Lost Cargo

by Hollister Ann Grant

  She was silent for a moment. “But he was somebody important.”

  Travis shook his head. “No, I think he was just a guy.”

  She stared at him. “Just a guy.”

  He nodded. “Just a guy,” he said, and kissed her.

  Monroe shook his head to clear it, touched the lights on the black triangle’s instrument panel, and lifted his eyes to the long windows. Earth spun to the east, and beyond it he could see the cold craters of the moon.

  The black triangle was flying rapidly out of Earth’s orbit.

  He remembered standing barefoot in the dark green grass at his grandfather’s side on a long ago summer evening. The old man was leaning on a cane, telling him the legends of the constellations. He could almost smell his grandfather’s sweat again, and his billowy cotton shirt, and the whiff of sweet pipe tobacco hanging in the sultry Mississippi air. “There’s the Dog Star,” his grandfather was saying, pointing a gnarled finger at the brightest star in the sky. “The big dog is waiting under the table to get the crumbs the twins drop.” Canis Major, Canis Minor, Gemini the Twins, and countless faint stars between the constellations trailed like shining crumbs across the sky.

  The black triangle thrummed.

  Monroe felt someone staring at him and turned to the alien at his side.

  “I can’t remember anything else,” he said, talking to himself as much as to the alien. “Just my grandfather talking about the stars.”

  The alien met his gaze with its cluster of eyes and seemed to nod.

  “I’ve forgotten something really important,” Monroe said. “I was going to do something, or see somebody, and I can’t remember anything about it.”

  The alien’s eyes were full of images. Stars. Leaving the solar system. Heading into the black depths of space, returning the cargo, and then traveling through the spiral arms of the galaxy to a humid, volcanic planet with lush ferns and dense trees with overripe purple fruit. Something was hiding in the ferns. They were flying there to catch a killer. A ruler had asked them to come.

  He met the alien’s eyes. It looked worried and seemed to be trying to reassure him of something. Then he noticed for the first time that it had a wounded arm.

  “You’re telling me someday my memory might come back,” Monroe said. “That I picked up the wrong thing back there. Right now I can’t even remember my name.”

  The alien placed an injured arm on the instrument panel.

  “The Navigator,” Monroe said with slow surprise. “You want me to fly the ship for you.” He ran his hands over the lights on the instrument panel and with a quiet sense of purpose turned toward the stars.

  Chapter 25

  Homecoming

  “Hey, look, Lisa and Ian’s car made the paper,” Travis said. He reached over Lexie’s shoulder to turn the page and winced at the pain in his ribs. The spectacular photos continued inside, wide-angle shots of broken windows and car hoods so dented they were almost folded in half. The familiar Honda sat in all its glory on page A2 with the windshield smashed into a thousand pieces.

  He leaned back to kiss her. They were on the couch in Burke’s sunroom with coffee and a plate of buttered scones on the brass Indonesian table in front of them.

  “You’re going to tell your boyfriend about us,” he said.

  She lowered her gaze. “I thought I’d call him. Text and email seem so cold.”

  “Send him a letter,” he said. “A personal letter would be the way to do it.”

  “I never thought about a letter,” she murmured, picking up the paper with her good hand. “Listen to this. They think an exotic animal ransacked Buchanan House.”

  “There’s Jane Fogg,” he said. “Freelance photographer. She was working for the Belize Audubon Society when she inherited the condo in Washington. Bad luck.”

  “The thing I don’t understand is she joined a birding club and nobody looked for her. You saw the photo. Why didn’t they call her?”

  “Maybe they thought she just dropped out. You know how people are. They probably thought it was none of their business.”

  “And what about her mail? Her mail must have piled up.”

  “Maybe the post office stopped delivering it,” he said.

  “Burke,” Lexie screamed. “Burke! It’s Burke!” She jumped up, scattering the newspaper all over the floor.

  Stunned, Travis stared through the sunroom windows at the stiff figure struggling up the icy sidewalk. Burke reached the top of Macomb Street, glanced around as if he wasn’t sure where he was, and ran a hand over his shabby beard. His once well-groomed hair was creeping down his neck, and his wrinkled suit had dirt on the trousers as if he’d crawled up a wooded embankment.

  When Lexie ran outside in her bare feet, Travis ran after her.

  “Burke,” she cried, grabbing his jacket. “Burke, you’re back!”

  Her brother stared at her with vacant eyes.

  “How did you get out?” she asked, taking his hands. She cradled his arm as if she was his mother instead of his baby sister.

  “Lexie?” Burke asked, as if he hardly recognized her.

  “Yes, it’s me. It’s Lexie. Where did you walk from?”

  He looked around in confusion. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  The first bitter week of November passed into the second. About the time the news of the ransacked building faded from the papers, the missing posters for Monroe Broussard appeared on telephone poles and cafe windows. Travis half-expected to see Monroe stroll up the sidewalk, but the third week of November came and went with no sign of him.

  Most afternoons Travis would show up at Lexie’s house for a strange, wandering conversation with Burke about photography or flowers, nothing difficult and nothing about what had happened to them. Burke seemed frail, as if he’d snapped for all time. He wore pajamas until noon and one day Lexie found him without a coat in the garden, staring at the sky. He was seeing a doctor and hadn’t returned to his office. His business partner came to pick up files again and looked startled to see Travis in the house.

  “Last night I finally asked Burke about the day we found the black triangle,” Lexie said one morning in the Hearth & Hook. “He doesn’t even remember when we went in the woods. I don’t think he’ll ever be the same again.”

  “Give him time,” Travis said, thinking it was a matter of days before Burke returned to his old obnoxious self. “They say that people who’ve been abducted by UFOs always have memory loss.”

  “How do you explain the two of us then?” she asked.

  “I can’t. I can’t explain anything.” He stood up and took a jacket from the back of his chair. “I want to give this to Annie. It’s Monroe’s.”

  They left the Hearth & Hook. Lexie stopped to read a poster about Monroe and looked at Travis as if she was struggling with a decision. At the end of the block they stopped outside Maxwell’s restaurant. A waiter placed menus in front of two tourists who only had eyes for each other. The woman’s glossy black hair fell over her face as she leaned in to whisper to her male companion. In the adjoining store Annie Broussard bent over paperwork.

  “I want to tell Annie what happened,” Lexie said in the voice of somebody on a mission. “We can’t just give her the jacket and leave.”

  Travis stared at her. “You want to tell her that Monroe was abducted by aliens.”

  “Not exactly, no, I don’t, but look at her. She doesn’t have any idea what happened to her husband. It must be torturing her. We should say something.”

  He followed her inside Maxwell’s dark, quiet aisles, hanging back, feeling so uncomfortable that he almost wanted to pretend they weren’t together. Cool winter sunlight fell over bottles of expensive organic wine, pottery, and designer cookware. Annie looked up with a drawn smile and then the light went out of her face when she saw who they were. She wore a shapeless, tea-colored sweater dress that made her seem even more washed out than her lifeless expression did.

  Travis handed her the jacket. “This
is Monroe’s. I’m really sorry about what happened, Annie. I really am.”

  “We’re both really sorry about his disappearance,” Lexie added. She’d come up behind Travis and stood there looking ill at ease.

  “He didn’t disappear,” Annie said.

  Lexie looked at Travis. “We know that, and we want to tell you that—”

  “He left me,” Annie said. “He didn’t want children.” Her eyes slid away from their faces. Snatches of conversation came from the tourist couple in the restaurant, people who had lives together and things to look forward to with each other. A soft bell on the door rang as more people crowded into the store.

  “Excuse me,” a man beside them said to Annie. “I’ll take this.”

  Travis knew Annie was waiting for them to leave. Tell her, a voice in his head urged, but the moment was gone. The whole thing was impossible.

  They went outside and stared at each other.

  “That was just awful,” Lexie finally said. “I mean really awful.”

  “We blew it,” Travis said. He put his arm around her. “You know, maybe it was his fate. Sometimes things just happen. Life just sweeps people away in the middle of everything, no matter how unfair it seems. Tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes. Everything changes in a flash.”

  Lexie turned to face him. “Did you see her? Did you see the way she looks?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Lexie shook her head. “Travis, she had on a maternity dress. She’s pregnant.”

  The posters for Monroe remained through the winter, tattered by the wind. Spring gradually arrived. Swelling buds unfolded in Rock Creek Park. Wild dogwood and redbud blossomed under massive oaks and sycamores that began to grow rich green mantles. Predatory eyes blinked open in dark holes. Migrating birds returned to the woods, birds that would never encounter the photographer who’d once wandered with her camera through the trees behind Buchanan House.

  Blocks away on Porter Street, Travis opened the door of his mother’s house. “It’s me,” he called. “Banana bread delivery service. Anything else you want me to take?”

  His mother gave him a wrapped package and a strange look. “No, but what are you doing with a helmet?”

  “Because I have a bike,” he said, gesturing at the ten-speed on the lawn.

  “That’s not safe, Travis. You’re going to get hit by a car and you’ll have to have plastic surgery to fix your face. You’ll end up with your nose in your forehead and pins in every bone in your body.”

  “I’ll be fine. The bike’s because of the plastic.”

  “What plastic? Plastic surgery?”

  “Plastic trash. The oceans are full of plastic trash and the plastic comes from oil. We’re all addicted to oil.”

  ”I should have guessed.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “I went through that in the seventies with my love beads and my hippie sandals. It lasted about five minutes. I’ve always been a girl who likes money.”

  Travis shook his head and headed for the front door.

  “Let’s see you on that thing when it’s ten degrees outside,” she shouted.

  He met up with Lexie on her bike and cycled across the city along the Potomac River. They kept pace with a boat churning along the bank and then outflanked it as they hit heavy traffic and crossed a massive bridge. Gulls mewed and wheeled over the gray-green water. As they rode past the city’s famous monuments, he thought about the night they’d flown above them all, heading for the stars.

  Ten miles later, they reached Old Town and wandered over the cobblestones, reading the house numbers. The quiet streets smelled of sun-warmed bricks and boxwood. Finally Travis stopped at a two-story townhouse with black wooden shutters and ivy growing up the chimney.

  “This is it,” he said, taking off the helmet.

  When Lisa answered the door in a Bach Festival t-shirt, they crowded inside.

  “How do you like the house?” Lexie asked her.

  “Well, the rooms are on the small side,” Lisa said, “and the ceilings are enormous, but it was built in the 1800s. It’s short on space but long on charm. We just moved in, so step around the mess. All we’ve done this year is play musical houses.”

  They followed her down a narrow hall that opened into a living room filled with boxes. A few books sat on the shelves, but nearly everything else Lisa and Ian owned seemed to be on the floor or shoved up against the walls. Even the chairs and rugs didn’t seem to be in permanent places. A tabby sunning itself in a window turned to look at them.

  “Your cat likes the windowsill,” Lexie said.

  “We’re lucky she’s okay,” Lisa replied, walking into the kitchen. “We lost our other cat when the building was ransacked. The whole place was a wreck. At least the insurance paid for everything, thank God.”

  “We saw the closet,” Lexie said.

  Lisa took down white china cups. “And it took forever to sell the condo because of the stories in the paper. You know, the man who died in the garage.”

  “The animal attack,” Travis said.

  Lisa turned on a Mr. Coffee. “The same animal that attacked Ian. Somebody owned that animal and must have known what happened. I’ll tell you what really gets me. The management must have known something, too, but they wouldn’t say anything because of the liability. I can’t understand what makes some people tick. I really can’t.” She sliced the banana bread and put it on a tray with a bowl of fruit. “But I’m glad we moved. This is a nice area. It’s better for Ian. More peaceful.”

  “How’s he doing?” Travis asked.

  Lisa picked up the tray. “He feels good today. You can see him now. He’s in the garden. We’ll have coffee out there.”

  They followed her down another narrow hall to a set of French doors. The doors opened into a garden with ten-foot brick walls that blocked the view of the street. Ivy covered one wall and hyacinths and daffodils grew against the others. A magnificent cherry tree that had to be as old as the house spread its great limbs in the center of the garden. Gnarled branches in full bloom grew over the walls and dropped their fragile white blossoms on the brick courtyard.

  Ian sat in a wheelchair under the ancient tree. He turned the wheels, revealing the stumps of his amputated legs.

  Travis and Lexie cautiously walked across the bricks to greet him.

  Like Burke, Ian had changed. He had always been a mellow man and had mellowed even more and grown his hair to his shoulders. Travis glanced at the books on a table by the wheelchair. The Bhagavad Gita sat on top of the stack.

  “We like the new house,” Travis began. He didn’t intend to question his brother-in-law about his ordeal, but after they exchanged small talk, Lexie turned to Ian.

  “Can you tell us what you saw in the woods?” she asked him.

  “The angel of death,” Ian said.

  Chapter 26

  Ten Years Later

  “Next week, exams,” Travis told his students. “Be on time, no pencils, practice legibility.” People were getting up, shrugging their coats on and picking up backpacks, not listening as they crowded out the door.

  Fifteen minutes later, Travis reached the bike rack outside the Gettysburg College English Department. Cars with their headlights on crawled around a horse-drawn buggy full of tourists. He cycled past the college, across Lincoln Avenue, through a block of aging mansions the students had turned into rentals and fraternity houses, and reached a country road. The road wound past a meandering stone wall built in the 1700s, through a Civil War battlefield, and into the darkness.

  He cycled uphill in the headlights of a few cars, but then the traffic died out, and he was alone. Lexie and the kids would be back from D.C., so he’d hear about her brother when he got home. He missed Washington, the international flavor, the bookstores and museums and Metro, but it was a better life here. For one thing, he could see the stars at night.

  Three miles later, he turned into the lane that led to their two-hundred-year-old farmho
use, got off the bike, and stood for a moment in the gravel driveway, taking in the night. The sky was so clear the moon’s mysterious rilles and craters stood out in sharp relief. Venus shone over the tree line and Jupiter gleamed in high magnificence against thousands of stars.

  Something was always moving around up there. He kept his eyes to the heavens until he spotted tiny lights blinking near the horizon. A helicopter, he realized with disappointed relief. A few miles away a commercial plane slowly flashed its lights as it flew south.

  He’d searched the sky for UFOs throughout the years, but he’d never seen another one.

  When his neck began to ache from looking up, he turned his gaze to his own humble patch of earth. Moonlight lit up the meadow beyond the lane and the well-worn path he walked every day with Maggie, their gentle collie. Insects called and frogs croaked from the bottom of the hill where a creek meandered through the woods. A steer bellowed from a nearby farm. The faint rush of cars came from the highway, followed by the lonely, wild wail of a train as it raced to distant places.

  The silhouettes of his wife and children moved in the kitchen window. When he opened the screen door, the puppy raced toward him and Maggie nosed his hand.

  Gordy rushed up and grabbed the wagging puppy. “Daddy, Daddy, we named him! We named him Fur Face!”

  His big sister Cassidy joined him on the floor. “No, no, he’s Walter P. Puppy,” she corrected her brother.

  “Cass, let Daddy get inside,” Lexie said.

  Travis closed the kitchen door. “Fur Face is a good name for a dog,” he said. “I vote for Fur Face.” After he kissed Lexie and hugged his children, the children and the dogs moved to the screened porch.

  “Exams next week,” he said. “This house is going to be crazy with the two of us grading papers all night.”

  She put dinner in the oven. “Tell me about it. The Maltese Falcon is on in half an hour. You want to watch it?”

  “Sure. How’s your brother doing?”