vultures searching for fresh meat. I had heard from Davy Ray Callan that the
Branlins sometimes tried to run cars off the street with their speeding black
bikes, and that he’d actually witnessed Gotha Branlin, the oldest, tell his
own mother to go to the bad place. Gotha and Gordo were like the Black Plague;
you hoped they wouldn’t get you, but once they laid a hand on you, there was
no escape.
So far I had been insignificant to their careening meanness. I planned
for it to stay that way.
Ben’s house was much like my own. Ben had a brown dog named Tumper, who
got up from his belly on the front porch to bark my arrival. Ben came out to
meet me, and Mrs. Sears said hello and asked if I wanted a glass of root beer.
She was dark-haired and had a pretty face, but she had hips as big as
watermelons. Inside the house, Mr. Sears came up from his woodshop in the
basement to speak to me. He was large and round, too, his heavy-jowled face
ruddy under crew-cut brown hair. Mr. Sears was a happy man with a buck-toothed
grin, woodshavings clinging to his striped shirt, and he told me a joke about
a Baptist preacher and an outhouse that I didn’t really understand, but he
laughed to cue me and Ben said, “Aw, Daddy!” as if he’d heard that dumb joke a
dozen times.
I unpacked my knapsack in Ben’s room, where he had nifty collections of
baseball cards, bottle caps, and wasps’ nests. As I got squared away, Ben sat
down on his Superman bedspread and said, “Did you tell your folks about the
movie?”
“No. Did you?”
“Uh-uh.” He picked at a loose thread on Superman’s face. “How come you
didn’t?”
“I don’t know. How come you didn’t?”
Ben shrugged, but thoughts were working in his head. “I guess,” he said,
“it was too awful to tell.”
“Yeah.”
“I went out back,” Ben said. “No sand. Just rock.”
We both agreed the Martians would have a tough time drilling through all
the red rock in the hills around Zephyr, if they were to come calling. Then
Ben opened a cardboard box and showed me his Civil War bubble gum cards that
had gory paintings of guys getting shot, bayoneted, and clobbered by cannon
balls, and we sat making up a story for each card until his mother rang a bell
to say it was time for fried chicken.
After dinner—and Mrs. Sears’s wonderful black bottom pie washed down with
a glass of cold Green Meadows milk—we all played a game of Scrabble. Ben’s
parents were partners, and Mr. Sears kept trying to pass made-up words that
even I knew weren’t in the dictionary, like “kafloom” and “goganus.” Mrs.
Sears said he was as crazy as a monkey in itching powder, but she grinned at
his antics just like I did. “Cory?” he said. “Didja hear the one about the
three preachers tryin’ to get into heaven?” and before I could say “No” he was
off on a joke-telling jaunt. He seemed to favor the preacher jokes, and I had
to wonder what Reverend Lovoy at the Methodist church would think of them.
It was past eight o’clock and we’d started our second game when Tumper
barked on the front porch and a few seconds later there was a knock on the
door. “I’ll get it,” Mr. Sears said. He opened the door to a wiry,
craggy-faced man wearing jeans and a red-checked shirt. “Hey, Donny!” Mr.
Sears greeted him. “Come on in, you buzzard!”
Mrs. Sears was watching her husband and the man named Donny. I saw her
jaw tense.
Donny said something in a low voice to Mr. Sears, and Mr. Sears called to
us, “Me and Donny are gonna sit on the porch for a while. Y’all go on and
play.”
“Hon?” Mrs. Sears drew up a smile, but I could tell it was in danger of
slipping. “I need a partner.”
The screen door closed at his back.
Mrs. Sears sat very still for a long moment, staring at the door. Her
smile had gone.
“Mom?” Ben said. “It’s your turn.”
“All right.” She tried to pull her attention to the Scrabble tiles. I
could tell she was trying as hard as she could, but her gaze kept slipping
back to the screen door. Out on the porch, Mr. Sears and the wiry man named
Donny were sitting in folding chairs, their conversation quiet and serious.
“All right,” Ben’s mother said again. “Let me think now, just give me a
minute.”
More than a minute passed. Off in the distance, a dog began barking. Then
two more. Tumper took up the call. Mrs. Sears was still choosing her tiles
when the door flew open again.
“Hey, Lizbeth! Ben! Come out here, and hurry!”
“What is it, Sim? What’s—”
“Just come out here!” he hollered, and of course we all got up from the
table to see.
Donny was standing in the yard, looking toward the west. The neighborhood
dogs were really whooping it up. Lights burned in windows, and other people
were emerging to find out what the uproar was about. Mr. Sears pointed in the
direction Donny was looking. “You ever seen anythin’ like that before?”
I looked up. So did Ben, and I heard him gasp as if he’d been
stomach-punched.
It was coming down from the night sky, descending from the canopy of
stars. It was a glowing red thing, purple spears of fire trailing behind it,
and it left a white trail of smoke against the darkness.
In that instant my heart almost exploded. Ben took a backward step, and
he might have fallen had he not collided with one of his mother’s hips. I knew
in my hammering, rioting heart that everywhere across Zephyr kids who had been
in the Lyric theater that afternoon were looking up at the sky and feeling
terror peel the lips back from their teeth.
I came very close to wetting my pants. Somehow I held my water, but it
was a near thing.
Ben blubbered. He made mangled sounds. He wheezed, “It’s… it’s… it’s…”
“A comet!” Mr. Sears shouted. “Look at that thing fall!”
Donny grunted and slid a toothpick into the corner of his mouth. I
glanced at him and by the porch light saw his dirty fingernails.
It was falling in a long, slow spiral, ribbons of sparks flaying out in
its wake. It made no noise, but people were shouting for other people to look
and some of the dogs had started that kind of howling that makes your backbone
quiver.
“Comin’ down between here and Union Town,” Donny observed. His head was
cocked to one side, his face gaunt and his dark hair slick with brilliantine.
“Comin’ down like a sonofabitch.”
Between Zephyr and Union Town lay eight miles of hills, woods, and swamp
cut by the Tecumseh River. It was Martian territory if there ever was, I
thought, and I felt all the circuits in my brain jangle like fire alarms going
off. I looked at Ben. His eyes seemed to be bulging outward by the cranial
pressure of pure fear. The only thing I could think of when I stared at the
fireball again was the tentacled head in the glass bowl, its face serenely
evil and slightly Oriental. I could hardly stand up, my legs were so weak.
“Hey, Sim?” Donny’s voice was low and slow, and he was chewing on the
toothpick. “How about we go chase that bugger down?” His face turned toward
Mr. Sears. His nose was flat, as if it had been busted by a big fist. “What do
you say, Sim?”
“Yeah!” he answered. “Yeah, we’ll go chase it down! Find out where it
falls!”
“No, Sim!” Mrs. Sears said. In her voice was a note of pleading. “Stay
with me and the boys tonight!”
“It’s a comet, Lizbeth!” he explained, grinning. “How many times in your
life do you get to chase a comet?”
“Please, Sim.” She grasped his forearm. “Stay with us. All right?” I saw
her fingers tighten.
“About to hit.” Donny’s jaw muscles clenched as he chewed. “Time’s
wastin’.”
“Yeah! Time’s wastin’, Lizbeth!” Mr. Sears pulled away. “I’ll get my
jacket!” He rushed up the porch steps and into the house. Before the screen
door could slam, Ben was running after his father.
Mr. Sears went back to the bedroom he shared with his wife. He opened the
closet, got his brown poplin jacket, and shrugged into it. Then he reached up
onto the closet’s top shelf, his hand winnowing under a red blanket. As Mr.
Sears’s hand emerged, Ben walked into the room behind him and caught a glint
of metal between his father’s fingers.
Ben knew what it was. He knew what it was for.
“Daddy?” he said. “Please stay home.”
“Hey, boy!” His father turned toward him, grin in place, and he slid the
metal object down into his jacket and zipped the jacket up. “I’m gonna go see
where the comet comes down with Mr. Blaylock. I won’t be but a little while.”
Ben stood in the doorway, between his father and the outside world. His
eyes were wet and scared. “Can I go with you, Daddy?”
“No, Ben. Not this time. I gotta go now.”
“Let me go with you. Okay? I won’t make any noise. Okay?”
“No, son.” Mr. Sears’s hand clamped down on Ben’s shoulder. “You have to
stay here with your mother and Cory.” Though Ben stiffly resisted, his
father’s hand moved him aside. “You be a good boy, now,” Mr. Sears said as his
big shoes carried him toward the door.
Ben made one more attempt by grasping his father’s fingers and trying to
hold him. “Don’t go, Daddy!” he said. “Don’t go! Please don’t go!”
“Ben, don’t act like a baby. Let me go, son.”
“No, sir,” Ben answered. The wetness of his eyes had overflowed onto his
pudgy cheeks. “I won’t.”
“I’m just goin’ out to see where the comet falls. I won’t be gone but a
little while.”
“If you go… if you go…” Ben’s throat was clogging up with emotion, and he
could hardly squeeze the words out. “You’ll come back changed.”
“Let’s hit the road, Sim!” Donny Blaylock urged from the front porch.
“Ben?” Mr. Sears said sternly. “I’m goin’ with Mr. Blaylock. Act like a
man, now.” He worked his fingers free, and Ben stood there looking up at him
with an expression of agony. His father scraped a hand through Ben’s cropped
hair. “I’ll bring you back a piece of it, all right, Tiger?”
“Don’t go,” the weeping tiger croaked.
His father turned his back on him, and strode out the screen door to
where Donny Blaylock waited. I was still standing with Mrs. Sears in the yard,
watching the fiery thing in its last few seconds of descent. Mrs. Sears said,
“Sim? Don’t do it,” but her voice was so weak it didn’t carry. Mr. Sears did
not speak to his wife, and he followed the other man to a dark blue Chevy
parked at the curb. Red foam dice hung from the radio antenna, and the right
rear side was smashed in. Donny Blaylock slid behind the wheel and Mr. Sears
got in the other side. The Chevy started up like a cannon going off, shooting
black exhaust. As the car pulled away, I heard Mr. Sears laugh as if he’d just
told another preacher joke. Donny Blaylock must’ve stomped the gas pedal,
because the rear tires shrieked as the Chevy tore away up Deerman Street.
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.
