“Ten months.”
“Kinda runty for ten months, isn’t she?”
“She is a he.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“All of mine have been small.”
“You have more?”
“They aren’t here.”
“Oh.”
Maryse took a can of Weightlesse from a shelf stocked with similar cans. She opened it and poured half the chalky tan liquid into a jelly glass and half into a baby bottle. She screwed on the bottle cap, pulled up a chair next to Gwen, and held out her arms for the child.
“You feed him that?”
“Same thing I eat.” She inserted the rubber nipple between the baby’s colorless lips. After a prolonged pause the tiny jaw muscles commenced a faint nursing action that reminded Gwen of looming close-ups in educational films about the private lives of insects. The movement faltered and stopped.
“You think there’s enough nourishment in that for a baby?” asked Gwen.
“Here”—thrusting the label under her face—“it’s got everything you need.”
Gwen read slowly, trying not to mispronounce: “Cupric sulphate…pyridoxine hydrochloride…”
“Those are just the scientific names for vitamins and other stuff that’s good for you.”
“You’re not even a little bit fat.”
“Of course not, I drink this.” Maryse smiled, held up the glass, and tossed back the sludgelike contents with stylish gusto. It was a commercial moment.
“But that’s why your baby is so small.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want it to grow up,” said Trinity.
“Oh,” said Gwen. She looked at her oatmeal. The milk had turned brown. Overhead the light was dark with flyspecks.
“All right,” Maryse declared in a peremptory voice. She deposited the baby in the empty sink and began to pour steaming water into a mustard-yellow cup. “Who can remember last night’s dreams?”
“Somebody die?” asked Dallas, sauntering through the door in a pair of fashionably torn jeans. He yanked open the refrigerator and a watermelon magnet flew off the door and bounced against the wall. “Bingo,” he said. He rooted around inside the cluttered refrigerator and finally emerged with the last of the Rolling Rock.
“I like your feet,” Trinity commented.
“Thanks.” He shuffled off into the other room. On the television set a pleasant farmer in a smart blue cap was dumping a jug of chalky solution into a spray tank mounted behind a tractor. Cartoon cutworms burst into vanishing exclamation marks. Dallas went upstairs and slumped in front of the radar screen. He drank the beer and flicked the toggle switch back and forth. He liked watching the sudden glow, the slow fade, as the alcohol wound through his head. The blip he wanted to see had already been picked up by the state police moving at a commendably legal pace it couldn’t exceed if it wanted to and, having putt-putted past the three two-storied blocks of Albert, was at this moment bearing down in a more-or-less straight line right at the nougat of the buzzy cocoon in which he sat, ball joints rattling, transmission rumbling, air screaming through the cracked vents, the football helmet bouncing around the backseat, the child’s arm stretched out the rear window and lifting into the wall of wind like a wing.
“There is an ocean of dreams,” Maryse was explaining, “that our sleeping heads dip back into late at night. The tides go in and out, cleansing the shore. Who we are is whatever silhouettes against that great sea. It is deep and vast and strong, and even in the clearest moment of the brightest day something is leaking in, a permanent trickle in the plumbing. Sometimes, in some of us, things collapse, but now the moment is approaching when the wave will break to carry us all away. This will happen. Consider the signs. Learn how to float.”
“But what’s all this got to do with UFOs?” asked Beale.
“They’re the openings the dreams come through.” The flesh of her face, no thicker than the skin on a pot of boiled milk, had become temporarily vitalized by the ardor of her argument. A gaudy dot of color appeared on the point of each cheek like a pasted-on decal. She resembled a terminal case in brief remission.
During the lecture, Trinity played with her food. Wielding a spoon as delicately as a surgical instrument, she hunched over her bowl, carving out of oatmeal an elaborate spiral trench.
Brooding Gwen had refused to offer up a sample of her nightwork for Maryse’s presumptuous inspection. Quiet presences framed by the window continued to occupy her attention, the big leafy tree, the small shaggy graveyard, the serried heads bobbing in unseen decay on the turning tide.
“It’s a gift,” added Maryse, sipping from her cup. Her hands were long and thin; there was a gold band on the ring finger. “I try to share it as best I can.”
Trinity braced her palms against the edge of the table, leaned over, lips pursed, and allowed a gob of spit to fall into the bowl, a mound of bubbles foaming at the milky center of an oatmeal spiral. She smiled all around. “I think it’s just what it needed,” she said.
The blue Bug came off the road in fourth gear, gravel spewing, muffler banging, bounced across the uneven lawn, and jerked to a halt atop a grassless patch of oil and cinders outside the kitchen window. There was a pause, the anticipation of a comic interval, a sudden geyser of radiator steam, popping headlights, exploding tires, the disgorgement of a hundred clowns. But nothing happened, the car sat there, engine continuing to tap out its uncertain, arrhythmic beat. The robin’s-egg-blue body was pitted with rust, from angry freckles to thick fuzzy scabs; the rear fender was crushed; the hubcaps lost, stolen, misplaced by careless mechanics; the antenna bent; one window replaced by a wrinkled sheet of plastic; and inside, the heat was jammed in the on position. The dented door on the passenger side swung open, and a child of indeterminate gender, wearing a silver football helmet, squeezed out of the backseat and bolted for the corner of the house, hands flapping erratically from outstretched arms, adult-sized mouth emitting an avian shriek that seemed to tear a jagged diagonal across the pastoral fabric. The child’s name was Zoe. The wipers flipped on, the lights flashed, the horn honked, the engine died. Movement carried on within the car, half-glimpsed shapes plotting behind the windshield glare where the sky burned clear as ice and a toy plane in the form of a cross etched a white furrow across the curved glass.
At last the driver’s door creaked open, and out climbed a man to pose for a moment against the corroded metal, broad hand resting atop the dimpled roof, a pair of black sunglasses turned toward the house, scanning brick and board, window and door, on up to the pyramid of a steeple and the motionless dish at its tip, then glancing off the sharply defined roof edge and into the blinding blue. A tall man in a black turtleneck and black pants, a black figure contemplating a black structure. When the woman got out she was wearing a hospital gown and turquoise cowboy boots.
Trinity hurried out to greet her parents.
The football helmet dashed past the kitchen window, the scream peaking and echoing away as it began its second revolution of the house.
“I guess she’s glad to be home,” mumbled Beale.
Gwen chewed on the raw pink nub of her thumbnail. The car, the kid, the man, the woman. Even the light was momentous this morning, startlingly three-dimensional, solid as a column plunged slantwise through the wall. Out of the sink, like the pale wavering tendril of a sun-starved plant, a human limb lifted itself tentatively into view, fluttered for an instant in the vertiginous air, and dropped abruptly from sight. Warm fur moved against Gwen’s leg and she leaped, yelping, from her chair as an orange cat scurried away, claws clicking on the tile, to the snug sanctuary of its hairball collection beneath the leaky refrigerator.
“How do you do, sir?” exclaimed Beale in the whiny adenoidal manner he affected before whatever authority he hadn’t yet cajoled a favor out of: a dull observation once absorbed osmotically and only now passing into Gwen’s melancholy awareness. “It’s been a great honor for both of us.” He wound stray wisps of beard about his nervous fin
gers.
Shaking Dash’s hand was like squeezing a sponge. A disconcerting impression. Gwen waited for him to ask a personal question she wouldn’t seem to know. Quick now, how many times had she vaulted the stars in the hollow of a golden ball? He peered at her over the tops of his glasses as though there were a piece of orange pulp stuck in her braces. Yes, this was what it was like when The Occupants threw down a beam, your helpless nerves surfaced in an indecent frenzy of embarrassment and confusion. Of course, he was smaller than she’d remembered. Off the podium everyone shrank. Then she was noticing all kinds of fascinating details memory had never had a chance to know, magnified specifics particularly about the eyes, in a glimpse she saw that they were exceptionally large and a complicated gray, the color of old driftwood, grainy and varnished; there were wrinkles around them, nothing serious, a shallow grid lightly traced in time’s permanent cosmetic, and under them, maturity’s sad pouches set among a broad scattering of youthful freckles, and in them, deep and clear and distant, what size was she? She smiled and muttered something dumb. The Object blazed like a bell in the bright raking light. The room smelled of attic dust and cracked hymnals baking in an early summer sun.
“The kids been treating you square?” Dash asked. Unamplified, the voice was barely recognizable, so flat, so disembodied. Gwen watched the mouth move and heard the words arrive after a slight delay as if the man had been poorly dubbed. With his military bearing, his uniform, his dark glasses, he looked like the director of a school for assassins.
Beale was beaming, unashamedly, all liquid eyes and sleek teeth. “It’s been a positive delight. Spending the night, I mean, in this house, under The Object. We are in awe.”
Each being was a point and each point pulsed and there were these concentric waves piling up in the corners because where there is not enough space there is only noise. Everyone was made of blood. Bodies shifted into predestined orbits in accordance with the laws of gravitation. The room reeled. Gwen sidled over behind Beale. Black ovals tracked her every move. She was going to faint, she wasn’t going to faint, she was, she wasn’t. Echoes, ghost images, surges in voltage, was something approaching, something actually growing near, a real moving object to contend with, a “working” ship?
“Newton, Tennessee,” Dash was repeating, head inclined in a thoughtful attitude, master to pupil, “don’t believe I know that one.”
Beale eagerly explained the origins, the convoluted and pathetic geography of their trek. Dash’s hair was short and brown and graying on the edges as it thinned out from the middle.
“The Kenneth Arnold Symposium, too?”
“All five days. We were in the third row, over to the right, between the ex–Air Force guys and the druids.”
“That was fun, wasn’t it?”
“I have a tape.”
Under the hospital gown Dot was dressed in her famous white outfit. She had a rural face, angular hardworking features, ruddy outdoorsy complexion, and when she spoke the occasional stranger was sometimes surprised by the expensive caps and the careful, dramatically modulated tones of a commentator at a fashion show. “All our people journey such vast distances,” she said, and hurried out to the kitchen.
“So how was the trip?” asked Trinity, who had welcomed her father with a kiss on the mouth that persisted several beats past the allotted time for daughterly devotion.
“Psychopaths and pornographers,” boomed the father. “Who left the goddamn set on?” The television was throwing jittery light across his dark chest. Ray decided to risk half his fourteen hundred dollars on the next spin of the wheel. The category was Famous Mining Disasters. Dash switched the channel.
Drawers slammed, cupboards banged, dishes clinked, utensils rattled. Dot returned from the kitchen displaying a mason jar full of either ammonia or soapy water in which floated blobs of a leafy wrinkled gray. “Maryse tells me you’re pregnant,” she stated breezily. “Dash, honey, would you mind?”
Dash took the jar between his large hands and twisted. Jason and Jennifer were lingering over their fettucine as they discussed in urgent stilted voices Harold’s emotional constipation and what Melanie could possibly have done with the missing inheritance money.
“Why, no,” said Gwen, searching the disorganized features of Beale’s face for signs of support, “no, I’m not at all, I really don’t know where she got that idea.”
The lid came open with a wet pop.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Dot held the jar under her twitching nostrils.
“But I’m not ashamed.” Her face pleaded with Beale; he wore the goofy smile that indicated he was no longer in attendance.
“That’s all right, dear,” said Dot. She turned to her daughter. “Where’s Edsel?”
“Over at the MacGuffin twins’.” Trinity was bouncing a piece of tektite from palm to palm with a deft self-satisfied coordination.
“Well, call them up and tell him we’re home.”
“He’s probably not there anymore.”
“Why not?”
“They might have gone someplace else after.”
“I don’t suppose you bothered to find out where that someplace might be.”
“Where the hell you think they went, the choices being so multitudinous and all?”
“I’m your mother, remember.”
“They’re at the stupid mall, where else they gonna be?”
Maryse crossed the room, stepping gingerly as a fawn among the brambles and the flames. She crawled into The Object without a word, her progress monitored by big black glasses.
“I know no one else in this family but me is going to take the trouble to find out,” declared Dot. “God knows where Edsel’s been and what he’s seen and what he’s done.”
“I didn’t notice anyone chaining him to a tree when you guys pulled out of here two weeks ago.”
“All right,” said Dash. Jason and Jennifer decided to attend Jeff’s wedding. Glenn’s cancer began to eat his stomach.
“This is what I came home to?” Drops of suspicious gray liquid fell from the gesturing jar in starburst patterns across the floor.
“Apparently so.”
“Why doesn’t someone get me a drink?” asked Dash. “Trinity, honey, why don’t you fetch your dad a nice cold beer?” Gwen and Beale, silent as children, pretended to look out the tall windows that reminded Gwen of distant classrooms. A light wind dizzy with pollen and manure was pushing huge clumps of cloud across an empty blue stage. Raggedy shadows swooped in over the rolling fields. Inside, the room went from light to dark and back again as if the equipment were being tested for a performance later that night. “She loves to wait on her old man.”
“There isn’t any.”
“Isn’t any what?”
“There isn’t any beer to get.”
“What about the cases under the sink and the six-pack in the refrigerator?”
“See for yourself.”
“Why is it every time I step out the door all the alcohol in the house instantly evaporates?”
“Beats me, maybe some kind of mysterious chemical reaction.”
“Where’s Dallas?”
Trinity shrugged her shoulders. Her mother dipped a finger into the swirling murk and tasted the contents of the jar with a bland thoughtful expression. Dash turned to face the choir loft. “Dallas, you up there? Dallas!”
There was no response.
“Maybe he went to work,” said Trinity.
“Does he work today?”
“I don’t know, what day is it?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Shouldn’t someone check on Zoe?” said Dot. “I don’t hear her anymore.”
They paused and listened to the silence.
“She’s probably crawled under the house again,” said Trinity.
“Well, why don’t you go drag her out,” suggested Dash.
Dot screwed the lid back on and, sloshing jar in hand, headed for the closed door in the wall where the communion rail m
ust have been. “I’ll be in our room.”
“How many of us does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Trinity asked the guests. “I’ll be back in a moment with the answer.” She exited through the front door.
Dash eased himself down onto a rickety piece of aluminum tubing and synthetic webbing. He leaned back, the impenetrable lenses of his glasses filling with cloud and streaming sky. “Chicago,” he said. All eyes turned. “Chicago was u-foria.” Yellow animal excrement was wedged into the tread of his nylon-cord soles. “Look at those lips.” Distorted TV faces slid around each other like globules of oil in vinegar. “I saw that pair in the same clinch ten years ago in the dayroom at Allendale. Ten years. There’s fire for you.” His laughter was dry and artificial, something frozen in a lab for future consumption.
Up in the loft Dallas poured the last drops from the last can onto his extended tongue and wondered if the gun in his hand was the same make his father packed with spit-shined boots and a whistle when he was an MP in Berlin back in the first great end-of-the-world days. The Germans shot defectors with stubby machine guns and pulled the corpses off the wire like deer carcasses with thick lengths of canvas rope. They were Communists. He rolled onto his side, pointed the barrel at the floor.
In the mechanical method of immobilization, the pistol is placed against the forehead of the hog and the charge of a blank cartridge propels the captive bolt into the skull.
Three
OF COURSE, YOU’RE STAYING for dinner.”
Dallas’s solitaire table had been pulled from the wall, lengthened, tableclothed, and carelessly set for eight, the afternoon light collected in points and puddles on the hard glaze of things, the mismatched china, the dented silver. In the center of the table was a pile of papery leaves and a damp twig skewering the ivory ring of an old hambone—treasures Zoe had rescued from the dank crawl space underneath the house. Zoe had black frantic eyes that avoided contact, and when Trinity tried to drag her over to meet the nice company she growled and scratched at her sister with the soft nubs of her bitten nails. Now she sat on the hardwood floor, wrapped in a fraying blanket, gaze inturned, rocking back and forth in ceaseless desperate rhythm as if the body were a hinge on a swinging door to nowhere. Gwen felt like a monster.
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