Mayor of the Universe

  “Whatever you meant by that, I didn’t get it.”

  Wanda’s smile was certain. “What I mean is that Tandy—that’s the ‘black babe’—was really an alien.”

  Dodd’s eyes traveled the short distance from Wanda’s face to Fletcher’s and back again.

  “I take it you’re not talking about some wetback without a green card?”

  Wincing at his remark, Wanda said, “I’m talking about an ‘alien’ alien—from outer space.”

  Beckerman winked at Fletcher, an insincere gesture that was enough to nudge Fletcher from his daze: if Wanda wanted to tell his neighbor about their experience, she must have a good reason and he would back her up one hundred percent.

  “That’s right, Dodd. I was visited by aliens. Right there in my very bedroom”—he pointed behind him, in the direction of his house—“and you know why? Because they were looking for the Mayor of the Universe.”

  Beckerman snorted. “Oh sure!” he said. “Of course! Out of all the billions of people in the world, aliens are going to decide you’re the Mayor of the Universe.” His smile and rolling eyes demonstrated that he got the joke, and he shook his head and chuckled as he traversed the matted path in the shag carpeting to the kitchen.

  Fletcher and Wanda shared the kind of look two neophyte skydivers do before jumping out of an airplane but remained silent until he returned, unscrewing a small bottle of whiskey he’d saved from his last plane ride.

  “I forgot I had this,” he said, twisting off the bottle cap and taking a swig. “So I get that the two of you are practical jokers—”

  “Well, not exactly, but it is my sense of fun they were drawn to,” said Fletcher.

  Dodd rubbed his jaw and it was hard to tell if he was smiling or grimacing.

  “Okay, because I’m your host and I’m glad to see you—by the way, I let myself into your house with the key your ma had given my ma, and I ran the water a couple times just to make sure the pipes wouldn’t freeze and turned on the lights so it would look like someone was home, so don’t ever say I wasn’t a good neighbor.” Beckerman took another swig from the bottle. “And I’m gonna play along with you because I can see somehow this game means something to you.”

  “You’re right,” said Wanda. “It does mean a lot to us, but it’s not a game.”

  Fletcher couldn’t help it. He let out a little cackle.

  Beckerman was reminded why it was he had always picked on Fletcher: because the jerk asked for it! But intent as he was on making a good impression on his wife, he stifled his desire to flick Fletcher on the forehead (an old practice). “Okay, so why did they decide you were Mayor of the Universe?”

  “They didn’t decide I was the mayor,” said Fletcher, “only that I was a candidate. I was in the running, but then I was disqualified.”

  Before he could censor himself, Beckerman asked, “What for? For being the world’s biggest dork?”

  Wanda’s smile was the one she used on kids like Sean Douglas, the best-looking boy in her class but also the most cold-hearted.

  “Dodd,” she said, and although her voice was friendly, sharp ears would hear the distain in it, “they chose Fletcher because they realized the importance of a deep, loving fun and how much he exemplified it.”

  Beckerman coughed down his whiskey “Deep, loving fun? Fletcher? They must have misread their flight plan—their space ship must have zigged north when it was supposed to zag south—they must have confused Fletcher for someone like me!”

  Hearing the desperation in his voice, Fletcher decided now wouldn’t be the time to tell Beckerman that the aliens not only didn’t choose someone like him but in fact short-sheeted his bed.

  “Because,” continued Beckerman, “what kind of aliens would take the trouble to come all the way to Earth and not want to meet me?”

  Feeling like the guy brought in to dismantle the ticking bomb, Fletcher said, “For all I know, Dodd, it was totally random. The luck of the draw. Maybe next time, they’ll pick you.”

  Outside, the snow was not so much falling to the ground as attacking it. Bent over against its assault, Fletcher led Wanda across Beckerman’s snowy yard and to his own, up the back steps, and into the area Olive called the mud room. When he turned on the light in the kitchen, Wanda issued a small sigh.

  “Oh, Fletcher,” she said, “I can just see you sitting there as a little boy, eating your TV dinner alone.”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” said Fletcher, his arm encircling his bride’s, “I love pot pies.”

  Later, as they lay so entwined in his old bed that he was hard pressed to identify which limb was his and which was Wanda’s, they talked about what had happened at Dodd Beckerman’s house.

  “Why did you tell him, Wanda?”

  He had left the rickrack-trimmed curtains open, and outside the snow twisted and swirled. It was in this room, the night the aliens came, that he had been the most terrified, but now he was certain that there was no place warmer, safer, than in the childhood bed he now shared with his wife.

  “I hadn’t planned to; the words just came out of my mouth.” Wanda lay on her side facing him, her head resting on her hands. “But maybe that’s how we should approach it, Fletcher. Maybe if we just tell people the truth, it’ll help us sort out everything that happened.”

  “But they’ll never believe us,” said Fletcher.

  “I don’t think we should live our lives concerned about what they believe. I think we should live our lives concerned about what we believe.”

  “Will you marry me?” asked Fletcher, pressing his head into the blonde curly hair that smelled of apples.

  “If I hadn’t already,” said Wanda, “I most certainly would.”

  In a diner in North Platte, Nebraska, they had gotten friendly with a jovial farmer and his wife while waiting out a snowstorm. As fellow travelers often do, they exchanged stories, the farm couple relaying their story of surviving the Good Friday earthquake while visiting relatives in Anchorage, Alaska, and Fletcher and Wanda sharing the tale of their alien encounter.

  “Okay, are we on Candid Camera or something?” asked the farmer, no longer jovial.

  “No,” said his wife, gathering up her purse. “Candid Camera’s funny. These two weirdos aren’t.”

  At another roadside diner in Colorado Springs, they shared counter space—and their story—with a trucker who sat nodding his head and stroking his long beard as Fletcher told him about waking up to a room full of aliens and Wanda imitated the robotic voice of the chairwoman of the Universal Head Council.

  “That reminds me,” said the trucker, dragging his fingers through his beard, “of the time I sold my soul to Satan while I was hauling chickens on Highway 61.”

  The poor waitress, who had overheard everything, wrote out their checks, her hands trembling.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” she said softly to both the newlyweds and the bearded trucker.

  They’d hustled out of the restaurant, leaving the waitress a forty percent tip by way of apology.

  “I take full blame,” said Wanda, once they were on the highway, both of them checking mirrors to make sure the bearded trucker with the sold soul wasn’t following them. “Seeing as I was the one who thought we should be open and honest. But now . . . well, now I think we should be a little more circumspect in telling our story.”

  “I agree,” said Fletcher. “But what about your parents?”

  Wanda’s lower lip trembled.

  Fletcher rubbed his wife’s arm.

  “They’re your parents, Wanda. I’ll take my lead from you.”

  The newlyweds arrived in Silver City just after five, and even though the backyard thermometer read fifty-two degrees, Wanda’s father, Clifford, insisted they eat their first meal together outside.

  “Could we do this in Aberdeen three days before Christmas?”

  As they enjoyed Irene’s taco hot dish (she had combined her midwestern love of casseroles with her new appreciation for southwestern spices) and
cornbread, the older couple regaled the younger one with their own courtship story.

  “We were in the same freshman comp class in college,” said Irene. “I was a Patterson and he was a Plum so I sat ahead of him, and the professor starts off the first day by reading Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” and tells us one of our assignments will be to write our own ode to our own particular joy. After class, this impudent boy taps me on the shoulder and tells me, ‘I’ve been staring at your hair the whole class, and I decided I’m going to write an ode to it.”

  “A certain cascade of honey-colored hair,” Clifford recited. “Invites me to swim in its waves, heart opened in prayer.”

  Irene tucked her chin into her upturned jacket collar and smiled. “And you only got a B- on that?”

  “What words could do hair like yours justice?” asked Clifford, whose own hair, a thick silver swoop, was odeworthy in its own right.

  “But you’ve already heard this story,” said Irene, looking across the table at her daughter, and even though she smiled, there was a tiny pucker of a frown on her forehead. Although some of her misgivings about her daughter’s hasty marriage had been assuaged by meeting Fletcher and seeing the obvious love the two shared, she still felt there was something fishy going on. “Now we want to hear every single detail of your own. You haven’t given us much in the way of details.”

  “That’s right,” said Clifford. “The last we’ve heard from you, you were planning a nice quiet Thanksgiving by yourself, and there’s not one word of a special fellow, and then we get a call a couple days later telling us you’re married!”

  “I know,” said Wanda. “It’s just that everything happened so fast and—”

  “Let me apologize, too,” said Fletcher. “Not for marrying Wanda—of course it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever done—but to deny you of your daughter’s wedding, of walking her down the aisle—well, for that I’m truly sorry.”

  Wanda nodded and nervously gulped her ice tea, swallowing so much so fast that it hurt going down in her throat.

  “It’s just,” continued Fletcher, “it’s just that we’d been through so much together that we needed to—”

  “Been through so much together, like what?” said Irene, folding her arms.

  “All we know is you met in Wanda’s classroom, as part of some sort of teacher rewards program,” said Clifford, folding his arms, too.

  “And I’m curious,” said Irene, “what would an actuary have to do with that?” She was shivering, and even though it was not wholly due to the chill night air, she suggested that they all go inside. “And then,” she said, with the same no-nonsense look Wanda used on unruly students, “you’re going to tell us everything.”

  Irene decided Wanda’s uncharacteristic coyness was because everything must mean a pregnancy, and she was flummoxed why her daughter didn’t just come out and tell them the reason behind their sudden marriage. It wasn’t as if she and Clifford hadn’t been waiting and waiting for grandchildren—how could Wanda think they would be anything less than delighted?

  The lights of the tree blinked in their cheerful, Christmasy way as they all sat down in the living room, and Irene wondered if she should feign surprise or not at the big announcement. She listened eagerly, but as Wanda spoke, and then Fletcher, and then Wanda again, she realized that their rushed marriage wasn’t because they were expectant parents but because they loved each other deeply. And oh yes, their intense experience with aliens from outer space had forged a profound bond that they felt a need to legalize.

  In telling their story, Wanda had only dared look at her hands, and it was only when she and Fletcher were finished that she raised her head. When she saw the look of fear on her parents’ faces, she burst into tears.

  “I’m so sorry to make you feel this way!” she wailed. “We debated not telling you—but we had to! It was so wonderfully, beautifully fantastic!”

  “It was,” said Fletcher, tightening the grip he had around his wife’s shoulder. “But that’s because it happened to us.” He mashed his lips together, as if he were trying to evenly distribute lipstick. “If the situation was reversed, and you told Wanda and me the same story, I’m sure we’d be just as upset as you. I’d be so scared that the people I loved most had gone crazy. But Clifford, Irene: we haven’t.”

  “It’s late,” said Clifford, standing up (and trying not to notice that his legs were shaking). “Let’s all get a good night’s sleep and we’ll talk everything over in the morning.”

  Irene, as shaky as her husband, scavenged for some hopefulness.

  “So you’re not pregnant?”

  “Not yet,” said Wanda.

  There was much whispering in the old-married-couple’s bed as well as the newlywed’s.

  “Could she be . . . ,” said Irene, facing her husband under the patchwork quilt she and her quilters’ group had pieced together. “Could she be on drugs or something?”

  “I wondered the same thing,” said Clifford. “And then I thought, did he somehow brainwash her?”

  “But she’s always been so level-headed!”

  “I’ll bet Joan of Arc’s parents said the same thing.”

  They allowed themselves a sad little laugh before Irene began to cry in the safe shelter of her husband’s arms.

  When Fletcher and Wanda woke up, they found on the kitchen table a note:

  We’re running errands and then off to hike in the City of Rocks State Park. We packed enough lunch for four if you’d care to join us, say noon, here?*

  XXX, Mom and Dad *Directions on next page.

  Wanda smiled. “This has to be Dad’s doing. Whenever I had a problem or was stuck on something, he’d say”—here Wanda cycled her arms—“‘Start some motion; that’s the potion!’”

  “But first the joe,” said Fletcher, pouring himself a cup of coffee, “and then we’ll go.”

  Threaded with thin wisps of clouds, the sky was a magnificent aqua, a different color from a South Dakota sky. The hiking path they were on was a fair grade, and Fletcher was surprised, and a little embarrassed, to find himself more winded than his in-laws.

  “It’s the altitude,” said Clifford, hearing him pant. “Plus Mother and I get out for a good walk every morning.”

  “Well, why aren’t you out of breath?” Fletcher asked Wanda.

  “I guess I’m just more fit,” she said, sashaying her hips.

  “Could be that space travel,” said Clifford.

  “Yes,” said Irene adjusting the small pack on her back. “Maybe it did something to your lung capacity.”

  Wanda stopped in her tracks, her shoes making a scudding noise on the hard dirt path.

  “Are you kidding?” she asked cautiously.

  “Kidding about what?” asked her mother.

  “About space travel. Are you making fun of me, or are you trying to tell us you believe what we told you?”

  Fletcher stepped closer to his wife and took her hand.

  “Trying to tell you we believe what you told us,” said Irene.

  Wanda grabbed her mother into a hug that Fletcher, whose hand she still held, was automatically pulled into.

  “All right, all right,” said Clifford. “We had enough waterworks last night. Let’s start some motion—that’s the potion!”

  They ate their lunch in the shadow of huge rock formations that jutted out of the earth in tall oblongs, in squat stacked circles, in irregular squares and triangles.

  “They say that all of this was made from a volcanic eruption,” said Clifford, sweeping the hand that held half a peanut butter sandwich. “And the rocks themselves were sculpted by erosion.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Wanda.

  “It is,” said Irene. “It looks almost like a lunar landscape, don’t you think?”

  “Is that why you brought us here?” teased Wanda. “Do you think it makes us feel more at home?”

  Chuckling, Irene elbowed her daughter’s side. “Maybe.”

  A cloud covered
the sun and made shadows on the strange rock formations.

  “Irene and I stayed up a long time last night,” said Clifford.

  “So did we, Dad,” said Wanda.

  “We figured as much.”

  Clifford took a bite of his sandwich and as if they were playing Follow the Leader, everyone did the same.

  “It’s still pretty hard for us,” he said.

  Wanda nodded, swallowing a lump that wasn’t peanut butter.

  “But that’s our problem,” said Irene. “And I’m not saying it won’t take some time to adjust to everything you told us.”

  “But,” said Clifford, “we asked ourselves, ‘Why would Wanda make up a story like that?’ and we realized there was only one answer: she wouldn’t. So we have to go from there, kitten.”

  “Thanks,” said Wanda.

  “It means a lot to her—and me—that you believe us,” said Fletcher, undoing the top buttons of his shirt and pulling down his collar. “Now I know this doesn’t look like much, but right there is the lodge medallion they burned into my skin.”

  Both Irene and Clifford leaned toward Fletcher to examine the tiny little scar hidden in his sparse chest hair.

  “It sort of looks like a vaccination mark,” said Irene.

  “Look carefully. The Lodge numbers are etched into it.”

  Both Irene and Clifford stood hunched close to Fletcher’s chest, lifting and lowering their glasses.

  “I can’t make them out,” admitted Irene.

  “Me neither,” said Clifford.

  “Well, they’re there,” said Wanda as Fletcher buttoned up his shirt, feeling like the dramatic display of proof was pretty anticlimactic.

  A lizard skittered out from under a century plant and, seeing it wasn’t alone, skittered back.

  “We just don’t want you to get hurt,” said Irene. “We’re afraid if you tell a lot of people—and you said you weren’t going to hide what happened—you’ll be treated differently.”

  “You mean like we’re nuts?” asked Fletcher.

  Clifford nodded. Tearing off a corner of his sandwich, he threw it at the cactus, hoping to lure the lizard.