“Not CR good.”
“Seriously, man, I don’t know how that happened to him. Well, I do know. He tore his ACL and got kicked off the team at Indiana U.” CR was quiet for a moment, and in the half-light of the night, Benji couldn’t quite make out his expression. “You know, I can usually handle my dad’s ‘CR will never amount to anything blah blah blah’ rants. And I want to leave Bedford Falls as much as y’all—well, as much as Ellie and Banjo. I bet Spinney was excited to leave town, too. But he had no damn clue he was peaking early. He just thought he’d always be . . .” CR laughed a little, which was good to hear. “How did your grandpa put it?”
“King Turd of Shit Mountain,” said Zeeko.
Benji, Ellie, and CR goggled at him.
“Zeeko, such language!” CR guffawed. “Where did that come from?”
“Outer space,” Zeeko deadpanned, making them laugh. “It’s a weird night, I guess.”
“You guessed right.”
“Hey, CR,” Benji said, “don’t worry about Spinney. You’re better than that. You’re better than any of the FIGs in town. Just kick ass at the homecoming game and everyone will see that. Truly.”
CR’s huge smile was visible even in the semidarkness. “I bet you say that to all the boys who help you hide busted ‘flying saucers.’”
One tree house. Four friends. Eight hands wrapped around a blanket wrapped around a secret wrapped around a winter night in Bedford Falls, Indiana.
A wooden ramp spiraled around the pine tree to their tree house in the backyard. They’d been here a million times, but not for a million years. The lock on the tree house door was rusted. But Benji remembered the combination easily, because it was the date he’d first met Ellie. CR bumped his head on the doorframe coming into the tree house, and said, “That used to be a lot higher,” and they set the pod down on the planks of the floor. And as they stood there, the air filled with the nostalgic smell of pine, the arthritic tree limbs chattered in the wind, making the pod glimmer in a fine lacing of shadow and light. The four friends stood there, in a den of childhood and on the edge of the future, and Benji pretended he had something in his eyes. He had begun to cry.
PART TWO
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
And so I’ll hold you close, my darling, on graduation day.
You may forget what you learned in class, but please remember what I say:
In all the dark,
Although we’re apart,
I’m just a dream away.
—The Atomic Bobs
You are a special kind of people. You have a certain gift, a special ability. For you, nothing is impossible. You can alter reality, and you can create the laws of nature. You are magicians!
—Dag Lofalk
9
It was a dream date.
Benji sat in the front seat, the leather plush and shiny red beneath him. His window was just barely opened, and the forest around him whispered with a breeze cool and sweet on the summer air. In the valley beneath him, dozens of cars (Studebakers, Chevys, Furies, T-Birds) glittered in the reflected light of the drive-in movie screen before them. Its black-and-white story seemed to float fantastically in the dark. The sounds of the movie filled the car, broadcast from the drive-in onto his car’s brand-new radio.
The girl beside him smelled like cinnamon.
Although the dream felt intensely detailed, Benji was aware on some level that he was asleep, so when he looked at the girl, he was surprised to see she wasn’t his dream girl. With her long dark hair tied in a braided ponytail, the unfamiliar girl wore an outfit like a costume in any 1950s flying saucer movie: penny loafers, a poodle skirt, a short-sleeved sweater with J stitched across the chest. The J was slightly distorted by the girl’s rather, ahh, prodigious bust. Judy, Benji knew. Her name is Judy.
Judy looked over. Benji, suddenly very aware how tight his pants were, dutifully snapped his gaze upward.
“Well, hello to you, too.” She smiled.
A tense silence hung between them, lightly electrified. They were on Lover’s Lookout, after all.
Time for some backseat bingo, Benji told himself. Make your move, daddio. In this dream world, he knew he’d been looking forward to this date for a long time—fantasizing about it, frankly, and boy, were his friends going to rag on him if nothing happened tonight.
“Something I can help you with?” Judy asked. He saw a small chip on one of her bottom teeth. It was somehow lovely.
Her face tilted infinitesimally toward him.
“Tell ya what, I’d sure love some popcorn!” Benji stammered. His voice sounded strange, more country-accented than normal, but its awkwardness was very familiar.
“Oh,” replied Judy, gamely hiding disappointment as she handed him the candy-cane-striped box of popcorn. He took a cold, buttery handful, and she turned back to the drive-in screen.
Cursing his lack of courage, Benji tried to watch the movie. It was called I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and it was awful in a way that should have been funny but wasn’t.
Like you, daddio, he thought, his brain hot with anger and pressure.
Benji looked at the car’s dashboard.
It had no modern LED display, just a series of dials. The speedometer’s numbers glowed radium green. He focused on them, and breathed, and . . .
A silence cocooned his mind. The Feeling of Magic.
In his waking life Benji knew nothing about cars, but in this moment he loved this car, his Cadillac, like a miracle. Her red steel and her chrome so bright and loud that she resembled a four-wheeled jukebox, her front grille grinning like a mouth happily eating up the road toward the horizon. He loved her.
It’s not “my Cadillac,” though, Benji thought. She’s my machine.
She’s my Dream Machine.
The speedometer’s markings glowed like emeralds. Or like strange eyes peering through the dark. . . .
“The monster’s coming.” This made Benji look over. Past Judy, thin night fog levitated over the ground, giving the forest an enchanted, fairy-tale quality.
“Hmm?” he said.
“That monster’s coming now for sure,” Judy repeated, and shivered as the movie’s soundtrack grew shrieky with violins. Benji glanced at the screen. The movie’s hero had just noticed the climbing full moon. Tufts of dark hair erupted from his waistband and the cuffs of his letterman jacket, like he was the victim of the world’s worst and speediest case of puberty.
His date shivered again (a little theatrically). “I don’t know that I want to watch this anymore,” she told him softly.
Now it was Benji’s turn to hide disappointment. “Say, that’s all right. We can go home. Sure.”
He shifted the Dream Machine into reverse, to take them out of their temporarily enchanted night.
The girl’s hand appeared on top of his, stopping the gear change.
“I didn’t mean I want to leave,” she said, and smiled in a singularly brain-melting way.
(As if on absurd cue, the teenage monster wolf-called at the moon: How-WOOOO!)
The audience screamed, and Judy leaned in, the cinnamon of her breath meeting his lips—
The Dream Machine exploded.
Or at least it felt so: Judy’s face was sailing in and BOOM, the car was smashed with a deafening human scream. She and Benji jumped and fell back in the seat. The scream wasn’t the audience’s; it didn’t even sound like the movie’s.
“What in the hell!” Benji shouted.
“—adio!”
“What!”
“That radio damn stupid radio!” she screamed. She snapped the volume dial hard to the left; the dial of his brand-new radio came off in her damn hand.
The primal, desperate-sounding scream filling the Cadillac didn’t stop. If anything, it crescendoed. And Benji realized the doom voice wasn’t just a shapeless howl.
It was singing. It was rock ’n’ roll, American doo-wop, a young man belting the song like he hoped his passion could shatter the globe and re
shape it into something unimaginably beautiful:
Ohhhhhh, I’m the one leaves a place, and never spies a familiar face,
And that’s the way I like it, since you asked!
See, honey, I’m the Voyager—see, tramping the journey is my story, sir,
And I’ll tell you why right now, since you asked!
The man who asks cannot understand, can’t know the heart of the voyaging man.
I prefer the horizon to a past!
Judy opened her door, spilled out of the car, looked up into the sky, and shrieked.
Light flooded the Dream Machine. Green light, but nothing like the radium dashboard. Brilliant green light from the sky, blinding him and turning the night fog into neon ghosts. And in the amphitheater of his own mind, even louder than the elemental rock ’n’ roll, Benji heard a new voice:
MR. FAHRENHEIT, MY NAME IS MR. FAHRENHEIT, I AM MR. FAHRENHE—
Benji woke up falling down, yelped, and thudded onto his bedroom floor.
He groaned into the hardwood floor, then rolled onto his back. For a few moments he just lay there, rubbing his side, heart hammering his rib cage. The sky in the window above his bed was a pale blend of crayon blue and pink. That girl, he thought. Who was she? The dream had been so detailed, almost more like a memory, but he didn’t think he knew her in real life. Still, there was something familiar . . .
She’d reminded him of Ellie. Maybe that was it.
He disentangled himself from his blanket as he stood, then reached over to slap off his clock radio. Right before he did, a voice spoke from the radio:
“See, honey, I’m the Voyager!”
The moment was vaguely surreal, the weirdly high-definition dream spilling into reality. He stared at the radio, his brow knitting.
“See, tramping the journey is my story, sir!”
With a sense of urgency that surprised him, he slapped the switch to silence the song.
Must’ve just heard the song in my sleep. That’s why I dreamed about it—
“The man who asks cannot understand, can’t know the heart of the voyaging man. I prefer the horizon to a past!”
Benji whirled toward the door, feet snarling in the blanket, catching himself on the bed. The song had come from somewhere downstairs.
He opened his door. The hall and the steps to downstairs were dark, all the lights turned out.
“Papaw?” he called.
No answer.
He called out again and there was only silence, save his echo and the song, which seemed to be coming from the den. Benji felt a thin, hot lash of paranoia and hurried down the steps, remembering last night, the barricade, how exhausted Papaw had looked. Benji couldn’t stop an image from coming into his head: his grandpa sprawled out on the den’s rug, mouth crooked and slack, gaze empty, chest silent.
But Benji threw open the den door, and nobody was inside. The song from the hot-pink jukebox faded as the chorus repeated the singer’s preference for the horizon to a past. Then just silence from the speakers. Benji didn’t know the jukebox could pick up radio signals, which it must have been doing since it was playing the same song as his clock. How had the jukebox turned itself on? Well, this thing isn’t exactly in great shape. He unplugged it from the wall.
The kitchen and living room were also empty. Ditto the driveway alongside the house.
I guess Papaw really did have to work all night.
Which was, in fact, what Benji had almost done. Once they’d installed The Saucer Thingy Thang (as Zeeko had christened it) in the tree house, Benji had felt wired with adrenaline and excitement, wanting to spend more time with the pod, to inspect it or whatever. The night so far had been a blur, all fire and velocity, which was memorable but not particularly conducive to examining the discovery of the century.
It was egglike in shape, which brought to mind “invasion of the pod people!” sci-fi clichés. But when Benji ran his gloved hands across the pod’s quicksilver surface, it was flawlessly smooth, no cracks, compartments, seams, or doors. Whatever the pod was, it didn’t seem to be meant to be opened.
He remembered the pleasant electricity he’d felt when he’d touched the pod with his bare hands at the quarry, and was filled with an urge to make direct contact again. He bent to put his ear against the pod, but CR grabbed him before he touched it. “New rule,” said CR, looking both nervous and slightly annoyed. “Don’t put your face against anything from outer space ever.”
Benji nodded, still staring at the pod. “I don’t even know where to start,” he said.
“Start with what?”
“This, obviously,” Benji said, laughing a little. The moonlight in the tree house was thin, but the pod glowed with it. “We should . . . test it or something.”
CR sighed. “Test it. Hey, pod, who was the second president of the United States?”
“John Adams,” Zeeko answered.
“Show-off,” Ellie smirked.
“No,” Benji said, “I mean we should try to figure out what it is, what it’s made of.” In Roswell, people had tested the strength of the “saucer shrapnel” using matches and hammers and knives. The metal had been impervious. So the witnesses said, anyway.
“Banjo, it’s late. CR needs his beauty rest,” CR said.
“You can go if you want.”
“I want.”
“I want also,” said Zeeko, and yawned. It seemed insane to Benji that anyone could be tired right then.
“I’m calling it a night,” CR said, “a crazy, cluster-fuggin’ night. Come on, Banjo. New rule number two: Nobody hangs out with the Thingy Thang alone. Okay, man?” He said it with such genuine concern that Benji had just nodded in agreement.
But CR isn’t home. He’s got morning practice, said a voice inside Benji’s head now. And I’ve still got a few minutes before I have to leave.
He felt a momentary indecision . . . but no, he didn’t want to lie. And he didn’t feel comfortable going against what CR said.
Benji went back upstairs, pulled on his hoodie, jeans, and sneakers. He had practice after school for Friday’s homecoming assembly, parade, and game, so he tossed his folded tux into his backpack alongside his collapsed top hat.
When he grabbed his rumpled coat from the floor where he’d dropped it last night, the small piece of saucer debris he’d picked up at the quarry, the one that looked like a silver question mark, tumbled from his hoodie pocket.
The object landed with a ping. He stared at it, considering. Then he put it in his backpack, covering it with his tux.
Benji biked to school, the sun a lemony wedge in the sky, the clouds crisp sky-ships sailing easy. The morning felt bigger somehow, but also more personal, the way your birthday does when you’re a kid.
He stopped off in the crowded, fluorescent cafeteria, the beckoning smell of breakfast burritos making his stomach rumble. By the time he got to the counter, first bell was ringing. He wrapped his greasy food-esque delicacy in several napkins, joined the crushing migration of students to class, and ate it in three bites on the move.
“Good morning, students,” said Principal Branch’s twangy voice over the intercom. “Remember that there will be no breakfast served on Friday, due to preparations for the homecoming assembly.”
“Howdy, Benjamin!”
Benji was passing the doors to the school’s administrative offices. He turned and saw something strange through the doorway: Papaw, sitting on the edge of a secretary’s desk with his sheriff hat on his knee, waving to him.
“H-hi, sir,” Benji said, surprised.
“I thought I’d come to school, see if I could learn somethin’ for once. So far I’ve learnt what it’s like to fall in love, and I mean tumble,” Papaw said, pointing to the older-lady secretary as Benji walked into the office. “But Brenda the Beauty won’t give me her phone number no matter how much I beg, can you believe it?”
Brenda, whose looks were pretty modest, pointed to her thin gold wedding ring.
Papaw shrugged innocently,
then took the sheriff hat off his knee and placed it on Brenda’s head. “You make that look better than I do,” he said. “You keep that for a while.”
Brenda laughed. For just that second, she did look a little beautiful. It was this sort of moment that made everyone in this tiny, futureless town love Papaw so much: He made them feel special.
“Benjamin, help me ease my sorrows with a little conversation. Brenda, that fella’s back in the conference room, is that right?”
Papaw motioned for Benji to follow. They went into a small hallway, cramped with filing cabinets and decorated with pictures of old graduating classes, that led to offices in the administration wing.
“There’s somethin’ important we need to talk about,” Papaw said. Now that he’d left “Sheriff Lightman” behind, his voice was scratchy and tired. His eyes were red-ringed, underlined in blue. He really had been up all night.
And yet, for some reason, he didn’t look as old as he had after his standoff last night with King Turd of Shit Mountain at the barricade.
“What ‘fella’ is back here, Papaw?” Benji said, trying not to sound nervous.
“A man who can help, I think. Benjamin, I’ve been tryin’ lately—tryin’ for a long time, truly—to tell you something, and time feels like it’s runnin’ out for me to tell you this particular thing. But I never know how to say it. The most important things are the hardest things to say—have you ever found that to be so?”
Papaw stopped a few steps short of the door to the conference room. He looked at Benji, and it took Benji a moment to realize that Papaw was waiting for him to answer—like, truly waiting and interested in Benji’s response. In spite of his confusion, Benji felt a warm door open an inch in his chest.
“Yeah, absolutely, Papaw.”
“Why is that? Mary and Joseph above, I sure don’t know. But it turns out it’s okay,” Papaw said, his tired eyes brightening. “’Cause this morning I got a phone call, and it was like a message from heaven, ya know?”
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