I looked toward the west again, and saw the fiery thing disappear over the wooded hills. Its glow pulsed against the dark like a beating heart. It had come to earth somewhere in the wilderness.
There was no sand anywhere out there. The Martians, I thought, were going to have to slog through a lot of mud and waterweeds.
I heard the screen door slam, and I turned around and saw Ben standing on the front porch. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He stared along Deerman Street, as if he were tracking the Chevy’s progress, but by that time the car had turned right on Shantuck and was out of sight.
In the distance, probably up in Bruton, dogs were still baying. Mrs. Sears released a long, strengthless sigh. “Let’s go in,” she said.
Ben’s eyes were swollen, but his crying was done. No one seemed to want to finish the game of Scrabble. Mrs. Sears said, “Why don’t you boys go play in your room, Ben?” and he nodded slowly, his eyes glazed as if he’d taken a heavy blow to the skull. Mrs. Sears went back to the kitchen, where she turned on the water. In Ben’s room, I sat on the floor with the Civil War cards while Ben stood at the window.
I could tell he was suffering. I’d never seen him like this before, and I had to say something. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “It’s not Martians. It was a meteor, that’s all.”
He didn’t answer.
“A meteor’s just a big hot rock,” I said. “There’re no Martians inside it.”
Ben was silent; his thoughts had him.
“Your dad’ll be okay,” I said.
Ben spoke, in a voice terrible in its quiet: “He’ll come back changed.”
“No, he won’t. Listen…that was just a movie. It was made up.” I realized that as I said this I was letting go of something, and it felt both painful and good at the same time. “See, there’s not really a machine that cuts into the backs of people’s necks. There’s not really a big Martian head in a glass bowl. It’s all made up. You don’t have to be scared. See?”
“He’ll come back changed,” Ben repeated.
I tried, but nothing I could say would make him believe any differently. Mrs. Sears came in, and her eyes looked swollen, too. But she managed a brave smile that hurt my heart, and she said, “Cory? Do you want to take the first bath?”
Mr. Sears was not home by ten o’clock, when his wife switched off the light in Ben’s bedroom. I lay under the crisp white sheet beside Ben, listening to the night. A couple of dogs still conversed back and forth, and every once in a while Tumper offered a muttered opinion. “Ben?” I whispered. “You awake?” He didn’t answer, but the way he was breathing told me he wasn’t sleeping. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Okay?”
He turned over, and pressed his face against his pillow.
Eventually I drifted off. I did not, surprisingly, dream of Martians and X-shaped wounds on the backs of loved ones’ necks. In my dream my father swam for the sinking car, and when his head went under, it did not come back up. I stood on the red rock cliff, calling for him, until Lainie came to me like a white mist and took my hand in a damp grip. As she led me away from the lake, I could hear my mother calling to me from the distance, and a figure stood at the edge of the woods wearing a long overcoat that flapped in the wind.
An earthquake woke me up.
I opened my eyes, my heart pounding. Something had crashed; the sound was trapped inside my head. The lights were still off, and the night still reigned. I reached out and touched Ben beside me. He drew in a sharp breath, as if my touch had scared the wits out of him. I heard an engine boom, and I looked out the window toward Deerman Street to see a Chevy’s taillights as Donny Blaylock pulled away.
The screen door, I realized. The sound of the screen door slamming had jolted me awake.
“Ben?” I rasped, my mouth thick with sleep. “Your dad’s come home!”
Something else crashed down in the front room. The whole house seemed to shake.
“Sim?” It was Mrs. Sears’s voice, high-pitched. “Sim?”
I got out of bed, but Ben just lay there. I think he was staring at the ceiling. I walked through the hallway in the dark, my feet squeaking the boards. I bumped into Mrs. Sears, standing where the hall met the front room, no lights on anywhere.
I heard a hoarse, terrible breathing.
It was, I thought, the sound a Martian might make as its alien lungs strained on earthly air.
“Sim?” Mrs. Sears said. “I’m right here.”
“Right here,” a voice answered. “Right…here. Right…fuckin’…here.”
It was Mr. Sears’s voice, yes. But it was different. Changed. There was no humor in it, no fun, no hint of a preacher joke. It was as heavy as doom, and just as mean.
“Sim, I’m going to turn on the light now.”
Click.
And there he was.
Mr. Sears was on the floor on his hands and knees, his head bowed and one cheek mashed against the rug. His face looked bloated and wet, his eyes sunken in fleshy folds. The right shoulder of his jacket was dirty, and dirt was smeared on his jeans as if he’d taken a fall in the woods. He blinked in the light, a silver thread of saliva hanging from his lower lip. “Where is it?” he said. “You see it?”
“It’s…beside your right hand.”
His left hand groped. “You’re a goddamned liar,” he said.
“Your other hand, Sim,” she told him wearily.
His right hand moved toward the metal object lying there. It was a whiskey flask, and his fingers gripped it and pulled it to him.
He sat up on his knees and stared at his wife. A fierceness passed over his face, ugly in its swiftness. “Don’t you smart-mouth me,” he said. “Don’t you open that big fat smart mouth.”
I stepped back then, into the hallway. I was seeing a monster that had slipped from its skin.
Mr. Sears struggled to stand. He grabbed hold of the table that held the Scrabble tiles, and it went over in an explosion of vowels and consonants. Then he made it to his feet, and he unscrewed the cap off the flask and licked the bottle neck.
“Come on to bed, Sim,” she said; it was spoken without strength, as if she knew full well what the outcome of this would be.
“Come on to bed!” he mocked. “Come on to bed!” His lip curled. “I don’t wanna come to bed, you fat-assed cow!”
I saw Mrs. Sears tremble as if she’d been stung by a whip. A hand pressed to her mouth. “Oh…Sim,” she moaned, and it was an awful sound to hear.
I backed away some more. And then Ben walked past me in his yellow pajamas, his face blank of expression but tear tracks glistening on his cheeks.
There are things much worse than monster movies. There are horrors that burst the bounds of screen and page, and come home all twisted up and grinning behind the face of somebody you love. At that moment I knew Ben would have gladly looked into that glass bowl at the tentacled Martian head rather than into his father’s drunk-red eyes.
“Hey, Benny boy!” Mr. Sears said. He staggered and caught himself against a chair. “Hey, you know what happened to you? You know what? The best part of you stayed in that busted rubber, that’s what happened.”
Ben stopped beside his mother. Whatever emotion tortured him inside, it did not show on his face. He must’ve known this was going to happen, I realized. Ben had known when his father went with Donny Blaylock, he would come home changed not by the Martians but by the home brew in that flask.
“You’re a real sight. The both of you.” Mr. Sears tried to screw the cap back on, but he couldn’t make it fit. “Standin’ there with your smart mouths. You think this is funny, don’t you, boy?”
“No sir.”
“Yes you do! You can’t wait to go laugh and tell everybody, can you? Where’s that Mackenson boy? Hey, you!” He spotted me, back in the hall, and I flinched. “You can tell that goddamned milkman daddy of yours to go straight to hell. Hear me?”
I nodded, and his attention wandered away from me. This was not Mr. Sears talking, not rea
lly; this was the voice of what the flask flayed raw and bloody inside his soul, what it stomped and kicked and tortured until the voice had to scream for release.
“What’d you say?” He stared at Mrs. Sears, his eyelids swollen and heavy. “What’d you say?”
“I…didn’t say—”
He was on her like a charging bull. Mrs. Sears cried out and retreated but he grabbed the front of her gown with one hand and reared his other hand back, the flask gripped in it, as if to smash her across the face. “Yes you did!” he shouted. “Don’t you backtalk me!”
“Daddy, don’t!” Ben pleaded, and he flung both arms around one of his father’s thighs and hung tight. The moment stretched, Mr. Sears about to strike his wife, me standing in a state of shock in the hallway, Ben holding on to his father’s leg.
Mrs. Sears’s lips trembled. With the flask poised to strike her face, she spoke: “I…said…that we both love you, and that…we want you to be happy. That’s all.” Tears welled up and trickled. “Just happy.”
He didn’t speak. His eyes closed, and he opened them again with an effort.
“Happy,” he whispered. Ben was sobbing now, his face pressed against his father’s thigh, his knuckles white at the twining of his fingers. Mr. Sears lowered his hand, and he let go of his wife’s gown. “Happy. See, I’m happy. Look at me smile.”
His face didn’t change.
He stood there, breathing roughly, his hand with the flask in it hanging at his side. He started to step one way and then another, but he couldn’t seem to decide which way to go.
“Why don’t you sit down, Sim?” Mrs. Sears asked. She sniffled and wiped her dripping nose. “Want me to help you?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Help.”
Ben let him go, and Mrs. Sears guided her husband to his chair. He collapsed into it, like a large pile of dirty laundry. He stared at the opposite wall, his mouth hanging open. She drew up another chair close beside him. There was a feeling in the room as if a storm had passed. It might come again, some other night, but for now it was gone.
“I don’t think—” He stopped, as if he’d lost what he was about to say. He blinked, searching for it. “I don’t think I’m doin’ so good,” he said.
Mrs. Sears leaned his head gently on her shoulder. He squeezed his eyes shut, his chest heaved, and he began to cry, and I walked out of the house into the cool night air in my pajamas because it didn’t seem right for me to be in there, a stranger at a private pain.
I sat down on the porch steps. Tumper plodded over, sat beside me, and licked my hand. I felt an awful long way from home.
Ben had known. What courage it must have taken for him to lie in that bed, pretending to sleep. He had known that when the screen door slammed, long after midnight, the invader who wore his father’s flesh would be in the house. The knowing and the waiting must’ve been a desperate torment.
After a while, Ben came outside and sat on the steps, too. He asked me if I was all right, and I said I was. I asked him if he was all right. He said yeah. I believed him. He had learned to live with this, and though it was a horrible thing, he was grappling with it the best he could.
“My daddy has spells,” Ben explained. “He says bad things sometimes, but he can’t help it.”
I nodded.
“He didn’t mean what he said about your daddy. You don’t hate him, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“You don’t hate me, do you?”
“No,” I told him. “I don’t hate anybody.”
“You’re a real good buddy,” Ben said, and he put his arm around my shoulders.
Mrs. Sears came out and brought us a blanket. It was red. We sat there as the stars slowly wheeled their course, and soon the birds of morning began to peep.
At the breakfast table, we had bowls of hot oatmeal and blueberry muffins. Mrs. Sears told us that Mr. Sears was sleeping, that he would sleep most of the day, and that if I wanted to I could ask my mother to call her and they’d have a long talk. After I got dressed and packed all my belongings into the knapsack, I thanked Mrs. Sears for having me over, and Ben said he’d see me at school tomorrow. He walked me out to my bike, and we talked for a few minutes about our Little League baseball team that would soon start practicing. It was getting to be that time of year.
Never again would we mention to each other the movie where Martians plotted to conquer the earth, town by town, father by mother by child. We had both seen the face of the invader.
It was Sunday morning. I pedaled for home, and when I looked back at the house at the dead end of Deerman Street, my friend waved so long.
4
Wasps at Easter
THE METEOR, AS IT turned out, must’ve burned itself to cinders as it flamed down from outer space. A few pine trees had caught fire, but it started raining on Sunday night and the fire hissed away. It was still raining on Monday morning, when the school bell rang, and the rain fell all through that long, gray day. The following Sunday was Easter, and Mom said she hoped the rain—forecast to fall intermittently all week long—didn’t spoil the Merchants Street Easter parade on Saturday.
Early on the morning of Good Friday, starting around six o’clock or so, there was always another parade of sorts in Zephyr. It began in Bruton, at a small frame house painted purple, orange, red, and sunburst yellow. A procession of black men in black suits, white shirts, and ties made their way from this house, with a number of women and children in somber clothing following behind. Two of the men carried drums, and beat a slow, steady rhythm to time the paces. The procession wound its way across the railroad track and along Merchants Street, the center of town, and no one spoke to each other. Since this was an annual event, many of Zephyr’s white population emerged from their houses to stand along the street and watch. My mother was one of them, though my dad was already at work by that time of the morning. I usually went with her, because I grasped the significance of this event just as everyone else did.
The three black men who led the way carried burlap bags. Around their necks, dangling down over their ties, were necklaces of amber beads, chicken bones, and the shells of small river mussels. On this particular Good Friday, the streets were wet and the rain drizzled down, but the members of the black parade carried no umbrellas. They spoke to no one on the sidewalks, nor to anyone who happened to be so rude as to speak to them. I saw Mr. Lightfoot walking near the parade’s center, and though he knew every white face in town he looked neither right nor left but straight ahead at the back of the man who walked before him. An invaluable asset to the interlocked communities of Bruton and Zephyr, Marcus Lightfoot was a handyman who could repair any object ever devised by the human mind though he might work at the pace of grass growing. I saw Mr. Dennis, who was a custodian at the elementary school. I saw Mrs. Velvadine, who worked in the kitchen at our church, and I saw Mrs. Pearl, who was always laughing and cheerful at the Merchants Street Bake Shoppe. Today, though, she was nothing but serious, and she wore a clear plastic rain hat.
Bringing up the very rear of the procession, even behind the women and children, was a spindly man wearing a black tuxedo and a top hat. He carried a small drum, and his black-gloved hand beat it to mark the rhythm. It was this man and his wife whom many had come out on the chilly, rainy morning to see. The wife would arrive later; he walked alone, his face downcast.
We called him the Moon Man, because we didn’t know his real name. He was very old, but exactly how old it was impossible to say. He was very rarely seen outside of Bruton, except on this occasion, as was his wife. Either a birth defect or a skin malady had affected one side of his long, narrow face, turning it pale yellow while the other side remained deep ebony, the two halves merging in a war of splotches down his forehead, the bridge of his elegant nose, and his white-bearded chin. The Moon Man, an enigma, had two watches on each wrist and a gilded crucifix the size of a ham hock hanging on a chain around his neck. He was, we presumed, the parade’s official timekeeper as well a
s one of its royal personages.
The parade continued, step by steady step, through Zephyr to the gargoyle bridge over the Tecumseh River. It might take a while, but it was worth being late to school to see, and because of it school never really got into session until around ten o’clock on Good Fridays.
Once the three men with the burlap bags reached the center of the bridge, they stopped and stood like black statues. The rest of the procession got as close as possible without blocking the bridge, though Sheriff Amory had set up sawhorses with blinking lights along the route.
In a moment a Pontiac Bonneville covered hood to trunk with gleaming plastic rhinestones was driven slowly along Merchants Street from Bruton, following the parade’s path. When it arrived at the center of the gargoyle bridge, the driver got out and opened the rear door, and the Moon Man took his wife’s wrinkled hand and helped her to her feet.
The Lady had arrived.
She was as thin as a shadow, and just as dark. She had a cotton-cloud of white hair, her neck long and regal, her shoulders frail but unbowed. She wore not a costume of outlandish color and design, but a simple black dress with a silver belt, white shoes, and a white pillbox hat with a veil. She wore white gloves to her bony elbows. As the Moon Man helped her from the car, the driver opened an umbrella and held it over her royal, ancient head.
The Lady, it was said, had been born in the year 1858. That made her one hundred and six years old. My mom said the Lady had been a slave in Louisiana, and had run away with her momma into the swamp before the Civil War. The Lady had grown up in a colony of lepers, escaped convicts, and slaves in the bayou below New Orleans, and that was where she’d learned everything she knew.