M31

by Stephen Wright

  Social life in Albert was represented by a cluster of unwashed pickup trucks tethered before The Bent Fork Cafe, the last outpost marking an abrupt end to the “commercial district.” Inside this murky cave were tables of large bib-jeaned men in grain caps, sipping from chipped coffee mugs, rattling newspapers, and debating in unemotional tones the immediate advisability of carpet bombing some irritating palm-treed obstinacy where neither the weather nor the government changed often enough. A young woman with a sleepy face and a cigarette in her mouth sat at the counter, spooning lumps of cottage cheese into the infant on her lap. An older woman in a charred apron stood with her back to the room, scrambling eggs on the grill.

  “Excuse me,” whispered Gwen, her small voice assuming intrusive proportions in this strange, suddenly silent space. The pie under glass was filled with a pale gooey substance impossible to name.

  The woman turned and spoke, but unfortunately only half her face was in full working order, the other side seemed to be sliding slowly off her head, the lid on one eye drooping so badly she couldn’t possibly see out of it. The good eye studied Gwen with a cat’s indifference.

  Gwen smiled.

  The hand holding the metal spatula twitched once, twice. So the problem was confined to the facial area only.

  “I wonder,” Gwen began, and felt something cold and wet on her arm—the pink hand of this remarkable child gazing up at her with full baby strength in two clear baby eyes that passed her in that moment an important message she would have to think about later when she was alone and less confused. “I wonder,” she began again, “if you’ve seen a guy about my age, a little taller, come in here any time in the last week. He has curly black hair and—”

  The twitching ceased. She spoke out of the corner of her mouth, and it was both hard to look and hard not to. “I’ve been standing behind this counter seventeen years for someone like you to wander in and ask me a question like that.”

  “Tell her, Iris,” shouted one of the rural lookalikes.

  “Is he lost?” Iris asked her.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you lost?”

  “We were traveling together and got separated.”

  “I know you,” the woman said suddenly.

  Gwen smiled without much conviction.

  “I knew you the minute you walked in. You’re one of those space people.”

  “Sheeeeeit,” called an anonymous voice from the floor.

  “Oh, let them laugh,” said Iris, leaning over the counter. “Who cares? I’ve seen two myself, just before my operation, right out in the middle of Yellowstone National Park. The bears howled all night. My mother says it’s the Russians, but I for one don’t believe so, I think they’re buzzing them, too.”

  “Could you tell me, is there a bus terminal around here?”

  “Friendley’s,” said Iris. “The gas station. Two blocks that way. You buy your ticket from the driver.”

  “The driver?”

  “Ask Sam about them. He saw a pair of them last summer on a fishing trip to Arkansas. Then he started showing up at church. Maybe he’d tell you what really happened.”

  “Thank you. I will.” She could feel the eyes, unblinking dozens, on her unprotected back, gross as hard-shelled, quick-legged bugs. When she turned to go, many of them looked her straight in the face, rapists all.

  The gas station attendant was an old man with sun-coarsened skin and oily rags dangling from his pockets like a magician on the skids. He held in his hands an auto part of some kind, a big metal ring his scarred filthy fingers kept nervously working themselves in and out of. She stood in front of him, patient as a private eye, quizzing him about the bearded boy, recent arrivals, departures. When she finished talking he reached into his right pocket, all the while steadily returning her curious gaze, and removed a blunt black object the shape of an electric razor that he pressed up against his neck in the crevice beneath his chin. He pressed a button and replied. His voice, vibrating through this plastic box, was the largely indecipherable cackle a toy chicken might make when you pulled the string on its back. He seemed to suffer from the same condition as the grill cook, but in a more advanced state. He pointed up the road. He looked at her. She thanked the Friendley man. She hadn’t understood a word.

  For variety she decided to walk back through the town on the sunny side of the street. She passed a feed store reeking of fertilizer. The door was wide open. No one inside. It was so quiet she could hear the clicking of bicycle chain as a group of tanned boys in mismatched baseball costume pedaled solemnly along, repeating the deliberate stares of their elders. And of course, now she knew what this was. She’d heard of towns like this before. There was a whole seminar on them at the last Ft. Smith Convocation—Dittolands, an Etherian idea of small town America mass-produced on huge space platforms and transported to Earth for jiffy erection in remote locales, on abandoned land. There were supposed to be hundreds of them all over the country inhabited by a skillfully integrated population of human collaborators and Etherian copies of real Earthlings. In Dittoland out for a jog you just might run into yourself.

  She hurried back to the truck and locked herself in the cab, where, after several suspenseful minutes, she succeeded in convincing herself that Albert was Albert; Dittolands, if they existed at all, waited in lonely distant regions for strangers far unluckier than herself. Eventually she fell asleep to wake much later with an aching head and the afternoon sun broiling the exposed side of her sweaty face. She groaned, sat up, popped open the door. Before her stretched the long, neat, innumerable rows of employee cars, bright tortoiseshells of steaming enamel and chrome, then the dark brick wall of the Green Farms Packing Company, behind which she could see herself in greasy hair net and stained apron at a sleek polished table, stuffing mashed pig into intestine casing day after day after day; at night she manned the backyard telescope. Railroad tracks curved gleaming through a high-wire gate to vacant loading docks in the shadows of the building. End of the line. Conveyor belts. Hooks. Vats. Did the chickens know? A new clean refrigerated world. No pain, no fear. Drumsticks.

  A siren shrieked. She cringed, missiles always in her future. Banks of double doors crashed open, releasing an impatient mob to the freedom of their cars.

  “I told you she’d be here,” shouted Donnie, tossing his soiled boots into the back.

  “How’d you like Albert?” Dallas asked. She’d never really seen him smile but knew that smirk quite well by now.

  “It’s nice.”

  The engine and the music started simultaneously. The sinister throb of heavy machinery. A pile driver’s percussive clang. The thunder of collapsing walls. A high-speed dental drill. The lead singer sounded exactly like the man at the gas station. On bad shocks they bounced down a bad road, Dallas’s shoulder rubbing, rubbing, rubbing against her own.

  “So what was your favorite part?”

  “The water tower with the skull and crossbones painted on it.”

  His eyes, those quick dark weapons, were only inches from hers, and she had to look away. “I did that,” he said.

  “God!” Donnie exclaimed, spewing cigarette smoke. “You’re as big a liar as your old man.”

  Dallas’s arm snaked around behind her back, punched Donnie on the shoulder. “Hey!” he yelled, holding the wheel with one big-knuckled hand, slapping back at Dallas with the other. Gwen crouched forward on the edge of the seat as they grappled behind her and the truck veered to and fro across the road.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Dallas shouted, connecting on each word. Then the arm withdrew, Gwen settled back into the space between. “He likes to fuck around,” said Donnie.

  “Step on it,” Dallas urged. “Follow that tractor.”

  They sped across the landscape, animating emptiness with mindless speed.

  Outside the 7-Eleven Gwen had a vision. She was alone in the cab, watching the boys horse around in front of the cooler inside, when there was Beale as vivid and goofy and lonesome as he always a
ppeared in real life, trapped in the interval between the filmy windshield and the tinted store window. The muscles of her throat contracted on a cry that would never come. He was standing at the edge of a baking highway in the middle of a great barren desert, looking uncertainly up the road behind him. He extended a wistful thumb. A gray car stopped, he got in, the gray car disappeared. In the vision he was wearing his old backpack. How could that be?

  They roared away from the store like stick-up artists, their feet propped on cold six-packs. Pop, pop, pop went the first cans, rapid as gunfire.

  “Where we going?” asked Gwen. After two chugs the beer went down like spring water. This was fun. One of the guys.

  Dallas raised his can in a mock toast. “To the moon.” He drank.

  Gwen looked out the window.

  “You’ve already been there, right?” Donnie asked.

  She didn’t understand.

  “Outer space, man. Whoosh, bang!”

  “Something like that.”

  “So what were they like?”

  “Who?”

  “Those Occupant things.”

  “I don’t know, they weren’t like anything. It’s hard to explain, I guess you just have to experience them.”

  Donnie nodded, looking serious. “Sexy,” he said. He hit the brakes with both feet, and, skidding sideways, the truck lurched off the highway into the deep ruts of a hidden dirt lane that wound through a narrow aisle of plump bushes and monstrous trees whose branches clawed at the truck, scraping paint, tapping at the windows. In the dappled shade of an unexpected clearing stood a small wooden shack with a swayback roof and broken windows and one crumbling corner where a giant had paused to nibble on the gingerbread. There was a thriving garden of assorted weeds and a couple emaciated cars sunk to the axles in black mud, and the postage stamp yard was strewn with tooled chunks of rusty metal from a machine that must have blown up here at least a century ago.

  “Anyone home?” called Donnie, and laughed his funny laugh until beer foam dribbled out his pointy nose.

  “What’s this?” asked Gwen, nudging a soft orange mushroom with her toe.

  “Our summer place,” said Dallas.

  “I meant this plant.”

  “That’s a basketball,” he said with a naturalist’s seriousness.

  Counting in unison, they pushed together on the heavy warped door. “Eeek!” screamed the frightened wood. “Eeek!” They slipped in sideways one at a time through an opening a foot wide. There were two rooms: the remains of a kitchen containing a fixtureless sink, bare cupboards hanging off the walls by their nails, and an overturned refrigerator packed with dirt that now served as a jumbo planter for a dozen or so tender shoots of marijuana; and the front “parlor,” a drifter’s lounge, a delinquent’s party den. Where the walls weren’t dense with spray-painted slogans and band names (Oi!, Megabone, Vectors Rule), the plaster was broken into fist-sized holes. Soft gray webs thick as cotton candy hung from the corners of a ceiling cracked and buckled and discolored by what appeared to be tremendous urine stains. Covering the floor, as if carefully sifted there in a deep even layer, was a carpet of dust, dirt, ash, butts, scraps, grounds, rodent turds, condoms, rags, papers, six-holed sets of plastic rings, cups, cans crushed and whole, and beneath the milky panes of a window where a couple of fat flies buzzed in futile commotion a mattress black with grime that Dallas kicked, prompting a mad stampede of many-legged bugs.

  “Oh my!” Gwen exclaimed, though she had slept on worse, had huddled one frosty night on a piece of damp cardboard below an interstate bridge outside Indianapolis, spinning wheels in her dreams, singing songs she almost knew, just like the voices she could sometimes pick out of the noise of an air conditioner, voices she almost recognized.

  They sat together on the foul mattress, cans of cold Bud between their thighs, and compared families. Donnie’s mom was pretty much okay except sometimes when she was on the rag and half-crazy and they all had to go to church on Sunday or she shouted and broke plates. Daddy was in the fields all day and out to political meetings most every night and cried sometimes alone in the combine, but no one was supposed to know about that. Sure, they believed in the saucers, each had seen one on several different occasions and was quite convinced of their other-worldly origin. The pastor said angels were at the controls, said it was sorta like a convoy, semis to the stars, hauling souls back and forth, pickup and delivery. Donnie wanted a ride in one, just like Gwen and Dallas had done. Donnie’s sister wanted them all to come at once, world being what it was these days. What we needed, a glimpse of the fleet. Because afterwards, she said, it would be like a tiny nightlight had been turned on inside everybody, and the earth couldn’t help but be a friendlier place. Yeah, interrupted Dallas, ’cause we could all find our way to the john in the dark. Donnie hated school, but he liked his job, Green Farms treated you square. But why work at all, claimed Gwen, when you could float through the days? Disappear away like her father had done, but she didn’t say that part. She talked about her mother, her crazy mother who talked out loud to the goldfish Stan and Ollie; actually stooped in public to pick up pennies off the street; had been threatening for the last decade to get her real estate license; and her boyfriends, the amazing dozens, walking cologne wicks with luxuriant nose hair, any one of which she would gladly marry if one only asked. She wanted Gwen to marry, too, joked about a double ring ceremony. Too bad she never met Beale, said Gwen, he would have been the perfect date for her. Dallas said he’d marry her, she sounded like Doris Day compared with his family. No drinking, said Gwen, she doesn’t believe in it. I hate atheists, said Dallas, and demonstrated how to swallow all twelve ounces in less than a minute from a hole poked in the bottom of the can. That’s nothing, said Donnie, once at the mall he finished off a fifth of Seagram’s, jumped out of the car crawling around on all fours barking like a dog, and bit a lady on the leg who kept whacking him with her purse ’til he rolled over and threw up. They couldn’t stop laughing. Dallas could chug a six-pack quicker than anyone in the whole school, then take a leak Tommy John the coach’s son once timed at four minutes twenty-two seconds swear to God. Out at the quarry one weekend he drained the kegs and ten minutes later started pissing off the ledge and everyone fell asleep and when they woke up he was still standing there whizzing away and R. J. said if we hadn’t run out of brew he could of filled it to the top.

  Stop, Gwen moaned, don’t make me laugh, struggling to her feet, I gotta go, the wall she leaned a hand against until the seesawing floor quit playing with her having momentarily lost the sturdiness of wood, and the dull dented doorknob, the axle of the room, grinning maniacally as if about to slowly turn. She found herself searching the corners, counting them off so as not to miss a single one, but since she could never remember where she started she had to keep beginning over and the count kept coming out differently. Beale, Beale, Beale, a name repeated like the strokes of a clock in her brain or in her mouth but he wasn’t it, what she wanted right now. What did she want? Oh, a pee, yeah, that was it, she needed to take a pee, she needed a john, where was john, john, John, Johnny. He didn’t appear to be around either. Isn’t one, giggled the awful boys, rollicking together on the ratty mattress like a couple of deformed twins, do what we do, outside in the grass. Beyond the door the light was dazzling, a christening of the day, and she could feel air on her eyeballs that knew better than to attempt anchorage on any one object. Keep moving and things remained in place, stop and the world would rear up on powerful legs, gallop out so far ahead you’d never find your way home.

  This patch of moss under a friendly sycamore tree looked inviting and somehow she got her jeans down far enough to squat there in the cool shade, water running out of her, lemon seltzer bubbling on the grass, two stupid doughy faces leering at her from an empty window frame, but she didn’t care, either about them or the fact her pants now seemed to be hopelessly wet. By the time she found her way back inside they were both on the mattress again, ignoring her, arguing over the
plot of a splatter movie no one that summer could quite figure out. She looked down at them from towering alcoholic heights, pressed a fist to her stomach, and belched loudly. “Beer,” she said.

  Later she noticed her feet were bare and bleeding from numerous cuts she didn’t know she had. Maybe she’d been outside again, in the cluttered yard, wandering through the open-air museum of exotic space junk lying exactly where it had fallen out of decaying orbits and damaged ships. Oh my God they were out of beer. She tiptoed to the window, tripping twice on the chaotic cemetery of aluminum empties, bloodprints dark on the sordid floor. The guys were out by the truck, talking, reenacting for her color cameras a scene from The Grapes of Wrath. Wherever there’s a cop busting a guy’s head, I’ll be there. Dallas’s own head, a spiky globe of light, was the texture of spun sugar. Then their mouths turned ugly and Donnie climbed into the cab, slammed the door, and the truck ground furiously away, weaving backward through the shaking bushes. Dallas came around the door, six-packs dangling from his fingers.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s an asshole. Don’t worry about it. Look at all the brew for us.”

  When Dallas drank, she drank. It was easy.

  Sunlight skipped across the shiny rims of discarded cans, their dark puckered mouths going “ooooh, ooooh.”

  The mattress was a raft.

  Her legs were attached to Dallas’s feet.

  The sky in the window was pale, an unchanging cream, deep with enigmatic burdens, irrecoverable longings.

  A broken chair stared insistently at her between splintered slats.

  “Dumb,” Dallas muttered.