Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  Henry didn’t know what to say to that. He could hear her kids, his nephews and nieces, in the background, yelling, and then a baby’s sharp, sudden sobs.

  “I gotta go,” Bernice said. They hadn’t talked since.

  His brother, Roy, had been more sympathetic. “You and me been dreaming about white girls since we were boys. Bernice thinks that’s all wrong and maybe it is, but a man’s got to follow his dream. ’S only natural to want what you can’t have.” But Roy hadn’t come either.

  Henry and Helen did have a good life, though. Decent friends. Enough money. Helen had even taught him to skate. He liked his job, was proud of the uniform, and Mr. Rhodes, the postmaster, treated him well. The first week, when there’d been a little trouble over Henry’s eating at the local sandwich shop, Mr. Rhodes had stepped across the street and told the owner that none of the postmen would be eating there again if Henry didn’t. And just like that the shop integrated, although Henry told Helen he wouldn’t have made anything of it himself.

  “Why not, for Pete’s sake?” she’d asked him, and when he shrugged she’d exclaimed, “You’re too darned dignified for your own good sometimes.”

  He was the only black man he knew in Manchester, but he followed the news of lunchroom sit-ins and the Freedom Riders and joined the NAACP, although he was a lifelong Republican, like his father and his grandfather before him. He met more Negroes, but they all seemed a little shy of each other, almost sheepish. “Far as civil rights goes,” one of them pointed out to him, “New Hampshire ain’t exactly where it’s at.”

  What nagged Henry was that it was all too good, unreal somehow, more than he deserved. He thought of his brother and sister and all the kids he’d grown up with. Why had he been the one singled out, plucked up by life and set down here? It made him a little scared to have something. Helen said he was just being superstitious, but he couldn’t shake the idea. He thought one day he’d wake up, or someone would come along and take it all away. When Helen had miscarried the first time, the spring before, along with the worry for her, he’d felt an awful relief that finally something terrible had happened. He’d been so ashamed he hadn’t known how to comfort her, except to keep trying. But when she’d miscarried the second time, that summer, he’d decided they couldn’t go through it again. They’d been distant these last few months, Helen insisting she still wanted a child, had always wanted one, Henry doubtful, thinking She wants one more now she maybe can’t have one, wondering if this was how she had once wanted him, wondering if he was no longer enough for her, which was why the idea of a trip to Niagara felt like such an inspiration.

  Helen had laughed and called him a romantic but taken his hand across the dinner table.

  The colonel wants to go back over the details again, as if he’s trying to trip them up. “I thought you said it was cigar-shaped, Mrs. Hull?”

  “From a distance,” Helen says impatiently. “Up close, you could see it was a disk.” She looks at Henry for support.

  “We had a pair of binoculars along for the trip,” he says. “I thought it might be a star at first. But when I pulled over at a lookout and used the glasses, whatever it was was definitely moving.” The colonel is silent, so Henry hurries on, a little breathless but feeling that more is required of him. “A little later it came to me that I’d left the car running the first time while I leaned on the roof with the binocs. I thought the vibrations from the engine might have been the problem, see, so I pulled over again, stepped away from the car before I put the glasses on it. And it was still moving.”

  Henry wants the colonel to write this down, but his pen doesn’t move. The colonel doesn’t even ask him about the binoculars—his service issue 10 × 42 Weavers.

  “Spinning,” Helen says. “Don’t forget it was spinning. That’s what gave it the twinkling effect.”

  “Right,” Henry says. “The lights that looked like they were moving across it from a distance were actually fixed to the rim.” He makes a circling motion in the air with his index finger while the colonel stares at him.

  “Did you write that down?” Helen asks, and the colonel blinks and says, “Yes, ma’am. I got it. ‘Twinkling was spinning.’ ”

  They had agreed before the colonel arrived that Helen would do most of the talking. Henry hadn’t wanted them to tell anyone about what they had seen right from the start, but Helen insisted on calling her sister, Marge. Hadn’t Marge seen a UFO herself in ’57? Henry shrugged. He’d never believed Marge’s story, but he knew Helen needed to tell someone, and Marge at least wouldn’t make fun of them. But it hadn’t stopped there. Marge put Helen on to a high school science teacher she knew, and he told her they should really notify the air force. Now here was the colonel with his clipboard. Henry hadn’t wanted to meet him, but Helen had had a conniption fit.

  “Henry Hull! How’s it going to look,” she said, “if I’m telling this story and my own husband won’t back me up?”

  Henry told her it wouldn’t make any difference, but what he really thought was that nothing he said would help her, might even make her less believable. “You’re a white woman married to a colored,” he wanted to tell her. He didn’t think anyone would believe them, but Helen wasn’t having any of that. “Of course they’ll believe us,” she said. “So long as we tell the truth. We have to try, at least. You’ve no gumption, Henry, that’s your whole trouble.” It seemed so easy to her, but Henry had had to work hard to be believed most of his life.

  Now he can see that Helen is getting tired of going over the same story again and again.

  “I’m not telling you what it means,” she says. “I’m just telling you what I saw. We were hoping you could explain it to us.”

  But the colonel just spreads his hands and says, “Sorry, ma’am.”

  “You act like we’re lying.”

  “No, ma’am,” the colonel says quickly. “I assure you.”

  Henry knows what’s coming next. Helen wants to get on to the part inside the ship, the stuff Henry doesn’t remember. He asked her not to talk about it, but she told him she couldn’t promise. “What if it’s a matter of national security?” she said. “It’s our duty, isn’t it? Think what it could mean for the future of everyone.” So now she explains to the colonel how she only remembered this part later, in her dreams. Henry feels himself shrink, but the colonel just makes another scratch with his pen, and Helen starts to tell him about the aliens—the short gray men—and their tests.

  “Gray?” The colonel looks from Helen to Henry, Henry to Helen.

  “Gray,” she says, and he writes it down.

  “And short,” she adds. “But not like dwarfs, like children.”

  In her dream, Helen says, she remembers them scraping her skin with a strange metal instrument. “Like a dentist might use, only different. It tickled,” she recalls, without a smile. Then she remembers them pushing a long thin needle into her navel. “That really hurt,” she says, “but when I cried out they did something and the pain stopped at once. They seemed sorry. They told me it was a pregnancy test.”

  The colonel, who has been taking notes with his head down, not looking at them, glances up quickly.

  “Oh, of course I’m not pregnant,” Helen says brusquely, and Henry sits very still. This is what he feared all along—that they wouldn’t be able to keep their private business out of this.

  “Have you ever heard of anything like it?” Helen asks. The colonel tells her he hasn’t.

  “You have no memory of this?” he asks Henry, who shakes his head slowly. He’s racked his brains, but there’s nothing. Helen can’t understand it. “How can you not remember?” she cried the first time she told him, as if he were the one being unreasonable.

  “Helen tells me I was in another room on the ship, drugged or something, but I don’t recall.” He wishes he could support her now, but also, in the back of his mind, he resents her dream, his weakness in it.

  Helen presses on. She says she knows how it sounds, but she has proof. “
I’m just getting to the best part,” she says. “The part about Henry’s teeth.”

  “Teeth?” the colonel says, and this time Henry sees a twitch to his lips that makes him feel cold inside.

  “That’s right,” Helen says, and Henry can tell she’s seething now. The aliens, she explains slowly, as if to a child, were surprised that Henry’s teeth came out and Helen’s didn’t. “They didn’t understand about dentures,” Helen says. Henry feels his mouth grow dry. They have argued about this part. He didn’t want her to tell it, but Helen feels it’s the clincher. “How could we make that up?” she asked him last night. “Plus there’s the physical proof.”

  “This was after the other tests,” Helen says. “They were as curious as kids. I’m jumping ahead a little, but don’t mind me. Anyway, after we were done, the one I think of as the doctor, he left the room, and the grayer one, the leader, he told me they were still finishing up with Henry. Anyhow, a few seconds later the doctor runs back in. He seems very excited and he asks me to open my mouth. Well, I don’t quite know why, but I wanted to get this over with, so I obliged, and before you know it he’d pushed his little fingers in my mouth and he was pulling on my teeth. Well! You can imagine my surprise. I slapped his hand away quick as I could. He was pulling quite hard too, making my head go up and down. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I said, and then he held out his other hand, and can you guess what he had?”

  The colonel shakes his head slowly.

  “Why, Henry’s dentures. There they were, sitting in his little gray hand. Well, I snatched them up at once. I don’t know what I was thinking. It made me so worried about Henry, I guess. That and the fact that he’s always losing them, or pretending to lose them, anyway.”

  She pauses, and Henry thinks he should say something.

  “They pinch me,” he mumbles. “And they click. I don’t like them so good.”

  Helen laughs. “I tell him he looks like a fool without them, but he doesn’t care. He has such a fine smile, too.”

  Henry looks past the colonel’s shoulder and out the picture window. He does not smile. It’s October, and the first snow is beginning to fall in the White Mountains.

  “Anyway, I snatched them up, and then the leader started in about why my teeth were different from Henry’s, so I had to explain all about dentures, about how people lose their teeth as they get older or, like Henry here, in accidents. I thought it was funny they were so flummoxed by dentures, but you know, now that I come to think about it, I don’t remember seeing their teeth. They had these thin little slits for mouths, like I said before, and when they talked it was as if they didn’t move their lips.”

  “Did they speak English?” the colonel asks. “Or was it more like telepathy?”

  “Maybe,” Helen says. “Like voices in my head, you mean? That certainly could explain it.”

  “And their fingers?” the colonel asks seriously. “Would you say they had suckers on them? Small pads maybe?”

  Helen pauses and looks at him hard. “No,” she says very clearly. “I would have remembered something like that.”

  There is an awkward pause before she goes on more brightly.

  “Anyway, to cut a long story short, I thought the whole thing about the dentures was funny and I remember laughing, but it must have been one of those nervous laughs, because afterward when I looked at my hand where I’d been gripping them, I’d been holding them so tight that the teeth had left bruises.” And here Helen holds out her hand to the colonel. He leans forward and takes it and turns it to the light. Henry can just see the crescent of purpling spots in the flesh of her palm.

  Helen nudges him. Henry doesn’t move for a moment, but then he decides. She’s his wife. He’ll try to help. He holds a handkerchief over his mouth and slips his plate out. He passes it to her, and with her free hand she places it in her palm so that the false teeth lie over the bruises. The denture glistens wetly, and Henry looks away in embarrassment.

  “See,” Helen says triumphantly. “Now that’s evidence, isn’t it?”

  “It’s something, ma’am,” the colonel says, peering at Henry’s teeth. “It’s really something.”

  Henry has tried his damnedest to remember what Helen’s talking about. But he can’t do it. It’s the strangest thing, he thinks, because he recalls the rest of the trip—start to finish—vividly.

  They’d gotten up at five A.M., packed the car, and been on the road to Niagara by six. Henry wanted to get a good start on the day. It was September, peak foliage. “What impossible colors,” Helen breathed, sliding across the seat to lean against him. “Better than Cinerama,” he told her. He’d sung a few bars of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and made her laugh, and she’d done her best Dinah Shore: “Drive your Chev-ro-lay, through the U.S.A.” She’d got impatient with him the evening before for simonizing the car, bringing out the gloss in the two-tone paint job. Now, he saw, she was proud.

  But when they stopped for brunch at a diner in upstate New York, Henry felt uneasy. The din in the place died when they entered, and the waitress seemed short with them. He ordered coffee and a doughnut, but Helen had the short stack and took her time over her coffee. When he called for the check, she looked up and asked what his hurry was, and he said they still had a ways to go. Didn’t he know she had to let her coffee cool before she could drink it? “Have a refill or a cigarette,” she said, pushing the pack of Chesterfields across the table, but he told her a little sharply he didn’t want either. He felt people watching him. Helen finished her coffee and went to the bathroom, leaving him alone for five long terrible minutes. He could hear a child crying somewhere behind him, but he didn’t turn to look. When she came back he hurried her out before she could retie her scarf, leaving a big tip. He had to stop to urinate fifteen minutes later and she made fun of him for not going earlier. “You’re like a little boy,” she said, and so he told her how he had felt in the diner.

  “Oh, Henry,” she said. “You were imagining it.”

  It made him mad that she wouldn’t believe him, wouldn’t take his word for it, but he didn’t want to spoil the trip with a fight and he let her half convince him, because he knew it would make her feel better. He played with the radio, pushing buttons until he found some Harry Belafonte. Helen just didn’t notice things the way he did. He loved her for it, this innocence, cherished it, though he couldn’t share it (found his own sensitivity sharper than ever, in fact). That night when he stopped at two motels and was told that they were full, he didn’t make anything of it, and when she said as they left one parking lot, “You’d think they’d turn off their vacancy sign,” he just let it ride.

  “Must be a lot of lovers in town,” she added, and squeezed his thigh.

  When they finally found a room at a place called the Falls Inn, she pulled him to her and he started to respond, but when she told him she’d forgotten her diaphragm, he pulled away.

  “It’ll be okay,” she told him. “Just this once.” She clung to him for a moment, holding him against her, before he rolled off. They lay side by side staring at the ceiling as if it were the future. After the second miscarriage, Helen had been warned that she might not be able to carry a baby to term. “We can’t take the risk,” Henry told her softly, but she turned away. “You’re afraid,” she said, curled up with her face to the wall. The knobs of her spine reminded him of knuckles. “I’m afraid of losing you,” he said at last.

  He told her he’d go out and get prophylactics, but driving around in the car, he couldn’t. He stopped outside one store and sat for fifteen minutes, waiting for the other cars in the lot to leave, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. He was afraid of losing her, he knew, though the admission, so abject and ineffectual, shamed him. But behind that fear was another—a dim, formless dread of his own children and what they might mean for the precarious balance of his marriage, which made him shudder. There was one more car in the lot, but before it left a police cruiser pulled in, and Henry backed out and drove slowly
back to the motel.

  When they were first married, Helen used to call him by a pet name, Big, burying the tight curls of her permanent against his chest. He would stroke her neck and answer in the same slightly plaintive baby talk, “Little” or “Little ’un.” It was how they had comforted themselves when they felt small and puny beside their love for each other, but remembering it now only made him feel hopeless before the child lessness that loomed over them. Helen was asleep when he got in, or pretending, and he lay down beside her as gently as possible, not touching but aware of her familiar warmth under the covers.

  The next day had started better. They’d gone to the falls and been overwhelmed by the thundering white wall of water. They bought tickets for the Maid of the Mist. Henry bounced on the springy gangway and made her scream. They laughed at themselves in the yellow sou’esters and rain hats the crew passed out and then joined the rest of the identically dressed crowd at the bow railings. “Oh look,” Helen said, pointing out children, like miniature adults in their slickers and hats, but Henry couldn’t hear her over the crash of the falls. “Incredible,” he yelled, leaning forward, squinting in the spray as if in bright light. He could taste the mist in his mouth, feel the gusts of air displaced as the water fell. Suddenly he wanted to hold his wife, but when he turned to Helen, she was gone. He stumbled from the railing looking for her, but it was impossible to identify her in the crowd of yellow slickers. He felt a moment of panic, like when she’d left him in the restaurant. He bent down to see under the hats and hoods of those around him, conscious that he was startling them but not caring. In the end he found her in the cabin, her head in her hands. She told him she’d thrown up. She didn’t like boats much in general, she reminded him, and looking at the falls had made her dizzy. “I didn’t want you to miss them, though,” she told him, and he could see she’d been crying. He put his arm around her, and they sat like that until the trip was over. The other passengers began to file into the cabin around them, taking off their hats and jackets and hanging them on pegs until only Henry and Helen were left in theirs.