Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

by Brad Watson

  Well, no, said one of my cousins. It was never lost, not that I know of.

  She never told you that Sophie had taken it?

  No, my cousin said. She never said that to me.

  I could have sworn she’d told me the recording was missing, stolen, possibly destroyed out of spite. But even the memory of her telling me that comes from so long ago, now, that I can no longer be sure.

  OUT AT THE Alamo Plaza’s pool next day there were a few people, a woman with two toddlers down in the shallow end, a few grown-ups in loungers along the apron. The big fat man who’d been jumping and doing cannonballs the night before was again on the diving board, leisurely bouncing and looking around, as if this were simply his place. He bounced easily, the board bending beneath his great weight and riding him slow as an elevator back up again. His toes hung over the end, his arms hung at his sides, and he nodded to us as we walked up.

  Across the highway the beach was empty. The Sound lay flat and brown in the sun’s glare.

  Morning, he called out to our mother. She smiled and nodded back. Morning, sir, our father said in his clear baritone sales voice. From my spot at the three-foot mark, I called good morning to the man, too, and he called back with a little salute and a wave, Morning, young man.

  Standing there bouncing.

  A long, big-boned woman lying flat out on a lounger with a broad hat over her face called to him. The voice came from her, but you couldn’t see her face. The hat didn’t move. Harry, she said to the man. Don’t go splashing all over creation.

  The man looked at her, still bouncing, then looked at me and smiled and winked. He walked back to the base end of the board and turned around.

  Harry, the woman said.

  The big man rose on his toes. It looked comical, the action of a much lighter, fitter man. He spread his arms like a ballerina, ran tiptoeing down to the end of the board, came down heavily, and the board slowly flung him up. He came down in a cannonball, leaning in the woman’s direction, and sent up a high sheet of water that drenched her pretty good. She sat up and adjusted the wet floppy hat on her head. Harry swam to the pool’s edge and grinned at Hal and me. I looked at our mother. She stared at the man and woman, her mouth cocked into a curious smile. She saw me looking and picked up a magazine and started reading it. Our father sat in a deck chair in his swim trunks, his elbows on his knees like a man watching a baseball game. A can of Jax beer rested on the concrete apron between his white feet.

  I heard a loud thawongabumpbump and a broad shapeless shadow darted onto the dimpled surface of the pool. There again was Harry suspended in all his bulk high in the air, a diving mule pushed off the circus platform. At the last second he tucked his head and rolled over onto his shoulders, sending an arc of water toward a mother and her two toddlers in the shallow end. They screwed up their faces and recoiled. When the water settled they all three turned, dripping, to stare at Harry, the mother annoyed, the children bewildered.

  That’s enough, Harry, the woman said. She’d snatched her hat off and I saw she was wearing a man’s heavy black sunglasses, like our father’s, and her wide mouth was painted bright red. Her hair was frizzled and graying.

  All right, sorry, Harry said.

  But as soon as the woman had pulled the hat brim down over her eyes, Harry was up and tiptoeing back to the diving board. He made shushing gestures to all of us, a finger to his lips. At the shallow end, the mother hustled her two toddlers from the pool, grabbed up their things, and headed for their room.

  Harry was poised at the base of the board. He spread his arms, rose on his toes, and pranced down its length. He swung his arms above his head, scrunched his big body down like a compressed spring. The board bent almost to the surface of the water, seemed to hesistate there, then cracked and split down its length and tossed Harry awkwardly into the air.

  He hit the water with a loud, flat smack. The split board bounced a couple of times and lay still. Harry floated motionless as the rocking water lapped the edges of the pool. A little scarlet cloud bloomed around him. Then he jerked into a flurry of motion. His head rose up and he bellowed, then sank down again.

  The big woman shouted and stood up from her chair, her hat tumbling into the grass. Two men standing poolside leapt into the water. They managed to subdue Harry and pull him to the pool’s edge. The woman stood rigid, watching them, her mouth hanging open. Then she closed it with a clap and her face took on what looked like a long-practiced expression of disgust. Other people came and helped drag Harry out onto the concrete apron. He made a groaning, desperate sound. Blood leaked from a wound on his foot. One of the men who’d helped rescue Harry from the pool pulled a car around, and he and the other man helped Harry into it. The woman got into the back seat beside Harry and they drove away, to the hospital I suppose.

  I walked over to the diving board, leaned down low, and looked at the split board, its two pieces splayed, blond splinters sticking out like bleached porcupine quills. Hanging there jammed tight in the split, a small blunt wedge drained of color, was what appeared to be Harry’s little toe.

  It was fantastic. It made the whole trip.

  OUR MOTHER WAS HORRIFIED, of course. One year, a drowning. The next, a dismembered toe. Not so disturbing as a death, but awful in its own way. I think it settled deeply into her subconscious, an augury somehow of vague misfortune looming.

  For our father, who was her opposite in terms of being able to live in the moment instead of living each present moment with a terrible awareness of the past and a foreboding sense of the future, the accident had a different effect. He would remember it with a kind of morbid humor, closing his eyes and pursing his lips and shaking with silent, wincing laughter. Ooo, shit, that had to hurt, he’d say. I still remember the time, riding with him in the car when I was a boy, and I had my arm out the passenger-side window. He glanced over and told me to take my arm into the car, that he’d heard about a man riding along with his arm out the window who was sideswiped by another car that took his arm right off at the shoulder. Ever since, I’ve never been able to leave my arm out a car window if there are other cars present within anything close to striking distance. I live with a combination of my mother’s morbid fear of danger, and my father’s irreverent appreciation of it.

  ANYWAY, YEARS LATER, I wasn’t even sure if the incident with the poor man’s toe had really happened. It had been so long ago, and I had been so young, and I hadn’t thought about it in some time. But I had been remembering it and trying to recall the details when I had the disturbing thought that I may have invented it all. I asked my mother if she remembered it. She was eating a piece of toast at the breakfast table, so I suppose my timing wasn’t good. She stopped chewing, as if stomach acid had suddenly boiled into her esophagus, and her eyes took on that vaguely alarmed and unfocused look she got when she was presented with something horrible. But then it passed, and she swallowed.

  It was his big toe, she said.

  I found that hard to believe and said so. I asked was she certain.

  I’m certain, she said. That’s what made it so horrible.

  I saw my father a couple of weeks later, though, and put the question to him. I told him what my mother said. He scoffed.

  It wasn’t his big toe, he said, that would’ve been impossible. It was his little toe.

  I didn’t say anything.

  It’s just like your mother to make it into something worse than it actually was, he said.

  SO, WE WENT BACK home that very afternoon of the accident, and a storm had passed through. A tornado had hopped right over our neighborhood, which was in a low area between two modest ridges, and had snapped off the tops of several tall pines. One of the pine tops lay in our backyard, another in the street in front of our house. The air was gray and you could smell the spent, burned residue of destructive energy in the air, feel it prickling the skin, as if we were inside a big discharged gun barrel. Green leaves and small limbs were strewn across yards and in the street and on rooftops.
A telephone pole leaned toward the ground, the wires on one side taut, those on the other side loose and hanging low toward the damp grass. Everything was wet and smoking.

  Some incredible violence had occurred, and yet almost everything remained intact. There sat our little brick ranch-style house. There, the pair of mimosas in the yard where I crouched concealed in the fernlike leaves, dreaming of Tarzan. There, the azaleas beneath mine and Ray’s bedroom window where every year our mother took an Easter photo of her boys, our bow ties and vests and hair flipped up in front. There, the picture window of the living room we used only at Christmas or when she and our father hosted their supper club. There, the inexplicable everyday, the oddness of being, the senseless belonging to this and not that. I was barely able to contain myself. Something in me wished it had all been blown to smithereens.

  Noon

  THE DOCTORS HAD DELIVERED BETH AND TEX’S ONLY child stillborn, in breech, and the child had come apart. Their voices seemed to travel to her from a great distance and then open up quietly, beside her ear. She felt the strength leave Tex’s grip on her hand as if his heart had stopped, the blood in his body going still. She looked up at him, but he turned away. Then the drugs had taken over, what they’d given her after so much reluctant labor, and she drifted off.

  They allowed the funeral home to take their child, and to fix her, though they’d never had any intention of opening the casket or even having a public service. And neither did they view the man’s work at all, despite his professional disappointment. He understood they wouldn’t want others to view her, but seemed to think they’d want to see her themselves. He was a soft and pale supplicant, Mr. Pond, who kind of looked like a sad baby himself, with wet lips and lost eyes. They explained, as best they could, that they’d wanted only to have her as whole again as she could possibly be, never having been whole and out in the world. But Beth couldn’t bear to see it, to see her looking like some kind of ghoulish doll. They’d named her Sarah, after Beth’s mother, who’d died the year before. Beth found a fading black-and-white photograph of her mother as an infant on a blanket beside a flowering gardenia bush. She placed it in her wallet’s secret compartment. This was what her Sarah would have looked like.

  THEY’D MADE HIM DECIDE what to do, and he’d decided to save her more risk. She made him tell her about it, next day. He stood beside her hospital bed, hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, hair lopsided from sleep.

  “It was getting a little dangerous for you,” he said. “It was either pull her out somehow or cut you, and they asked me what we wanted to do. You were kind of out of it.

  “I understood what they meant,” he said. “You were having some problems. It was dangerous. I said to go ahead and pull her out, to get it over with as quickly as they could.

  “I was afraid for you,” he said. “Something in the doctors’ voices made me afraid. I told them to get it over with and to hurry. So they did.”

  What he was saying moved through her like settling, spreading fluid.

  “I don’t want to dwell on it,” Tex said after a moment. He sounded angry, as if he were angry at her for wanting to know. “There wasn’t anything they could do. She was already gone and it was an emergency. There was nothing anyone could do about that.”

  He stood there looking at the sheet beside her as if determined to see something in it, words printed there in invisible ink.

  “She broke,” she whispered. Her throat swollen and too tight to speak.

  He looked at her, unfocused. She understood he could not comprehend what he’d seen.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “She was already gone.”

  “It means something,” she said. “It means the world is a horrible place, where things like that can happen.”

  They went home. They arranged the funeral and attended it with his parents and her father, who came with her two sisters. No one had very much to say and everyone went home that afternoon.

  In the house over the next few weeks they seemed to walk through one another like shadows. One night she woke up from a dream so far from her own life she couldn’t shake it and didn’t know herself or who slept beside her. A long moment of terror before she returned to herself with dizzying speed. She lay awake watching him as calm was restored to her bloodstream, quiet to her inner ear. Her heartbeat made an aspirant sound in her chest. She gently tugged the covers from beneath his arms. Their skins were a pale, granular gray in the bedroom’s dim moonlight, which failed in silent moments as if an opaque eyelid were being lowered over its surface. She gathered his image to her mind swiftly, as if to save it from oblivion. But he seemed a collection of parts linked by shadows in the creases of his joints, pieces of a man put together in a dream, escaping her memory more swiftly than she could gather it in. In a moment he would be gone.

  JULIE VERNER AND MAY MILLER had lost theirs, too, at about the same time. Miscarriages. They were all in their mid-to late thirties, friends for close to ten years now, ever since they were young and happily childless.

  It was May’s first, but Julie and Beth had each lost two, so they were like a club, with a certain cursed and morbid exclusivity. Their friends with children drew away, or they drew away from the friends. They speculated about what it was they may have done that made them all prone to lose babies, and came up with nothing much. They hadn’t smoked or drunk alcohol or even fought with their husbands much while pregnant. They’d had good obstetricians. They hadn’t even drunk the local water, just in case. It seemed like plain bad luck, or bad genes.

  On Friday nights the three of them went out to drink at the student bars near the college. They smoked, what the hell. Julie smoked now anyway but Beth and May smoked only on Fridays, in the bars. They smoked self-consciously, like people in the movies. Saturdays, they slept in and their husbands went golfing or fishing or hunting. Tex was purely the fisherman, and he would rise before dawn and go to the quiet, still lakes in the piney woods, where he tossed fluke-tailed artificial worms toward largemouth bass. When he returned in the afternoons he cleaned his catch on a little table beneath the pecan tree out back. He kept only those yearlings the perfect size for pan-frying in butter and garlic. On days he didn’t fish he sometimes practiced his casting in the backyard, tossing lures with the barbs removed from their hooks toward an orthopedic donut pillow Beth had bought and used for postpartum hemorrhoids.

  On the mornings he went fishing Beth rose late into a house as empty and quiet as a tomb. Despite the quiet she sometimes put in earplugs and moved around the house listening to nothing but the inner sounds of her own breathing and pulse. It was like being a ghost. She liked the idea of the houses we live in becoming our tombs. She said to the others, out at the bar:

  “When we died they could just seal it off.”

  Julie and May liked the idea.

  “Like the pharaohs,” May said.

  “Except I wouldn’t want to build a special house for it,” Beth said. “Just seal off the old one, it’ll be paid for.”

  “Not mine,” May said. She tried to insert the end of a new cigarette into a cheap amber holder she’d bought at the convenience store, but dropped the cigarette onto the floor. She looked at the cigarette for a moment, then set the holder down on the table and pushed her hands into her hair and held her head there like that.

  “And they shut up all your money in there, too,” Beth said. “Put it all in a sack or something, so you’ll have plenty in the afterlife, and they’d have to put some sandwiches in there. Egg salad.”

  “And your car,” Julie said, “and rubbers, big ones. Nothing but the big hogs for me in the afterlife.”

  “Is it heaven,” May said, “if you still have to use rubbers?”

  “Camel,” Beth said.

  “Lucky,” May said.

  Julie doled them out. When they were in the bars, when they smoked, it was nonfiltered Camels and Luckies.

  THEY WENT TO THE Chukker and listened to a samba band, the one with the hig
h-voiced French singer. Beth danced with a student whose stiff hair stood like brown pampas grass above a headband, shaved below. Then a tall, lithe woman she knew only as Gazella cut in and held her about the waist as they danced, staring into her eyes.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Beth.”

  Gazella said nothing else, but gazed frankly at her without flirtation or any other emotion Beth could identify, just gazing at her. Beth, unable to avert her own gaze, felt as exposed and transparent as a glass jar of emotional turmoil, as if the roil and color of it were being divined by this strange woman. Then the song stopped. Gazella kissed her on the cheek, and went back to the bar. Watching her, Beth knew only one thing: she wished she looked like Gazella, a nickname bestowed because the woman was so lithe, with a long neck and an animal’s dispassionate intelligence in her eyes. Powerful slim hips that rolled when she moved across the room. And like an animal, she seemed entirely self-reliant. Didn’t need anyone but herself.

  She looked around. The pampas grass boy was dancing with someone else now, a girl wearing a crew cut and black-rimmed eyeglasses with lenses the size and shape of almonds. Beth went back to the table. Julie and May raised their eyebrows, moved them like a comedy team, in sync, toward Gazella. May had the cigarette holder, a Lucky burning at its end, clamped in her bared teeth. Then the two of them said the name, Gazella, in unison, and grabbed each other by the arm, laughing.

  Beth said, “I was just wondering when was the last time y’all fucked your husbands?” May and Julie frowned in mock thought. May pulled out her checkbook and they consulted the little calendars on the back of the register. “There, then,” Julie said, circling a date with her pen.