The Mutual UFO Network

by Lee Martin

  “Man, it’s cold.” He wrapped his arms across his chest. “Man, I’m almost froze to death.”

  “You don’t have a coat,” Wright said. “Where’s your goddamn coat?”

  Gary unfolded his arms and held them away from his sides as if he were trying to carry something very large. He looked himself over, genuinely surprised that he had no coat. Then he looked up and grinned, that smile of pure amazement Mona remembered so well from when he was a boy and something surprised him. “No coat,” he said. “How about that?”

  “You’d think you were twelve,” Wright said, and Mona, hearing the anger in his voice, knew they were at a point of danger.

  “Better go out and check on the foal,” she said to Wright. “Go on. I’ll bring the colostrum out when it’s thawed.” She felt herself taking charge, knowing it was better to keep Wright and Gary apart until Wright had the chance to get comfortable with the fact that Gary had come home and that he was still in trouble with the meth. She touched Wright’s arm. “Go on,” she said. “Please.”

  Wright did what she asked. Without a word, he put on his insulated coveralls and went out to the barn.

  Whatever happened from that point on, Mona knew that she would always be grateful that he had paid her this favor, the chance to be alone with Gary, to try one more time to say how much she loved him. She would speak kindly, not foolishly like she had that night when Wright had beaten Gary with his fists. She would start at the beginning—already the details were coming to her: the way he followed her though her flower beds when he was a boy, and she taught him the names, salvia, coreopsis, zinnia; the way Wright swung him up on his shoulders and galloped across the yard, neighing, while Gary shouted, “Heigh-ho, Silver,” and the dog, Penny, a black lab, chased after them, her barks echoing. She would remind Gary of the time she had taken a snapshot of him and Penny sitting on the front steps. It was Easter morning, and he had on his first suit and a bow tie. His hair was combed off his forehead and held in place with some of Wright’s Vitalis. He had his arm around Penny’s neck and he was grinning, showing off the gap where he had lost a tooth. They had sent the photo away to a place that enlarged it and then made it into a jigsaw puzzle. Mona still had it, and sometimes she got it out of the closet and put the pieces together, recalling that Easter morning when the sun had been bright and the grass green and there had been just enough of a breeze to ruffle the yellow cups of the daffodils atop their stems.

  She would offer up all this, their simple story which, at its heart, was a story of love, as evidence that there had been a time—and could be again—when the three of them were happy. She would remind Gary of the way he had curried Lucy, his arms moving with such grace that anyone who watched him would know he still felt himself connected to the world. He hadn’t drifted so far way that it would be impossible to save him.

  All this she meant to say, but the only thing that came out of her mouth was a plea: “Let us help you. Gary, please.”

  She knew right away that she had made a mistake; her request was too urgent, too pressing, more of a command than an offer. It was the sort of finger-wagging, no matter how well-intentioned, that Gary had always bridled at.

  “Help me?” He lifted his chin and his nostrils flared. “What makes you think you can help me?”

  “I’m your mother.” She said it plainly, trusting in the simple hope that flesh would answer to flesh.

  “And you think you can fix me?”

  She told him about the dummy foal and how it twitched and barked as if it were a thing lost to itself. She tried to tell the story without passing judgment on him and the way he was letting his life slip away to nothing.

  “You were a good boy,” she said. “You were my good boy.”

  “And now?”

  “Here you are. The world gives us chances, opportunities. You came back for a reason.”

  “I came back because I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble, Moma. More than you know.” He leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “They’re on to me.”

  “They?”

  “The aliens. They’re on my tail.”

  He told the story in a whisper, afraid, he said, that they might be listening. His hushed voice soothed her. It was the sound of wind stirring leaves, of water lapping at stones, and because he was so forthright, so earnest, there was a nobility to his telling that would seduce anyone, Mona thought, no matter how doubting. Listening to him, no one could deny that he was in the midst of something extraordinary and yet completely human, and he was trying his best to explain it, to say it simply and directly and make it something that belonged to anyone who heard it.

  “Do you know why they want me?” he said. “Because I’m magic. I can do magic things.”

  It was the meth talking; Mona knew that. Still she couldn’t help thinking that a long way back she had prepared the way for Gary’s fantasies. She had made his delusions possible. When he was a boy, she told him stories—goodness, where had they come from—stories about an octopus who played four violins at once, or a man so tall that when he walked his head bumped the stars and shook them from the sky. She painted a mural on his bedroom wall, the emerald city of Oz rising up beyond a field of poppies. In the backyard, she hooked an old playground slide to the branch of an oak tree, fashioned oversized bird’s claws from Styrofoam and left them sticking out of the leaves at the slide’s top so it looked like a giant bird, at any second, might come whooshing into view.

  Had she made Gary’s world too large and bright, led him to expect so much that the ordinary, even after he had become a grown man, was never enough? “Meth jazzes things up,” he had told her once. “It makes everything king-sized.” She remembered the names he had for it: Mr. Crystal, crank, tweak, go-fast. There had been times—she had to admit this now—when the drug’s effects had seduced her, too, had brought her into Gary’s euphoria, a small part of her charmed when he was just high enough to be jaunty and full of spirit. Of course, she felt guilty later, but there it was, a true thing.

  “Come over here,” he told her now, and, when she hesitated, he gave her a shy grin. He crooked his finger and motioned for her. “Come on.” He ducked his head, and she felt herself lean toward him. “Moma,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  She never for a moment thought he would. She remembered how on Christmas Eve she had got out of bed for a drink of water and had come upon Gary in the kitchen, standing in the dark at the back door watching the snow drift down past the pole light in the barn lot. There was no wind, and the snow came straight down at a steady, lulling pace. “Waiting for Santa Claus?” she asked him, and he gave her a sheepish grin and told her no, he was just watching it snow. She stayed with him awhile, watching everything outside turn white, and she felt there was no need for words ever again; Gary had kicked the meth and they had put behind them the pleas and threats and desperate attempts. She was content to stand there with him in the middle of the quiet night.

  That was the feeling that was coming over her now. She thought that if she went to him and did what he asked, everything would be all right.

  He had picked up a juice glass from the counter and was holding it out to her. It was a slender, fluted glass with a dainty etching of fruit along its rim: grapes, an apple, an orange, a pear. “Take it,” Gary said, and she held it in her hand, feeling its delicate design. It was the last glass left from a set that had been a wedding present; its mates had been cracked and chipped and broken over the years. Mona hadn’t realized how much this last one meant to her until she held it now, and Gary looked at her and said, “I want you to drop it.”

  “Drop it?” she said. “Are you joking?”

  “I’m magic, Moma. Remember? I’m your good boy.”

  She heard in his voice a mix of plea and challenge, begging her to accommodate him if she dared, and she sensed that if she turned away from him, he would think it the final betrayal, and she would lose him forever. She remembered what, just a few minutes before, she had told him about op
portunities, chances. All they had to do was take them. “Drop it,” she said, trying to get used to the idea. “All right.”

  He would close his eyes, he told her. “Here, hold it close,” he said. “Right here. Right in front of my face.” He pressed his elbows against his rib cage and held his hands apart. “Put the glass directly above my hands, and prepare yourself to be amazed.” He closed his eyes. “Whenever you’re ready. Don’t tell me when you’re going to drop it.”

  For a good while, she watched the way his eyelids quivered—just the slightest tremor, as if he could barely keep them closed, and she thought of all the times she had watched him sleep when he was a boy and given thanks for the mere fact of him. Now she could feel how eager he was for her to drop that glass, how badly he wanted her to do it. She held the glass by its rim, the raised lines of its etching—the roughness of them—her only tether to common sense. Drop the glass? How could she? But there was that flutter in Gary’s eyelids urging her on. “Trust me,” he finally whispered. “Just trust me.” And she let the glass go.

  She couldn’t know, then, what was happening in the barn, that the foal had come out of the Diazepam and had begun to shake. She would know it in just a moment when Wright would run out into the barn lot and call her name. “Mona,” he would say. “Mona, come quick.”

  For the time being, though everything happened in less than a second, she was fascinated with the feeling of there being nothing in her hands; the glass had been there, and then it wasn’t, and she was completely powerless to stop whatever was going to happen next.

  Later, she would consider with amazement how much could be held in a fraction of a second, how many journeys the mind could take. She imagined Lucy sliding down the highway on her side, her legs pawing at the air as she tried to right herself, the white feathering around her hooves blowing back in the wind. That and the way Wright had beaten his fists against Gary’s slender arms, and the way the blood had felt pulsing through Lucy’s umbilical cord, and the sound of the foal barking, and the delicate cups of daffodils on that long-ago Easter morning, and snow falling.

  Then Gary’s hands moved—she felt the air stir—and there he was, holding the glass.

  For a moment, he kept his eyes closed. He held the glass in front of him, two hands grasping it as if he were a child and the glass was full and he was being careful to hold it steady. Mona thought it the most wonderful, the most frightening thing—the blind sense of motion, the quick movement of hands, the glass now safe.

  She felt the way she had when she had tickled the foal’s nostrils and it had begun to breathe—lucky, thankful to be free from disaster. “You caught it,” she said.

  Gary opened his eyes and looked down at the glass. “Magic,” he said. Then he laughed, and Mona was glad for his laughing, for the risk they had taken and then come away clean. He laughed until his shoulders shook and his face was wet with tears, and he wasn’t a man laughing at all, but a misery sounding, something raw and horrible just beyond ecstasy.

  Mona held out her hands to him, wishing there were some way she could take it from him, all the terror. He lifted his arms—in a moment he would collapse against her, sobbing, his arms around her neck, and she would hold him up—but now he was only moving toward her, and the glass was falling from his hands to the floor where it shattered at their feet.

  Months later, in summer, she would tell the story of the foal again and again. “It was the darnedest thing,” she would say. “Yip, yip, yip. Just like a dog.” But she wouldn’t tell the part about Gary; that, she would hold to herself, considering it too precious to let out into the world. She would think of it all through the long months of his visits to the rehab clinic. “I can quit,” he would say. “I just can’t stay quit.”

  She would remember how he went out to the barn with her that winter morning, where they saw the foal shaking on the straw.

  “Would you look at it?” Wright said, and he seemed so helpless. “Would you just look? Poor thing.”

  But Mona was seeing something different, something rich and unexpected—a blessing where she hadn’t thought to find one.

  For Gary had got down on his knees behind the foal and had laid his hands on it. He stroked its face and throat, rubbed his fingers over its lips and gums. He took his time, his hands slow and unhurried. He caressed the foal’s ears, and Mona imagined the way they would feel—as sleek as the beards of irises, the blades of lamb’s ears, the petals of roses. When she saw that the foal was beginning to relax—its head still now, its legs not twitching as badly—she felt something open inside her, some mercy. She felt so small in the presence of this astonishing thing, her ruined boy petting this dummy foal.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” Wright asked.

  “Loving it,” Gary said in a whisper. “Letting it know it isn’t alone.”

  He moved his hand over the foal’s mane, combing his fingers through the hair. He stroked its withers and back. He rubbed its belly, taking care around the vet’s incision for the feeding tube. The foal tipped back its head and nuzzled Gary’s arm. Over the days to come, the sucking reflex would finally come to it, and it would nurse from Lucy. But now it was enchanted with Gary; his touch was the most wonderful thing.

  All Mona could do was watch. Then, in a quiet voice, she asked Wright to please go to the house and fetch the colostrum, and he did.

  While Gary held the foal against him, Mona squeezed the colostrum from its bag and into the feeding tube.

  “There’s broken glass all over the kitchen floor,” Wright said, catching Mona’s eye, asking her with his stare what had happened. She sensed an accusation in that stare, an unspoken belief that whatever followed would be her doing.

  She wanted to say everything she was feeling, but she was dumbstruck. How could she begin to explain that moment in the kitchen when she had dropped the glass and Gary had caught it? How could she tell Wright what she now knew: love was nothing without surrender. She imagined Gary standing there, his eyes closed, his hands at the ready, listening for the faint, almost imperceptible sound of her fingers lifting from the glass and letting go.

  “An accident,” she said to Wright. “Just one of those things.”

  He didn’t press her for anything more, and she was thankful for the fact that the three of them were together, gathered around the foal. They were kneeling in the straw the way the Clydes did sometimes in open pasture when they sensed a dip in air pressure, a rising of the wind, and they braced themselves for changing weather. The foal laid its head across Gary’s legs and closed its eyes. Mona watched the rise and fall of its chest, its measured breathing responding to the gentle motion of Gary’s hand. It was all so simple, she thought—this touching—and she wished they could stay there, never have to move, never have to rise up and face the rest of their lives.

  She told herself there were days and days ahead of them—days and weeks and months and years—time enough for anything to happen. Anything, she thought, and a shiver passed over her. The word was so lovely, and yet so frightening. It lay against her, weighty and splendid, a promise alive and trembling at the heart of ruin, waiting for her to claim it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank the editors at the journals in which these stories first appeared:

  “The Mutual UFO Network” and “The Dead in Paradise” in Shenandoah; “Love Field” and “A Man Looking for Trouble” in Glimmer Train and The Best American Mystery Stories, 2015; “Belly Talk” in The Southern Review; “Bad Family” in The Nebraska Review; “White Dwarfs” in Another Chicago Magazine; “Real Time” in Cimarron Review; “Drunk Girl in Stilettos” in The Georgia Review; “Dummies, Shakers, Barkers, Wanderers” in The Kenyon Review.

 

 

 
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