Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

by Brad Watson

  “Hot damn,” I said. “Are you crazy?”

  “I’m not crazy, man,” he said. “I’m just drunk.”

  Then he got thoughtful again, uncorked the bottle, and dropped the cork to the floor. He nodded at the wedding band I still wore on my finger.

  “You’re a married man,” he said. “Where’s your wife?”

  “My wife’s dead. If it’s any your business.”

  He cocked his head and looked up at the ceiling. I thought maybe he really was nuts.

  “Your wife ain’t dead,” he finally said. “I know your wife, seen her up here with you many a time. I saw her yesterday, hanging out with some strange-looking dudes down at the Triangle, eating some of them Chik-Steaks.”

  I felt myself flush, and my mouth flooded with saliva like I was going to throw up. I went over to the window again and spat.

  “Just get out,” I said.

  There was a half inch of bourbon left in the bottle. Crews drank it down and then walked to the door. He stopped, turned around.

  “My wife,” he said, “has been dead for nine years. Heart attack. Only forty-seven years old.” I looked at him, and he looked back at me as if he’d never had a drop to drink in his life, and calm. “I don’t need to manufacture no grief,” he said then, and walked out.

  I felt pretty rotten then. How to say it, except straight-up. My wife wasn’t actually deceased.

  She was an oddly pious woman I’d married because, I suppose, we were both studying public relations at the same school, took almost all the same classes, and just didn’t really know anyone else. We were shy and awkward and it was just easier to be around someone as painfully self-conscious as yourself.

  She was pious, but I always thought there was another side to her trying to get out somehow. In bed she cussed like a Marine and got crazy, which was fine, but she’d cry about it afterward, and she might even ask God to forgive her, lying there in the bed naked next to me. It was like she’d been possessed and then left behind in her pale, timid shame.

  She was on her scooter one day, making a quick trip to the post office, when she hit a slick spot, went down, and banged her head pretty hard on the pavement. She’d left her helmet at the office. When she woke up four days later, she was a different person. She was not the woman I had married. That would have been all right with me, to tell the truth. I’d been having some serious second thoughts. But it wasn’t all right with her.

  She said I was a nice man but kind of boring. She said she was thinking of moving in with Majestic 12.

  I said, “Who’s that?”

  “Well, they’re artists. Painters,” she said, leaning her head to one side and sticking a finger in her ear. The finger in the ear was a peculiar habit she’d picked up since the accident. As if she were listening to something inside there, receiving signals about what she should do or say next.

  She took the finger out of her ear.

  “They live in this big Victorian house up on the ridge south of town, by that old radio tower. It’s kind of like a commune. I mean, you don’t have your own room or anything, you just sleep where you want to, with whoever you want to, or by yourself, it’s up to you. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “I mean,” she said, holding her arms out and shaking her fingers like they were wet, “none of this bullshit.”

  She put the one finger back into her ear and wandered off into her studio, which was empty because she’d taken all of her old paintings, of puppies, quaint storefronts, and still-lifes of fruits and flowers, to the dump.

  And she moved in with Majestic 12. They smoked a lot of dope, painted with oils, were obsessed with alien visitation and abduction, and rode Harley-Davidsons. After weeks of trying to coax her home with letters, phone calls, knocking on the door to the big Victorian and being turned away by one Majestic 12 or another, I gave up. I didn’t even have the heart to file for a divorce. I just kind of pretended to myself that she’d died.

  And that’s the way I’ve left it.

  AFTER CREWS LEFT I drove to Midway, an all-night bootleg joint, bought a bottle of sour mash, and hit the streets. I was working some things out of my head, and it wasn’t pretty. I saw a group of teenage girls walking home from the bowling alley, and whistled and yowled at them from my car. I took a pellet pistol that for some reason I had in the glove compartment and shot out a couple of streetlights in a new subdivision north of town. I’d never smoked but I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes from a convenience store and chain-smoked them as I drove around, coughing and slugging the whiskey. I got out into the country and saw a big vegetable garden, with tall corn and bean vines strung on poles, glowing in the moonlight beside a house, and I steered the car into the driveway and across the yard and mowed down the whole little crop and got back to the road and hauled ass. Then I felt so bad about that little garden that, for the rest of the night, I just drove around and drank the whiskey, trying to forget.

  At four a.m. I was so crocked I didn’t know where I was and got lost. I’d had nearly a whole bottle of whiskey and all my reckoning finally collapsed. I ended up in front of my house somehow, jamming the spare key into the lock, the pellet pistol hanging from my other hand. I completely forgot about the enormous woman I had rented to, forgot she was living there at the time.

  I was still on automatic, moving through the living room with my free hand outstretched in the dark, my eyes nearly swollen shut with booze, sleepwalking toward the bed fully clothed. But I’d fallen just halfway to where the mattress should have been when I hit something soft but firm, bounced off onto the floor, and rolled over onto my back, dazed—only to see this massive shape blot out the moonlight coming through the bedroom window. She screamed, a high-pitched one for such a large woman. Then I screamed, too, to let her know she was not the only hysterical person in the house, and plinked off a pellet at her before I could think about it.

  She paused, then screamed again, and didn’t stop until she had pulled a giant Navaronnean handgun from the bed-table drawer and fired off a deafening round. I dove for the hallway just as she fired again, taking off a hunk of doorjamb above my shoulder. She screamed again and I heard some thing wrench and then a kind of twanging. I lay tense for a moment, then turned around to see her broad behind framing the area where the lower half of the bedroom window had been. She’d tried to dive out through the screen.

  I ran around to the back door but when I stuck my head out she fired at me from her hanging position. The bullet popped into the asbestos siding of my next-door neighbor’s house.

  “Miss Duke!” I shouted. “It’s Conroy, your landlord. Don’t shoot.”

  “Conroy! Oh, God.”

  I peeked around the doorjamb and saw that her arms were hanging limp, and she was kind of bouncing, her arms jiggling around, the big gun still clutched in one hand.

  “Help me,” I heard her whisper. Her head hung down, her mussed hair all around it, nearly touching the dew-laced grass. I pushed and heaved at her, she grunted and pulled, until finally she came free and sat back onto the floor. She shook her head and wiped her eyes.

  “Oh, my God,” she said in a soft voice. She looked up, saw me, seemed confused for a moment, and then she slowly raised the revolver again and pointed it at my head there in the open window.

  I ducked just as it went off, over my head and into the little stand of trees behind the house. I scrambled to the car and peeled out. Twice more I heard the gun’s Caroom! slam and echo into the night, and soon after the distant wail of sirens.

  When I cruised past the house the following afternoon her car was gone and the front door stood wide open. Inside, dressers were torn apart, the closets in disarray. A trail of parachute-like smocks led to the bedroom and I walked on them back and forth. They were printed and embroidered with little-girl things, teddy bears and Raggedy Anns and bluebirds, plantation waifs in sunbonnets, all feminine and soft.

  I moved back in.

  MISS DUKE FILED CHARGES and I
spent a few hours at the police station with a lawyer, working things out. She had no permit for the pistol she’d shot at me, and I certainly didn’t want to press charges of attempted murder, so her lawyer persuaded her to drop the charges of breaking and entering and assault. The pellet I’d shot at her had sunk a couple of inches into one of her arms. I paid for her outpatient surgery to have it removed.

  A few weeks after it was all over, I made the mistake of spilling my heart to a lady down the street, a nosy old widow named Mrs. Nash. She’d been bringing me jars of fresh homemade soup and chili ever since I’d come home, and she seemed very nice and concerned, so one day I broke down and told her everything. The worst was that I’d confessed I was about to die of being lonely, that I wished I just had a good friend, and so on. After that, people on the street just looked away when I drove by, and their awful children got a kick out of calling me on the phone. It would ring in the middle of the night and when I answered some kid would be on the other end.

  “Hello, is this Mr. Lonely?”

  “Who?”

  “Is this Mr. Lone-lee?”

  “No, this is not Mr. Lone-lee.”

  “You must be lonely,” said the boy’s voice.

  “You kids cut it out,” I said.

  “Oh, please don’t be lonely.”

  Mrs. Nash told them everything. The phone rang one night about twelve-thirty and I answered it without speaking.

  “Hey, mister, there’s a naked fat woman in your front yard and she has a gun.”

  I was furious.

  “I’ll kill you,” I shouted into the phone.

  Even so, I crept to the window and peeked through the drapes. The shrubs and trees stood silvery black in the evening, very still. Something small and quick darted over the lawn, and I wanted to run out there, run it down, and rip it to pieces.

  I went to the library and saw a group of Harley choppers outside the door, but didn’t think anything of it. Inside, I was thumbing through a book when, glancing up, I saw the face of my wife peering at me from the other side of the shelf. She walked around and stood there staring at me. She wore a full set of tight black motorcycle leathers. Her hair was jet-black and cut in a pageboy. A big gold nose ring, the kind they actually used to put onto bulls, hung down over her upper lip. A pair of heavy, strapped, chrome-buckled boots came up to her knees.

  “Hey, Conroy,” she said. “You don’t look so good.” Then she smiled and leaned on the bookshelves. “How’s the old homeplace?”

  “I don’t know you,” I said. I put the book back in the same place I’d taken it from and walked out.

  On my way home Majestic 12 came out of nowhere and roared past me on their Harleys. I saw a slim black leather-clad arm flip a wave at me from a quivering pattern of red taillights that disappeared into the night like a spaceship.

  THINGS HAPPEN.

  Last night Sylvia and I were going at it, in the bedroom for once. But she lost her head, forgot where she was. Her eyes were closed, and she was humming to herself, and I could see her eyes darting back and forth behind her pale bruised lids. I was a little mesmerized. But then something emptied my mind and left everything quiet.

  I lifted my head and looked at her, but she didn’t notice. She was murmuring, “Pedro,” in a kind of whispering moan. “Pedro, baby, oh, man. Pedro.”

  I couldn’t go on.

  She went still and opened her eyes. “What’s the matter?”

  “Who’s Pedro?” I said.

  I could tell she felt awful about it.

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Conroy. I didn’t mean it. I just spaced out.”

  I felt like an idiot for caring.

  “Oh, fuck, Conroy,” Sylvia said. “I mean, that’s not even his real name, man.”

  “What?”

  “I mean”—she kind of wiggled her hands—“it’s just a pet name.”

  “What’s his real name, then?”

  She sat there a moment looking at the opposite wall, then shrugged.

  “Wayne. I haven’t seen him in, like, weeks, I guess.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

  I rolled over and looked at the darkened bedroom ceiling for a while.

  “I’m really sorry, Conroy,” she said then. “Don’t be upset.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry about Wayne.”

  It took me hours to go to sleep. Bad dreams kept me restless. They were all dreams in which I said the wrong things, did the wrong things, dreams in which I forgot the names of people I’d known for a long time.

  Early this morning I got up and came out here with my lawn chair and my flask. An hour or so later I heard her voice behind me.

  “Well, goodbye, then,” she said. “I’m going.”

  I raised a free hand, waved it. I heard her retreating footsteps in the grass.

  I went back into the house, just to look around, really. I walked around the den for a minute, then into the kitchen, where I washed a dish. Then to the bedroom, where I found my bed neatly made up, the pillows fluffed. It was the first time I’d seen my bed made up since I didn’t know when. Since I’d shown the house to Miss Duke, I suppose. I went into the bathroom, pressed my bare feet on the cool tiles, looked around. I noticed that Sylvia had stolen all my shampoo and soap. I looked into the closet. Half my towels and wash rags were gone. I thought for a moment, then went back into the bedroom and looked at the neatly made-up bed. Sure enough, my wife’s old quilt was gone. I went through the kitchen and the living room. Something was missing from one of these rooms, I knew. But I still haven’t figured out what.

  I went back out to my lawn chair and I’ve been sitting here all day, listening. When I close my eyes the world seems full of sound. Traffic on the highway half a mile away. Children shouting on a playground at the neighborhood school. Dogs barking to other dogs, those dogs barking back. Telephone ringing in a house somewhere. The knockity-knock-knock of a roofing crew. Birds scratching in the shrubbery for grubs.

  A breeze drifts through the live oak leaves, cooling the sweat on my burning skin, dropping me into the kind of sleep that’s deep as death, or the underworld, a whole other life you never knew you were living. It was nice, for a while. Only the sound of the blood rustling quietly like the ocean in my veins.

  Terrible Argument

  ONCE THERE WERE A MAN, A WOMAN, AND THEIR DOG. Neither the woman nor the dog had ever conceived, so there were no babies or pups. The man and woman drank heavily and often had terrible arguments late in the evening, and raged back and forth at one another for an hour or more, their fights often spilling out of the house and into the yard. If they had guests, which was rare, they tried not to argue but usually failed, and then they would argue in loud hissing stage whispers that inevitably became loud hushed gargling voices like people being strangled. They were sure that the guests heard almost every terrible word they said to one another: the threats to leave, the vows of retribution and declarations of hatred, the sock-footed stompings in and out of the room, and the openings and furiously careful closings of the front door as one or the other went outside to smoke or pace around in frustration and rage.

  More than once, as he stomped out to his car intending to leave her to her own insane devices, she leapt onto his back and rode him around like a fierce, undisengagable monkey until he fell down and promised that he wouldn’t drive away. She demonstrated a frightening strength when she was enraged, and all he could do in the face of this was submit. Once, he managed to throw her off in a jujitsu-type move onto her back, throwing his own back out, and she was so astonished, outraged, and incredulous that she made him fetch the cordless phone from inside and called the police as she lay in the yard. When the police came, they argued so vehemently over who had attacked and hurt whom that the officers put them into the caged back seats of separate squad cars until they calmed down and then made them go back inside their home and behave.

  Sometimes their lives entered less disturbing or fe
arful periods of relative calm. These times were most often disturbed in small ways, incrementally, subtly and insidiously cracking the door to more serious arguments, awakening their hibernating ires. They might argue about the salt and pepper shakers, gone empty again, how the one never bothered to refill them and so the other always did. They argued about the recycling, how the one never bothered to take it to the recycling center. They argued about who failed to remove their hair from the shower drain sieve. About who snored or farted, frequently, in sleep. About who left the front door unlocked in the night. Who left the car windows down when it rained. They fought over the dog, over who loved the dog more or less, or walked it less, or yelled at it when angry, or did not love it, or traumatized it by yelling at the other, not at the dog. They fought over who had wanted the dog in the first place. About who picked up more of the dog’s turds from the yard. Who had let the dog chew on the battery whose acid had eaten away part of its tongue. Who’d let it eat the mothballs that had nearly vaporized its anus.

  For her part, the dog seemed traumatized by their constant fighting. She had a put-upon look on her face as if she wished they would just settle down. She had been a shelter rescue and although they knew nothing of her past they assumed it had not been good. She was an exceedingly good-natured, gentle dog, with big brown eyes she would level on them as if they were the saddest creatures in the world. But she was nervous, a little neurotic, and in truth such outright conflict increased her anxiety to the point where she had become a compulsive eater. In addition to the battery and the mothballs, she had eaten a mole, a chipmunk, a piece of rope from a corner in the garage, the dried corpse of a mouse from the same place, a pine cone, several sticks of various sizes, a bunch of roses from the garage garbage pail, cat turds, dog turds, coyote turds, squirrel turds, a pair of severed crow’s feet, a songbird’s skull and beak, several small stones and one larger sedimentary rock, a rubber part from a motor mount, a valuable 1924 buffalo nickel, a utilities overdue notice, a box of wooden matches, a hot sausage right off the grill, many fleas, and of course hundreds of pounds of kibble. She shat approximately twice a day, in the best possible accessible places in the yard or the park or out on the prairie. When she was on long trail walks she liked to shit on top of tiny shrubs, no one knew why.