The Mutual UFO Network

by Lee Martin

  Then one night while he was sleeping, the telephone rang, and when he answered it, a woman’s voice spoke his name. “Frank?” she said. The silken voice charmed him, and for a moment he felt something close to hope. “Frank Cain?”

  “Yes,” he said. He was beginning to understand that it wasn’t his wife speaking to him, as he had first believed, but perhaps, he thought, someone who knew something about where she was.

  The woman’s voice shrank, nearly vanished, but still he could hear it, barely a whisper. “I want you to know something.”

  “Yes,” Frank said again, impatient. “What is it? Tell me.”

  “It’s like this,” the woman said. “I’m HIV.”

  For a moment, he was amused. How absurd, he thought. The very idea that this woman had confused him with another man who happened to share his name. No matter what he had thought from time to time about his wife, Frank had always been faithful and aboveboard. He imagined this other man, asleep somewhere in the city, ignorant to what might be in store for him, and though Frank knew he should feel sorry for him, he couldn’t manage it. In fact, he felt a flash of anger fire inside him. He hadn’t asked for this woman’s call or for the ugly news she was confessing. He had enough of his own misery.

  “Why are you telling this to me?” he said. He lowered his voice, and it occurred to him that it might sound as if he and the woman, at one time, had been in cahoots, that he might actually be guilty of something.

  “You think I wouldn’t?” the woman said. “You think I’d let you slide? Baby, that’d be cold.”

  “But you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong, Frank. I’ve been tested twice. Trust me. You better get yourself checked.”

  And before he could tell her, straight out, she had the wrong number, the wrong Frank Cain, the woman with the voice like silk hung up.

  “Just like that,” Frank told his friend, Big Boy, the next evening when the two of them were outside on Frank’s deck. “‘I’m HIV,’ she says. Can you imagine what that did to me?”

  It was September, the tail end of warm nights, and Big Boy had his telescope and was trying to get Frank to recognize various constellations. Frank could manage a few, Capricornus and Cygnus, but others—Pavo, Delphinus—escaped him, seemed only skeins of lights strung through the night sky. Big Boy had studied astronomy at the university for a while before dropping out, and when he spoke about the stars, his voice was reverential and soothing.

  “You’re the estimator, Frank,” he said. The backs of his hands were fat and dimpled like sponges, but his fingers, for a man his size, were surprisingly long and slim. “Give me an idea.”

  By this time, Frank had gone back to work. It was his job, at A-1 Metro Movers, to walk through a house, to open cabinets and closets, estimate cartons and weights, and then give the homeowner a figure. To do it right, he had to be nosy. He had to poke around and ask questions—“Does this go? How about this?”—and sometimes he saw things he knew people would rather he didn’t: ratty bathrobes, pornographic magazines, enema bags. He always acted as if he didn’t notice. He was there to do business, not to intrude, and over the years, he had developed a brisk, friendly manner that made everything go easily. He had a way of assuring people that their belongings would get to their new homes in tip-top shape. “We treat everything like we own it ourselves,” he would say, when the truth was he couldn’t guarantee a thing. The men who loaded the vans were men humping too much weight for too little pay, and who could blame them if they dropped a carton of dishes or banged the edge of an armoire, maybe even on purpose, just to remind someone they were all people, and, hey, sometimes people screwed up. Still, Frank had to pretend that everything was, and would always be, “A-1 a-okay.” He had to keep himself in the perfect world of the brochures and moving tips booklets the company gave its customers, the ones where the workers wore clean, crisp uniforms and smiled as they wrapped dishes and loaded cartons onto two-wheeled dollies. Nothing ever went wrong in the pictures, and he had to live there in that world of protection and safety; otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to offer the glib assurances that people expected.

  “I’ll tell you how it made me feel,” he said to Big Boy. “Put-upon. That’s the only way I can describe it. Like that woman was telling me something I didn’t want to know. I don’t need any of it, not on top of what I’m going through.”

  “Of course you don’t, Frank.” Big Boy put his hands on his hips. He was wearing a cream-colored jumpsuit, and his beard was neatly trimmed. Frank could tell he was meticulous about his appearance, and for a moment he could imagine Big Boy in a laboratory coat, the knot of a necktie barely visible, as he leaned over a lectern at the local planetarium. He was that smart about astronomy, a fact that amazed Frank. “So you felt put-upon,” Big Boy said. “Who wouldn’t? It’s only natural. The question is, what are you going to do now?”

  Big Boy was a packer. He wrapped people’s glassware, their lamps and mirrors and knickknacks. It was up to him to make sure everything was snug. Nothing went anywhere, he always said, until he had it squared away.

  “I tell you what I’d like to do,” Frank said. “I’d like to tell him what I know. That schmuck.”

  “Have you looked in the phone book?”

  “You think that should be my next move? Wouldn’t that throw him for a loop? Knock the air right out of him. Jesus, can you see it?”

  “No, Frank,” said Big Boy, his voice flat with disappointment. “You’ve got it wrong. That’s not the way it is at all.”

  There were stories around the warehouse about Big Boy, and more than one customer had complained. He had a habit, Frank knew, of telling people exactly what he thought. “That lamp’s a piece of shit,” he might say to someone. “And that couch? I can’t believe you’re spending good money to move it.” He had a trick he liked to pull when he first went into a house to start packing. He brought in a box of broken glass, careful not to let it rattle. Then, when he was packing china and the homeowner was out of the room, he would drop the box of broken glass and say, “Oops.” When the homeowner would come running to investigate, Big Boy would confess his gag, and the homeowner would be relieved. “Don’t you feel lucky?” Big Boy would say. “Whatever happens from here on, remember how you feel right now.”

  It was the nerve of Big Boy, the balls-to-the-wind way he had of moving through the world, that first drew Frank to him. When Frank finally went back to work, too many people at the warehouse, after extending their sympathies, became cautious and shy in his presence. Their silence, their meek glances, surrounded him like the quilted pads they used to cover furniture. That was when he found himself gravitating toward Big Boy, the one person at the warehouse who treated him as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Often they would spend the evenings together. Sometimes they would just sit out on the deck and gab. Big Boy liked to talk about himself, and though Frank always felt guilty after an entire evening had passed and he hadn’t said a word about his wife, he was thankful for Big Boy’s stories and the way they distracted him from his own trouble.

  The one story Big Boy told over and over was a story about his father. It was an account that disturbed Frank the first time he heard it, but after he had heard it enough times, he didn’t mind it as much. He even started to look forward to it, because it was the kind of story that made him feel fortunate, lucky not to have been there when Big Boy, fifteen years old, found his father in a closet, his legs out straight in front of him, the toes of his oxfords knocking against the door jamb as he turned back and forth at the end of the cord burning into his neck. He had tied a curtain cord to the rod in his clothes closet. He had gone about it very scientifically, Big Boy said. It was clear his father had figured distance and space to come up with the exact length of cord he would need to do the trick. “The rest was simple,” Big Boy said. “All he had to do was sit down.”

  Usually, that was where the story stopped, but one night Big Boy told Frank something new, how his father,
a professor at the university, had left a box of letters he had written to one of his students, a boy named Larry Kiel, letters he’d never sent. Most of them were brief lessons in physics, pedantic discussions of matter and energy, motion and force. One of them explained the closed paths described by the lines of force in a magnetic field. Another talked about thermodynamics and the diathermic wall that was necessary to conduct heat between two systems.

  But one of the letters, the last one Big Boy’s father would write, had turned personal, and he had expressed his admiration for Larry Kiel. The line from the letter that Big Boy remembered was one that under any other circumstances would have seemed an embarrassing attempt at conceit, a farfetched metaphor from a man whose only language was science: “Perhaps in some other universe—some other creation—you and I might have been a thermoelectric couple.” But when Big Boy repeated it, his voice full of forgiveness, the words seemed all the more urgent and heartfelt, a declaration of love from a man inadequate for the task. And when Frank heard them, he imagined all the times he had disappointed his wife, and he wished he had managed, in their time together, to have been more considerate.

  So that night on the deck, when Frank was trying to find the constellations, and Big Boy told him it was cruel, now that he knew what he did, to keep this other Frank Cain in the dark, Frank listened.

  “The way I see it,” Big Boy was bent over the telescope, his face pressed to the eyepiece, “with news like this, you’ve got to give it to him straight. You’ve got to say, ‘Look, pal. Here’s the story.’”

  “Right,” Frank said. “Look, pal.”

  The way it was, Big Boy explained—“And believe me, Frank. I’ve done some thinking about this”—was that people were always moving through one another’s lives, and there were reasons for them coming together, opportunities to be grabbed. “Never turn a blind eye to anything, Frank. It’s all there for a purpose. That woman told you something meant for someone else. You’re the messenger now. You know something you have to deliver.”

  “That call was a wrong number,” Frank said. “And she didn’t even know it. She had sex with this guy and she didn’t even know him well enough to know she had the wrong number.”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know.” Big Boy straightened and looked at Frank. “Did you know that only four percent of the universe is stuff we can see, stars and galaxies and stuff? The rest of it, the missing mass, is invisible. Go ahead, Frank. Take your best guess. What do you think makes up the other ninety-six percent?”

  “I couldn’t begin,” Frank said.

  “Dead stars. That’s what it is, Frank. Lightless bodies we can’t see because they’ve burned themselves out. White dwarfs, astronomers call them. That’s what you’re carrying, a white dwarf. You’ve got the missing mass. That’s your payload. All you have to do is pass through this other Frank Cain’s life for an instant. Just a few moments of your time.”

  In the house, Frank laid the telephone book on the kitchen counter. Lincoln was a good-sized city, the state capitol, and it took him a while to locate the page where the “Cains” were listed. There were fifteen, not counting his own entry, but there were no other Frank Cains, nothing even close—no Cain, Francis, or Cain, Francisco, or Cain, F., or even “F” as a middle initial, which might have been a clue.

  One of Big Boy’s long fingers traced over a line on the page. “‘See Also Cane-Kane,’” he read.

  Under C-A-N-E, there were two entries, Camille and Roger.

  “Check ‘K,’” Big Boy said.

  And there it was: KANE, FRANK, 131 N. 26TH.

  Frank knew the neighborhood only from driving through it on his way to somewhere else. It was the north central part of the city, near the university, a pocket of homes that had seen better days, occupied now by people who couldn’t afford more or students looking for cheap rent and a short walk to school. People, in other words, who had no money for professional movers when it came time to leave for somewhere else. Frank recalled a few landmarks from the area that had stayed with him from his trips down North Twenty-Sixth: Captain Zig’s Guns and Ammo, Fast Bucks Check Cashing, King Dollar Jewelry and Loan, Rocky’s Hungry Eye Tattoo.

  “So we’ll call,” Frank said to Big Boy. “That’s the way to do it, right? We’ll say, ‘Look, pal.’”

  Big Boy tapped his finger on Kane, Frank’s address. “I wish it could be that easy,” he said, “but is this the kind of news you’d want to get over the phone?”

  Kane, Frank’s house was a one-story home with a screened-in front porch edged with Christmas lights—red, blue, green, and orange twinkle lights that kept flashing on and off.

  “Now that’s smug,” said Big Boy. He eased himself out of his utility truck and slammed the door. “Christmas lights still on in September. Like this guy’s got something to celebrate and the rest of us are just mutts. I’m going in there and tell him what’s what.”

  Frank followed Big Boy up the narrow walk to the house, recalling with a sudden pain that Saturday in June when his wife told him, “I wish you’d come with me, but don’t worry, I won’t be long.” He had spent the morning noodling around with some lawn work, thinking how pleased his wife would be to see the freshly cut grass, the trimmed hedges. He would help her carry in the flats of strawberries, and the house would be fragrant with their scent.

  Big Boy threw open the screen door and stepped up onto the porch. Frank could hear music inside the house, some sort of polka tune all bouncy with tubas and accordions. An orange extension cord poked through a crack in the window frame and snaked across the arm of an old brown sofa. Big Boy traced the cord and found the connection for the Christmas lights. He grabbed the plug and yanked it free. The porch went dark. “That’s smug,” he said again. “This joker’s got to know what Christmas lights in September can do to people.”

  Inside the house, footsteps thundered across the floorboards, then a porch light came on, and a glaring white shaft fell over Big Boy and Frank.

  The front door opened and a man stepped out. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt, and his skin was a babyish pink. He had a strand of barbed wire tattooed around his arm, just above the bicep, and for a moment Frank wondered how he had hooked up with the woman who had called, a one-night stand most likely. It probably hadn’t meant jack-stump to Kane, Frank. A quick pop with a woman who later wouldn’t even know how he spelled his name. He was wearing glasses with small, round gold rims, and he tipped back his head and squinted to better see exactly what the fuss was on his front porch.

  “Fellas,” he said. “What’s the story?”

  “Are you Frank Kane?” Big Boy said.

  “Hey,” the man said with a laugh. “Don’t tell me I’m in trouble.”

  Big Boy stepped up to him, up close, and he said, “We’ve got something to tell you. My buddy and me.”

  Frank understood he was to say nothing. He understood this had somehow become Big Boy’s show.

  And then Big Boy said it, just the way he promised he would, straight out. “Look, pal. The other night my buddy got a call from a woman. She said she was HIV.”

  “I’d say that’s tough luck for your buddy,” the man said.

  “My buddy’s name is your name,” said Big Boy. He even had the nerve to reach out and poke his finger into the bare, pink flesh above the neckline of the man’s undershirt. “That call was a wrong number. Think again, pal. Tough luck for you.”

  The man looked at Frank the way so many homeowners had, their faces anxious and pleading. They were trusting everything they owned to A-1 Metro Movers, and they wanted him to tell them it would all be safe.

  “Hey, that’s a good joke,” the man said. He tried to laugh again, but it didn’t come out with much force. “You must have sat around all night thinking up that one.”

  “It’s no joke,” Frank said, knowing something in his voice would convince him.

  Kane, Frank took a step back and sat down on the brown sofa. He took off his glasses and rubbed his e
yes. His shoulders were quivering, as if all of a sudden he was freezing.

  “That’s a good piece of music,” he said. The polka music was still blaring. “That’s Moostash Joe. You ever catch his band?”

  “You won’t be dancing the polka when the AIDS hits,” Big Boy said, and Frank realized that when Big Boy had told him the story of his father and Larry Kiel, it hadn’t been forgiveness Frank had heard in his voice, but a fierce, burning hate. “We’re talking lesions, blindness. You’ll lose your hair and your skin will come off in flakes. And then there’s the pneumonia. They’ll try to scrape your lungs, but it won’t work. All because you stuck your prong in a strange socket.” Big Boy poked Kane, Frank in the chest again. “Happy holidays, pal.”

  And just like that, it was over. Frank got back into Big Boy’s truck and sat there staring at the house. The Christmas lights didn’t come back on. “Did you see that asshole go white?” Big Boy said. “All the pink just went right out of him.” Big Boy gave his horn a long blast. “He won’t sleep tonight. Christmas lights in September. Did you see that tattoo? Tough guy. Who does he think he is?”

  Frank felt the anger that had flared inside him when the woman had called burn out and go cold. He thought of his wife. When the first panic hit, when she knew she was in trouble, did she call out for him? Or for an instant, and maybe beyond, did she despise him, because she had asked him to come with her and he had said no?

  “Wasn’t that a kick in the pants, Frank?” Big Boy said. “Who’s put-upon now? Wasn’t that a hoot?”

  Frank didn’t answer. He was trying to imagine Kane, Frank’s trembling shoulders and how they would feel if he were to step back onto the porch, reach out, and touch them.