The Dream Life of Astronauts

by Patrick Ryan

  The Dream Life of Astronauts is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Ryan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  THE DIAL PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Some of the stories in this work were previously published in different form in Crazyhorse, Faultline, Catapult, Denver Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, and Feedback. “The Dream Life of Astronauts” was originally published in Between Men (New York: Running Press, 2007).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Ryan, Patrick

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The dream life of astronauts : stories / Patrick Ryan. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-34138-7—ISBN 978-0-8129-8972-4 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3618.Y336A6 2016

  813'.6—dc23 2015025991

  ebook ISBN 9780812989724

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for eBook

  Cover photograph: © Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Way She Handles

  The Dream Life of Astronauts

  Summer of ’69

  The Fall Guy

  Miss America

  Fountain of Youth

  Go Fever

  Earth, Mostly

  You Need Not Be Present to Win

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Patrick Ryan

  About the Author

  Late one night during the summer of Watergate, I was in bed reading a Hardy Boys novel by flashlight when a car pulled into our cul-de-sac, its headlights sweeping the walls of my room. If I’d been reading something else I might not have been so in tune to things, but a mystery by flashlight turns everything into a clue. A few paragraphs later, it occurred to me I hadn’t heard a car door slam. Which meant someone either was lingering in the car or had closed the door so quietly that it didn’t make a sound, and why would a person do either of those things if he weren’t trying to get away with something? I got up on my knees, inched back the curtain, and spied a dark-blue Lincoln Town Car parked in front of our house.

  The headlights were off and, sure enough, someone was sitting behind the wheel. Someone else was in there, too, and their murky shapes were moving around suspiciously. Donning black gloves, maybe. Pulling ski masks over their faces.

  Then our porch light came on and I could see my father step out into the front yard. He was barefoot, dressed in his robe and pajamas, and he was holding a croquet mallet.

  He was halfway across the yard when my uncle came running out of the house to catch up with him. My uncle was also barefoot, and he was wearing a pair of cutoff shorts. He patted my father on the back and said something to him I couldn’t make out, and my father sat down on the grass so fast it was like he’d dropped into a hole. He let go of the mallet and clutched his head with both hands.

  All of which did nothing to address the two people in the Lincoln and led me to have what my last year’s English teacher, Mrs. LaPeach, would have called a mature thought. “I know you’re just children,” she would say to us, “but it wouldn’t kill you to have a mature thought every now and then.” Mine was, This is why I watch so much goddamn television and read so many goddamn books. Because nothing interesting ever happens in real life.

  But then my father got to his feet again and walked the rest of the way across the lawn as calmly as if he were retrieving the morning paper—only he had the croquet mallet back in his hand. When he reached the front of the Lincoln, he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, raised the mallet as high as he could, and brought it down onto the hood with a gargantuan thunk I felt in my chest. The head of the mallet broke off and went somersaulting behind him. And right on the heels of the thunk, one of the Lincoln’s passenger doors opened and I heard a voice—my mother’s, it turned out—screaming into the night, “JESUS CHRIST, PHIL, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?”

  That was the end of my mother’s foray into adult education. The next day, she withdrew from the one class she’d enrolled in and didn’t even bother to sell back the textbook she’d been clutching when she’d scrambled out of the car. I glimpsed the book’s title in the trashcan—Economics for Daily Consumption—and understood why she wouldn’t want to stay in that kind of class, but I didn’t know what had made my father so angry. When I asked him about it, he told me it was a grown-up matter and that I should have been asleep, anyway. When I asked my mother (after my father left for work), she said, “Wasn’t that bizarre? The man was my teacher, after all. He was just giving me a ride home.” And when I asked my uncle, while the two of us stood side by side in the bathroom brushing our teeth, he shrugged and said into the mirror, “Love, little guy, is a many splendored thing.”

  —

  He was my mother’s little brother, her only sibling, and he’d hitchhiked all the way from California to start a new life in Florida. Out west, he’d been a bread baker, a gardener, a songwriter, and a meditation instructor—occupations he’d listed in a letter to my mother before saying he was ready for a change and asking if he could come stay with us while he checked out “the east coast scene.”

  “I don’t understand,” my father had said midway through my mother’s reading of the letter aloud over dinner. “What scene?”

  “New people, I guess. New opportunities.” She squinted against the smoke from her cigarette. “How the hell should I know?”

  “Well, does he have any sort of plan?”

  “Actually, he does. He says here he wants to pursue a career in music therapy.” She took a sip of her drink. Her lipstick decorated the rim of the glass.

  My father, still in his yellow Century 21 blazer, swirled what was left of his drink around until the ice collapsed. “What?”

  A couple of Saturdays later, I was in the garage with my father, sweeping while he struggled with the fishing line on the weed-whacker, when a Volkswagen van rounded the cul-de-sac. The van stopped at the foot of our driveway, its side door slid open, and a man all but stumbled out, his blond hair sweeping his shoulders as he righted himself. A duffel bag was tossed after him, a tiny guitar case (which he managed to catch), and what I thought at first was a wicker basket, but turned out to be a crimped cowboy hat. “Thanks!” he hollered as the side door slammed shut and the van sped away. “You’re beautiful people!”

  My mother ran out of the laundry room and straight through the garage, squealing as if the house were on fire. At the end of the driveway, she jumped up and down and hugged the man at the same time. He put the cowboy hat on her head.

  “This was a mistake,” my father said, still clutching the weed-whacker.

  We all moved inside to the air-conditioning, where my father shook my uncle’s hand as if the two of them were entering a shady business deal. When I held out my own hand, Robbie grinned down at me and said, “Only squares shake hands, man.” He slid his palm flat against mine in slow motion.

  “Can I fix you a drink, Robbie?” my mother asked. “We have vodka, bourbon, Scotch, and gin.”

  “Water’s fine,” Robbie said.

  “You’re sure? Nothing stronger?”
<
br />   “Don’t flip your lid, Judy, but I went on the wagon about a year ago.”

  “Really,” my mother said, as if this were of particular interest to her. Still wearing the cowboy hat, she walked over to the sideboard in the dining room where the liquor lived.

  Robbie dropped down onto the couch. “When you forget three whole days of your life and wake up on a beach in Monterey with no wallet or shoes, it’s probably time for a change, right?”

  “Probably is,” she said, dropping ice into a pair of highball glasses.

  I tugged my big red hand chair out of the corner and sank into it.

  My father took his recliner. “And you’re with us squares for how long?” he asked.

  “Just till I figure out the lay of the land,” Robbie said. “See what’s what and, you know, get something started.”

  “Your cake baking and, what is it, music therapy?”

  “It was bread, not cake. But, yeah, a little music therapy never hurt anyone, did it?” He glanced at me, grinning as he said this.

  “See, here’s what I’m a little cloudy about,” my father said. “What exactly is music therapy?”

  “Songs for the heart,” Robbie said. “Songs for the soul. Get it out, make it sweet, soothe the world.”

  “Uh-huh,” my father said. “And what does that mean?”

  My mother came back into the room carrying a tray of drinks—a vodka and tonic for her, one for my father, a can of Pepsi for me, and a plastic tumbler of water for my uncle. As she distributed the drinks, she said, “Phil’s our Welcome Wagon, can you tell? He’s loaded with charm.”

  “Ha ha!” my father said.

  She sat down on the couch next to my uncle. “I think music therapy sounds like just what we need right about now. We’re living in crazy times.”

  “That we are,” Robbie said.

  “But what is it?” my father asked.

  “You ever get into a bad mood, and then you hear a song, and for whatever reason it’s just the right song to pull you out of that mood and set you down on an oasis?”

  “No,” my father said. “Not an oasis, no.”

  “Well, that’s called music therapy. That’s part of it, anyway.”

  “It’s called turning on the radio,” my father said. “It’s not a career; it’s a dial.”

  “Oh, for godsake, Phil, give it a rest,” my mother said.

  “Hey, I’m just making conversation. Just entertaining guests in the comfort of my own home.”

  “Yes, you wear the pants. We know.” She pushed the cowboy hat back an inch on her head, took a sip of her drink, said, “Mm!” and pointed to the statue on top of the television. “Do you like my latest acquirement, Robbie?”

  “Acquisition,” my father said.

  “Do you like it? I bought it at an art show in Cocoa. It’s called ‘The Lovers.’ ”

  “It’s great,” my uncle said. “You’ve really got the place decorated nicely.”

  I’d never thought of our house as being “decorated” before. There was a vase of plastic flowers on the dining room table that we pushed to one side when we ate. A painting over the couch of a ship drifting through a sunset. Another painting by the front door of baby chicks in a box and a dog peering down at them. The statue on the television was nearly a foot tall, carved out of wood, and was supposed to be a man and a woman kissing, but for some reason they were shaped like Q-tips.

  “I helped a couple of guys just back from Vietnam work through their night terrors,” Robbie said. “And a woman with chronic insomnia who sleeps like a baby now.”

  “By turning on the radio?” my father asked.

  “By helping them write their own song. Sometimes the inner demon’s got the sweetest voice. The Chinese believe in something called Ghost Possession. Ever heard of it?”

  “I have,” my mother said.

  My father rolled his eyes.

  “Some people’ve got the ghost,” Robbie said. “Charles Manson. Roger Mudd. Tricky Dick.”

  “The President of the United States,” my father said.

  “Phil voted for him,” my mother told Robbie. “Twice.”

  “So did a lot of other people. You can tell by his eyes that there’s something dead in there. It’s like looking at a mannequin’s eyes.”

  “You’re really out there now,” my father said.

  “You should do some sightseeing,” my mother said. “There are all kinds of things to do around here. The Space Center. The wildlife refuge. The beach! And Disney World’s only an hour away. I’m sure Sam would be happy to give you a grand tour of the Magic Kingdom.”

  “Is that right, little guy?” Robbie asked me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We should all go out and do something fun right now,” my mother said.

  But we didn’t go anywhere. We stayed in the living room, and they kept talking. Finally, I got up and went to my room to read.

  When I came out an hour or so later and peered into the living room, my father was still in the recliner, and my mother and Robbie were still on the couch. She was leaning sideways a little and had her feet up on the coffee table. “Is that your biggest complaint?” she was saying. “That I flirt? Honestly, Phil, I don’t know whether to laugh or to feel sorry for you. I live in the world, okay? I exist. And if that means I smile at somebody at a party or the grocery store or the 7-Eleven, then so be it. I mean, really, boo fucking hoo. Right, Robbie?”

  “I don’t have a dog in this race,” Robbie said.

  My father muttered something under his breath.

  “What was that?” my mother said. “You have to speak up, Phil. No one can hear you if you mumble.”

  “I said, would you please take off that goddamn hat?”

  Still later, I was bored, hungry, and wondering what was for dinner. The door to the guest room across the hall was standing partway open and I could see Robbie lying on top of the bed, sound asleep, with his feet crossed and his hands folded over his stomach. His duffel bag had been emptied, and a pile of rumpled clothes sat on the floor next to the tiny guitar case.

  I heard music coming from the front of the house: violins and an earnest-sounding woman singing that song from The Poseidon Adventure. I felt a momentary surge of excitement, thinking the movie was on TV, but the music was coming from the stereo—the Love Songs of the Cinema album my father had given my mother last Christmas. Their highball glasses were on the coffee table (along with the cowboy hat and one of the bottles from the sideboard) and they were standing in the middle of the room, facing each other. His arm was around her waist. Her head was resting on his shoulder. And though they seemed not to be moving at all, they were—just barely—dancing.

  —

  Robbie had come at a good time. There were a couple of other kids my age who lived in the neighborhood, but they were both on long summer vacations with their families. We got four channels on the television, but one of them was PBS and the other three were eaten up every day by Watergate. It was the only reason I’d been reading so much: daytime TV was either educational shows or men in suits talking into microphones. I’d spend all of a minute flipping the dial and watching their suits—and sometimes their complexions—change color just slightly from one station to the next; then I was done with Watergate. But Watergate didn’t seem to be wrapping up anytime soon, and the summer was only half over.

  With Robbie there, my mother seemed rejuvenated—at least, while my father was at work. She made quiches and frittatas for breakfast. She kept us at the table as long as possible, asking Robbie to tell stories about their childhood back in Ohio and then barreling over him to tell them herself. The time they stole a For Sale sign from a neighbor’s house and planted it in the yard of their high school principal. The time they made rum and cokes from one of the booze bottles their father kept hidden in the garage and then rode their bicycles through the flowerbeds in front of the courthouse. “And you—you!”—lighter in one hand, cigarette in the other, rocking damp-e
yed with laughter—“you mooned the mayor!”

  “It wasn’t the mayor,” Robbie said. “It was one of the town councilmen.”

  My mother turned to me. “He did it on his bicycle and nearly crashed into a mailbox.”

  “Well, that part’s true,” he said.

  “And we snuck in to so many movies. Back in the good old days, before all the doors had fire alarms, we put duct tape on the back door of the theater so it wouldn’t latch. I think I saw Singin’ in the Rain a dozen times. And what was that Western I couldn’t stand, but you kept going back to?”

  “High Noon.”

  “With Gregory Peck—handsome, but boring as hell.”

  “It was Gary Cooper.”

  “Right,” she said. “Also handsome and boring.”

  “Judy-paloodie,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Robbie-palobby.” With the hand that held the cigarette, she reached over and jostled my shoulder, trailing smoke between us. “Sam-palamb!”

  I felt like the three of us were siblings, only I hadn’t been born for any of their shared memories. It was fun to see her so animated, so cheerful. We played board games. We went to lunch at the Piccadilly and Red Lobster and the restaurant at Mathers Bridge. In the afternoons, my mother would leave to run errands, and for long stretches it would just be me and Robbie. I asked him if it was easier to play a tiny guitar than a regular-sized one, and he told me it wasn’t a guitar; it was a ukulele. He played me a few songs, then said, “If you could write a song about your favorite thing in the whole world, what would it be?”

  I gave that some thought and told him my song would be about The Six Million Dollar Man.

  “Shoot,” he said, grinning. “How old are you?”

  “Almost ten.”

  “Tell you what—in a couple of years you’re going to be singing a different tune, but that’s okay. The Six Million Dollar Man will do for now.”

  He played a succession of chords and helped me write the words. They went like this:

  I’m a man with unusual power