The summer air seemed ready to burst into flame. I finished mowing the grass and stretched in the rubber-ribbed lawn chair. Ten feet away, my mother stood with her head tilted, her sunglasses reflecting two white specks of sun, and aimed her gun at a pyramid of 7-UP bottles. Bang-bang-bang. Only a green shard remained from the top bottle, but her other shots had missed. “I’ll flunk my accuracy test tomorrow,” she said.
“Keep practicing,” I said. I was dressed in sandals and shorts, my bare knees smudged with grass stains. I sipped orange juice through a straw. I had basted my chest with suntan oil that smelled like toasted coconut.
The newspaper and mail had arrived early that morning: a telephone bill, a postcard from Deborah showing Haight Street under a tie-dyed sky, and a membership notice from the National Rifle Association for my mother. The other letters came from colleges in Indiana, Arizona, and a Kansas Christian school called Bethany that had no doubt gotten my name from some church function I’d participated in years ago. “Congratulations Christian Graduate,” the envelope said. I dumped the letters on the grass unread. I’d already decided to stay close to home for two years and attend the community college in Hutchinson.
My mother reloaded and aimed again. The bullets missed, missed, and missed, whizzing down the hill on the house’s north side. She gingerly placed her.38 on the grass. Watching my usually serious mother at target practice made me want to laugh. I wondered what the town’s busybodies thought, whether avenues of women were standing on their porches, squinting toward our house. Maybe a write-up would appear in the weekly paper, something like “Shots Heard on North Side of Town.” Since my father and Deborah had left, I reasoned that Little River regarded my mother and I as weirdos: the forever solemn, gun-toting divorcee and her acned, bookworm son.
My mother rubbed the gun against her thigh, slipping it into an imaginary holster. “Get dressed,” she said. “It’s time to go food shopping, and I need the company.” In the month since I’d finished high school, this had become our Saturday routine: a trek to Hutchinson to buy the week’s groceries, then stop for chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl ice cream cones on the way home. We were both free for the day-me from my occasional lawn-mowing jobs, and my mother from the prison.
Inside, I bounded the stairs to my room. I kicked aside paperbacks, plucked a shirt from a pile of clothes, and slipped it over my oily shoulders. Downstairs, I grabbed the newspaper and followed my mother out the door.
The heat rose in visible waves from the highway. My mother drove forward. She flipped a switch, and cool air filled the Toyota ’s front seat. I withdrew my mother’s country-western cassette from the car stereo slot, retired it to the glove compartment, and replaced it with a tape by Kraftwerk. My mother protested but began tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. The band’s robotic voices droned lyrics about romancing a machine. I “sang” along, then unrolled the Hutchinson News and scanned the headlines: COMMISSIONER INDICTED ON RAPE CHARGE; FLOOD WARNING FOR RENO COUNTY.
Neither story interested me, so I turned the page. What I saw took a few seconds to register. The individual letters U and F and O were stamped across the top of the paper. On the page’s left side, someone had penciled an amateurish drawing of a spaceship.
I’d seen similar drawings in hundreds of books, but I never expected an everyday newspaper to run a story about UFOs. “Listen to this,” I said to my mother. I announced the headline. “NBC to Broadcast Local Woman’s Extraterrestrial Story.”
The car swarmed with a gunpowder smell that emanated from my mother’s skin. She looked at the newspaper in my lap and nodded, pressing me to read on.
I skimmed the article’s first half. “This woman from Inman,” I said. “She doesn’t live that far away. Her name’s Avalyn Friesen. This says she’s been abducted by aliens at various times during her life. It all came out under hypnosis. Some TV show is doing a special on alien visitations this coming Friday night, and she’s among the people they’re featuring.”
I believed the woman’s story, and my mother knew it. She and I had discussed UFOs countless times. Before my parents split up, these discussions had acted as a bond: my father hadn’t accompanied us when we witnessed the UFO hovering over our watermelon field, so talking about the incident was our way of shutting him out. My mother knew I still read magazines and books, still watched TV shows about unexplained spacecraft and close encounters.
“I feel sorry for her,” I said. “People in her town will think she’s a freak.” I stared at the thumb-size picture of Avalyn. She had chubby, rouged cheeks and a closemouthed smile that looked like a tiny bow tie. She wore oversize, rhinestone-framed glasses. She resembled a widow, struggling against the pull of tears. She didn’t seem the sort who’d fabricate an outlandish story for attention.
According to the caption, Avalyn had drawn the UFO herself. She shaped it like a gray football with legs and antennas. I could remember the spectacle of our UFO as if I’d sighted it only yesterday. During the first week of school after that summer, I had drawn a similar spacecraft on poster board, its lights shooting beams of energy in blue crayon. I was in third grade then. I remember standing for show-and-tell, displaying my handmade poster, and relating my UFO sighting to my classmates. They had laughed until I fell back into my seat. On my walk home from school that day, a group of kids wrenched the poster from me. They stomped and spat on the drawing until all that remained were tattered bits in a puddle of mud.
The grocery was located two blocks from the Cosmosphere. When we got to the store, I usually loitered in the parking lot, squinting at the Cosmosphere’s marquee to check for any upcoming shows or special announcements. But now I’d found something more important, more real than the shows I watched from month to month on that domed screen.
I followed my mother through the store’s aisles, carrying the newspaper in front of my face, sidestepping other shoppers. I kept staring at Avalyn’s photo. For years I’d wanted to actually meet someone who confessed to an alien encounter. I didn’t know anyone beyond my mother and sister who claimed to have even seen a UFO; now, twenty miles from my own home, a woman had been abducted and taken aboard a ship from some other world. Even through the photograph’s grainy ink, I could tell she knew something remarkable, something ethereal and profound. Beauty resided in that knowledge. I wanted it. Perhaps Avalyn Friesen was in Hutchinson at this moment, maybe even shopping at this very store. Carts wheeled past me, and I looked up from the photo for any scrap of resemblance. While my mother bagged radishes and cucumbers, I noticed the profile of a woman weighing zucchini: similar nose, same hair pulled into a bun. I moved to stare into her face. The woman turned away. It wasn’t Avalyn.
I waited for my mother to finish, then stepped out the sliding glass doors. A plane of heat replaced the store’s cool air. I knelt before the newspaper machines- Hutchinson, Kansas City, Wichita. No headlines about Avalyn, but I guessed that a story might be lurking somewhere within those pages. I took a chance on Wichita. I plugged two quarters into the machine, pulled out two papers instead of one, and returned to the Toyota.
On page C- 12, in the “People and Places” section, I found it. The story in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon mirrored the one I’d read in the News, complete with the innocuous spacecraft drawing. But this piece contained specific additions. Avalyn had drawn one of her abductors. The alien was short with droopy arms and an enormous, hairless head shaped like a lightbulb. It had tiny pinpricks for a nose. Its ears were question marks. Its mouth thinned to a slit, a mere line scissored into its face. But the wildest aspect of Avalyn’s alien was its eyes. She had blackened them in, huge almond-shaped pools embedded in its face. The drawing was crude, almost childlike. I tried to imagine coming face-to-face with this being, this thing that had touched Avalyn’s skin.
Beneath the pair of columns was something else the first article had omitted. A psychologist who specialized in treating alien abductees had provided a list of signs and signals that indicated possible interaction with aliens.
HAVE ALIENS CONTACTED YOU?
Wondering about the possibility of a past alien encounter? Ren Bloomfield, psychologist and self-professed “spiritual counselor,” lists six signs that could indicate a “close encounter” in his third and most recent book, Stolen Time. According to Bloomfield, some signals to look for are:
1. Any amount of stolen time; missing hours or even days you can’t account for.
2. Recurring, overwhelming nightmares-especially those of flying saucers or extraterrestrials, or of being examined by these aliens on an observation table.
3. The occurrence of unexplained bruises, sores, nosebleeds, or small puncture wounds.
4. Constant foreboding feelings, paranoia, and sensations of being watched.
5. Fear of the dark or of being outside alone.
6. Unexplained, continued interest in movies, books, or trivia about unidentified flying objects-sometimes to the point of obsession.
If you have experienced more than one of these phenomena, chances are you’re not alone. Memories of a close encounter may lie buried within your subconscious mind.
Item number one, regarding the stolen time, reminded me of the night I woke in the crawl space. Sometimes, even now, serious concentration could bring back the air of that room, the smell of my nose’s bewildering blood. Ren Bloomfield had mentioned nosebleeds in item number three. And I remembered times in my life when the dark had petrified me, times I’d felt paranoid, times I’d had strange dreams. Finally, the list’s last item was an understatement in my case. Ever since the day I’d seen my UFO, I’d been fascinated, searching everywhere for scraps about extraterrestrial life. Chances are you’re not alone, the article said. The urge to speak to Avalyn overwhelmed me. I wanted to discover all the knowledge she’d been unwillingly given.
My mother tapped on the passenger’s side window. I jerked my head from the article and saw her standing in the parking lot. A chubby kid stood beside her in an ink-smudged apron, his arms laden with grocery sacks. “Open the trunk,” my mother yelled. I folded the paper in my lap and pulled the latch.
“Let’s get ice cream,” she said as I started the car. When I didn’t answer, she stared at me. I pointed to the newspaper on the dashboard, and she picked it up.
“Oh, her again,” she said. She began the article, her finger guiding from word to word, and while she read I coasted through the Snow Palace drive-thru and ordered the regular.
I steered home with one hand; held the ice cream cone with the other. My mother polished off the article. “So,” she said, “I guess we’ll be spending Friday night in front of the TV.” A half-brown, half-white ice cream smear covered her upper lip.
During the week, I searched the papers for updates on Avalyn. I watched TV for commercials about the upcoming UFO special. Before bed, I read books from my bookcase’s top shelf. Some were yellowed large-print paperbacks my mother had bought from book fairs or kids’ mail-order clubs when I was younger. Their covers showed drawings of lanternlike spaceships, more cartoon than reality. Some included blurry black-and-white photographs of objects that resembled Frisbees, hubcaps, beanies, and, in one case, a newfangled telephone. The stories in these books only concerned UFO sightings; none told details of alien encounters. It was as if the abductions were something intimate and secret, relegated only to books geared toward adults.
On that hot Friday afternoon, my mother suggested we go fishing-something we hadn’t done since my father lived with us. “An angling excursion,” she called it, and I agreed. I brought along a skimpy paperback, Searching the Skies. Its final sentence made a poor attempt at scaring preteen readers: “Will you or your family be the next to make contact with a craft from another world?” I lobbed the book into the backseat. “Stupid,” I said.
My mother steered onto a sandy, tree-framed road that led to a field of grazing cattle. A family named the Erwins owned the land. Years before, Mr. Erwin had told my father he could fish in the pond whenever he wanted. My mother wasn’t certain the welcome still extended to her, more than three years after the divorce. “What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked. “You and me, hauled into jail for trespassing.”
We sidled through weeds, carrying our poles toward a pond shaped like a mirror-image Oklahoma. Fish bones and plastic six-pack rings littered the bank. Wind winnowed through maples and oaks that circled the water’s edge, the sound like distant applause. It served as percussion for the bawling cows in the distance. I mooed back at them. My mother sighed and plucked a bass lure from the tackle box. It was the same box that Deborah and I had bought my father for Christmas years ago, the same he had abandoned. She held the lure toward the sunlight. It looked like a beetle coated with purple feathers, and my mother squinted at it as if it might suddenly spring to life. “There’s nothing like the taste of grilled widemouth bass,” she said. Crescents of sweat had already formed on her blouse.
“I predict there will be no widemouth bass in this pond,” I told her. “Perch, catfish, carp maybe”-I guided a wriggling night crawler onto my hook-“but no bass.”
I cast my line. I breathed in, and the confectionery air filled my nose. Kansas always smells great when summer has kicked into gear-damp, almost flowery, as if an exotic tea is brewing in each cloud. My mother and I sat on buckets of white plastic, the buckets we hoped would carry loads of fat fish by the day’s close. She chewed gum that smelled like apples. When I asked her for a piece, she tongued her fingers and wiped on her jeans. She bit her own gum wad in half, rolled it into a green ball, and dropped it into my open mouth.
My bobber floated in the center of the Erwins’ pond, and I examined it for the slightest movement, any ripple of water. Nothing. Beside me, my mother reeled in slowly, remembering what she could about the proper way to snag a bass. She hummed a melody I seemed to remember from some faraway time. Aisles of cattails rose from the incline behind her. Above her head, bobwhites overpopulated the oaks. A single meadowlark stared down from a tree limb, its black V a banner across its yellow chest.
Watching the pond’s surface made me queasy. The water was the sort where some faceless and neglected kid might drown, only to be dredged up years later. I waited ten minutes; when no fish nibbled, I lost patience. I reeled in and reached for the coffee can my mother had filled with worms and mud clods. That morning, she had stepped to the shade beside the back porch. She had stabbed her shovel into the ground, drawing out triangles of black earth. “Voilà,” she said. She pinched night crawlers from the mud and dropped them into the can.
I baited my hook with another cashewlike worm. The hook tore it in half, and it wriggled in the dirt, blindly searching out some earthly haven where it could perish in peace. I stared, humming, my mind drifting elsewhere. Avalyn, I thought. Her TV show was scheduled to air at nine o’clock that night. I couldn’t imagine how it would dramatize her UFO abduction. I planned to record it with the VCR my mother had bought last Christmas, to watch the program over and over. I wondered if Avalyn had fished in ponds around this area. Perhaps she had ponds of her own, centered in the fields that surrounded her farmhouse, the fields where they’d beamed their spotlights before whisking her into their ship.
My mother stood from her bucket. Her pole bent slightly, and I knew she had a nibble. She said “Shhh,” and I held my breath. The sun’s rays continued their heavy massage, and the wind paused. My mother reeled in slowly, teasing her fish, and in that silent space of time I realized how alone we were. Quite possibly there was no one within a mile radius, only us. I thought about the UFOs, the alien spacecraft that could suddenly stall over the barren fields. I thought of how, even in broad daylight, we could be taken, and of the utter simplicity of our abduction-how the aliens could beam us up just as they’d done to Avalyn. No one would see it, no one would suspect a thing.
The fish slipped away. My mother pulled her line from the water and frowned. “Must not have been a bass.” She sat back down, opened the tackle box, and began rummaging through the mess of lures and weights and hooks.
My thoughts moved to another abduction story, one I’d read about in books. In October 1973, two men, Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker, were fishing near the town of Pascagoula, Mississippi, when a UFO landed near the lake. I always remembered this story-first, because it had happened almost exactly one year after I was born, and second, because the description of the craft-platelike, with blinking blue lights-resembled my own UFO. As I scrutinized my motionless bobber, I rattled on to my mother about this case as if she were my student. “The aliens were as short as dwarves,” I said. “When they came toward them, one of the guys fainted. But the other stayed awake, and unlike most people he remembered everything. They examined him on a silver table. There was a weird contraption, like a moving eye on the end of a rod. It gave his body a series of X rays.”
My mother played along with my lecture: “Then what happened?”
“Nobody believed either of them,” I said. “Even when they passed lie detector tests.” I wondered if Avalyn had taken such a test. I wanted to ask her a million questions.
“What would you do,” I asked my mother, “if a UFO came zooming over those trees right now and sucked us into it?”
Her mouth twisted into the half-smile of a disbelieving judge. “I’m not sure. When we saw that one before, all I wanted to do was stare. It was so odd, like a Ferris wheel floating through the sky. I’m sure there was some explanation.” The half-smile evened out, and I knew she was playing along. “But now, if one tried to take you away, I’d probably run for my gun. I’d blast them all between the eyes before they could harm you.”
“I doubt you’d have the chance. They’d be quick.” I paused. Sunlight needled through the trees, stinging my eyes. “Besides, they’d stun you or something. You wouldn’t know what hit you, and you wouldn’t remember it afterward.”
My mother rummaged through the tackle box. When she pulled her hand out, it held a green can of mosquito spray. She doused her forearms with it and threw the can to me.
I sprayed my neck, arms, chest, and legs, then asked, “What do you think about the fact I’ve been obsessed with UFOs and stuff like that all my life? Do you think that’s odd?”
She didn’t answer, so I continued. “That article about Avalyn Friesen. It’s made me think. There’s a specialist on the UFO abduction thing. He conducts hypnotic regressions of these abducted people. Anyway, he says that an unnatural preoccupation with UFOs may mean you’ve had some sort of past contact.”
“If you had gone to some other planet, surely you’d know something about that-” My mother stopped and stood again. The bucket tipped from behind her, somersaulting toward the water’s edge. “Bite, Brian,” she said. “A bite.” My bobber was shaking back and forth, its red and white now a pink blur. I gripped the handle of my pole. Whatever was under the pond paused, then took the bait, endeavoring to speed away with the worm. The bobber shot downward, purling the water, and I tugged at my pole, keeping the line tight as I reeled in.
By eight o’clock, the sun had slid beneath the row of oaks. The shadow spilled across our faces like an enormous veil. “Are we done?” my mother asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Then let’s leave.” She had snagged three perch, which she had tossed back, and one catfish, which she kept. I had caught a pair of keepable catfish. The second had a flat and loamy gray head as large as the ball of my foot.
We walked to the car. I sat and sandwiched our catch between my feet. My mother drove through the Erwins’ pasture, the foul-smelling water sloshing at each bump and splashing the seat’s burgundy vinyl. I thought of afternoons long past, when my family had chugged home in my father’s pickup from a day of fishing. I remembered Deborah and me lounging in the back of the cab, choosing our favorites from the fish that curled against one another in the bucket’s brackish water. My father, the experienced angler, had caught them all. He would gut and filet them. My mother would cook, and the whole family would eat.
I hopped from the car and opened the gate to the Erwins’ pasture. The Toyota trudged past it, onto the sandy road. Behind us, under the trees, a cow mooed, as if saying good-bye. I shut the gate, ending our day of trespassing, and returned to the car. “I had fun today,” I said, and replaced my feet beside the bucket. I meant it. My mother smiled, and I knew this was how the next two months, the remainder of my summer, would fall into shape. Only my mother and I, occupying our days with whatever spontaneous urge pleased us. In the mirror beside my window, the sun melted into Kansas, and the sky made an amazing change from pink to blue.
I ditched the bucket on the back porch. A catfish tail cut the murky water, droplets pearling my shirt. In the twilight, the three fish gleamed like intestines, and I covered the bucket’s top with a towel I’d used for sunbathing.
Inside, my mother chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce for sandwiches. The TV was already on. “Coming up next on ‘World of Mystery,’” a voice said, “our investigators probe the terrifying world of UFO abductions. Is the phenomena just mass hysteria, or is it something ALL TOO REAL? And after that, on the ten o’clock news…” I grabbed the VCR’s remote control, punched the record and pause buttons, and waited.
My mother handed me a plate and took her seat beside me. She had changed into terry cloth shorts. A spray of thin blue veins branched up the side of her leg. Trapped among the veins, the red dot of a mosquito bite.
“It’s on,” she said, and the program started. The show’s producers obviously favored style over substance. Eerie synthesizer music comprised the soundtrack, which I loved; the visuals, however, were corny. The first person interviewed, an elderly man from Michigan, claimed a spacecraft had kidnapped him when he was a boy. As his shaky voice narrated, the screen displayed a soft-focus “interior” of a “UFO”: a silver table, an array of lights, and a tray laden with misshapen surgical instruments. “They stuck the damned probe into my stomach,” the man’s voice said. On screen, a blurry hand, which I figured was a kid’s in a wrinkly gray glove, reached for an object shaped like a small silver wishbone. The hand guided it toward a belly button.
Four others were interviewed: a young married couple, a sculptor who decorated his house with life-size replicas of the beings who’d examined him, and a Polish woman who’d been abducted not long after her immigration. The latter woman’s eyes teared when she told of the “horrible, unspeakable acts” the aliens had performed on her. “Get to Avalyn,” I said to the TV. “There’s only fifteen minutes left.”
After a stretch of commercials, the show resumed. The camera panned across a flat, sunlit field, obviously Kansas, where a woman played with a polka-dotted mutt. “It’s her,” I said. Avalyn tossed a ball, and the dog retrieved it. “She looks exactly the same as her picture.”
“She’s sort of homely,” my mother said. “She seems sad, as if no one’s ever loved her.”
According to the lead-in, Avalyn Friesen lived on the outskirts of the farming community of Inman, Kansas. She’d never married, and her brother and mother were both deceased. She shared a small log cabin with her father, and she worked as a secretary at the local grain company. She was thirty-two. The everyday details of her life ended there. “But there is something special about Avalyn, something beyond ordinary experience,” the narrator said. “For as long as she can remember, strange things have happened to her, things she cannot explain.”
The camera centered on Avalyn in a rocking chair. Sunlight angled through a window behind her, illuminating a fourth of her face. I could see a corner of her house; hardback books lined a shelf behind her, and a posse of stuffed animals scattered an end table. She sipped from a coffee mug and began to speak.
“I was always scared whenever I watched movies about UFOs,” Avalyn said. “Even E.T. horrified me. I wasn’t sure why. And one day I saw this book in the grocery store by Ren Bloomfield. In it, he talked about people who’ve had experiences with missing time, pieces of their lives they can’t account for. I’d had so many of those. I contacted Ren, and the rest, I guess, is history.”
During the next part of Avalyn’s story, the camera alternated between its gaze on Avalyn’s face and another soft-focus re-creation of her tale. The music swelled, keyboards tinkling a high melody.
“Ren flew to Wichita to meet me. He wound up conducting our first hypnotic regression session. Surprisingly, the stuff just started pouring out of me. Over the next months, I wound up remembering the more-than-twenty times I’ve been abducted.”
I could feel my mother watching me. Outside the window behind the TV, the night sky deepened its smooth, starless black.
“The first time it happened, I was six years old. This was back in 1964 or so. I’d gone on a picnic with my twin brother and my grandparents in Coffeyville. It was getting dark, and I remember Grandpa driving down a dirt road. There was this blinding light behind us that got brighter and brighter.” Bluish white beams strobed across the television square, and I thought about our own UFO, so long ago. The TV framed my mother’s face with that familiar blue.
“Teddy and I turned around in the backseat to see where all that bright was coming from. Suddenly the car swerved off to the ditch and Grandpa made this sound like ‘huh?’ like he had no control over it. The light surrounded the car, a whole ocean of it. It was jewellike and unlike the regular lights you’d see in a regular house. Well the next thing I remembered, at least for the next twenty-three years or so, was my grandparents driving back into the driveway, and my parents waiting there for us, saying where have you been, you’re three hours late, you could have at least called.
“So under hypnosis I found this out: the aliens only chose me to examine. My grandparents and my brother Teddy stayed in the car, unmoving, their eyes closed like they were asleep or frozen in some sort of suspended animation, as Ren calls it. But I floated right up out of the backseat and into the mouth of this disc-shaped ship.”
The synthesizer music swirled, and a pink-dressed girl appeared on screen, an actress in the role of the young Avalyn. The girl bit her lip. Her eyes darted back and forth, and her pigtails shot behind her head like a pair of blond horns. The girl screeched. “Creepy,” my mother said.
“Under hypnosis,” Avalyn continued, “I remembered lying on a table, all silvery white and smooth like Formica. A group of aliens surrounded me. They carried little silvery boxes, out of which they pulled thin tubes and instruments, like things a dentist would use. They were bald with huge marshmallowy heads and tiny arms that appeared as if they didn’t have an ounce of muscle in them. The fingers were cold and didn’t feel human at all. But the worst things about them were their eyes: big black diamonds is the closest description I can give, only instead of hard like diamonds they were all jellylike and liquidy.”
“Yes,” I said, answering her, as if she were speaking only to me.
Avalyn’s interview ended there. The narrator reappeared to describe how many victims of abduction, Avalyn included, were often “tracked”-aliens inserted devices into a person’s brain, nose, stomach, foot, wherever, making it easier to locate the person later. “Humans become guinea pigs,” the narrator said, “with the extraterrestrials coming back for them at various times in their lives, conducting ongoing experiments. One might think that the person is free after the first abduction. But that isn’t always the case in this world, the ‘World of Mystery.’” A hasty summary followed. The camera zoomed in on a spaceship, moving closer and closer to its rays of white, until the entire screen drowned in light.
Before falling asleep, I thought about how repercussions from a single incident had shaped Avalyn Friesen’s entire life. And the more I considered Avalyn, the more I considered my own life. The idea of abduction made perfect sense. It had first happened on a night more than one decade past: I had opened my eyes to find myself curled in a dark corner of the crawl space, five hours erased from my mind. And if the theory of aliens “tracking” humans was true, I reasoned I was a victim of that as well. My nose had been bleeding that night because of the tracking device the extraterrestrials had jammed deep into my brain. Two years later they had returned to find me again, on that Halloween night when I’d blacked out in the woods beside the haunted house. I was almost nineteen now. Was the tracking device still embedded in my brain like a tiny silver tumor? What other times, I wondered, had I been abducted? Were there other encounters so deeply buried in my mind I hadn’t the slightest memory? And would the aliens reappear to find me again?
I waited until the following Sunday to tell my mother my theory. We were returning from Hutchinson, after the grocery shopping and ice cream. The Fourth of July was approaching, and merchants had fashioned fireworks stands on the roadsides, multicolored banners and signs flapping in the breeze.
I began by discussing stories I’d read about other UFO abductees, and I gave my voice as matter-of-fact a tone as I could muster. Then I spoke of myself. “The fact is,” I said, “that we still don’t know, we’ve never known, what happened to me when I was little. But that was so close in time to the night we saw the UFO. I’m wondering now, no, I’m certain, that those two nights are connected somehow. Connected also, maybe, to my blackout on the Halloween night a couple years after that.” I paused. “And watching that show about Avalyn made me realize how similar my story is to hers.”
My mother nodded hesitantly. I wiped ice cream from my mouth and continued. “Don’t you think it might be true? I mean the whole alien bit?”
We passed another fireworks stand. Two separate families gathered around it, leaning over the colored boxes. “Maybe,” my mother said. She spoke slowly, as if maybe were a foreign word she wasn’t certain how to pronounce. “Maybe.” She gripped the steering wheel, veins visible on her wrist.
I started to speak again, but she cut me off. “Some memories,” she said, “take time to clarify.”
I knew then that my mother had at least opened her mind to the possibility that my theory was true. I knew she would support whatever move I made next. She would stay beside me until I solved it. Even if to solve meant to lose another block of time, to slip into the unknown world where I was certain they’d taken me before.
In a cabinet drawer at home, I found a package of stationery and envelopes my father had given my mother years ago. Lilacs and daisies garlanded each page. The stationery seemed like something Avalyn would cherish. I made sure the pen’s ink wouldn’t smudge; that my handwriting remained steady. Then I carefully wrote “Avalyn Friesen, Rural Route #2, Inman KS ” on an envelope. I found her zip code in the telephone book.
I selected a piece of the paper. I wouldn’t leave anything out-I wanted Avalyn to know about the crawl space, our UFO sighting that same summer, the strange blackout on that later Halloween. I wanted to confess everything to her.
“Dear Avalyn,” I wrote. “You don’t know me, but…” In my mind, a spacey voice finished the sentence. You will, it said.
Neil McCormick was turning me into a criminal, and I loved it. Our new hobby: thrift store theft. In the month since graduation, we’d generated a wealth of secondhand books, housewares, and enough clothes for an army. School was over forever; crime seemed the only thing left to do.
Our favorite target was the United Methodist Thrift on First Street. On that particular Friday in June, I eyed a barely worn pair of combat boots, but I wasn’t about to pay the twenty-dollar price. Neil distracted the clerk by complimenting her bleached flip, which even a two-year-old could have guessed was a wig. He also bullshitted about central Kansas ’s recent rain and hailstorms. “I’ve begun to worry about flooding,” I heard the woman say. He had her in his spell. I shuffled toward the back of the store, removed the boots from the rack, and kicked off my ragged high-tops.
One important shoplifting rule I’d learned from Neil was to simultaneously buy something else to erase all suspicion. I watched him drop a rubber snake on the clerk’s counter. “Ninety-nine cents,” she said. While he dug through his pockets for change, I saw my chance. I concentrated on the clerk’s face and telepathically transmitted Center all your attention on the cash register. It worked, and I moseyed out the door. “Stop back in, boys,” the clerk yelled.
Neil and I got into his gas-guzzling Impala and tore from the parking lot to begin our daily cruise around the city. I’d only lived in Hutchinson four months, but I already knew enough to hate the place. How else could I feel about a city bordered by the following attractions: to the west, a meat-packing plant; the north, a boring space museum; the east, a maximum security prison; and the south, “The World’s Longest Grain Elevator”? In Modesto, I’d had a scattering of friends who shared the same interests in music and were queer like me. Here, I only had Neil.
I spat on a finger to shine the boots. I untucked my shirt, revealing the wadded-up gloves and the belt I also stole. “I could get arrested,” I said.
“Stealing’s the least of my evils.” His voice was thick with pride. I’d become a thief with him, but I knew I could never hustle. The idea of taking money from men for sex unnerved me; in addition, I didn’t have the looks, the irresistibility I knew Neil used to every advantage.
“If you’re free tonight,” Neil said, “you can come to the ballpark with me.” Neil worked Friday nights and weekends as announcer and scorekeeper for tournaments at another of Hutchinson ’s lamebrained attractions, Sun Center. KANSAS ’S LARGEST HAVEN FOR SOFTBALL FUN, its glitzy signs screamed. I hated that place. On the previous weekend, I’d joined him in his press box. We got high, and I pierced his earlobe with a safety pin and a fistful of ice cubes. We practically ruptured our stomachs laughing at all the morons.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, which meant yes.
Neil’s elbow jutted from his open window, the full weight of the sun’s rays slamming into his skin. It was only June, but he had begun to turn as dark as milk chocolate. A fitting simile, since that was a staple of his diet. While he drove, Neil tore the foil from another half-melted Hershey’s. He bit a corner off. He held the bar toward my face: its shape was the spitting image of my new home state.
I pointed to the center of the chocolate Kansas. “Here we are, stuck in the middle of hell.”
“But not for long,” he said. “In my case, anyway.” Soon, in August, Neil would be moving, leaving the Midwest for New York. Now, he was biding his time, coasting until his life would begin again. He would abandon me in Hutchinson ’s dust.
Neil turned onto a shady avenue, his car winding its way toward my grandparents’ trailer park. When we got there, I spied Grandma and Grandpa in the yard, pruning a bush with flowers like red-skinned fists. “The grannies are home,” I said. “Let’s go to your house.”
Neil made a U. He smiled at me and took a last bite from the chocolate bar. The look on his face suggested he’d never tasted anything so perfect.
After my parents’ accident, I’d moved from Modesto to Hutchinson to live with my grandparents. I spent my first day in Kansas in my new school’s vice principal’s office, filling out forms, enrolling in classes that paralleled the ones I’d taken in California. American government, senior English, advanced art-everything seemed unnecessary. I scribbled my name on countless papers. On each page, someone had thoughtfully blacked out the spaces designated for parents’ signatures. “All done.” I handed a secretary the finished forms. Her eyes, which darted from my clothes to my expertly applied eyeliner to the dyed spikes of my haircut, couldn’t fathom how to feel sorry for such a freak. I trudged to the hall, dreading every moment.
There he stood: Neil, jamming books into his locker. His looks were faultless. He had lips so pouty they might have been swollen; brown eyes; brows that met in his forehead’s center. His angular nose, chin, and cheekbones seemed sculpted by an ecstatic, mescaline-fueled god. His hair was the color of onyx. Everyone else seemed to be avoiding him. When he saw me watching, he smirked. That smirk delivered me from hopelessness.
Later that week I learned his name; I also heard the word fag used in the same breath. We shared two classes. During discussion in American government, I stared at him instead of the Bill of Rights notes that Mr. Stein scribbled across the blackboard. After school, Neil would rush to his Impala, as if fleeing a burning building. He was sometimes accompanied by a shady-eyed kid named Christopher. They’d drive off, oblivious of me, and I’d walk home. Those first few nights, I fell asleep imagining what he looked like naked.
It didn’t take long to discover that being a queer in a Kansas high school was a world of difference from being one in California. I learned to proceed with caution. After two weeks, I spied Neil hanging out with this “Christopher” in the park on the south side of town, a place I’d heard through various grapevines was notorious as queer cruising ground. He wore sunglasses and a cantaloupe-colored windbreaker. As I later wrote in my journal, Neil would have “averted my eyes from an uncapped grenade.” I assumed that a young guy in Carey Park was strange, because I’d only seen the over-forty crowd there.
I’ll never forget the smug expression on Neil’s face as I drove by in my grandparents’ powder blue Gremlin. It was as though Neil knew he’d wind up sleeping with me.
Neil waved, and I blushed. I sped home.
The next day, he turned toward me in American government. He briefly appeared as if he would spit or swear. Then he grinned. He pointed to my exam; held up his. We’d both gotten D pluses.
“You forgot to answer the Brown v. Board of Education question,” I said. I injected my voice with all the cockiness I could muster. “At least I wrote something down.”
“You stare at me a lot,” he said. “I’m Neil.”
“I know.”
His bangs fell in his eyes, and he angled his head to shake them away. “Is your mother aware of where you were yesterday?”
“My mother’s dead,” I said.
He didn’t flinch. I liked that.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “I would have moved eventually anyway. Sooner or later they would have kicked me out of school. My friends and I started some fires, did some vandalism.”
That was a slight exaggeration, but Neil seemed impressed. He told me I had guts for dressing like I did at such a backward high school. On that particular day, I was packed into tight black jeans. The usual cross dangled from my neck. My T-shirt, massacred with rips, featured Christ’s stigmataed hand reaching from a thunderhead toward an amazed crowd. Neil touched JC’s dripping nail hole. He winked. A girl in a cheerleader’s uniform rolled her eyes, as if she’d seen this process a billion times before.
Neil and I skipped last hour. We headed for the parking lot, where Christopher was waiting. “See you later,” Neil yelled to him, not bothering to introduce us. He showed me his Impala, and I crawled in. Although it was a chilly March day, we bought tutti-frutti ices from the 7-Eleven. We whizzed toward my grandparents’ house, which by that time I was calling my house as well.
No one was around. I shut the door to my room, and Neil stood there, staring heavenward. What could have been so engaging about a mobile home’s waterstained ceiling? Curious, I looked up too, and that’s when he pinned me against the wall. He kissed me. His mouth was extra cold and wet, as if his tongue were a chunk of pink ice. We took all of ten minutes to get our clothes off.
It’s not the actual sex I remember best. It’s what he said to me after we’d finished. Neil toweled off, slipped his underwear back on, and sat at my bed’s edge. He asked when I would turn nineteen, and I answered December. Then he looked away, smiling. “That makes you younger than me,” he said. “What a novelty.”
As it turned out, “novelty” wasn’t a bad word to describe our sex. We only fooled around a couple of times after that, but I soon discovered that Neil’s major focus was older men-preferably, ones with cash. Strangely though, he didn’t discard me; since his pal Wendy had moved to New York, he claimed, he only had Christopher and his mom to hang out with. “But Chris has serious problems,” he explained, “and my mom’s not around much.”
What the hell, I thought: I didn’t have friends, either.
The air in Neil’s neighborhood smelled like hamburgers and split hot dogs, like lighter fluid and barbecue sauce. It was an odor of permanence and familial bliss. After he parked the Impala, we jumped out and ran for his front door, if only to get away from that smell and into somewhere familiar and cool.
Neil’s mom was at work. She had left the windows open, the door unlocked. “What this means,” he announced, “is we can watch porno on the VCR.” I followed him to his room. On the wall, a framed photo showed Wendy, the best friend I’d yet to meet. The sides of her head were shaved, the rest matted into worm-slender dreadlocks and pulled back into a ponytail. She’d autographed the photo’s bottom like a movie star. Beneath her was Neil’s nightstand, littered with small hills of pennies, a dead violet-winged butterfly, and two trophies he won in Little League years ago. MOST RBIS, SUMMER 1981, the gold plaque on one of them read. A towel was wadded on the floor. It reeked of sex, and I wondered if the dried sperm on its surface was Neil’s or the memento of some middle-aged trick he’d brought to this very room. I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
Neil reached under his bed’s mattress and retrieved a key. He unlocked his bottom dresser drawer, his back blocking it. He closed the drawer and turned. He held a videotape in one hand, a bag of pot in the other. We shuffled to the front room.
The movie, an old one, starred men with mustaches and an abundance of body hair. There was substantial fucking, but not a condom in sight. Neil and I sat at opposite ends of his sofa, not touching ourselves or each other. “Here’s my number one scene,” he said. A beefy ranch owner entered a barn, only to find a young ranch hand bound and gagged, pleading for mercy. The ranch owner untied, caressed, then seduced him. Their sex gradually transformed from tender to ferocious. At one point, the pale skin on the young guy’s ass grew streaked with red welts. The film ended with ranch owner once again holding ranch hand in his glistening, tanned arms.
After the credits, I poured two glasses of lemonade from a pitcher in Neil’s refrigerator. His mother had left a cherry-colored lipstick trace on the pitcher’s rim. The air conditioner’s cool wasn’t enough, and Neil plugged the cord from a portable fan into a socket. My hair whipped back, and I smelled the black dye job from the previous day. The smell was identical to the antiseptic odor of the Modesto Funeral Home. I made a mental note to wash my hair again before I joined Neil at Sun Center.
Neil ejected the tape and inserted a horror film called Suspiria. “I’ve seen this one hundreds of times. It’s great, but if I fall asleep it’s your job to wake me. I have to be at work by six.”
I sat at an angle that offered a view of his face. In the opening segment, a hairy hand repeatedly stabbed a woman’s chest; the camera closed in on her heart as the knife torpedoed it. The hand tugged a noose around the woman’s throat; tossed her through stained glass. Neil stared at the screen. His expression was identical to the one he’d worn during Rawhide.
“Defenestration,” I said. “‘The act of throwing someone through a window.’” I knew a lot of words like that.
Neil stretched out, his foot brushing my hand. I wondered what he would do if I said, “I want to move to New York, too.” If I said, “I’m falling into uncontrollable love with you.” Save it for your journal, I told myself.
We got stoned, and half an hour passed. More murders and mayhem. I glanced back at Neil and discovered he’d fallen asleep. A feeble red vein branched across his eyelid. Behind it, his eyeballs darted and wobbled, surveying the details of a dream I doubted would feature me. I concentrated, attempting to psychically drive a message into Neil’s brain: Hi. Although I’ve known you nearly four months, a large chunk of your life remains as strange and enigmatic as one of those unidentified people the authorities found in that circus fire I recently read about, their faces burned beyond recognition. The mystery that surrounds you only makes me love you more. Oh well, what can I do? I leaned over Neil’s ear, wanting to kiss it, but instead whispering against the skin, “Sweet dreams.”
In the film, an hysterical woman crawled through an open window, only to drop headfirst into a roomful of twisted barbed wire. That’s precisely how I feel right now, I thought. When her screams grew too loud, I muted the volume and watched him sleep.
I arrived at Sun Center to find Neil positioned in his press box. He wore white, his shirt wounded with gray sweat stains. On a table in front of him were pencils, a score pad, and a microphone, its mouthpiece covered with a red foam ball that made it look obscene. He listened to a portable stereo playing music from a tape I’d made him, one I’d labeled “Depressing Shit.” Genuine pain racked the singer’s voice. “Ooh, you’re still standing in my shadow.”
“Hello, hello,” Neil said. He revealed a bottle he’d been concealing beneath his chair. Vodka. I wondered if his mom would notice it missing, or if she would care. “Now shut that door behind you before someone spies this.”
I sat beside him. From the press box vantage point, I could see nearly all of Sun Center. There was the gleaming white of the powdered chalk, its straight lines trailing to first and third base, its batter’s box rectangles and on-deck circles. The dugouts, each tagged with a sign displaying the team’s name, each with a mammoth orange cooler filled with water. The rubber of home plate and the pitcher’s mound, the base paths scarred by players’ cleats; the outfield that shone with a green so vibrant I wished I could view it on acid.
The night’s opening game was about to start. The teams took their places on the diamond. The players’ wives and friends sat on the bleachers, most drinking from beer cans, shoving burgers or hot dogs into their mouths.
Neil took a swig from the vodka bottle, then clicked on the microphone. He lowered his voice to sound “official,” “professional,” or some other adjective he assigned to his expected job performance. I, however, could see right through it: he thought it all a big joke. “Welcome to Sun Center,” he said. Some softball-adoring morons glanced up at us, and I scooted my seat back so I wouldn’t be seen. Neil continued. “The first game of the Men’s Class C Divisional Tournament features First National Bank, out of McPherson, against Auto-Electric, from Hutchinson.”
The umpire, a man wearing a light blue shirt over his beer gut, turned and gave the okay signal. “Play ball,” said Neil.
The first inning dragged by. In seconds I was bored. Neil and I passed the bottle between us, waiting for something hilarious to happen. “Watch this.” He clicked the mike. “Ward is the batter, with Knackstedt on deck,” he said, giving extra emphasis on the K in the latter name.
A man in the bleachers’ top row shot up from his seat. He was the typical softball moron, dressed in his straw hat, his yellow-framed sunglasses, his black socks with jogging shoes. He turned, glaring at Neil. “It’s Nock-Shtitt,” the man pronounced. He shook a noisemaker at us, one he’d brought in case his chosen team won the game. Neil gave the okay sign, and the man sat back down.
Nock-Shtitt flied out to left field. End of inning. I felt like saying, He couldn’t hit worth shtitt, but just as I opened my mouth, Neil’s mike clicked again. “No runs, no hits, no errors,” he said. “After one full inning of play, the score is First National Bank zero, Auto-Electric zero.” He reached for the keyboard to the electronic scoring device and punched a button. I looked toward the left field fence; on the scoreboard, the inning changed from one to two.
While I sipped from the bottle, Neil pointed out men he thought handsome. During game number two, he said, “Look at that one,” indicating the third baseman. “Oh, baby.” At first I thought he was kidding. The guy had huge sideburns, a toast-colored mustache, and a bald spot the circumference of a hubcap. “I’d have him for free,” Neil said.
A player hit a foul ball. I watched it loop over the fence, bounce into the parking lot, and disappear beneath a Jeep. “Please bring all foul balls to the press box,” Neil said into the mike.
Seconds later, there was a knock on the door behind us. “Enter.” The door opened, and a boy stepped into the box, his hair cropped short, sweatbands cuffing his wrists. He presented the grass-stained ball to Neil, cupping it in both hands like something sacred. “My daddy hit this,” he said.
Neil reached into a box beside the scoreboard buttons. Inside were wrapped pieces of bubble gum and some shiny dimes. “What do you prefer, little man?” I’d never seen Neil around a kid before. He’d seemed the type who would ignore or torture them, but that wasn’t the case. He shifted his eyes from the game and scrubbed at the boy’s hair. “Will it be the money or the bubbles?” The boy shuffled forward to get a better look at his choices, and Neil patted his shoulder. “I’ll decide for you,” he said. He held out three dimes and five pieces of gum. The boy took them, the smile practically cracking his tiny face, and scampered out.
“When kids do well, you’ve got to reward them.” Neil looked back to the game. “Jesus, look at that catcher’s ass.”
The second game was ending, and Neil and I were drunk. His fingers drummed the vodka bottle in time to the music. I wanted to kiss him, but that part of our relationship was over. In the sky, a low-flying plane trailed a banner that advertised something, its letters unreadable in the waning light.
On the drive home, I could only think about Neil. If what I felt was love, it had happened unexpectedly, like a slap from a stranger or a hailstorm of cherries from a cloudless sky. We’re supposed to be just friends, I told myself. He likes only older men. I stepped on the Gremlin’s accelerator, figuring the best thing to do was get home and write some really fucked-up, drunken lines of poetry in my journal. I was contemplating moronic possible poem titles-“Raining Tears of Blood”; “The Bottomless Pit Called Me”-when I zoomed through a red light. I didn’t see the pickup. I slammed into its back end.
I sat there, dazed. I took a breath, paused, breathed again. I carefully rearranged my thoughts. A picture of my mom and dad took shape in my mind, and I forced it back into some far, neglected corner. I’m alive, I thought. They weren’t so lucky.
The pickup was illegally parked alongside Fourth Street, in front of an apartment complex. In the apartment’s lot, partygoers whooped it up, speakers blaring an old Led Zeppelin tune at top volume. I picked out the words “woman,” “baby,” and “shake that thing.” I waited, but the music didn’t cease. No one came cussing or flailing out. Gradually, the fact dawned on me that I’d hit the windshield. The glass had spiderwebbed.
I felt an ache in my forehead, like a hot scalpel along my right eyebrow. I guessed no one had witnessed the wreck, because I sat for minutes without anyone approaching. Fingers of steam plumed from the new bend in the car’s hood. I thought of Neil, less than a mile away in his press box, as drunk as me but unscathed.
I touched my head, swiped away some blood. The sight of it made me strangely happy. I shifted into reverse. When I tried to move, the Gremlin’s wreckage caught a little on the pickup’s back end. “I am so fucking wasted,” a partygoer’s voice declared over the Led Zeppelin. I waited for the guitar solo to crescendo, then revved the engine. The car separated from the pickup. I steered back onto Fourth and headed home.
The next afternoon, I woke and realized it was true: without warning, I’d fallen in love with Neil McCormick. It was a doomed, impulsive, and criminal sort of love. I felt the vicious effects of both vodka and accident, and in the mirror I saw the purplish black crescent beneath my eye. It would turn purpler and blacker. I touched a peroxide-soaked cotton ball to the eyelid, and the sting made me flinch. “I’m the ugliest son of a bitch on earth,” I said in my best Clint Eastwood.
It was raining outside. Soggy leaves fell everywhere, clinging to my bedroom window, their greens already sunburned to yellows. I telephoned Neil, hoping the sudden storm had temporarily postponed Sun Center ’s tournaments. He picked up; drowsily answered, “Yeah?”
“I take it they canceled the games,” I said.
“Praise the lord.” On his end of the line, his mother was singing along to a TV jingle.
I asked if he wanted to hang out. He coughed and said, “I don’t feel too hot. I think I’ll sleep most of the day. Call me later.” Click.
Grandma waddled around the kitchen, grilling cheese sandwiches. She had skewered black olives on each finger like ten miniature hats, and she periodically bit them off. She spooned a kidney-size wad of butter onto a plate and dipped a slice of bread. “Yummy,” I said. My head was ready to implode.
She regarded my eye, one olived finger on her chin. “You’ve been hurt.”
“Um, yeah.” I figured as little as my grandparents used the Gremlin, they wouldn’t notice the damage. I let my tongue spew forth the lie. “Last night, I was so tired, while visiting Neil, I stumbled down the steps leading to his Sun Center press box. Nothing else was hurt, but oddly enough I landed face first on one of the steps…” Grandma wrapped three ice cubes in a paper towel and held it to my eye. When I used to have headaches, my mom would do the same thing.
After lunch, I went back to sleep. I didn’t wake until the early evening, crawling from bed into a graceless and disarranged world. I waited for it to arrange itself again, then found my journal.
A Saturday night, and I’d spent the entire day at home. I wrote the word BORED across the top of a page. Then I wrote LONESOME, decorating each letter with art deco swirls. “Better get used to it,” I said aloud. “He won’t be here forever.”
Seven o’clock, eight. The rain stopped, but it was still cloudy. I watched the claustrophobic trailer park from my window. The neighbor family, replete with mom and dad, obviously couldn’t wait for Independence Day. They touched cigarettes to firecrackers, tossing them toward the street. Their two children applauded as Roman candles spat pebbles of red and blue over their trailer. I picked at the dinner plate Grandpa had brought to my room, forking the cornbread, hominy, and butternut squash into a colorless mash.
When my grandparents retired to the TV room, I ran a wet comb through my hair, took another gander at my eye, and said, “What the hell.” The mobile home’s door slammed behind me. The neighbor family turned their heads to look, and I strutted toward the car.
I drove the familiar route, imagining how Hutchinson would look on fire. The Impala wasn’t parked in Neil’s drive, but I tried anyway, ringing Neil’s doorbell one, two, three times. No answer. I prepared to jam my finger into the bell a fourth time when I noticed the note, written on a small grocery list that bore the logo of the store where his mom worked, attached to the screen with electrician’s tape. The note’s edges harbored thumbprints of milk chocolate. He hadn’t addressed it to either his mom or me. It read: “G-At Sun Center. There all night due to rain delays. Meet me @ 10ish. You won’t regret it.-N.”
G? I thought. And “won’t regret” what? My answer wasn’t hard to figure. “He’s hustling again,” I whispered.
The sky was almost dark, the sun leaving an umber residue across the bank of clouds to the west. Below them, Sun Center’s stadium lights glowed in a silvery nimbus which, if I hadn’t hated the place so much, I might have found beautiful. I returned to the wounded Gremlin and hightailed it over there.
By the time I arrived, the rain had begun again. Under the ballpark’s lights, it looked like billions of needles. No games were in session. The bleachers had emptied, save for a few random fools under umbrellas. The players huddled in dugouts. On each diamond, ground crews layered the infields with shimmering tarpaulin, skittering from base to base to secure its blue corners.
The rain drenched me, plastering my hair to my head, and I smelled the black dye again. I took the stairs that led to Neil’s press box three at a time, half-knowing what I’d find. Then I stood on tiptoe to peer into his window. I saw Neil’s shiny black hair, the top of his ear, his closed eyes. He sat in his scorer’s chair. Mmmm, his voice said, the sound as lazy and as one-step-shy-of-genuine as the noises the actors in his porn films made. Then another head-G’s, I assumed-entered the square frame of the window: this one nearly bald, a neck so sunburned it looked smeared with scarlet paint. I couldn’t see the face. The head kissed Neil, then moved down, out of the frame. I heard an audible slurp. Neil’s eyes opened, his gaze locked on wherever the head had maneuvered itself.
Below, between the diamonds, a softball player cowered beneath an umbrella. As I moved away from the window, the player stared up at me. “Are the games called off or aren’t they?” he asked through the pounding rain. I shrugged and walked back to the stairs. I could hear muffled car doors slamming, people yelling good-byes. None of them knew that nearby an eighteen-year-old boy was receiving a blow job from another in a long list of johns. I wondered about the sunburned man’s age; how much he’d negotiated to pay. Mud bubbles splattered the boots Neil had helped me shoplift, and I deliberately stomped through puddles until I reached the car.
Before I left, I squinted back at the shadow of Neil’s press box. I won’t deny I love you, but you’re basically an asshole. I doubted he’d receive the message.
I couldn’t stomach the trailer park, so I detoured toward North Monroe. I needed to hurt him somehow, to raze and weaken him, or, as I suddenly longed to scribble down as the line of a poem, “to scissor through the starched gristle of his heart.” Looking back, all that seems senseless-I’d known all along Neil was a hustler, understood I had no hold on him. But to know it was happening was one thing. To see it was another.
I ran through the rain to Neil’s front door and tore away his note. I reread it, wadded it, aimed for a puddle and pitched it. When I tried the door, it was unlocked.
The house reeked from Neil’s mom’s cooking, in this case a dish she’d obviously sprinkled with too much cumin. In the kitchen corner’s trash can, charred onions and beans rested beside a recipe card marked MULLIGATAWNY. I hurried through the hall and opened Neil’s bedroom door.
The place appeared virtually the same as the day before; Neil’s sheet twisted into a new configuration, and he’d spilled some pot across his night stand. Yet things seemed different. I danced around the room, toppling stacks of tapes, kicking pillows, shoes, letters from Wendy. I pushed the lamp from the table. It knocked against the floor with the vacant clunk I imagined a decapitated head would make when striking pavement. I ruined his meticulous stacks of pennies. I closed my fist around a baseball trophy, the points and ridges from the tiny gold figurine’s face cutting into my palm. “Most RBIs, Summer 1981,” I screamed, my voice raising with each syllable, and on the “eighty-ONE!” I flung the trophy at the wall. It didn’t break. I ran toward it as if it might scurry off, then threw it again. No luck.
The key, I thought.
It was still under the mattress. It burned its forbidden shape into my hand, catching a ray from the streetlights outside Neil’s window. It turned easily in the dresser drawer’s lock.
The drawer’s contents were divided into two sections. On the left were wads of bills-I noticed tens and twenties among the fives and ones-plus pills, acid tabs, a bag of pot. The right side contained a thick stack of things. Rawhide rode the top of the mountain. I brushed aside some random pieces of paper, skimming through an unintelligible letter from Christopher Ortega and a torn Panthers baseball line-up, the name “McCormick” fourth from top. Finally, I pulled out what looked to be an enviable collection of porno books and magazines.
Neil’s magazines were beyond belief. I couldn’t venture a guess where he’d gotten them. Most boasted glossy, hardcore photo spreads of rough-looking men. I recognized one guy as the ranch hand from the movie; once again, he was being dominated by a mustached muscleman. The others had similar appearances. But these pictorials of older guys sucking and fucking were tame compared to the magazines at the bottom of Neil’s stack. In one, the photos were so amateurish they seemed taken during a tornado. Bracelets and cummerbunds of leather secured a young boy to a wall. In the magazine below it, a grinning, obese man paired up with a different boy, this one sporting closely cut blond hair and freckles. On the cover, under the title of “Free Range Chicken,” the handcuffed preteen knelt before the man. The kid’s jeans bunched at his ankles. I turned the pages, skimming the photos, and saw an arm with an anchor tattoo wrapped around the kid’s body; an erect adult dick pressing against the kid’s obviously terrified face; a close-up of two stubby thumbs as they meticulously separated the kid’s ass like the seam of an overripe peach.
I replaced the stuff as I’d found it. I picked up the trophy again, threw it, watched it fall to the floor and bounce. I wanted to open my mouth and scream. I needed a soundtrack for my rage. There was a tape in Neil’s stereo, so I turned up the volume and pressed play.
I scattered more pennies, gave more kicks to the pillow, and then stopped. Slowly, the things I heard came into strange, acute focus. I had expected Neil’s tape to be some earsplitting, rhythm-heavy band with just the right brand of self-possessed and mournful lyrics to match my mood. But the tape wasn’t playing music at all. Two people spoke in voices I didn’t recognize, the voices of a man and a little boy. The boy giggled, and weird buzzes and blips echoed in the background like noises from a cartoon. This one’s going to be a good one, the boy said. Pause. Then I heard a burp, an extended hiccup at once obscene and undeniably cute. It was the burp, I thought, of a prince in the guise of a toad, of an angel on the outs in Heaven.
That was a bi-i-i-ig motherfucking burp, the older voice on the tape said. Go ahead, into the microphone. Say it.
The child took a deep breath. That was a big motherfucking burp. The kid giggled again, and the adult joined him. In the midst of their laughter, I heard another high-pitched bleep, and I recognized the noise as the sound effect from a video game I’d played years ago. Pac-Man, I thought. No, Frogger. There was a recorded rustling and a bump, as if an arm had brushed the microphone, and at that second I remembered Neil, just yesterday, leaning over his mike at Sun Center, the mouthpiece padded with red foam.
I knew the identity of the child on the tape. It was in the warped vowel of the boy’s fuck, the lilt of his giggle. I loved that voice. Whether then or now, I would know it, and I would love it.
The tape’s voices paused again, and within that silence I heard someone moving in the house. My first thought was, burglar; my next, more realistic, was, Neil. I leaped up, clicked the stereo off, and took the tape out. Written on its label was NEIL M.-JULY 81. It wasn’t Neil’s handwriting. I shuffled to the dresser drawer, slammed it, and returned the key to its precise hiding place.
“Neil?” someone asked, and a shadow entered the room. It was his mom. “Whatever’s going on in here, I have to ask you to keep it down a little, because-” She stopped, seeing I wasn’t her son.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
I put my hands in my pockets, then took them out again. Mrs. McCormick bit her bottom lip. Her face was shiny and apologetic. “I thought you were Neil,” she said. “But that’s okay.” She surveyed the room’s damage, then glanced at my hands, perhaps checking if I was armed.
“There was a fight,” I said. I took the trophy from the floor and replaced it on the table. “I went slightly crazy, I guess. Now it’s time to clean up.” I reached toward the penny avalanche. “The ball games are still going out there. Neil’s great at that job, you know.” I sat on the bed and began stacking the pennies, one after the other, rebuilding the gleaming copper tower on the night stand.
Mrs. McCormick found some letters I’d scattered and put them on Neil’s dresser. A photograph fell from one, and Wendy’s face smiled out, two fingers raised in peace. Neil’s mom saw the picture and watched it, her eyebrows raised. Her movements were labored and effusive, as if she’d just crawled from a sea of bourbon.
“I need to fall asleep,” I said. “I’m so tired.” I wasn’t, really. Somewhere outside the house, a cricket chirped. “Kansas is horrible. All it does is rain here. School is over at last. Do you think my hair color is too severe? Neil won’t give me an honest answer.” These words meant nothing to either of us. I had to say it. “Oh, yeah, I’m in love with him.”
Neil’s mom didn’t look away from the floor. I sat on the bed, and she sat beside me. She inhaled sharply three times, and for a moment I believed she would cry. What did she know about the voices on the tape? What did she know about Neil’s current whereabouts?
“Why are you telling me this,” she said. “I’m his mom.”
“My parents used to claim the word love was useless, that people say it too often.”
Mrs. McCormick hadn’t heard me. “You think I’m drunk.” Something sour and oily covered her voice. “You think I’m drunk, but I’m not. I’m perfectly sober.” In the darkness, she had her son’s precise features: his full lips, his jagged bangs.
Outside, a car sped past, its radio wailing a song from before I was born. I watched the dresser drawer as if it might fly open. “My parents are dead,” I said. Neil’s mom lay back on the bed and patted the space next to her, a signal she wanted me to join her. The thought of doing that terrified me. “I have to go,” I said, or perhaps I thought I said it. I stared at the figurine on Neil’s trophy, its repulsive grin beneath the gold cap. And then I left. Neil’s mom didn’t see me to the door.
At home, I took my journal outside and sat in the damp garden grass. The trailer park gave off an eerie glow, as if it were the chosen setting for an upcoming miracle. Mosquitoes buzzed the air. Dead earthworms scattered the sidewalk like veins. “I’m in love more than ever with Neil,” I wrote. “My heart feels like a cartoon valentine card that some bratty kid’s balled in his fist until it’s become nothing but a ragged wad of paper, then thrown into churning, chopping depths of the trash compactor. If only he liked guys his age and not over-thirty-five men with more hair on their chests than heads. Where’s the razor when I need it?”
I read what I’d just scribbled down. It all seemed so pathetic, I could do nothing but cross it out, blacking over everything with the pen. I kept picturing that look on Neil’s face, his satisfied smile as the john’s head moved toward his crotch.
The wind shifted, rattling the trailer’s frail walls. Perhaps I should try writing another poem, I thought. I wanted to create something profound, something generations of people would read, nod, whisper, I know exactly what he felt. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Shit.” The words caught in my throat. I reopened the journal, squinted at the mess of ink, and tried to remember what I’d written.
The dreams began two days after Avalyn’s appearance on “World of Mystery.” Generic at first, they harbored images of rubbery-armed spacemen with blue-gray skin and penetrating eyes that seemed equivalent to the Hollywood depictions I’d seen on TV. These aliens petrified me nonetheless.
After the second dream, I telephoned my mother at work and told her how the memories had revealed themselves. She returned home that evening holding a spiral notebook decorated with an elaborate bow. “To record them in,” she said. “Whatever’s inside your head, let it come out.” I drew a crescent moon and stars on the notebook’s cover; beside that, a spaceship whizzing past a chunky cloud.
I kept the journal at bedside, and during the following week I logged what I could from each alien scenario, sometimes sketching a face or hand or beam of light. In my half-sleep, I’d misspell words or stop midsentence. A typical entry:
6/29/91-
I get out of a station wagon, my little league uniform is on-I stand in the middle of a yard-crows are flying (indecipherable) getting darker. My hand is crammed into the baseball glove my father bought when (indecipherable)-in the trees a blue light, the color at the bottoms of swimming pools, I walk closer but it seems I’m running toward it then I see the spaceship and a light shoots out, the light tugging me forward-like a giant hand-the blue light (indecipherable)-really scared, and the hand starts to m (word trails into scribble off edge of page).
The dream log aided my memory. But something else bolstered my ability to remember, something apart from the dreams, something I couldn’t explain to my mother. I began recalling other bits and pieces about my first abduction, images beyond those that took shape during sleep. I would be watching TV, eating lunch, or sunbathing on the side of the hill, when out of nowhere a scene would surface in my head. For instance, I suddenly remembered this: that halfway through my final Little League game, it had begun to rain. The rain became a downpour, and the umpire had officially canceled the game midinning. My teammates had abandoned me in the dugout, running hand in hand with parents to their family cars.
Had that been the moment I’d initially been taken? Had the aliens witnessed me through the net of clouds as I’d lingered, alone, on the baseball field? I wasn’t yet certain. I had no idea why I remembered these pieces now. The more I remembered, the more alone I felt, as though some devious secret were just now being revealed, as if for ten years I’d been the butt of an enormous joke. Yet I knew the information that tangled like wire inside my head was all-important, clues that moved toward some destination.
July commenced with a telephone call from Avalyn Friesen. Her voice sounded angelic, just as it had on the TV program I’d rewound to watch at least twenty times by then. She said she had received my letter-“my first and only piece of fan mail,” she called it-and wanted to meet me. “You said you think you’ve had similar experiences,” Avalyn said. “Well, Mr. Brian Lackey, your eagerness is usually the first step toward coming to grips with the truth.” She paused, and a dog yapped from somewhere on her end of the line. “I just hope you’re ready.”
We talked for nearly an hour. I informed Avalyn of additional details beyond those I’d written in my letter. I mentioned my recent series of dreams, and she told me she’d been through a similar pattern. “Your memories are ready to make themselves known to you,” she said.
We scheduled our meeting for July third, Avalyn’s day off from her job as secretary at Inman’s grain elevator. I dialed a couple of numbers to cancel my lawn-mowing appointments. Then I called the prison in Hutchinson. A receptionist directed the call to lookout tower number five, where my mother no doubt sat staring over the prison yard, her.38 in her side holster. She picked up, and I asked if I could borrow the car.
“I’ll find another ride to work that day,” she said. “This is something you have to do.”
On July third I dressed in my best khaki pants, a short-sleeved blue oxford, and a pair of oversize loafers I’d confiscated from a box of clothes my father had never returned to fetch. I slicked back my hair and touched a pair of zits with dabs of my mother’s flesh-colored makeup. I didn’t look half bad.
The stretch of highway from Little River was one I’d passed hundreds of times, but on that afternoon it seemed utterly new. Midway between Little River and Hutchinson, I slowed for the turnoff toward Inman and glanced at the inside cover of my dream log. There, I’d jotted instructions for reaching Avalyn’s: “Go six miles east. Right after the sign advertising Kansas Beef, look for driveway with the blue mailbox…”
The Friesen farm sat a quarter mile off the main road. Holstein cattle grazed in overgrown stretches of pasture. A lane of flesh-colored sand trailed toward the house, flanked by trees that appeared centuries old. The trees folded over themselves like clasped fingers, squirrels and birds darting between the branches. I drove under them, parked at the side of a boxy log cabin, and rechecked my reflection in the side mirror.
I’ve never excelled at meeting people, but meeting Avalyn seemed inevitable. My nervousness was nowhere near as uncontrollable as I’d feared. I passed rows of zinnias beside the gravel path; before I reached the door, she opened it. When I saw her, I felt tingly, the way I imagined I’d feel glimpsing a celebrity. Avalyn wore silver teardrop earrings, a white housedress, and no shoes. Her hair gleamed, pulled into an oily bun that sat like a cinnamon roll on her head. “Brian,” she said, and it sounded more like Brine. She offered her hand, and I took it. The hand felt soft and feverish, as if I were holding a hummingbird. I released it, and she brought her fingers to her chest. “It’s good to meet you,” she said.
Avalyn introduced me to her father, an ancient-looking man who slurped from a coffee mug. Beneath his red cap, his face was grooved with wrinkles. He had thick, tanned biceps that shone from his shirtsleeves. One arm revealed a tattoo, an eagle bearing a scroll that read LIBERTY. He smiled, tightened a strap of his overalls, then coughed and cleared his throat. “Avalyn and I are all that are left in this family.” He spoke so slowly, cobwebs could have formed between his words.
Avalyn’s father opened the refrigerator’s top compartment, unwrapped a green Popsicle, and gestured toward the back door with it. “I’ve got work to do in the field,” he said. He took off his hat. Hair fluttered from his head as if startled.
After Mr. Friesen had gone, Avalyn led me toward a rocking chair, and I sat. I surveyed the simple room-the TV, a dusty wood-burning stove, a rolltop desk, her collection of stuffed animals. The wall displayed various pictures of an older woman, assumedly the late Mrs. Friesen, and a chubby young man with a crew cut who resembled a platypus in military garb. Avalyn saw me staring. She shrugged, stepped into the adjoining kitchen, and returned with a plate of Saltines and a bright red sardine tin. “I haven’t eaten lunch,” she said. She unsheathed the tin with three twists of the tiny key, then placed chunks of sardines on the crackers. They were the kind doused with mustard, and yellow blobs spilled onto the plate. “Help me with these,” Avalyn said. I bit down, cupping my hand to catch the crumbs.
I began. “I videotaped your TV show. I’ve watched it over and over.”
“It wasn’t bad,” she said. “A little showy for my tastes, and they left out some things I told them, but they managed to get across the right idea.”
“You were playing with a dog.”
“That’s Patches,” Avalyn said. She swiped the back of her hand across her lip’s mustard smudge. “He’s an outside dog. He follows Daddy into the fields to look after the cows.” She got up and padded back to the kitchen. She reached into a cracked pitcher, pulling out two sticks of incense. “Which do you prefer, frangipani or sandalwood?”
Before I could answer, Avalyn touched a match to the tips of two sticks. She jammed the incense into the dirt of a potted plant in the kitchen window. Curlicues of smoke lifted around her head. “Let me give you a tour of my little home,” she said. “And I can show you around the farm if you want. And we’ll talk.”
Her father’s bedroom was empty save for a small dresser and a double bed. The bed seemed to separate into two distinct hemispheres; the first had a rumpled pillow, the blanket’s corner pulled away to reveal the sheet underneath. The bed’s second half was immaculate, unwrinkled. The room smelled like an elderly spinster’s perfume. Avalyn switched off the light. “And now, my bedroom,” she said.
She opened the door. Her room looked like a teenager’s: posters and triangular college banners covered the walls, and clothes, books, albums, and tapes scattered the floor. The room was messier than my own. “I cleaned,” she said, “just for you.” She laughed.
Avalyn flopped on the bed. Her housedress lifted, revealing her thigh, as white as porcelain. I turned away and focused on the wall’s largest poster, where four scraggly-haired men in makeup stood on silver podiums. They pouted and scowled dramatically. “That’s my all-time favorite band,” Avalyn said. “They went by the name of Kiss. Are you old enough to remember?”
“Vaguely,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ve heard their music.” I sat on the floor, next to an album by that very band. “I mostly listen to electronic stuff, music no one else listens to.”
“I went through the same rebellion in high school,” Avalyn said. “But I’ve always liked the glitter rock, the heavy metal. Kids around here just listen to country-western twang and not much else. Things never much change.” She gestured toward the Kiss poster. “What a group they were,” she said. “So theatrical. You could get lost in them. The band members were each a specific character, hence the makeup. Every day was Halloween. They were the lover, the vampire, the kitty cat, and the spaceman. Guess which member I loved the most.” I scrutinized the spacey-looking-one’s outfit: shiny boots with spiked heels, metal plates crossing his chest and crotch, starbursts of silver makeup around his eyes.
Avalyn leaned over and took the Kiss album between her fingers. She slid the record from the sleeve, lowered it onto her turntable, and clicked the stereo switch. A guitar riff filled the room. “Yes.” She lay back on her bed, directing her voice toward the ceiling. I looked there; saw glittery speckles in the dimpled surface.
“As you’ve no doubt figured out by now,” Avalyn said, “there’s a reason for everything. Something as simple as me, in my teens, being attracted to the guy in the band that dressed and acted like a spaceman. Or me, throughout my life, reading all these books…” She pointed to a bookcase, and I noticed several titles from my own room’s shelves. “These are clues. For me, memories were buried there. The aliens don’t want us to remember, but we’re stronger than that. For you and I, nearly everything we do stems from our abduction experiences. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
“There’s so many of us. Not all of us realize it. Yet we have a drive to know what’s happened. What they’ve done to us.”
On the record, the guitar solo started, and the singer howled in ecstasy. Avalyn sat up and tugged at sections of her dress to fan herself. “From what you’ve told me on the phone, I know you’re at a difficult position. I was there a few years ago. Things are starting to come back to you, and you’re curious. You want to know what’s going on.”
“You’re exactly right,” I said. Her hand had fallen to the bed’s edge, motionless. I wanted to hold it. “Something happened to me that summer, that night I told you about. And maybe, later, on that Halloween night. I know it.”
The music ended. In that empty groove of vinyl between the two songs by Avalyn’s favorite band, I heard sounds from outside: barn swallows twittering, cicadas humming. Somewhere, far away, a round of firecrackers popped and snapped.
“There may be even more to it,” Avalyn told me. “Instances you don’t yet know about. Brian, it’s odd. People like you and me are in this for the duration of our lives. The first time they take us, we are tagged. They track us, and they come again and again. We’re part of their experiments.
“Let me show you something,” she said. “Here’s one thing they left out of that foolish ‘World of Mystery.’” She lifted the frilly edge of her housedress, her white thigh cold and shocking against the dark bedspread. “Lean closer,” she said, her words coming in perfect synch with Kiss’s pounding bass.
Avalyn thumbed a V-shaped scar on her thigh’s upper region. I felt a blush spread across my face as she traced it back and forth. “You can touch it,” she said, and the blush grew warmer. In the dim light, her eyes were the color of outdated pennies, the ones I used to collect in hopes of making a fortune. She reached out to take my hand, guiding it toward the scar. I touched it, then withdrew.
She sighed, and I could smell the sardines on her breath. “When the aliens returned me to my grandparents’ car that first time, my leg was bleeding. We got home, and I remember my parents being furious, with the whole ‘what the hell happened to Avvie’s leg’ and so on. But none of us knew anything about it, not even me. The cut didn’t even hurt.
“Through Ren’s hypnosis, I discovered that was where they’d put their tracking device. They’ve known where to find me, all these years, because they inserted something into my skin. It’s floating in here, somewhere, just as much a part of my blood as the food I eat and the water I drink. It’s filling them in on everything I do. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re up there watching us right now, taking notes.” She waited for my reaction, her eyebrow raised as if she knew what I’d say. Her finger returned to the scar. She caressed it as she might caress a pet salamander.
“I think they tracked me too,” I said. “I might have told you this in my letter, but when my sister found me in the crawl space, my nose was bleeding. They must have put something there.”
“Aha.” Avalyn nodded. “The old nose trick. Some have scars on the leg or the arm. But others, like you, get it right up the nose, where the scar can’t be seen.” She moved closer to my face, peering into my nostrils, as though she might spy their miniature machinery. “Now we need to figure out how they’ve used you. It’s doubtful they would shove something into your brain without coming back to experiment further.”
“I think they tried to take me again that same summer,” I said. “When my mother and sister and I saw the ship over our house. All my life I’ve connected that night with the crawl space night. Only now am I starting to understand why.”
Avalyn lifted the needle from the record. She stared me right in the eye, letting me speak. It was the first time someone beyond my mother and sister had listened like this. I wanted to saturate the room with the complete story of my life.
“I want to tell my mother what I’m slowly beginning to discover,” I said. “I need her to believe me.”
“It’s not easy for those who aren’t like us. Remember that. But if you ever need someone, I’m here. And I know what it’s like.” Avalyn pushed herself from the bed and shuffled toward the door. I followed her lead. “As for me,” she said, “my father doesn’t believe a word I say. He refuses to support me. I pay for the trips to New York with my own cash, and Inman Grain isn’t exactly the world’s best-paying employer. Hypnosis sessions cost money, but I’m willing to pay, if only for the temporary peace of mind until they abduct me again.”
Avalyn walked to the front room. She reached above the screen door, plucked a pair of clip-on sunglasses from a nail, and put the dark lenses over her own rhinestoned frames. She opened the door. The July heat tidal-waved into our bodies, and we stepped out. Avalyn’s father had dropped his Popsicle in the space of grass beside the front porch. It looked like a lemon-lime knife, melting in the sun. Somewhere in the distance, more fireworks exploded, echoes crackling across the dry fields.
“This sun could kill me,” Avalyn said. “You now, with your towhead, undoubtedly tan at the drop of a hat. But feel this.” Once again, she took my hand and guided it toward her flesh. This time, she scrubbed my fingers over her shoulder, as if trying to erase an indelible smudge. “This skin is as soft, as cold, and as white as skin’s ever going to get.”
“Then let’s find shade somewhere,” I said.
Avalyn led me to a mulberry tree. Earlobe-size berries hung from the leaves, ranging in color from white (under-ripe) to red (halfway there) to a deep purplish black (fully ripe). The blacks polka-dotted the ground around the tree, staining Avalyn’s bare feet. “The red ones are my favorites,” she said. “They’re sour.” She pinched some from the tree; dropped them into my hand.
Two birches stood beside the mulberry tree; an island of grass stretched at one’s trunk. The tree’s bark was scabrous and mottled and mushroom colored, the color of an extraterrestrial. Nearby, a scattering of bees swirled in the air between two bushes: one bulged with yellow roses; the other, with pink. The heavy smell lingered in the air. Avalyn and I sat in the grass simultaneously; on our way to the ground, the frames of our glasses clicked together. I shrank back, but Avalyn laughed.
Avalyn lamented that she hadn’t fixed a picnic lunch. “I’m always hungry.” She leaned against the tree, strands of hair loosening from her bun. The teardrop earrings glittered from her lobes. She parted her legs a little, exposing the scar. It curled like a worm against the white thigh. I remembered when I used to attend church; the booklets with photographs of stigmata and other miraculous hieroglyphics on human bodies. Avalyn’s scar was like that-remarkable, holy, a mystery imprinted on her skin that only she and I could unravel.
The afternoon droned on. Avalyn loved to talk. She told me about her mother’s death from cancer, her brother’s death that same year in a car accident. “It’s been four years now,” she said. “And Daddy still hasn’t gotten over it.”
Avalyn cut her history short and asked more about me. “I want details you haven’t told me yet,” she said. I related what I knew about my father, the life I was no longer part of. I told about Deborah, now in San Francisco; how she planned to return home for the holidays. I filled her in on my mother’s recent promotion at the prison, about my nervousness concerning the upcoming autumn and my first year at college.
Avalyn listened to everything. Still, the words we spoke about our lives and families seemed conspicuous substitutes for what we truly wanted to say. Avalyn and I kept swinging back to the matter at hand: the experience of our abductions, the bond and the link from the majority of people who walked the earth around us.
Avalyn suggested that hypnosis would be the best way to discover the truth. “But specialists in regression for UFO abductees are expensive. And they’re mighty hard to come by in Kansas.”
“We have money,” I said. I stared at the purplish smudges on her foot soles. “We’ve always had it, even since my father left. But I doubt that my mother is ready to send me to a hypnotist.”
“I’m not saying you’ll only remember through hypnosis,” Avalyn said. “It sounds to me as if you’re on your way already. Keep logging the dreams you talked about. They act as clues. Be your own detective. If you see a place in a dream, hear a name, whatever, be sure you seek it out. Soon you’ll have the answers you need.”
By five o’clock the breeze began picking up. Wind gusts carried the odor of distant fireworks, the dangerous musk of gunpowder that often stained my mother’s hands. “It smells as though the world is burning,” Avalyn said. Through the crisscrossing nets of branches above us, an airplane trailed across the blue air, sparkling like tinsel, scarring the sky with its vapor. The people on board had no idea that Avalyn and I sat thousands of feet below in the grass. They had no idea what had happened to us.
I didn’t want to leave, but I had recently started helping my mother with cooking-I fixed dinner on alternating nights-and I needed to arrive home before her. I told Avalyn I planned to bake a Cornish hen with stuffing. She Mmmmed and rubbed her stomach.
We walked back to the house. “It would be a good thing to meet your mother,” Avalyn said, and I agreed. She smoothed wrinkles from her dress. “We could all go to the Cosmosphere together.” I hadn’t told Avalyn about my obsession with the space center. She just knew.
Inside, the frangipani and sandalwood replaced the firecracker smell. I poured myself a glass of water; Avalyn went to her bedroom for “some gifts,” as she called them. She returned with a handful of pamphlets. “These were published underground,” she said. “They are hard to get, unavailable in bookstores.” I scanned the titles: “What Our Government Isn’t Telling Us,” “Were You Abducted?,” and, my favorite, “The Wild World of UFOs.”
I thanked her. Avalyn smiled, exhibiting shrimp-colored gums. She handed me another book, a copy of Ren Bloomfield’s Stolen Time. I’d already read it, but I didn’t tell her. “One of the people studied in chapter five is based on me,” she said. “They used a pseudonym-I’m ‘Georgia Frye.’ How silly. Anyway, you can have that copy. I autographed it for you.”
Inside the front cover, Avalyn’s writing appeared beneath the title and author’s name. To Brian. To know you’re not alone. We have to stick together. Love, “Georgia Frye,” i.e. Avalyn. Below her signature, she’d drawn a series of tiny valentines.
The dreams continued. The shell was cracking; pieces were showing through. I filled page after page, scribbling additional revelations in the log. I even dreamed about that Halloween night, years ago. Far from elaborate, the dream featured me in the hokey Satan costume, peering up at a blue cone of light in the sky. Simple as it was, I understood it as necessary information.
I telephoned Avalyn nearly every day. One afternoon, two weeks after our visit, I was rereading a pamphlet when I found myself thinking about Little League. I could remember that first baseball practice-how nervous I felt, my clumsiness at holding the glove and the bat, the row of teammates that had gawked as if I were a cripple.
I closed my eyes and saw myself as an eight-year-old. Another kid held my hand, leading me forward. Both of us wore Panthers uniforms. It was crazy-I could somehow feel the boy’s damp palm, could smell the freshly mown grass, could hear the thunder that boomed from the storm around us. The boy directed me into an open door, and we stood in a room diffused with blue light. Was it the interior of the UFO? I couldn’t quite tell, but as we stepped into the light I saw that someone else stood there, someone taller than the two of us. The person’s presence commanded us like a king’s. I looked up at the tall figure-and then, the daydream ended. No matter how desperately I pushed it, nothing else materialized across my screen of memory.
My mother was napping, so I dialed Avalyn’s number. She must have been at Inman Grain, because no one answered. Still, I couldn’t let this new recollection rest. Something Avalyn had told me kept repeating in my head: her insistence that my dreams were clues, that I should seek out the necessary information. “Be your own detective,” she’d said. And now I knew that the aliens had kidnapped someone else besides me, another boy on my Little League team. I asked myself if this boy might still be around, still living in Hutchinson. And I wondered what, if anything, this boy had managed to remember.
It was essential, I thought, to determine the names of the kids who’d played on my baseball team that June. Most had lived in Hutchinson; they hadn’t been boys from my school. Perhaps there were records somewhere. I remembered the Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce, the building on the city’s west side where my father had taken me at that summer’s outset. Surely they had files, documentation that could lead me toward the boy I’d dreamed about.
I did something out of character and decided to take the car into Hutchinson without asking my mother’s permission. I found a shirt in the pile of dirty laundry, tugged it over my head, and bounded down the steps. I scrawled a note-“URGENT. BE BACK SOON”-and stuck it to the refrigerator door with a magnet shaped like a celery stalk. Then I rummaged through my mother’s purse; the car keys, a lipstick, nickels and dimes, and a few bullets toppled to the floor. Without cleaning the mess, I grabbed the keys, ran outside, and hopped into the Toyota. I turned the key in the ignition, praying it wouldn’t rouse my mother.
The roads into Hutchinson needed repair, but I took them at seventy miles per hour anyway. I sped past fields of corn and wheat; overgrown meadows intersected by branches of Cow Creek and the Little Arkansas River; pastures where cattle hunched under trees to avoid the heat. Oat and sorghum silos gleamed in the sun, and farmers I’d never met waved as I passed. Leftover fireworks debris had been strewn through the ditches. When I passed the turnoff toward Inman, I thought of Avalyn.
The Chamber of Commerce stood tall and shining in the center of a series of buildings, a buckle on the belt of the street. A few people milled around inside. I entered the main hall and opened the first office door. A dark-haired receptionist sat at her desk, nibbling on beef jerky, one hand typing fiercely at a manual typewriter. She turned to me, asked the standard “May I help you,” and listened as I fabricated a foolish story. I was researching a college baseball player who’d played for Hutchinson Little League teams ten summers ago. “This guy’s going to be the next big thing,” I said. “I’m doing a story on him for the community college paper.”
Luckily, the receptionist believed my hogwash. She explained that they kept no records of the summer’s teams. “What we do have, however, are old photographs.” She indicated the floor by shuffling her fingers. “In the basement hallway, chronologically by year, are photographs of all the League squads since we began sponsoring the program over twenty years ago. Makes the walls rather unsightly, if you ask me.” She stopped gesturing downward, took another bite of the beef jerky, and turned back to her typewriter. “You might be able to find things easier if you know the name of the team you want.”
“Panthers,” I said, and descended the stairs to enter the empty basement, its fluorescent lights buzzing. Framed glossy photos covered the hall walls. I could vaguely remember our first team practice, that initial week after my father had signed me to the Panthers’ list. I had made certain my uniform was in place, then lined up with the others as a photographer had snapped our picture. I thought it strange that for all these years, my photo had been nailed to the wall, here in this building, without my knowledge.
“Nineteen eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five…” I wandered the hall, sliding back in time, until I arrived at 1981. That year’s team photographs were grouped together, twenty-two in all. The navy and white pizzas on our uniforms’ fronts divulged my team. I stood eye-level to the picture. I scanned faces, not really seeing them, until I came to mine. There-me, kneeling on one knee in the front row center. I rested my gloved hand on my other knee, faking a smile. My hair was blonder than I remembered, my face flushed and sheened with sweat.
I looked away from the photo and made sure I was alone in the basement. And then, for the first time in my life, I committed a crime. I reached up, delicately maneuvered the frame from its nail, and pulled the photo from the wall.
Upstairs, I wedged the photo inside the waistband of my shorts, then untucked my shirt to conceal it. I scurried through the Chamber of Commerce, my steps punctuated by the chattering of the receptionist’s typewriter. I made it. When I got back to the car, I sat for a second, breathing. I felt as though I’d just done something unspeakable, like a bank heist or a gun blast between someone’s eyes.
I slid the photograph out, and the smiling faces stared back at me. I focused again on the eight-year-old me. I glossed over the front row, and once again, folds of memory layered in my head: here was a kid I remembered as our pitcher, his arm gunning forward to strike me out during practice; another kid, one of a pair of twins, whom I remembered spraining his ankle during the Panthers’ opening game; and another, the weaselly-looking boy at the end of the row, was the one, I suddenly knew, who’d broken my glasses and laughed at me, that Halloween night when the aliens had returned for me.
But none of the boys in the front row was the kid in my dream.
When I switched and began scrutinizing the top row, I found him. He stood there, his jaw clenched, a line of black sunblock below his eyes like warpaint. He wore jersey number ninety-nine. His face looked savage, the face of a kid who’d been raised in the jungle by wolves or apes.
I didn’t bother looking at the others. I knew those were the eyes that had looked into mine; the hands that had led me into the blue room. The kid stood next to the end of the top row, his arm brushing the arm of the Panthers’ coach.
Something about the coach stopped me. Strangely, I couldn’t remember anything about him. For years I had recalled things about baseball practices, those agonizing first games I’d trudged through before quitting. But I had erased this coach. Still, something about him looked familiar, as if he’d starred in an outdated movie I’d seen through my half-sleep, years ago. In the photograph, he towered above everyone else, smiling broadly, the expression almost noble, brimming with pride for his team. His teeth shone unnaturally white beneath the broad curve of his mustache. He was the only person in the picture who gave me as intense a response as the boy from my dream, and I wondered if this coach had somehow played a part in the abduction as well. Perhaps he had been there, just as Avalyn’s grandparents and brother had been there when the aliens had kidnapped her on that long-past afternoon.
My heart was thrumming. I had taken one step, perhaps one giant leap, closer to discovering an answer. “What next?” I said aloud. Curiously, I felt queasy, as if I were being watched by someone or something that wanted to harm me. I glanced at the side and dashboard rearviews, then rolled the window down and squinted up at the sky.
7/21/91-
A dream about the kid from the ball team-we’re together in the blue room again. This time, we’re on opposite sides of the room, I’m just watching as the tall alien figure glides over to him, slowly stretching him out on the silver table. The alien’s fingers are a sickly gray, the color of fish scales, and they’re shaped like frankfurters, they’re touching my teammate’s arms, his chest, his face-when the fingers get to the kid’s mouth they linger there, caressing the skin of his lips, and then the kid’s lips move-they mouth the words “here we go” and I know the kid is speaking to me, he’s looking at me, and then he smiles and the alien’s fingers penetrate that smile, they slip between the lips, reaching into the boy’s mouth-I’m watching this all, I’m horrified but I can’t move. And then the boy’s clothes are in a pile on the floor. I look up at the blue light that floods everywhere, waterfalls of blue, and I know the boy’s hand is reaching for me, the alien’s hand is reaching for me, but I won’t look at them, I only look at the light, because the light is blinding me, and I want to be blinded.
7/29/91-
I stand in the middle of trees, I’m wearing the Satan costume-the Haunted Mansion is behind me, it’s that Halloween night again-and this time when the stick cracks I turn and see the alien-its skin is gray and rubbery, it has unbelievably long arms-its hairless head and those huge black eyes-it resembles a joke sculpture made from marshmallows or bubble gum wads. It shuffles toward me, almost gliding as if its feet are wheels-and then its arm comes reaching out, stretching and stretching toward me-it twists off my mask and its fingers touch my face-I feel the fingers land there like heavy bugs, one-two-three-four. And then it takes me in its arms, it lifts me up to hold me like it’s in love with me, and then the most surprising thing, the alien’s teensy slitted mouth opens and it speaks. It says Brian you don’t remember me do you, but I sure remember you-it says I sure liked you Brian, I always hoped I would see you again, I always wanted you to come back to the team.
Sleep came fitfully, disturbed by the aliens’ black eyes and their disembodied blue-gray fingers. Some nights I barely slept at all. After dinner my stomach ached, sharp pangs shooting through my body, as if sea creatures rested inside, prodding and flexing their pincers. The pain and the insomnia reminded me of certain UFO cases, and I returned to the books that contained passages about a couple named Barney and Betty Hill. I read how Barney, plagued with ulcers and sleeping disorders for years, had finally opted for hypnosis, only to discover that he and his wife had been abducted during a drive through the White Mountains of New Hampshire in 1961. The Hills knew something I, too, would soon know.
One night, around 2 A.M., I was preparing for bed when the telephone rang. My mother was sleeping, and the house had been still for hours. The ringing cut through the silence with a clamor I’ve always associated with sadness or bad news. The noise made me think of the night the hospital had phoned to notify us of my uncle’s fatal stroke. It made me think of times when my father would call, those random nights after he’d left, to scream at my mother in a drunken rage.
Before the third ring, I picked up the receiver and whispered hello. It was Avalyn. I thought she might be calling to cancel the upcoming dinner I’d planned at my house, but that wasn’t the case. She sounded flustered. “Something’s happened,” she said. “I’m a little jittery. I want you here with me.”
I didn’t question her. But I knew, for the second time in as many weeks, I would borrow the car without my mother’s approval. She hadn’t minded when I snuck to the Chamber of Commerce; I’d told her about the dream and that I’d seen the photo, but she didn’t yet know I’d stolen it. I doubted, however, that my mother would okay my leaving at two o’clock to drive to Inman. But it couldn’t wait. After Avalyn said good-bye, I listened to the swollen hush at the other end of the line and knew I had to go.
The car radio’s station played nonstop romantic favorites. Faceless singers crooned about finding love, losing it, and finding it again. “Just look at it out there,” the deejay said between songs. “It’s the perfect night for making love.”
The road linking the highway to the Friesen cabin was spooky after dark. Thin tentacles of moonlight stretched through the overhead dome of trees, accentuating some shadows, deepening others. The area was as gloomy as the roads that twisted through the White Mountains or that fishing pond in Pascagoula. The Toyota coasted forward, and I eased it into the space where I’d parked before. A single light shone from Avalyn’s bedroom window.
Once again, Avalyn met me at the door. She wore a similar white dress, this one even frillier than the last, its pearl buttons gleaming like a row of cataracted eyes. “Thanks for coming,” she said. At the sound of her voice, Patches trotted forth from the darkness, his tail feathering behind him. I bent down, and he licked my face.
Avalyn stepped onto the porch and shut the door. “Follow me,” she said.
We walked out into the night, Patches lagging behind. Toward the north, heat lightning blinked on and off from a wall of clouds, luminescing distant acres of wheat. Leaves rattled in the wind, but everything else seemed uncomfortably quiet. There were no cicadas, no crickets, no random bullfrog making its lewd croak. “The silence,” I said, and I realized I was whispering. Avalyn and I were tiptoeing as well, as though we’d become spies, and this trek to her pasture was our secret mission. I suddenly wanted to tell Avalyn about the dreams I’d had since our last phone conversation, about the shards of memory that concerned my Little League teammate. But the worry lines across Avalyn’s brow stopped me from speaking. I knew she meant business. Whatever she needed to show me, it had to be something significant and indismissable, something potentially threatening.
After we’d walked a few hundred feet, we reached the pasture’s edge and its stretch of barbed wire fence. I turned. The Friesen log cabin sat behind us in the shadows. The single bedroom light still burned, but the rest of the windows were sheeted with black. Avalyn’s father slept inside. He was separate from us because the dreams he dreamed were safe and warm, the dreams of a regular human, of the unblemished.
Avalyn leaned to touch the fence. Several of its barbs were wrapped with balls of red and black hair, furry twists where cattle had scratched their hides against the sharp points. She tugged one hair ball away and slipped it into the pocket of her dress. “For good luck,” she said, smiling.
The smile faded. Avalyn’s touch on the fence became a grip. “You first.” She stepped on the second line of the wire, then pulled another upward to make a gaping barbed wire mouth. I crawled through it. I made another “mouth” for her; she grunted as she shimmied through. Patches flattened himself on the ground, shrugging his body under.
We stood inside the field. I breathed the sweet smell of alfalfa, the manure and the dewy, freshly turned earth. And, underneath that pungency, the faint odor of roses, the yellows and pinks from the bush where we’d lazed only days before. Avalyn gave me a soft shove. “Keep walking,” she said. “It’s a couple hundred feet forward, over by that tree.” I squinted toward her finger’s point; saw the outline of a small evergreen.
More lightning in the distance. We headed for the tree. As we approached, I made out the shape of a cow, standing still beside the evergreen’s webby fronds. Its stomach’s curves expanded and contracted on each breath. The cow suddenly mooed, a drawn, haunting bawl aimed toward us, frightening me a little. We got closer, and at the cow’s feet I saw another form. It lay in the grass beside the tree trunk. In the dark, it looked like a pile of discarded clothing. Patches galloped ahead. He stopped when he reached the reclining form, nosing and sniffing it. “Patches, get back,” Avalyn said, and she skipped closer to shoo him away.
I bent level with Avalyn. The cow stood over us, breathing heavily, her warm air fluttering my hair. I was sweating, and Avalyn’s dress stuck to my skin like a tongue against dry ice. I could feel the heat emanating from her body to blend with mine. “Here he is,” Avalyn said.
The form on the ground was a young calf; the adult cow, I presumed, was his mother, standing guard beside him. The moonlight made the calf look silky, cocooning it in a faint glow. I could see its hide’s pattern, black spots against white, and the tiny coarse hairs on its face. I touched its ears, the curved cartilage like rubber cups. I touched its fragile eyelashes, the pad of its nose. Instead of damp and velvety, the nose was dry and stiff. The calf was dead. When I understood this, I looked at the full of its body. There was a gash in the calf’s neck, a smile wedged into its flesh. Most of the animal’s form was unharmed, but under its stomach was another cut, this one an immense gouge between its back legs. The calf’s genitals had been severed.
The cow softly lowed again, a sound not unlike the noise a human mother in mourning would make. “This has happened before,” Avalyn said. “Farmers around here have been finding mutilated cattle for years now. Happens all across Kansas. I told ‘World of Mystery’ about it, but they edited it out. And my father still denies the truth, even though he himself found two of our holsteins dead on the same night last autumn. He insists it’s a bunch of maniacs or Satan worshipers that drive around chopping up cows. Ha ha.” She touched the calf’s throat, tracing the incision’s border with her finger. “What kind of maniac cuts with this precision?”
Avalyn lifted her hand from the calf, and it landed on my own hand. “Feel this,” she said. Together, we reached toward the wound in the calf’s underside. I ran my fingers over it, feeling a meaty organ, a mass of guts that coiled around my fingers like cooked onions. “This is what’s left,” Avalyn said. “They take the sex organs away, the udders and the slits on the females, the you-know-whats on the males, even their anuses. The aliens experiment on cows, because animals can’t complain, they can’t voice themselves like humans.”
Something was building from deep inside my throat, something rising toward my mouth that could have been vomit or a scream but felt sickeningly like a fist, a fist slowly opening. Avalyn continued, her voice muted and far away, as if spoken from behind a mask: “Us, on the other hand, they can’t kill. But we have to live with the memory of what they do. And really, it’s what they do to us that’s worse.”
She still held my hand, pressing it into the wound. “Notice anything else strange? I’ll answer for you. There’s no blood. They took that, too.”
Avalyn was right. The calf’s throat had been cut, and it had been bizarrely eviscerated. But the grass wasn’t glistening with its blood. I knew the aliens had taken it, necessary fluid for more of their enigmatic experiments. I moved closer to the calf, shuffling my knees forward in the grass, and as I did I drew my hand from Avalyn’s. With no reason, no reason at all, I pried my fingers under one of the exposed organs, probing deeper inside the wound. The innards were bloodless, but still as damp and sloppy as sponges. They closed around my wrist, accommodating my hand. I moved farther inside the body, searching for any remaining drops of blood.
Within minutes I was up to my elbow. I closed my eyes, and at that moment the clouds across my mind broke. Something like this, I knew, had happened before.
In my head I saw him just as he’d appeared in dreams: the boy, my Little League teammate, crouching beside me. Open your eyes, he said. Here we go. He whispered in my ear. It’s okay, he likes it, he’ll give you money. It feels nice. It’s fun isn’t it, tell him you think it’s fun. I heard him speaking to me, but I couldn’t comprehend his words, tangled chunks of sentences that meant nothing to me. He told me to open my eyes, to see what was happening, but I wouldn’t do it. I was eight years old again, and I wouldn’t open my eyes.
Like before, the boy was nothing more than a vision. This time, however, I wasn’t certain how to control the dream; it seemed far removed from the usual security of sleep and the sheltering knowledge that I would soon wake up.
I was up to my elbow. It feels nice, the boy’s voice said.
I lost hold of the fact I wasn’t alone, must have briefly forgotten Avalyn and Patches and the cow beside me, because I started crying. I tried to hold it, but the sob broke like glass in my throat. Avalyn held me, her arm around me as shocking as icy water. I leaned into her and cried, cried because, at that moment, I considered the possibility that everything I’d recently accepted as fact was wrong-my new beliefs about my buried memories, the aliens and their series of abductions, these perfect explanations for my problems. What if all of it, each particle of this new truth, were false? What then?
The animal’s mother mooed, and the silence closed around us. We sat there, no one in the world but Avalyn and me. I tried to persuade myself they were watching us, hidden away in some cubbyhole of the heavens, analyzing our every move with their infinite black eyes, waiting for the upcoming day when they would once again touch us with their mushroomy skin.
Avalyn pulled me closer. After a while, she took her hair from its bun; it cascaded across her face like a black veil. The hair smelled extravagant and secret, the smell of a rare flower that only bloomed at night. Avalyn rested her head against my shoulder, and I breathed that scent.
Minutes passed. I tried to erase the picture of the boy from my mind, because I knew that whatever had happened then-whatever I’d done, the unspeakable thing he’d wanted me to open my eyes and see-was beyond anything I could handle. I stopped crying and pressed into Avalyn. “It was the aliens,” I said. My arm grew numb, still inside the calf. “It was, wasn’t it.”
“Yes,” Avalyn said. “And it’s okay. As hard as it is to believe, it’s going to be okay.” Her right hand gripped my shoulder, and then, gradually, her left hand snaked into the wound. I felt the warm slide of her skin as her fingers reached, reached slowly up, searching higher into the calf’s carcass until her fingers stopped to intertwine with mine.
New York beckoned, two weeks away. Both Mom and Eric avoided the topic, choosing instead to speak about the twenty-cents-an-hour raise offered by the grocery store (Mom) or the grandparents’ latest dessert concoction (Eric). Neither wanted me to leave. Mom did everything she could to keep me at home; Eric went so far as to buy me drugs with the weekly allowance from his grannies.
Whenever opportunity knocked, I tricked, usually on nights Mom was working. I had saved enough to survive a while in the city, and Wendy promised I wouldn’t pay rent until I could manage. But Kansas sex began boring me. As my departure date neared, I spent evenings watching horror films on the VCR with Eric. On the Wednesday during Nail Gun Massacre, he fell asleep, his head on my lap. I wanted to be elsewhere. “Sleep tight,” I said. I kissed Eric’s knuckle, something I wouldn’t have done had he been awake.
The Impala stalled at traffic lights. It was on its last legs, but at least the stereo worked. I blasted the volume on a song’s whirlpooling guitar feedback, rolled the window down, and burned rubber. A cluster of kids gawked from their spot on the corner of Eleventh and Main. I recognized them from school: their drugged faces, their short-on-top/long-in-back haircuts, their clothes advertising heavy metal bands. They conformed to a past I’d soon forget. I yelled “Fuck you” out the window and thanked god I wouldn’t live in Hutchinson much longer.
I headed toward the far east end of Seventeenth. For a Wednesday night, Rudy’s was busy. Cars crowded the curb and parking lot. I eased into an empty space, stepped on the emergency brake, wedged my hand into my back pocket. A folded envelope housed the acid tabs I’d bought that morning from Christopher. He’d written “Lead My Thoughts Unto Sensation” across the envelope’s front. I selected a square of paper that showed a tiny sailboat and dropped it under my tongue. It fit there perfectly, like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. “Mmmm,” I said to no one in particular. I sat in the car until the tape ended, then switched off the ignition.
The bar had no sign, just a yellowed piece of paper on the door, its name inked in capital letters. When I set foot inside, everyone turned to stare. I remembered a dumb saying from childhood: “Take a picture, it lasts longer.” Then I said that exact thing. In seconds, a tubby bald man grabbed my shoulder. He had shifty shark eyes and a wounded trout mouth. He wore a studded leather bracelet and a Rudy’s T-shirt: white logo across pink triangle. “Let’s see an ID.”
I handed it over. “Shit, you know I’ve been here before.” Fatso tried his damnedest to detect the ID as counterfeit. No such luck.
Rudy’s, the only queer bar in Hutchinson, always seemed caught in an extremely twisted time warp. I’d read somewhere once how trends and practices of the east and west coasts usually took three years to catch on in the Midwest. If that were true, Rudy’s lagged a decade behind. On that night, for instance, a late seventies tune pulsed from the jukebox. “I wanna disco with you all, night, long,” the singer wailed.
Another thing: the customers were perfect. Most were men I wanted, men I found myself picturing before I dozed off at night. They looked nothing like the guys that starred in the current pornos Eric and I saw on display at video stores, those poofs with blow-dried hair, shaved chests, glistening and steroided muscles. The guys at Rudy’s sported facial hair, beer guts, and expressions that weren’t practiced in front of home mirrors. Not everyone was attractive, but they were real. In the couple of weeks since I’d discovered the place, I’d already met several of them, had gone home with three, had even accepted fifty bucks from one.
On that particular Wednesday, most guys stood around in plaid flannel shirts and jeans. At the bar, the rips in the knees of their denims formed a straight line that resembled a row of singing mouths. For fun, I counted mustaches; divided the number by the total people there. Seventy-nine percent.
The air smelled like a mixture of smoke, spilled beer, the cedar chips that littered the floor, and a musky cologne that had probably been all the rage in New York one decade previous. Walking through that air felt like breaststroking through a murky lake. I ordered a Bud and reflashed the ID to the bartender. On the TV above the bar, a St. Louis Cardinal cracked a single over the shortstop’s head. In a water-stained poster on the wall, collies and Saint Bernards were involved in what looked like a pretty interesting game of poker. I snuck to a corner, holding the beer bottle like a magic lantern.
The jukebox light cast a liquidy pink over my face. I hovered in front of it, searching its selections for anything I might want to hear. Ever since I was a kid, Mom had craved a jukebox. She’d point to the TV screen when a game show host unveiled one. “When we win the lottery, we’ll dance around the house to that.”
Dancing with Mom was my earliest memory. I must have been three or four years old. We had been in the kitchen, the radio blaring. She had grabbed my hands and lifted me, standing my bare feet on her own, larger, sandaled feet. She had led me, stomping and twirling through the room, holding on all the while, moving me with her. There, in Rudy’s, I could still sense the rhythm of her movements, could still smell her perfume. Mom, who danced whenever she drank. Mom, who wanted to plug a jukebox into the living room socket. I wondered how difficult it would be to unplug the jukebox and carry it out the door.
I surveyed the crowd again. I recognized some faces; the guy at the end of the bar was one I’d slept with last week. Robin. Since I’d last seen him, he’d shaved his beard into a goatee. He wore the same ripped-sleeve flannel shirt and too-tight Wranglers.
Robin chatted with a guy who could have been his brother. The familiar way they watched each other and the casual positioning on their barstools told me they were just friends, not the night’s bed partners. Guy number two wasn’t bad-looking. I thought I’d seen him before at Sun Center. He noticed me staring, raised an eyebrow to Robin. His mouth formed the words, “You know him?” They looked over. Robin nodded his head. I slid through the cedar chips toward them, and the entire crowd rubbernecked.
“Robin,” I said. I acknowledged his pal by a jerk of my head. “Who’s this, Friar Tuck?” That was ridiculous, but I knew they’d love it.
Bingo. Both laughed, their heads thrown back. “Whatever,” the unfamiliar one said. “You can call me that if you want.”
“We rob from the rich and steal from the poor,” Robin said. He looked at Friar, apparently amused by the way he was gawking at me. “Are you rich, or are you poor?”
I remembered the Robin Hood tale, the one Mom read to me at bedtime, eons ago. “Very poor,” I said.
“Then we’ll have to give you something,” Friar said. They laughed again. I had to gnaw my lip to keep from rolling my eyes.
Robin plucked a pretzel from a basket on the bar and crunched it in half. “Neil here’s new in town,” he told Friar. “His dad’s an actor out in Hollywood, and his mom’s an international stewardess. They’e only in Hutchinson briefly.” I barely remembered telling him those drunken lies.
“An actor,” Friar said. He turned to me. “What’s he starred in that I might have seen?”
I hadn’t anticipated this. Lying’s best when it’s spontaneous, so… “He’s starring in an upcoming film called Blood Mania. Plot: tainted meat supply infects already-weirdo family. They go nuts, cannibalizing all who near the vicinity of their spooky, off-the-beaten-track farmhouse. The end. Mom and I are flying to France for its premiere next month.” I swigged the beer.
“Wow.” Friar winked. “Are you planning on starring in movies? You could do it. You look a little like, oh, who’s that cute star?” He sipped from a snifter of a thick and chocolatey-colored liquid in which two ice crescents tinkled like bells. I’d seen Mom drinking something similar, only she often decorated her glass with a mini umbrella she’d saved from a date with someone whose name I’d forgotten.
The jukebox blasted a country-western song from years back. Once, after the Panthers had won a Little League game, that same song had played as moms and dads celebrated in the parking lot with barbecued hot dogs and a cooler of beer. The space of pavement became a hoedown beneath the buzzing ballpark lights. My teammates and I watched, stunned, as the parents square-danced and sang along. I remember rushing for Coach. “Drive me away from this,” I’d said. “Now.” He took me to his house, not mine.
Robin hummed the chorus off key. “Work’s been hectic since I last saw you,” he said. I couldn’t recall any specifics about his life. I vaguely remembered a brown-paneled studio apartment on the city’s south side, next to the railroad tracks. I must have been really stoned that night.
I clunked my empty bottle on the bar between their elbows. “Need another?” Friar asked. He was already reaching for his wallet, a gesture I’d grown familiar with in men his age.
After three beers, I’d heard enough bits and pieces about Robin to remember he was a lawyer, owned a poodle named Ralph, had celebrated his thirty-ninth on the night before we’d screwed. Friar was his “business associate,” in from Wichita for the night. “You guys should get to know each other better,” Robin said, his eyes darting between our faces. I loved that sort of blatancy.
The acid was beginning to affect me, and I closed my fist, pressing my fingers into the ball of my palm. The heavy pulse in my hand thrummed against the weaker pulse in my fingertips, blood eddying beneath the flesh. My skin felt elastic. Right then I wanted to knead it against someone else to get that amazing sensation of two skins pulsing together, that pliability and friction. I held out my hand and placed it squarely against Friar Tuck’s cheek. He smiled. His muscles tensed, and I felt the line of his gums, the ridge of each individual tooth.
“I need to take a piss,” he said, but the words were a code for something entirely different.
Friar clomped to the bathroom, looking over his shoulder once, twice. “He wants you,” I heard Robin whisper beside me, but the voice seemed fathoms away, as if coming from a secret cavern beneath the bar’s floor. “Go get him,” the voice said. Friar paused before he opened the bathroom door. I followed his path.
A ring-nosed bull had been drawn in the center of the bathroom door. I shut and locked the door behind us. At that instant, the remainder of the acid soothed into me, and my body felt delicate, glistening, a figurine on a shelf. “Hey,” I said, and I smiled. Tuck repeated the word and the smile. I said it again, because I knew it was the stupidest possible thing I could say, and he’d love that. This time I reached up to touch his hair. “Heeeyyy.” The word lingered in the air, not really my voice at all. It sounded like it had blown in on a wind.
The faucet dripped. The water in the toilet bowl glowed sapphire blue, a wad of TP blooming in its center like an immaculate lily. I looked up; saw a crown-shaped gray stain on the ceiling.
The meat of my forearm met his. Hundreds of his hairs brushed against me, tickling like insect legs. “My little actor,” he said. That did it. I shoved him against the wall, slapped a hand on his butt and kept it there. I stood tiptoe and maneuvered my chin into his open mouth.
He raised his arms above his head and crossed his wrists. I was in control. I held him pinioned, my hand a clamp over his wrists, pushing him against the cold tiles as if the wall were a barrier I had to break with his body. He kissed at my ear, still sore from when Eric had pierced it. I moved away. He struggled a little, and I pushed harder, immobilizing him. “You’re one strong kid,” he said. “I bet you could do some damage.” I nodded, but inside I was thinking shit: what he said hit the bull’s-eye, but the way he said it wasn’t right, his voice high and tinny. I remembered something Christopher Ortega had said once about a guy he’d screwed: Looks like Tarzan, sounds like Jane. Friar started to speak again. I crammed my tongue between his teeth, stretching it far into his mouth to shut him up.
My free hand tore at his shirt. It seemed as though I were moving in fast motion, and he in slow. His ivory shirt buttons popped open to reveal his chest. There, the tattoo of a whale skimmed across waves, a geyser of water shooting from the top of its head. I bent and bit it. He made a sound like “yeah.” He wriggled so his nipple met my mouth. I took it between my teeth and nibbled, grinding my teeth on its tough gristle.
I wasn’t hard-typical when I’m tripping-and I nudged his leg away when he tried to maneuver it up my thigh. I thought how this wasn’t sex, really, just another experience. Yet it was what I wanted: the heavy contact, the two bodies shoving and slamming together, the stuff that could be proved the next day by bruises. I also wanted the thrill of knowing I made him happy. I wanted him to return to Wichita and tell his buddies about it. “Guess what, I made it with an eighteen-year-old tonight.”
I stopped biting his nipple and returned to his mouth, sucking his bottom lip as if extracting poison. This was something I excelled at, something I’d learned long ago. Friar tried to say a few words, but they garbled without the use of the lip.
In ten minutes I’d ascended over him. I could take him like a vampire. The words “at mercy” flashed on and off in my head, and I wanted to do something neither of us would forget: scratch my initials into his shoulder, plunge my dick into his ass without a condom, bite the lobe from his ear. He knew nothing about me, nothing but a first name, four measly letters that could have been another lie. He didn’t know a single truth about my life. He didn’t even know my face, a face that wouldn’t be the same tomorrow, in the mundane light of day.
I jerked my tongue from his mouth, leaned my head against his shoulder, and in that second I saw myself, a flash of tanned skin in the bathroom mirror. His body blocked mine, and my head hovered above his back like a swollen trophy. I realized he was naked, although I couldn’t remember stripping him. For some reason, that struck me as uproarious. I smiled at my face. The reflected expression didn’t seem anywhere near a smile. It must have been the acid.
By the time I left the bathroom, the digital numbers on the bar’s clock read one-thirty. Saliva from Friar’s kisses covered my ear, which felt like a steamed mussel when I touched it. I heard him behind me, clearing his throat, zipping up. I slammed the door. Two men stood there, waiting. One applauded as I walked past. I didn’t turn around for Friar’s standard handshake or telephone number. “Whoa,” I heard Robin say. The bar’s perspectives were a hundred percent off-kilter. I stepped forward, leaving a trail in the cedar chips, and galloped out the door.
I did that out of boredom, I thought. New York will be better. I took Main at fifty miles per hour. On the other side of the windshield, everything kaleidoscoped; streetlights slid together into white ribbons.
I stopped at the Quik-Trip and pumped five gallons into the gas tank. I wandered inside the store, pretended shopping, and managed to steal two boxes of Hot Tamales from under the clerk’s nose. Even that didn’t seem as exciting as it once had.
The Impala sputtered to life. I tore at the candy box, popped a handful of Tamales in my mouth, then shut off the stereo and listened as the motor’s rattle echoed through Main Street. I figured there would be some freaks prowling Main, drunken kids in the parking lot of Burger Chef. There was no one.
Carey Park had emptied as well. “No luck tonight.” I didn’t care; since I’d discovered Rudy’s, hustling the park was a thing of the past. Now the place seemed like an old carnival I’d once visited, its memories shrouded like spirits. The car coasted past a sign bragging Hutchinson’s history, its words still obliterated by the FUCK AUTHORITY and NO FUTURE graffiti Wendy and I had sprayed there years ago.
The moon looked like the tip of a fingernail. My headlights branched across crowds of skeletal oaks, cutting arcs in the humid and honeylike air. I eased the Impala into a gravel path that led to a playground. I switched dims to brights. They illuminated a swing set, two slippery slides, a rickety merry-go-round. For a second, I feared the acid would trick me, and I’d hallucinate the phantoms of murdered children. I got out and shook the thought from my head. The lights fell across the edge of a tiny jungle gym. I couldn’t believe my body had ever been small enough to fit inside its silver squares.
I shuffled through the Impala’s high beams toward the bathroom shed. The door wasn’t locked, and surprisingly, the lightbulbs hadn’t been smashed by vandals. I tugged at the dangling wire. Click-click. The walls had recently been painted orange, but when I squinted I could still see the ghost of my handwriting from months previous. I’d actually scribbled “FOR A GOOD TIME:” above the terms.
Back to the car. I lifted the neck of my shirt and buried my face inside it, smelling a sour fusion of breath and sweat and come. I left the park, running a red light, overwhelmed by the urge to speed home and ease into the world’s hottest bath.
By the time I reached Monroe Street, I remembered that Thursdays were Mom’s early mornings at work. I imagined Mom as I’d seen her so often whenever I came home late: snoozing on the couch, one arm fallen to the side, her fingers touching the carpet, her mouth open slightly, eyes trembling behind the lids as they surveyed the details of another dream.
I didn’t want to wake her, so I drove toward Eric’s trailer park. My mouth hurt, its soft parts throbbing, as if its layers of skin had been tweezered away. “Blood Mania wins Grand Jury prize at Cannes,” I spat out. “Best Actor Richard McCormick dedicates his award to his only son, Neil, whom he claims will follow in his footsteps and then some.”
A dog howled in the distance. I slid into Eric’s curb. He was home, because the Gremlin was there, its front fender still crushed from his “little accident.” I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene inside the house. This time, I pictured his grandpa and grandma, snug under their patchwork quilt in their brass bed, their spectacles or dentures or whatever else placed carefully on the nightstand beside them. Across the hall, Eric slept on half his futon. His face set into its permanently depressed frown. His heroes stared down from his walls’ posters.
Next I drove to the Petersons’. I could hear their air conditioner whirring, and they’d left their lawn sprinkler on. Inside were Wendy’s little brother Kurt; her mom and dad. In the year since she’d moved, I hadn’t set foot in there. No doubt her room was empty, its rug tattooed with burns from candles we’d dropped during sleep overs, its walls pocked from times we’d tacked up posters of favorite new-wave bands. Once, years ago, we’d written our initials on the wallpaper of purple irises. In one corner, near the floor, we etched “WJP” and “NSM” with the rusty point of a carpet knife. We had taken turns holding the knife, me spelling her letters, Wendy spelling mine. I wanted to break into the Peterson house, sneak to her room, and check to see if the initials remained.
I thought about the three houses, three distinct worlds where I’d lived my life. The lawn sprinkler circled back to shower the Impala’s grill. It made little crunching sounds, as if dwarf hands were scrabbling to get in from under the car. It was oddly soothing. Eventually, my thoughts of Eric and Wendy and Mom merged to form a path that led toward one other place, one other person. I was coming down from the acid. I had no memory of starting the car again, or of driving back toward the side streets off Main. But by the time my thoughts clarified, I was there, idling in front of the house where Coach once lived.
I sat staring at the door and shuttered windows. I half expected Coach to come running out, his arms held open as if created solely to fit around my body. My Neil, he would say. He had moved from Hutchinson years ago. The house had since been painted, regaraged, reroofed. Yet I still could smell him there, could hear him breathing. This is where it started, I thought.
And then I heard sharp wails coming from the house: a baby, crying. I saw a light in one room’s window. It clicked back off, and another room’s light clicked on.
As I watched the window, I realized the sound emanated from Coach’s old bedroom. I imagined a young mother in a lacy nightgown, calming her infant in that same perfect square of world where Coach had stretched beside me in bed. In there, he would hold me for hours, my head on his massive chest as I balanced my ear against him, listening for his heartbeat.
After some time, the wailing subsided. Maybe, I thought, the mother would speak to her baby. Maybe she would start to sing, a secret and peaceful song to lull her child back to sleep. I closed my eyes and clutched the steering wheel, leaning my forehead against it, listening.
On the night of Avalyn’s scheduled visit, I helped my mother cook my favorite dinner: Caesar salad, asparagus, and pork chops surrounded by a moat of au gratin potatoes. I opened the stove’s door to peek. “You’ll ruin the food,” my mother said. Her apron showed a large fish preparing to devour a small fish, who in turn prepared to eat an even smaller one. She hadn’t worn it since the days of my father.
I went upstairs to wait for Avalyn. Under the bed, my eight-year-old eyes gazed out of the Little League photograph from the Chamber of Commerce. Only Avalyn knew I’d stolen it. By now my mother resided in a different realm, apart from Avalyn and I, beyond the boundaries of our experiences as UFO abductees.
It was the beginning of August, and my dream log was half full. In my sleep I still saw aliens, and I tried to forget the doubt that had entered my mind on the night I’d viewed Avalyn’s mutilated calf. I held firm to the belief that my dreams were all clues, pieces of my hidden past now revealing themselves. It was as though my brain had little rooms inside it, and I were entering a room that had been padlocked for years, the key sparkling in my fist.
I’d grown bored with skimming through the borrowed pamphlets, so I bided my time staring at the boy at the end of the photograph’s top row. I truly believed he provided my most effortless way toward a solution, that he would reenter my dreams to tell me his name, where he lived, what he’d retained from our concurrent abduction and any similar experiences he’d since had. I needed him.
The presence of the coach still bothered me: his squared shoulders, his broad, sandy mustache, and the coyotelike gaze that speared through the picture as if he knew he’d be locking eyes with me, thousands of days in the future. Whenever I looked at the picture, I’d press my hand against the coach’s form to block him out. This queasiness was just another enigma I couldn’t solve. I hoped my teammate, whenever I would meet him, could explain it.
“Come down here,” my mother yelled from the bottom of the stairs. If I joined her, I could count on her to avoid the UFO subject, pushing it out of conversation to discuss instead my “upcoming college life” or “future career in the real world.” I wanted no part of that. I made certain my bedroom door was locked tight. I pretended I couldn’t hear her over the din of synthesizers and computerized drums. After a while, she walked away.
Avalyn arrived ten minutes early. When I heard her car in the driveway, I leaped downstairs. She stood at the door, holding six yellow carnations. She wore a dress, her wrists ornamented with silver bracelets, her face rouged and eye shadowed. She’d taken her hair from its usual bun, and it meandered down her back in a dark ponytail. I let her in, holding out my hand to shake. She waved my hand aside and hugged me instead.
“Avalyn,” I said, “this is my mother.” For a second I thought she would hug my mother too. Instead, she gave her the carnations. My mother took them as she might take a wriggling child.
It was the first time I’d invited a guest for dinner, so leading Avalyn from room to room seemed the apt thing to do. She lingered over my mother’s plants, caressing individual leaves and fronds with the tenderness a nurse might administer to a burn patient. “Someone’s watered this little guy too much,” she said. She arched a plucked eyebrow at the stack of gun manuals and NRA magazines on the couch.
Avalyn followed me to the kitchen and sat at the table. I put the carnations in a mayonnaise jar, filled it with water, and sat beside her. My knee brushed her leg. I thought first of her scar, and then of the way she had touched me that night in her field as I cried.
“Brian tells me you’re a fan of this Cosmosphere place as well,” my mother told Avalyn. “I don’t think he’s missed any of their programs since the place opened.”
“I haven’t either,” Avalyn said. “As I told him over the phone the other night, it’s a miracle we never bumped into each other there.” She unfolded the napkin I’d arranged beside her plate. “My favorite show was the one on unusual weather. I also loved the shows on volcanoes and roller coasters. The one on the history of railroads in America, on the other hand: boring.” My mother brought the food to the table, and Avalyn continued to explain how that particular night’s program concerned the history of flight. “I’ve a feeling Brian and I will enjoy this one.”
We ate. The conversation lagged, my mother and Avalyn its only participants. My mother seemed to be testing our guest, unraveling her layers to get at some kernel of truth, and I didn’t like it. “I’d enjoy hearing more about the whole process of hypnosis,” she said. “Since Brian is so interested in it, after all.”
Avalyn began relating stories I’d already heard. My mother hadn’t said much after she’d seen Avalyn’s feature on “World of Mystery.” But there, at the dinner table, in front of the flesh-and-blood Avalyn, my mother wore the look of a hardened skeptic. She even clucked her tongue at one point.
“Now I’d like to ask you a question,” Avalyn said. “Brian tells me you were there when he sighted his first UFO, the one he remembers. It’s not uncommon for those who’ve seen one to see another.” She wriggled her fingers beside the frame of her glasses to indicate the flutter of memory. “Do you have any other sightings inside your head?”
“No,” my mother said. “I barely remember the one he’s told you about.” She paused and pressed her knife into what remained of her pork chop. “But I’m eager to find out what’s behind his suspicions about his missing time.”
“Oh, I’m convinced that Brian’s suspicions are true,” Avalyn said. “There’s no question in my mind; something’s happened to him.” My mother stared at Avalyn with the exact eyes I’d seen her center on the 7-UP bottles beside the house, the gun in her hand.
“No question in my mind at all,” Avalyn repeated.
My mother gripped the steering wheel, her eyes locked on the road. Avalyn lounged in the passenger’s seat as if it were the world’s coziest chair. I leaned forward from the back, my head inhabiting the uneasy air between them. Hutchinson’s skyline loomed closer, and Avalyn pointed toward the structure of white plaster in the distance. “The famous mile-long grain elevator,” she said.
We reached our destination as dusk was frosting the trees and rows of homes. The breeze smelled of honeysuckle and highway tar. The Cosmosphere building, a mammoth chocolate-colored octagon, sat near the community college. I scanned our surroundings. I was familiar with the college’s buildings and sidewalks and lawns, but the place now carried a growing sense of dread: I’d no doubt spend the next two years of my life here, studying toward a degree I still wasn’t certain of.
Yellow flyers had been pasted to each of the parking lot’s light poles. I read one as we walked toward the building. They pictured a pigtailed little girl named Abigail Hofmeier. She had been missing since July twenty-first. “Please Help Us Find Our Baby,” her parents had written at the bottom. My mother, reading over my shoulder, said, “That’s heartbreaking.”
The three of us entered the sliding glass doors. Touristy-looking people shuffled through the lobby and the adjoining gift shop. The next show was scheduled in fifteen minutes, so Avalyn and I browsed through the absurd souvenirs we’d seen hundreds of times already. My mother took her seat on a bench and waited.
Posters of planets covered the gift shop’s walls, as well as astrological charts and informative lists about U.S. astronauts. Rocket mobiles and kites dangled from the ceiling, twirling in a counterclockwise ballet. Compasses, various key chains and pencils, miniature robots, and space-laser water guns crowded the shelves. One box was filled with dehydrated squares of food that resembled sections of brick. IDENTICAL TO THE HAM-AND-EGGS BREAKFAST EATEN IN SPACE BY ASTRONAUT ALAN SHEPARD! read a package’s glittery letters. Avalyn examined a dehydrated meat loaf, then kneeled to a shelf containing make-it-yourself model kits. In one, kids ages eight to eighteen could construct a model unidentified flying object. “They don’t know what they’re messing with,” she said.
We walked back to the lobby, where a maroon-coated man ushered people through the door. “Time to take our seats,” my mother said. We paid for our tickets and filed into a long hall leading to the Cosmosphere’s domed auditorium. The ceiling was blank and white. The room smelled synthetic, almost sugary, as I half-remembered the interior of the blue room in my dream had smelled.
The auditorium filled in a matter of minutes. An older couple with identical shag haircuts sat on Avalyn’s left. The woman’s eyes were dazed and slightly unhinged, eyes that may have just seen her own house burn to the ground. She, like everyone else, watched the ceiling, waiting for the show to start.
Lights dimmed, and I heard music that sounded like the electronic tape we’d listened to in the car. What had been a white dome above us became a replica of the night sky. From the corner of my eye, I could see the couple beside us shift in their seats. Their identical digital watches gave off twin green auras. Gradually, on the “sky” above, pinpricks of twinkling light flickered on, one by one. This opening sky simulation was always my favorite part of the Cosmosphere trips-it reminded me of the past, when I’d climb to our roof at home and watch as the night’s stars gradually appeared, stars so familiar I almost possessed them. Avalyn must have sensed my excitement, because she whispered in my ear, identifying constellations. “Cassiopeia,” she said. “Ursa Major, with Leo right beside it.”
The moody music ceased, and the feature film began. The announcer’s voice was enthusiastic and sexless, its timbre like a game show host’s. “Welcome one and all to ‘The Boundless Blue: The History of Flight in America,’” he/she said.
The film, which proved to be nothing special, traced the discoveries of the Wright Brothers all the way to current developments in air and space. Nothing concerning extraterrestrial life materialized. At one point, my mother squeezed my right hand. Then, slowly, Avalyn took my left. I wondered if either of them knew where my other hand was. I pretended to be uncomfortable in the seat and fidgeted, clasping my hands in my lap to empty them.
On the way home, we saw fires on the horizon, farmers burning skeletal stalks of corn after harvest. The orange glow at the sky’s edge made the world seem ready to crack open, and I watched until the fire fizzled to nothing more than a sparkle in the distance. By the time we arrived in Little River, sleepiness had filtered through my limbs. Avalyn helped me out of the Toyota and looked toward her pickup. “Don’t leave yet,” I said. “I need to finish the tour of the house. There are two important places you haven’t seen.”
My mother clicked the TV on, brushed aside her magazines, and sat on the couch to watch a weatherman trace the meanderings of a tropical storm in the Atlantic. Her mouth pinched into a pout. I walked to the basement door, switched on the light, and led Avalyn down.
At the bottom of the stairs, I stood on tiptoe, reaching to move the crawl space door aside. Once I had needed a chair; now I was tall enough to stretch my head into the opening as Deborah had done a decade ago. “Here’s where my sister found me,” I told Avalyn. She nodded, already familiar with the story.
I looked inside. The room appeared exactly as it had years before, the dust a little thicker, the cobwebs tangled and dense on the cement walls. Here is where I chose to hide, I thought. Here is where I went to get away from them.
“Now, the top floor,” I said. “You still haven’t seen my room in all its splendor.”
My mother didn’t look as we passed her. I trudged up the steps, opened the door to my room, and stepped inside. When Avalyn followed me in, I remembered what she’d said when I’d first visited her. “I cleaned just for you,” I mimicked, sweeping my hand over the books and tapes and clothes I’d ever-so-slightly tidied that morning.
Avalyn stood in the room’s center. I couldn’t remember anyone beyond my immediate family being there before. She surveyed my bookcase from top to bottom shelf, fingering titles, hmming or aahing occasionally. She ran her hand along the knobs of wood on my bedpost, then faced the wall. “I didn’t like that film,” she said, indicating my Capricorn One poster. She turned to Angry Red Planet. “And that, I never saw.”
I stretched out on one end of my bed; Avalyn took the other. “Your mother doesn’t care much for me,” she said. “We are very different people. She thinks I’m stealing you away, I can tell.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” I forced a smile, as if it were no big deal.
“I had a boyfriend in high school once,” Avalyn said. The sentence came out of nowhere, scaring me a little. “I wasn’t so fat then. On our second date he brought me home late, and while I was getting out of the car my father appeared from the darkness, clamped his hand on the boy’s arm, and told him if it happened again he’d personally blow his head clean off. So much for my love life.”
From where I sat, I could see out the open window. Wasps dipped and spun from their muddy roof nest, threatening to fly inside. Down the hill, random lights in Little River’s kitchens and porches and rec rooms flickered on and off. The ballpark’s lights created a halo over the entire town. I remembered times when Deborah and I watched the players running bases, catching fly balls, sliding into home. I wondered if the boy from Little League still played ball somewhere; if he lived close enough to contact.
I reached under my bed for the framed photograph. “This is what I need to show you.” Avalyn scanned the fifteen Little Leaguers to find me; when she saw my face, she tapped her finger against the glass. “Oh, don’t look at him,” I said, and I swaddled her finger with my hand to guide it toward the top row. “Here he is: the one from sleep.”
Avalyn stared at him, glanced up at me, and stared at him again. “So he’s your man. Yes, he could well be one of us.” Minutes passed without a word, and I wondered what she’d say next. Then, without warning, Avalyn lifted the framed picture and slammed it, hard, against her knee. The glass splintered. She brought it down again, the frame’s corner striking the spot where the tracking device’s scar curled across her skin. Glass shards tumbled onto my mattress and fell to the floor.
“What-” I began. “Why?”
“Shush.” Avalyn brushed the glass away with her hand, unconcerned with cuts. She extracted the photograph from its frame, shook off excess splinters and glass dust, and held it to her face. “Oh, Brian,” she said. “It’s just as I thought.”
She handed me the eight-by-ten, back side facing up. Printed there, in blue ink across the white, was a list of names:
(Top row, l to r): C. Bailey, M. Wright, O. Schrag, M. Varney, D. Porter, J. Ensminger, G. Hodgson, N. McCormick, Coach J. Heider. (Bottom row, l to r): V. Martin, J. Thieszen, B. Lackey, B. Connery, E. Ellison, T. Ellison, S. Berg.
Our names. My name, “B. Lackey.” And the kid’s name. “I can’t believe this,” I said. “I should have thought of this.” I didn’t care about the others; my mind had speedily linked the boy at the end of the top row with “N. McCormick.” I said the name aloud; said it again. It was the one the aliens kept secure in their confidential files, the one they’d logged alongside “B. Lackey.”
“And now we have to find him,” Avalyn said, reading my mind.
She reached into her dress pocket. “By the way, I almost forgot.” She centered something in my open palm. It was the hair ball from that night on her farm, the red and white and black fur she’d pulled from the barbed wire fence. “I wanted you to have this,” she said. “Whether it’s the little calf’s fur or not, it’s proof that he was alive, that he was a living, breathing thing before they came for him.” Avalyn closed my fingers into a fist around the hair ball and moved closer to me. “We always need proof. To remember something’s happened.”
She began unbuttoning her dress then, fiddling with one after the other until she’d reached her waistline and the dress had bunched around her stomach. She wore a T-shirt underneath, a shirt that had once been black but had faded to a dark gray. The front sported a cracked and flaky iron-on transfer of her favorite band, their caricatured faces pouting and snarling.
“Kiss,” I said, and before the word had fallen from my lips she pressed against me, leaning into my body, my head twisting against the pillow. She muttered something like, “I thought you’d never ask,” and as she spoke she jammed her mouth against mine. Our teeth clacked together. She thrust her tongue inside my open mouth, and somehow I recognized it, as if her tongue had dwelled there before, long ago. But I didn’t know how to kiss back. I kept my mouth as still as possible, waiting for her to stop.
She pulled away and winced. “Ouch.” The muscle of her palm had snagged on a stray glass shard. I leaned toward her to examine it, but she pushed me back, untucking my shirt to maneuver her hand inside. She touched my chest, feeling the tiny blond hairs around my belly button, moving up to tickle the scattering of hair between my ribs. Her hand leaked a residue of blood, and it left a dark red grin beneath my right nipple. Her finger erased the smudge; flicked the nipple. “I really want to make you feel good, Brian.” When she said my name, my face went hot.
Avalyn slid the shirt from her shoulders. Her body’s top half exposed, she lay down on me, her head on my chest, her breasts brushing my stomach. Something was horrifying about it: Avalyn, cowering against me, suddenly pitiful in the way her weight bunched together, the white flesh folding into itself, the skin terraced and scalloped and ridged. But even more horrifying was the body she lay upon: my scrawny arms, the uneven tan from the days I’d spent mowing lawns, the zits in a scarlet constellation on my chest.
I tried to concentrate on something else-the new name I’d learned, the upcoming days that would be filled in pursuit of N. McCormick-but, as desperately as I tried, I couldn’t detach myself from what was happening. I was hard. Avalyn snaked her bleeding hand into my jeans, not bothering to unbuckle or unzip.
Before she even touched me, I realized what would happen. It was as if I’d known this for years, that I knew the secret to the reason I’d never approached anything remotely resembling sex: it would take me back to something I didn’t want, a memory that had hovered for years, hidden, in my head. Her hand clamped around me, one finger gingerly tracing a line up my penis, stopping at the tip. I felt as though a part of me were vanishing. I felt the same trapped feeling I’d felt only days before, that night in her pasture.
“I can’t,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Brian,” Avalyn said, and although her lips moved, I heard another voice entirely.
It will feel good, the voice said. The kid’s voice. Yes, the voice of N. McCormick.
Open your eyes, it will feel good.
Something was spinning. My head had become a confused Ferris wheel, winding and twirling out of control. I had cried in Avalyn’s pasture, but I would not cry again. Out the window, the wasps still buzzed and dipped from their nest, peering in at us with their rainbowy eyes. B. Lackey, they murmured. N. McCormick. I gripped Avalyn’s wrist and pulled her arm from my jeans.
She went limp. “I’m sorry.” This time, the voice was hers, not the kid’s. I wanted to tell her no, don’t be sorry, it’s not you, it’s me. But I couldn’t speak. She rose from the bed, wriggling into the arms of her dress. I could see the red trickle forming a line from her palm to her wrist. One of the wasps had flown into the open window; it twirled in intoxicated circles against the ceiling. “I’m so sorry,” Avalyn said.
After Avalyn left, I waited forty minutes. Then I called her from the downstairs telephone. I began by thanking her for discovering the names on the photograph’s flip side; gradually, I led into my apology for the evening’s uncomfortable culmination. “Forget about what happened just now. There’s something in this head, something they did to me. I can’t shake it.”
“I understand,” Avalyn said. In the front room, my mother lounged on the couch, the TV’s light fireflying across her face, her head cocked as if straining to hear me. “And don’t worry, you’ll get over this. It just takes time.”
After I hung up, I joined my mother. It had been years since we’d had an honest-to-goodness fight, but I could still remember the precise curl of her lip, her jawline’s rigid architecture as she had scolded and yelled. That look was identical to the shape her features took now.
She held the remote control at eye level, switched off the set, and stared me down. “You need to explain something to me,” she said. I thought of Avalyn, her top half exposed, lying across my bed, her hand inside my pants. Did my mother know? Then my mother’s voice raised into a question. She almost screamed. “Why are you shutting me out of your life?”
She was angrier than I’d anticipated. “She understands things,” I said. “You don’t.”
My mother mocked me. “‘She understands things.’ That’s just it, Brian. I want to understand things. But it’s hard. Soon you’ll be in school, you’ll be so preoccupied. I want this time to be ours. You’re shutting me out.” She was yelling, her voice a hammer, nailing me in place. The remote control leaped from her hand. I watched it bounce under the coffee table, resting at last beside the folded entertainment section of yesterday’s newspaper. ACTOR DIES AT 32, a headline read.
My mother continued. “It’s not that I don’t want to believe you. I watched that silly program with you, I bought you the notebook to record your dreams in. But you’re not foolish. I mean, think about it.” Although she wasn’t saying it directly, I knew she meant this: the idea of you, Brian Lackey, being abducted by a UFO and examined by space aliens, is completely preposterous. If she had said those words, something inside me would have ignited.
“I just want more time with you,” my mother said. “Time that isn’t spent talking about what the interior of that damned ship looked like, how you think their fingers felt when they reached out and grabbed you. Please. I know you need to sort those things out.” Her expression melted slightly. “We should have brought this up earlier. If you want to see someone for help on this, really, there’s nothing wrong with it, they even offer it free at the prison. A lot of people I know-”
In all honesty, the idea of psychiatric help for what I truly believed had happened to me didn’t make me all that angry. At the time, however, a tantrum seemed the proper response. I allowed my eyes to widen, to reach cartoon proportions. There was nothing near me to grab and throw, so I simply stomped from the room. She didn’t follow. I strode outside, toward the car, and as I walked I remembered the night my father had left-how Deborah and I had listened from the staircase as he had stormed through the house, slammed the door, and departed our lives forever.
I drove and drove. I was nothing like my father; I would eventually return. But at the time, I wanted to be alone, wanted to plan my next move. The car careened down dirt roads, tires spinning. I crossed rickety bridges; the steel ribs of cattle guards that sent wicked vibrations through my body. I drove past acres of stubbled cornstalks. My headlights revealed a shadowy scarecrow, hunched and emaciated on his cross. Ahead, Hutchinson’s feeble lights beckoned.
Open your eyes, it will feel good. I had to know what that meant.
When I got to Hutchinson, I crisscrossed random streets. The majority of the city was safe behind closed doors. I puttered here and there for nearly two hours, pausing before each individual house. I scrutinized mailboxes, searching out his name. “McCormick,” I said, hopeful. “Come on, just one McCormick.”
By three o’clock, I’d found one McLean, one McCracken, and two McAllisters, but not a single McCormick. Soon it would be morning. My mother would be worried. I looked at my glazed eyes in the mirror, made a U-turn in the center of the street, and headed home.
The morning of Neil’s scheduled move to New York began like any other. It was a day of stalled air conditioners and rapidly melting ice cubes, a day when the sky was so cloudless and gorged with sun it granted no one the privilege of shade. I had a stomachache and a fever blister the size of a dime. The latter didn’t bother me; I wasn’t expecting a good-bye kiss anyway.
I waited until noon to dial his number. Mrs. McCormick answered. “Hello, Eric,” she said. “The weather is exceptional, and I don’t have to work. The sleepyhead’s still in bed. Let’s make his final day in the breadbasket of America a memorable one.”
My grandparents had been awake for hours. They crouched in the garden, dressed in matching aprons and sun bonnets. Grandma touched her yellow rubber gloves to the vegetables she’d cook for me on the next night I was home and hungry. Grandpa fiddled with marigolds and pansies he’d planted inside tires, the worn Michelins strewn about the lawn that added to the ramshackle antiquality of the mobile home. The temperature gauge on the porch-a rusting tin hobo, pulling down his dungarees to display a thermometer-pushed its red level toward ninety degrees.
I sat beside them. Grandpa handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill. When he asked where I was headed, I explained how my “good friend” was leaving town that night, said I’d be back before dark, and hurried to the Gremlin. Grandma warned that the day’s pollen count had surged to an uncomfortably high level. She pinched at the feverish air, and Grandpa waved. Good-bye, good-bye, see you later.
During the drive toward Monroe, I paid close attention to my surroundings. On one lawn down the block, a gathering of children played in their bathing suits, screaming and giggling through a game of sprinkler tag. Three blocks later, a man hunched in a ditch and tried to coax something from a culvert. Kids sat on car hoods, their radios blaring heavy metal. Hutchinson was no different from before. But today, Neil would leave forever. I was stuck, an off-color thread weaved into the city’s bland fabric.
Neil stood at his garage door, beside his mom. They grinned suspiciously. Mrs. McCormick wore a green dress printed with daisies. Neil wore jeans and the usual white shirt. He was the taller of the two. Her hair, a little longer than his, was the same thick and heavy black, only streaked here and there with gray.
I slammed the car door. “Not so fast,” Neil said.
“We’re in the mood for a little trip,” his mom said. She held licorice whips, curled around her fist like a red-and-black lasso, and a fold-out Kansas road map. A paper sack sat at her feet. “The Impala’s been acting up,” she continued. “I fear it’s the transmission. I’m willing to give you gas money if you’re willing to chauffeur us”-she placed her palms on the Gremlin’s scarred hood as if to spiritually heal it-“in this little gal.”
“No problem,” I said. “Where to?”
Mrs. McCormick unfolded the map and smoothed it on the hood. She traced a line from Hutchinson to Great Bend, a city nearly an hour’s distance northwest. Then her finger curled toward a pastel green square on the map. I squinted at the green and read the words, “Cheyenne Bottoms Nature Conservatory.”
“We’ll spend the day there,” she said. She picked up the paper sack, and I heard the sound of bottles clunking together. “Wine and cheese. And if it’s okay by you, when the time comes we’ll see Neil off to the airport.”
Their minds set, I couldn’t argue. Neil took the passenger seat, and his mom clambered into the back. “Cramped,” she said. Her eyes met mine in the rearview. “But I’m not complaining!”
I left town via Plum Street, out of Reno County and into McPherson, turning onto Highway 56 and its sign for yet another county, Rice. The band of asphalt stretched before us, shimmering and curved like a water moccasin. August’s sun scorched the flat fields, and we saw three different ditches burned black by grass fires. Grain silos disrupted the smooth tedium of the land, their silver cylinders reflecting nothing but blue sky. It seemed that Rice County had emptied of people. In one pasture, a group of palominos lazed beneath a single tree, so exhausted they didn’t bother looking up when Neil reached across my arm and blared the horn. We filed past the array of towns-Windom, Little River, Mitchell, Lyons, Chase, Ellinwood-all the while nearing Great Bend. As much as I wanted to hate Kansas and its smothering heat, it dawned on me that the state was almost beautiful, almost like home.
Neil’s mom consulted her map, filling us in on historic landmarks and population numbers. She scanned the sketch of Kansas from top to bottom, announcing noteworthy town names: “Protection. Nicodemus. Medicine Lodge.” She pointed to Holcomb, home of the murdered family in that famous book. She pointed to Abilene, Emporia, Dodge City. She showed us the tiny Herkimer, where an ex-boyfriend had lived. “What a waste. Driving that far just to be wooed by that shit-for-brains.”
Neil nodded as she spoke. He chewed the same gum he gave for foul balls at Sun Center, blowing bubbles as wide as his face.
Billboards announced Great Bend’s restaurants. The Black Angus, Smith’s Smorgasbord (“Down Home Cookin’ at Rock Bottom Billin’”), Jim-Bob’s, and Country Kitchen (“Free 72 oz. Steak if Eaten in One Sitting”). Neil’s mom leaned into the front seat. “Who’s hungry? Let’s get something in our systems before the wine and cheese and the trek through nature.”
We decided on the Kreem Kup. Its sign sported a towering ice cream cone that twinkled and glittered in white neon even in the blistering daylight. Mrs. McCormick led the way, the licorice still in her hand. The twenty-or-so customers stared as we stepped inside, some literally leaning from their vinyl booths, their heads craning toward us. The waitress scurried away from a frying cage of onion rings and took position at the counter cash register. Neil ordered for us.
“You’re not from around here, right?” the waitress asked.
“We’re exchange students from a small carrot farming community in Iceland,” Neil said, scratching unabashedly at his crotch. He indicated his mom with a nod. “She’s our geography teacher, who joined us to write a book about the flora and fauna of Kansas.” Neil’s lies were amazing.
“Is that right.” The waitress handed us a plastic placard displaying the number twenty-nine. I grabbed it and slid into a booth, across from Neil and his mom. On the café’s opposite side, a group of teenage boys watched us. They were all ugly. Their eyes gave close scrutiny to my haircut, my eyeliner, Neil’s earring, my clothes, my fever blister, and Mrs. McCormick’s breasts. I heard a drawling voice spout the word “homosexuals,” almost cheering it, as if it were the final word in a national anthem.
I mouthed “white trash.” Neil’s mom winked at me. “They’re just jealous,” she said. Neil stuck his chin in the air. He was relishing the moment, having grown accustomed. I feared he would spit or throw ice at them.
The waitress brought the food and plucked the twenty-nine card from our table. Cocktail toothpicks skewered each bun like teeny, festive swords. Mrs. McCormick’s pork tenderloin leaked a puddle of grease, tomato slices and wilted lettuce leaves beside it. “This should hit the spot,” she said.
Under the table, my foot brushed Neil’s ankle. He moved his leg and looked out the window.
We were half finished before the assholes at the neighboring table mustered enough courage to approach. One of them accepted some sort of dare and walked toward our booth. His front tooth was chipped. He wore a studded leather armband, black cowboy boots, ripped jeans, and a T-shirt showing an intricate drawing by some German “artist” who’d been popular with kids in art class at school. In the drawing, stairs spiralled and wound around and between and across each other, creating an optical illusion. The scene was the exact opposite of Kansas’s elementary landscapes.
The lamebrain crossed his arms, biceps flexing. He cleared his throat, and I knew something wounding and sarcastic would spew forth. “We could tell you weren’t from around here.” His chipped tooth resembled a minuscule guillotine, suspended from his puffy upper gum. “And we just wanted you to know”-pause-“this is an AIDS-free zone.”
My mouth opened. I wanted to bludgeon him, but instead attempted to send him an especially damaging telepathic message. Drop dead, shithead was all I could generate.
Mrs. McCormick fared better. She looked him straight in the eye. “You are an evil little man,” she said.
It was Neil’s turn. “Fuck off,” he told the kid. Then he leaned across the table, in full view of the entire café, and placed his tongue between my still-parted lips. He was only doing it for the effect, but I closed my eyes, forgetting the context for a split second, letting the restaurant’s humdrum atmosphere melt around me, cherishing the tongue that hadn’t been inside my mouth in months.
“Fucking faggots,” the kid said, and headed back to his buddies.
I remembered how, before sex, Neil would crunch cupfuls of ice; the chill that emanated from his tongue as it searched my mouth. There, in the Kreem Kup, his tongue tasted just the same, felt just as cold. I wanted him to thrust it past my teeth, down my throat, to choke me.
“Let’s leave,” Mrs. McCormick said. She dropped the remainder of her sandwich, and we scurried off. As we passed the jerks’ table, two legs arched out to trip us. Neil breathed in deep and belched at them, and I remembered the little boy’s voice on the tape I’d heard in his room. I still hadn’t asked him about that.
Without turning to the café’s windows, I could feel their eyes on us. “That was horrific,” Neil’s mom said. She crawled into the Gremlin and started laughing. “And greasy, too. We’ll not come to the Kreem Kup again.”
On to Cheyenne Bottoms. I pulled into a gas station, its green brontosaurus logo painted on a cement wall. Mrs. McCormick leaned from the back window and asked directions. “Two blocks that way, make a right, then two more blocks, watch for the sign,” the attendant said. He fanned his arms back and forth like windshield wipers.
We followed his instructions. I piloted the car onto a road that twisted away from Great Bend’s city limits. We moved farther from everything. Two signs advertised the nature conservatory, one in the right ditch, one in the left, simple black CHEYENNE BOTTOMS block letters against white. The left sign had been tampered with, and the words now read HEY TOM.
When we reached the place, the world seemed to open up and level out. Cheyenne Bottoms was a five-mile-by-five-mile stretch of marshland, a scene that seemed more typical of, say, Louisiana than Kansas. Its air was heavier, smokier. There were few trees; in their places stood tall, rustling grasses and ferns, azure reeds and bracken. Banks of cattails swayed in the breeze, poking from shallow ponds and mud hills. Everything looked scrubbed with bleach. “Amazing,” I said. We left the city behind, going deeper into this new realm.
Birds ran everywhere, their matchstick legs skittering across mud the color of peanut shells. Killdeer mingled about, thrilled, guests at an amazing party. Their forked footprints left zigzagging patterns on the mud. A cream-colored egret stood alone, looking forlorn. “Look there,” Neil’s mom said, indicating a glassy pond where wood ducks swam in figure eights. The scene looked unreal, almost comical. I half expected a crocodile’s jaw to pop forth and devour the birds.
Neil peered into the rearview, then over his shoulder. “There’s no one around for miles,” he said. “We’re alone.”
I parked the car in the road, in a spot I estimated as the exact center of Cheyenne Bottoms. The heat slammed down. Neil and I got out, and a mosquito lighted on my forearm. It left an apostrophe of blood beneath my hand.
Neil’s mom wriggled free from the backseat, the sack snug in her fist. She arranged the wine and cheese on the car hood. She pulled out three chocolate bars as well, all the while staring, mesmerized, at a flowering shrub nearby. The blooms grew close to the earth, thick white-petaled knobs surrounding red centers that stretched forward like the bells of trumpets. A few bees hovered there. Neil walked over and plucked a flower from the bush, then brought it back and tucked it behind his mom’s ear.
A bullfrog began croaking. Neil tugged at his shirt-one he’d stolen from United Methodist Thrift-and tossed it through the open front seat window. He gulped his wine and sat on the hood, beside the block of cheddar. “Aaaaaaah,” he said, arms stiff in front of him. At the sound of his voice, the frog silenced.
I removed my shirt as well to expose my white skin. Mrs. McCormick donned sunglasses and slipped from her dress, revealing a tight bikini. We joined Neil, our legs stretched on the hood, our backs and heads against the windshield. Neil rested between us, where he belonged. For him, New York was eight hours away.
The three of us ate and drank, eventually abandoning the cheese, but continuing to sip the wine. We stared out at the marshes, listening to crickets, the hissing of dried grasses, the various bird whistles and quacks and trills that somehow managed to harmonize in the steamy air. I kept hoping to see a kingfisher or some equally provocative bird, but none showed up. “Neil has a birthday coming,” his mom said, languidly slurring her words as if easing into a dream. “The first time in nineteen years I won’t be there to celebrate.”
“We’re celebrating now,” he said.
She patted his knee, then leaned across to pat mine. “We are, aren’t we.”
Nearly an hour passed in silence. I found it strange how there was so much to see, to hear, even smell. Cheyenne Bottoms, the land of slow motion. Occasionally a flock of geese flew over the car, caterwauling and honking, and Neil’s arm shot up to follow their path across the sky. The sun devoured any cloud that tried to materialize. The chunks of cheese were practically steaming; Neil gave them a barefooted kick, and they bounced into the sod, a banquet for ants. I looked at his mom to see her reaction. She was sleeping. The flower had fallen from her ear. Her face and shoulders had already lobstered. I retrieved my shirt from the car and covered her sunburn with it.
Neil poured the wine’s remnants into his cup and swigged it. “My bladder’s about to burst,” he announced. He jogged to a ditch, his feet audibly sloshing, and stepped into the reeds. I listened to his zipper unzipping, the patter of his piss as it hit the mud. Overhead, more geese soared in a group so thick they briefly obliterated the sun.
“Eric,” Neil said. “Come here.” I rolled my body off the hood, careful not to wake his mom.
I headed toward the reeds, grasshoppers catapulting every which way. One dive-bombed toward Neil’s back, and I saw him standing there, jeans bunched at his knees. He turned. He gripped his balls and his dick in one hand, displaying himself to me. The other hand scratched idly around the ridge of his pubic hair. “Do me a favor. Take a look.” I bent down, dropping to my knees on the spongy earth. I remembered assuming the same position once, in Neil’s bedroom, under different circumstances. But he wasn’t hard now. “I’m bleeding,” he said. He sounded like an innocent kid. “What’s wrong with me?”
I shooed away the hand that wouldn’t stop scratching. Scattered across the flesh of Neil’s crotch, almost hidden within his hair’s black curls, were tiny dots of blood from his fingernails’ abrasions. And interspersed with the blood were black specks, like little peppercorns, imbedded in his skin. I recognized them immediately as crab lice. I pinched one away. In the sun’s slant, I could see the thing’s whisker-like legs wriggling against my finger. “Gross.” I tossed it and stared up at Neil, his soft dick and its parasites even with my mouth. He had no idea. The reeds around his head rustled softly, haloes of gnats darting between their towers. “You’ve got crabs,” I spat out.
His eyes widened. He smiled, the pained, divided smile a person would make while being tattooed. “Oh.” I wanted to slug him, to preach to him about hustling, about having sex here and there with this guy and that without knowing anything about the consequences. And then my thoughts of Neil’s sex life led to other thoughts, all my surfacing fears of herpes and syphilis and AIDS, and before I could muzzle myself I opened my mouth and said something I should have simply tried to send through brain waves. I said, “You’d better be playing safe.”
Neil stared down at me: beautiful, exquisite, a bronze statue I wanted to worship. “I stay in control,” he said.
At the sound of Neil’s voice, the reeds beside us shuddered, and something lifted in the air, its wings flapping sluggishly. Neil and I glanced up, breathless, and saw a great bird, a heron, its narrow banana-colored bill cutting across the sun, its crested head jutting forward, its neck bowing and dipping, its webbed feet drawing into its body as it ascended. For a brief moment it loomed directly above us. It cast us in its shadow, and I saw that its coat wasn’t white, but sapphire blue, a color even I knew was rare for Kansas herons. It was the raw color of sky before the sun breaks. We watched it leaving. Neil hiked his pants, and we shuffled from the reeds, our eyes fixed on it. His mother still slept, unaware, on the car hood. The heron’s wings coasted and waved, coasted and waved, as it moved farther away, as it flew northeast.
The direction of New York, I thought.
By the time we began seeing signs for Wichita International Airport, most of the day had burned away, the evening now a colorless husk. We had barely spoken since we’d turned onto the highway. I knew we each thought the same thing: what direction would our lives take now? The thought seemed wildly melodramatic, and I concentrated on the road, the wheat fields, the sandy driveways leading to farmhouse after farmhouse.
Neil’s flight-one-way, not round-trip-was scheduled to leave at 7:30 P.M. sharp. He stood before the baggage desk, grinning. An attendant verified his ticket, punching keys on her computer. In the loading zone outside the sliding glass doors, the wounded Gremlin sat, a blue eyesore. I would have to hug Neil now. I knew if I so much as touched him, I would start bawling. Instead, I handed him the sack I’d carried from a Great Bend drugstore after we’d left Cheyenne Bottoms. I’d explained to Neil and his mom how “the grannies need aspirin.” I’d lied. Inside was a box of lice killer, “pediculicide,” the solution to annihilate his crabs. “A little going-away present,” I whispered, and shoved it into his carry-on.
Mrs. McCormick leaned into Neil. She rubbed the tip of her nose against his chin, kissed his cheek, and rested her head on his shoulder. He watched the surrounding airport, his eyes darting among the horde of unfamiliar people, not focusing on me or his mom. “I love you,” she said into his shoulder. Then-as if she knew-“Be careful.”
Neil made a hip-swaying motion, his way of scratching without using his hands. He positioned his bag on the X-ray conveyor and stepped through the security sensor. I would have bet a month’s worth of allowance on it beeping. It didn’t. “Hooray,” said his mom.
On the other side of an enormous plate glass rectangle, the 747 waited, scheduled to board in mere minutes. There was no sense in staying to watch. Neil raised a hand to us, and we turned away.
I figured if I were a true death rocker-if I honestly believed in my black clothes and dyed hair, in my fascination with skulls and crosses and dilapidated cemeteries, or in the melancholy and nihilistic lyrics that littered my favorite bands’ songs-then this would be the point I’d hang myself. My parents were ten feet under. Neil might as well have been with them. I picked up my journal, scribbled a stick figure distended from a noose, and debated for ten minutes on a proper metaphor for what would lie ahead. I finally settled on “my future is a booby prize.”
Two weeks to the day after Neil left, I vowed to stop moping in my room. The poems I’d been writing were nothing but whiny diatribes I’d surely blush at later. “Time for a change,” I said. I waited for my grandparents to catch the senior center bus for their afternoon of bingo. Then I rummaged through some junk in the garage until I came up with the dog grooming kit they’d used years ago on their now-deceased poodle. I clicked the attachment I needed onto the clippers and took a deep breath. In the bathroom mirror, the hair fluttered off in fuzzy black clumps to reveal the shabby blond beneath. “Ouch.” I looked as though I’d just escaped from a death camp. I’d dye it again later.
I drove around Hutchinson, windows down, relishing the slight breeze against my shorn head. I passed the fairgrounds, where carnies and commissioned KSIR prisoners mowed, cleaned, and set up rides and ticket booths for the imminent Kansas State Fair. It would be my first, but Neil would miss it. Across the street was the discount bakery where he and I had shoplifted fruit pies. In one window, left over from the recent holidays, were stale cakes lettered with HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, FOR A FANTASTIC FATHER, etcetera.
At a traffic light, two heavy-metallers looked over from their car. “Skinhead,” one of them barked. The word was so different from faggot or freak. I could get used to it.
I drove to North Monroe, anticipating Neil’s mom’s reaction to my hair, hopeful she would accompany me to thrift stores. A car sat in the ditch, a Toyota, the sun’s glare ricocheting off its windshield. But the Impala was nowhere to be seen. I figured Mrs. McCormick was at work. I rang the doorbell anyway; heard the spooky echo from inside, like a child’s voice calling across an empty canyon. I doubted she’d locked the door, but I didn’t try opening it.
“You’re probably having the time of your life,” I said aloud to the nonexistent Neil. And then, telepathically: Come back.
There was no way I could steal from the United Methodist Thrift without Neil. I couldn’t do a lot of things without him. I walked back to the car, and as I did I noticed someone watching me. A figure lounged in the Toyota’s driver’s seat, a blond kid whose eyes approached a bugging-out-of-his-head wideness. I recalled the stories Neil had told about his neighbors: how they were morons, how they had eavesdropped and spied on him and his mom since the day they’d moved in.
I started the car. In the mirror, I saw him getting out, stepping toward me. For a millisecond I panicked, half-remembering a story about a young drifter-murderer who crept up on victims in their cars, unsheathing his foot-long butcher knife, ripping it across their throats before they had the chance to scream… No, this kid looked as harmless as a baby beagle.
He stood beside the Gremlin, contemplating me. His stare was benign, not the kind I was used to from strangers. Sweat stained his too-tight shirt, his glasses disorganized his face, and the zit above his lip looked ready to burst. Still, something about him was cute. “Are you N. McCormick?” he asked.
“N.?” I almost laughed. “Neil?” Then I did laugh. “No. I’m certainly not Neil McCormick. He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“So it’s Neil,” he said, then said the name again. He seemed briefly excited; in seconds, that excitement fizzled, altered, became something close to disappointment. “Doesn’t live here. I’ve visited nearly all the McCormicks listed in the phone book, trying to find him. It’s taken all week. I’ve spent too much money on gas.”
That sounded illicit. I leaned out the car window, inspecting him head-to-toe. “Who are you, the FBI?”
“I used to know Neil,” he said. “At least, I think I did. But weird things happened to us, he and I together, and I need him now. To help me remember.” He blinked twice nervously, a gesture that made him seem close to tears. He was holding something, twisting and twirling it in his fingers. It was an unsightly ball of red and black hair, and it resembled a chunky mouse. He pocketed it. “Do you have any clue how I could get in touch with him?”
“Yes,” I said. If he was interested, I could tell him a lot. And perhaps he could tell me something about Neil, could answer some of the million questions that had sprouted in my head during the past few months. I held out my hand. “I’m a friend of Neil’s. Eric Preston.”
He shook it. “Brian Lackey,” he said.
We looked away, toward the McCormick house. Neither of us spoke for what seemed a very long time.