable, something eternal that he would never understand.  
 
Arnie was surprised to discover that this sensation gave him, not pain, but a fine, subtle pleasure that lingered like faint perfume, long into the evening and beyond.
 
 

© Brent Robison 2009
 
This story is from the collection of linked stories—The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, by Brent Robison, newly reissued by Recital Publishing.