The Mutual UFO Network

by Lee Martin

  By this time, Wink had the Mustang pulled off onto the shoulder. We were just out of the last curve before the straight shot into town. I could see the population sign—1,200—just up ahead, and beyond that the city cemetery with its tall cedar trees and its monuments and mausoleum and the lake with the statue of Jesus rising out of it, his arms outstretched to gather you in if you were of a mind to let him, as I’d been more than once when I’d walked through that cemetery in the twilight just for the peace of it.

  “Get out.” Wink was shouting. He had his door open, and he folded down his seat so he could reach the girl. He took her by her skinny arm and pulled so hard her sunglasses got all cockeyed on her face. “Hold a gun on me, goddamn it.” I heard her knees hit the floor. Then Wink jerked her out of the car and she fell into the weeds and her sunglasses went flying. He got down there with her, lifted his patch, and said, “There. You want to know about my eye so bad? Just take a good look.” His socket was all scar tissue and an empty place where an eye should be.

  The girl was crying. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “I don’t care what you meant.” Wink let her go. “Now you can just walk.”

  “Not in these heels.” She stood up, took off one of the stilettos, and showed him the back of her heel. “I’ve already rubbed a blister.”

  It broke my heart to see her broke down like that in the turkey-foot grass and the milkweed and foxtail. I got out of the Mustang and walked around the front until I could lay my hand on Wink’s shoulder. I had the 10/22 in my hands. “How come you want to go and make a scene? We’re almost to town.” I clicked off the safety. “Don’t you hurt her.” I asked her again, “Darlin’, where is it you’re going?”

  To the funeral home, she said, for Jackie Frutag’s laying out.

  “Jackie Frutag?” Wink got to his feet. “You know Jackie Frutag?”

  The girl nodded. “He’s my daddy.”

  I put the Ruger’s safety back on. Then I found her sunglasses in the grass. I studied her face, and it all came clear to me. “You’re Lily, aren’t you?”

  That sobered her up. She gave me a shy grin. “How’d you know my name?”

  I handed her the glasses and she put them on top of her head, the stems stuck through her thick brown hair. “Your daddy used to be a friend to us. I haven’t seen you in a good long while.”

  There was a time when Jackie ran with me and Wink. This was back in the day when we were too young to know a damn thing even though we thought we knew it all. Jackie Frutag—a scrawny mutt with long stringy hair and a knobby chin. We called him Pygmo because he couldn’t have been more than five foot two and that was in his Dingo boots. We all worked pipe for Marathon Oil for a few years and spent most of our nights helling around. Then Jackie married a Bridgeport girl, Cathy Catt, and got religion. He started lay preaching for the Church of Christ, where my mama went, and she made sure she let me know what a miracle it was that he’d turned his life around and had a little girl now, Lily, and wasn’t she just the most darling thing. I got tired of it in a hurry.

  Jackie Frutag stuck in my face as an example of what a man could do with himself if he took a notion. I’d see him uptown on a Sunday, coming out of Piper’s Sundries with his Evansville Courier. He had his hair cut, of course, and most generally he’d have on a pair of dress pants, a short-sleeve white shirt, and a necktie. Cathy and Lily would be waiting for him in the car, and they’d head off to church. Sometimes he gave me a nod. Once he tried to talk me into coming along with them. I told him I didn’t want his religion. I told him I was just fine with living the way I was. If I could, I’d let him know now that he was right—there was a peace to be found—but I couldn’t on account he was laying corpse up there at Sivert’s Funeral Home, dead in an unremarkable way (“He just went to sleep one Sunday after service,” my mama told me, “and never woke up.”), and his girl, liquor on her breath, was on her way there.

  “Jesus,” Wink said. “Jackie Frutag. I bet he’d turn over if he could see you drunk and dressed like that.”

  Lily stood up and smoothed her denim skirt over her legs. She tugged at the hem of her T-shirt. She slipped her blistered foot back into that stiletto. “I don’t have to stand here and listen to you talk to me like that.”

  She was a tender-hearted girl. I could tell that. In spite of the liquor and the Betty Boop purse and those stilettos and all her tough talk, she was a girl who’d lost her daddy.

  “Where in the hell you been to be drinking the day of your daddy’s wake?” Wink shook his head at her. “And you a preacher’s kid.”

  She’d been to a party in the country. “Just a party,” she said, like she knew there was no way to explain the logic of a girl going out on a drunk with her daddy just dead, and here she was still a little lit the day of his laying out.

  Wink was disgusted. No matter what he thought of Jackie Frutag and his Bible shaking, he couldn’t get cozy with Lily’s disregard. “You ought to think more of your daddy than that.” He snapped his eye patch back into place. “You ought to have more respect.”

  But it wasn’t like that, I wanted to tell him, and would have only I didn’t want to say it in front of her. She was just at a loss. That’s the story I told myself. She didn’t know how to face the fact that her daddy was dead, so she tried to go on like the world was running its regular course, like there was nothing she had to accept. Trust me, I wanted to say. I know the extremes we’ll go to so we don’t have to face the truth, particularly when that truth is the ugliness of our own living. Eventually, though, we come to the facts. Jackie Frutag was dead. She was his daughter. Drunk or not. Stilettos or not. Short skirt and T-shirt or not. Betty Boop or not. She had a place she needed to be.

  Then she said, “Mama told me if I came to the funeral home, she’d have me arrested.”

  “Now, darlin’,” I said. “Why in the world would she do that?”

  It was a stupid question. I knew it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. How many times had my own mama threatened to call the cops when I was drunk and out of hand? “Benny, I don’t want to do it,” she said one night, when I was in a craze. I’d already ripped the curtains down from their rods, all because I couldn’t stand to be in my own skin and didn’t know any way to say that but by tearing something all to hell. “But I will,” she told me, “if I have to. Believe me, Benny. I surely will.”

  A family is a family up to a point, and I’m lucky that my mama, turning toward her last days now, believes in forgiveness. Since I got sober, I’d heard about Lily’s troubles: the meth, the scrapes with the law for writing bad checks, the shack-up boyfriend in Lawrenceville, the rumor of an abortion. “Such a shame,” my mama said. “And Jackie and Cathy just the best people you could know.”

  It was plain that the Frutag family had their rough spots, and now here we were—Wink and me—in the midst of their drama.

  “I’ve not been the best daughter.” Lily flipped her sunglasses down. “I guess you know that. I’m sorry you’re mixed up in it now.”

  Wink gave me one of those looks again, and I knew he was thinking that if I hadn’t insisted on stopping to give the girl a ride, we’d be long up the road—smooth sailing—with nothing at all like this to deal with. What could we do now? Leave Lily there along the blacktop to walk the last half mile into town? Carry her on to the funeral home and wish her well? Put her back in the Mustang and drive her somewhere, far away from the mess of her life? Whatever we did, we’d be thinking about it later. I knew that for sure.

  A car was coming from the south, and we watched it come. A shiny new Cadillac Escalade—white—one of those 70K-plus SUVs. It slowed down just enough so the people inside—a man and woman I didn’t know—could give us the once-over. The woman, an older lady with her gray hair swept up on her head, actually pointed at us. The man—he was wearing a black beret—turned to follow her pointing finger, and there we were, two men in Carhartt bibs and thermal undershirts. Two redneck men, one of them wearing an e
ye patch and one of them holding a rifle. Two scruffy-assed, potentially psychopathic men, and a girl in a short skirt and stilettos.

  The Escalade went on past, toward town. The brake lights came on once, as if the man was trying to decide whether to stop. Then he sped up and was gone.

  “Come on,” I said, ashamed now on account of those looks from that man and woman, but determined, too, not to let them tell us who we were. “Wink, this lady needs an escort.”

  There comes a time when you have to own up to your life. That’s what I was thinking as we all got back in the Mustang and Wink drove nice as could be into Sumner. We drove past the cemetery and that statue of Jesus with his open arms. We drove past the first houses. They had pumpkins on their front porches, cornstalks gathered up into shocks, bales of straw, scarecrows posed this way and that. The Borla X-pipes on the Mustang guttered along, making that rumble that would wake you from your bed with your heart fluttering if you heard it in the middle of the night. Wink didn’t have any music playing now, so I listened to the somber rumble of those pipes, and I heard Lily draw a deep breath and then let it out as the funeral home came into view.

  Cars were parked up and down the street. The sidewalk was full of people—women taking men’s arms and walking with ginger steps over the uneven concrete and the leaves that had fallen there, children holding parents’ hands and skipping along because they were too young to understand where they were going.

  I knew the feeling. My first day without a drink was a snap. I thought I had clear sailing ahead of me. I thought I could just walk through a door, easy as pie, into a brand new life. The next day taught me I was wrong, and the next one after that, on and on. Then finally I reached a place where the life of a sober man seemed right to me, and little by little I moved away from the drunk man I used to be.

  Then this day came, and Lily flagged us down on the blacktop, and because of her, I called back what it felt like to be about to walk into a group of people and have everyone stare because you were who you were and they were who they were, and the difference was something they’d never let you forget.

  “I can’t go in,” Lily said. She put her face in her hands and started to cry. “I just can’t.”

  Wink pulled the Mustang in behind the Cadillac Escalade that had gone past us on the blacktop. It was empty now, and the man and woman, obviously folks who somehow knew Jackie Frutag, were inside the funeral home paying their respects.

  “This is your daddy’s laying out,” I told Lily. “This is a day that won’t ever come again. You need to be present.” I reached back and snapped my fingers next to her ear. “You need to pay attention.”

  She took her hands away from her face. She dug around in her Betty Boop purse and found the handkerchief I’d given her. She dabbed at her eyes. She leaned across the console, looking for her reflection in the rearview. Wink turned it so she could see. She patted her hair. “All right,” she said, “but I don’t know that I can do this alone.”

  Wink said he wasn’t going in there. He said he hadn’t signed on for anything like that. He bristled for a tick, and then he turned a little shy. He ducked his head and touched a finger to his eye patch, tugging down on the corner, resettling it, and for an instant I felt the kind of life he had. “I’m not dressed proper,” he said.

  “Me either.” I slapped at the legs of my Carhartts. “But you know what, Wink? It doesn’t matter a flip as long as our hearts are in the right place. Even Jackie would tell you that.”

  “Please,” said Lily.

  That’s how we ended up at Jackie Frutag’s laying out, Wink and Lily and me. We walked in big as day. I didn’t care how we looked. I didn’t care what people would say. “Wink,” I’d say later. “It was what we had to do. It was the right thing. I’ll never have doubts about that.”

  They had Jackie in the main visitation room, the long center room with rows of folding chairs and the comfortable armchairs and sofas along the side. The double doors were open, and we stood in the vestibule, looking in at the people who’d come. They stood in little groups or sat on the folding chairs. A few folks were gathered at the casket. I looked for my mama, who I figured would be stopping by, but she wasn’t anywhere I could see.

  Cathy was sitting on a sofa near the casket, her hands in her lap, fiddling with a handkerchief. She had on a dark dress and black stockings. She’d always been a pretty woman, and she’d come to middle age in a fine way. Just a sprinkle of salt in her brown hair, just a few lines around her eyes. Jackie lay in the casket, his eyes closed, his folded hands resting on his stomach.

  There’s nothing quite like the smell of all those fresh flowers carried in for a funeral—all the gladiolus and mums and carnations and roses. There’s that smell of flowers and the murmur of voices and the feel of the carpet under your feet to make you understand that this is a special place, a place where things come to an end.

  “There’s your mama,” I said to Lily, and I nodded my head. “You ought to go up and let her know you’re here.”

  “I’m afraid,” Lily stuffed her sunglasses into her purse. “I won’t know what to say.”

  “That’s easy.” I cupped her elbow and gave her a little nudge forward. I knew from my own missteps that it was best in times like this to come clean. “Just tell her you’re sorry for the hurt you’ve brought her. Go on, darlin’. Just start there.”

  The woman from the white Escalade was signing the guest register. The man, still wearing his beret, stood a few feet away from her, waiting. He wore a black suit and one of those white shirts without a collar, the sort that buttons right at your Adam’s apple. He had on a pair of black loafers with tassels, and he seemed fascinated by them on account he kept tapping first one foot and then the other, staring down at his feet to watch those tassels jounce.

  The woman turned and saw us. She had on dressy black pants and a black wool poncho that tapered down in a vee. Half-frame reading glasses perched on her nose, and she squinted at us over the tops of them.

  “We saw you on the highway,” she said.

  Her husband looked up from his loafers. “Were you having trouble? I wasn’t sure whether to stop.” I knew he was thinking about that Ruger. I knew he was trying to determine whether he should be afraid of us. “No, wait a minute. I know you.” He chuckled. “You’re that man. The one who drove the barstool.” He shook his head. “Lord a mercy. What a fool thing. What in the world were you thinking?”

  Wink took a step toward him. “That’s ancient history, mister.” He poked him in the chest with his finger. “Leave it alone.”

  The man—he was ballsy for his age, I’ll give him that—knocked Wink’s hand away. “Are you some kind of goon?” he said. “Is that why you wear that eye patch? Are you this fellow’s henchman?” He laughed, tickled, I guess, on account he thought he was being a funny man. “I bet you don’t even have a reason to wear that patch. I bet it’s just for show.”

  Wink said, “That’s right. I’m his henchman.”

  He said it in a low, even voice, like that was a word he was used to saying every day of his life. He said it like he was stating a fact and there wasn’t anything funny about it.

  But the man laughed again. A little chuckle. “Henchman,” he said with a smirk, like it was a word that people like him owned and it didn’t belong on the tongues of people like Wink and me.

  Something went through me, then, the feeling I used to get when I’d stagger out of a bar, maybe puke on my shoes or piss myself, or fall over on the street and end up scraped and sore, and I’d hear people laughing, or worse yet, they wouldn’t say a thing—they’d just stare, and when I caught them, they’d look away like I wasn’t right there in front of them. Standing there in that funeral home, I got that old sick feeling of hating myself and the life I had. I let that man do that to me even though I thought I’d squared things and was moving on.

  I took Wink by the arm and pulled him back so I could get up between him and the man. I reached up and tore that be
ret from the man’s head—he was all-over bald—and shoved it into his hands. “Take off your lid, brother. This is a funeral home.”

  That’s what did it, set off a chain of events that went too fast for anyone to stop. If I had to do it over again, maybe I wouldn’t have—maybe I’d have just told that man, no, there’d been no trouble out there on the blacktop, thanks for asking—but there’s no use wondering about it now. What’s done is done, and all I can do is tell it, plain as I can, the last part of this story, the part that’ll haunt me forever.

  The bald man slapped that beret back on his head, and I said, “Maybe you didn’t hear me.” I snatched the beret again, and this time I stuffed it into the bib of my Carhartts. “Do you need a lesson about respect? And another thing, I don’t like the way you talked to my friend.”

  I looked around for Wink, but he was gone. I felt alone, then, hung out to dry, but I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself on account the man was giving me what for.

  “Respect,” he said with a snort. He looked me up and down. “A man like you is lecturing me about respect?” He gave me one of those exaggerated laughs—ha, ha. “Look at you,” he said. “Ridiculous.”

  That’s when I took him by the throat. I’m ashamed of it now. He was an old man who happened to be in the way of everything that ailed me. I took him by the throat, right above the top button of that ridiculous shirt, and I told him to shut up. I told him he didn’t know anything about the sort of man I was.

  Maybe I didn’t either. Maybe that’s what I was about to find out.

  The man’s wife screamed. The people in the visitation room turned to see what was happening in the vestibule.

  Cathy rose from the sofa and saw Lily. The white handkerchief fell from Cathy’s hand, and it was like she was frozen, like she was afraid to move one way or the other for fear that what she was seeing might disappear.

  That’s the last thing I saw before the funeral director put his face in mine. He was a blond-haired man with one of those tanning parlor bake jobs. He tried to loosen my hands from the man’s throat, but I hung on. Then he got me in a headlock. He wrestled me away from the man, and we sort of scrabbled across the vestibule until we knocked into the guest register stand and we both went down.