Mr. Spaceman

by Robert Olen Butler

  “I think we need another place at the table,” I say. “The one who serves us this meal shall sit at my right hand. My wife Edna Bradshaw.”

  Edna squeezes my hand. “Oh you spaceman. I guess I can manage. I’ll get another chair.”

  “I’ll help you,” Viola says.

  “Thank you, Sweetie,” Edna says, and the two women move off.

  I approach the table.

  Citrus starts to move to the left of my chair, but Lucky is there and he flashes his place card at her.

  Citrus’s black lips tighten and she lowers her face.

  “It is all right,” I say to her. “You are near me wherever you sit.”

  She looks up at me. “Of course,” she says. “Forgive the weakness of my faith.”

  I hesitate, trying to translate this observation. There is some body of knowledge standing between her and me now and I am sad for that, sad that I cannot speak to her and hear her directly. Before I can reply, she moves off to her place around the table.

  Some of the guests are standing, some are sitting. “Please,” I say, motioning to the chairs.

  “This is all real strange, you know,” says Trey.

  Before I can answer, Citrus leaps in. “Don’t you realize we’re chosen people?”

  “Chosen for what?” Digger asks, though he does not sound frightened.

  “He loves us,” Citrus says.

  And I am struck motionless, where I stand, just behind my place at the table, my hand on the back of my chair. Then I have a reinforcement of this notion from a source close to me. Edna’s voice from across the room, coming this way: “He’s the most loving creature you’ll ever find.”

  I look at her and she is carrying a tall, brushed-metal chair like all the others. She puts it beside mine and turns at once and heads off again. I set aside the question of love for the moment.

  “You are all certainly chosen,” I say. “Since these are the final hours of the observation phase, you are even more special.”

  “Is this the end of the world?” These words rise in a small and quavering voice from the far side of the table, from Mary Wynn, whose Vietnamese name means generous.

  I cannot refrain from expressing my own fears at the moment. “Not of your world. No. Perhaps of mine.”

  Digger and Trey and Hudson remain standing. I say to them, “Please, gentlemen. I welcome you to my table. I am a friendly guy. My wife is the cook of your dreams. Please sit.”

  And they do. And I sit, as well. I am grateful to my wife. I am happy to be at this table with Chicken Wiggle and all the trimmings on the way. I am happy to be with these creatures. These people. These friends. These friends that I love. Yes.

  I am looking around at their faces turned to me. And I wish to touch them, take their hands in mine. I wish to put this feeling I am having about them directly into the deepest recesses of their minds. And then I notice, sitting before me, a great glass pitcher of Presbyterian Punch. The liquid is very still in its pale greenness. There is a white froth on the top. I feel the coursing in my veins and I look at these faces as they wait and all their glasses are empty and I reach and take up the pitcher. I pour myself some punch first, just a little. I am afraid of this substance, but to give of myself I must overcome my fear. I must share this moment. I say, “This Presbyterian Punch is precisely the color of a spaceman’s blood. Of my blood. Drink this and know that I love you all.”

  I pass the pitcher to Lucky who pours and passes it on and he holds his glass but he hesitates, he does not drink, and the pitcher moves to Claudia and she pours and the Presbyterian Punch flows into her glass and it feels as if it is coming directly from me, from my body, I feel an emptiness growing in me as the pitcher moves on and another glass is filled and another and I am growing weaker and my blood passes into the hands of one guest and another and another and they hold their glasses before them, waiting, though Misty starts to drink but Digger gently stops her with a touch on her arm and he nods to the other guests who are waiting and she waits too, and when Citrus pours from the pitcher she looks at me and she smiles in a knowing way and she says, “I knew you’d do this,” and she passes the pitcher on and it moves and the voice of Edna Bradshaw is near me saying, “I am oh so sorry but I didn’t realize till the last minute that I’m out of tea because of course this meal needs iced tea but it’s all so festive, being New Year’s Eve and the end of the millennium and all—though didn’t we end one last year too?—anyway I thought something sweet to drink with dinner would be nice so I made Presbyterian Punch, which was such a big success when we all first met”—and I am glad Edna Bradshaw is here and Viola Stackhouse, too, for she is still beside my wife to help serve the dinner, and I say to them, though my voice is faint now from my weakness, “Please sit, both of you, drink with us,” and they do sit and at last the pitcher is in the hand of my wife and there is enough left for a few fingers of punch in her glass and I am weak, I am empty, I feel in some literal way that I am in the hands of these twelve I snatched from the night as they chased their luck, these twelve I have chosen, and in the hands of Edna Bradshaw my wife, who I also chose, and she puts down the empty pitcher, and it takes a great effort even to raise this glass, but I do, and I say, “Please. Drink.”

  And Citrus says, “Do this in remembrance of Desi.”

  Some faces turn to her at this but then they all drink and so do I and I expect the taste of blood, the briny sea-taste of my spaceman’s blood, but I am sweet I am bubbly I am the Pause That Refreshes and I feel myself filling up once more, as those around me drink, and I am restored. We all put our glasses down.

  “That was nice,” Edna Bradshaw says, and then she rises. “But if we’re going to eat this dinner in the present millennium, I’ve got a few things to do.” She goes off and as Viola starts to rise, Edna calls out, “It’s okay, Viola honey. I can manage.”

  And they sit before me, waiting. In a few hours I must say crucial things to a planet full of strangers. These twelve sit before me now and I know them and they are getting used to me, and yet I have no words. I am in big trouble.

  Abruptly, Trey breaks the silence. “I knew this was in the cards all along. I saw a UFO once. It had red and yellow lights on it and it moved real smooth over a tree line and then disappeared. It never left me, the sight of that.”

  “I saw one too,” Digger says.

  Misty shoots a glance across the table at her husband. “You never said.”

  “I am sorry to interrupt,” I say. “But it is very unlikely that either of you saw us. Mr. Trey, where was this exactly?”

  “Up in Michigan. About thirty years ago. I never forgot it.”

  “And you, Mr. Digger?”

  “In a duck blind near the Gulf.”

  “That was swamp gas you both saw, the result of decaying vegetation releasing methane, hydrogen sulfide, and phosphine.”

  “Oh no,” Trey says. “With all due respect, Mr. Spaceman, it was a certain winter day and I was stone cold sober and I saw what I saw.”

  “You bet.” Digger punctuates his solidarity with Trey by slapping the palm of one hand down on the table. “I’ve seen swamp gas, and my UFO was entirely different.”

  I feel a bubble of irritation rising in my chest. “With all respect to you as well, Mr. Trey and Mr. Digger, but there is only one true source of UFOs on this planet called Earth. And that is from my home planet.”

  Trey makes one of the statements in the form of a question: “You saying there’s nobody out there but you?”

  “Of course not,” I say. “But we are the only species to visit your planet.”

  “How do you know?” says Digger.

  “Wait a minute,” Citrus cries. “You all just aren’t getting it, are you.”

  I am still engaged with Digger’s challenge and I find my irritation growing. “Duh?” I say to him. “I am a spaceman. I should know.”

  “He’s the one true spaceman,” Citrus cries, “because there’s only one true God.”

&
nbsp; “We always knew there was somebody bigger and better watching over us,” says Jared. “One era, it’s a carpenter. A whole other era, it’s a spaceman.”

  “Hey,” Citrus says to Jared. “Love grows.”

  “Love grows,” Jared replies. I sense a semantic ritual between them.

  Misty raises her hand as if she were seeking permission to talk in a schoolroom. But she speaks immediately, “Excuse me. Are we saying this spaceman is Jesus Christ or something?”

  “Do you have nuclear weapons onboard this ship?” Arthur asks.

  Viola flaps a hand across the table at her husband, “What are you talking crazy for?”

  “It’s not crazy,” Arthur says. “I just want to know what our host has in mind for planet Earth.”

  “That’s what we all want to know,” Digger says.

  “Hush,” says Misty to Digger. “You can’t always act like you’re speaking for everybody.”

  Digger gives Misty a puzzled frown and a cock of the head. I sense that he is not accustomed to being criticized by her. Perhaps the circumstances have emboldened Misty.

  “No one need be apprehensive about our intentions,” I say. “As I explained when I first brought you onboard, I only wish to talk with you.”

  “My companion is a worrier,” Hank says, softly. He is nearby, just beyond Edna and Viola. “We’ve been missing a couple of days, haven’t we?”

  “I am sorry for that. I realize there is a mystery surrounding you. We normally are very discreet about taking up our visitors.”

  Edna has appeared with a tray of salads, which she sets on a serving stand. Viola jumps up and Claudia begins to rise, too, though Viola waves her back down, saying, “Two’s enough.”

  “Why have you suddenly become indiscreet?” I recognize Hudson’s voice. I turn to him as a salad clunks down in front of me and I nod my head to him in respect.

  I say, “This is a special circumstance. You will all be back on the planet in a matter of hours. And you will be my first visitors to retain their memory of all this.”

  My wife Edna Bradshaw sits down beside me, placing her own salad before her and declaring, “I just wanted him to have this final little meal with you all so he doesn’t think he has to go down there tonight in person.”

  Hudson says, “You give us our memories, but if we tell the truth, we sound like lunatics.”

  “I will personally give you confirmation,” I say. I pause and look at Edna, not wishing to dash her hopes in this public way, but I must explain myself to these people so that they might advise me.

  Edna leaps into my pause. “This is the homemade Thousand Island dressing I was talking about on this salad here. I wanted to have shrimp cocktail, too, but this was short notice and I’m not able to shop on my own, as it were. There’s special machines and all.”

  “This is fine,” Viola says, lifting a forkful of lettuce dripping with the homemade dressing.

  Another murmur goes around the table, affirming the quality of the salad. My wife Edna Bradshaw takes the compliments with a humble lowering of the face.

  “What kind of confirmation?” Hudson asks.

  I must think clearly now. And simply. It is time. I say, “At midnight I must descend in a public way and reveal to your planet the existence of my species and, by implication, the existence of a multitude of other species out among the stars.”

  Wordless sounds of surprise and interest come from the table at this announcement, but more noticeable for me is the severe cry of my wife’s scooting chair. I look up at her, as she is now standing. She declares, “I must go and get the entree and so forth.” But she goes nowhere. I look down from the struggle of her face to maintain its mask of the cheerful hostess and I see her hands trembling.

  “Please,” says Viola, “don’t bother, Edna honey. You’ve done enough. We can all go out to the kitchen and serve ourselves.”

  “Of course,” says Claudia. And then others say “of course” and “no problem” and they are all rising and Viola shows them the way to the kitchen.

  Edna remains standing beside me, letting our guests serve themselves first. When we are alone I know I should speak to her but I am afraid. Then her hand is on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Desi honey,” she says. “I’m being a baby. A man is his work, I guess, and you have to do what you have to do because orders is orders no matter if it’s dirty work because somebody’s got to do it and if you can’t be a help you should at least just get out of the way, which I want to do for you, out of respect, Desi, you honorable and obedient spaceman you, here’s your sausage and there’s the door.” Her hand suddenly squeezes tight at my shoulder. “I’m going a little crazy here, I realize that, going crazy in my usual babbling way. But that’s what you liked about me when you were first listening in to me and my friends with your machines before you and me ever met in the Wal-Mart Supercenter parking lot in Bovary. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that what you told me? That you liked the way I talked?”

  I wish to affirm this to be true for my sweet and prolific wordmaker of a wife Edna Bradshaw, but she does not pause even for a breath with these questions, she rushes on, “And the proof was, after you heard me doing a lot of talking over a period of—what? months?—you asked me out for a date and then you asked me to marry you and that marriage proposal didn’t happen because I’d clammed up, though part of me had been advising that, but I never did listen to that advice, you heard the real me and even so, you still wanted to marry me and that was a very sweet thing, a kind thing.”

  I insist now on the insertion of a few words of my own, regretfully overriding the voice of my wife. “It was not a kind thing, Edna Bradshaw,” I say. “I wanted to marry you. I got what I wanted.”

  “See what a good idea this was?” she says, and she lets go of my shoulder and moves off toward her kitchen.

  I do not follow her. I remain where I am. Now Jared is coming back with a plate full of food and Mary after him and Lucky right behind and others are following and I lower my face, turn my attention inward. I begin to hum soundlessly inside myself, an avoidance, I realize, a copping out, but I want now only to be left alone in my life—which, of course, would still include my wife Edna Bradshaw and our yellow cat Eddie—no, I yearn for the three of us to be left alone—I am afraid this is more than a simple want. And like so many yearnings, this is ultimately impossible to have, because for one reason, the yearnings inside all these individuals who are bearing their plates full of Chicken Wiggle to my table even now, their yearnings are an inseparable part of my most intimate concern, as well. I would carry a deep sense of all of them with me to my place of aloneness, and a deep sense, too, of all the others, all those I have interviewed over the years, those who have forgotten me utterly or who are dead. They, too, would follow me wherever I went.

  I have one pleasant thought now. The memory of me, of Desi the Spaceman, will not pass from those who are sitting here at this table. And as the last of these coming from the kitchen—Viola Stackhouse—sits down, my hands flop foolishly about in front of me, striving to do something for them, for each of them, and there is a brush of warmth past my face and a wicker basket lands before me and a plate of food and Edna sits down with her own plate now and she motions to the wicker basket. “Why don’t you pass the homemade buttermilk biscuits, Desi honey,” she says.

  And I take up the basket and I fold back the cloth and there are, within, many biscuits. I hold a great, steaming trove of Edna Bradshaw’s homemade buttermilk biscuits, and I am happy to have these biscuits, for this is something I can do for these dear and fragile creatures before me—recognizing that I am myself fragile, that all sentient life in this universe is fragile—and I say, “Here, have some biscuits.”

  And I take one and I pass the basket to Lucky and he takes one and passes the basket on and the biscuits move around the table and I realize everyone is holding his or her biscuit, neither laying it down nor eating it, and the basket reaches Edna and she takes a biscuit and sets the basket befor
e us. I gaze about the table. “Why are you all not eating?” I ask.

  Some of my guests look down at their biscuits and they, too, seem puzzled, but still no one is eating. And then Citrus says, “They’re beginning to understand, is why. We’re waiting for you to break the bread.”

  And I look at the biscuit in my hand. And I look up at all the faces turned to me.

  And I say, “Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven.”

  Then I break the biscuit, and one voice—I do not exactly know which one, because it remains isolated for only the briefest of moments—a voice begins, “Nothin’ …” and the rest of the voices—all of them, I think—instantly join in, and all the voices say, “Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven.”

  And I have broken my biscuit in two and they all break their biscuits in two and all eyes are on me and I do not like to have anyone watch me eat, especially not members of another intelligent species, but everyone is clearly waiting for me and I put one piece of the biscuit in my mouth. It is, by the code of daily conduct adhered to in Bovary, Alabama, far too big a piece of biscuit, but my mouth is large and the pressure on me is great and so I take in half a biscuit and I wait until the others turn away before I chew, since I expect to inadvertently expel crumbs of my biscuit in the process. But they have all done what I did. They have all taken fully half a biscuit into their mouths and their cheeks are pooched out and they are still watching me, still not chewing.

  So I chew. And they chew.

  “See how nice this all is?” Edna Bradshaw says, though her words are muffled through the biscuit. I discern an ongoing nervousness in my wife, since, by the same Bovarian standards, she normally would not be speaking with her mouth full.

  “Nice,” Viola says, sending some crumbs forth onto the table.

  “Very nice,” Misty says, also spewing crumbs. “Excuse me,” she appends, with the same result for which she seeks absolution, and she claps her hand over her mouth.

  “It is all right,” I say, spewing crumbs myself, wishing no one to feel ill at ease.

  “Thank you.” Misty releases more crumbs.