Mayor of the Universe: A Novel

  He leaned back on the couch and smiled, proud of his astute psychological analysis.

  “See, you take a guy like me—mother who thinks he can do no wrong, a father who’ll throw a football around with him for hours—man, when he bit the dust, that hurt—well, then you’re pretty much bound to be a popular, well-adjusted guy.”

  Fletcher could have blamed what he said next on a drunk’s loss of inhibition, but the fact was, he wasn’t drunk. His forehead had started to pound in protest of cold beer too quickly consumed, but even a nondrinker like himself had a higher tolerance than inebriation from a half-bottle. No, what compelled him to ask the question was simple curiosity.

  “Then why were you such a bully?”

  Beckerman jerked his head, his eyes wide.

  “Bully? What are you talking about? Me?”

  Fletcher fiddled with the knot of his tie, finally unloosening it. There was something in Beckerman’s voice that advised him to recant what he had just said, but already beat up emotionally, Fletcher thought he may as well get punched in the face, too.

  “I asked why you were such a bully. I mean, your parents sound great, but still, you weren’t very nice to people.”

  “Fletch, I am seriously wounded,” said Beckerman, holding a splayed hand to his chest. “I have no idea where you get off saying such a thing.”

  “Please. You were always picking on me. In the eighth grade I couldn’t walk to school without you ambushing me by the Jensons’ peony bushes, taking my lunch money.”

  “Peony bushes,” said Beckerman, shaking his head. “Only you would remember the Jensons’ had fucking peony bushes.”

  “From the time you started wrestling in ninth grade, you liked to show me the holds you were working on—without my permission, of course. And in twelfth grade, right in the middle of the lunchroom, in front of everyone, you gave me the Biggest Spaz Award.”

  Beckerman laughed. “Oh yeah, I do remember that. A bunch of us made up awards out of tin foil and gave ’em out to all the class losers.”

  Fletcher shook his head at the memory. “Real nice.”

  “But you were the biggest spaz, Fletcher. I was only the messenger on that one, buddy.”

  “What about all the other things?”

  “No memory of ’em, pal. If you ask anybody from Central, they’ll tell you what a great guy I was.”

  “Would Connie Yarborough say that?”

  Beckerman’s shapely black eyebrows squiggled over his eyes. “Connie Yar—oh yeah, big dyke Connie Yarborough! I remember her.”

  “She was not a dyke! And don’t use that word!”

  Shaking his head, Beckerman got up and made his short walk to the kitchen and refills. He came back with two bottles, which he set in front of himself.

  “You know what they say time does to memories, Fletcher. Distorts ’em. I’m a nice guy, always have been a nice guy. I’m sorry if I called you a spaz, but you were. Still are, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “I mind you saying a lot of things—especially that my mother was cold and unaffectionate. Because even if she didn’t think I was king of the world, she probably thought I was at least a duke or something.”

  Beckerman stared at Fletcher for a long moment.

  “You are really too much, man,” he said, but not unkindly. He stretched his arms to the ceiling and then brought them down, resting his clasped hands on top of his head. “So what do you think?”

  Fletcher blinked. “Of what?”

  “Of my pad. I ditched all the doilies—I’m telling you, the old lady loved her doilies. I junked all the little braided rugs that I was always tripping on and smashed to hell every little glass Hummel thing. Man, I hate those Hummel things.”

  Hippies and Hummels, thought Fletcher. What else did Beckerman hate—hide-a-beds? Habadashery? Hackensack?

  “I mean, it’s cute for a seventy-six-year-old woman, I guess, but a guy can’t live in all that shit, right, Fletch?”

  “Right.” Realizing he wasn’t about to get a belated apology for years of bullying, Fletcher decided he may as well go along with whatever conversation Beckerman wanted to pursue. It beat going back to his own empty house.

  “So I got all this furniture—it’s vinyl but it looks like leather, doesn’t it?—at this warehouse sale in Sioux Falls, and the paintings are from a lady friend of mine.”

  There were four paintings—one for each wall—and each one contained a topless woman on a motorcycle. While the women looked identical in each painting, each motorcycle was a different make—a Harley, a Triumph, a BSA, and a Norton—and all intricately detailed.

  “She’s not a lady you’d want to mess with,” said Beckerman.

  “I guess not,” agreed Fletcher.

  The men sat back, nursing their beers in silence that to Fletcher was growing more companionable. He was beginning to relax, thanks to Beckerman’s American beer, and quick fantasies flitted through his head of himself and Beckerman watching Sunday afternoon football games on TV, fishing in the Missouri River, or shooting pool together. That Fletcher didn’t follow football, didn’t fish, and had never chalked a pool cue in his life was immaterial; if he was going to be Beckerman’s friend, he’d better learn!

  During Fletcher’s reverie, Beckerman stumbled off and returned with more beer and a small box.

  “Here,” he said, lobbing it at his guest.

  “For me?” asked Fletcher, fumbling it.

  “Geez . . . it’s not a present, Weschel. It’s just something I want you to see.”

  Fletcher struggled to sit up straighter on the slippery vinyl couch, and when he opened the small box he sat quietly, staring at its contents perched on a layer of cotton balls.

  Presently he said, “It sort of looks like an ear.”

  Beckerman hooted, slapping the meaty thigh that strained against his creased dress jeans. “It is an ear! A real live, gen-u-ine ear!”

  Fletcher’s stomach churned and he snapped the box shut and dropped it on the coffee table as if it were hot to the touch.

  “Why . . . what do you have it for?”

  Beckerman took the box and opened it. “It’s a war souvenir. I won it in a game of poker in Oberammergau. Won it from Captain “Killer” Ackerblade—guy had been in the Big One, in Korea, and just finished a tour in ’Nam. He was doing a little sightseeing—wanted to see the Passion Play—before he went stateside.”

  Fletcher wondered how on earth he could have thought he and The Bod might become friends.

  “He couldn’t tell me whose ear it was,” said Beckerman, an odd glint in his eyes as he gazed at the box’s contents. “All’s he said to me was, ‘Son, could be a Kraut ear, could be a Jap ear, could be a Gook ear. When you’ve killed as many of the enemy as I have, you can’t really keep track.”

  “Well, then,” said Fletcher, sliding off the couch to stand. “If anyone asks you to lend an ear, you’ll be all set.” He brushed the lapels of his suit as if something had spilled on them and headed, his path slightly crooked, toward the door. “Thanks for the beer, Dodd.”

  The former wrestler and private first class followed him. “It’s just an ear, Fletcher. And it’s not like I chopped it off or anything. Don’t be such a baby, man. I hate babies.”

  “Why would you hate babies?” asked Fletcher. “And while we’re on the subject, why do you hate hippies?”

  “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I myself think hippies were on track about a lot of things. Peace and love and that sort of thing.”

  Beckerman looked at him as if he were speaking pig Latin in Latin.

  “As for Hummels,” Fletcher continued, “I really have no opinion.”

  Beckerman opened the door and with his hand on Fletcher’s back gave him a hearty push out. “You’re weird, man.”

  The shell Fletcher had been in since boyhood was now a virtual sarcophagus. His days passed with little variety; it was work and sleep with a few evening hours reserved fo
r household and yard maintenance, television, reading, and lonely amusements like solitaire and crossword puzzles.

  Window monitoring also became something of a pastime.

  Fletcher knew Mrs. Wilde across the street never cleaned up the messes her Airedale made on everyone’s lawn but her own, and that every morning at seven Old Man Helger did isometrics in his boxer shorts while watching The Today Show. He also knew that gut or no gut, women still saw The Bod in Dodd’s brawny body; there was much female commotion in and out of Chéz Beckerman.

  Now a butcher at the Food Palace, Beckerman was in the enviable position of dealing with women every day. He was a big flirt—handing the lieutenant governor’s wife her T-bones and reminding her that “the rarer the steak, the better the amour,” and sending pregnant Nancy Bowser home with a fryer chicken, musing aloud to her why it was that breast meat was the most tender in all species.

  He had recently had a pork chop tattooed on his bicep and made the friendly overture of showing it to his neighbor one evening when Fletcher was doing his weekly shopping.

  While pricing ground beef, Fletcher heard a tap on the small window in the wall behind the meat counter and looked up to see Beckerman waving, meat cleaver in hand.

  Laughing, the butcher came through the swinging door, dapper in a bloodied white coat and jauntily angled paper hat.

  “Hey, stay away from the ground beef, Fletch. Clipped a couple of my fingernails into it today.”

  Fletcher dropped the cellophaned package back into the refrigerator case, despite Beckerman’s claims that he was kidding.

  So, you’ve seen this?” Beckerman asked as he let his white coat slip past the straps of his ribbed T-shirt. He tensed his bicep and the pork chop bulged.

  “Nice,” said Fletcher.

  “Well, it sure beats what I’ve got tattooed on my ass.”

  Fletcher was saved from asking what that might be by a woman who nudged him aside with her cart, asking where the sweetbreads might be, and he scurried off, not particularly wanting to hear the butcher’s answer.

  In the summertime, Beckerman threw barbecues in his small square backyard and once, while weeding his tomato patch, Fletcher listened to him regale the assemblage of bikinied cashiers and sunburned stock boys gnawing at fatty Food Palace spareribs.

  “The guy next door,” Beckerman was saying in his loud voice, “guy’s name is Fletcher Weschel, can you believe it? What kinda name is that? Sounds like a German specialty wine, if you ask me.” He cleared his throat. “Ya, my frient here vill hef za Leibfraumilk und I vill hef a glass of za Fletcher Weschel.”

  The partygoers laughed, enjoying the sophisticated humor that some of them didn’t quite get. On his knees in a slug-infested vegetable garden and hidden behind the lilac bushes that divided their properties, Fletcher sighed, wondering why he ever thought he might be more to Beckerman than the butt of his jokes.

  At thirty-seven, the edges of Fletcher’s hair and the swirl of his cowlick were faded brown, just on the verge of gray, but his face was still boyish and unlined—unmarked, he thought, by experience. He had just celebrated, in a manner of speaking, his fifteenth year with Mid Summit American Life. Consciously, he hadn’t the heart to declare himself a lost cause, doomed to a life of loneliness, but his subconscious was well aware that Fletcher Weschel was a loser and sent out subtle messages to that effect every day.

  He was savoring a cup of warm Ovaltine after his regular Monday night supper of meatloaf and creamed corn, unscrambling the daily word puzzle in the paper. It was a cold November night, a night when the wind ran howling down the avenues like a mischievous ghost, yanking leaves off trees and tossing them into roof gutters where they would rot into muck and interfere with drainage.

  Suddenly the fun of unscrambling words like unratt (truant) and kceifl (fickle) was interrupted by a voice in his head, urging him to do something about those pesky window drafts. It was obvious that the Farmers’ Almanac extended weather forecast was wrong, and that maybe it wasn’t going to be an unseasonably mild winter after all. He hadn’t planned on executing his winter insulation duties until that weekend, but thinking, What the heck? he carefully cut putty strips and tamped them into the window seams. Later, as he sat on the edge of his bed, lining up the toe of his slippers with the blue stripe in the rug, he chuckled at his spontaneity. It wasn’t often that he fiddled with his schedule, and it made him feel reckless and bold. He even set his alarm clock to go off fifteen minutes later than usual, but eventually he calmed down and changed it back to 5:45. He began to recite chronologically the presidents and their terms of office, getting up to James Buchanan, 1857–1861, before he fell asleep. Three hours later, his room was filled with aliens.

  Dear Readers:

  Please forgive this intrusion, but we (whom you will get to know shortly) feel a need to express to those who have been so kind to come along on Fletcher’s journey thus far: Sorry.

  It is now evident that what is about to happen to our hero is beyond usual earthly conventions, if one subscribes to the idea that earthly conventions are, in fact, usual. We suspect you do not; advanced and literate earthlings like you (yes, flattery is a tool plied in any dimension) are willing to suspend disbelief when faced with the irrefutable wonder and mystery that exist in such depth, scope, and volume on your planet.

  Still, you might have preferred the trajectory of Fletcher’s story to follow a less wild arc, perhaps something transformational, but more along the lines of a career change, or an act of heroism, or the meeting of a soul mate. At this point, we’re certain Fletcher would also opt for these more traditional choices. No one, however constrained their present life may be, is prepared when that life is tumbled, jumbled, tossed, spun, jerked, and turned upside down. We do not presume to think that a story can take such a sharp left turn without some sense of being jostled. We hope nothing was spilled.

  And now, we request your patience and a willingness to go with what is decidedly a very unusual flow.

  . . . Imagine how Fletcher feels.

  4

  He was in the middle of a dream featuring Cindy Dahlberg. A contestant in the first beauty contest of the civilized world, Cindy was playing the marimba in the middle of the Coliseum, wearing only a few well-placed Roman numerals. Her audience, men who looked like Peter Ustinov in Spartacus, sipped wine from goatskin pouches and bribed judges with their filthy lucre. Cindy was a crowd favorite, especially when the lively rhythm she played unhinged the X covering her left breast. Fletcher’s unconscious mind was a pancake, pleasure pouring over it like warm syrup.

  To be rudely awakened by thin luminescent space creatures was one thing, but to be deprived of a dream featuring Cindy Dahlberg as Miss Appian Way was downright mean.

  “What on earth?” sputtered Fletcher, sitting up in his bed.

  The aliens tittered, as if he had said something funny.

  One stepped forward and said in an electronic monotone, “Take me to your leader.”

  Again the aliens laughed (Fletcher assumed it was laughter coming out of the turned-up slits that were their unattractive mouths), nudging each other with rubbery looking arms.

  “Who are you?” asked Fletcher in a small voice, not certain at all that he wanted an answer. Feeling cold sweat begin to bead along his hairline, he drew the blankets over his chest. His Adam’s apple bobbed above it like a buoy.

  “We are what you call aliens,” said the one who had spoken earlier. He gestured to the small group in the corner of the bedroom before pointing to a metallic emblem embedded in his shiny Lurex bodysuit. “Lodge 1212. Brother Charmat at your service.” He gave a jaunty salute with one finger—the only finger—of his right hand.

  “Lodge,” said Fletcher. “You’re a lodge member?” His panic was rising like swamp gas, but he couldn’t help but respond to the absurd things the absurd-looking space thing was saying.

  “All aliens are lodge members. It’s a way of making us feel a little less, well . . . alien.”

&n
bsp; A tree branch, tossing in the wind, clicked against his windowpane. Under the covers, Fletcher pinched his thigh, and when he felt the quick zip of pain his analysis of the situation was gravely disappointing: this was no dream, what was happening was really happening.

  Recalling a story he’d read in one of the tabloid magazines Cindy Dahlberg stocked the break room with, he asked, “Are you . . . are you going to conduct medical experiments on me?”

  The half-dozen or so aliens laughed again.

  “Good heavens, no,” said Charmat. “That’s Lodge 527’s thing. They can’t go anywhere without dissecting someone or something.”

  “You mean they’re not harvesting genes or implanting tracking devices or something like that?”

  “Lodge 527?” Charmat rolled his bulbous, opaque eyes. “They’re nothing but scavengers, out to steal a few human souvenirs. First they’ll raid your refrigerator, then they decide, ‘Why not take home a jar of testosterone or a couple bile ducts while we’re at it?’”

  “They raid refrigerators?”

  “They claim they can fuel their galaxy trams with a mixture of green salsa and RC Cola, but then why must they hoard the frozen waffles and the Hershey’s syrup?” A pink light pulsed in Charmat’s twelve-inch forehead as he shook his head. “They are not doing their jobs.”

  Fletcher gulped. “Jobs?”

  The alien leader sat at the foot of Fletcher’s bed and absently began to pet the coonskin hat that hung like a flea-bitten opossum on the bedpost. “We all have jobs to do. You don’t think we make these house calls for fun, do you?”

  Fletcher swallowed down the rock of fear that filled his throat and shook his head.

  “Then you’d be wrong!” shouted the alien, leaping up.

  Fletcher gasped, pulling the covers completely over his head. Crouching under his tent of sheets and blankets, he smelled the Ovaltine in his hot panicked breath. Hunkering there, he listened to the high-pitched hum of alien laughter, and when he felt himself being jostled, he lifted a square of sheet and peeked out. The circus had come to town.