But You Scared Me the Most

by John Manderino

  Anyway, on the phone with Jane I tell her I’m not a hundred percent sure but I think I may have been abducted by aliens.

  “What happened.”

  I tell her.

  “They were tickling you?”

  “Next thing I know, it’s six innings later.”

  “And that’s all you remember?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Sure you didn’t just fall asleep and dream it?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I would say probable.”

  “Right, you’re the only one who gets abducted, the only one they ever choose.”

  “Jesus, Ed, listen to yourself, you sound just like a child.”

  Jane went to a hypnotist after she kept having these little “gaps.” She’s always been pretty spacey, but I told her if she was really worried she ought to go see a doctor. She had this theory, though, and went to a hypnotist who put her under and, sure enough, pulled out all these details about her being snatched away on a regular basis by aliens. She’s never shared them with me, these details, but she’s dropped a few hints. Apparently she has herself quite a good time up there. I asked her, was she talking about sex? She told me that’s none of my business, not anymore. This has all happened, you see, in the last year or so, since we’ve been separated. The only definite thing she’s told me concerning her abductors is that they’re all marvelous dancers. So is Jane, as it happens. Or anyway, she thinks she is. We’ve gone dancing quite a lot over the years. I’ve never said anything but it’s a little embarrassing how show-offy she gets on the floor, especially after a couple drinks.

  She tells me now to try and describe what my visitors looked like.

  “Very small, very skinny, with great big heads,” I tell her.

  “Bald?”

  “Completely.”

  “And huge black eyes?”

  “There you go.”

  “Hate to say it, Ed, but they sound like aliens out of a dozen different sci-fi movies.”

  “Yeah, well, yours sound like they’re straight out of some beach party movie with Annette Funicello.”

  She laughed. Which is something I’ve always liked about Jane: she’s not above laughing at herself sometimes.

  “And what’s-his-name, Tab Hunter,” I added.

  “Frankie Avalon,” she corrected, and told me if I really wanted her to, she would come over and try hypnotizing me, find out what happened, if anything—“which I doubt very much,” she added.

  “Since when do you know how to hypnotize people?”

  “I’ll just do what he does. It doesn’t involve much. You just have to trust whoever’s doing it. Remember that word, Ed? ‘Trust’?”

  After we got off the phone I ran around the apartment picking up stuff, then jumped in the shower and afterwards got into all clean clothes, including underwear.

  She knocked, just once.

  When I opened the door she walked right past me, wearing this yellow sundress I like a lot. I told her how nice she looked.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  She had me sit on the couch while she sat on the coffee table facing me, our knees not quite touching. She held up a finger and moved it slowly left and right, telling me to keep my eyes on it. She said I was beginning to get very sleepy, that my eyelids were getting very heavy, that they were slowly closing, and I closed them slowly. She said I was falling into a sleep, into a deep sleep, into a very . . . deep . . . sleep. She asked me if I was asleep.

  I answered in a sleepy voice, “Yes. I am.”

  But I wasn’t.

  I didn’t want to go under. I was afraid to. On the phone she mentioned trust, right? Well, the truth was, I didn’t trust her. She’s still got quite a lot of anger over what happened, and I wasn’t sure what she might do if given the chance, once she had me in her power. She might try to have some nasty fun with me, make me think I’m a monkey or a dog or a cat or something, have me do things, humiliating things.

  But, see, I didn’t want her to know I didn’t trust her. So that’s why I told her I was under, asleep.

  “All right,” she said, sounding kind of excited that it actually worked. “Now: I want you to tell me again. What happened? You were watching the ballgame, and then . . . ?”

  “It was the third inning,” I said in this slow, hypnotized voice, eyes closed. “The Cubs were losing, eight to one. They’d already made two pitching changes.”

  “Then what?”

  “They were now batting. But instead of trying to get some runners on base, they were all swinging for the fence, they were all trying to—”

  “Enough about the Cubs. You’re sitting there watching the game. Then all of a sudden . . . ?”

  “All of a sudden they came marching in, shoulder to shoulder, up to the couch, and started tickling me.”

  “And what do you remember next, Ed? What happened after that?”

  She meant did I find myself on a flying saucer. Well, by now I was pretty certain I wasn’t really abducted. The little men were just a goofy dream. I fell asleep, that’s all. The Cubs will do that to you.

  “Think, Ed.”

  Jane seemed to want me to remember being abducted. And I wanted it, too. It would be something exciting we could share, Jane with her aliens, me with mine—although, to be honest, I don’t think Jane’s been abducted any more than I have. But I know she likes to believe it. So this would be something to help us maybe reconnect a little. So I went ahead and made something up. I probably should have thought a little harder and come up with something better, but she was waiting, so I continued with the baseball theme and told her the next thing I knew I was sitting in a dugout.

  “A baseball dugout, you’re saying.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That is correct.”

  “So . . . you were dreaming.”

  I told her no, that is not correct. I told her I was sitting there wearing a baseball uniform much too small for me and a cap that was much too large, and as I looked along the bench I saw all these little skinny guys with big heads, these aliens, my teammates.

  “So you’re saying you found yourself . . . on an alien baseball team.”

  “That is correct.” Then I told her how good these guys played the game, how they played the old-fashioned way: drawing walks, bunting, hitting behind runners, stealing bases, manufacturing runs.

  “Ed . . .”

  I was into it now. It was the bottom of the ninth, I told her, two outs, we’re down by a run, a guy on base, and they send me in to pinch hit. I go up there with this Little League–sized bat and take a nice easy swing, just trying to make contact, and what would have been a single in a human field turns out to be a home run, the field is so dinky. Game over, we win, and they’re all waiting for me at home plate, jumping all over me, getting me down on the ground, tickling me, digging their fingers in, and the next thing I know . . . I’m back on the couch.

  I kept my eyes closed, waiting.

  She finally spoke. “That was a dream, Ed. You fell asleep during the game and had a very silly, juvenile, wish-fulfilling dream.”

  I tell her, “No. That is not correct.”

  “That is correct. You’ve wasted my time.” She was quiet then. “Are you still under?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you still seeing that woman, that . . . barber bitch?”

  “No,” I told her. “I am not.”

  Then she said, “I want you to tell me something, Ed.”

  “I will try.”

  “I want you to tell me exactly what it was about this woman that appealed to you. Will you tell me that please?”

  “She liked my hair,” I answered.

  She was quiet for a second. “She liked your hair?”

  “That is correct.”

  And it is correct. Right away, my very first time in the chair, Laura whispered in my ear, pressing a breast against my arm, “You have a beautiful head of hair, do you know that? So thick and luxurious,” running her ha
nd through it. She was quite a bit younger than me but seemed very excited by my hair—sexually, I’m saying. I felt like an exciting person, sexually and otherwise, like my hair was just the tip of the iceberg. I never cheated on Jane before, not even close. The whole time with Laura, I felt like I was out of my mind. That was the excuse I kept giving myself: I’m out of my mind. I started going for a trim every other Saturday, same time. Laura had this little room in the back of the shop, with a couch. I would usually sit and she would straddle me, her hands in my hair. We went on like that for six whole months. Then it was my birthday and Jane got me this incredible gift, a baseball signed by my guy, Ron Santo, former Cubs third baseman, a ballplayer with a tremendous heart. I couldn’t stand it. I burst into tears and told her about Laura.

  I still had my eyes closed as Jane said to me now, very calmly, very factually, “You are a piece of shit, Ed. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said to her. “That is correct.”

  “A complete and utter piece of shit.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “All right.”

  She gave a sigh and said wearily, “Okay, I’m going to count to three and you’ll wake up. One . . . two . . .”

  I waited.

  She was thinking, I could tell. Then she said, “I’m going to count to three and you will wake up wanting me so bad it hurts. You will be utterly, totally, pathetically desperate for me. You will be like a . . . like a pathetic little dog.”

  See? What did I tell you? She wanted me to sit up and beg.

  “Do you understand?” she said.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “All right. One . . . two . . . three.”

  I opened my eyes, looked at her in that yellow sundress and began panting rapidly, my tongue hanging out. She stood up and moved away. I got down on all fours, intending to hump her leg.

  “One-two-three you’re not a dog, one-two-three you’re not a dog,” Jane kept telling me, backing off. But I was a dog, a miserable little mutt, and went on crawling towards her. And here’s something sick: I had a terrific boner.

  She backed up all the way to the door, groped for the knob, and found it. I stopped a few feet away. She was going to leave me now. She was going to go away and leave me here. I cocked my head and made whimpering sounds, begging to be taken home.

  She let go of the doorknob.

  I cocked my head to the other side, whimpering louder, meaning Please? I’ll be good. I’ll be faithful and affectionate. I promise.

  “Oh, Eddie.” She came over.

  I wagged my butt.

  She got down on the floor and stroked my hair, my luxurious gray fur.

  DRACULA’S DAUGHTER

  Mark was a hippie. He had hippie hair and hippie clothes. He had Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Jefferson Airplane, Cream. He smoked a lot of pot, had read Steppenwolf and The Doors of Perception and The Hobbit. He had a hippie girlfriend named Wendy who didn’t shave her legs or even her armpits, hair being natural. So was sex. “Let’s have sex, Mark,” she would say, and he would say, “Let’s,” and they would. That was how natural.

  Wendy lived in Stevenson North and Mark in South. He had a roommate named Steve, who was a nice guy but very straight, who talked about possibly pledging next semester. Wendy had a roommate named Maggie, who Mark still hadn’t met. Wendy said she was kind of strange, but wouldn’t say more than that.

  There was a peace rally one Sunday afternoon at the lagoon. It was late October, a nice day out, windy but warm, the leaves on the trees flickering red and yellow. Mark and Wendy were going to the rally, of course—being for peace, being hippies.

  He came to Wendy’s room in his Buffalo Bill jacket, half the fringes missing, which he liked about it: showed he didn’t care about appearances. Same with his Indian headband, half the beads gone. He was also wearing moccasins, but not to go with the headband, although of course Indians were the original hippies. On the left sleeve of the jacket he had a black armband, and when people asked him what it was for he told them, “For all the Vietnamese children we’ve burned and murdered.”

  Wendy was wearing her big, floppy straw hat. She looked cute in it, like a cute little hippie chick, his cute little hippie chick.

  “Do I look all right in this?” she asked him. “Not too stylish?”

  “You look like a cute little hippie chick.”

  “I don’t want to look cute, Mark.”

  “Well, I’m sorry.”

  She told him to wait, she had to go pee. The bathroom was down the hall. Then they would leave. So he was waiting, studying the Salvador Dalí poster she had on the wall, the one with the melting clocks. Mark had never dropped acid. He was a little afraid it might be like this.

  Then Maggie walked in.

  He almost laughed.

  He thought maybe she was on her way to a Halloween party, or back from one. It was nearly Halloween and he thought maybe this was her costume: Dracula’s daughter, in a long black dress all the way to the floor, just a few inches longer than her shiny black hair. But her hair was real, you could tell, and her skin was so pale and her lips so full and shiny red and her arms so long and slender, and her eyebrows very low.

  “Hello, Mark,” she said, in a voice that came from deep in her throat, her long, white throat.

  He had to swallow first before he could speak. “Hi,” he said.

  He wanted to sit down, his legs felt so weak, but then Wendy came back. She told Maggie they were on their way to the rally and asked if she had any plans for the afternoon.

  Maggie said, “No.” Then she looked at Mark, from under those eyebrows. “I’ll be right here,” she said, “all afternoon.”

  “Does she always dress like that?” he asked Wendy, on their way.

  “Uh-huh.”

  When they got there, several hundred people were all sitting in the grass facing a platform set up in front of the west end of the lagoon, with a speaker system. Mark’s political science teacher, Dr. Abernathy, was up there in a folding chair with several others, waiting to speak. At the microphone now was a student with a bleached-out denim jacket and acoustic guitar doing a song he wrote about the war, about the carnage, about Johnson’s lies, about the military-industrial complex, a very long song that he sang in a Bob Dylan voice.

  Sitting there next to Wendy, their legs folded under them, Mark was trying to pay attention to the song. But he kept picturing that look Maggie gave him beneath her eyebrows, that deep, sly, knowing look: I’ll be here, Mark. That was what she meant. I’ll be waiting for you.

  He didn’t care about the carnage or Johnson’s lies or the military industrial complex, or even about Wendy.

  I’ll be here, Mark.

  He got up, telling Wendy he had a cramp from sitting like that and wanted to walk it off, and went limping away before she could join him. He made his way in and out among all those solemn, earnest people sitting in the grass, whiffs of pot here and there, returning a lot of peace signs before he finally reached the sidewalk and took off running.

  He knocked, softly.

  “Come in, Mark.”

  He went in.

  Afterward he wandered around the campus in a trance.

  He ended up back at the rally, standing on the outskirts under a tree. Dr. Abernathy was at the microphone now, gesturing a lot, shouting against the strong wind. Wendy was sitting where he’d left her. She would lean forward and listen to Dr. Abernathy for a minute, then lean back and look around—for him, no doubt—then return to Dr. Abernathy.

  In her hippie hat.

  He wandered off toward the other side of the lagoon, no one over there. He could still hear Dr. Abernathy, going on now about napalmed Vietnamese children, the ones Mark was wearing his black armband for.

  He slid it down off the sleeve of his Buffalo Bill jacket and flipped it away, then decided to get rid of the jacket as well and dropped it in the grass as he walked along. Same with the tie-dyed T-
shirt underneath it, pulling it off over his head, the beaded headband coming with it. Next he kicked off his moccasins, left foot, right foot, pulled off his socks, then went ahead and unbuckled, unzipped, and slid his denim bell-bottoms down, along with his underpants, and stepped out of them. Still not satisfied, he got a good grip on his hair with both hands and pulled his entire suit of skin off over his head—guts and muscles sliding from his bones into a warm heap.

  This was more like it.

  He walked on, the wind making eerie music in his ribs.

  KILLING CARL

  He was my girlfriend Cindy’s husband, so what else could I do? I guess I could have not killed him. Anyway, it’s too late. I got him with a .22 pistol, a pretty wimpy gun but I got him in the middle of the forehead three inches away. We were standing around in his office, everyone else gone home, talking about the White Sox, agreeing what they need is pitching, hitting, and fielding, and then they’d be set. “Oh, by the way,” I said, and pulled out the gun and shot him. You should have seen the look on his face. Talk about surprised. But only for a second, then his eyes went blank. He was already dead when he hit the floor, otherwise he would have hurt himself the way he fell, broke his arm or something, which maybe he did, but that was minor compared to being dead.

  I told him I was sorry. I told him I didn’t really mean it. I was even crying a little. I never killed anyone before. It’s not as enjoyable as you might think. I said to him, “Carl, can you forgive me?” He didn’t answer. I took that as a yes and got out of there. I didn’t want to be around when the authorities arrived, him lying there dead, me standing over him with the so-called smoking gun. That would look pretty suspicious. I drove to my apartment and walked around and around. I couldn’t believe Carl was really gone—I was just talking to him twenty minutes ago! I was in denial, you see. But then I accepted it. That’s the first step, acceptance. Then I had to learn to forgive myself. “I forgive you,” I said, and I meant it. I figured if Carl could forgive me, right?