by Ron Carlson
There’s a lot inside a man that never gets out; I don’t understand that or pretend to understand it, but if women ever knew that those waits, those times that I stir my coffee, twenty times right, twenty times left, were just full, full of the way a day crams my heart full, if women knew how much was in a man, they’d never let up. But there’s nothing I can do about it. The worse something is, the deeper I keep it. That’s the law.
If Sarah won’t let it go, if she gets on me, I have a simple strategy: I turn and ask when she’s going to have that rummage sale and get rid of some of the junk in the garage and the basement. That’ll start her. She’s a woman who has saved everything she’s ever had in her hand. I won’t go into it, but she has a box of egg cartons once touched by her Uncle Elias and they remind her of him. Actually, they do me too.
Anyway, I don’t tell her all the ugly details of being sheriff. And I especially didn’t want to tell her about Harold and how he fell and killed himself. All I want to do is see her there sleeping and to crawl into the bed by her.
It was 1:20 A.M. I was driving home and I was a tired man.
Now get ready. At 13 and 30, where I turn for home, there at Chernewski’s Tip-a-Mug, I saw the UFO. It sat down in the road right in front of me. Actually, I heard it as I slowed for the four way. There was a clanking—awful—like a pocket knife in the drier. I mean a real painful sound, some machine about to die, and then: whomp! The whole contraption dropped onto Route 30, hard as a wet bale.
At first I thought a combine had turned over; I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t see it too well. It just sat there clanking and hissing. I could also hear it spitting oil on the pavement; honest to god, this UFO was a wreck. I stood out of the car. I could see all the terrible plumbing caging several gray oil drums and rusty boxes, and lots of little ladders, some missing rungs. The wiring ran along the outside of the heavy ductwork, taped there by somebody in a hurry.
Then the smell hit me. It had been burning oil and something else, something like rubber or plastic. The fumes were thick, billowing off one side just like the train wreck over at Mercy when the asphalt truck got creamed last winter.
I was going to go up to the thing to see if anybody was hurt, but the way it was settling, jumping around like a winged duck, and banging, I was afraid it would all give way and fall right on me.
Besides, about then I saw the alien. A door slammed open right then, falling out like the gate on the back of a pickup. And I stood there in the dark while the alien climbed down.
Now the alien, the alien. The alien looked a lot like my boy, Derec. To me, the alien looked like my son. It was a kid about twenty-three years old wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt with the words JOHN LENNON on the front. He wore greasy green surgical pants and tennis shoes. No socks. He jumped onto Route 30 and walked past me this close and looked in the backseat of the car. Then he folded his hands like this, across his chest like he was confused. Then he looked in again and put his hands on top of the car like this, like he was waiting to be frisked or just thinking it all over. I don’t know what he’d expected to be in the car, but it wasn’t there. Then I found out. He looked at me, and this is going to sound like a weirdo, like some airbrain who likes these encounters, but he looked in that moment just like Derec. He said to me, “Where’s Harold?”
Well, I was a little surprised by that. I didn’t know what to say. And I didn’t have to say anything. He skipped past me again, walking just like Derec, bouncing a little in those tennis shoes, and he climbed back up in that crazy rig. He had to slam that tailgate hatch or whatever it was four times to get it to stay closed, and the last time I heard glass break and sprinkle onto Route 30.
I stepped back, watching all the time. The UFO cranked itself up into a frenzy, the hissing made me squint. He had it revved up and shaking, just a raw sound for three or four minutes, more than any engine I know could take. Then it jumped, and that’s the right word: jumped, ten feet straight up, and it came down again hard, really shaking, and then it jumped and hovered up over Route 30. As it climbed up a little ways, I could see a small propeller on the under carriage—and the oil was dripping onto that and it sprayed me a good one going by. After I couldn’t see the UFO anymore or hear it, thank God, or smell it, all I could hear were the crickets and the buzzing of Chernewski’s Tip-a-Mug neon sign with that silly cocktail glass tipped and fizzing the three green bubbles, and all there was left on the road was the worst oil spill you’d want to see. I went over to it and it was oil all right, dirty oil that hadn’t been changed in five or six thousand miles of hard driving, and I found all these pieces of glass. Looks like some kind of Mason jar. And I found this one bolt. It’s left-handed. The oil stain is still out there—over both lanes, for you to see for yourselves. You can’t miss it: four or five gallons—at least.
That was the UFO.
I WAS a boy in this town. And now I am a man in this town. A lot of things happen some days. Somebody’ll die and there’ll be a mattress in the backyard. Some kid driving a hard hangover and an asphalt truck won’t see a train and there’ll be smoke, clear to Griggs. And somedays nothing happens. The flies won’t move five inches down the counter in The World. Some days things happen, and some days nothing does, but at the end of each I have to lie down. I lie by Sarah, the collector of treasures, in our bed which is surrounded by rooms full of the little things of our lives. She still has the ticket stubs from the game with Mercy, our first date, and they too sleep in some little box in some drawer in our house. I lie by Sarah in my place on earth, and slowly—it takes hours—I empty for the earth to turn and prepare me for the next thing, another day.
Sarah is in the bed under the covers in the shape I will always identify. Her form is identifiable. “The hospital called,” she says. She’s awake. I button my pajamas and don’t answer. I don’t want to get started. I don’t want to get started on Harold and go over the whole thing. I climb heavily into bed. “Delores called from the hospital.” I weigh nine hundred pounds; sleep is coming up around my eyes like warm water. “Delores called from the hospital. She said Harold is going to be all right.”
I float in the bed by my wife Sarah’s side. I know she is going to go on. “I made reservations for Palo Alto, for Derec’s show. We’re going next Thursday, so get the time off. You want to go, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.” Sleep rises in me like sweet smoke. It is late here in Cooper. It kind of feels late everywhere. Maybe it is just late for me. My son Derec. We’re going to Palo Alto, California. We’re going to fly out there.
I I I
HALF LIFE
APRIL FOOL’S morning I spotted the salt and pepper shaker right away. They are never on the table, but suddenly at breakfast there they were, right in front of Paris’s smiling face.
“Are you ready for school?” I asked.
“Yep, I’ve already eaten.” She looked at my grapefruit.
Okay, I thought. I’ll bite. I lifted the salt shaker and turned it slowly over the dish. Nothing. The lid stayed on. I shook it.
“April Fool!” Paris laughed.
Stacey turned from the counter. “She got you, eh?”
“Oh, and, Dad, I’ve changed schools. I’m going to Astronaut Training Institute.” Paris made her face very grave. “Uintah is fine, but I’ve decided to be a …” She looked up at Stacey for the support that gave them both away. “Space Cadet!” I gave her the smile back and she was able to say, “April Fools!” happily.
“You and Jake Garn. Let’s head out,” I said, grabbing my coat, case, and keys from the sideboard.
“Michael,” Stacey stopped me. “Remember to pick up Dalton today.” She handed me one of her memo sheets with the flight number and time on it.
“Now say ‘April Fool’s,’” I said. Paris was already out in the pickup.
“Michael. Be nice. It’s just three days. I’ll be in court until after five. Just bring him back here and get settled in. I’ll meet you at seven at the
Park Cafe.”
I grabbed her in both arms, dropping all my gear, pressing her fiercely back against the counter, covering her mouth with mine, trying to get a hand under her folded arms and onto a breast. Despite her fussing it was a great kiss and a sweet minor struggle.
“Oh the jury would love to see this,” she said. “My credibility would soar.”
“It’s April,” I said, kissing her quickly again. “Good luck in court. Keep your arms folded; it’s very effective.”
I didn’t like Dalton. Six years ago he had been one of my students at Dorcet. A lot of my former students come to visit; they remember me as the person who taught them Huck Finn or Gatsby. Some remember the comments I scribbled on the bottom of their compositions. They are now writing for Institutional Investor or Business Week, and they have a week to ski and they come West to see us. I am their old teacher and they remember the way I scolded and fostered the children they were. And I like most of them. They remind me of things I said when I was young, and it makes me feel good to have once been wise, and I wonder how it escaped me, that wisdom. I just remember being a young teacher and trying hard.
But Dalton was one of those students I didn’t care for. He took English the way others take two weeks in Jamaica: casually. He was rich and good-looking as a seventeen-year-old senior and he glided through school with an athlete’s grace, studying nothing harder than the forward pass. I’m not saying he was dumb. No, he knew he would go from Dorcet to Yale, where his father was a trustee and where he would major in economics and from there drop into Manhattan for Goldman Sachs or Fenner DeWitt. What I’m saying is he had that special kind of arrogance that seems earned. He deserved to be the way he was. He had a reputation for nailing the sophomore coeds on the golf course fall and spring, but the reason I didn’t like him was not any of this, or because he had a photograph in his dorm room on Alumni Fourth of himself shaking hands with the President, or wore hundred-dollar shoes with no socks to class, but because he hung around our apartment, drinking our tea and chatting—as so many of the Dorcet kids did—with Stacey.
He had always been in our building anyway, picking up a date or lounging in the common room, and then he started dating Rebecca Eastman, the proctor on our floor who was always in our apartment talking to Stacey for hours on end. There was a group of seniors who made our place a nightly rendezvous point: Rebecca and Dalton, another boy named Chip Stewart, two other girls from the floor. Stacey was in law school then and had tales of other worlds. I could hear them in the living room laughing, while I sat in my study and read compositions. Every once in a while I could hear Dalton’s polished voice above the rest. Later, I’d go in for more coffee and I’d lean into the room where Dalton would be arranging another log on the fire and ask Rebecca if she didn’t have any homework.
“Senior slump,” she’d say.
“I’ve had it for three years,” Dalton would say and they’d all laugh again. Paris was three at the time and she’d be walking around with part of a doughnut, printing powered sugar everywhere.
“Come on in,” Stacey would say. “We’re talking about the First Amendment.”
“And the rights of topless dancers,” Dalton added.
But I would slip back to my study and pretend to work until the ten o’clock bell sent the boys back to their dorms. Stacey kidded me about being antisocial and a grump. And it was funny; she was right, but there was more.
ON THE way to the airport with Paris I asked her if she remembered Dalton.
“Was he at the school?”
“Yes, he used to hold you on his lap and feed you doughnuts.”
“That was eons ago. I don’t think I remember him.” The eons ago was one of Stacey’s phrases.
“Do you know what an eon is?”
“Six years.” She answered with confidence. “Five or six years.”
AT Dorcet Stacey would sometimes keep the kids after ten if it was a Friday night or the discussion was especially good, some faculty gossip or something. She’d call the other dorm heads and tell them Dalton and Chip would be half an hour late. I remember once coming in for coffee and finding Dalton and Stacey in the kitchen alone. There was nothing going on, but the silence I created by entering the room was so uncomfortable I did an about-face and went back to my work. A moment later Stacey came into the study. “Don’t you want to come in and join us?”
“I will,” I lied. “As soon as I finish this set of papers.”
“Okay,” she said. But when she turned to go, I saw something on her rear end. On one cheek of her pants there was a large handprint in powdered sugar. I remember sitting there for an hour, until I heard the boys leave by the front door, and for the whole hour I did not move. I did not close my mouth. All the uneasiness I had about Dalton focused itself sourly.
I never said anything about it. What would I say? Besides it could have been her handprint. I never did see which side the thumb was on. Later, Dalton arranged to have Stacey’s photo in the back of the yearbook captioned Faculty Fox. It was a kind of joke, I guess, and when the book came out, we all laughed. I was trying to be large about it, and I kidded Dalton: “She’s not on the faculty, Dalton,” I said.
His answer: “Hey, sir, but she is a fox, right?”
EVEN this late in the spring, the airport was full of skiers from New York. Dalton came striding across that floormap of the world in a blue cashmere blazer and gray slacks. His shirt was open a button or two at the top. He smiled and took my hand, as any young broker should. “Mr. McGuire! Good to see you!” Then he looked at Paris: “And who is this monster? Is this the dear child I rocked on my undergraduate knee?”
Paris did not take his hand. She backed a step and said, “I don’t remember you.”
He placed a white plastic bag against my belly and whispered, “For you.” I looked inside; it was a six-pack of Rolling Rock. “I didn’t know if you could get a real brew in this state.”
So it all started that night at the Park Cafe. Stacey joined us from the office and she sensed the tension right away. Paris had resisted all of Dalton’s good-willed attempts to stir her memories of the old doughnut days. She’d even repeated her eons ago line once. I had been matter-of-fact, that is, cold, I suppose. He was just too jolly. At one point he had pulled his trouser cuff up to reveal no socks in his new Italian shoes and said, “We’re talking vacation here. At the office, it’s all socks. There’s a dress code just like Dorcet!”
The Park Cafe is not a place to go if you are going with someone who talks too loud. They drywalled the ceiling and no sound escapes, and there was Dalton dropping names at ten decibels. He worked for Parker and Ellis Investment Bankers. He had spent Christmas on St. John’s. His father bought a new boat called The Trickle Down. Throughout the dinner he called me Mr. McGuire and Stacey, Stacey. Stacey smiled through all of this, and I simply addressed my pot roast. Paris moved her chair closer to me than usual and talked conspiratorily to me about our plans for this year’s kite, which we were planning to make and launch on Saturday.
The next two days, Dalton skied. I drew him a map to Alta, gave him the Honda, and sent him along. The first morning when I handed him the thermos full of coffee, he looked at it as if it were an award and shook his head. “You guys in the west!” he said. “Coffee from a thermos. You guys got it made.”
He returned each evening with tales of encounters with young females, describing them as “Narly Madonnas” and describing the conditions as “harsh,” a word that in his vocabulary meant wonderful. I think. Evenings we’d have brews and suds and even brewskis, and Dalton would say “Hey” a lot in the fashion of the Great White North. He and Stacey would stay up and talk an hour after Paris—and then I—had gone to bed.
When Stacey came to bed after the first night, she turned to me and said, “Be kind, Michael. He looks up to you.”
“Sure he does. I married the faculty fox.”
“No. Dalton’s not doing as well as it seems. He’s been deferred from the training
program at Parker and Ellis. And Rebecca Eastman, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“She just got married in January.”
“I’ll be kind to him,” I said. “I’ll try to try harder.”
The next night Dalton and Paris and I were all watching the news. One of the leading stories was the weather, a spring storm in Ohio, which everyone was calling the Midwest and which is actually the Mideast, and when Mark Eubank came on, he was his adrenal self. He kept making antic, sweeping gestures and moving around the satellite photograph a lot, like a high school basketball coach in one of his last time outs.
Dalton said: “What is wrong with that guy?”
“He’s just our weatherman; he’s doing a pretty good job.”
Stacey came into the room with some cheese and crackers on the mallard plate my parents gave us a couple of Christmases ago, a plate we hadn’t ever—to my knowledge—used. In one hand she had a glass of white wine. “Who’s doing a good job?” she said.
“Snowbank,” Paris said. “Dalton doesn’t like Mr. Snowbank.”
Stacey looked at me. “You want some wine?” and then added “Anybody?”
“I’ll have a brewski,” Dalton said from his deep slump in the butterfly chair. Stacey started back toward the kitchen. “Michael?” she said to me. “Anything for you?”
“No, nothing for me. Thanks.”
“No brewski, Dad?” Paris said.
When Stacey had returned with Dalton’s can of Rainier and we were watching the sports, she raised her glass and said, “Cheers, everybody. Dalton, we’re glad you’re here.” Paris raised her empty hand and I tapped her knuckles. “And,” Stacey went on, saying exactly what I wanted her not to, “tomorrow’s Michael’s birthday. We’ll have to do something special.”
“Let’s take him skiing with us,” Dalton said.