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 really; 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 as 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
