boot, which only doubled the abuse directed at him. He was a stoic before I
knew the meaning of the word.
The movie meandered to its conclusion like a jungle river to the sea.
Tarzan defeated the evil elephant poachers, returned the Star of Solomon to
its tribe, and swung into the sunset. The Three Stooges short subject came on,
in which Moe wrenched out Larry’s hair by the handfuls and Curly sat in a
bathtub full of lobsters. We all had a grand old time.
And then, without fanfare, the second feature began.
It was in black and white, which caused immediate groans from the
audience. Everybody knew that color was real life. The title came up on the
screen: Invaders from Mars. The movie looked old, like it had been made in the
fifties. “I’m goin’ for popcorn,” Ben announced. “Anybody want anythin’?” We
said no, and he negotiated the raucous aisle alone.
The credits ended, and the story started.
Ben returned with his bucket of buttered popcorn in time to see what the
young hero saw through his telescope, aimed at the stormy night sky: a flying
saucer, descending into a sand hill behind his house. Usually the
Saturday-afternoon crowd hollered and laughed at the screen when there was no
fighting going on, but this time the stark sight of that ominous saucer coming
down silenced the house.
I believe that for the next hour and a half the concession stand did no
business, though there were kids leaving their seats and running for a view of
daylight. The boy in the movie couldn’t make anybody believe he’d seen a
flying saucer come down, and he watched through his telescope as a policeman
was sucked down into a vortex of sand as if by a grotesque, otherworldly
vacuum cleaner. Then the policeman came to visit the house and assure the boy
that no, of course no flying saucer had landed. Nobody else had seen this
flying saucer land, had they? But the policeman acted… funny. Like he was a
robot, his eyes dead in a pasty face. The boy had noticed a weird X-shaped
wound on the back of the policeman’s neck. The policeman, a jolly gent before
his walk to the sand hill, did not smile. He was changed.
The X-shaped wound began to show up on the backs of other necks. No one
believed the boy, who tried to make his parents understand there was a nest of
Martians in the earth behind his house. Then his parents went out to see for
themselves.
Ben had forgotten about the bucket of popcorn in his lap. Johnny sat with
his knees pulled up to his chest. I couldn’t seem to draw a breath.
Oh, you are such a silly boy, the grim, unsmiling parents told him when
they returned from their walk. There is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing.
Everything is fine. Come with us, let us go up to where you say you saw this
saucer descend. Let us show you what a silly, silly boy you are.
“Don’t go,” Ben whispered. “Don’t go don’t go!” I heard his fingernails
scrape against the armrests.
The boy ran. Away from home, away from the unsmiling strangers.
Everywhere he looked, he saw the X-shaped wound. The chief of police had one
on the back of his neck. People the boy had always known were suddenly
changed, and they wanted to hold him until his parents could come pick him up.
Silly, silly boy, they said. Martians in the ground, about to take over the
world. Who would ever believe a story like that?
At the end of this horror, the army got down in a honeycomb of tunnels
the Martians had burrowed in the ground. The Martians had a machine down there
that cut into the back of your neck and turned you into one of them. The
leader of the Martians, a head with tentacles in a glass bowl, looked like
something that had backed up out of a septic tank. The boy and the army fought
against the Martians, who shambled through the tunnels as if fighting the
weight of gravity. At the collision of Martian machines and army tanks, with
the earth hanging in the balance…
…the boy awakened.
A dream, his father said. His mother smiled at him. A dream. Nothing to
fear. Go to sleep, we’ll see you in the morning.
Just a bad, bad dream.
And then the boy got up in the dark, peered through his telescope, and
saw a flying saucer descending from the stormy night sky into a sand hill
behind his house.
The End?
The lights came up. Saturday afternoon at the movies was over.
“What’s wrong with them?” I heard Mr. Stellko, the Lyric’s manager, say
to one of the ushers as we filed out. “Why’re they so darned quiet?”
Sheer terror has no voice.
Somehow we managed to get on our bikes and start pedaling. Some kids
walked home, some waited for their parents to pick them up. All of us were
linked by what we had just witnessed, and when Ben, Johnny, and I stopped at
the gas station on Ridgeton Street to get air put in Johnny’s front tire, I
caught Ben staring at the back of Mr. White’s neck, where the sunburned skin
folded up.
We parted ways at the corner of Bonner and Hilltop streets. Johnny flew
for home, Ben cranked his bike with his stumpy legs, and I fought the rusted
chain every foot of the distance. My bike had seen its best days. It was
ancient when it came to me, by way of a flea market. I kept asking for a new
one, but my father said I would have to do with what I had or do without.
Money was tight some months; going to the movies on Saturday was a luxury. I
found out, sometime later, that Saturday afternoon was the only time the
springs in my parents’ bedroom could sing a symphony without me wondering what
was going on.
“You have fun?” my mother asked when I came in from playing with Rebel.
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “The Tarzan movie was neat.”
“Double feature, wasn’t it?” Dad inquired, sitting on the sofa with his
feet up. The television was tuned to an exhibition baseball game; it was
getting to be that time of year.
“Yes sir.” I walked on past them, en route to the kitchen and an apple.
“Well, what was the other movie about?”
“Oh… nothin’,” I answered.
Parents can smell a mouse quicker than a starving cat. They let me get my
apple, wash it under the faucet, polish it, and then bring it back into the
front room. They let me sink my teeth into it, and then my dad looked up from
the Zenith and said, “What’s the matter with you?”
I crunched the apple. Mom sat down next to Dad, and their eyes were on
me. “Sir?” I asked.
“Every other Saturday you burst in here like gangbusters wantin’ to tell
us all about the movies. We can’t hardly stop you from actin’ ’em out scene by
scene. So what’s the matter with you today?”
“Uh… I guess I… don’t know, exactly.”
“Come here,” Mom said. When I did, her hand flew to my forehead. “Not
runnin’ a fever. Cory, you feel all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“So one movie was about Tarzan,” my father plowed on, bulldog stubborn.
“What was the other movie about?”
I supposed I could tell them the title. But how could I tell them what it
was really about? How could I tell them that the movie I had just seen tapped
the primal fear of every child alive: that their parents would, in an instant
of irreversible time, be forever swept away and replaced by cold, unsmiling
aliens? “It was… a monster movie,” I decided to say.
“That must’ve been right up your alley, then.” Dad’s attention veered
back to the baseball game as a bat cracked like a pistol shot. “Whoa! Run for
it, Mickey!”
The telephone rang. I hurried to answer it before my folks could ask me
any more questions. “Cory? Hi, this is Mrs. Sears. Can I speak to your mother,
please?”
“Just a minute. Mom?” I called. “Phone for you!”
Mom took the receiver, and I had to go to the bathroom. Number one,
thankfully. I wasn’t sure I was ready to sit on the toilet with the memory of
that tentacled Martian head in my mind.
“Rebecca?” Mrs. Sears said. “How are you?”
“Doin’ fine, Lizbeth. You get your raffle tickets?”
“I sure did. Four of them, and I hope at least one is lucky.”
“That’s good.”
“Well, the reason I’m callin’ is, Ben got back from the movies just a
little while ago and I was wonderin’ how Cory is.”
“Cory? He’s—” She paused, and in her mind she was considering my strange
state. “He says he’s fine.”
“So does Ben, but he acts a little… I don’t know, maybe ‘bothered’ is the
word I’m lookin’ for. Usually he hounds the heck out of Sim and me wantin’ to
tell us about the movies, but today we can’t get him to talk. He’s out back
right now. Said he wants to make sure about somethin’, but he won’t tell us
what.”
“Cory’s in the bathroom,” my mother said, as if that, too, was a piece of
the puzzle. She cast her voice lower, in case I could hear over my waterfall.
“He does act a little funny. You think somethin’ happened between ’em at the
movies?”
“I thought of it. Maybe they had a fallin’-out.”
“Well, they’ve been friends for a long time, but it does happen.”
“Happened with me and Amy Lynn McGraw. We were fast friends for six years
and then we didn’t speak for a whole year over a lost packet of sewin’
needles. But I was thinkin’, maybe the boys ought to get together. If they’ve
had an argument, maybe they ought to work it out right off.”
“Makes sense.”
“I was gonna ask Ben if he’d like Cory to spend the night. Would that be
all right with you?”
“I don’t mind, but I’ll have to ask Tom and Cory.”
“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Sears said, “Ben’s comin’ in.” My mother heard a
screen door slam. “Ben? I’ve got Cory’s mother on the phone. Would you like
Cory to spend the night here tonight?” My mother listened, but she couldn’t
make out what Ben was saying over the flush of our toilet. “He says he’d like
that,” Mrs. Sears told her.
I emerged from the bathroom, into the well-meaning complicity. “Cory,
would you like to spend the night at Ben’s house?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know,” I said, but I couldn’t tell her why.
The last time I’d spent the night over there, back in February, Mr. Sears
hadn’t come home all night and Mrs. Sears had walked the floor fretting about
where he might be. Ben told me his father took a lot of overnight trips and he
asked me not to say anything.
“Ben wants you to come,” Mom prodded, mistaking my reluctance.
I shrugged. “Okay. I guess.”
“Go make sure it’s all right with your father.” While I went to the front
room to ask, my mother said to Mrs. Sears, “I know how important friendship
is. We’ll get ’em patched up if there’s any problem.”
“Dad says okay,” I told her when I returned. If my father was watching a
baseball game, he would be agreeable to flossing his teeth with barbed wire.
“Lizbeth? He’ll be there. ’Round six o’clock?” She put her hand over the
mouthpiece and said to me, “They’re havin’ fried chicken for dinner.”
I nodded and tried to summon a smile, but my thoughts were in the tunnels
where the Martians plotted the destruction of the human race, town by town.
“Rebecca? How’re things goin’?” Mrs. Sears asked. “You know what I mean.”
“Run on, Cory,” she told me, and I did even though I knew important
things were about to be discussed. “Well,” she said to Lizbeth Sears, “Tom’s
sleepin’ a little better now, but he still has the nightmares. I wish I could
do somethin’ to help, but I think he just has to work it out for himself.”
“I hear the sheriff’s about given it up.”
“It’s been three weeks without any kind of lead. J.T. told Tom on Friday
that he sent word out all over the state, Georgia and Mississippi, too, but he
hasn’t come up with a thing. It’s like the man in that car came from another
planet.”
“Now, there’s a chilly thought.”
“Somethin’ else,” my mother said, and she sighed heavily. “Tom’s…
changed. It’s more than the nightmares, Lizbeth.” She turned toward the
kitchen pantry and stretched the cord as far as it would go so there was no
chance of Dad hearing. “He’s careful to lock all the doors and windows, where
before he didn’t care about locks. Up until it happened, we left our doors
unlocked most of the time, like everybody else does. Now Tom gets up two or
three times in the night to check the bolts. And last week he came home from
his route with red mud on his shoes, when it hadn’t rained. I think he went
back to the lake.”
“What on earth for?”
“I don’t know. To walk and think, I suppose. I remember when I was nine
years old I had a yellow cat that got run over by a truck in front of our
house. Calico’s blood stayed on the pavement for a long time. That place
pulled me. I hated it, but I had to go there and see where Calico died. I
always thought that there was somethin’ I could’ve done to keep him alive. Or
maybe up until it happened, I thought everythin’ lived forever.” She paused,
staring at pencil marks on the back door that showed the steady progress of my
growth. “I think Tom’s got a lot on his mind right now.”
Their conversation rolled on into the realm of this and that, though at
the center of it was the incident at Saxon’s Lake. I watched the baseball game
with Dad, and I noticed that he kept closing and opening his right hand as if
he were either trying to grasp something or free himself from a grip. Then it
got time to get ready to go, and I gathered up my pajamas, my toothbrush, and
another set of socks and underwear and shoved everything down in my army
surplus knapsack. Dad told me to be careful and Mom told me to have fun, but
to be back in the morning in time for Sunday school. I rubbed Rebel’s head and
threw a stick for him to chase, and then I climbed on my bike and pedaled
away.
Ben didn’t live very far, only a half mile or so from my house at the
dead end of Deerman Street. On Deerman Street I pedaled quietly, because
guarding the corner of Deerman and Shantuck was the somber gray stone house
where the notorious Branlin brothers lived. The Branlins, thirteen and
fourteen years of age, had peroxided blond hair and delighted in destruction.
Oftentimes they roamed the neighborhood on their matching black bicycles like
