M31

by Stephen Wright

  “They’re watching us,” he announced.

  She looked up into the steep empty sky.

  He laughed, a contemptuous barking sound that entered her hearing like a knife.

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Where the fuck you think we are?”

  She shielded her eyes with one hand. “Where? What am I supposed to see? I’ve never been this close to farms in my life.”

  “Don’t they grow shit in Tennessee?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Beale. I’m from San Jose.”

  “So what do they grow there?”

  “Nothing.”

  His arm described a vague arc. “Welcome to something.”

  “There is a lot of it, isn’t there?”

  “Don’t see much of anything else.”

  “So what are they growing behind the fence?”

  “Mushrooms.”

  “In those little sheds?”

  “Under ’em. Uncle likes to farm deep.”

  “Your uncle owns that?”

  “Everybody’s Uncle.”

  “Oh.” She scanned the enclosure for signs of secrecy and menace. There were some telephone poles, some white storage tanks maybe, there was a blue truck. The silos bulged with warheads under the living camouflage of the gentle grass. The toy buildings reminded her of outdoor latrines at summer camp.

  Dallas sat up and peeled off his sweaty T-shirt. There were long thin cuts across his chest, too.

  “I come out here a lot,” he said. “It’s quiet, it’s a good place to think.”

  “Gives me the creeps.”

  “Isn’t that the point?”

  “About what?”

  “Thinking.”

  He popped open a can. “I hope it goes when I’m sitting here. No one would ever have seen that before.”

  She thought of the geysers at Yellowstone.

  He finished that can and immediately opened another.

  The road was a piece that connected to all other pieces. The keys were in his pocket.

  “It’s a strange country,” he said, the beer beginning to muse through him.

  “Yes,” she replied. The light seemed to be getting brighter as the day died.

  “Things shift.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, not really sure what he meant.

  “You can sit out here for hours looking at nothing in particular, zoning out, and suddenly fffft! everything shifts.”

  “Shifts?”

  “Like driving a stick and shifting to another gear, colors, shapes, stuff like that, like two pieces of film are stuck in the projector at the same time.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, I don’t remember anything like this when we lived in the city, but out here it happens all the time.” He sent a gob of spittle flying out into space where it broke apart into a glistening necklace of tiny translucent eggs clinging to the swaying columns of a few grass stems. “Fact is, this is an alien planet. Don’t no one know it yet.”

  A rush of fear passed over her quick as a wind. But if he was one of them, would he be talking to her like this, occupying this form?

  Then, as if he had read her mind, he said, “Shapes, you know, are just a different kind of music.”

  “Yes. That’s fascinating. What does your father think about these interesting ideas?”

  “My father is an asshole.”

  He studied the dark triangular opening in his beer can. When he looked up, there was more shine in his eyes than she wanted to see in the average rogue male.

  “I like being drunk, know why? ’Cause it’s like licking metal, and that’s a radical feel.”

  “Give me one.”

  He moved the dripping cardboard case between them. “You ever go to work drunk?”

  “I suppose I must have once or twice in my long career.”

  “All the knives going at once, that’s all you see, and all the flashing like hypnotizes you or something and someone tells you to get moving and it’s like you got to get across this room without getting cut.”

  “Is that what happened to your arms?”

  “You ever go to school drunk? Puke in your locker, pass out in history. Everyone a zombie. I fell down the stairs once, eight stitches right here behind my ear.”

  His arm jerked out in front of her, and he opened his fist on a couple broken stems and one beige grasshopper drooling brown fluid on his fingers.

  “Tobacco juice,” said Dallas.

  He held the insect by the abdomen and squeezed. The insides popped out the tail like pus from a pimple.

  “Shouldn’t we be getting back?” asked Gwen. The beer was tepid and backing up her throat.

  “That herbert you came with.”

  “Beale?”

  “He’s a pud.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Something you don’t need. What storm did he come in out of?”

  “We met at a space show.”

  “Yeah, I know all about those. Like, show me some space.”

  “We’re not exactly handcuffed together.”

  “Yeah, see his eyes crawling on my sister like nasty fingers.”

  “I like how clean clothes smell on his body.”

  “Screwing him must be like getting it on with The Occupants.”

  “Hardly. He’s only got one tube.”

  Dallas barked. “Hey, not bad for a diskhead.”

  “Beale’s much funnier than I am.”

  He pressed a fist to his stomach and forced a belch. All the beer he had drunk was condensing on his forehead and trickling down his cheeks. He turned to look at her. “On other planets,” he said, “atomic explosions are a natural occurrence, and all the people eat chrome.” The light burned. He unzipped his jeans and shoved them quickly to his knees. He wore no underwear. “Hey?” cried Gwen, scuttling away backwards on her hands. But it wasn’t her he was reaching for. She looked and looked away. The band of bright flesh, untanned and prickly with hair. The beating of his blood in the naked sun. He eased himself back onto the ground. “Go ahead,” he urged. “I won’t look.” “No,” she declined softly, “that’s…” Her voice faded away. And even when she wasn’t watching, she was still aware of the unmistakable exertions of hand in lap as of someone attempting with mighty effort and limited success to catch a floppy fish without a net. She realized now why the fly on his shoulder hadn’t moved. It was a tattoo. The loosened shadows of the advancing clouds came on in hectic silence, slipping seamlessly over their sprawled bodies, the black road, the dull roof of the car, the grass browning beyond the fence, and the invisible young men beneath it with their zippered uniforms and their earnest little keys. His legs stiffened and the air turned pink around her. He wiped himself off on the grass. “Looks like rain,” she said.

  They rode back in silence, unaccompanied by pterodactyls.

  Four

  THE TABLE HAD ALL but disappeared beneath a Thanksgiving-sized spread of green food, yellow food, white food, and brown—all the colors unnaturally bright—in heaped and steaming platters and bowls seemingly suspended together on an invisible plane, and still Dot kept bustling in from the warm kitchen, mittened hands full, and somehow, magically, a space was opened for yet one more bubbling dish. When the jellied herring salad went quivering by, Gwen experienced a dip in the room and settled gratefully onto the nearest firm chair. The boy, Edsel, appeared before her, the corners of his thin mouth stained a pale cherry red, sticky fingers curled possessively around the plastic body of a man-shaped lizard in cape and jackboots. He aimed a tiny reptilian fist at her face.

  “She’s in my seat.”

  “She’s company,” responded Dot, wiping her hands on the spotted hospital gown. “Sit over here for today.”

  “No.”

  “For one day.”

  “I can’t see TV from there.” He pressed a button on the toy’s back and the fist sailed over Gwen’s head.

  “I’m sorry.” Gwen pushed back her chair. “I didn’t know.”

&nbs
p; “Don’t you budge another inch. We’ll just move the set.” Dot dragged the squeaking video trolley out into the center of the room, angled it toward her son, and crouched over the knobs. “It’s his favorite show.” The picture bloomed and held. A dapper mustachioed man in a smoking jacket was declaiming in a broad theatrical manner. A thin long-haired woman stood listening before him, her evening gown too tight to accommodate sitting. A pair of strange-looking children ran up out of the basement. A monster perched on a bench playing a harpsicord. A disembodied hand emerged from a box with the day’s mail. Lines of dialogue were shunted in and out between crashes of mirth from the laugh track. Maybe Gwen had seen the show once or twice; she couldn’t recall the name.

  “This is good, huh?” asked Edsel seriously.

  Gwen smiled, nodding. She always agreed with children. The clear late afternoon light was of a quality that transformed the earlier day into something glimpsed behind smudged glass. Across the room The Object glowed with the warm good humor of a burnished distillery vat. Gwen could hear the pronounced reassuring tick of a large unseen clock. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be drugged by the gentle weight of the light on her face. She could feel the movement of her insides, popping and trickling in total darkness. Secret recipes were being prepared in there.

  Dash came in and stood at the head of the table, staring down without expression at either her or the comical woman shrieking out the door on television, she couldn’t tell because of the sunglasses. She smiled and nodded. The skin of his face was drawn tight and thin as a surgeon’s glove over the bone, and the top of his steely flat-cropped hair resembled the business end of a brush whose bristles, Gwen imagined, must be coarse and sharp.

  Dot announced dinner, and Trinity led in Zoe by the hand, blinking and looking about like an imprisoned creature let briefly into the light while the cage was being cleaned. Dallas took the seat directly opposite Gwen, furtively adjusting himself under his clothes where the gun was tucked in his waistband. He saw how Gwen was looking at him, but he gave nothing back. Beale left the bathroom without washing his hands and squeezed in around the table to the empty chair beside Gwen. “This young man,” said Dash, patting his shoulder as he went by, “once majored in physics and, not only that, claims he can play the trumpet, too.”

  “So what,” said Dallas.

  Dash looked at his son and waited. Seconds passed like drops from a slow leak. Dallas removed the cigarette dangling off his lip and flipped it backwards out the open window.

  “Well, actually, to tell the truth, I never really finished,” explained amiable Beale. “I dropped out my junior year.”

  “Some never even bother to drop in.” Dot handed a package of paper napkins to Trinity. “Here, everybody take one and pass it on.”

  “He got a girl pregnant,” said Gwen, as surprised as Beale to hear the words coming out of her mouth, “and had to leave town in the middle of the semester.”

  “But I came right back, yeah, I came back and everything was worked out okay.”

  “That kid,” declared Maryse. She emerged from the interior of The Object wearing a dirty white turban on her head and a mass of handmade ceramic necklaces. “He’s so quiet I spend half my time just checking to see if he’s still alive.”

  “Wonder why,” muttered Dallas, eyeing the tall glass of Weightlesse centered on her otherwise empty plate.

  “Fuck you.”

  “All right,” said Dot. “You know I won’t stand for that sort of thing at the table.”

  “Or on it,” added Trinity.

  “A little company shows up, everybody gets excited and thinks they have to perform.”

  Gwen leaned her arm against the wobbly table and circles of milk went pitching and yawing inside the glasses and she laughed out loud. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that this reminds me so much of home.” It was a Sunday afternoon, and she was a daughter again.

  Zoe rocked back and forth in her chair, crooning softly over her plate as if to raise the painted lilies there. The cords in her neck were as thin and taut as telephone cable.

  “Shall we begin?” asked Dash. He bowed his head, folded his hands. So did the family. Gwen and Beale traded looks. Then everyone huddled together in silence, listening to television noise and the dozens of flies already swarming over every edible surface. Finally, Dash spoke: “From crab nebula to finny fishes, we thank You Whoever for these swell dishes.”

  Dallas snickered.

  “A family joke,” explained Trinity.

  “What’s the joke?” asked Dash.

  Edsel began banging knife and fork on the table. “Let’s eat!” he cried. Zoe dug into the mashed potatoes with her hands.

  “I hope there’s enough.” Dot lifted a salad bowl heaped with green beans.

  “Oh Mother,” said Trinity. “She’s so worried you’re not going to get the complete Midwestern dining experience. Whatever that is.”

  There were traces of dried egg between the tines of Gwen’s fork.

  “There’s enough here for all of Buchanan County,” said Maryse. She was rationing out her meal in brief sips. The dark half-moons under each eye resembled the marks rubber soles make on a linoleum floor.

  “It’s good to be able to feed your guests,” said Dash. Whenever he looked at Gwen she felt as if she were being scrutinized by the wrong end of a telescope.

  Poly stuck her head through the window and made a sound like a squealing brake.

  “The whole family together again,” said Trinity.

  “She looks sick,” said Dot. “What’s the matter with her eyes?”

  Dallas bounced a muffin off the goat’s nose and she disappeared.

  “What’s that?” asked Edsel, pointing.

  “Swiss steak,” answered his mother.

  “I hate that.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Last time you cleaned your plate and begged for more.”

  “Is Swiss the same as Midwestern?”

  “No, of course it isn’t, what are you talking about?”

  “I’m not eating any.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “No because you said.”

  “Yes, what did I say?”

  “You said we were having Midwestern and this is Swiss and I’m not eating any.”

  “No, no, they just call it that, dear, Swiss steak, it doesn’t mean the meat comes from there.”

  “We all know where the meat comes from,” said Trinity in a stage whisper directed at her brother.

  “Oh God,” Maryse groaned, “if we have to endure this juvenile conversation one more time…Really, people are trying to eat.”

  “I wouldn’t call what you do eating,” said Dallas.

  “Don’t you tell me you—”

  “Pass the gravy,” said Dash, and everyone shut up. They stared at him in surprise, then turned to their plates as if discovering only now there was actual food in front of them to be eaten. The sound of the television sitcom was joined by the scraping of utensils, the creaking of chairs, the clinking of china. Gwen became uncomfortably aware of her own chewing, the physical act of it, the muscles, the juices, the warm inner night of animal life.

  Zoe sucked gobs of chocolate pudding from her fingers.

  “I think the potatoes might be a bit overdone,” suggested Dot.

  “Nonsense,” replied her husband. “The potatoes are perfect.”

  “Jesus Christ,” muttered Dallas.

  “Load up on legumes, everyone.” Dash displayed a steaming white chunk on the end of his fork. “Holy eggs of light tenderly laid in the nesting darkness of the earth.” He plopped the piece into his mouth.

  “You’re supposed to eat one a day,” Trinity explained. “Like apples.”

  “Ask any doctor,” offered Dash, cheeks bulging.

  Under the table Beale scribbled surreptitious notes in a pad he kept in his back pocket. There were words that should not be lost. “We haven’t eaten
this well in months,” he said.

  “Yes.” Gwen dipped her head shyly as if to stoop beneath a low door. “Delicious.” She had tried everything that was leaf or root or pod and had carefully carved the meat into ragged fragments she was arranging about her plate to suggest enthusiastic consumption. Even the vegetables seemed to have been fried in animal fat.

  “You’ve outdone yourself, dear,” said Dash. He still had not removed his sunglasses.

  “Yeah, Mom, real good,” chirped Trinity.

  “Yeah, Mom, real good,” repeated Zoe in tone-perfect mimicry. There were bits of chicken skin hanging in her hair. She let out a whoop and, leaning forward, overturned her Donald Duck drinking cup, splashing milk over half the table, one pearly drop clinging to her forehead like a caste mark. Without a word Dot picked up the curtain rod beside her chair and reached over and cracked the backs of her daughter’s hands. Zoe’s howl lasted about a minute, and then she subsided into an entranced silence, watching the particles of dust drift across the bar of light above the food like a heaven of stars.

  On television a chubby bald man in a fur-collared gown inserted a bulb in his mouth and it went on. “Look at that, Dad,” said Edsel.

  Dash lifted the lid on the Styrofoam cooler he kept at his feet. “Who needs a beer?” He handed the dripping red-and-white cans around the table.

  “Hey,” protested Dallas. “What about me?”

  “Yes, what about you?”

  “I’m the one who made the run to Seven-Eleven.”

  “Yes. And you’re the one who was the reason for said run.”

  “He’s too young, anyway,” Maryse declared. “Drinking the way he does. If Mignon ever grows up to carry on like that, I’ll slap his face.”

  “Mignon,” said Dallas, “will be lucky if he’s ever able to sit up.”

  “Did it rain here?” asked Dot brightly. “It rained the whole time in Chicago.”

  “Did you have watches and warnings?” said Trinity. “We had watches and warnings all night.”

  “Cold front,” said Dash, scooping up some lima beans. “Supposed to start getting hot again tomorrow.”

  “Yeah? I heard more rain.”

  “All right,” cried Maryse. “Could we please for once talk about something other than the weather?”