The Mutual UFO Network

by Lee Martin

  “Go ahead, Del,” she said. “Take a look at Sonny’s operation. It might be just the winner you’ve been looking for.”

  Del noticed she had picked up Sonny’s soothing way of talking, and it filled him with a great hope. “All right,” he said. “Sure. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  At the storage unit, Sonny took the keys from his pocket and put the shiny gold one into the padlock. He yanked it open and then lifted the door. The sections clacked over the rollers as they folded and disappeared overhead.

  “Step on in, chief.” Sonny smacked his hands together. “Make yourself at home.”

  Del walked into the storage unit and let his eyes adjust to the dark. A dim glow from the vapor lights outside washed over the walls and the floor, and he could see that the unit was empty except for an Army footlocker at the rear against the wall. Because it comforted him to think it, he imagined Liz had felt a similar uncertainty when she first stepped into Willum’s motel room for her boudoir shots—just a brief panic as she wondered what she was getting herself into.

  “You told me there were cartons,” Del said to Sonny.

  Sonny chuckled. “You fell for that, didn’t you? I’m not surprised. I could tell right away you were that kind of dope.”

  “No body wraps?” Del said.

  “I read about it in the paper.”

  “And your wife?”

  “Sorry, chief. No wife.”

  Del heard Sonny pulling down the overhead door. The light faded, and Del stood there in the dark. Then he felt a sharp blade against his throat, and he knew it was the carpet knife he had seen on Sonny’s dashboard.

  “I want you to get down on your knees,” Sonny said, and his voice was so gentle and kind. Del felt a hand on his shoulder pushing him down to the floor. “I want you to stay here. Just like you’re praying.”

  The knife blade came away from his throat, and he heard Sonny’s footsteps on the cement floor.

  For a moment, Del thought about trying to run—nothing seemed as sweet to him, then, as the idea of him and Liz alone in their car driving through the night—but then Sonny said, “It’s a hell of a story for a man’s wife to tell on him. What was that noise you made? Like a cow? She made you out to be a fool.”

  “Don’t hurt her,” Del said.

  “Give me a break.” The footlocker’s lid slammed shut. “I watched you when she told that story. You wanted her to pay.”

  Del bowed his head. Suddenly he felt guilty, a criminal at heart. Since the night of the break-in, what he had wished more than anything was that Liz could know the same alarm that had overwhelmed him the moment he had seen the burglar come into their house. Then she would know why he had shouted. He had been afraid, yes, but more than that, he had loved the world too much to leave it. He had loved himself and Liz and the life, though imperfect, they had together. There had been no words for all this, only a fierce and strangled bawl.

  Now he heard Sonny moving toward him in the dark. “Put your hands behind your back,” Sonny said, and Del did. He heard the ripping sound of duct tape unwinding from its roll, felt it sticking to the hairs on his arms as Sonny wrapped it around them where his wrists were crossed. “There are people,” Sonny said. He whispered it in Del’s ear. “People like me.”

  Del imagined Liz waiting in the car. Sooner or later she would hear the door to the storage unit open and see Sonny coming toward her. How long would it be before she would know she was in trouble? And once she did, would she call out? Would she say, “Del?”

  “Del,” he imagined her saying again and again until it wasn’t “Del” at all, but a wail so high and thin it could barely hold the weight of such fear—at last, something private and intimate between them.

  DRUNK GIRL IN STILETTOS

  WE CAME UPON HER SOUTH OF TOWN ON THE BLACKTOP, WlNK AND me, this girl looking all whoop-de-doo in high heels, her hip jutted out, her thumb stuck in the air, begging a ride.

  “Pull over,” I said. We were running eighty in his Mustang GT, and it was going to take a while to shut it down. “Damn it, Wink. Now.”

  “Jesus, Benny.” He pressed his lips together and squinted at me with his right eye. His left one—or the empty socket, I should say—had a black satin patch over it. He owned an artificial eye made from acrylic, but he wasn’t wearing it that day. The patch gave him a tough look that I suspected he secretly liked. The thin strap slanted down across his forehead. “All of a sudden you’re a Boy Scout?” He was busting my balls, but he’d already put his foot to the brake. “Thought you were in a hurry to get home.”

  “Just do it,” I said, and he did.

  He was in one of his pissy moods and more of a mind to keep heading up the blacktop, but I saw a girl who needed a ride, and I knew what that was like. Let me say it plain: I’ve not always been an upright man, and as a result, I’ve had to rely on the kindness of folks; some, like my mama, loved me, and some were strangers who didn’t owe me the time of day.

  We were maybe a hundred yards beyond the girl, and Wink was stubborn and wouldn’t back up, so we waited while she came to us, teetering along on those spiked heels. I got out of the car and watched her come. In the sunlight, her bare legs looked whiter than they probably really were, but she was a fair-skinned girl anyway. I could see that. She was wearing a short denim skirt and a black T-shirt with writing in pink letters across her chest. I could finally read the words when she came up alongside the car: I’M SHY.

  A little straw purse dangled from her wrist. It had a picture of that cartoon character, that Betty Boop, on it. Her red dress—Betty’s, I mean—was lifting up over her hip, and I could see her white stocking and the garter with a red heart on it.

  “Hey, know what Lady Godiva said toward the end of her ride?” I asked the girl. I waited just long enough for effect. With comedy, like with women, the trick is in the timing. “I’m nearing my clothes,” I said, but I could tell she didn’t get it. I opened the Mustang’s door, folded back the passenger seat, and motioned for her to get in back. “Her clothes,” I said again, taking one more shot at the punch line, but again I got no reaction.

  “He thinks he’s a funny man,” Wink said.

  I bowed to the girl. “I’m Benny. I’m a funny man.”

  She had on big round sunglasses with white frames. She pushed them up on her head and stuck her face up close to mine. “I know who you are.” I could smell the liquor on her breath, and for an instant I wanted to kiss her just for the taste of it, even though I was too old to do that. She was just a girl, and I was a man on the downhill side of fifty. “You’re Benny Moon.”

  “You’ve been drinking,” I said.

  “Yeppie.” She pressed a fingernail into my chest. “But I know who you are.”

  “Everyone knows Benny,” Wink said. “He’s about as famous as they come round here. Aren’t you, Speed Racer?”

  Odds are you’ve heard of me. Back in the summer, I got arrested for DUI. No big news there, just that I happened to be driving a barstool at the time. That’s right. A barstool. Welded to a frame and powered by a five-horsepower Craftsman lawn mower engine. Topped out at thirty-eight miles per hour. Slick as can be. For a couple of weeks there, I drove it around. Didn’t have much choice. I’d lost my license, and the only way to get from here to there was to hoof it or to ride that barstool. We live in a dry town, and it’s five miles to the nearest tavern. A man gets thirsty? Doesn’t have the legal right to drive a car? You do the math.

  Anyway, I’d been to Bridgeport to the Hilltop Tavern one day, a Saturday, and I made sure to start back to Sumner while there was plenty of daylight left. Then I remembered that I’d left my billfold on the bar after I settled my tab. I tried to do a U-turn right there on Route 250. Guess I didn’t cut my speed enough. Next thing I knew, I was down, scraped all to hell from the pavement, a knot on my head. Then I made my mistake. Called 911 on my cell. Said I’d had a wreck. Said I was out on 250 just before King’s Hill. The dispatcher wanted to know how bad I wa
s hurt. “Bad enough to call you,” I told him.

  Then the ambulance showed up, and a county sheriff’s deputy, and, well, one thing led to another, and before I could say snap, I was all over the Internet and on CNN and in newspapers coast to coast. Even Letterman and Leno and Conan and the other late-night funny boys were telling jokes about me. I was that guy, the drunk who wrecked his barstool.

  You’d think it’d make me feel foolish, but I can’t quite manage it. Truth is, that’s what stopped me—took me off the booze for good, near as I can tell anyway—and what’s a little ribbing compared to the grace of that? I’ll be Speed Racer. I’ll be that guy. I’ll be an idiot forever as long as I can say I’m a sober man.

  We drove on up the blacktop, Wink and me and the girl. It was a nice fall day—Indian summer—warm enough to have the windows down, sun filling the Mustang, shining bright on the hood, the fields flashing by, bare now except for corn and soybean stubble, a few red and orange and yellow leaves still holding onto the maples and oaks and sweetgums in the woodlands. We were at that time of the year when things were letting go, giving up, hunkering down—soon there’d be snow and ice and the long freeze until spring—but for a while yet, there was sun and enough warm air to make me want to believe it could last forever. Wink had a CD in, Drive-By Truckers’ Gangstabilly, and we were just heading up the blacktop, almost to Sumner, the water tower already in sight and the silos of the grain elevator, and we were listening to “Late for Church”: All this hollerin’ makes me wonder. Does a whispered prayer get heard?

  Sweet autumn day, sweet music, and now this girl and those stilettos. She seemed like a gift, the sort of thing handed to you when you’re not expecting a thing. I’d been out at Wink’s shooting up bottles and cans with my rifle, a Ruger 10/22, just target shooting to pass the time, and now he was running me home.

  We’d had a little tiff. He’d got off on a jag—just a lot of bullshit, really—about what it would take to get me drinking again. I told him not a thing. Ever. End of story. That was enough to make him set his jaw. “Must be something,” he said. “How about if you won the Mega Millions? Hell, even the Little Lotto.” No, I told him—not even hitting the state lottery, not even the Mega Millions, would make me backslide. “What if you knew you only had a month to live?” Ixnay. “Finding yourself on a desert island with Madonna and a fifth of Maker’s Mark?” He was starting to tick me off, picking at me the way he was, determined to prove there’d be something to touch a weakness in me and send me back to the bottle. No, I told him. Then he said, “Okay. What about if some psychopath had a gun to my head, and the only way to stop him from pulling the trigger was if you took a drink. Surely you’d do it then?”

  Well, of course there’d be a limit to how long I’d hold out. I wouldn’t let a man die, but Wink was too sure of too many things. He thought he knew me. His little game was his way of saying he’d bet good money that before long I’d be that guy again. That drunk guy. So I said to him, “Nah, not even then.”

  “All right, just be an asshole,” he said. I tossed the Ruger into the backseat of his Mustang—didn’t even bother to take out the mag—and we started up the blacktop.

  Drive-By Truckers were now singing “Panties in Your Purse,” and that song about a woman called a whore and a tramp, her man catching her with her stockings in her hand and her panties in her pocketbook—a song I ordinarily never gave a second thought—now broke my heart to hear because I was listening to it in the presence of that girl in stilettos. I guessed she was up against something hard and didn’t need to be hearing a song like that. I reached over and changed the track to “Steve McQueen,” the coolest doggone motherscratcher on the silver screen. Wink always sang along with that one. We saw that movie, Bullitt, and the chase scene through the streets of San Francisco, when we were thirteen, and that was enough to sell us on Mustangs and speed. We didn’t know, then, that I’d turn into a drunk. We didn’t know that Wink would get beat in a bar fight and lose an eye. None of us can guess what life will do to us until it’s done, but that doesn’t excuse the misery in the world. Not by a long shot. I can say that now that I’m a sober man, and I intend to stay that way, no matter what Wink might believe.

  He knocked my hand away from the CD player. “Who made you DJ? I was listening to that.”

  Wink’s a big man with a shaved head and rolls of fat on the back of his neck. When he wears that eye patch, he looks dangerous. I used to tell him jokes. What did the brave pirate tell the fraidy-cat pirate right before the big battle? “Nothing to be scared of, matey. I’ll keep an eye out for you.” “Ha ha,” Wink said when I told him that one. “Ha-frickin’-ha.” He told me to can the crap. Said he’d had enough of my jokes. Said his eye was gone-baby-gone, and every morning when he looked at his face in the mirror, there wasn’t a damn thing, far as he could tell, to laugh about. I thought I was just lightening things up for him, just playing the fool to give him a chuckle. It wasn’t that way, though. He made that plain. He said in a hurt voice I’d never heard from him, “Damn it, Benny. No matter what slips and shakes you’ve had, you’re still a whole man. I’ll never be that. Never again.”

  So I backed off. Stopped telling those jokes. Even resisted the one about the man having dinner in a restaurant and noticing the beautiful woman eating alone at the table across from his. All of a sudden she sneezes, and her glass eye comes flying out. The man calmly reaches up, catches it, and returns it to her. She’s embarrassed. She puts the eye back in and insists that the man allow her to buy his dinner. He agrees.

  They dine together and hit it off. They go out for drinks and end up back at her place. In the morning, she makes him a grand breakfast. “I bet you do this for all the guys,” he says. “Nah,” she tells him. “You just happened to catch my eye.”

  Even a joke like that—one that makes me happy to know there’s still something to laugh about in this world—I stopped telling Wink because he was my friend and had been for years. If he wanted me to stop, I’d stop, and if he wanted to switch that Drive-By Truckers CD back to “Panties in Your Purse,” I’d let him do that, too, despite what I thought about that girl and what she didn’t need to hear.

  It left me disappointed in myself—I’ll admit that—on account there was that girl and I should have done right about her. A drunk girl. Trust me, I know what it’s like to be loose from right thinking, to be hard on the end of a bad shake, to reach for that bottle and not give a fiddler’s fart about anything else. I could tell she needed something good and happy in her life, something that’d last, and not that song reminding her exactly how grim things were. But like I said, Wink, no matter the little spat we’d had—no matter how bad he wanted to make me feel like it was only a matter of time before I went back to being a drunk—was my friend. He’d stuck by me through all my drinking days, stuck by me when I’d been an embarrassment and everyone else had given up on me, everyone except my mama who got down on her knees by her bed each night and sent a prayer to heaven for my redemption. I’m not sure what it was that kept Wink at my side. Maybe he needed me in order to feel better about himself. As long as I was drinking, and as long as he stayed true to me, he could be the long-suffering friend who, though he might be maimed, wasn’t—praise Jesus—a drunk man. I guess there are reasons people are friends even if we don’t know as much at the time. I guess it takes something like what happened that day with the girl to make it clear.

  She tapped Wink’s neck with the barrel of that 10/22. “Hey,” she said. “What happened to your eye?”

  Jeezy Pete. She had that Ruger, her finger on the trigger. As luck would have it, the safety was still on.

  Wink tucked his head toward his right shoulder to see what was poking him in the neck. “Shit fire.” He jerked away from that 10/22, and the Mustang swerved over into the other lane for just a few ticks before he could bring it back. “Drunk girl with a loaded rifle.” He narrowed his eyes at me and gave me that what-the-fuck-you-thinking look I knew so well from my drin
king days. “Now that’s just exactly what I need.”

  “I’m just a little bit drunk.” The girl put the barrel right up to Wink’s temple. “But that doesn’t mean you’ve got a right to treat me mean.”

  “Darlin’.” I used my gentle voice, the one I’d heard so many women use on me when I was falling-down drunk and they were trying to coax me into bed so I’d sleep it off. “Sugar.” I reached around and took hold of that 10/22 by the stock. “Sweetie, you don’t need to be playing with that.”

  I gave a gentle tug, and she let the Ruger slide out of her hands. I laid it across my lap, but that put the barrel in Wink’s crotch. He gave me that look again, and I swung the rifle up and over and propped it between me and my door.

  A loaded rifle uncased in a moving automobile in Illinois? Well, sure it was illegal, but I’d been in a hurry when Wink and I were done shooting. He’d given me that interrogation about what it would take for me to start drinking again, and I just wanted to hit the road and get back to my place as quick as I could. I’ve gotten good at being alone. I put on my white noise machine, close my eyes, and listen to rain or ocean surf or a babbling brook. I hear grace in the water; I hear forgiveness.

  The girl was crying a little now. She opened up that Betty Boop purse and took out a wad of Kleenex, the kind that’d been in that purse forever and were now one big crumbling tissue biscuit. Little white flakes fell off onto her shirt. I reached into my hip pocket and pulled out my handkerchief—white and freshly pressed that morning and folded into a neat square.

  “Don’t cry, darlin’.” I gave her the handkerchief. “Where is it you’re on your way to?”